Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch stuff like 2012, which is really funny, in spots. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s nice line about the death of sweet, saintly Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, one of the great tearjerkers of the 19th century:
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
It was a hot day, still 98 degrees at 6 PM, as I zoomed through gridlock on my freshly fixed 1979 Kawasaki KZ-400, squeezing between the monster trucks and lifted SUVs clogging one of Victorville’s main drags, pouring sweat into my helmet and leather jacket on my way to an anti-Obamacare “town hall” meeting at the local community college.
I thought I knew what to expect when I got there. Like everyone else in this country, I had been watching the packs of deranged tea bagger types and their astroturfing overlords dominate the healthcare reform debate like a pack of retarded howler monkeys in heat. But TV hadn’t quite prepared me for the reality of it. You can’t really appreciate how fucked this country really is until you see, as I did, hundreds of blue collar Americans sync up their primitive brains in a paranoid racist-hick seance, channeling White Power ideals through Reagan’s damned soul. (more…)
Mark Ames appeared on MSNBC earlier this week as a guest on Dylan Ratigan’s new “Morning Meeting” show. Ames squared off against Jack Matlock, ex-American ambassador to the Soviet Union, now known as perhaps the last true “Grumpy Old Man” kickin’ it grump-skewl.
He knows his wife knows. So he ups and leaves for five days, doesn’t leave anybody in charge of the state, in case there’s an emergency…This is almost like: I don’t give a damn! Country’s going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! … He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn’t want any part of it. He lost the battle and said “What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!”
So everyone is fuming about Limbaugh’s suggestion that the Federal government might actually be responsible for South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s infidelity. But Rush is not the first person to say so, nor is he the most authoritative. Thing is, Sanford blamed it on the Feds right off the bat, when he first admitted to having an affair on live network TV last Wednesday. (more…)
Is Larry Summers taking kickbacks from the banks he’s bailing out?
Last month, a little-known company where Summers served on the board of directors received a $42 million investment from a group of investors, including three banks that Summers, Obama’s effective “economy czar,” has been doling out billions in bailout money to: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. The banks invested into the small startup company, Revolution Money, right at the time when Summers was administering the “stress test” to these same banks. (more…)
VICTORVILLE, Calif. — Ever since it became clear that Barack Obama would be our next president, there’s been an unprecedented run on guns ‘n ammo in America. Partly this is fueled by fears, some justified, some not, that Obama will outlaw a broad range of assault weapons; partly it’s fueled by socioeconomic factors, racism and right-wing hate.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in Victorville, a desert exurb of Los Angeles that boomed faster with the subprime craze than just about any city in the country and fell harder when it all collapsed. Today, guns and ammo are in short supply here in Victorville. But there is an abundance of despair and paranoia. (more…)
This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners and in parks across the country to protest.
They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the Democrats’ stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes. They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.
But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.
Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core. (more…)
This year, Sundance got shoved back toward its mid-‘80s roots as a small nowheresville festival in an ugly ski town showcasing bad independent films nobody wants to buy or see.
Attempts to prove Barack Hussein Obama isn’t really an American citizen have gone about as well as the search for the footage featuring Michelle Obama excoriating “whitey.” Freethinking 100% Americanos like swift-boater Jerome R. Corsi and No Quarter’s Larry C. Johnson have no doubt been interviewing birth certificate-forgers and Muslim midwives and so on, looking for the ultimate proof of Obama’s un-Americanness. Silly of them, because we’ve had the proof staring at us from a million screens and glossy magazine covers for ages now. Here it is:
