Calling All Celebrities


Fall through the cracks

On billmon’s return to bloggity blogging, he sez McSame is doomed because the media is finally catching on to what an ultimately shallow codger he is for being the self-serving flip-flopper non-maverick he is and also incapable of thinking outside the Bush policy box. (A great read I might add.) At Sadly, No!, Brad sez Obama might be doomed for underestimating the shallowness of voters. I’d like to think it’s somewhere in between. A lot will shake out when the VPs are presented and there are a couple of debates.

Also consider the wisdom of a surge in Afghanistan. Remember how much fun the Russians had there.

I’m reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Things are getting loopy.

Bartering with Satan’s Lattes


The Longshortsmen of South Street Seaport

The Bush administration has learned a creative accounting trick or two from The Smartest Guys in the Room™ [Enron]. Like Enron’s PR douchebags, we’ve got waterboys like Ben Stein and Phil Gramm telling us everything is fine. Recall that some of Enron’s shenanigans ultimately led to California’s rolling blackouts of 2001. Extrapolate as you will.

Via ThinkProgress and (in a rare fit of actual journalism) ABC:

ABC: Without ‘creative White House accounting,’ Bush’s deficit is actually $600 billion.»

Yesterday, the White House “increased its estimate for next year’s deficit to nearly $490 billion, a record figure that will saddle the next president with deepening budget problems in his first year in office.” But, on ABC News’s Good Morning America today, Claire Shipman reported that the deficit is actually much higher because “creative White House accounting” didn’t include the war, the unemployment costs, Medicare fees, or the housing bill in its calculations. If those numbers are included, it brings “the grand total to about $600 billion.” […]

To illustrate how big the deficit is, Shipman explained: “If every American were to pitch in 2,000 dollars, we could pay off this year’s deficit. Or if we handed over each of us 500 gallons gasoline. Or, in terms we can all really understand, if every American gave up 666 lattes for a year.”

666 lattes. A Hawaiian vacation with hotel for a week for every American! The contents of every 99¢ store across the land inside our homes! The mind reels and reels.

Nasty dirty embarrassing campaign tactics aside, If I Ran the Zoo invokes Cheney on why the aging McSame must be kept away from the Whitehouse:

Cheney is the epitome of the politician without a constituency, the indifferent technocrat and autocrat who owes his allegiance not to the people but to himself. Cheney went into the VP slot with the stated understanding that he would never run for President or compete with Bush in any way by appealing to the people or to the party. What did we get for it? An activist VP who never cared about either the fate of his party or the country after his stint in the White House is finished. He’s got no political future, and so his actions have been unconstrained by calculations of long term effects, popularity, legality, or morality. The lesson I take away from Cheney’s terms in office is–never elect a dead man walking. He’s got nothing to lose. McCain is similarly situated. This is the last stop, for him. What does he care about your kids education? the environment? America’s laws? the popularity of his political programs. None of these will affect him in a few years.

Now recall that Cheney pretty much set up the current administration’s energy policy in 2001. Now of course, McSame is in the pocket of the head-in-the-sand oil industry. Dead Men Walking Faster.

Harriman State Park Escape Valve

It’s Saturday at noon. (Dateline!) Somehow we managed to stuff two backpacks with a change of clothes, some gourmet provender from West Side Market, a tent and the rest, and drive up to Harriman State Park which is a 45 minute drive from Manhattan. Bear Mountain is there and a couple of crowded car-camping sites but we’re set on roughing it. From a secret parking lot, we hike to a lake in 45 minutes and pretty much have the whole place to ourselves.

Sunday afternoon view from the tent, Harriman State Park
Sunday afternoon view from the tent, Harriman State Park

Skinny-dipping, campfire, philosophical talks about how amazing it is to be alive and how we’re going to be dead in 50 years pretty much no matter what, and whether the afterlife is being Brangelina’s dog or an astronaut floating around Jupiter or having endless Utz® Cheese Puffs. I’m not saying you had to be there. The thing is, there were no generators, no kids yelling, and no one pointing their flashlights at you. The weather is better Saturday but the rain holds off for the most part on Sunday and there’s still lots of swimming to be had.

There are giant oceans of wild blueberries. I exaggerate but there are lots of them and they’re addictive and delicious.

Blueberries at the campsite

There are beavers but no photos. We made friends with the local one-eyed goose. I got her good side.

There’s stuff in the park like Lake Welch where you pay $7 to park in a stadium-sized parking lot to sit on a beach the size of a Manhattan bathroom with everyone and their sausage tailgate parties and lawn chairs but if you do your homework (or if you know someone who’s done it before, heh), you can get all away from New York City quickly, cleanly, heavenly.

Throwing a Party? Fascist!

Fascists gather at Taxi Beach
Fascists gather at Taxi Beach

Pandagon and Digby confront the growing meme that Obama and his fans represent a rising onslaught of American fascism.

We have to recognize this and understand it. There is a very concerted and completely ahistorical effort to make “fascism” synonymous with “popularity.” As Jesse Taylor notes:

On the one hand, it’s an awful abuse of the concept of fascism, disrespecting the millions upon millions of people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed because of the dream of nationalist identity and corporate power uber alles. On the other hand, it is remarkably entertaining to see them try to figure out how Barack Obama’s favorite ice cream flavor plays right into the hands of the fascist dream.

By this dumbing down of the word fascism, any concert, movie, speech, nice meal at a restaurant, disco dancing that a large group of people might pay money for becomes American fascism flexing its mighty fascist muscle. Give me a break.

The Urge to Define Surge Success

This video at TPM prompted me to haul out one of my old DJ flyers.

(Yes, that’s from 2007.) Over at Kos, there are a couple of posts spelling out the conflicting accounts citing the recent GAO report and other sources on whether the surge has really succeeded or not. Even as the White House and McSame insist the surge has succeeded, the GAO report also implies there is no post-surge strategy. And all that aside — if we have succeeded, why can’t we leave?

Robots and Sunglasses

In which I shamelessly post in the style of This Recording….

I was watching Westworld (1973) a few weeks ago and a couple of images at the beginning of the movie struck me.


Obviously, they’re the same guy/robot and the implication is that they’re both robot pilots guiding the unsuspecting tourists to their doom at the hands of disgruntled robots. Even though Steve Vai believes his guitar is his personal window to his soul, the Hollywood tradition is that robots wear sunglasses to hide their eyes because eyes are the windows to the soul — and robots and governors don’t have one.

When Yul Brynner shows up in Westworld, he has creepy eyes with movie lights in them which is to say, this post is sort of about robot mythmaking. Oddly enough, in the movie, you differentiate the robots from humans by looking at their hands, not by the movie lights in their eyes.

(I was saddened when I realized that Yul Brynner had been reduced to a robot cowboy signalling the end of the Hollywood Western. The genre was briefly revived when Lawrence Kasdan did Silverado (1985) and then Clint Eastwood did Unforgiven (1992). Let’s face it: the genre will live on with a respirator the same way Elvis does).

People wear sunglasses in public, on the subway, and when they’re playing poker because they don’t want you to see their souls or their wandering eyes. Similarly, femme fatales and French film directors have souls of dubious provenance. Tut alors! They’re both (somewhat) French!


Celebrities wear the sunglasses and take their endorsements because even Republicans know that celebrities don’t have souls. And the whole history of sunglasses is wrapped up in celebrity culture and power culture. You can be an instant rock star by popping ’em on!

I’ve recently watched the first two seasons of the newer Battlestar Galactica. The show has a giant fanbase and a lot has been written about it already but maybe…. not…. I’m the first to observe that the robots … well, “skin job robots” … don’t wear sunglasses because they have souls. The best mindwarp of the show is that the “skin jobs” are made by the “Danger Will Robinson” Robby Robots. Thank goodness.

There’s an old science fiction book the Jesuits made me read called A Canticle for Leibowitz where humanity is doomed to reach The Nuclear Age, destroy itself, then evolve back up into another Nuclear Age, ad infinitum. The stories and the sunglasses just keep coming, don’t they? Here’s me editing this post….

Let’s watch a robot video. Robot video looker….