I’m not one of the people that have a long list of grievances with this particular fellow. A short list, perhaps, and mostly minor.
I tend to think we don’t deserve him. I think we’re extraordinarily lucky he came along. And once he’s gone, I think we’ll miss him. Terribly.
45 to 48 percent of registered voters would vote for either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. This fact bodes quite ill for our fate as a nation, I think. Clearly.
Lucky.
Colyn Fischer takes a solemn moment to address the haggis at the Second Friends of Burns gathering on the occasion of Robert Burns’ 253rd birthday.
Yes, I had my first haggis today. Have no fear, ’twas a vegan haggis to be sure. So, perhaps it wasn’t a real haggis then. The beast that Colyn addressed in the picture above was the genuine article stuffed in a cow’s stomach and all.
The occasion was magnificent. The location was the same as that where Planet My Love was recently performed, at the home of Shauna Pickett-Gordon, aka my music teacher. The picture below features Shauna on keyboard along with several fiddlers including Colyn (an absolutely amazing musician) and Jim Tillotson beside him (the guy who played violin on the recent PML).
The 12 yr-old laddie over Shauna’s shoulder had been playing for all of two months but looks to have a fine future. That’s his mom playing beside him. There were many toasts to Robert Burns’ memory, to the haggis, to all the lads and lasses, and much premium scotch woggled. Twas a fine time!
Sofi and I even got in the act briefly by reciting a Burns love poem in English and Russian. Turns out Burns is much beloved in Russia and she had known of him since she was a wee lass. Best of all, there was some incredible music performed in a most intimate setting - all about two blocks from our home.
Robbie would have been proud I’m sure.
Video here. Couldn’t resize it. Also annoyingly auto-plays.
VICE goes to the end of a month-long rave in Kazantip, off the coast of the Ukraine, held near an abandoned nuclear reactor. This is a cultural window I have not looked through before.
Think I’m too old for that shit. Think I was always too old.
I thought maybe — River Horse? He likes this kind of stuff, right?
Andrew Sullivan - a self-styled conservative - just penned a fairly stirring defense of he current president n Newsweek. This is certain to piss off a hell of a lot of people on both extremes, a pretty good sign he’s right on target.
A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.
Such effing bullshit. Such liars. Conservatives live in a completely manufactured reality, which is why their ideas and actions are so destructive and poisonous.
MLK and conservatives
by digby
Judging by a cursory look at the news this morning I see that the right wingers are fully engaged in the annual airbrushing of their real relationship to Martin Luther King. It’s sort of become a tradition.
Here’s Perlstein to set the record straight:
‘When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.”
Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”
That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”
That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.’
‘Git ‘im offna stage! He’za soshulisd!’
The robots are roaring. Signifying the will of the one percent. It is all they do; all they are. I wonder how that feels, to be that character. Real-life Stephen Colberts, owned and operated by greedhead orcs.
‘There is no redeeming value to shame or guilt,’ unless you’re a conservative, and then it’s all that keeps you from serial rape and murder. Thanks, religion.
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