Friday Stuff

I know I commented on "Just Plain Folks" Sarah Palin a bit today in the post, but I just cannot resist putting up the infamous interview in front of the turkey slaughterhouse one more time before we close out the year next week...



...Santogold ("Lights Out"; I believe a standard high resolution PC monitor supports about 2 million colors, and I think this video tests every single one).

Doomsy's Do-Gooders And Dregs (2008 - Pt. 6)

More than halfway there: prior related posts are here, here, here, here, and here (and I also posted over here)...

Do Gooders Of The Year Nominees

The Greensboro, N.C. News And Record, which refused to allow the DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West” to be inserted with its newspapers for distribution in September (the DVD was described as “fear mongering and divisive” by John Robinson, the newspaper’s editor - here).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Robert M. Sanchez, the engineer of the commuter train in southern California that crashed with a freight train, killing 25 people (including Sanchez himself) and injuring more than 130: he was sending text messages via his cell phone shortly before the crash occurred (here)

Do Gooder of the Year Nominee

Gwen Ifill of “The Newshour With Jim Lehrer” for her thoroughly professional job of moderating the Biden-Palin debate in October in the face of the criticism she received over charges of bias since she mentioned Barack Obama in a book she’d written (give me a break).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

YouTube, for shutting down the account of Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films because of a complaint by Michael Savage, of all people, over the BNF video “Michael Savage Hates Muslims” (and in the process, YouTube also shut down a bunch of great BNF videos; they restored them except the one in question, but they shouldn’t have bowed to censorship and shut down the account at all! - here)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Repug House Rep Heather Wilson of New Mexico for defending “Governor Hottie” and the latter’s baseless smears of Barack Obama alleging that he “pals around with terrorists” here. Get a load of this horsebleep…

He’s been critical not only of the President but of American policy and hence has kind of a negative view of America in the world. That’s not unusual frankly among liberals in kind of post-Vietnam America, to say that America is the problem.

Get any more U.S. attorneys fired lately, Rep. Wilson?

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opinion columnist Heather Mallick, who wrote here that “Governor Hottie” has “the toned-down version of the porn actress look” and suggested that Republican men were “sexually inadequate,” according to the NY Times story, and of course she “received an alarming number of truly vicious and vituperative messages” for her trouble as a result (also, Palin was nabbed by the Canadian radio duo known as The Masked Avengers pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy here).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

CEO Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers (I got yer’ “bailout” right here – WAAAHHH!!!)…

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

AIG (similar reasons as Lehman here – no further comment necessary)…

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Bill Perkins, a Houston-based venture capitalist who took out a series of full-page ads in the New York Times in the form of cartoons during September/October decrying the Bushco/congressional financial services bailout (gee, ya’ think a guy like Perkins who’s cleaned up in the business sector being rescued would, if not show gratitude, at least know enough not to waste tons of money on his little vanity ads – how about taking all that dough he spent to have his little hissy fit and donate it to a fund to help troubled homeowners instead - here).

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Champaign County (Ohio) Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott, who offered to reduce the fine of Urbana University student Andrew Vactor from $150 to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin (Vactor’s offense was playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo, and the judge wanted him to get a taste of listening to something he didn’t like - here).

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Departing Illinois House Repug Ray LaHood for having the guts to stand up to the Palin-McBush mob here (and congrats on being tabbed for Transportation Dept. Secretary by incoming President-Elect Obama)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Flyers owner Ed Snider for allowing “Governor Hottie” to toss the first puck, as it were, for the Flyers home opener against the Rangers on Saturday October 11th.

And here is the completely predictable result.



The “Wankery In Another Language” Citation

MoDo’s Times column on October 12th was half in Latin (without translation, of course - here)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Climate crisis denier Bob Conley, a DEM running against Huckleberry Graham for the latter’s Senate seat (as much as it would've been nice to turn that seat over, it was almost a good thing Conley lost - here).

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Dennis Hopper, a Repug voting for Obama (here)

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Sheila Bair, FDIC Chairman who chided Bushco for not doing more to help mortgage holders caught in the subprime meltdown (here)

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Andrew Cuomo for going after AIG (here)

This Year’s Moment of Right-Wing Looney Pundit Inevitability

Glenn Beck leaves CNN and signs with Fox Noise (here)

Non-Story Of The Year Nominee

William Ayres has a picture of Mumia Abu-Jamal on his office door here (can’t see it from the pic, though – h/t?? The Inquirer).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Repug U.S. House Rep Robin Hayes for saying here that “liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God” (here - screw you).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Bucks County Courier Times columnist J.D. Mullane, for implying here that Obama wasn’t truthful about William Ayres (I don’t have to explain who Ayres is, I’m sure) because – hold onto something now, this is earth-shattering – Obama praised a book Ayers wrote! OMIGOD!!!!!!!!!!

(And by the way, dishonorable mention for his 10/21 column also where he claimed that Obama would raise business taxes; he was too cowardly to say that himself, so he plucked those words from someone who apparently was recently arrived to this country and didn’t bother to point out that this person was wrong, of course – now why on earth would Mullane do that? Ya’ think he just wanted to confirm his opinion and the facts be damned?)

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Neil McGinness, former executive at National Lampoon and marketing manager at Broadway Video (founded by Lorne Michaels for SNL), who, as noted here, bought the Weekly World News in October and promised to revive it online (And resuming print editions? Could “Bat Boy” live again?).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Montgomery County, PA lawyer Phil Berg, who filed a suit in U.S. District Court to get Barack Obama thrown off the November ballot because he supposedly was born in Kenya and not Hawaii (yawn is right - here).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

20-year-old Ashley Todd of (where else?) Texas, who made up a story here of being beaten at a Pittsburgh-area ATM by “a big black guy” who saw a Palin-McBush bumper sticker on her car (and he supposedly carved a “B” in her face for good measure because of it – your wingnutosphere in action, my fellow prisoners…and yes, she will face charges for filing a false report).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

You betcha there’s a bunch of reasons for tagging “Governor Hottie” with this one, but this stands out in particular – she claimed to support autism research and made fun of studying fruit flies, when in fact that type of study has led to further knowledge of autism-related disorders.

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Naomi Judd, who introduced “Governor Hottie” at a rally in Springfield, Missouri here by saying “Never before in the history of American politics has any political candidate ever been so maligned by the unrepentant liberal biased media, the pseudo-intellectuals, the Hollywood elite, and the bloggers and the haters.”

Judd has actually done things to help people, and I don’t enjoy singling her out like this, but I have a big problem with this type of demagoguery, and I don’t care who it is who’s responsible for it; when I hear about it, I’m going to point it out.

Update 3/11/09: I think I confused Naomi (wingnut) with Ashley (totally cool progressive) based on this - my bad.

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

CNN, for refusing to carry Obama’s prime-time special on Wednesday 10/29 here (though they were happy to provide space to Glenn Beck and will no doubt be amenable to his ideological replacement)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Full mooner Repug U.S. House Rep Steve King of Iowa, who said that Obama would make America a “totalitarian dictatorship” here.

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, who refused to extend voting hours in her state (here) even though Florida’s Repug governor Charlie Crist did so; some in Georgia had to wait eight hours to vote because of “machine glitches" - more on Handel here

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Collectively, to this bunch of B-grade comic actors for trashing Al Franken in a campaign ad (and how lame is John Ratzenberger anyway, a guy who played a working stiff on “Cheers,” turning out to be every bit as obnoxious in real life as his character on the show – you’d think he’d be grateful just to keep his mouth shut considering that he’s probably made a fortune recycling the same voice throughout about two dozen movies, including most of the great Pixar films).

(And by the way, here's the latest on the recount in the Coleman/Franken campaign - let this take as long as it needs to, particularly because Coleman seems to be losing all his legal challenges...a good thing about all of this is that it's helping to establish recount procedures that can be used in other elections.)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Senate Repug Kit Bond of Missouri, for claiming that Barack Obama would nominate judges who “empathize with ‘the gay’” here (or, as Margaret Cho famously said to her mother when she used that phrase, “It’s not like there’s only one, Mom.”)

And is it out of line to say that that’s a funny remark from a guy whose state initials are MO?

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona for stating here that he would block Obama Supreme Court nominees if he thought they were “too liberal,” which is funny for at least two reasons: 1) No openings currently exist, even though Stevens and Ginsburg will likely step down, and 2) Kyl was one of the people who supported the “nuclear option” which prevented filibustering judicial appointees in 2005, which Kyl seems to be advocating now once more.

More later...

Thursday Stuff

Harold Pinter talks here with Charlie Rose about the difference between "natural and social laughter" and the fact that "it's not nice to be dead," which, now, he is, sadly...



...along with Eartha Kitt ("I'm Just An Old-Fashioned Girl").



Forty years ago, Kitt spoke out against the Vietnam War, as noted here by Wikipedia (and let's try to help them out, by the way), and she was "professionally exiled" from this country. Pinter spoke out against the Iraq debacle, criticizing both Dubya and Tony Blair in particular, as noted here.

For these reasons, I think we should take particular notice of the passing of these brave artists (examples to be emulated by us all, including these people).

Merry Christmas 2008

I thought this was pretty neat; this is the 1898 film "Santa Claus" by G.A. Smith using what was, for its time, pioneering visual effects...



...and from us to you, here's Nat "King" Cole with "The Christmas Song" from 1961.

Tuesday Stuff

Two weeks ago in this space, I pitched a fit because I couldn't embed the MSNBC video of Keith Olbermann's takedown of Dubya and the latter's recent preoccupation with his place in history - well, thanks to YouTuber Jeremy The Blue Duck, here it is...



By the way, I think this is the sort of an endorsement that nobody should want.

(And no, the above pic isn't me "pitching a fit" - ha, ha - but one of another typically clueless "Dubya moment.")

...and here's the trailer for "The Warning" about Bushco's myriad abuses of power (more info here)...



...winding down with the seasonal stuff: here's Bing and Bowie ("The Little Drummer Boy")...



...and John Lennon/Yoko Ono ("Happy Xmas/War Is Over").

Doomsy's Do-Gooders And Dregs (2008 - Pt. 5)

Once more, prior related posts are here, here, here, and here...

Do-Gooder Of The Year Nominee

(Shockingly) to KevMart for this (along with fellow FCC commissioners Copps and Adelstein)

The “Corporate Media Pundit Channeling Phil Gramm” Citation

Dana Milbank of the WaPo, who wrote a July 30th column ridiculing Obama filled with “misleadingly cropped quotes, false insinuations, and negligent reporting,” according to Media Matters (prompting a correction from the newspaper), then criticized those who called him on his BS as “whiners” (here...and kudos to K.O. for this in response)

Do Gooder of the Year Nominee

California state controller John Chiang (here - as good as Ahh-nold is on energy and the environment, apparently, that’s as bad as he is on everything else)

Dregs of the Year Nominee

Cokie Roberts for blaming Barack Obama for visiting that “exotic, foreign location” of Hawaii, somehow not acknowledging that it’s actually a state here (and congrats to Cokie for this)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Gorby (sadly), for blaming Georgia in the Russian invasion here (though, with the passage of time, he’s been proven partly right).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

U.S. Olympic women’s pole vaulter Jenn Stuczynski for some rather inopportune trash talking of her Russian opponent (hey, I don’t like what they did in Georgia either, but that’s not Yelena Isinbayeva’s fault – she ended up with the gold, and Stuczynski ended up with the silver here)

Front-Runner Of The Year (or the “You Ready To Make Nice?” citation)

Toby Keith, who supported Obama here (kos backgrounder included here)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

A collective citation to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign for the “blacker” ad here

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Anyone who blames Elizabeth Edwards for her husband’s infidelity, including Flush Limbore here

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Vincent Curatola, the actor who played mob boss Johnny Sack on “The Sopranos,” for starring in ads denouncing the Employee Free Choice Act here (playing up to a mob stereotype is one thing for a TV show, but it's pretty lame to do that for a political campaign)

Taunt Of The Year

(Ya' think McCain wishes he had a 'do-over' here?)



Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Huckleberry Graham for criticizing Obama for missing too many votes here (er, Huck, ya’ wanna’ check “Straight Talk” McCain on that before you open your gob, OK?)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler for saying that the timing of Hurricane Gustav hitting the Gulf Coast (disrupting the Repug National Convention in Minneapolis) demonstrates that “God is on our side” here (smooth move, brainiac – they don’t have many weapons as it is, but you just had to hand them one anyway, didn’t you? And dishonorable mention to Michael Moore who said just about the same thing to K.O. in the same timeframe)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

William Gould, a 62-year-old electrician working at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who hung a noose near the locker of a black employee because Gould “was resentful about a program to prepare minority employees for management promotions.” He faces a maximum of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine (at the very least...here).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Adam LaDuca, the former executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of College Republicans, who wrote on his Facebook page in late July that Barack Obama has "a pair of lips so large he could float half of Cuba to the shores of Miami (and probably would)."

And kudos to The Pennsylvania Progressive for nailing this idiot (here).

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Meghan McCain for saying the following: "No one knows what war is like other than my family. Period" (here).

The “Drill, Baby, Drill” Citation

Employees of the Interior Department for this (representative of their boss, "Dirty Dirk" Kempthorne)

Broken Promise Of The Year

U.S. NJ Dem Congressman Rob Andrews for at first deciding not to seek another term, then welching on that when his primary challenge to Senate Dem Frank Lautenberg went up in smoke (here)

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Lynn Forester De Rothschild, a former Hillary Clinton supporter in the primary who decided to work for John McCain in the general election.

I acknowledge that she has the right to do so (though I think it’s cowardly to turn on the Dems this way), but get a load of the reason why; she thinks Barack Obama is “an elitist.”

Once again, her name is Lynn Forester De Rothschild, who splits her time between London and New York and built a multimillion-dollar telecommunications company before marrying international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, according to this post.

As kos would say, “pot, meet kettle.”

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

Former Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Roynell Young, founder of Pro-Vision, a nonprofit organization based in Houston, TX that began with trips in a red Toyota Land Cruiser to dangerous neighborhoods in search of troubled kids and young men; Pro-Vision broke ground this year on a 16-acre campus with a nature trail, garden, tree farm, amphitheater, and NFL-sponsored football field, all funded by private contributions (and as much as I hate to give Rod Paige credit for anything, he did help with this).

Dregs Of The Year Nominees

Bob DeMoss and Mark Whitlock for this (Obama Waffles)



Beat Down Of The Year

St. Paul storm troopers outside the Rethuglican National Convention do their thing on “Democracy Now” filmmakers and reporters, including Amy Goodman (here).



Dregs Of The Year Nominee

House Minority Leader John Boehner (pronounced bo-ner); so many reasons, but this definitely qualifies as one, where he basically believes that the $700 billion bailout of our financial institutions “shouldn’t help Main Street.”

Dregs Of The Year Nominee

Fernando C. de Baca, chairman of Bernalillo County Republicans in New Mexico, for saying that Hispanics wouldn’t vote for Obama since they believe they’re “above blacks” here (apparently, de Baca didn’t get the memo, as they say).

Do Gooder Of The Year Nominee

You can’t imagine how hard this is for yours truly, but I gotta give the nod to Sen. Jim “High And Tight” Bunning (R-I Hear Voices) for “coming out swinging” against the $700 bil Paulson bailout scheme here (probably for exactly opposite philosophical reasons, but he “found the nut” all the same, and it wasn’t him for a change).

Cartoon Of The Year

This one featuring Governor Hottie, which, according to Editor and Publisher Online, inspired 750 complaints (truth hurts, doesn’t it?)

More later...

Monday Stuff

Oh noes...Rahm Emanuel spoke to B-Rod 21 TIMES!!! OMIGOD!!! AND SEAN INANITY SAID IT WAS FOR 21 HOURS!!!!!

...

Uh, no, people. One phone call to Blago. No "quid pro quo." Four calls to Blago's chief of staff who has since resigned.

There's no "there" there. Just watch and read this if you don't believe me (kudos to "This Week With George S." for a change)...

Update 12/24/08: Pathetic (h/t Atrios)...



(Oh, and before I forget, I also posted over here.)

...and for anyone out there who could still be wondering at this point why we despise Dubya (maybe one or two "bitter enders"), this is only a part of the reason (and contact your elected representatives and tell them you want to bring back the CRA, by the way)...



...time for seasonal stuff again as the day draws nearer; here's Perry Como ("Do You Hear What I Hear?")...



...and The Killers ("A Great Big Sled").

"Deal" Or "No New Deal" For Obama

(Just a quick note: after today, posting is going to be iffy for the remainder of the week.)

I think we can pretty much expect a cacophony of protest against the planned infrastructure spending by the incoming Obama Administration (the editorial page of the Murdoch Street Journal has already been in high dudgeon for some time with their comparisons to Japan’s deflationary troubles in the 1990s when they followed a similar approach, but it’s funny: I’ve heard not a word of protest from them or our other corporate media cousins over the non-oversight of approximately $700 billion in TARP funds and the effect that would have on deflation, to say nothing of that black hole of spending known as the Iraq war – I thought this was a good analysis of what happened in Japan during that time, for what it’s worth).

Update: Kudos to Media Matters for taking on the whole "well it didn't work in Japan so it can't work here" thing here.

Despite the howls of outrage by the Repugs and their acolytes, though, I should note that this story (h/t McClatchy) recalls how the New Deal (the massive public works project that helped to lift this country out of the Great Depression, though I’ll admit that the Depression didn’t officially end until WWII) helped throughout North Carolina; the story tells us that…

The New Deal programs poured an estimated $428 million into North Carolina from 1933 to 1938 (roughly $6.4 billion in today's dollars), according to historians Hugh Lefler and Ray Newsome.

The federal programs had an impact in ways you might not imagine. New Deal programs, for example, were instrumental in creating the state's two major cultural institutions -- the N.C. Symphony and the N.C. Museum of Art.

…

(President Franklin D.) Roosevelt, who was immensely popular in North Carolina, created a series of national programs to put people to work. They included the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration.

Armies of unemployed were set to work on public works projects that have helped define the modern North Carolina landscape.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was built. Costumes for "The Lost Colony" production in Manteo were made. Fort Macon was restored.

Public works projects included Mount Mitchell State Park and the migratory bird refuge at Swan Quarter. In fact, much of today's state and federal park system, including Pisgah National Forest, the Appalachian Trail, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Hanging Rock and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, is a product of New Deal programs.

This takes you to California’s “Living New Deal” Project sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley, and this tells you that “Pennsylvania’s Little New Deal” sponsored by Dem governor and FDR confidant George H. Earle III was responsible for the 1935 Child Labor Act that raised the minimum working age to sixteen and regulated the number of hours teenagers could work (and in 1936, just one year after the federal Social Security Act became law, the state legislature, at Earle's prodding, established unemployment compensation for workers who had lost their jobs).

It should also be noted that the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was authorized in 1937 “to build what soon became known as ‘America's First Superhighway.’ This state-of-the-art public works project remains among the most significant legacies of Pennsylvania's Little New Deal” (even though I’ll admit that the Commission has always been a patronage haven, try imagining the importance of the Turnpike to commerce in this state and where we would be without it).

Oh, and concerning the New Deal spending of North Carolina, please consider the following from the story…

Conservatives such as then-U.S. Sen. Josiah Bailey, a Democrat from Raleigh, worried about the cost of the millions being spent, whether the projects were boondoggles, whether it encouraged laziness and whether it produced shoddy work.

However, the following should be noted in particular…

Richard Nixon, a Duke law student, earned $30 a month working in the school library. Jesse Helms, a Wake Forest College student, made $18.75 per month doing sports publicity. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Terry Sanford worked in the Swain Hall dining room. They were all federal New Deal jobs.

And because of conservative opposition, North Carolina received fewer New Deal funds than any other state (and based on this story, it looks like, as I noted earlier, the “right” is ready to pick up once more where their predecessors left off…more fool them - and here's another indicator that Obama is doing the right thing).

Sunday Stuff

More seasonal stuff: Josh Groban performs "O Holy Night" at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center in NYC on December 4, 2002...



...and I ask you, what would a holiday celebration be without The Wet Spots ("Fist Me This Christmas").