Grouchy’s Liberaltopia

About 6… Eastern.

I was four.

My middle brother was about seven and a half.

We tiptoed downstairs; well “tiptoe” as much as little kids can, and turned on the old RCA. The first show was agricultural. I guess since Mom had grown up on a farm, and Dad in the wilderness, a program about farms and big farm equipment was the main attraction. Oh, and being about something and somewhere other than the New York City area. Though our two story white house, and what eventually became close to an acre “spread,” looked over the scenic yet massively polluted Hudson, it was far less than we desired.

Huh?

Let me explain. Our father, Bill Carman, had filled us with stories of how woodland life in the Adirondacks was magical and city life something to be loathed. I suppose that’s why we found even a show about farm life comforting compared to our slightly better than average NYC version of suburbia: late 1950s; early 60s.

After the tractors all tractored, and the barns slowly seemed to back away because the cameraman had pulled back; credits for the “Ag” program rolled. Then there was the sound of a galloping horse punctuated by frenetic and shaky music, announcing the arrival of a thoughtful and wise rabbit in shining armor carrying a lance. On some of the sites I haunt, net-wise, you will find a picture of that hare stuck in a contemplative moment next to my name. I wonder some days if I can ever live up to his legacy or the men and women who created him, or gave voice to him, Rags and all his “children.” His name: Crusader Rabbit… and his buddy was Rags: the classic smart straight man partnered with a hilarious dunce who unwittingly delivers punch line after punch line. This formula has worked well for practically every Jay Ward Production and inspired both Animaniacs, where everyone but our heroes were dull knives in the drawer of life, and Peter in Family Guy. Peter, who is his own far less than brainy sidekick; is surrounded by his brilliant baby Stewie, quite smart and tolerant wife Lois and wise, yet wise guy, dog; Brian. Brian Griffin: this generation’s Mr. Peabody; the creative progeny of the only dog to ever have a pet boy.

This is the story of how a rather Conservative gentleman named Jay and a peace activist named Bill made animation history while inspiring generations of entertainers, writers and animators. If only our partisans these days could work together so well.

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And This Day in Hell…

“Them that’s got shall get,
Them that’s not shall lose…”
– From “God Bless the Child (That’s Got His Own),” by Arthur Herzog Jr. and Billie Holiday, and recorded by her for Okeh Records in 1941.

“Free market capitalism — as a faith — really is an inverse of Marxism. It is a theology that believes their system will bring paradise on earth and moral perfection. When their system is in power in the real world, their true believers claim that any problem only happened because their ideology has not been applied with sufficient purity.”
– Larry Beinhart, “The Fall of a Free Market Prophet,” Common Dreams, Dec. 7, 2008.

“Sometimes the Invisible Hand is all thumbs.”
– Jared Bernstein, C-Span, April 16, 2008.

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
– Ernest Hemingway [Bush reversed the formula, but it's still true today.]

So far we’ve seen the Top Dogs – underline ‘dogs’ – of Wall Street and Detroit parade before Congress insisting they need our tax money to bail them out. The former ‘Masters of the Universe’ have made so many stupid short-term decisions they have shamed their MBA parchment into so much worthless sheepskin accorded to those who can pay the tuition, or have the family clout, to squeeze them through college. To add insult to injury, the bankers who have fleeced us for billions in the name of providing credit to keep businesses going have refused to use our money to provide credit to keep businesses going, instead financing bonuses for themselves, luxury retreats at pricey resorts, and apparently precipitating a sit-down strike by 300 union workers at a Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago last month. Not only were these people unceremoniously fired and given one day to clear out, the company reneged on its contract to provide wages and vacation pay owed them and the severance pay they were guaranteed. That’s right – Republic refused to pay wages and vacation pay already earned and blamed it on the Bank of America, while they hastily moved their Chicago equipment to Iowa. BoA received $25 billion of our tax dollars to avoid just this kind of situation. Fortunately, thanks to nationwide publicity for this sit-down strike, and support from near-President Obama, the Republic workers finally received their back wages and other pay, but let’s see this for what it was: A naked attempt to bust the union, and it was mostly successful. Republic’s union workers are still out of a job and the company has set up a low-wage non-union plant in Iowa. (Incidentally, inquiring minds would like to know: who is paying the salaries of Republic’s top executives and how much do they make?)

Morality and ethics hardly exist in the corporate boardroom but, if this isn’t wrong, what is?

How to correct it? Let’s hope President Obama takes a page from Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially his Economic Bill of Rights speech delivered January 11, 1944, during the Second World War, which included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

As FDR concluded: “All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

“America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.”

If we have those rights, the economy will take care of itself.

What Does Late Jazz Sax Player Stan Getz Have to Do with Our Economic Meltdown? Read on:

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Ye Olde usually offers in house satire parodies and a few links. But Scribe this week will simply provide a quote and a link. This is satire to be proud of, and NOT pulled out from Scribe’s out there outlook.

Rove and Morris Swept up in Prostitution Sting

Washington, DC: Former Bush administration insider, Karl Rove, and GOP political consultant, Dick Morris, were among 30 men rounded up last night. The two men were each charged with “indecent acts,” and “cruelty to animals.”

A Rove spokesperson said the former top adviser to President George Bush will fight the charges.

“Mr. Rove is the target of a vast left wing conspiracy, he knows that and is anxious to prove in court that that sheep was planted in his room by enemies of America.’”

Rove’s spokesperson refused to explain why, at the time of their arrests, Rove was dressed as a farmer and Morris as a farmer’s daughter.

Looking for the rest? HERE YA GO!!!!!

“As Scribe, dressed as Slim Pickens, rides da bomb down to planet blog.”

“Slim Pickens?” What ever happened to his brother who hogged the buffet line, “Fat Sloppings?”

-YOS

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Coverage of the Big Stuff of 2008, in the form of cheesy top ten lists and lofty-worded think pieces, will be churned out endlessly by Our Corporately-Owned Media over the next few weeks, so here are some of the lesser-reported annoyances, intrusions on sanity, and other head-smackers of the year past.

The Good: It’s a new year and Obama takes office in less than 20 days! (Happy 2009, BTW.)
The Bad: Bush and Cheney can still stir up trouble in their ‘Final Days.’
The Ugly: What if they decide not to leave?

The Good: The already-weakened Republican Party is splitting apart in a war between the ‘Jesus Camp’ Christopublicans and the Neocon Corporate Pragmatists. (The true principled conservatives having ditched the GOP years ago.) The latter are willing to bend rather than break; the former can’t, since they arrogantly believe, apparently without the assistance of hard drugs, that their Invisible Omnipotent God of the Infinite Universe Who Hates Liberals and Homos has nothing better to do than whisper in their ears what kind of retail politics and holy wars against his other creations will set them straight with Heaven.
The Bad: There’s a good chance the NCP will dump the Republicans entirely and put all their money into the Dems, which will have the result of making the Dems as debased and corrupt as the GOP.
The Ugly: Even though the Theocrats-for-a-Better-Armageddon are a small minority, the GOP in their hairy paws will become a rural party of ranting rubes, bedeviled boobs, slick hicks, hypocritical hucksters, predatory politicians, snake-handling simpletons, and mumbling morons (not that it mostly isn’t already) and, thanks to our unique system of apportioning two senators to each state no matter what the population (another nasty legacy of the era of slavery), the Christopublicans will continue to wield enough influence to block legislation and stir up other governmental mischief to the detriment of us all. The future of the Republican Party might very well be an army of pious Puritan dunderheads marching in righteous lockstep, infecting the US body politic like a bad case of psoriasis – it won’t kill you, but it can be damned aggravating.

The Good: Speaking of Sarah Palin, her 18-year-old daughter Bristol had a healthy baby recently.
The Bad: As Bart of Bartcop fame wrote, “[Sarah] Palin promised her daughter ‘and the young man’ would get married but that was during the campaign so she can’t be held to it.” So, now that Bristol’s bun is out of the oven, where is the fuming outrage of the Big Media and the Christopublicans that she’s officially an unwed mother and, since Ma holds down a gub’mint job, she’s being supported by taxpayer money?
The Ugly: The kid’s father, Levi Johnston, remains a proudly ignorant redneck oaf, and he just went to work for a ‘let’s-rape-the-wilderness’ energy company.

The Good: A Democrat has finally vowed to fight back against Republican smears and refuses to cave in to their demands.
The Bad: That Democrat is the convicted-by-the-media-without-a-trial Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich.
The Ugly: Here is the dumb-bunny guilt-by-location smear the RNC and every right-wing website will be repeating ad nauseum as long as Obama is president, even if Blago is cleared of all charges: “Obama and Blagojevich are both from Chicago, Illinois, which is, like, the most corrupt city and state in the union – the FBI guy said so! – and, hey, common sense says they must both then be completely corrupt, right? This is another one of those unanswered questions about Obama that the public deserves to hear the full truth about!” 2010 BM pundit’s comment: “Let’s say ‘hello’ to Illinois’ newly-elected Republican Governor Patrick Fitzgerald! At least he’s ethical, even if he couldn’t convict Blagojevich of anything!”

The Good: Illinois finally has a US Senator to replace Obama, a man with a clean and honorable record, former IL Attorney General Roland Burris.
The Bad: He is being morphed into Blago’s Rev. Wright by the scandal-happy ‘Whitewaterized’ Big Media, eager to toss him into the same ‘guilty-even-if-he-hasn’t-been-convicted-of-anything’ pot with Blagojevich. Burris is now ‘tainted’ just because he accepted the appointment. Note to the Big Media: What about all of those prominent Washington Senators of the Republican persuasion – Mitch McConnell, John Ensign, Saxby Chambliss, Richard Shelby, Orrin Hatch, et al — who openly dined and danced with the likes of Jack Abramoff and Karl Rove? Oh, right – Rove hasn’t been convicted of any crime – but when has that stopped you? (Hey, the Clintons weren’t convicted of any crime in the Whitewater land deal; and no crime was even committed in the ‘Travelgate’ fiasco, but that didn’t matter – they were still media-created ’scandals’ that filled up newspaper columns and media airtime for years.) Lack of conviction, so to speak, certainly hasn’t been any bar to gleefully drubbing Blagojevich and Burris with the corruption stick. Abramoff is in prison and Rove is being subpoenaed and investigated all over the place for bribery, fraud and other assorted dishonesty, yet their close connections to prominent Republicans, not to mention the White House, somehow doesn’t carry the same ‘taint’ of corruption? Is the BM afraid of the GOP High and Mighty, or is it just your ingrained conservative bias showing?
The Ugly: Congressional and Illinois state Democrats are incredibly doing the Republicans’ job for them, sticking the blade in deep and twisting it not only with Blago, but now Burris, too. Hey, dingbat Dems, a simple ‘innocent until proven guilty, it’s the American way’ would be the way to go.

There’s more below the fold…

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Inspection- 00 to 08; a Preamble to New Year: 09

I’ll start with a quote by “Elvis” at Bartcop.com…

“(ask the MSM)…why Michael Connell’s death is not has suspicious as Vince Foster’s…”

New Years, 00. I was haunted by November and I have no idea if Michael Connell had something to do with it. But it doesn’t matter if he did or not. As far as being haunted…

We all know why.

New Years, 04. I was haunted by November, and Michael Connell may well have had something to do with it.

Why did I feel haunted?

My wife and I were at a Kerry election night “celebration,” Nashville, TN in November. Why both candidates create something resembling a high class frat party when one always turns into a funeral, I’ll never quite understand. They could at least have alternate plans to change it into a New Orleans type funeral. Now that would be going out with class.

About 8:30 Central, things had been going fairly well, and suddenly the numbers on the board started going screwy. I told my wife, “It’s like someone pulled a switch.” The local Kerry phone bank head had just met us in a hallway and acted rather nice, another “switch,” since she had stopped talking to me. A couple of months earlier I had mentioned I had a lot of information in E-mail accounts about vote rigging, and if she wanted, I could E-mail her a couple things I had just to see what she thought.

Her response?

Basically, “Shut the hell up, I don’t want to even know, now get back to your phone.” Then she stopped talking to me and acted haughty towards me until election night.

And we wonder why Dems kept losing?

Remember that time; about 8:30 Central: 9:30 Eastern.

Michael Connell’s recent plane crash has brought up an old wound. At 9:30, Eastern, 2004… Republicans funneled votes through a server in Tennessee, the lawsuit that Connell was supposed to testify in after being warned several times not to fly due to possible sabotage says. The claim: votes were switched; Kerry to Bush. Connell had agreed to testify concerning this. That was the approximate time I said, “It’s as if someone threw a switch…”

Spooky.

Inspection- Questioning, Yet Hoping, for More “New” in the New Year: 09

That’s right! Now ‘new and improved!’ Here it is, old man time, now reformulated: born again. Washes cleaner, brighter, younger, filled with more intelligence… though maybe not ‘whiter.’ You need it now. Right now!”

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These people haven’t figured it out yet, but they lost the last two election cycles for a reason:  they are WRONG, and have been.

Monday, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell announced that he intends to block President Obama’s stimulus bill without ever seeing it.

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

He wants to bog this entire process down by sending everything through different committees, and spending months, if not years haggling back and forth on it.  He also wants to tie in tax breaks for the ultra-rich into any spending bill because Republicans are still convinced that the only way to stimulate the economy is from the top down.

The actual goal of the Republicans is to continue to try and box the Democrats in by threatening filibusters.  They are playing this huge game of chicken and their plan is to wait until the mid-term elections in hope that the electorate will feel the Democrats have failed.

I say, let’s just do away with the filibuster.  If the Democrats aren’t going to force the Republicans to actually camp out in the Senate and continually jabber on until they are exhausted, then maybe we don’t need it at all.  The spirit of the filibuster wasn’t to cave in at the mere threat of one, — the burden is on the person making the threat to carry through on that threat.  Harry Reid needs to either grow a HUGE set of balls right now or step aside and let someone else take over the Majority Leader position.

Going along to get along is only useful  if you are in the minority.  I kinda understand the reason for being timid during the 2007-2008 term because the majority margin was paper-thin.  But it is not so thin now.  We have an almost sixty percent majority in the Senate now.  If a party wants to “go along” then that should be the minority party.  Either get in involved or get out of the way.  But if they are going to do nothing but block important key legislation simply because they want to be spoilers, then lock them out altogether.  Take away the filibuster, or limit it to having only one active filibuster at a time.

As far as McConnell’s statement about whether taxpayers deserve to know about where the money for the stimulus bill is going to be spent, Hale “Bonddad” Stewart has the appropriate response to McConnell and other Republican Idiots who would stand in the way:

“Let me get this straight. A Senator who oversaw one of the largest expansions in government spending in history is now concerned about spending? According to the CBO, total government outlays under Bush and the Republican controlled Congress from 2001 -2006 increased from $1.8 trillion to $2.4 trillion — that’s an increase of 33%. At the same time — again under Republican rule from 2001 to 2006 — the total debt outstanding increased from $5,807,463,412,200.06 at the end of fiscal 2001 to $8,506,973,899,215.23. And now a man who helped to oversee this is complaining about spending? Excuse me?”

McConnell was also one of the strongest supporters of the Wall St. bailout and the biggest opponent of the Big 3 bailout, being the one who put the kibosh on the done deal that was hammered out by all the other parties involved. So the only question that remains really is, “Why does Mitch McConnell hate the working class?”

What’s the Republican Political Angle to the Blagojevich Prosecution?

Is Illinois’ F**king Golden Boy Merely the Stooge for a Partisan GOP Attack on Obama and the Dems?

Had Enough Leading Questions Already?

While some may choose others – such as Billo, Hannity, the Savage Wiener or Radio’s Anal Cyst Rush — as a reliable weathervane of what not to believe, I have my own preference – second-tier CNN newsreader Kyra Phillips. In the case of the first four names, we know they are regurgitating their daily Talking Points from the Ministry of DoublePlusGood Neocon Truth, but Kyra aspires to a level of journalistic integrity that renders her eructations of state-sanctioned Big Media hooey more entertaining – and she’s easier on the eyes and ears than the Cave Boys.

I first noticed Kyra’s particular talent in this regard back in May of 2003, following Junior’s Commander-Cody-with-a-Codpiece moment on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his hilariously boneheaded ‘Mission Accomplished’ ramblings afterward that ‘major combat operations’ had been completed in Iraq.

The Most Trusted Name in Newspeak had Kyra onboard the carrier that day and, with time to fill and a Glorious Victory in Eastasia to celebrate, she was given a free ride on a US Navy jet at the taxpayers’ expense. After landing, the breathless and excited Ms. Phillips gushed — only verbally, as far as I know — over the sea-going military, jet pilots, aircraft carriers and the whole goddamned Good War thingie – we had kicked Iraqi behind and all was right-wing with the world! But I noticed something in Kyra’s flushed smiling face and twittering-with-glee voice – why, it reminded me of a time decades before when I ran into a notorious groupie just hours after she had ‘balled’ (late ’60s slang term for copulation) every member of her favorite band! Of course, the video of Bush’s dumb publicity stunt is only useful now as a platform to launch a thousand jokes, and I’m sure Kyra’s embarrassing orgiastic spurt of militaristic slathering, wearing a flight helmet, no less, has been filed in the root cellar at CNN never to be seen again.

In the years since, whenever Kyra decides to editorialize the news, whether it be Rudy Giuliani’s popularity with Dixie-Fried Republicans, Fred Thompson’s manly irresistibility to voters, or Sarah Palin guaranteeing a big McCain win with the womenfolk, I have sure knowledge that whichever way Kyra blows, so to speak, the opposite is true.

This came up again a few weeks ago as the news of Scooter Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s December 9th arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich blanketed the airwaves like an all-day Chicago blizzard. There was Kyra, frowning eyebrows crawling toward one another, serious-minded caterpillars an omen of the bad news to come, hyperventilating that the Blago scandal was “ten times worse than Watergate,” an attitude likely shared by some of her second-string Big Media cable colleagues but not expressed in so grandiose and historic a phrase.

Really, Kyra, ‘ten times worse than Watergate’? Hint to Phillips’ fevered brainpan: Blago didn’t have a private ‘Plumbers’ force breaking into his political opponents’ offices, he didn’t suborn perjury, he didn’t claim executive privilege to protect himself, he didn’t have a slush fund with millions of dollars in it to pay off criminals in his employ, and any scandals he’s alleged to be involved in are fairly pedestrian examples of political corruption and not a Constitutional crisis for the nation.

Perhaps she was taking her cue from Fitzgerald, who buzzed that Blago was on a “crime spree.” Whoa! Al Capone went on ‘crime sprees’ such as the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre – Blago’s babbling about wringing cash out of various politicians and bigwigs comes nowhere near that level of violent wrongdoing.

Whatever Blago’s crimes, no one died, no one was injured, he didn’t start any unnecessary wars based on lies, he didn’t authorize torture or the waste of billions of dollars in taxpayer money through no-bid contracts, he didn’t order Ken Blackwell to finagle the Ohio vote in 2004 to shoehorn Junior back into the presidency, he didn’t conspire to steal an election and jail the winner, as in the Don Siegelman case in Alabama, all of which seem to me to be much more serious than these routine instances of alleged malfeasance by Blagojevich.

But there’s more to this story than has been unearthed by the corporate BM, using the telescope from the wrong end, as usual.

Here are a few facts that have been missed in the rush to convict Blago:

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Round here people think all the big bankers got arrested and thats why they needed to be bailed out….

However being the bastion of education and the only person in the area with an IQ that exceeds 17 I felt the need to explain it in detail…

1. If yer broke, no money, no food stamps or stuff to trade like moonshine, stolen chickens, naked pics of yer sister etc then meybe you can git a bailout.

2. But there are some requirements…like you need to have a business of some sort.  It don’t need to be profitable, (like cousin Jimmie Jacks Fishing Camp and All Night School Of Electrical Repair for instance) it actually needs to lose money.  It also helps to have some corrupt people in charge (kinda like the folks who run our county). You also have to have no respectable plans for the money and it’s okay if you squander it paying people for doing piss poor work.

3. You may also be asked to give up some frills (just fer appearance sake) like yer dirtbike and maybe your fancy 8mm movie camera that you shoot those porno’s you call family reunions on).  I also hear they will want you to take a pay cut but seems to me that cutting perfectly good paper money into pieces is kinda dumb.

4, If you go to Washington to plead yer case you have to be sure not to arrive in anything fancy (that means no hubcaps on yer pickup) and by cutting bonuses they mean that you can no longer tip Fannie down at the diner that dollar when she brings you yer grits and eggs.

5. You will also need a bank account, and in view of yor new found wealth I suggest throwing away the old dependable shoe box and buying one of them plaster pigs with the slot on top.

I hope this helps and remember to waste whatever you get wisely!! Btw Merry Christmas everybody!

Yet another holiday rerun. Merry Christmas!

THE GUY IN THE JESUS SUIT

The guy in the Jesus suit
occupied space at the end of the bar
exuding waves of beneficence
and winey fumes
to all and sundry.

The suit fit comfortably,
38 Regular, relaxed-fit pleat pants,
with a seven-and-a-quarter halo
on the side.
He muttered of Old Testament doom
and it wasn’t even Sunday.

“I’m only here to fulfill prophecy,”
he remarked to the bartender,
who was taking his money from the bar.
On the jukebox Bing began to croon
‘White Christmas’ and Jesus started to say,

“I’m very disappointed in you all,”
he turned to me and glared,
“As usual, you people just got it all wrong:
I was actually born in June,
and died at the end of May.”

“I was a Jew preaching to Jews,
and so were all twelve original Apostles,
and then along comes Paul,
who was something of a loon,
and gives to the Gentiles a way

“to get into heaven.
Hey, the only person I said was saved
was a thief hanging next to me,
sometime before noon,
on my crucifixion day.

“And you can’t even follow
the few simple words,
that I spoke in the Sermon on the Mount,
instead you fight about theological trivia
and spread horrifying gloom
and tell people there’ll be hell to pay,

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