Well, thank you Sunshine.

A little too grim for Monday morn, sir.

free copies of Atlas Shrugged for all!

“the traditional anticapitalist aspirations of the Left”

Amazing that their entire system of “governance” is based entirely upon crushing a caricature. The “Left” that Kristol and the rest of his ilk battle exists nowhere but in their own imaginations. Is it any wonder the country’s completely screwed up?

Here, have a little something to cheer you up.

Thanks, Simba. You’re a peach.

Especially funny is the fact he worked as a researcher. Imagine hiring Jonah to do intellectual work for a book. His employer is lucky the book didn’t end up looking like this.

Derelict said,

June 2, 2008 at 14:58

Amazing that their entire system of “governance” is based entirely upon crushing a caricature. The “Left” that Kristol and the rest of his ilk battle exists nowhere but in their own imaginations. Is it any wonder the country’s completely screwed up?

Just like the theocons’ continuous battle against Satan worshiping fetus killing butt fucking evilutionist jihadi Mooslims. Sure, the “Left” wants more economic regulation, but it’s a far leap from that to Stalinist communism. You give these fuckers a nanometer, and they make a lightyear out of it.

Actually, big business launched an organized counter-attack against labor and the New Deal reforms in the late 1960s, and by the 1970s had begun setting up alternate institutions to propagate their message since they could no longer rely on academic institutions to so simply robotically repeat their missives.

So, clearly, arrogant sh*ts like Kristols 1 & 2 portray this as something they cleverly engineered, when all they were in reality were the hired help.

C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and the Failures of Mainstream Political Science
by G. William Domhoff in New Political Science 29 (2007), pp. 97-114

[Sociologist C. Wright Mills mistakenly] thought there was a “truce” between organized labor and the moderate conservatives in the power elite that was a stable and permanent one, with class conflict contained within administrative and judicial structures. Contrary to that claim, which Mills discussed for only a sentence or two in The Power Elite after giving it several paragraphs in The New Men of Power (1948), we now know, based on historical research by James Gross (1974, 1981, 1995) on the origins and activities of the National Labor Relations Board, that there never was any real acceptance of unions on the part of the moderate conservatives.

Moreover, thanks to Gross’s (1995) now-it-can-be-told interviews with corporate lawyers and National Labor Relations Board officials, we also know that the moderate conservatives felt so threatened by a labor board decision in 1962 giving unions the right to bargain over outsourcing, subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court, that in 1965 they quietly started to organize a counteroffensive to reverse the decision.

It was victory in this battle, finally achieved in the early 1970s, in conjunction with the attack on construction unions that began in the late 1960s as part of the fight against inflation, that spelled the beginning of the end for the limited power labor unions had achieved.

Once outsourcing was no longer an issue that could be contested by unions, the internationalization of American corporate production could take place at a faster pace in the face of the increased European and Japanese competition in American markets.

This corporate effort also led to the creation of the Business Roundtable, which became the central policy group in the power elite in the mid-1970s, to the shock and awe of many observers, including Vogel (1989), who then decided that business had become powerful because it had finally organized.

…Within the context of civil rights militancy on the one hand and capital-labor conflict on the other, the old power arrangements fractured. To begin with the South, the civil rights movement set in motion a train of events that led to the abandonment of the Democratic Party by the Southern rich because it could no longer help them keep African Americans powerless. Southern white elites, who were industrializing the region in any case, thanks to runaway northern corporations and defense contracts directed their way by the Southern Democrats, therefore began efforts to carry a majority of white Southerners into the Republican Party with them on the basis of appeals to racial resentments, religious fundamentalism, super-patriotism, and social issues like gun control (Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Carter, 2000).

But it was not just racial conflict in the South that destroyed the New Deal coalition within the Democratic Party. It was also racial conflict in the North, as historians are now revealing in detail as they reexamine the documents and press statements showing that the words spoken by right-wingers in the late 1960s were being said quite openly in the early 1960s by the many white trade unionists who were not prepared to share jobs or power with African Americans (e.g., Sugrue, 2001).

There were a few notable exceptions among labor leaders, of course, but enough of the rank-and-file resisted integration in housing, schooling, and unions to put the Democrats on the defensive in the North as well as the South. This point is seen most dramatically in the votes for Alabama Governor George Wallace in Democratic primaries as early as 1964– 30% in Indiana, 34% in Wisconsin, and 47% in the former slave state of Maryland, where he won 16 of 23 counties, the state capitol, and the “ethnic” neighborhoods of Baltimore (Carter, 2000, p. 215). Then, in the 1972 Democratic primaries, Wallace presaged the more coded and symbolic politics of the New Right by mixing tirades against busing and welfare with revivalist religious appeals to win majorities in Michigan and Maryland just as he was forced to drop out of the race by the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed and in excruciating pain (Carter, 2000).

Nor was it just racial conflict that led rank-and-file white trade unionists to inadvertently aid in the weakening of their unions at a time when they were starting to come under more pressure than most members realized. Many of them did not like the feminists or environmentalists either, whom they saw as a danger to their jobs or threats to their status as proud white males. Moreover, many white union members did not like what they saw as the anti-Americanism of the antiwar movement. They were not crazy about the war, but they came to dislike the protestors even more (Mueller, 1984). All of these factors contributed to the disintegration of the liberal-labor coalition and made it possible for Nixon and his right-wing allies to attract more and more white Middle Americans (blue collar and white collar, union and non-union) into the Republican Party.

The nationwide white turn to the Republicans made it possible for the moderate conservatives to make a right turn on many policy issues in the 1970s once the inner cities were finally calm and the corporations were faced with new economic problems due to spiking oil prices, inflation, and rising unemployment, as well as the previously mentioned challenge to their markets and profits by German and Japanese corporations.

We know in detail about this decision to turn right because the issues were debated in the policy-planning network, thereby making content analyses of their policy intentions possible.

For example, Joseph Peschek (1987) showed in a study of the policy positions proposed in the 1970s by five different think tanks and policy-discussion groups that centrist groups like the Brookings Institution turned rightward in the face of the new problems and possibilities, with former Democratic appointees leading the way.

The same scenario is revealed by the deliberations at a moderate-conservative policy-discussion group, the Committee for Economic Development, where the majority of corporate trustees rejected permanent wage and price controls as well as other plans for greater government involvement in the economy that some members had been entertaining. Instead, they advocated monetary policies that would throw people out of work, cutbacks in the welfare state, deregulation of key business sectors, and continuing attacks on unions (Domhoff, 2006b, pp. 97-100; Frederick, 1981).

…this account disagrees with any version of pluralism because it shows the continuing domination of the government by the corporate-based power elite, first tacking “leftward” in the face of the militancy of the Civil Rights Movement and its offshoots, then rightward when it had to choose between government-oriented and market-oriented solutions to the new economic problems that it faced in the 1970s.

What Domhoff means by the “moderate conservatives” are those who are primarily interested in advancing the interests of business and capitalists; the radical conservatives such as the barking John Birch society types become useful to the “moderate conservatives”.

Later, you could see how the Reaganite and then the Bush Jr / Newt Gingrich brought the two groups — business conservatives and screaming rightwing neo-imperialist fatherland nutjobs — together.

OK. I wait all weekend for a post that does something other than remind me that I won’t be drinking sadly in Portland this evening, and this is what I get? Irving Kristol? Man, I hate Irving Kristol.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Ah, but they’ve completely bypassed this by repeatedly claiming that fat corporate profits mean more money for you and me. They’ve taken morality out of the picture. Not exactly the first time for that, but you know what I mean.

He appealed for a more discriminating corporate philanthropy that would identify and support those academics and intellectuals who believed in a strong private sector. Though they were few, they could be found, he insisted.

Or faked.

How sweet. A charity devoted to the care and feeding of the morally handicapped.

Kristol included scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, and public health physicians whose hidden agenda, he refused to discerned, was to propel the nation toward an economic system “so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anticapitalist aspirations of the Left.”… a safe, functioning, prosperous society.

Fixed.

Or shorter Kristol: Common decency = Communism. Here’s my invoice.

Part of the dazzling idiocy of this approach is that they would have nothing to sell without the creative drive and ideas of the very people they are trying to trample into the mud.

The personal computer, to name just one ubiquitous commodity, would not exist without a small band of dedicated nuts who were ignored by the Business Community until their point became The Bleedin’ Obvious.

Of course, they’re stupid, so they think it doesn’t matter.

Goldberg has also been critical of the French and claims credit for popularizing the term “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to refer to them.

If by “claims credit for popularizing” he means repeating one of Groundskeeper Willie’s most notable lines.

Being a wingnut welfarian means being a thief, in more ways than one.

Fucking wankers.

El Cid — Thanks for that. I do remember reading somewhere that Lewis Powell had an earlier turn in the role Kristol played. And it seems like AEI, Manhattan, Heritage, etc. were around well before the late 70s. But they weren’t as big. I think Kristol does deserve credit/blame for expanding the infrastructure. Remember that the sorry bastard got a WSJ gig in the mid-70s. That was the perfect bully pulpit.

Hey–don’t think that it’s been all beer & skittles for the Kristollnacht Kids. As Big Daddy Kane reminds us, pimpin’ ain’t easy.

You can always tell if it’s real Irving Kristol by the sound it makes when you run your finger around the rim.

The funny part is that it turns out that the Republican-leaning “moderate” (i.e., Big Biz) conservatives have been hurt by linking their wagons to the “Deregulation Now, Deregulation Forever / Blow Up the Middle East / Crazy Rapture Talk” ultra-right.

Serves ’em right, too.

Part of the dazzling idiocy of this approach is that they would have nothing to sell without the creative drive and ideas of the very people they are trying to trample into the mud.

The one thing that binds together the disparate branches of Movement Conservatism – the Jesus crew, the big business acolytes, the permanent war people – is anti-intellectualism. It’s the place where all of their interests converge, and the jumping off point to selling it to the American people.

Hey! A gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.

Serves ‘em right, too.

Yep. It seems the poor fellows never read the parable of the Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs.

Yep. It seems the poor fellows never read the parable of the Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs.

The sad part is, they did, and what they got from it was that they didn’t kill the goose soon enough, and the best way forward is a surge in goose-killing.

I just want to repeat this. Because it’s so importantly true:

#

“WereBear said,

June 2, 2008 at 16:41

Part of the dazzling idiocy of this approach is that they would have nothing to sell without the creative drive and ideas of the very people they are trying to trample into the mud.

The personal computer, to name just one ubiquitous commodity, would not exist without a small band of dedicated nuts who were ignored by the Business Community until their point became The Bleedin’ Obvious.

Of course, they’re stupid, so they think it doesn’t matter.”

Tell it, brother. And it holds for all the art, music, literature, theater, etc. they pride themselves on “appreciating.” One is tempted to say that all of culture is an effort by civilization to rescue itself from Irving Kristol and his gang of smug yobbos.

Oh boo fucking hoo. So the guy got rich sucking some rich cock. You’re just jealous.

Besides, total laissez faire has been proven time and again to be the only reasonable way.

Also, the surge is working.

And through the *Institute for Educational Affairs which he and William E. Simon founded in 1978, financial resources directed toward sympathetic scholars and the research projects of think tanks.

Crikey. Tis’ the inspiration for Dick Cheney’s Quest for a Vice President.

Stoopids people have been doing it since forever. It’s the kill more cats syndrome.

Social infrastructure: Marxist menace or Satanist conspiracy?

They prefer barbarism, but if you ask nicely, & wear some of that Corporate Brown Lipstick they go for, they’ll settle for feudalism.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

A couple of examples appeared in my Sunday newspaper over the weekend. George Will, reliably reactionary asshole, doesn’t like carbon cap-n-trade systems because it’s a “government grab for power.” Never mind that it was the right that advocated for cap-n-trade on (I think) sulphur dioxide in the 80s and that that program turned out to be wildly successful. “It’s creating artificial shortage (the shortage of the freedom to dump carbon into the atmosphere) and therefore it’s bad!!1!” Sheesh.

Then there’s one of my favorite retards to hate: Chuckie Krauthammer doesn’t think we should act on global warming because it’s all based on those model thingies and we all know that those are all wrong. So therefore we shouldn’t do anything. I’m too lazy to chase it down but it’s my understanding that the models’ problem has mostly been that they have under-predicted the changes that have already actually occurred. But for god’s sake, let’s not change our ways until the models are perfected!!1! Argh.

And these are their intellectuals. Worse: they’ve held sway for 20 years now.

Thanks for the link, PeeJ.

Not having the slightest understanding of how things actually work will blow up on you every time.

For instance, a most glaring deficit that has seemed to escape their notice is that forcing all their consumers into underemployment and third world poverty would reduce said consumers ready cash for purchasing purposes.

Perhaps there’s an upside to this third world poverty thing I’m not grasping…

But then all you have to do is lower interest rates and they’ll borrow the money. That’ll last until the payments come due and work their way through the inevitable lawsuits and bankruptcies. Then Big Business will just sell to Europe and Asia. When that goes bad they’ll go after whatever’s left–water, air, soil, whatever. It’ll never end because greed never ends.

Pigs fly: Young Billy Kristol (of the ilk) describes his own writing as “banal and platitudinous” in today’s New York Times.

Then he tries to mug Obama with stuff that is neither factual nor telling. Talk among yourselves. nothing else to see there …

I demand that the Sadlies snark this article immediately.

I am 100% serious. Do it.

I demand that the Sadlies snark this immediately.

It’s been done.

Kristol asked whether it was in the long-term interest of corporations to continue to support institutions that had proved so hostile.
Indeed, it’s the bucks rolling in from corporate entities that’s keeping all our scientitsts, city planners, public health physicians and social workers rolling in TEH PHAT LEWTS. Hardly a day goes by that some stinking tree-hugging environmentalist doesn’t la-de-dah his way past in his Halliburton sponsored solid gold litter, smoking his grey poupon with caviar. WTF is he talking about? Admittedly, lawyers are getting pretty fat off of this sort of thing, but a lot less fat than any of their classmates.

Perhaps there’s an upside to this third world poverty thing I’m not grasping…

Are you kidding? Kristol and pals will be able to get actual English speaking people, possibly with degrees, to do their domestic work for twelve bucks a day. You think immigration is a hot button issue now? Just wait ’til middle America actually needs that gig manually separating rendered pig solids. The Republicans will never lose another election.

rb,
from the wiki, snark accomplished:
“The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.”

Yeah, but Michelle Obama said “whitey”!!!!

I understand why sane, honest, decent, rational people might shrug their shoulders at that, but I’m milking it for all it’s worth.

Liberals. Hmf.

Kristol needs to go get a nice sammich from MickeyDees and shut the fuck up.

Man that Marx guy writes like a fadge-ing thesaurophile. laudator temporis acti my ass.

Then Big Business will just sell to Europe and Asia. When that goes bad they’ll go after whatever’s left–water, air, soil, whatever. It’ll never end because greed and corporations never ends.

New and improved!!

I don’t know, justme, I think they’d be lined up against the wall before it got that bad.

The Republicans will never lose another election.

Under ideal conditions a Republican candidate will be able to win over entire villages by flinging fistfulls of rice before election day.

Kristol’s op-ed today berates Obama for not urging the Wesleyan students to enlist in the military.

Funny, Kristol was just the right age to serve in Vietnam. I guess Daddy wouldn’t let him serve his country, insisting instead that Billy go straight into the family business (collecting wingnut welfare.)

I think they’d be lined up against the wall before it got that bad.

Not until we’ve run out of brown people. And communists. And gay people. And witches.

Ah, the concept of relative wealth gone horribly wrong, or taken to its logical conclusion. Same thing, really. If you believe that absolute condition has no meaning, and all that matters is how much more you have than the next guy, then bankrupting the country is as good as winning the lottery.

While, arguably, your lawn will look much better in the short term with PhDs mowing it for shoe-leather jerky, as a viable ideology to further the societies of mankind, it leaves something to be desired.

I think they’d be lined up against the wall before it got that bad.

Which they?

Man, I hate Irving Kristol.

Don’t be so harsh. He was really good on Soap, and he presided over one of the “funny peaks” on SNL…

Oh, wait…

I don’t feel really that shocked by this it like they cry about how the market should decide yet they are not in the market them selves.

Anyway the link is to Jeralyn farewell rant. The lady may be bat-shit crazy when it comes Clinton but wow these spinning numbers to be pro-Clinton are pretty wild and far fetched, but she will never say quit on this. So you have to give that to her.

So we can’t do it again?

P.S. As long as we’re pondering the rise of wingnut welfare, let’s not forget the billionaire (who inherited his banking empire, of course) who has done the most: Richard Mellon Scaife.

For extra snarkitude, I attended a lecture/cheerleading event (encouraged by our employer) last year in Columbus. Among the speakers, was Steve Forbes, Jr., who extolled the virtues of capitalism and hard work.

If your brown gay commie witch neighbors are starving, too, how long before you all gang up on the guy with all the money and food? Starvation tends to be pretty radicalizing, and though minorities would bear some of the brunt, especially at first, the more people affected, the more likely the wealthy would become the primary targets, on practical grounds if not ideological.

Also, in case, someone ever needs, extra commas, here, you, go.

Thanks commas have been pretty scarce here since me and my friends accidentally ran the ATV through the comma garden popping wheelies and doing doughnuts and so forth.

You stinking comma-nists and your collective punctuation.

P.S. I note that tigrismus has made extensive comma use in the post after my overly exhuberant use of commas. I wish, to state, at this point, that my comma comment, was not, directed, towards tigrismus’ comment, or commas.

I prefer my sentences to have that colonial je ne sais quoi: makes ’em look important.

Great. My front hedge is now a topiary sculpture of Proust. Who the hell’s idea was it to hire PhD’s to do my lawn?

Right from Zombie Marx’s own mouth (after sticking it to Burke):
“A spectre is haunting Sadly,No!— the spectre of comma-nism. All the grammarians have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: (Carole) Pope and (Punctuation)Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals (this was from before we knew how “le jus de la pomegranate” could help control French Radicals) and German police-spies (Just goes to show that those Marxists can’t be trusted. I mean Godwinning in 1848?!).”

Who the hell’s idea was it to hire PhD’s to do my lawn?

Tell me about it. You have no idea what kind of mess can be made of your kitchen if you hire a deconstruction crew.

Hey Mar-eeo- issa da comma before da storm-a.

It’s time to ‘raise up’ the comma’s to where they ‘belong’. Post’s and comment’s that denigrate the comma’s by ‘abasing’ it will be ‘snarked’

Comma’s ‘belong’ above the letter’s.

Hmph!

commas ain’t shit but hos and tricks

Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon
You come and go
You come and go

Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon…

Goddamn it!

RB pwned again!one1!

Commas are apostrophes that have come down in the world.

Why don’t you comma and see me sometime.

Comma one, comma all

Sadly No is an icommaclast.

RB pwned again!one1!

John Brown nutty about pwnage: big whoop.

Oh, comma-n

What’s the deal with semicolons? The thought of half poops gives me pause.

isn’t that just a comma that’s having its period?

Aw ‘cmon already.

S’uup? Y’all lapsing into a comma or sumpin?

Hail to thee oh semicolon,
Crutch of pedant masked as Solon,
Aid to bold Non Sequitur;
The weather’s nice today.

LittlePig said,
June 2, 2008 at 14:40

Well, thank you Sunshine.

A little too grim for Monday morn, sir.

A troupe of drunkards that leave a picture of Jonah GolfPantaloonsDoughyLoad up- for 50 hours I might add – walk out of the house with a fist full of cash and credit cards on a Saturday afternoon for an evening of Drinking Sadly, then stagger back into the office,two days later, wearing the same clothes, reeking of vodka, sporting new roach burns on their shirts and a set of keys to a car that they, for the life of them, couldn’t begin to tell you how they came into their possession. What did you expect? Enlightened discourse? Hell, these guys are running on Visine and a sugar rush, give ’em a few hours. Sheesh!

It is so unsurprising that the Obots on Sadly, O! would make fun of hard-working Americans who happen to be on welfare. Since when have you people even attempted to stand for the struggling Reagan Democrats throughout Appalachia- that beating heart of America’s soul? Yes, they may happen to need government assistance, but that doesn’t mean their votes don’t count. I’m worried that Obama in his rush to frame Hillary Clinton under the usual misogynistic vicegrip has steamrolled these hard-working Democrats, and that John McCain will easily pick up these votes and roll to a November win. The Democrat Party would best heed my advice and nominate Hillary, the one *true* hard-working American candidate in the field.

Damn, Fake Iris is good.

Once we take out the guards, we’ll be able to sneak in to the Sadly, No! comma centre and activate the self-destruct. Then we’ll break into the vaults and escape with all of that filthy social justice moneys which we can use to fund our conservatorium thinkerjob maker!

Why do they call it puntuation? It isn’t punctual at all. The vast majority of it comes pretty late in the sentence, as in at the very end. I guess they couldn’t call it tard-uation because then we’d think it was all provided by Jonah.

Does “Rise of the Counter-Establishment” have anything to do with Graeme Frost and his corporate sponsored solid gold countertops?

Iris, I think you,re looking for Sadly, Oi !

Eh. The real Iris would be much more belligerent_comma_ insistent_comma_ verbose_comma_ and whiny. But that wasn’t bad for a beginner_period

Irv Kristol asked: Why do they call it puntuation?

Because people like you and your boy kick the grammar around like a junior leaguer.

Actually, big business launched an organized counter-attack against labor and the New Deal reforms in the late 1960s, and by the 1970s had begun setting up alternate institutions to propagate their message since they could no longer rely on academic institutions to so simply robotically repeat their missives.

You can trace this sort of shit even further back. In May 1914 the Rockefellers hired pioneering public relations expert Ivy Lee “to burnish the family image” after coalminers on strike against Rockefeller-owned mines were massacred at Ludlow, Colorado. Lee was a consummate shill who frequently proclaimed his total commitment to complete honesty while he was lying his ass off. His work for the Rockefellers after the Ludlow Massacre is one of the first examples of the effective propagation of corporate misinformation through the systematic, sustained manipulation of the press – a turning point in the history of bullshit.

Bonus weird fact: Ivy Lee was William S. Burroughs’ uncle.

(Thanks for the info, El Cid)

Far too derivative, troll. Sorry: try again.

The fact is, commas are a great way to start a sentence.

Us moonbat mexislamohomofascists will ensure that Barack Obama wins the Dem nomination. I only hope Billy Kristol promises to leave the country when Obama becomes President.

Because people like you and your boy kick the grammar around like a junior leaguer.

So, like, totes OMG! Did you hear that Obama like didn’t talk about the troops at that speech thingy he gave? Like, at all? Wazzup with that?

You think that’s derivative trolling, try this:

Sure Obama’s in the lead right now but that’s only due to his performance before Feb. 20. Clearly the trend is in Hillary’s favor. A smart investor would place themselves behind Hillary futures. Not only will she get votes from states that count, but also from all the by-product states. Escaping the coffin that the Obamania MSM has built will be a real Houdini act.

Ivy Lee did John D to make sure that the people united will always be defeated.

Most of my sentences start with
and the prisonomer will be reamnded into the custody of the state

The fact is, all of you should just shut up.

Looka this and note the comments:

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/06/unreal.html

Floating torture chambers! Up to 17 prison boats plying the seas with their secret cargo of the disappeared! Wow, talk about Accelerating Your Life(tm). One tour and you’ll have more than enough material to regret into your golden years.

and the prisonomer will be reamnded into the custody of the state

Sounds painful.

I note Gary hasn’t brought up tongue baths in quite a while. Tough breakup, lil guy? Let it out, we’re here for you.

Yeah, I guess it would have been funny without the tipo.

YAYS! 100+ comments and no one has welcomed any overlords!

I for one welcome our non-overlord welcoming… aw, screw it.

YAYS! 100+ comments and no one has welcomed any overlords!

Hooray! No under-bus throwing, nor “the stupid! It buuuuurrrns!” “good times, good times” or “Bzzt! Thanks for playing!” either.

I’m still amused by “Well played”, but I don’t think it’s got long before the bloom is off.

We have had a “fixed” but the “fuck” count is way low. Get fucking with it you assholes.

The USS Bataan floating torture camp. Does anyone even think about this stuff? At all? Even a little bit?

I was recently in Norfolk, VA. I happened upon the MacArthur Center, a 3 level mall in the center of town, right next to the MacArthur Memorial. At the time, I thought it seemed crass and tasteless to combine the shiny mall and the solemn memorial. But this, this…. These people have no sense.

Some 10,000 people died and this is how we remember them? With a torture ship?

Beheadings, cut throats and casual shootings were the more common and merciful actions — compared to bayonet stabbings, rapes, disembowelments, numerous rifle butt beatings and a deliberate refusal to allow the prisoners food or water while keeping them continually marching for nearly a week (for the slowest survivors) in tropical heat. Falling down, unable to continue moving was tantamount to a death sentence, as was any degree of protest or expression of displeasure.

BOOOS! All those comma comments and no one brought up footnote George.

Its about time someone brought in their bag of dicks though. You never know when a bag of dicks will come in handy.

YAYS! 100+ comments and no one has welcomed any overlords!
————————————–
Hooray! No under-bus throwing, nor “the stupid! It buuuuurrrns!” “good times, good times” or “Bzzt! Thanks for playing!” either.

Not even a single Just sayin’! Is there some kind og global cliché shortage going on?

‘Fuck’ and ‘bag of dicks’ are different. Those are essential to civilized discourse.

Just as every whore will eventually find his/her perfect john,

Where the fuck did *that* come from? Mostly they just end up dead, actually. I demand the aphorism police come and slap someone with a fish.

[tossing brussell sprout grenade]

I know a little bit about Ivy Lee. His PR work for the Nazis ruined him.

I have a friend who is fascinated by PR (she is NOT a fan) and she was showing me a video about the history of PR … and it didn’t mention Ivy Lee. PR has done a bit of PR on its own history and they have made Edward Bernays – slightly less loathesome than Ivy Lee – the father of PR. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he claims he got his ideas on PR from his understanding of Freud. I believe he got his start in the Office of War Information, the US government’s PR arm during World War I.

Bernays’ best example of postwar PR is hiring a bunch of women to smoke as a group during a women’s suffrage march, attracting the notice of the press and linking women’s independence, women’s suffrage and smoking.

Yep. That’s something to be proud of.

Gary Ruppert, aka Colonel Lardass leader of the 101st keyboarding division.

Al Gore’s Eye of Newt Tabbouli

Ingredients:
1 peccary, jellied
2 portions bitter eye of newt, charred
3 jiggers tongue of dog, glazed
3 cups nuclear lizard nose, outwardly tossed
2 cups ginger
1 bunch mustard

Sluggishly grease a cookie sheet. Separate peccary brain from foot. Mock foot. Mix the eye of newt with the tongue of dog over low heat in a skillet. Pour resulting goo over the peccary. Marinate – very humanely – the lizard nose, ginger, and the mustard. Heap the latter combination on to the former. Abandon for 104 hours. Serves 2 individuals with great stomachs.

Dude. You can not make Eye of Newt Tabbouli without chicory.

Liberals. Hmf.

In other Kristol news, Duncan Donuts Black is picking on poor Billy for hacking it up in his NYT column. First for criticiz[ing] Barack Obama for what he himself has long failed to do and then linking the ThinkProgress piece pointing out that Billy is paying Weekly Standard editorial assisstants less than half the national median.
And as if called by the siren, guess who want to add to the discussion.

How does one mock a peccary foot? Nyah nyah, you lump of connective tissue, we’re only after the tasty organs. Seriously, I need to know, I’ve already started defrosting the lizard nose in the microwave.

I have just re-read my post on Edward Bernays and I want to revise my assesment. Bernays is not less loathesome than Ivy Lee. He is probably worse. He is just slightly more presentable because he didn’t work for the Nazis.

At least Ivy Lee stood by his profession and its main rationale, that all image problems are PR problems. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Look, if you guys don’t want to follow the advice of St. Al Gore then prepare for an iceberg to melt in your kitchen after you fuck up the tabbouli.

Incidentally, our friend Joe was 22 at the time of the Tet Offensive.

Hey, enjoy the drinking Sadlynaughts. I hear someone’s been working on tabbouli since Thursday morning.

Look, if you guys don’t want to follow the advice of St. Al Gore then prepare for an iceberg to melt in your kitchen after you fuck up the tabbouli.

Tabbouli’s some kind of pastry, right?

POWs were transported out of the Philippines on these ships.

Re: blog clichés

Over the last few years, Rox Populi has done some Banned/Retired Stock Phrases of the Blogosphere threads. I’ve been waiting for months for the next one so I can put down “just sayin'” and “what [someone else’s name] said.”

The right wing does not support capitalism or a free market. What they support is huge corporations who can crush their competition through monopoly practices.

My front hedge is now a topiary sculpture of Proust. Who the hell’s idea was it to hire PhD’s to do my lawn?
RobW now lives in a veritable utopiary.
I hope you like their landscape gardening, with the new patio, surrounded by a colonnade constructed from left-over punctuation.

I’ve been waiting for months for the next one so I can put down “just sayin’” and “what [someone else’s name] said.”

I’ll have to chase those threads down. Do they have “made of win” / “wins the internets” and my personal anti-favorite mangled cliché, “Rinse, lather, repeat?”

The FDL comment threads are, as the immortal Myles na gCopaleen once wrote of his own Catechism of Cliché, a unique compendium of all that is nauseating in contemporary writing – a harrowing survey of sub-literature and all that is pseudo, mal-dicted and calloused in the underworld of print.

Well Tom, some of the right wing does in fact support unfettered capitalism. THAT”S WHY THEY ARE ALWAYS YELLING.

Wait, so is “AEI” just the Spanish abbreviation for “Institute for Educational Affairs”?

“made of win” / “wins the internets”

I hate this because each day poor individuals all over the globe other than myself lose the internets. It makes me sad.

#

SamFromUtah said,

June 2, 2008 at 21:33

YAYS! 100+ comments and no one has welcomed any overlords!

Hooray! No under-bus throwing, nor “the stupid! It buuuuurrrns!” “good times, good times” or “Bzzt! Thanks for playing!” either.

I’m still amused by “Well played”, but I don’t think it’s got long before the bloom is off.

Man am I glad to read this.

I thought that repetitive, thought-free shit only annoyed me, probably because I’m an asshole (I don’t even play one on TV).

Maybe the people who do it just don’t realize how mindless they appear to be.

I KNOW!!

Let’s tell ’em….

mikey

And I don’t even wanna MENTION those assholes who don’t close their stoopid tags….

mikey

SamFromUtah: I think this is her most recent thread on clichés. It includes links to the previous ones.

I’d like for the word “ilk” to be used less. And other words of its sort.

I hate this because each day poor individuals all over the globe other than myself lose the internets. It makes me sad.

We should have a self-esteem-building “Everyone Wins an Internets” day.

Aha, thanks, J-.

Sam wins the internets!

Hey — can someone link me to an entry with the “pointing, shouting” guy? I am finding myself in dire need.

Sam wins the internets!

Who, me? …I’d like to thank my momma and Elvis. I plan to donate my winnings to the FromUtah Internets Fund, established so that underprivileged commenters may each be issued an Internet.

Every time I read one of those “so-and-so is full of win,” “so-and-so for the win,” or “so-and-so wins the thread” comments, the first thought that crosses my mind is “Who the fuck made you arbiter?” The second is “And when did commenting become a competitive event?”

I KNOW!! Let’s tell ‘em….

I prefer to keep my aggression passive.

You’re all wrong. I win.

Torture ships. Brilliant.

Just sayin’

The Oryoku-maru was a 7,363-ton passenger cargo liner that the Japanese used to try to transport 1,620 survivors of the Bataan Death March, Corregidor and other battle sites. It left Manila on December 13, 1944, and over the next two days was mistakenly bombed and strafed by American planes.About 270 died aboard ship, from suffocation or dehydration or were killed in the attack or from drowning while escaping the sinking ship. A colonel, in his official report, wrote:

“Many men lost their minds and crawled about in the absolute darkness armed with knives, attempting to kill people in order to drink their blood or armed with canteens filled with urine and swinging them in the dark. The hold was so crowded and everyone so interlocked with one another that the only movement possible was over the heads and bodies of others.”

I always think “skunked again.” Damn you, SamFromUtah! I shake my tiny fists at you in wordless fury, or at least that’s what I would be doing if I weren’t typing.

J— wins the internets from Sam, masterfully beating him down to take the title belt until Athenawise won the internets with an eye gouge!

DAMMIT!

Fiery outrage from tigrismus wrests the internets belt from Athenawise’s bloody hands! Win!

Wait, commenting is like professional wrestling? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Forget what I said about competitive events. I’m in!

As soon as I find my Super Comentarista mask.

It feels empty when it’s just a pity win. Maybe this means I can finally refind that 4-bit pixel porn site though…

Yo soy el traductor Google monstruo! Voy a aplastar todos los competidores!

That Bernays documentary is fascinating. I have all four episodes which I downloaded from somewhere. Let’s see, try
http://www.documentary-film.net/search/video-listings.php?e=70

It’s called “Century of the Self”

Oh that’s right. How silly of me. I downloaded them from Great Gazoogle video.

Hehehe. Commenting is so much more fun when you imagine everyone dressed like Luchadores with fireworks and fanfares by campy mariachi bands.

Now I’m pumped! Where’s my sparkly spandex face mask!? FLYING CHUPACABRA KICK!

Mis adversarios se estrangulador en sus comas!

Fuck, are we back on sex costumes again?

Stryx gana la Internets!

the “fuck” count is way low.

Can we leave my personal life out of this_comma_please?

fucking pelicans

goooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I para una recepción nuestros overlords que usan de la piel.

goooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Super Pedante te corrige y te quita el

¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Super Pedante gana la Internets!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Punctuate the bourgeoisie!

We’re all Bastion Boogers now.

screw the repetitive phrases what’s a lurker gotta do to get some photoshopped sammiches around here?

Sigh. Who’s Booger wrestling now, do you think? Iris?

Iris wrestles Obamabots in Jell-O (TM).

So I was in a rented Stingray, and it was over-heating. I pulled into a Shell station; he said I had blown a seal. I said, “Fix the damn thing and leave my private life out of it, okay pal?”

I have no problem with the Clinton/Obama thing being resolved via death match not unlike when Kirk and Spock fought to the death. Bwabwabwa-bwa-bwa-bwa-bwa-DAH-DAHDAH-DAH-DAH!

The fact is, I sing in a mariachi band.

I got dibs on being El Borbah.

Iris wrestles Obamabots in Jell-O (TM).

Mmmmmm…

Just as every whore will eventually find his/her perfect john…

Oh really? See, I didn’t know that.

I have no problem with the Clinton/Obama thing being resolved via death match not unlike when Kirk and Spock fought to the death. Bwabwabwa-bwa-bwa-bwa-bwa-DAH-DAHDAH-DAH-DAH!

I picture it more like this.

I picture it more like this.

That scene rocks!

…Kristol asked whether it was in the long-term interest of corporations to continue to support institutions that had proved so hostile.

How can the wingnuts get things SO wrong? Of all people, they should know that Charles Elmer Doolin, the inventor of both “Cheetos” and “Fritos” was an ardent vegetarian (and thus, a fascist), yet they virtually live off of his fascistic snacks. He was allied with Gandhi (a super-fascist) and yet his inventions have been the source of billions of dollars of capitalistic enterprise (most of it from otherwise paste-eating denizens of the Right) since their original creation, keeping Pakistani-jihadist-7-11’s rolling in dough, enabling them to continue pushing us into Sharia law!

Kristol, as head wingnut, has done *nothing* to dissuade his winger brethren to stop this Islamofascist funding by swearing off the Cheeto (and its delicious counterpart, the Frito) as they dip their pudgy fingers into the cheesy-goodness again and again. We all remember the wingers pointing to the “purple finger” of the Iraqi vote as proof that “We’re Winning!”, but oh, how they shamefully hide the orange finger of Cheetodom, as they vote for liberal fascism with every bite that they take. I can only hope that Michelle Malkin will take up the cause and bring Frito-Lay and their vegetarian-nazi products to their knees, lest all hope be lost for our proud, Christian nation.

The thing I like about this is that using the phrase “whore” to describe the Bill Kristols and Jonah Goldbergs of the world is so appropriate. A whore is someone who will, for a fee, do something degrading for the pleasure of whoever has the money. This applies perfectly to wingnut think-tanks.

What I like about this too is that as the nation awakens from the delusions of these think-tank propelled idiots, we are poised to make a statement, as sane and rational citizens, that we shall no longer tolerate these fools masquerading as “experts” on anything.

But the think tank nonsense has fallen far from the trunk of the tree that Buckley planted. Whereas the original movement Conservatives were semi-intellectual, your modern day welfare wingnut whore is an uneducated or “gentleman’s C” boob like Rush Limbaugh or Jonah Goldberg who, under even a casual cross-examination by a disinterested or modestly-informed third party, would fold like a wet paper sack. There’s a really fantastic video out there of Limbaugh, circa 1987-88, before he figured out to NOT appear in front of a randomly-selected audience, being viciously booed off the stage of a talk show (I can’t recall but I think it may have been Donohue) and displaying his utter failure to grasp how to communicate with an audience that didn’t share his worldview.

These people are like puffer fish. They’ve been immersed in their bullshit at an incredible depth for waaaayyy too long. Bring them up to the surface and they’ll fucking explode.

“I want two quarts of la Larda tequila, a quart of Dinkelass bourbon, three cases of Green Death beer, a couple cartons of Gaspers, limes, ice and uhhh… They got any take-out Mexican food around here?”

– el Borbah, getting ready for Drinking Sadly

In fact we are mainly coastal or shallow-water species. Is it not enough to bear an uncanny resemblance to Dinesh D’Souza? Must we also suffer these comparisons with Think-tankards? Unlike them, we do not actually secrete the neurotoxin that makes us poisonous, instead extracting it from bacteria. Also we have a very small and efficient genome.

Another lists of nonoes for 08:
27 May at http://norbizness.com/
under the aptest heading
“Stop Saying ________ , Cartman”

I read Rox Pop’s 2004 list and all I could think of was that no-one outside Chicago had heard of Barack Obama at the time.
What could it possibly mean?!?
For refraining from use: !1!1!1 in all its infinite combinations.
And: it’s not “the stupid, it burrrrrrrrrns”.
It’s: “teh st00pid….”
– MC

Thanks for all this input.

I walked 47 miles on barb wire, Use a cobra-snake for a necktie.

RIP, Bo Diddley.

That’s it. Really nice!

Actually, this is the best Star Trek fight music video of all time.

Bitch I live in a fully furnished gold plated trash can!

Poison Dinesh … poison Dinesh … tasty Dinesh!

There is something apt about Irving Kristol playing a cameo role in Endgame.

We should have a self-esteem-building “Everyone Wins an Internets” day.

Would that be like the Special Internets?

(I know that was bad. Please don’t hurt me)

He had to find somebody to pay the bills after he got off the precursor welfare program as editor of Encounter. He knew how the dole creates dependency from personal experience, you might say.

Hey graph!
No wucking furries mate.
Thank you for putting me back in my box with such a sophisticated brand of humour.
– MC

Also, I got hedges that look like Proust, Kierkegaard, Einstein, the whole lot.

So there.

On the left is there is no real counterpart to institutions like AEI, Heritage Foundation, Hoover, Cato, etc. The reason is that on the Left all the energy, effort and the money go to electoral politics.

“Just vote Democratic and everything will be peachy. We promise. You will get the policy you want because we understand your concerns.” And then complicated things happen which cause the Dems to not deliver on their promises.

The Right understood a long time ago that politicians come and go, but if you can shape the policy debate in the media, then whoever gets elected has to play along. The Left, such as it is, does not get it.

Imagine how many struggling, no health insurance-having, B and C-list bloggers could make a living off 1% of what the candidates have raked in during the campaign. Imagine lefty think tanks that can place their own bobbleheads on any network yak show on any given Sunday.

Remember the Rockridge Institute, the people who brought you the concept of Framing? They are toast.

Building progressive policy infrastructure has to happen at the same time as electoral campaigning. It’s hard to see how a Democratic victory will deliver progressive policy if the Right still controls the public debate.

if i’m not mistooken, john kenneth galbraith spoke @ my high school graduation in ’86, and given the ‘liberal education’ in civics i received, didn’t know who he was @ the time

The Galbraith family has a significant amount of farmland holdings in western Franklin County, Ohio (central Ohio; Columbus area), which is just a few miles from my childhood home. Their lands are bordered on U.S. Route 40 by white fences of a distinct variety that gives the area some unique character. My father, who also grew up in that area, tells me that there was good money to be had in the summer many years ago painting those miles of fences (they are now vinyl instead of painted wood). Sadly, they’ve been selling their land of late (central Ohio is growing like a weed and cookie cutter ‘burbs are popping up everywhere).

Ah, well. I’ll always have my memories I suppose.

Simba B said,

The Galbraith family has a significant amount of farmland holdings in western Franklin County, Ohio (central Ohio; Columbus area)…

guess where i went to school: central ohio, the columbus area, so i wasn’t mistooken

Simba I think you’re confusing two different Johns. John W. Galbreath is the one who owns land west of Columbus. He is also a former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, during which they won the World Series 3 times.

John K. Galbraith only ever won the Presidential Medal of Honor. Twice.

stryx said,

Simba I think you’re confusing two different Johns…

now maybe i was mistooken, it might have been W. and not K., it was 22 years ago and there was alcohol involved….

“Bully pulpit”? Don’t you mean, more accurately “bally platform”? The small stage from which a circus barker exhorts the crowd to buy tickets.

This practice was not invented here. It is part of the inherent advantages of power that you can buy justification (and salvation).

Three centuries ago, it was said that no philosopher was ever punished for writing a treatise on the Divine Right of Kings….

Pretty sure the quote is not by JK Galbraith, but his son, James, a big lefty economist at the U of Texas, and well worth reading in his own right.

Those of you with an interest in PRopaganda should look up Frederick Houk Law, school-textbook anthologist and corporate shill extraordinaire. He pioneered putting a “family values” patina on the corporate agenda.

I’m sad to hear about the Rockridge Institute closing; I’ve been a fan of Lakoff’s since way, way before Lakoff was cool, but I went to grad school in the ’90s… (And no, I don’t do topiary.)