Did you know the hit reality show “Jersey Shore” was quickly “co-opted by the would-be hip” but overcame this potential liability “by staying true to its artificiality”?
This must be true, I read it in The New York Times, in a story describing how Snooki and her swine were cast before the pearls of Florence, Italy, courtesy of MTV.
Do you spend a lot of time logged in and looking for the truth? Could be you’re searching in the wrong places, or at least on the wrong sites. Try God’s Blog, and don’t forget to tell the Divine One what you think of his work.
Concerned that nations will soon fight over oil reserves? If you think that’s bad, wait until world population booms to 10 billion or so at the same time all the fresh water is drying up.
But that’s long-term stuff. This short-term disaster is all I can stomach for now, just barely:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made a Super Congress a central part of his last-minute proposal, multiple news reports and people familiar with his plan say. A picture of Boehner’s proposal began to come into focus Saturday evening: The debt ceiling would be raised for a short-term period and coupled with an equal dollar figure of cuts, somewhere in the vicinity of a trillion dollars over ten years. A second increase in the debt ceiling would be tied to the creation of a Super Congress that would be required to find a minimum amount of spending cuts. Because the elevated panel would need at least one Democratic vote, its plan would presumably include at least some revenue, though if it’s anything like the deals on the table today, it would likely be heavily slanted toward spending cuts…
Don’t believe anything these jerks say, D or R. The formation of a Super Congress — or super committee, as some are calling it now — will do nothing but allow D.C. politicians to do their dirty work even further in the dark, away from constituents, where only high-level campaign donors can burrow.
Democratic leaders should know better than to sign on to the Super Congress idea. (Picture Mitch McConnell, the Human Tortoise, in green cape and cowl, leading a gang of geriatric Marvel Comics villains.)
The problem is, there are no Dem leaders. Harry Reid is a dead weed twisting in the wind. Nancy Pelosi must have had work done on her brain (lobotomy?) while having all that work done on her face.
Remember: Neither of these hacks, or most other Dems, are saying a word about how they caved on jobs programs and tax hikes for the rich. We should remind them every day and run them out of office, one by one, as soon as possible.
I’m on the home stretch with my novel-in-progress Good Sal/Bad Sal, set in casino-era Atlantic City. One of the final chapters starts with Good Sal asking:
Have you ever let the cold surf creep between your toes and thought what’s the point of my time, I’ll be gone a million years and these waves will still roll in? No? Then maybe you spend too much time on Facebook.
It’s good for the soul to brush up against something even dumber and more unwieldy than human nature and simply accept it. It can put your hopes and fears in perspective.
The downside is too much time near the sea might lull you into psychic undertow. Here’s Tom Waits on the danger:
The ocean doesn’t want me today
But I’ll be back tomorrow to play
And the stranglers will take me
Down deep in their brine
The mischievous braingels
Down into the endless blue wine
I’ll open my head and let out
All of my time…
I’ve made a vow: No swimming until the novel is finished and I have an agent for it. The latter part of the vow might keep me out of the water for a million years.
Anybody but Obama. Lewis Black would do a better job.
The true believers were way off, probably because they couldn’t, and can’t, admit Obama has turned out to be exactly the wrong person to lead the fight against Republicans determined to use the debt issue to destroy the social safety net and maintain huge tax breaks for the rich. The loyalists will keep the faith even though, as Paul Krugman wrote yesterday
The deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Obama is not a Democrat. In fact, he is somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon on most issues, although he is, of course, much cooler than Tricky Dick. In the end, Mr. Cool called our bluff, not the GOP’s. He gambled that even progressive Democrats will stand with him in 2012, because we have no one else to turn to as a viable candidate. It’s time to prove him wrong.
There has been much talk about how self-defeating it would be for Democrats to give up on Obama, but wouldn’t it make sense to try to draft Sherrod Brown or Howard Dean or Elizabeth Warren — feel free to suggest others — if only to disrupt the Dem establishment that stood solidly behind Obama even as he began to talk about dismantling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?
I’ve heard stand-up comedians who make better sense than Obama. That’s it — Lewis Black for president! At least he wouldn’t let himself be made a fool of by Mitch McConnell, the human tortoise, or by that great statesman John Boehner.
The frame looks like this, but all scratched up
I rarely blog about myself. I prefer the veneer of fiction when it comes to personal matters, so when my bicycle was stolen Monday, I blogged about the thieves in business and government who prosper at the expense of the poor and near-poor. The usual stuff.
But I’m still angry about losing my bike. I’ll probably never meet the Koch brothers or Gov. Tom Corbett and the other creeps who rob us from afar, so I’m content to simply bitch about them. And yet it seems somehow unfair to me that a street thief should remain as unaccountable and inaccessible to me as his white-collar brethren. It’s as if I’ve unwittingly bought into the societal double standard that the Goldman Sachs crooks rely on to stay out of prison.
As Celine wrote:
Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
I’m still on the lookout. The theft took place outside a shop on Eighth Street where I’d stopped for a coffee to go. There was no place to lock up the bike (Iron Horse, black, hybrid, 26-inch wheels), and it was gone so fast, it was like magic. I didn’t even see the thief.
I reported the theft to police then drove around South Philly in my car for a few hours, not sure what I wanted more, to get back my bike or get my hands on the guy who stole it.
I tried to think things through. If I saw someone on the bike and ran him over, then I’d ruin my bike and probably go to jail. But if I stopped the car and shouted “Hey chump, that’s my bike,” he’d keep peddling and disappear before I could catch him on foot. If I saw him and called the cops — well, most of you probably know how much good that does, so I’ll spare you a rant about our lazy men and women in blue.
It seemed best to cut directly in front of the thief, to make him stop riding, then jump out of my car and nail him. But I didn’t see my bike on the road, so my prowling was a waste of time, as were my visits to various bike shops and pawn shops. Street thieves can be pretty stupid, but usually not stupid enough to try to sell a bike to a store anywhere near the crime scene.
I saw bikes locked to poles all over South Philly and slowed my car for a close look many times, much to the annoyance of drivers behind me. I found that, if you really look hard for a stolen bike, you can drive yourself crazy thinking you see it then realizing you don’t.
I’ve checked craigslist to see if my stolen bike is for sale. I’ve searched again in my car — I normally use the car only for certain long-distance trips or to transport heavy stuff — but I suspect the thief probably has painted it a different color by now, put different handlebars on it, and so on, an infuriating thought.
A friend told me to “let it go” and move on, to accept the theft as part of the downside of life in the city. After all, if you ride more than 300 days a year in a town run by people too dull and backward to even install bike racks on a large scale, then your bike will eventually be stolen. In fact, I’ve lost several bikes to theft in the past decade, one of them right out of my house.
But moving on is easier said than done. Off-road bikes are too low to the ground and slow, skinny-wheeled racers get too many flats, and a used hybrid that looks shabby (so as not to catch the eye of most thieves) but rides great is extremely hard to find, and usually costs more than I can afford.
I’ll put the theft in perspective soon. Meanwhile, I’ll also continue to console myself — my apologies to hippies who read this — with the thought of what I’ll do to that thieving prick if I catch up with him.
Interesting blog yesterday by Paul Krugman, edgier than most of his op-ed columns, sparked by his gloomy conclusion that “the cult of balance, of centrism” is hurting the country more than the cult of right-wing loonies pushing for default on the national debt:
Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president…
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.
I suspect Krugman, in denouncing faux centrism, was thinking of his colleague Thomas Friedman, a jack-ass of the first order whose latest pipe dream involves a Washington, D.C. “political start-up” called Americans Elect that wants to hold an “internet convention” to select a centrist third-party presidential candidate for 2012.
And how would this third-party force obtain the multimillions of dollars needed to develop an infrastructure that would get out the vote? Friedman doesn’t address this and many other questions, just as he never addressed the devastating downside of globalization in The World Is Flat, his wet dream about our glorious future in a world run by multinational corporations.
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