Rudy In Ruins

Sometimes I can be wrong, like here for example where over a year ago I opined that, much to my dismay, Rudy didn't have a prayer of making the GOP ticket.

Well. . . I guess I was right, BUT for the wrong reason. Silly me, I thought the dire health problems of the 911 rescue workers surfacing at the time was enough of a story to keep the jerk away from sniffing distance of any primary, and maybe in the saner land of my youth that would have been the case.

But no, a prerequisite for the GOP standard bearer now is an utter disdain of working suckers, a prejudice embraced by the college-educated MSM crowd, and nothing quite says Eat My Dust, Losers! than, well, working stiffs eating toxic dust.

Early in the game I had hoped Rudy would run just for the sheer, and selfish, joy of watching him immolate on camera at some especially stressful moment, berating some reporter or heckler, or dressing down a subordinate. I wanted America to meet the Rudy New Yorkers have known for years. We may yet be treated to such a display over the cumada's police cabs, but I have to say the thrill is gone, as are the jerk's stinking hopes.

Still, the glee with which the NYPD bureaucracy, and the NY papers, turned on that third-rate fascist is pretty damn interesting. He was once the poster boy for police state entitlement, very popular with both cop and editor, and I would guess that the sick and dying 911 workers really do have something to do with the institutional mood shift.

Yay, Guy

One of the best bloggers in the biz just got out of the fever shallows of Firedoglake and is putting his queer shoulder to the wheel. Thanks to him, America is a slightly better place.

On Trent Lott's freshly indicted brother-in-law:

Have I complained lately that every Republican politician south of the Beltway seems to have a name that would make a golden retriever weep with shame? Honestly, a grown man called "Dickie"?

Welcome TRex, folks, a fellow about as smart and bitchy as they come.

Get used to it.

Days Of Whiners And Cirrhosis

It is a peculularity I am still trying to understand that the Chicago Sun-Times runs editorials against the Iraq Project while featuring very few stories about it, while the Chicago Tribune, whose Iraq coverage has been very good, has yet to state its opposition and fills its op-ed pages with the likes of V.D. Hansen, S. Chapman, and J. Greenberg. To balance this gang, they run the mindless, mainly dyspeptic, observations of that notable showbiz crank, G. Keillor, a Parliament of Fooles if ever there was one.

What this means, I think, is that caught in a downdraft of declining circulation and revenue (and - Whoa! - here's today's bad news for the Trib), papers are utterly helpless in deciding what to do about it.

The Sun-Times is not a very good paper, but is in the process of reimagining itself as a progressive voice now that it is free from the fat, greasy thumb of Conrad Black. Problem is, progressive for the likes of them mainly means Cranky, and I have yet to see any evidence of them doing anything more than complain. A vivid, graphic, impudent, infuriating, crusading rag, something that would antagonize one section of the public while drawing together another is beyond the imagination of all those J-school grads.

The Trib's sorry news is no small bag of catnip for yours truly, as I embarked on my own private boycott of the paper (tell no one!) a month ago after a pointless scan of their op-ed page (shorter Greenberg: Liberals are Babies, shorter Keillor: My Father was a Fine Man.) As it is I had reduced my purchase of the paper to two a week (and once upon a time I read two or three papers a day.) I don't even go to the Trib website any more. There is no point in rewarding such fatuous nonsense, if only slightly.

What is notable about the Greenwald/Klein dustup is not, as IOZ would have it, Greenwald's naivete, or Klein's lazy conniving, rather just how silly and exposed and second-rate Time has been made to look, at least among those smart few paying attention.

I am older than a great many of you, old enough to remember a time when Luce's Time was a monolithic presence, authoritative, cautious, informative to a degree, and, as the outgrowth of a hideous, white, male, Christian, mid-west, ivy league culture, utterly malign in its intent to control. That Time is long gone, replaced by the shallow, reactionary wad of colored paper extruded each week which is so wedded to the noise of Klein. Quite a fall, and one might run the energy needs of a great skyscraper from the force of Henry Luce spinning in his grave.

I keep saying here that their days, the days of the stupid authoritarian media, are numbered and few. In fact they have already ended, though we will probably need another election to make that clear to all.

UPDATE:

Bob tees up Time, 1965

Cauling All Curs

The ever-brilliant IOZ makes the case a little strongly here, though his point is no less correct for its force. Here Krugman touches on the same subject, though in a more avuncular fashion.

It is altogether worth noting that in those western countries where a mainly free press has always been the collected mouthpieces of the state and its predominant political parties, a clear-eyed view of those nations' individual fortunes has held sway over the years. This is just another way of saying that in England, France, and Italy (the only nations whose newspapers I am capable of reading with varying capacities of understanding) someone somewhere will shoot the shit straight, if only to piss off the other side.

Here, where the press is, pace IOZ, less an organ of the state than the trumpet of the Chamber of Commerce, an inability to honestly relate really bad news (that is, anything which might upset the status quo) borders on the pathological. We have instead financial reporting, for example, that really really really needs the the stock market to go up, and people to buy shit this Christmas. This also gives us dead enders like Halpern and Klein shilling not so much for the War State per se (even as the scales fall from their reptile eyes), but for the commercial/academic apparatus that has found the War State so darn useful in delivering the goods to its monied classes of heartless, over-educated, self-important fatheads for the last, oh, sixty-odd years.

The well-being of the military-industrial War State depends on this caul of institutional blather far more than the other way around. To be revealed without the membrane of illusion, to be seen in the light of day, absent the correct modeling, is to abrade the nature of the State. One so built on illusions and IOUs, like ours has been, has little give to it, and nowhere to go but earthward.

While I do not think for a second that the Democratic Party will be the main instrument that will either effect change (which is in no one's hands anymore), or by necessity deliver the American people to the safer shores of a stormy sea, I do think that of the many financial, media, political, and military organizations bound for collapse in the next four years, it runs the best chances of surviving as a vehicle of continuity and whatever progress is left.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels 2

The estimable Prairie Weather the other day, in their habitually sharp-eyed rundown of political news, worried a bit about the malign effect of the noise machine on the electorate.

It is a common refrain among my buddies on the left that the GOP has a lot of firepower in the likes of FUX Noose. But it is a timid notion and self-serving and wrong, and I here encourage my 22 readers to let it slip from the tether of their thinking.

You want to know how well the GOP standard bearer will poll next November? Take that squalid little man's approval rating next October, average it with his popularity total, then add five points. If that sumbitch registers north of 40 percent then there might be a remnant of the party left for 2012, otherwise the Repug dream, at least the stupid one about the Ownership Society's City on the Hill, is over.

(And here let's note how the Owners on the Hill fucked things so for themselves and their buttondown cadres.)

It should be clear to anyone with a sovereign brain, which excludes nearly all TV talkers, that Rudy's popularity plummets in any given locale once the voters there get to spend time with his pinched face, annoying voice, and asshole pronouncements. Mitt will spend his money and stagger to the convention the front runner. I gotta say Thompson has provided a lot of potential mirth. What keeps him from being genuinely funny is that his mere presence shows us just how fucked up the political ecology has become. He is the seven-armed frog of our electoral wetlands. Paul and Huckabee? Give them points for candor, then see what damage they can do.

While we have been cautioned this past weekend not to read too much into another country's politics, I am going to do just that. Howard's shellacking Down Under is a model for what's in store for our War Party. Granted Australians are, as a group, better educated, traveled and socialized than Americans (trust me, I played cricket with a bunch of them in New York for five years), but Americans, as dumb as many are, and as many more like to behave, know when things aren't working. Note also that Australia is the nest of the Murdoch beast, and that the dirty digger probably did his low-brow best to bring it home for Howard.

Please consider that no amount of angry yammering is going to carry rain to the southeast, bring the people to support the war (even if things there "go well", which they won't), lower energy prices or health care costs. In fact the nation's problems, played out in every household, tend to demonstrate just how brittle and out-of-it the version of life As Seen On TV News really is. There will never be any shortage of nitwits willing to go to a big box store at four in the morning to buy crappy electronics on sale, however the number of people prepared to feel sorry and embarrassed for them is, I think, growing exponentially.

The Wright Stuff

From the glorious Shorpy Photo Blog comes this lovely portrait from 1900 of a boy with his catch right out of the surf.

If the apparatus in the background looks a little familiar, it's because it is part of the Wright Brothers' glider. We are at Kitty Hawk, and the very able photographer is either Orville or Wilbur. (Full image here)

Look how people who lived near the ocean used to dress to go out! Big hats, long pants (hand-me-downs needing suspenders) and long-sleeved shirts (here rolled up) to protect the wayfarer from the harsh conditions of wind, sand, and sun. Look how serious Americans used to be, then think of the fun that boy had catching that fish, then showing it to his uncle's friends, the fellahs with that man-sized kite. And those strange men from Ohio! "Hey, Tommy, that's one heck of a fish. Hold on a sec, let me get a picture."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Dirk, Nasty, Stig, and Barry.

My favorite is Barry.

Mailer 5.26.95

Mailer 12 years ago, talking about now.



"There's a core of decency in this country that's never even been tapped by the left."

Mailer

In what seems like another lifetime, but was only about 1985, I had the privilege of spending a couple hours in a bar in New York in the company of Norman Mailer. A couple of my friends knew Norman very well. (Writers all, they boxed with him Saturday mornings at a gym on 14th Street, though I was not part of that particular scene.) The three of us had gone to see the first showing of Maidstone in many years, the screening at, I think, the Thalia, to be introduced by the director himself.

Getting a drink nearby after the show, we were sitting at a table when Norman and a few of his pals came in. Our tables joined.

What impressed me about him that night, and still does, was not the impudence of his speech, his brilliant spinning of ideas, or the range of his opinions. All of those qualities are evident in all his books and articles, and are up there on the screen in his TV and documentary interviews. What is not apparent, at least obviously, in the public Mailer was how deeply interested he was in what everyone around him had to say. In that cheap bar, after a public appearance, Mailer gave his undivided attention to whomever was speaking, no matter how misinformed or ridiculous whatever they had to say was. (Note to biographers: he also put ice in his beer.)

He listened to you deeply, sincerely, and thought about what you said, and then, because no waking moment of Norman's was ever wasted, he came back with questions, testing the logical outcomes of whatever it was you proposed, to see if they were, at least, consistent. He was enthralling.

I sent a brief note to his Brooklyn Heights address, filling in a point or two I'd thought of later (the discussion, it seems to me now, was mainly about technology and TV. He hated TV.) He wrote back! Complimenting my writing! And that was the last of our direct contact.

Though clearly a self-centered man, he was not a selfish one. Indeed, his generosity knew no bounds. I saw him last February at his reading here in Chicago, did not try to remind him of our earlier meeting and mutual friends as he signed my books. God, he was great that night. Shrunken to a disturbing degree, walking, no, striding, with two canes, like the captain of a pitching sailing ship, impudent, profane, acutely aware of death, unabashedly mystic, looking ahead with unflagging interest into that vast, looming deep.

Shittybank

Tale telling time, kiddies. This weekend brought word that Citigroup, that amalgam of brutal institutions, has stumbled to its knees over subprime securities (now there's an oxymoron for you!). Which prompts this tale from the crypt.

A very good friend of yr. hmb. svt. once had a very good job in the technical research department at Smith Barney. Technical research, for the uninitiated, is basically an examination of share prices and markets based strictly on the charts of past performance. It is purely numbers based, a discipline of pattern recognition which presumes to predict broad future individual performance based on the shapes, the waves and peaks, of a plotted graph of past data.

Technical research is not based at all on sales figures, market share, or any innate capabilities a company may have in regards to its field, only an historical record of share price and certain aspects of share trading. It was considered little better than voodoo for a generation, but lately has been gaining respect, and here's one reason why.

Back in the days when that criminal enterprise called Enron was gulling America sideways, Wall Street analysts were, of course, talking up its fortunes, while brokers were bidding up its price. Over at Citigroup, which by then owned Smith, Barney, all sorts of money was to be made on the banking and brokerage sides being bullish on Enron. Only one department, the tech research office, saw something fishy, mainly a pattern of insider selling, and detected what's called a fundamental weakness in the share price. Their message to clients, which were mainly the local brokers working for Smith Barney nationwide, was to Get Out of Enron.

Well, when the dust settled a few years later, what did Citicorp do but axe the tech research department at Smith Barney, a cost cutting measure, it was said, savings to the tune of about $15 mil. Lunch money.

The real reason was that as the lawsuits were building up, Citi's liability exposure was based on the fact that its in-house tech research department at SB got it right, and was ignored. So as to prevent any future outbreak of clear vision and prudence in the company, the offending sense organ was removed completely.

Now Chuck Prince is taking the "honorable course" and stepping down. Once these assholes start talking about honor, you know they must be terrified of something.

Wither Forecast

I suppose lefty blogoville feels obligated to take the Repub presidential race seriously. Not only because it is being propped up by the MSM in dire need of the ad dollars of a desperate campaign season, but that humane and dedicated policy wonks like Josh Marshall, Ezra Kline, Kevin Drum (and I admire each one of them) can, I think, only focus on the matters at hand, which tend to be dictated by (you will have to forgive me for this one) mad hatters.

To wit, everyone wringing their hands over Il Rude and his malign proto cabinet ignore the fact that next year whoever the nominees in each party will be will most likely have to campaign in a nation reeling from $5, or thereabouts, a-gallon gas (NB: it is currently the equivalent of $8, that is -- one quid per litre, in the high tax UK, just so you know), where the Iraq Project will be at BEST a stalemate, itself a disaster of status-changing proportions, and the environment in a large section of Red State America gone tits up (Atlanta, as I write, has about three months of fresh water left in its reservoirs with little rain in the extended forecast.)

Crapped out too may well be the gross experiment of finance capitalism, invented about thirty five years ago to make up for the export of our manufacturing base to Asia (Don't take my word for it. Read Chalmers Johnson's eye-opening Blowback), crashed on the lousy finances of the inevitable real estate bubble such policy encourages, which no one could save.

None of this spells success for the more-of-the-same, all-war-all-the-time party.

It appears the Fed has twigged to the idea that cheap dollars mainly add to the price of oil. This is not a winning hand, and there may not be one anywhere in the deck. The effects of the quarter drop of Wednesday, and the unconvincing signal that it would be the last, wore off rather quickly. I suppose a weak man might still bow to the increasing needs of a reeling, and astoundingly ungrateful, Wall Street, but that way lies madness, and Bernanke knows it.

The biggest surprise is how little the price of gas has gone up following the leaps in the oil market. And here your suspicious host thinks that a lot of people in power were doing what they could to hold the line against the looming $4 gallon in the last few weeks, hoping that futures might ease. Somewhere in Washington someone has figured out a priceline for gas, any movement over which the economy tanks. Maybe it's $3.75 maybe it's $4.25, but with housing in the toilet for the foreseeable you can bet that none of the Eagles in DC want to find out. Their oilco buddies will do everything they can to help, but bidness is bidness, and Exxon will not be looking to extend its current ten percent decline in revenues much longer.

You know, I'm just a crank, really; middle aged, with a certain capacity for observation and abstract thinking. I don't claim to be right in any of this (and boy was I wrong about the World Series), only to undertake a look and try to understand what's going on around me. People who run political campaigns have no stomach for basing their success on the likelihood of events they themselves can't control. If, for example, gas next summer sits at $2 per, if swimming pools in Georgia overflow, then the candidate talking about a New Conservation economy loses, and there's too much money at stake for that.

We will find out how nimble and resourceful our campaigners are, maybe even see new ones suddenly emerge, much to the dismay of the anointing MSM, with far better grasps on the needs of the day. Maybe not. For now, though, we are obligated to take our incremental social steps into the ditch, or off the cliff, leaving talk of grand gestures only to the maniacs.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Taj & Corey Harris and my favorite song, well one of my favorite songs . . .