Weekend in review, Monday morning quarterbacking

Daisy on the radio!


I'm still at it, going into my third month. Can you believe? I remain an amateur, but working on it. I started my show with some unexpected feedback on Saturday: "What's that hum?" I said, right out loud. Yes, just like the blog, I BLURT THINGS OUT, and so far, I am proud to say that doesn't include a single cuss word. In fact, I read a news story on the air (from Rolling Stone, see below) and the f-word was in it; I blanched, actually censored myself and successfully skipped over it.

Whew, that was close.

The podcast is up, and we are working on tarting up the show for advertisers. PLEASE advertise on my show! We are doing all the commercials ourselves, just like Rush Limbaugh, unless someone has one of their own they feel strongly about and prefer to use. (Since we are concentrating on small businesses, most do not have their own ready-made commercial.)

Contact my producer (I love saying that), Gregg Jocoy, on Facebook. Or just drop me a line, email is in my profile.

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What-all I covered on the show this week:

The recent Republican debate in Las Vegas was one topic; we specifically applauded Ron Paul's brave remarks about "Empire building"--which we heartily agree with. We segued into conversation about the death of Libya's despised leader, Muammar Ghaddafi. (I also repeated a tasteless joke, that he was executed because nobody could agree on the spelling of his name.) Gregg admitted he couldn't watch the execution footage, whereas I admitted I watched it several times... interesting gender-reversal there!

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As stated above, I read a segment of a Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi, titled The Real Housewives of Wall Street:

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.

The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.

And there is the dreaded "fuck" that I almost said on the air! Eeep!

Although this is a story from back in April, I feel that it illustrated what the Occupy movement is all about, as well as the intricacies of the Bail-Out that benefited the rich, exclusively. I don't think if you or me applied for that loan (who even knew such loans existed?), that we would get it. These things are earmarked for the rich, and middle class people (never mind actual poor people who really do need the loans), need not apply.

At left, BEST PHOTO EVER, from yesterday's successful Greenville Occupation. (Local priest from Anderson, whose name I didn't get, standing beside Swami Shantji.) More photos HERE.

We also talked about the ongoing Occupation, and how successful it has been. Neither Gregg nor I expected it to take off nationwide. We heard from one Occupier via phone! I'd love some more calls, especially locally. Please call me next Saturday morning, 9-10am, WFIS radio... live streaming is available.

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Other links of interest:

>> Creepy story about how the evil junk-food makers/demons are using psychology and "neuromarketing" to reach the teenagers. It's all true!

>> Student writing in The Nation: Why I Occupy.

>> More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hindi have chosen new names for a fresh start in life:

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony Saturday that it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

The 285 girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.

In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars such as "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali," or "prosperous, beautiful and good."

>> Tea Party to American business: Stop hiring! Well, no WONDER we have a high unemployment rate... the Tea Partiers are trying to squeeze us deliberately.

>> Toxic Algae turning Florida rivers green. Gross!

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I am currently reading Joe McGinniss' fabulous muckraking book about Sarah Palin... from which I learn that young hell-raiser Track Palin was on Oxycontins and never finished high school before Sarah and Todd prevailed upon him to enlist and go to Iraq as good political PR for the family. There's so much dirt in this book (for instance, as mayor of Wasilla, she fired the local librarian for not censoring books), that I hardly know where to begin. Hoping to do a "fun facts about Sarah Palin" post when I have finished the entire book, since I am madly jotting down the gossip for all of you to enjoy.

Short version: Some people are disgusting, thoroughly fraudulent pigs, who will say and do anything for money and/or power.

With friends like these...

Matt Taibbi's "inside" look at the Tea Party, just published in Rolling Stone, is entertaining, by all accounts. PZ Myers linked it on AlterNet, and I immediately started brawling with the people who loved it.

First page of article. I winced and then, just started banging my head against the wall:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives.

Oh ha ha ha! Ain't gimps funny? Ain't old people funny? And add FAT OLD GIMPS altogether in one whole sentence, and you have to hold onto your ribcage from laughing so hard.

"Giant atrophied glutes?" "Sucking oxygen?"

Is this necessary?

Actually, this superior-sounding bullshit is the problem, as I tried (vainly) to explain to Taibbi's enthusiastic AlterNet fans.

I have heartily disliked what Alan Keyes and Thomas Sowell have said, but I don't resort to race-baiting over it. I have heartily disagreed with Andrew Sullivan, but I don't call him a faggot or jokey joke about HIV. Etc. Isn't there a way to disagree with these folks, even call attention to the obvious discrepancies in their logic, WITHOUT being an ill-behaved, ageist, ableist LOUT?

Well, hey, whaddaya know, YES THERE IS... I did it MYSELF in my piece on the Tea Partiers at the Town Hall meeting in Travelers Rest. I made note of the fact that many of these people were/are old, but I was not an asshole about it and did not find assholism necessary to make my point. Matt Taibbi and other college kidz, take heed.

This is why we are losing.

The condescension and prep-school arrogance with which a rich kid like Taibbi (son of Mike Taibbi, four-time-Emmy winning journalist for NBC) makes fun of disabled old people in a poor, ignorant, hardscrabble state like Kentucky... well, it just makes me nauseous. (NOTE to Taibbi: Coal mining usually leads to people sucking on oxygen, in case you didn't know... you might want to keep that in mind the next time you turn on your lights or fire up your fancy laptop: someone is sucking on oxygen just so you were able to do that cheaply.)

I mean, if those Kentuckians had gone to Concord Academy with Matt Taibbi? Maybe they'd know the stuff he knows. And maybe they'd have healthy glutes and not be sucking on oxygen. He knows that, right?

I guess it's a good article. Yall can let me know. I quit reading after the first page. I don't need to be insulted, and those people are of my class and background.

The fact that *I* am insulted, and I ACTUALLY AGREE WITH TAIBBI'S POLITICS REGARDING THE TEA PARTY?!? (I am significantly to the left of Taibbi, in all honesty.) What does this mean?

It means we're in trouble. Do you see that we are in trouble? Please SCALE BACK the classism and elitism, if you really want to SCALE BACK the Tea Party.

Or do you?

Does it just feel good to be funny and have everyone pat you on the back and tell you how clever you are, Matt Taibbi, as PZ Myers and all his friends do? (And could PZ Myers get elected as dog catcher?) Because if that is all it is? We don't need friends like these. Not at all. After all, Matt, your career will be fine, you went to Concord Academy, your daddy has 4 Emmies. You can afford to throw spitballs and be superior. The rest of us? We are rightly worried about our futures and our lives, if the Tea Party should win.

To Matt Taibbi, its about furthering his career and being lauded for his wit, but for US, it is life or death.

And here the preppie is, waving a fucking red flag in front of the proverbial bull.

(((recommences banging head on wall)))

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EDIT OCT 1st: This reply to my comments over at AlterNet, was just too amazing not to cross-post here. And remember, these are the progressives talking:

And how do you know these people were disabled? NO. The scooters, chairs, and oxygen tanks usually aren't for "disabled" people. Go to Florida, NC, and other areas where Tea-Partiers have a strong hold, and see how many 50+ people go around on scooters simply because they ALLOWED THEIR MUSCLES TO ATROPHY, and a scooter helps them avoid exercising. (Same with the oxygen tank -- it's not only people with asthma and emphysema, its lazy people that get winded cuz they are so out of shape their heart and lungs can't keep up if they actually start moving around)

Not because they are disabled -- but because they are winded, and lazy, and haven't exercised in years.

And it was more targeting "motorized scooters" than wheelchairs.

And now their lazy asses are sucking 50-70% of our nations medical expenses on avoidable chronic illnesses caused by our lazy-ass lifestyles and eating habits, that tea-partiers will defend to the last breath their right to have. (God forbid we legislate and regulate High fructose Corn Syrup, Trans-fats, or give tax breaks for people who exercise, etc...)

No overt ageism, ableism or fat-hating there, huh? I replied:

How do I know they are disabled? It's Kentucky, and they are likely coal miners who breathed too much coal dust... that's the reason for the oxygen, which you can't get without a prescription. And why don't you know that? It's easy to see what kind of crowd you hang with.

And that is exactly my point... thank you for making it for me so well.

...

On another note, it just kills me that some of the hardest working people on the planet are assumed to be lazy, instead of their bodies breaking down from overwork and coal mining... when your body breaks down, exercise is terribly painful. I assume everyone knows that too, but I suddenly get it. As Michael Harrington said in THE OTHER AMERICA (paraphrasing): they just don't see these people for who they really are, and how they hold everything together.--DD 10/1/10

Going Rogue

The cover of Sarah Palin's book, GOING ROGUE, shows her looking angelically up to heaven. Love the dreamy clouds and the little flag pin. (Iconography ain't just for Catholics anymore!)








How to write about awful Sarah Palin without sounding sexist? It's difficult. As a FEMINIST, it is difficult.

So I'll admit, in this matter, I kinda feel sorry for the guys, trying to come up with new terms for stone-ignorance that sound gender-neutral. Matt Taibbi's "IQ of a celery stalk" is my favorite so far.

Mr Daisy has been watching the Sarah Palin-crowds on YouTube, and that shit is depressing. Celery stalk-level IQs are attracted to Palin, since she is (as she tirelessly reminds us) one of them. Well, you'll certainly get no argument about that from me.

On Bill O'Reilly's show, Palin pluckily responded to David Brooks condescendingly tagging her as "a joke"... and I instantly winced, knowing that a New York Times writer, ANY New York Times writer, is instant hate-material out here in the heartland. In fact, David Brooks will likely be prominently featured in Palin's upcoming, inevitable campaign ads: DAVID BROOKS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES SAID I WAS A JOKE! Pure gold; some people will vote for her for that reason alone.

Matt Taibbi believes political discourse has descended to talk-radio, uber-Twitter level, suitable for the celery stalk-heads:

It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.

And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

Indeed, I have noticed this in Mr Daisy's endless videos of tea-baggers and Sarah Palin groupies. One man insists that Barack Obama translates (!) into "antichrist" in some ancient language; another woman claims she doesn't have health insurance and doesn't need any, by God. One shakes one's head in amazement. Palin would never disown a single one of these people, as Glenn Beck also wouldn't. They openly embrace the fringe, which is the notable new thing. This turns the wacko right-wing fringe into the mainstream, which is their whole goal. It moves the political discourse (one strongly feels the need to write "political discourse" in quotes) to the far right, and makes one unwillingly more comfortable with the Black Helicopter faction.

Taibbi continues:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring.

And this might be why Rush infuriates many progressives on a level that Palin can't quite reach. He brings "facts" that sound real enough, and only when one thoroughly investigates, do you see how he bends those pseudo-facts (truthiness!) to suit the conservative agenda.

He works, in short, and to argue with Rush, you have to work, too.

Palin is 100% entertainment, and there is no work involved. As Taibbi points out, Rush makes you think too hard, by comparison:

Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or not, but at least he tries. The poor guy nearly killed himself this summer trying to find enough horseshit to arm himself with against the health care bill, coming up with various fairy tales about how state health agencies used death panels to try to kill cancer patients who just wanted to live a little longer, how section 1233 is Auschwitz all over again, yada yada yada.

Rush is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.

Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

Grudge politics, perverted populism in these difficult economic times... tempered by just the right notes, such as having a prayerful dinner with Billy Graham.

Meanwhile, the left is bringing up the rear on the entertainment front. The left is sounding like wonky Rush and talking about, you know, solutions.

In this atmosphere, the only thing left to do is have at her. Eat her for dinner, engage in the same hateful nastiness that she engages is. Ridicule. But be careful. Do not be sexist, do not be ableist (concerning her disabled son Trig, although I think making fun of his name and calling him Twig is okay), do not be anti-large-family, anti-Christian, anti-Pentecostal or anti-rural. Got that? Because most lefties don't get it. Every time you engage in that behavior? She sees your anti-progressive hypocrisy and successfully uses it against us. "See?" she says to the rural hockey moms, "they really are making fun of us." And she's right.

Then again, I admit it is often too much to resist. I laughed my ass off at the Village Voice's fake "excerpts" from Palin's book:

If I wasn't so gosh-darned busy raising all my kids, I would have paid better attention to all that entrepreneural jazz. But you mothers know how that goes: you buy a car wash, and then little Plug has a loose tooth and little Geezer lost his mittens and before you know it, guess what -- the darned cars aren't getting washed, and you have to sell the thing off for a profit! And there was Todd so busy building our house out of sticks he found while he was snowmobiling, I couldn't go off playing with businesses. So I said, "Doggone-it, I'm gonna stay right here, mend socks, wipe noses, and such like." But then one day I was clipping coupons for Sunny D and I saw the ad in the paper that said they were looking for a new Mayor for Wasilla, and I guess I just got a wild hair in me.

On David Letterman:

We get to bed early in Alaska, as we have to be up before dawn to catch and skin moose, so I never saw his show. But when we heard those awful things he said about Willow, I looked up some pictures of him, and sure enough, he was the spitting image of that gap-toothed man I saw years ago when I was shopping with Willow at Out of the Closet, who offered her a Mars Bar and then reached down and rubbed her little butt. I still remember how he ran and jumped into a helicopter while I screamed and several good citizens came at him with sticks. Also, a friend played me the theme music from the show and I would swear to you it was the same music that helicopter was playing as it flew away. Folks, this is the kind of thing we're up against!

Okay, funny! But one has to walk a fine line in that kind of satire, and I think Roy Edroso (author of those pieces) managed to succeed in doing that.

As popular as she is right now, I don't have a clue how to stop her. Let's hope she's a phase, like this year's fashion or Reality-TV show... which I guess is what she really is.