Dan Hicks Double Shot

LOL: Boing Boing gets pwnd

Wikileaks to target a Big Bank

 Uh-oh. I hope Julian Assange has life insurance and bodyguards. It's one thing to take on the government. But to embarrass the corporate oligarchy? As in BofA? Risky business. 

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats.

We have a winner!

 The 2010 'Bad Sex in Fiction' award goes to The Shape of Her by Rowan Somerville.

The books that Somerville beat at being the worst are here. More bad sex scenes from The Shape of Her can be savored at The Guardian. 

They also raise a great question over there at the Guardian: Why is there not a good sex in fiction award? Rather than just snickering at embarrassing efforts like this, sexy, literate love scenes should be rewarded, too, no?

Read a very NSFW excerpt from The Shape of Her below the fold.

It's the good advice, that you just didn't take

<via Pittsburgh Review Tribune>

Glenn Beck will promote his book "Broke: Restarting the Engine of America" with a $90.50-a-ticket performance Thursday at the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh's Cultural District, a day after a book signing in Robinson. The show will be simulcast to 537 movie theaters across the country, where tickets cost $20.

So Glenn Beck will be charging the Villagers nearly $100 per to tell them how broke they are.

Last one for November. Live From Daryl's House

Presidential biographer drops the F-bomb on the teevee...calls Americans lazy, obese

It's all about the stupid. <Via Politico - the portal we love to hate>

On CBS's "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer, anchoring an authors roundtable discussion with the likes of Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, kept engaging the panelists in discussion about how America’s Founding Fathers would have felt about today’s political climate.

 “What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?” 

 “You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian. “As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in 'My Cousin Vinny,' ‘That’s a f----- up question!'” Morris said, relishing over the word as network censors bleeped him out. 

 “You cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today,” he continued. “I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we hope for in our presidents now, what we look for in our presidents now and what we’re increasingly disappointed by. He understood foreign culture, recognized the dignity of the United States. He was forceful yet dignified. And what I really feel these days is, we’ve become such an insular people.”

 Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”

Ending your week with a belt of truthiness

"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."
--H.L. Mencken







Mencken in 1926:

I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. 

More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. 

And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

Get more here 

Sunday Afternoon Nostalgia: Volume to MAX

Beyond brilliant. RIP Stevie Ray.

Your wisdom teeth need to be pulled because your brain is too big

The Top 10 Daily Consequences of Having Evolved
 <Via Smithsonian>

Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day. Here are ten.


 
1. Our cells are weird chimeras
Perhaps a billion years ago, a single-celled organism arose that would ultimately give rise to all of the plants and animals on Earth, including us. This ancestor was the result of a merging: one cell swallowed, imperfectly, another cell. The predator provided the outsides, the nucleus and most of the rest of the chimera. The prey became the mitochondrion, the cellular organ that produces energy. Most of the time, this ancient symbiosis proceeds amicably. But every so often, our mitochondria and their surrounding cells fight. The result is diseases, such as mitochondrial myopathies (a range of muscle diseases) or Leigh’s disease (which affects the central nervous system).

2. Hiccups
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.

3. Backaches
The backs of vertebrates evolved as a kind of horizontal pole under which guts were slung. It was arched in the way a bridge might be arched, to support weight. Then, for reasons anthropologists debate long into the night, our hominid ancestors stood upright, which was the bodily equivalent of tipping a bridge on end. Standing on hind legs offered advantages—seeing long distances, for one, or freeing the hands to do other things—but it also turned our backs from an arched bridge to an S shape. The letter S, for all its beauty, is not meant to support weight and so our backs fail, consistently and painfully.

Buzz-Kill for this week

Q: You’ve said that every country has scam artists; but only in a dying country, only at the low end of the most distressed third world, are people like that part of the power structure. Do you really mean that? 

Matt Tiabbi: I lived in Russia for ten years, and one of the things that attracts me to this Wall Street story was that it reminded me of what I had seen in Russia. In the former Soviet Union, I saw this incredible pessimism. There was no belief in the future because there was so much instability that people who had the ability to take anything, steal anything were doing it. They wanted to get the money and get out of the country as quickly as possible. They might steal the money from the government and buy a villa in France. That was the modus operandi in those years. That’s how I see the financial services industry in America with the mortgage scam.

It’s the same mindset, whether it was the guys at companies like Countrywide who were pushing people into bad loans when they qualified for good ones, or the banks who were immediately taking these loans and selling them off to pension funds and insurance companies knowing that they were going to explode, or the hedge fund guys who were intentionally creating masses of crappy loans to dump off on other people, or the ratings agencies who were rating stuff that they knew was crap. Then at the very top you had companies like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank that were basically getting the taxpayer to buy this stuff through the bailouts, knowing that it was severely over-valued. It was the “let’s get what all we can right now before it all blows up” mindset that you see in a third world country.

<Via AlterNet>  

Then and now

 

Click to embiggen 

The Fashion Professionals

I hate to be the one to link to this...

 <via Boston Globe>
Phrases that announce 'I'm lying'

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there’s a whole range of phrases that aren’t doing the jobs you think they’re doing.

In fact, “I hate to be the one to tell you this” (like its cousin, “I hate to say it”) is one of them. Think back: How many times have you seen barely suppressed glee in someone who — ostensibly — couldn’t be more reluctant to be the bearer of bad news? A lack of respect from someone who starts off “With all due respect”? A stunning dearth of comprehension from someone who prefaces their cluelessness with “I hear what you’re saying”? And has “I’m not a racist, but...” ever introduced an unbiased statement?

These contrary-to-fact phrases have been dubbed (by the Twitter user GrammarHulk and others) “but-heads,” because they’re at the head of the sentence, and usually followed by but. They’ve also been dubbed “false fronts,” “wishwashers,” and, less cutely, “lying qualifiers.”

Entertain the Grandchildren

Your Kiss

Live From Daryl's House. Daryl Hall is joined by Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20.

Alice's Restaurant. A Thanksgiving Tradition

This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant. No.  That's just the name of the song, and that's why we all call the song Alice's Restaurant. Do you get it? Are you older than 55? Whatever.

Diana Krall

The Hack 30: Salon counts down the top 'journalist' hacks

The complete list of America's worst pundits. <Via Salon>
Here they are - but you need to click the link above to be properly briefed on these gasbags.

The Hack Thirty

1. Richard Cohen

2. Mark Halperin

3. Thomas Friedman

4. David Broder

5. Marty Peretz

6. Marc Thiessen

7. Jonah Goldberg

8. Maureen Dowd

9. Laura Ingraham

10. Peggy Noonan

Mark Morford on the Federal Leather Sniffers

<via SFGate>

Hi. I am now going to touch your junk.

Sweet Jesus, we should have thought of this ages ago. Why didn't we think of this ages ago?
It seems so obvious. You want to ignite some delicious outcry in this brutally divided country? You want to unite the wary populace around a single, seething hotbutton of patriotism, privacy and putrefied civil liberties?

Do not launch bogus wars that cannot be won. Do not tell them lies about a major health care reform package that actually helps millions. Do not invade their dreams with thoughts of happy gay people holding hands in a wedding chapel. Do not rip their retirement accounts to shreds, sell them bad home loans with a grunt and a slippery Wall Street grin. What are you, an amateur?

What you do is, you go direct. You grope them right on their tingly 'n forbidden genital regions, AKA God's country, AKA Father O'Malley's special secret, real and true and WTF-do-you-think-you're-doing. Works every time. Just ask the Vatican.

Sarah Palin declares war on South Korea

<via ThinkProgress>

Mama Sasquatch Sarah Palin made a special appearance on Glenn Beck’s famous radio program this morning, and W.T.F???  When asked by one of Beck’s radio groupies how she would “handle a situation like this thing in North Korea” after she becomes president, Sarah Palin went with the “obvious” answer: “Obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.”

 So basically Sarah Palin would throw diplomacy in the garbage can and immediately declare war on our “real allies,” the South Koreans, without even talking to them first. Christ. What a dumbshit.

Here's a cool idea: Classify 'happiness' as a psychiatric disorder!

In 1992, psychiatrist Richard Bentall wrote an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics proposing that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.

<Link>

Have learned so much from these Hillbillies about how to prepare food..

Their Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarbecueWeb

T.S.A. fun!

REM. Live. Canada

The Lyrics: For EYP

Krugman again. That usually means trouble

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing.

--Paul Krugman, New York Times, 11/22/10:


Paul Krugman examines Alan Simpson’s recent comments about how excited he, Simpson, is about the prospect of a government shut down or, as Simpson puts it, a “blood bath in April.” Why, Simpson sounds just like a teenager waiting for the next Michael Bay film! “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he says.

Sociopaths like Alan Simpson belong in a straitjacket - not in some TV studio spewing bile. Ditto for Newt.

When terriers daydream

Pope sez: Put on your rubbers

How did I miss this?

“Pope Benedict XVI has said the use of condoms is acceptable “in certain cases”, according to a new book.
He said condoms could reduce the risk of infection with HIV, such as for a prostitute, in a series of interviews he gave to a German journalist.
The Vatican newspaper ran excerpts on Saturday.”

WTF?? (Glaring angrily at kids across the room)
 Now he fucking tells us. Go to your room!
Haha - that is a joke

Except that...the new ruling does not apply to Heterosexuals. Once again, the gay prostitutes get to have all the fun.

Lamebook

And still more Live at Daryl's: Great Bonnie Raitt cover

Put this on Fullscreen - and turn the volume to Full..
The look on Daryl's face throughout this cut is priceless. It's musical orgasm. That's it.
Thank you.
Here's the lyrics for anybody interested...

Sunday Afternoon Nostalgia: Volume to MAX

Possibly the best live Rock album ever blasted onto vinyl. The Allman Brothers Band at the Fillmore East. Recorded March 12-13, 1971.

Seattle in Snow

 

View from across Lake Washington at Bellevue. Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains in background.

A little experiment

(More things that make me cry)

Thanks to my friend

Just when I thought I'd had enough
All my tears were shed
No promise left unbroken
There were no painful words unsaid
You came along and showed me
How to leave it all behind
You opened up my heart again and then much to my surprise
I found love
Love in the nick of time.

More Live From Daryl's House

Kevin and Michael Bacon join Daryl Hall

Oh shit. Chomsky and the pesky truthiness

Grab a shot of 151 Rum before settling into this mindblower.

These shameless gunsels need smartening up

A handful of newly elected Republican US Senators have written to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trying to undo the Constitutional authority of other elected incumbent US Senators.

Senator-elect 'Dr'. Rand Paul  -  the one with an endless raging hard-on for Strict Constitutionalism is engaged in lobbying that would impose illegal burdens on incumbent elected representatives, violating the word and spirit of the United States Constitution. He wants to take charge now although he won't be seated in Congress until January.

The 20th Amendment to the US Constitution states: the respective terms of US Senators and US Representatives ends at noon on January 3rd.

Senators "elect" Roy Blunt, Ron Johnson, Rob Portman, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio have written to Senator Reid stating:

On Election Day we were elected to represent the constituents of our respective states in the Senate. Out of respect for our states' voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New START Treaty or any other treaty in a lame duck session prior to January 3, 2011.

 WTF? Suck on it, you pimps. You trash-talkers are not yet freaking seated in that Congress place. The incumbent Senators, parked in seats they won previously, have all the powers embedded in their positions until 12 noon, January 3rd. Christ Jeezus. Your ass ain't seated yet, but yer howling like goddam wolverines in heat. Trying to dictate your shit like this is extralegal, irresponsible, and unconstitutional. So what is up with that, Dr.Rand Paul - Mr. Libertarian? We're just not off to a great start here, dipshit. Now go apologize to the poor un-curious dupes who voted for you. More dipshits.

I just LOVE shit like this

A BMW - essentially built by hand - assembly time lapse. Model Z4 GT3

The Beatles LIVE: 1964 - pretty rare footage

As always, a great live band. Lennon is hilarious and Ringo rocks the joint.

Buzz Kill for this week

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera Extended Interview<a>
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Sorry to disrupt your precious daydream. This shit is going on whether you are awake or whatever.

The Animators of Life

Introducing a newer, mean and lean, buffed up Dick Cheney

The new and improved Dick.
He will cheat death forever.

Reading assignment!

 Excellent piece from Dissident Voice

 When Fascism Masquerades as Populism

With its reliance on corporate money and financial contributions by the wealthy, the U.S. electoral system provides movement in only one direction: to the right. Traditional liberals lack the financial wherewithal to compete against free market fundamentalists. Corporations do not fund candidates who would regulate them and hold them accountable to the people. The electoral system is useless as a tool for the expression of traditional liberalism or progressive reform.

Capitalism does not empower people; it gives primacy to capital. Like the corporation, money is a legal fiction that allows bankers and financial institutions to create phantom wealth from nothing. It gives rise to privatized banking cartels and to the Federal Reserve which controls the money supply and loans it at interest to the government and to people. In effect, this gives bankers control of the government and our cultural institutions.

Free market fundamentalism was elevated to the status of religion decades ago by Milton Friedman and his disciples at the Chicago School of Economics. Its adherents regard the market as a holy oracle that takes precedence over man and nature, the diviner of social and economic status, a force more primal than the laws that govern the motion of planetary bodies and the formation of distant nebulae.

Sorry, I missed it. But I will review it anyway.

Behold! Sarah Palin's Alaska - “a reality show” that premiered last night on The Learning Channel, a channel for the willfully ignorant. 

Here we go. We get the Palin family values up close and in your face. There's the Todd Man, and Trig and Willow. LOL - Mama Grizz tells the boyfriend not to sneak upstairs to Willow's suite, and the little pimp ignores her. Ha Ha. Why didn't she send Todd Man up there to pound his ass?

New Congressional Teabagger want his Big Gummint health care NOW

Surprise! He ran against Obamacare!

Republican Andy Harris, a conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.

LOL. Buckle up, kids. The lunacy gets good now. 

Nicolette: Live 1982.

Just get yourself past the first 50 seconds of douche Rick Dees. Only Want To Be With You will never be the same. Unbelievable backup band.
Christ...I loathe Rick Dees as much as I love Nicolette. RIP Nicolette Larson.
Rincon Rats: the lyrics mean something.

The original from Dusty Springfield: 1964.

Just when you thought the world was safe from Rick Satorum...

You thought Rick Santorum got kicked to the curb - for good. You were beginning to feel safe again, knowing that the nation's Rick Santorum Shortage has turned out to be a very good thing. Well. He's back. Like rats in your face.

Via Politico (the vile portal we love to hate), Rick sez:

 "There isn't a single candidate running for president who can claim to be a tea party candidate. That's by definition. The people involved in the movement weren't involved in politics, and were only activated by what they saw in Washington."

But Santorum said he can lay some claim to the tea party mantle as someone who left politics and is only eyeing a comeback because of the same concerns that dominate the movement.

Mmmmm...Santorum 'left' politics because Casey thrashed him like a rented mule on election day.

"I qualify," said Santorum, after hosting an afternoon talk with former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf near the Capitol. "I was out, content to be out, but now I feel compelled to come back."

Mother of jabbering Christ. Not even the deranged GOP would nominate this dimwit fucknozzle. Santorum feels so compelled to force himself back into The Light because Mama Grizzly is hogging all the headlines. 

Keeping your trashy secrets to yourself - even on FB

No human relationship can withstand complete transparency. Facebook gives you plenty of opportunities to commit social faux pas in the name of "connecting," but there's no feature to help you keep necessary secrets. You have to get tricky about it.

The problem here isn't you, reader. Hopefully you're smart enough not to post things that will get you fired. It's your idiot friends, who are liable to tag you in drunken photos, or write on your wall about the time you made a bong out of a cheese steak sandwich so that your 15-year-old son can read it.

Internet scholar Danah Boyd recently explained the 'risk reduction strategies' teens use to keep their Facebook profiles free of drama caused by friends. But these can be applied to adults just as well. Let's take a look:

The "Super-Logoff"

The super-logoff is the practice of deactivating your Facebook account entirely each time you log out, then reactivating it when you log in. Your profile disappears when you deactivate, but Facebook keeps it on their servers for a few days before deleting it indefinitely since they know most people will come crawling back for a hit of social crack. With the super-logoff you can assume maximum control over you profile, since people will only be able to see and post on your wall when you're logged in. (And, presumably, in front of your computer.)

This would be a good strategy for when you go to Burning Man and don't want to come back to find yourself tagged in dozens of Facebook pics naked but for splashes of glow-in-the-dark body paint. (And it only takes a couple more clicks than logging off.)

The guy who writes papers for your students tells it

The author of this piece makes a living writing custom term papers for college students. Anything from admissions essays to graduate thesis. His annual income is higher than most of the professors who assign the work.

The Shadow Scholar by 'Joe Dante'

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.


I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.


In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

Read the entire article here - now!

Meditate for a minute: Tommy Emmanuel with 'Angelina'

Attention any guitarist who ever imagined the thankless task that was borne by our favorite god-like talents (Eric Clapton) who spent endless hours refining their chops (during those lean and dark days) - working toward a sound that sounded effortless: Just STFU. You have another think coming. Australian Tommy Emmanuel makes it look so ridiculously easy. Start by watching his right (picking) hand during the closeups. His pinky finger performs a dance all on it's own. Not to mention this flatpick/fingerpick style that you will never master.

I thought I told you to go to bed!

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole: At once haunting and beautiful

RIP Israel. We will hear your voice for all time through the astonishing legacy of the music you left for us. Thank you.

Make the voices stop!

It's about time. The Catholic Church has finally stopped farting around with settling priest abuse lawsuits and trashing women and gays long enough to take a stand on something the church is good at. Exorcism!

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

Live From Daryl's House. Daryl Hall and K.T. Tunstall. Superb remake

Lil Jon Remix of Sesame Street Theme - SO NSFW

Who would've thought...

...that Chimpy would plagiarize other legitimate authors for his stupid book? 

<Via Huffington>

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.

It's FRIDAY you Bastards!

Yummy Mezcal

Tiabbi: Courts helping banks thrash homeowners

From the November 25, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.

They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
Finish reading article - Matt Tiabbi - Rolling Stone

Little Feat live in Germany - before the invention of Autotune

Gawd I miss these guys. RIP Lowell George and Ritchie Hayward.
Filmed at the Grugahalle in Essen, Germany in 1977, just a few days before the recording of their legendary live album Waiting For Columbus.

Historic Compromise Reached

'Extend all tax cuts, let Obama's term expire
In a stunning display of bipartisanship, President Obama and the Republican Leadership have reached an historic compromise, agreeing to extend indefinitely the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but allowing the President’s term to expire prematurely, sometime in mid-2011.
Mr. Obama hailed this agreement as an example of “how the two parties can meet in the middle and respond to the needs of the electorate — and without even having to spend taxpayer funds on a slurpee for Mitch McConnell, or a Merlot for Speaker-to-be Boehner.”
The President further emphasized that he had still “stood on principle, by not handing the ‘keys’ back to the Republicans,” but that he would instead “serve as their ‘designated driver,’ by personally driving the car back into the ditch.  Since the GOP  is now the party of Bachmann and Palin,” Mr. Obama added, “just think of it as Driving Miss Crazy.”

Chimpy's book gets reviewed in China!

The Decider stomps on the terra firma once again

In case you haven't noticed, George W. Bush - still swaggering around like a goddamned washed up peacock that was run out of the flock years ago - the previous unelected resident of the White House, has been peddling a boatload of unbearably stinking revisionist  vomitus...conjured up by his ghostwriter.


How does he walk through the world? 'The Editors' at Esquire Magazine want to know. Interesting that the 'Editors' declined to identify themselves editorially. Oh, never mind. Not particularly interesting. Move along. Nothing to see here.

His two wars drag on, as does his vandal's contempt for the rule of law. His economic intemperance and neglect live still as a consuming dry rot. New Orleans remains a shadowed, haunted place. One of the most poignant sights in the world is in the lower Ninth Ward, where, block after block, there's nothing left of the houses except the front steps. Little stairways to nowhere. That is the country he left behind.

How does he walk through the world?

T-Bone Walker: Live 1967

Saw this legendary guitarist perform at a prom dance once upon a time...

Math is easy

See?

Easy bar bets: God has a plan for these losers

Nate Silver - the statistician brainiac over there doing his 538 column at the NYT - brings some welcome hopey-changey:

The table below compiles a number of statistics related to prospective G.O.P. candidates in 2012. Moving from left to right, we have their current chance of winning the nomination according to the political futures market Intrade; the candidate’s current “power ranking” according to the National Journal’s Hotline, their average standing in five recent polls of prospective Republican primary voters (I don’t use the recent Zogby Interactive poll — we don’t consider Zogby’s online polls to be scientific), and favorability ratings among Republican adults according to the recent A.P.-G.f.K. survey.

<Nate Silver>

Love me some Johnny A.

The world according to some cynical densepack

<click>

You are dreaming of Bali

Postcard from Bali from Stephan Kot.

The enabling of Rush Limbaugh: the Vulgar pigboy

President Obama lowered taxes. Why doesn't the country know that? Rick Perlstein on how Rush Limbaugh helped mislead a nation—and why the Democrats let him get away with it.

We live in a mendocracy. As in: rule by liars. Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday. 

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows. And it was all too predictable.

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