Awesome

An Endorsement?

I love the Silly Season.

I was out on a walkabout with a fresh burrito on my mind (weather gorgeous today in Phoenix), and ran into this hacktastic sales slogan. Of course I have no idea about the political leanings of the proprietor of the Lube, but it must mean something besides "we give really reliable oil changes." Or not.

The Eggman Goeth?

This caught my eye over at Crooks & Liars. Nicole highlights a post at Media Matters which notes (distilled to the point by moi, and emphasis is moine, er, mine):

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago... Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

The dynamics of the campaign have irrevocably changed, and the mighty Drudge Report, the news site Beltway journalists trip over themselves to genuflect in front of, has been a complete bystander in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign. [..]

The reason is simple. ...we're now in serious times... the Drudge Report doesn't do serious. The American public's attention has shifted from the campaign to the economy, and that's why the Drudge Report remains largely irrelevant to that unfolding story...

This non-news I would, normally, just give a pass, but this is personal.

I have a dear friend, a self-professed liberal - one of those "sellouts" we gnashed our teeth and tore our garments over during the Reagan-era Wall Street zombification of the True Believers (a sincere pedigree, indeed... how many of us weren't?) This man is a Deadhead, and to his eternal credit often was on his heels in shame during some of my more pious rants of the last two decades (for which I reserve my own share of shame, but that is beside this point). (This song still freaks him out, to this day.)

Oh, but when it comes to Drudge - whenever I iterate that I never link to that accursed fool and he rejoins with the smug information that he checks in with The Eggman daily, well, he's like a guy on the subway gripping a Wall Street Journal snootily eyeing some schmuck chugging through the New York Post. Like, he's gettin' the "inside." (Well, he is a broker.) Quite infuriating.

Hey, Jeff: The Drudge Report doesn't do serious. Hey now!

Two Weeks Is Too Loooooooonnnnngggggg!!!

Photo courtesy of stolen from The Shock Doc Show

I have successfully requested to be relieved of my Sandwich Artist duties for and on this coming Election Day. This will be one of the rare, scattered days in a given decade on which you will find the teevee on at my place.

I will be drinking.

Cheery Words From Wolcott In These Difficult Times

In getting right to it, Let the Hieronymous Bosch Worm Dance Begin!:

...I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.

I really don't think that's too much to ask, even in these frugal times.

It really is almost worth the ruination of Western civilization.

Seriously, though - even if this situation goes all "New-Deally" and the upward arc begins anew, these ideas, and their heirs, will be back again. Even if humankind felicitously breaks down into local, greeny, sustainable tribal units - well, the pursuit of wealth (which is more accurately characterized as the lust to be "betters") will decimate even these dulcet arrangements.

The question is - will enough hearts have been set right, proportionally speaking, to keep the greedheads busy at the docket, too busy to hawk their madness?

This hope amidst catastrophe, by the way, is why "they" say "we" hate America. Just remember that we are "hating" America, Inc. - not the America of the Enlightenment, the Constitution, the "of, by and for" America. You know, the real aspirational one.