I’m feeling like a bit of Tina… I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

I liked the Mad Max movies generally, and I think that besides Braveheart, they were the best thing Mel Gibson ever acted in. Yeah, I know, Braveheart…but what can I say, I dig a really great epic hero story. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Tina sang the bad-assedest female leader song ever:

I’ve never been a huge James Bond fan. My personal fave was, of course, Sean Connery. Tina was the best thing about GoldenEye:

Beside Private Dancer, Proud Mary is probably Tina’s most famous song. I love this version…if only that half-wit hack Ike would STFU with his sorry excuse for a bass voice. Tina, as usual, tears it UP.

In 2008, Oprah had a special, and Tina came out at the age of 69 and did Proud Mary. Sometimes when aging musicians come out on stage on some TV special (American Idol is notorious for this), they sound…well, embarrasingly bad. Voices age right along with bodies, and sometimes, that voice just isn’t there anymore. You can’t say that about Tina, or Cher, who joins her in this version of Proud Mary. Tina may not be able to shimmy like she used to, and Cher might have gone a bit too far with the facial plastic surgery, but they both still got it.

I hope everyone has a safe, and fun, Labor Day weekend, and I really hope you get a day off tomorrow. See you next week!

WTF?? 1. Glenn Beck v Martin Luther King. Glenn Beck had his rally in Washington DC today, at the spot where the Good Reverend * once gave his “I have a Dream” speech. Oh, boy, did that cause some paroxysms of indignation. And what a coincidence, On his website, in a tucked away little .pdf called “faq for the media”, he says “We didn’t realize that the date was the same as the MLK anniversary until the media reported it.” I don’t buy that. He also says that the event was not political in content. I don’t buy that, either. His site discouraged attendees from bringing any signs to the rally. You know, signs like this one that was floating around during the health care melee:

I can understand why Beck wouldn’t want those at his TV event. It’s a turnoff. But, still, political it was. Sarah Palin was there prattling on about crazy, and everything that woman does is political, so therefore, it was a political event. It was a religious revival, too, with vague calls to bring god back, etc. etc. And it was a moment to forget how utterly heinous whites were (and can still be) toward a people some of their ancestors dragged over here in chains and then bred like cattle to populate the fields.

“This country has spent far too long worrying about scars and thinking about scars and concentrating on scars. Today, we are going to concentrate on the good things in America, the things that we have accomplished, and the things that we can do tomorrow.”

I think, given the next couple of courses in our little potluck today, that those scars actually haven’t been worried over or thought through enough. Not nearly enough.

The “rally” was essentially an orgy of beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth over Why, oh Why, could this great country vote a black man into the White House, because let’s face reality: That’s where most of the complaints are really stemming from.

I find the paroxysms of displeasure to be wasted air and wasted energy. You see, that little wierdo Beck might throw a rally today with 100,000 whites in attendance whining together how they pay too much in taxes (when they don’t pay enough, actually) and how jesus isn’t given the seat of honor at dinner anymore (and I beg to differ on that point too, when every time I walk down the stupid street I can’t throw a dead cat without hitting something with the WWJD or the “i heart jesus” on it, or a church, or some moron praying for a new set of mags for his camaro, or some idiot praying to jesus that their team of choice will win the playoffs, and you get the picture). I won’t even bother to compare the Good Reverend’s speech and Glenn Beck’s rally, because there is no comparison to be made. It’s like trying to compare oranges and moon rocks, and such disparate subjects bear no attempts at comparison.

Really, Beck is just an urban meme. Mental masturbation is the best anyone will get out of him, and every move he makes will be calculated for “ratings.” Just like his rally yesterday, a made-for-tv event. In 100 years, no one will remember who Beck was – he’ll be a footnote, at best. In 100 years, the Good Reverend Dr. King will still be remembered as a brave and eloquent man who wanted to bring a people out of the bondage of Jim Crow and lynch mobs and several hundred years of some of the worst degredation the world has known. No, I don’t think these scars have been mulled over nearly enough.

*Dr. King is the ONLY human you will EVER see the Bee refer to as the Good Reverend

WTF?? 2. Dr. Laura: Are you really going?? Please say it’s so! I’m sure you’ve all heard about Dr. Laura’s tirade at an african-american call-in over why can the black folk call each by a certain term, but whites can’t get away with it, and it’s just not fair. Dr. Laura proceeded to repeat nigger over and over again. Not unlike a toddler testing their boundaries, to see how far they can go before polite society smacks them upside the head and tells them to shut up or go to their room. Tough luck, Dr. Laura. Are you really gone, by the way? Because you’re pretty damned obnoxious anyway, so no big loss. Another mental masturbator gone the way of the washed-up radio host. It’s just one less fool clogging the broadband, as far as I’m concerned.

WTF?? 3. Katrina rebuilding grants go to… Wait for it. Wait…you know what’s coming…Bingo! You opened door number 3, and it’s: Rich White People! Are you surprised? No, neither was I. Seems that the state governments of Mississippi and Louisiana stacked the deck yet again against poor blacks when they structured the rebuilding grants (those are federal dollars, BTW, so you and I got to help some rich bastard rebuild his dock where he parks his 50′ yacht). A federal judge has found that Louisiana’s program discriminated against blacks because they couldn’t collect more than the pre-storm value, which wasn’t much (think housing worth $20,000, and yeah, there’s plenty of that, and $20,000 won’t build much these days, and let’s not even get into the zoning laws disallowing trailers). In Mississippi, in order to collect, you had to 1. have homeowner’s insurance and 2. have water damage. Wind damage? No need to apply, the state program didn’t cover wind damage. Guess where most of the water damage was? On the coast where the wealthy and wealthier live. Guess where most of the wind damage occurred? Inland, where most of the poor blacks lived. See the plan? It’s really very simple. The state governments found a way to get rid of their “poor people” problem permanently, and they seized the day. Ever wonder why so many poor people are black, or other minorities? Because it was designed to be that way. A little design and a hell of a lot of opportunism can go a long way to keeping certain people in their place.

Someone come tell me racism isn’t alive and well today, and I’ll offer to sell you that bridge in New York I’ve been thinking of unloading.

For your viewing pleasure, the Good Reverend himself, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963:

And one more, if you please. Billie Holiday sings Strange Fruit:

WTF?? 1. Enough with the stupid Mosque, already! I’m sure everyone knows more than they probably want to about the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero. Except it’s not AT Ground Zero. It’s actually around the corner, and not even within sight of Ground Zero. It’s about 1/10th of a mile away, which means a couple of minutes of walking time. It’s also not right on the bus route, so, as Matt Sledge said recently in HuffPo, you would need to go out of your way to have it offend you. And, it’s not really a mosque, either. It’s mainly a community center type deal that happens to contain a mosque. Now, I understand why people don’t like the idea of a muslim owned/operated building near Ground Zero. Everyone from the average yahoo on the street to the President himself has weighed in with their opinion, and the opinions differ somewhat. Those who say they can live with a Mosque within a country mile of the WTC cite religious freedom and tolerance, and they have a good point. This country tends to preach that stuff a lot, except when inconvenient to its own emotion investment to do so, which leads to the other side of the exchange. Those who don’t want a Mosque within 3,000 miles of WTC also have a point. It’s kind of rude and unthinking for the NYC Muslim community to want to build anywhere near the GZ to begin with, don’t you think? Honestly, what were they thinking? That no one would notice? That everyone would say “oh, sure, come on into the neighborhood where your rather more fanatical brethren destroyed two american icons and murdered a lot of people just trying to get through their days at their crappy jobs and build a new Mosque, or community center or whatever you want to call it, we’ll be just hunky dory with that.” I can see both sides of that coin. So what is the solution to this little conundrum? In Real Life, I’m all about pushing the easy-button. The easy-button here is that NO religious structures, monuments, plaques, etc. of ANY religious bent should be allowed within 3 NYC blocks of the GZ. Why? Because it was religious fanaticism that led directly to 9/11 to begin with, and it was public zeal fired by our own imams (think Pat Robertson and every other preacher who went anywhere near a tv camera in the past 10 years) that helped, in part, to allow a lot of americans to justify to themselves that bombing the hell out of a country that didn’t actually have a dog in the fight was a great idea, which has further fed the flames of the idiots in the Middle East who think a blind and/or illiterate imam knows all. That Great Big Lie called the Iraq War wouldn’t have been possible without the public’s support, and our own homegrown domestic terrorists (think: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, et. al.) were perfectly happy to provide everyone with all the rationalization they needed. So, while I can see both sides of the argument (I won’t call it a debate, because I haven’t seen any actual debate, just a lot of prattling about feelings and religious liberty, and then there are the kooks who yammer “but islam ain’t no religion!”). The easy-button for New York City is to simply not give permits to any religious group who wants to erect or hang up or leave lying on the ground any religious symbolism at all, be it Muslim, Christian or zoroastrian. That way, christians can’t be offended when a Muslim whatever goes in next door, and the Muslims can’t call it “religious discrimination” because it’s just a lack of any religious anything near a site of horror that religion was one of the root causes of, and the Muslims can’t say “but you’re discriminating against us” and no one needs to be offended . Leave religion out of the equation, and there might be left enough open brain space for someone to think of something to build near the WTC that actually IS appropriate.

WTF?? 2. The whole illegal immigrant scare thing is just going too far. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently filed a lawsuit against Mississippi authorities on behalf of Cirila Baltazar Cruz. Cruz gave birth to a daughter in a Mississippi hospital. The hospital and the Mississippi Department of Human Services (which will sound soon like a serious misnomer) took Cruz’ baby away and put the child in foster care with a white couple. We don’t even know the details of the case or what Cruz was accused of by MDHS (allegations later proven to be false) because some podunk family court judge put a gag order on Cruz and her lawyers. The SPLC is attempting to have a federal court void the gag order so that Cruz’ story can be made public, and it needs to be public. Health and Human Services did a little looking into the MDHS, and there is reason to believe that Cruz’ story is not an isolated incident. I don’t care if Cruz is an illegal, which we don’t know, and I don’t care if she couldn’t speak English or Spanish (she speaks an indigenous language) and I don’t care if the “illegals are taking over the country” like we hear spouted in every news outlet and yahoo on the street. Without good cause, you don’t take an infant away from its mother. Ever. MDHS did not have good cause, the hospital did not have good cause, and I hope this kid gets a college fund through a nice little lawsuit designed to calm the state of Mississippi, and any other state or its agency, who thinks they can act with impunity just because a person is brown, doesn’t speak english, and may or may not be a so-called “illegal alien.”

I had trouble classifying this next one. It made me laugh, but it also made me say “EWWWW!! WTF????” so, I”ll call it a WTF, and you can decide for yourself what category it belongs in.

WTF?? 3. Dog saves man’s life. Jerry Douthett of Detroit, Michigan, passed out in a drunken stupor. When he woke up, the family dog had gnawed off his infected, diseased, and about to kill him dead big toe. EWWWWW! But still pretty cool. Good doggy!

WTF? 4. If you’re going hiking in Yellowstone, don’t expect the Park Rangers to slog to the top of the peak to bring your dumb self hot chocolate. Idiots abound in this country. Really, if we put the stupid people in jail, there would be a jail on every single street corner in America, and every single one of those jails would be so overcrowded they’d be sleeping 4 to a cot. Just ask the National Park rangers who, yes, got an emergency call from some wahoo out hiking in the middle of absolute nowhere and decided that they MUST HAVE HOT CHOCOLATE TO SURVIVE. People are walking out into the wilds carrying a cell phone and a handheld GPS, and not much else. Then they push the panic button because their “water tastes salty, bring us some more,” which causes a $3,400/hour helicopter rescue trip out into the wild outback for no good reason. It’s a National Park, fools, not the Waldorf Astoria, and they don’t have room service.

This next one really is a “Strikes My Fancy” moment. I can’t wait to see what this kid does when he’s 25:

SMF: 8 year old art prodigy sells out an exhibition for $250,000. Kieron Williamson is 8. Eight! If I dug up Michelangelo himself, brought him back to life and had him tutor me for the next hundred years, I couldn’t do this:

I don’t know if one of his collections is worth $250,000 right now. I think there was some “novelty” buying going on there – or planning for increases in value when this kid ends up being the next Picasso. Give him 15 years or so, though, and his art just might be worth that kind of cash. Kieran has a wonderful eye for spatial relation and color, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do when he’s 25.

Have a great rest of the weekend!

Bluegrass isn’t for everyone, but over the years, I’ve developed a taste for it. As a young’un, I watched Andy Griffith on reruns, and some of my favorite episodes involved the Darling Family:

In the 90’s, I took a trip to Memphis to see Graceland. I found something better: Delta blues. Muddy Waters (the man who introduced electric blues to Chicago), John Hurt. Sweat-beer-and rip-your-heart-out-in-a-run-down-dive-blues. This one is Son House croonin’ “Preachin’ Blues”:

The other day, I got the hankering for some Rolling Stones. Jumpin’ Jack Flash makes me dance like Whoopi, but my real Sympathy is For The Devil:

I listen to some old standards over and over again. One of those is the Indigo Girls. “Oziline”, which I unfortunately couldn’t dredge up a really good video for, has become one of my favorites:

Bill Miller holds a special place in my iPod playlist. This is Bill doing “Reservation Road”:

Here’s hoping everyone has a good weekend.

WTF?? 1. Watergate Was Not About Taped Conversations. The Nixon Library is now run by the National Archives, and a new Watergate exhibit is in the works, and boy-o-boy, the Nixon Loyalists are having a cow over it. The former exhibit, approved by Nixon himself, was a dark little hallway that nobody wanted to walk down with little white signs with black lettering that nobody wanted to read. Nixon and his loyalists liked that just fine – it ensured that no one would walk away from the Nixon Presidential Library with anything on their mind other than Pat Nixon’s gown collection. Then enter the big bad National Archive, who figure that Watergate was, in fact, a large factor in the Nixon Presidency, since, you know, it caused an impending impeachment and a resignation of a sitting president. They reckon that is a pretty important thing to know about. Bob Bostock, a former Nixon aide, leader of the loyalist Nixon Foundation and designer of the original exihibit nobody wanted to see, sent a 132-page objection letter to the National Archives. The basis for objection revolves around other presidents, from FDR forward, taping conversations in the White House. The problem with his objection is this: Those presidents didn’t order a petty burglary of the political oppositions offices, they didn’t use their re-election campaign coffer to fund the burglary, and they didn’t erase their tapes in a half-assed attempt to clear their names of burglary and political espionage. Bostock doesn’t think that what Nixon did warranted impeachment. Not today, it doesn’t, unless one’s name is Clinton and it’s all about a democrat getting a BJ in the Oval Office while Bush lied to the country to start a war on false pretenses and nothing happens there but that the wars just grind on and on and on. But in 1974, a sitting President being involved in a crime of any kind was enough to warrant impeachment. Oh, how the world has changed.

Strikes My Fancy: Burn a Confederate Flag Day. You all know how Glenn Beck & gang proclaimed September 12 as some kind of sick, twisted and in my humble opinion decidedly non-patriotic tea party? Well, it’s also Burn a Confederate Flag Day. Yes, that’s right. Wherever tea-parties occur, burn a Confederate Flag in protest (as the website says, as long as local laws allow, or as long as you’re willing to spend an hour or two in the clink). Sounds like fun for all to me!

The movie got me thinking about corporate rivalries, particularly here in America. We’ve had some spectacularly nasty ones, and the rivalry between Tesla, Thomas Edison and Westinghouse comes to mind. We all know how that ended – the world ended up with the far less efficient incandescent bulb. Edison, with his inferior lightbulb, won in the end. But it was Tesla bulbs that lit up the Vegas Strip.

Another spectacularly nasty rivalry involved Preston Tucker. Tucker was an inventor and a car lover who, just after WWII when the Big Three were still rolling out the same pre-war models they had become wealthy on, started production on the Tucker ‘48 Sedan.

The Tucker '48

WTF?? Did Toyota have a design problem? I was pretty sure they did. I’m still pretty sure they did actually have some design/software flaws that they let go for entirely too long while resting on their laurels of being one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers. The anecdotal reports at first were sketchy. Stories of accelerators that stuck in the wide open and cars that couldn’t be stopped began to surface earlier this year. Then it was said that not only did the accelorators stick, but the automatic transmissions couldn’t be shifted into neutral and the brakes didn’t respond. There were some deaths. Toyota was accused of having serious design flaws that went beyond sticky pedals and floor mats. Toyota leadership was hauled into Congress and told to testify as to the allegations bandied about by the press and Congress. They did, apologized, came up with some “fixes”, and meanwhile lost quite a bit of street cred with their decades-old safety track record. A lot of people traded their toyotas in on new domestic models produced by our Big 3. 8 million toyotas and lexuses have been recalled, and federal investigations are still ongoing.

NPR ran a segment recently quoting a Wall Street Journal article which says that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analysis of “black boxes” from Toyotas that failed show that driver error is to blame. In other words, drivers are hitting the accelerators instead of the brakes. Some disturbing items struck me when reading the WSJ article.

The initial findings are consistent with a 1989 government-sponsored study that blamed similar driver mistakes for a rash of sudden-acceleration reports involving Audi 5000 sedans.

This one sentence bothers me on a number of levels. What exactly would a 1989 government-sponsored study of Audi 5000 sedans have to do with a 2010 government-sponsored study of Toyotas? Unless the government-sponsored study was looking to be consistent with 20 year old findings in another unrelated study.

NHTSA has received more than 3,000 complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas and Lexuses, including some dating to early last decade, according to a report the agency compiled in March. The incidents include 75 fatal crashes involving 93 deaths.
However, NHTSA has been able to verify that only one of those fatal crashes was caused by a problem with the vehicle, according to information the agency provided to the National Academy of Sciences. That accident last Aug. 28, which killed a California highway patrolman and three passengers in a Lexus, was traced to a floor mat that trapped the gas pedal in the depressed position.

Out of 3,000 complaints, 75 fatal crashes and 93 deaths, only one could be attributed to anything other than driver error. And my warning bells sound when we learn that in that one instance, a California Highway Patrolman was killed. Yes, I am saying that because a cop was killed, that crash had to be something other than driver error, while the other 2,999 cannot be confirmed as anything BUT driver error.

Toyota admits that is has a sticky pedal/sticky mat problem and that’s why 8 million vehicles have been recalled. Between the still-ongoing NHTSA study and Toyotas own data downloads, they are find no evidence of brake depression during the out-of-control accelerations.

However, Toyota has admitted that, along with sticky pedals and poorly designed floor mats, their “black boxes” are unreliable data sources in crashes.

A Toyota spokesman said the company considers the device “a prototype tool. It wasn’t designed to tell us exactly what happened in an accident. It was designed to tell us whether our systems were operating properly.”

The WSJ article raises a series of questions in my mind concerning this whole sordid episode, but I want to talk to one question in particular.

What about the timing?

Toyota Complaints Timeline

In February 2010, complaints of acceleration problems in Toyota models skyrocketed, largely due to media coverage. The media covers a complaint or two and suddenly you have a plethora of complaints when people think about it and say “Hey, yeah! That happened to me!”

About this time last year, Chrysler and GM were dying slow debt deaths, and received a government “bailout.” Meanwhile, Ford was still running, if not in the black, at least close enough that they didn’t require government funding for survival. GM and Chrysler, however, were close to having to close up shop permanently. The “bailout” was not popular, on either side of the aisle. I still contend that it was necessary – but necessary does not equate to popular.

If GM and Chrysler were forced to fold, Toyota was poised to take over that market share. Nearly every single bit, save for pickup trucks and heavy-duty trucks market share, which would have been filled in by Ford. In February of this year, right around the time that Toyota owners began their complaints in earnest, Cash for Clunkers was in full steam, but 2 of the Big 3 were still in financial trouble.

Suddenly that competition from Toyota was effectively squelched with allegations of design flaws and dangerous vehicles and around April of this year, GM Was suddenly able to start paying back some of that government bailout money. The deed was done, and Toyota was effectively tarred and feathered on CSpan coverage of Congressional hearings. Toyota was nearly Tucker-ized. Trust in the brand wasn’t entirely destroyed, but it certainly took a big hit in the left quarterpanel that couldn’t just be hammered out and bondo’ed over.

It is no coincidence that in the 2010 safest cars list, Toyota doesn’t register at all – in any category. The damage had been done. Are the parties to the damage now trying to un-do some of that damage in the form of prelim NHTSA studies and WSJ articles, further touted by the generally well-respected NPR that coincidentally fall in line with a 1989 study of similar problems in Audi?

I do not believe that all of this was “masterminded” – I believe it was opportunism at its dark, macabre finest.

The problem with the damage-creating is that it can backfire in unwanted ways. Some of those Toyotas are built right here in American plants. Those profits might be going back to Tokyo, but American workers in those plants are still employed and are still drawing a paycheck. So if the Toyota brand were permanently tarnished, sales might well drop and those plants might have to be closed, putting even more Americans out of work and boosting the unemployment levels. Something the government certainly doesn’t want right now – particularly the White House. Some of the damage has to be un-done, it seems.

What a coincidence, here comes the WSJ to the rescue with NPR nipping at its heels, and the story becomes “well, maybe those Toyotas were safe after all – maybe there were a couple of little design problems, but there was some driver error involved, as well. Those fools couldn’t tell the brake from the gas pedal!” It’s not even Toyota saying it, it’s the NHTSA and the Wall Street Journal.

A lot of lessons have been learned by big business and the government over the past 100 years or so in how to run with the opportunity to take the molehill and turn it into the mountain – at least in the public eye, all while distracting us all with equivalents of the OJ glove. Toyota has some design problems, Toyota admits that. I don’t believe for one New York second that all those people were mistakenly hitting the gas over and over again instead of the brake and even Toyota seems to be saying that the NHTSA is putting too much stock in those “black boxes” and the crash data, but the Wall Street Journal, then NPR, took it and ran with it.

Government works for corporations now. It’s a nasty truth, I know, but it is a truth, and in this little episode, I believe it worked for the Big 3, as it did when the Tucker dream of a better, safer car was swept into the “no competition” trashcan. The media also work for those same corporations that have been investing money by the barrel into Congress for decades. Hell, the media ARE the big corps now. The question becomes, when every single event seems to be tangled in a gordian knot of duplicity and opportunism, what can we believe as true?

Once upon a time, long long ago, in a galaxy far far away (or at least that’s what it feels like), the media reported on the opportunism of government and industry. Now, the media is just a complicit party to it.

Welcome to the table, folks, and let’s get started.

WTF?? – The Martyrdom of Shirley Sherrod to the Altar of Fox News. I was going to have a say about this entire episode of Breitbart’s edited videos picked up by Fox, the resultant accusations of “reverse racism” (which is really just a euphemism employed by white people who are afraid one might detect that they are, themselves, racist to some degree) and her ouster from the USDA, only to be offered reinstatement when it was discovered that the POS Breitbart doctored the video so badly that nothing about it was true anymore. I was going to have a say, but my friend Isaac, whom I have extended a “contributors” license here at The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and who I hope will come by occasionally and drop some wisdom on us, said it better. Here is what Isaac had to say about it, and let me make this clear: The following comes from a series of emails where he wasn’t even trying. If you want to see a formidable writer in action, just wait until he’s trying.

I think there’s another context here and it’s not a pretty one.

In the last couple of months there have been other instances of people saying or writing something that pissed off the right and immediately their jobs disappeared with no questions asked.

Helen Thomas, one of the best, if not THE best reporter ever to grace the White House Press Corps saw her distinguished career end when she made a brief public comment regarding Israel and Palestine.

The same thing happened to Octavia Nasr, who was fired by CNN over a comment about the Middle East.

Dave Weigel was immediately let go from the Washington Post after he made a comment on an e-mail list for journalists, which was not a public email list, about the Right wing that the bowtie-wearing shit stain Tucker Carlson didn’t like. Carlson made the comment public, and *poof*, Weigel gets fired.

Now Shirley Sherrod.

Anyone with more than a handful of brain cells working should be asking where are the examples of right wingers being terminated from their jobs for saying something somebody didn’t like?

Look at what also happened to ACORN and Van Jones, with public verdicts coming in before there was even a trial.

And when the answer to the above question comes back “zero,” the next question should be why are news and government organizations so quick to bend over backward looking out for the hurt feelings of the Right and cut people loose who don’t kiss right wing ass?

Liberal media, my hairy ass. Although Sherrod wasn’t in the media, it was the right wing media that drove this thing. A couple of accounts I heard said that she was forced to resign because Glenn Beck was going to run the story that night. Glenn fucking Beck?

When did not pissing off the Right become the standard? They do what they do because they know they can get away with it. They know that the people in charge on the Left will fold faster than Superman on laundry day if a right winger looks at them cockeyed. These people are bullies and they know they can keep taking our lunch money without a fight.

Octavia Nasr, Dave Weigel and Helen Thomas weren’t in the government, they were members of the media speaking their minds outside of their professional roles as journalists.

If I remember correctly, Octavia had sent a Tweet that the right didn’t like. Helen Thomas said what she said into a microphone during an interview, and Dave Weigel, as I said, spoke his mind on a private e-mail list. Their media organizations didn’t waste any time showing them the door at the first sign of right wing hissy fit.

Media organizations should be the last ones to react that way, given specific Constitutional First Amendment protections. The gist and spirit of that amendment must be something that a media organization is mindful of when it comes to the speech of its employees.

The proper response to free speech is more free speech and the Right exercised their right to it. But the spirit of free speech isn’t that someone only has the right to it until someone doesn’t like what was said. The proper response should have come down to some version of “She/he said, she/he has the right to say it, we stand behind their right to have and express an opinion, and if you don’t like it, you can piss up a rope. If you’re so all fired hot to make a big deal of it, submit your thoughts and we’ll run it on the opinion page or we’ll make time on one of our shows for a representative of your point of view to appear and articulate your position. Until then – choke on it.”

Instead, what happened is that these organizations gave more weight to the free speech rights of the Rightwing, and granted them another right that doesn’t even exist – the right not to be offended. The Right essentially now has more free speech rights than the rest of us.

These were the personal views of journalists, but the Right were able to successfully call into quesiton the “objectivity” of these journalists. To me, that signals a humongous case of projection on the side of the Right – that a journalist’s personal opinion will be what drives their coverage rather than giving them the credit to be able to objectively report the facts. When I was a working reporter, I could report objectively. I was forced to write negative stories about people I liked and complementary ones about people I didn’t like. Fox News never reports objectively, with the exception of Shepard Smith, who refused to go along with the Shirley Sherrod smear. He knew what no one else at Fox either knew or would admit – that anything coming from Andrew Breitbart is questionable, at best.

They are all for free speech when it benefits them, but let someone organize a boycott of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, and you’d think the sun had just exploded. The Right doesn’t boycott – they go after the heads of their enemies, and the government and the media follow right along rather than investigate the situation or even offer token resistance or support for their own.

So now we’re in a position where “free speech” is only for the right wing and the First Amendment means whatever the right says it means, and we just keep getting our lunch money taken away.

Why does our side suck so bad?

I have to agree with Isaac, we suck, and we suck badly. Right now after Shirley Sherrod was martyred on the alter of fox news, the Obama administration and the man himself are looking like the kings of suckers because they not only fell for the edited video from an extremely suspect individual, they ran with the stupid thing.

The left has never been as good at the devious and dirty pool tactics that the Right has consistently used to its advantage. If the most recent polls showing Obama’s favorability ratings taking the fast road down the proverbial toilet are true, then the Left has already lost. Hell, we lost when John Kerry got his war record in Vietnam swiftboated by a bunch of yahoos who never knew him, and the ones who did know him in Vietnam lied through their teeth just to ensure that doubt would be cast during a “time of war” and that the horse’s ass didn’t change in mid-stream. We ended up with a second term of Georgie Bush because too many fell off the cliff for that “he’s no war hero” line. Now, republicans have zero to bring to the table but trash, trash and more trash, be it Sarah Palin’s dipstick bumpkinisms wrapped up in an Armani suit, or the resurrection from total political annihilation of Newt Gingrich, of all people. They have no ideas on how to clean up their mess (and make NO mistake, these wars, this economy and the constant infringements on the Constitution were republican messes. Bush had 8 years to fix whatever perceived mistakes Clinton made, but didn’t bother because he was too busy faking that he liked horses and could be a Texas rancher and in the process managed to make more, and bigger mistakes, so save the “no new taxes” crap). But they’ll blither and blather on for ages about those “reverse racists” in the USDA, sacrificing a woman’s career to their baggage-laden hubris. The sad and pathetic part is they can’t even find anything really, really nasty to get a Shirley Sherrod, or a Helen Thomas, or an Octavia Nasr, or an ACORN on. They have to game the system, edit the videos and run their little half-assed personal “sting” operations, and even those they have to edit the living daylights out of to get anything they can pass off as “reverse racist” or “marxist” or whatever crap they’re drinking out of the Koolaid bottle this year.

So let’s talk about “special interests” and “entitlement society.” If the NRA isn’t a special interest, then tell me, What is?? And if the Right thinking that they should be able to talk any trash they please because of their “first amendment rats” while the rest of us are supposed to shut up and say “thank you sir, may I have another?” isn’t an entitlement society, then I don’t know what is. From their politics and their personal boogeymen to their wacked out religions, they think we’re supposed to all join them on the bandwagon to nowhere-real-fast and I’m taking a pass on the crazy, thank you very much.

I’ll leave you with something I ran across this week as a nice little “Strikes My Fancy.” Enjoy some Sarah McLachlan and Run DMC:

WTF?? 1. When did the educational system become afraid of children? I’m not talking about the 17 year old 300lb linebacker who threatened to beat the hell out of the teacher, or another student, after school. I’m not talking about 16 year old girls driving each other to suicide and murder with their malicious sense of self-importance. We’ll be talking about a 6 year old who, after breaking a school rule, was handcuffed over a chair. Last May, Ja’Briel Weston, a 6 year old at Sarah T. Reed Elementary School in New Orleans had an argument with another student over a chair. Like all children do, from time to time – they squabble and argue over things of seemingly no importance to anyone but themselves. Lil’Bee does it all the time. I’m sure you kids do, or did, too. But with zero-tolerance policies in hand, and school security outsourced to private contractors, we end up with a child treated like a hardened criminal who just shanked a prison guard. All I can do is shake my head, and wonder, when did the educational system become so deathly afraid of children? The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a class action suit against the school, where this type of treatment of young children has been routine for some time. I hope they win, and I hope they go after any other school that shackles young children to anything. We can only hope that young Weston learns of a different path, has a different experience soon that shows him that school is not a jail but a place and could free his mind so that he can overcome his fear and loathing of his oppressors, for that is exactly what they have become. This is not education, this is sanctioned oppression, and I find it intolerable. Treat a child like a dangerous felon long enough, and guess what that child will eventually become?

WTF?? 2. Watch the NRA flex its muscles. As I’ve said before, this is an organization that presents a clear and present danger to the republic. If you still have any doubt, read the following from the New York Times:

Beyond Guns: N.R.A. Expands Agenda
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — Fresh off a string of victories in the courts and Congress, the National Rifle Association is flexing political muscle outside its normal domain, with both Democrats and Republicans courting its favor and avoiding its wrath on issues that sometimes seem to have little to do with guns.
The N.R.A., long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit card regulations and Supreme Court nominees.
In the health care debate this year, for instance, the N.R.A.’s lobbyists worked with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to include a little-noticed provision banning insurance companies from charging higher premiums for people with guns in their homes.
The N.R.A. worked out a deal last month exempting itself from a proposal requiring groups active in political spending to disclose their financial donors. Its push this spring for greater gun rights in the District of Columbia served to effectively kill a measure — once seemingly assured of passage — to give the district a voting seat in Congress.
With a push from the N.R.A., a popular bill last year restricting credit card lenders came with an odd add-on: It also allowed people to carry loaded guns in national parks. And the gun lobby put potential supporters of the Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on notice this month that a vote for her would be remembered at the ballot boxes in November.
The N.R.A.’s expanding portfolio is an outgrowth of its success in the courts, Congressional officials and political analysts said. With the Supreme Court ruling last month for the second time since 2008 that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to have a gun, the N.R.A. now finds that its defining battle is a matter of settled law, and it has the resources to expand into other areas.
When the N.R.A. had a narrower range of targets, it relied on a core group of political figures and met with stiffer resistance from vocal gun control advocates in Congress and outside groups. It now has freer rein to leave its mark politically on issues that once seemed out of its reach.
“The last two years have been a disaster for us,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat and a longtime advocate of increased gun control. “A lot of members are just afraid of the N.R.A.”
On Monday, the N.R.A. began broadcasting advertisements urging senators to oppose or filibuster the Kagan nomination. But the group’s top priority is still finding ways to use the Supreme Court ruling in cities, states and courts nationwide to overturn more restrictive gun laws and establish gun rights measures.
N.R.A. officials say they are determined to protect gun rights even if it means using the group’s $307 million budget and membership of more than four million gun owners to influence ancillary issues. (editor’s note: don’t forget those more than 4,000,000 members outnumber 2 to 1 ALL law enforcement and active military – ALL of it).
“What you’re seeing is a recognition that support for the Second Amendment is not only a very powerful voting bloc, but a very powerful political force.” Chris W. Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said in an interview last week at the group’s Washington office, a few blocks from the Capitol.
He pointed to the debate this spring over loosening gun laws in the District of Columbia after a 2008 Supreme Court ruling found the city’s gun ban unconstitutional. At the time, advocates for district voting rights saw their best chance in many years to gain a voting seat in the House, but they abandoned their own proposal after gun rights supporters attached a provision weakening local gun laws.
“I honestly don’t care about D.C. voting rights,” Mr. Cox said of the legislative maneuvering. “I care about reforming D.C. gun laws, and we’re going to use voting rights or any other vehicle at our disposal to address what we consider a blatant disregard for the Constitution.”
The N.R.A. was just as aggressive last month in getting Congressional Democrats to carve out an exemption tailor-made for the group to exclude it from the so-called Disclose Act, requiring disclosure of donors, rather than risk a defeat of the whole bill because of opposition from Republicans and conservative Democrats supportive of gun rights.
“They shot holes in the Disclose Act with such precision and force that it would make an N.R.A. member proud,” said Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who specializes in lobbying issues.
But the group’s muscle has generated tensions with some gun owners themselves, who do not like the idea of the N.R.A. straying into areas outside its core base and aligning itself with Democrats as it broadens its agenda.
The headline on a recent blog post from a rival faction, the Gun Owners of America, singling out the N.R.A.’s exemption from the campaign finance bill, captured the sentiment: “The N.R.A. Sells out Freedom to the Democrats.”
A point of contention on both the left and the right is the N.R.A.’s close working relationship with Mr. Reid, the Senate leader who helped get a number of pro-gun rights measures included in broader bills.
That relationship has led some gun rights supporters to lobby against the idea that the N.R.A. might endorse Mr. Reid in his tough re-election campaign this November in Nevada.
The N.R.A. is not tamping down speculation. While Mr. Cox said the group had not decided on any endorsements, he pointed to what he considered an unattractive alternative if Mr. Reid loses and the Democrats hold power. “I’ll give you four words: Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,” he said.
Mr. Reid, for his part, does not run from his support for the N.R.A. His office noted that he had been a longtime “champion of the Second Amendment.”
One reason for the group’s greater political leverage is that battles in Washington are so closely fought now that powerful interest groups hold more sway even if they can only deliver a handful of votes.
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, said in pursuing an ambitious legislative agenda, President Obama — who has been largely silent on gun issues — and Congressional Democrats must either work with the gun lobby or risk losing votes. “They basically end up saying, ‘We’re willing to capitulate to the N.R.A. to get the greater good of whatever passed,’ ” he said.
That approach bothers him and Ms. McCarthy, who first came to politics on a pro-gun-control platform after a gunman with a semiautomatic weapon killed her husband and five others during a rampage on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.
Ms. McCarthy said the group drew its power from its money — it has donated more than $17.5 million to federal candidates, mostly Republicans, since 1989, and spent millions more in lobbying — and the fear of political retribution.
“I’ve told the Democratic leadership, if you give in to them once, you’re going to see every piece of legislation with a gun amendment added to it,” she said. “But it’s put the leadership in a very difficult position because they know they might not get their bill passed.”
N.R.A. leaders say they plan on broadening their efforts.
“I think we’ve done it better than any organization in the country, to be honest,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s executive vice president.

If that doesn’t make you sit up and wonder just what that sociopathic “organization” is capable of, given the right stresser event, then I don’t know what will. I’d like a shout-back from all my loyal readers: What do you think would be an event that just tips the NRA into calling its “reserves” into “active duty” against the country itself?

For this potluck, I only have one Strikes My Fancy dessert item on the menu, and it’s Meatloaf. He has a new CD out called “Hang Cool Teddy Bear”, and it’s pretty darned good – especially the track “Running Away From Me” which is suprisingly catchy. Some of Meatloaf’s stuff sans Jim Steinman was…mediocre, at best. This new one isn’t with his old partner Jim (who wrote the songs on Bat out of Hell and BOOH 2 and 3), but it was produced by Rob Cavallo, who produces Green Day, and I can recommend it for the song-writing and reasonably good rock-opera’esque feel.

The following is from “Bat Out of Hell 2: Back Into Hell”, and it’s an oldie but a goodie. Enjoy!

WTF?? 1. Who are the real deadbeats? The Uber-Rich, of course. One in 12 homeowners with mortgages less than $1 million dollars defaults and walks away. One in seven with mortgages of more than $1 million walk away. And they’re the ones we are all supposed to look up to as scions of society? Those are the people we are supposed to want to emulate? I’ll take my low-class neighbors any day of the week as role-models, thank you very much. Why are the wealthy walking away from their mortgages? Why else? Theirinvestments went sour. Here’s just another example of how the rest of us, who when faced with losing our homes, sell everything else we can first, then try to find a second job (if we even still have our first job) before losing our homes will end up paying for the wealthy and their bad investments. Oh, poor Mr. Gotrocks lost half the value on his villa Los Altos. Poor, poor Mr. Gotrocks. Why should he continue paying on a bad investment? But don’t worry, the banks that foreclose, well, they’ll get all that money they’ll lose when the property sells for 33% of the outstanding loan balance back. They always do. Maybe they’ll hike your credit card rates again. Or maybe they’ll come up with some new fee they can charge you – like charging you to speak to a human on the phone…or to walk into their brick and mortar branches and having the gall to want to actually perform a transaction. Wait, they already do that. Maybe it will be a fee for even daring to ask to use their bathroom. Or maybe when you forget about that check you wrote for the kid’s soccer lessons and bounce your account, they’ll smack you with some more brand new fees they told you all about in that mailing 6 months ago – you remember, yeah, that one, the one with 3 point font that you couldn’t read with your 98 year old grandfather’s coke bottle glasses. But don’t you worry, in the end, Mr. Gotrocks will be just fine, and whoever lent the deadbeat all the money to begin with will get theirs back, too. From you and me. Welcome to the true welfare state, folks.

What the hell, give him a swiss bank account.

WTF?? 2. Walmart fighting $7,000 fine. Remember the Walmart worker who, black friday before last was trampled to death by asshats fighting their way in at 3 in the morning for a piece of shit brand-you-never-heard-of $200 LCD tv that would last probably a week? Yeah, that poor schmuck. Well, it seems that since then, Walmart has cut some deals with Long Island. Walmart created a $400,000 fund for customers trampled that day and donated $1.5million to various programs in Nassau County. However, Walmart is fighting tooth and nail a penny-ante $7,000 fine OSHA levied against Walmart for not providing a safe environment for the employees and getting one TRAMPLED TO DEATH. OSHA wants Walmart to provide for foreseeable accidents…like when you have 2,000 slavering mad people outside the door at 3 a.m. with the bloodlust of $2 kids pajamas and $200 laptops clouding their vision, you can reasonably expect that eventually you will have pushed your luck and one of the 3 people you put at the door to herd the shoppers through the store will wind up hurt or dead. I’d say that’s certainly foreseeable. Walmart calls it “unforeseeable” and the OSHA requirements “vague.” Really, this is what it boils down to: Walmart doesn’t want to stop riling up the crowds standing outside their doors 2,000 thick with the promise of cheap christmas presents, and they know good and well they can’t control that crowd if that crowd suddenly gets it into its collective mind to get ugly. I think we’re all aware of how quickly a crowd can become a mob. So, was it foreseeable? Of course it was. It was not only foreseeable, but only a matter of time.

...if you don't get trampled, that is...

Time for some dessert, some Strike My Fancy to wash away the unpalatable tastes of the WTF??’s.

SMF 1. Mark Twain tells us what he really thinks. I for one am looking forward to the new, 3 volume, 500,000 word autobiography of Mark Twain, of which the first volume will be published in November. Volume one will have approximately 5% new material over previous published auto-biographies. It will be in Volumes 2 and 3 where we will really see some substantive differences from previously published volumes. If you thought Mark Twain could be caustic in what has been published before, bear notice: His heirs and editors, and even the great bard himself, thought some of what he had to say was entirely too caustic for the times. Twain considered that maybe the world would be ready to hear what he really had to say 100 years after he was gone. That remains to be seen. Twain will talk again, not in that sanitized version we’re all so used to, but in that ascerbic, caustically witty manner to which we are unaccustomed, but in which we see the real man behind the image. Twain said the following: The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars…He pays taxes on two million and a half. Nothing much has changed. Technology has brought us together, and divided us even further along the lines of ideology, religion and personal hubris, but the wealthy still don’t pay their share, the churches still tend all too often to be bastions of greed and self-righteous immorality. Twain would, I think, find it both disheartening and supremely ironic. I don’t know if this country is ready to hear what one of its golden children really had to say, but what I can tell you is this: I’m ready to hear it. Tell me what you really thought, Sam.

SMF 2. My decent human being award of the week goes to: Denise Sakai. Denise, a full time independent hairdresser with a husband and a young child, learned about Gregory Reese’ problem, and decided to solve that problem. Reese, a homeless man stranded in Hawaii after the job offer he moved there for fell through, has a father dying of lung cancer in Seattle. Reese’ dilemma made the news. State lawmakers got involved, one chipped in $100 bucks for a plane ticket for Reese, while the rest dithered and I hope did not try to make it a “look at me, vote for me, I’m a nice guy” political ploy but of which I’m certain that they did indeed try to turn it into a political PR moment. Meanwhile, Denise didn’t dither while waiting for the camera flashbulbs to show her in all her legislative glory. She ponied up and bought Reese a plane ticket back home to see his dad.

Let me tell you about my day. At 5:30, I wake up with swelled up left eye (no, Mr. Bee did not clock me, he would never, ever do such a thing) from my mold allergy. At 9:00, I’m eating a bagel at my desk when the permanent crown I got a little over a week ago…fell out. So much for permanent. At 9:30, I get an email from an operations department telling me I fucked something up. Turns out I didn’t, they just can’t read. At 11:30, a co-worker says “hey, wanna order chinese delivery?”

“Sure!” I said. There’s nothing like a little Triple Delight and fried rice to make a girl feel better about life. But then the food arrived, and instead of the Triple Delight I ordered, I got the “homestyle tofu.” Who the hell eats tofu anymore, anyway? (Jess, don’t say it! Don’t say it!)

I had the permanent crown glued back in at 4:00. I guess it rained during the 15 minutes I was in the chair, because I walked out to a steam bath. Just wish me luck that the crown stays in this time. And two hours later, the layer of steam hanging about 3 feet off the ground is. still. there.

Did I mention I’m looking for a new dentist??

So, here I am, sitting here whining, and feel free to tell me to zip it.

I saw a few headlines today that caught my eye.

From MSNBC.com: Tapped-out consumers weigh on recovery. It’s not that we don’t want that 50 inch 3D LCD tv, it’s that WE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY, STUPID!

Another from MSNBC.com: Iranian Embassy denies widow to be stoned to death Once it got into the media and the human rights organizations started screaming, Iran backed down on the “death by stoning” penalty for an Iranian woman who was convicted of adultery. She’s already served 5 years and whipped with 99 lashes, so it’s good news that Iran won’t bury her in the ground up to her neck and let a bunch of losers with a death-lust and nothing better to do throw rocks at her until she dies of cerebral hemorrhage.

Again from MSNBC.com: BP: Early plugging of well in ‘perfect’ scenario Today a BP exec said that in a perfect scenario, they’ll have that well plugged by August. The problem is, nothing is ever “perfect.” There simply is no such thing as a “perfect” scenario.

More from MSNBC.com: U.S.: Russia to release 4 in swap over spies What century is this? I didn’t even know spy swaps still happened.

And finally, from MSNBC.com: Girl welcomed home after kidnapper kills self A 4 year old in Missouri was abducted by a convicted sex offender. He held for for 3 days, then did her, her family, and the world a favor by abandoning her and shooting himself to death. For once, we get a bit of good news. The little girl is alive, and her tormentor did what he should have done a long time ago.