Schmaltz und Grieben

 

 

"...I like they way they present their view even when I don't agree."
Lewis Medlock, Deliverance

"...fortuitously discovered in my recent wanderings - good stuff."
Zee, Road Sassy

"...entertaining and provocative. Just how I like it."
Rachel Arieff

"...whew, wow, yowsa and yikes!" Jan Karlsbjerg

"Malignant." Tim Dailey

 

 

Fellow Fighters Against Fascism:  Jake's Economic TA Funhouse Rock Netroots The Political Environment Caffeinated Politics Cognitive Dissidence Democurmudgeon

....................

 

 

 

November 2o18

11/08/2018:

  

WISCONSIN IRON CURTAIN SWINGS OPEN, SLAMS SHUT AGAIN: Sometimes being vindicated is no fun. This is one of those times.

I have never minced words on this blog about how extraordinarily painful, insulting and life-nullifying the reign of Scott Walker and the WiGOP has been to myself, my family, and all manner of decent Wisconsinites unfortunate enough to have lived through it. Our early almost-daily cries of "He can't do that!" were invariably met with "Well, he just did"--until there was only the dullness people in any totalitarian land feel knowing that their government exists in no way to serve them or even to listen to them. We watched Walker and the WiGOP declare war on education, science, and the public trust--one particularly obnoxious bromide WiGOPers were fond of was, "If you don't like it here, MOVE."

I sure wish I could have, but my wife's health had declined to a point, largely due to Walker, that made moving impossible.

He imprisoned protestors, including a man carrying a newspaper around the capitol rotunda after Walker had imperiously decided that you couldn't carry newspapers in the Capitol (no negative coverage of King Scottie, please). He sold state wetlands and parklands off to his developer friends. He bragged on-camera that he was going to "divide and conquer" Wisconsin, then dictated a book called "Unintimidated" (no, really) that had him facing down the hundreds of thousands of protestors who inundated Madison's Capitol Square after Walker passed his infamous union-neutering Act 10 in the dead of night. In reality, Walker hid in his office surrounded by his heavily-armed paramilitary security force and left the Capitol via a secret underground tunnel. Go see if you can find any YouTube videos of Walker confronting anyone, even one of those unicorn-like "Big Government Union Bosses!" he was always standing up to in his book and in the endless reams of money-grubbing entreaties he sent his followers.

We lived through eight years of this America-on-its-head insanity--three years longer than WWII. Two challengers went head-to-head with Walker in that time and both were defeated by WiGOP dirty tricks*. Finally, the mild-mannered but popular state schools superintendent Tony Evers--a man who might have been a poster child for everything Walker never was and never could be--dealt him the death knell by convincing literally almost every single anti-Walker voter in the entire state to get their ass to the polls and get rid of Scott Walker once and for all.

And he did it! WE did it! Democracy triumphed!

Except, you see, it didn't.

One can imagine a scene unfolding tonight somewhere in Wisconsin where Mom, Dad, and little Suzy are sitting down to dinner.

SUZY: Today in school, we learned about demockussy. The teacher said we all have a vote, and if we don't like the people in power, we can go to the polls and vote them out. But didn't they do that with Scott Walker? How come he still gets to be governor?

MOM: Other states have democracy. We have the Wisconsin Republicans.

SUZY: You mean if we don't like the Wisconsin Republicans, we can't go to the polls and vote them out?

DAD: No, they're the only party here. Kind of like Putin in Russia.

SUZY: But we're not in Russia. We're in America!

MOM: Or so they say.

DAD: Suzy, if you want to live in America, move to Minnesota when you grow up. Maybe we will too.

 

 *walker probably won his first election legally, but there is considerable evidence that his subsequent returns to office were due to extreme gerrymandering, extreme voter suppression, and in the case of his recall, 44,000 manufactured votes.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

"...I like they way they present their view even when I don't agree."
Lewis Medlock, Deliverance

"...fortuitously discovered in my recent wanderings - good stuff."
Zee, Road Sassy

"...entertaining and provocative. Just how I like it."
Rachel Arieff

"...whew, wow, yowsa and yikes!" Jan Karlsbjerg

"Malignant." Tim Dailey

 

 

Fellow Fighters Against Fascism:  Jake's Economic TA Funhouse Rock Netroots The Political Environment Caffeinated Politics Cognitive Dissidence Democurmudgeon

....................

 

 

 

November 2o18

11/08/2018:

  

DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD: Our nearly decade-long nightmare is finally over.

Certainly anyone who still reads this blog knows how much misery and suffering Scott Walker has caused my family and the entire state of Wisconsin. No one has ever messed up my life the way Scott Walker has. As such, it was extremely difficult to reconcile my responsibility as a committed Christian to even consider forgiving him for what he has done to me and to my family. I know that he could care less, and never will care. How can I forgive him? He doesn't acknowledge any wrongdoing. Tony Evers may have sent him down in flames, but Walker will always be the smug, self-centered sociopath who thinks that he was elected to enforce the will of a smug, self-centered, sociopathic God.

Thankfully he wasn't elected President. Oh, never mind, that didn't come off right.

I suppose I could use that last paragraph to point out that we in Wisconsin had a very long prequel to the Trump presidency (about five years, to be exact). It was almost amusing to me, in a sick way, to watch Democrats go on and on after the 2016 election about how Trump had ruined their lives. To many Wisconsinites, it just felt like more of the same. Now the rest of the nation got to find out what it felt like to live under the iron fist of an anti-science, anti-education nitwit who thought that the law didn't apply to him and that anyone who disagreed with him should just be "disappeared." When laws didn't suit Walker, he either changed them or ignored them. He locked up his political opponents, even grandmothers who dared to protest him.

I kept trying to tell the rest of the country what it was like to live in a fascist dictatorship. Right-wing hate radio and the newspapers brimmed over with threats against people who dared speak against Der Neuen Reich. As someone who ran a blog that spoke constantly against the governor and a frequent writer of anti-Walker screeds on various platforms, I grew increasingly nervous when people called my house and hung up, or when I kept seeing a gray sedan with red state plates and two guys in suits pull up frequently alongside me when I ate my breakfast at Kwik-Trip. The suits never got out of the car.

Meanwhile people were being arrested at our state capitol in Madison for unbelievable reasons, including the guy who was booked for carrying a newspaper (his name was Ed Kuharski).

And this was America. That's what I kept telling myself. I live in America.

I desperately wanted to move to Minnesota and get away from the pressure, to return to the America I remembered. Where you could say unkind things about the governor (not that I would have; Mark Dayton is a perfectly decent and upright guy) and creepy apparatchiks in suits didn't hang around in the parking lot watching you eat breakfast. Where you didn't risk getting thrown in jail for exhibiting "the wrong attitude" in your own state capitol building. Most of all, where your governor didn't laugh while he peeled your civil rights away (while he opened another beer paid for by YOU, just to rub it in).

Yeah. That was life in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. Meanwhile, my wife was recovering from open-heart surgery. I was working as a school bus driver and watching teachers bail out en masse for jobs in Minnesota, where they'd be safe and wouldn't receive death threats from Walker backers. I lived through this; I lived through the denial of federal Medicaid dollars, the flirting with secessionists, the attempts to sabotage Obamacare with no replacement in the wings, the decimation of the University of Wisconsin (my alma mater and the reason I moved to Wisconsin 30 years ago), the trashing of Wisconsin's public schools, Walker's secret rewrite of the Wisconsin Idea which basically declared that the UW--one of the world's great research universities--was to become a voc-tech school that existed only to serve corporate Wisconsin*, the WiGOP's infamous "Fourth Of July Assault" on the state's open-records law, and so very, very much more. Neighbors would say to neighbors, friends would opine to friends (or in hundreds and thousands of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor), "He can't do that!" To which Walker, with his drunkenly drooping eye and sadistic smile would retort, "I just did!"

As a "compassionate conservative" (thanks, GWB), I quickly found myself unable to support a man who was quickly dragging the state into an anti-intellectual fascist quagmire where facts were distorted to fit the planning of the Regime and objective reality no longer existed (or, in any event, was not tolerated). As I have said, we in Wisconsin have lived under Trumpism since January 2011. God damn, we needed a break. Any kind of break.

Here's a 2013 S&G post that encapsulates the hopelessness that was life in WalkerWorld. I wrote it after one of my frequent visits to Minnesota to decompress:

    After three years of living in the ruin Scott Walker has made of Wisconsin, I'd quite forgotten that in the rest of America that good old American optimism still prevails. People in other states smile, greet each other on the street (can't do that here, the person you're greeting might be in the "other camp"), and look generally happy to be alive. When I saw mobs of folks hitting a liquor store in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, on their way to Saturday Night In The Rest Of America, it really hit home that I hadn't seen so many smiling, convivial people in one place in a very long time.

Walker's Wisconsin is a grey, paranoid, Soviet-communist sort of place where factories are shuttered, everyone is suspicious of everyone else and no one can talk for fear that "The Forbidden Topic" (whether you think Walker is God or the Antichrist--there's no middle ground) will come up.

I almost wept when I crossed the St. Croix River back into this burned-out, beleaguered state. Sure wish I'd moved to Minnesota 27 years ago instead of here.   

I'm sure Walker backers will find all of this to be perfectly hilarious (a little less so, perhaps, now that their tinhorn Stalin is about to leave the statehouse), but they took away eight years of my American citizenship, destroyed my wife's health, and practically bankrupted me.

I only wish that there could be show trials now. 

*When caught trying to insert his rewrite into the state charter, the WiGOP claimed they'd made a "drafting error" after a firestorm of bipartisan protest ensued.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

September 2o18

09/18/2018:

  

GOP: GROPERS, OLIGARCHS AND PERVERTS. Just exactly what is it with today's GOP?

Why am I not shocked that their most recent nominee for US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, apparently sexually assaulted a woman in high school?

The former party of God, Guns and Guts has these days degenerated into the party of..... well, GUNS. You sure don't see God making much of an appearance, at least as any deity that would be recognized by any self-respecting Judaeo-Christian. And guts? Puh-leeeze. Trump blew into town and the GOP folded like a house of cards before a pathetic strongman with orange hair who conducts himself like a deranged toddler. Guts? Oh, yeah.

It's getting to seem like the Republicans never met a pervert they didn't like. Just recently you had their great enthusiasm for Roy Moore, the child groper from Alabama. And of course Missouri's disgraced former governor Eric Greitens, who liked to rough up his women and blackmail them with cell phone photos. And let's not forget our Misogynist-In-Chief, who can just "grab 'em by the pussy" because that's what powerful misogynists get to do.

Hezbollah calls itself the "Party Of God," too. Actually, that is a direct translation of their name.

Let's just say that I am not amused. And certainly not fooled. By any of the above.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

August 2o18

08/21/2018:

  

TODAY'S MUST-READ: Madison blogger Gregory Humphrey (one of my personal favorites... Gregory calls himself a liberal, but he frequently finds himself defending conservative positions, like his support for the beleaguered-by-the-lunatic-left Madison Police Department and Dane County Sheriff's Office) is on point here with his summary of American news organizations who took a stand against Trump's bullying of the print media--the Enemy Of The People, don't you know.

I have kept my tagline of "All Fake News All Of The Time" for quite awhile now, in deference to the people in the media who now must go to heroic lengths and even risk their lives to report the actual happenstance of what is going on in this country and with its unhinged government. And I would rather read the real news (i.e. NOT FOX) all day long than read even one more of Trump's childish, drooling, misspelled tweets on any subject whatsoever.

BTW Gregory, I do not agree with your last assertion that our free press is more important to the republic than the military, because the latter is what enables us to have freedom of the press to begin with. Although it's hard to remember that on days when our president's followers opine that he should have the power to shut down news organizations he doesn't like.

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me. What country is this, anyway?

 

 

DAILY GAAAAAAZ-O-LEEEEEEN AWARD: While we're on the subject of "fake news," consider this gem posted today by "lightly carbonated," commenting on this:

To be a Republican is to fear nothing! Like when John Brown led an army of Nez Perce warriors to The Alamo and defeated the Mexicans!

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

July  2o18

07/19/2018:

  

THE PRESIDENT MUST GO: First, let me apologize for not posting for so long. In truth, I was thinking of moving this blog "beyond politics," because with the usual GOP (and liberal!) shenanigans I have been documenting here for years and years, well, it's caught up to me and I'm sick of it.

But a man (or woman) has a duty to their country, so I must soldier on for now.

Our president, Donald J. Trump, has betrayed our nation and everyone who lives in it.

I wanted to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, although I certainly did not vote for him. (No fan of Hillary's either, as this blog amply demonstrates.) I grew up lower-middle-class in the Midwest with people who probably are or grew up to be Trump voters. Back in the day most of these folks weren't college-educated (my parents were always the odd ducks everywhere we lived), but they had family-supporting jobs in places like locomotive plants, pizza dough factories, and public works departments. Many were combat veterans. To even suggest that these people weren't patriotic Americans is beyond ridiculous.

It troubles me profoundly that so many of them seem now to have been co-opted by the Russian government.

Never mind his deeply disturbing performance at Monday's Helsinki summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin (or DO mind it, preferably, but that's not the main issue right now).  We have now been confronted with the spectacle of an American president suggesting that he might turn over a former US diplomat to the Russians for interrogation. Note my source. I used Fox News (although they're doing their best to bury it, of course) because I don't even want to hear a whisper that this amounts to "just more fake news".

This, people, is completely beyond the pale--I don't care what your political striping looks like.

And I don't care if Trump walks it back, which he invariably will (until he decides he didn't, which doesn't make me sleep better at night). The fact that this was even considered, and that White House spokesminion Sarah Huckabee Sanders admits that it is under consideration, means that we in America have reached a whole new level. It is highly possible that our president, either through sheer stupidity or actual malice, is working for the Russians. Since he won't release his tax returns and won't come clean to special counsel Robert Mueller, we have no way of knowing that he isn't. But because of recent events, ladies and gentlemen, the burden of proof is now on the president. Make no mistake about it.

And will Trump act in good faith to show that he is not a tool of Moscow? Of course not, either because "nobody pushes around The Donald!" or because, more likely, he really is working for the Russians.

We can't expect any of this to make a sizable dent in Trump's beloved base, because Trump's true believers are more along the lines of a Jim Jones cult. The Donald tells them to drink the Kool-Aid, they will drink the Kool-Aid. No matter what their president does, they will blame all the negatives somehow on Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or both. I don't know how they will angle the selling-us-out-to-the-Russians trope to be the fault of Obama and/or Clinton, but they will. Believe me. They are that insane.

"Drain the swamp!" Trump and his supporters yell. Well, guess what? If the Russians own the swamp, what good is it going to do for you and for that Country You Were Going To Make Great Again?

Here's the bottom line. My writings show explicitly that I understand very well the reasons why "forgotten white America" went for Trump in droves. I understand why they despise the status quo, because I despise it myself and have suffered the same travails. I have railed repeatedly about GOP schemes to redistribute income upward and I have talked at length about how here in Wisconsin we have long been familiar with a government that is openly hostile to anyone but its supporters and donors.

But you don't overturn the status quo by kowtowing to a hostile foreign government and you definitely don't turn our citizens over to the Russians. I accept that it may be many years before I once again see the kind of American government that I can cheer for. But be that as it may. I cannot sell out my country, and Trump supporters (never mind the man himself) must ask themselves just exactly what they are doing by not insisting that the madman step down. Now.

[UPDATE 08/21/18 PM: As I was saying. Out. Out. Out.]

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

May  2o18

05/15/2018:

  

MILLENNIAL FEVER LAFF RIOT: Let's say you're a college-educated Millennial looking for a state to settle down, work and play, and maybe even raise your kids in.

Surely at the top of your list would be a state where:

The government is openly hostile to education and the educated;

It took a federal mandate to enforce the legality of gay marriage;

The GOP (which holds nearly all positions of power) has no interest in legalizing or even decriminalizing marijuana;

The governor is a college dropout who is incapable of speaking in coherent sentences (but who has still managed to sell the state to the Koch brothers and other "conservative special interests");

The state's abundant natural resources are being flagrantly sold off, undermined, or pissed away;

The governor and his Republican minions want to charge a special fee to owners of electric or hybrid vehicles;

The people keep electing these clowns or, more likely, elections are rigged so that the GOP can't lose;

Wages keep falling;

The state government has made abundantly clear that they serve only their donors and can't be bothered to talk to anyone else.

Millennial with freshly-minted college degree: "Gosh. Where do I sign up?"

What's even worse is that Governor Scott Walker (see above, or below) is by most accounts his own brain trust, or lack thereof. So how is he going to remedy what is obviously a hopeless situation? 

Spend millions of taxpayer dollars on ad campaigns begging Millennials to move here!*

You can't make this stuff up.

It's kinda like our spiffy new 7-character license plates. Despite the lame DMV explanations to the contrary, anyone who knows anything about math knows that you don't "run out" of three-letter, three-number combinations in a state with 5.5 million people. And if you think you might, you mix up letters and numbers in your six characters (like Missouri does). No, this is yet another pathetic Scott Walker election-year gambit to "prove" that our state is growing (when actually the opposite is true, as might be expected after 8 years of GOP strangulation and our abuse as a Koch Brothers test laboratory).

Moral of the story: If you keep dumbing down the population by driving out the educated, moving laws back to the 1950s, and thinking that having seven-character license plates makes you look like you're successful, you shouldn't waste taxpayer dollars to convince smart young people to move to your state. Because they ain't gonna.

 

 

*So they can work at all our $10/hr-if-you're-lucky jobs!

 

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

February  2o18

02/20/2018:

  

WHEN YOU'RE IN A HOLE... stop digging. Isn't that what they say?

I'm talking about our military-grade-weapons apologists (as distinct from our gun apologists--it's the former group who runs the NRA today). Knowing that they are on a very slippery slope now since Las Vegas and especially since our latest school massacre in Florida on Valentine's Day, NRA apologists have started digging themselves deeper by claiming that "in some years, the per capita gun deaths exceed America's in some other developed countries." They like to point out Norway, which apparently leads this list. What they neglect to mention is that one right-wing wacko named Anders Breivik, back in 2011, massacred 77 Norwegians in a single day. Norway is a country with 5 million people. An American would have to slaughter, oh let's see, about 4400 people in a day to equal Breivik's terror. That's more people than died on 9/11... just saying.

And now the NRA's boughten whores in the GOP (including, of course, our president) are whining ad infinitum that this is a "mental health issue, not a gun issue." 

Well, gee. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Seems like only yesterday that GOPers like Iowa senator Joni "Let's Try A Little Of That Cancer" Ernst voted to rescind a law that prohibited the severely mentally ill from owning guns. So I guess the thing we've got to do now is counsel the mentally ill that it's bad form to take their legally-acquired military-grade assault weapons and mow a lot of people down. Or am I missing something here? Please explain.

The other thing the military-grade-weapons apologists like to say is that we've got to tolerate a Second Amendment the Founding Fathers could have never envisioned in their darkest nightmares (the average citizen being able to own a weapon that can kill dozens of people in minutes) because it will "keep us free from the tyranny of the State."

I've got a couple of things to say about that.

Number one: If you are SO concerned that the government of the United States is going to turn on you to the point that you'll have to fight your way out*, maybe you should just MOVE. No one's stopping you. An acquaintance that some longtime readers of this blog may remember moved to Canada so he wouldn't have to live under George W. Bush (GEORGE W. BUSH! Boy, those were the days, eh?). And if you're a total gun nut, you could probably make out pretty well in a country more to your liking. Like Afghanistan. Or Yemen. You could shoot that assault rifle on a just-about-daily basis. Bitchen!

And here's number two: You're on your porch with an Uzi and a case of Busch Lite. You are NOT going to take on the US military "if" it turns on you. They've got air support. You don't. And you never will. Maybe it's time for you to move (see above).

*I turned left-of-center when I realized that the right wing had abandoned our national principles and moved toward fascism. WE are in a lot more danger than YOU are.

 

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

January  2o18

01/31/2018:

  

STATE OF THE UNION: TOO STUPID FOR WORDS. I have always been fond of referring to our local blood n' guts news station (think New York Post) as "the ambulance news," a term I borrowed from humorist Dan Jenkins.

I never thought I'd see the day when I would invent a term of my own to describe serious news outlets like CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times:

The Clown News.

Now, don't get me wrong: I don't for a minute agree with our Cheeto-mopped Covfefe-In-Chief that these news sources amount to "fake news" because they dare to print things he doesn't like. But, you see, that's part of the problem... by printing or broadcasting the actual news, they expose us as a nation to things that are just so incredibly, unbelievably lamebrained that, to quote Jenkins again, I'm afraid we're all going to come down with a terminal case of the dumb-ass.

There are millions of examples of this (you can probably glean a hundred or more on a typical day), but here are three of my recent favorites:

The Mike Pence Grovel-O-Rama. The Covfefe-In-Chief, at a staff meeting, folds his arms over his chest and asks Vice President Pence, apropos of nothing, to "say a few words." Here's what he got, for starters:

You’ve restored American credibility on the world stage. You’ve signed more bills rolling back federal red tape than any president in American history. You’ve unleashed American energy. You’ve spurred an optimism in this country that is setting records... Because of your leadership, Mr. President, and because of the strong support of the leadership in the Congress of the United States, you’re delivering on [a] middle-class miracle.

I mean, the Vice President of the United States actually said that. Don't you feel a little dumber already, or that you ought to go take a shower?

Imagine Obama and Biden engaging in this self-abasement ritual. "Joe, I'd like you to come over here and drool on my shoes, and then spit-shine them." Hell, imagine this scenario with any other President and Vice President. You can't... and that's a little bit scary.

TO BE CONTINUED

(02/20/18) Here are my other recent candidates for Too Stupid for Words:

"Shithole Countries." In which we see the President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World, using exactly the same language that Sal (parroting his redneck daddy) used in the high school locker room--looking pointedly at the black and brown kids--to lift a leg on his "inferiors." Swell, huh?

"Treasonous." Is Trump so fucking stupid that he doesn't even know what treason is? Or does he really think we should be shipped to Gitmo if we don't applaud his every ill-informed, self-aggrandizing, and hysterical statement?

Either way, people, that's some scary shit.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

November  2o17

11/8/2017:

  

KEEP IT AT HALF-STAFF: If you're as old as I am (born in the 1950s!), you can still remember a time when the flag flew at half-staff only on very rare occasions (President Kennedy's assassination; the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding). But now, thanks to overarmed wackos (mostly American citizens) executing mass numbers of civilians every few weeks, the flag seems to be at half-staff most of the time. Have you noticed that? Because I sure as hell have.

Here's my recommendation: Why don't we just keep the flag at half-staff indefinitely? Because some overarmed wacko is going to kill huge numbers of civilians again in a matter of weeks if not days. You know it's going to happen and so do I. Why even pretend to have a nation that functions under some kind of rudimentary rule of civilization? If there was some inkling that we were moving to do something about the nonstop carnage, I would never make such a suggestion. But we aren't. As one pundit had it, America's national conversation about gun control stopped after Sandy Hook. When we decided that children (and apparently fully half of the victims in the Texas church massacre were children) could also be massacred at any time with nothing more than a collective shrug of our shoulders, the conversation was over. The lunatics won.

So I say let's leave the flag that my father, many of my friends, and my ancestors fought and died for at half-staff. Because if we're not in a national state of perpetual mourning, we ought to be.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

October  2o17

10/3/2017:

  

MY ONLY COMMENT ON LAS VEGAS: I, unlike some of my fellow Americans, do not look forward to living in a country where we've all got to walk around "strapped" all the time so we will always be ready to "waste the bad guys." Although that's a very studly fantasy, Second Amendment "activists" have yet to explain to me how this makes living in the USA any different from, say, living in the Old West of the late 1800s. Or Afghanistan. Or Yemen. Call me a pussy (and I could care less if you do), but I really enjoy being able to leave my house without carrying a gun. To me, that is one of the major hallmarks of civilization. To return to the days where the average citizen must be armed at all times is simply devolution... no other way to look at it (see Old West, Afghanistan, Yemen).

I'm not against guns or hunting. I think everyone should be able to own a rifle and a shotgun--hell, I do myself. Perfectly adequate for home defense. But I start getting muddy when people tell me why they "have" to have a handgun. And I sure as hell don't see the reason for any citizen to own military-grade weaponry. Wanna shoot an automatic rifle? Join the Army. They'll even pay you to do it.

Long and short: My right not to be senselessly massacred (note that the Las Vegas shooter was a nobody on law enforcement radar, and he was shooting from the 32nd floor of a building--so much for studly retribution fantasies) outweighs your "right" to carry military-grade weaponry for fun n' recreation. That's about it.

Nowhere else in the whole wide world does the citizenry arm itself with weapons beyond what even the average American soldier carries. Oh, except for Afghanistan and Yemen (why do those countries keep cropping up? They are so obviously nations we should wish to emulate). Why do only we in the US have gun massacres on a depressingly regular basis? Gee, I wonder. I've always failed to see a connection between crazy people having access to high-powered weapons and mass murder.

That being said, our quote for the day comes from Peter Bergen at "Fake News" CNN: 

 One can only hope that the tragic events in Las Vegas may change [things]. However, given that previous tragedies have not changed this deadly equation, there is really little reason for hope.

That resigns us to a dystopian future where Americans attending something as innocuous as an office holiday party in San Bernardino in 2015, or partying at a nightclub in Orlando the following year, or attending a country music concert on Sunday in Las Vegas have to live with the lethal reality that they may become the innocent targets of their well-armed fellow citizens.

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

September  2o17

09/20/2017:

  

GOP EUGENICS PROGRAM RISES FROM GRAVE: If you're a poor American (even a poor American who voted for Trump) you'd better look out, because they're coming for you again.

 

Go away!

 

Under the polite guise of the name "Graham/Cassidy," the Republican attempt to kill off poor people restrict the access of lower-income Americans to medical care is back in force. I guess we all patted ourselves on the back when it seemed that America had finally driven a stake through the vampire's heart... even though there were voices of caution warning that celebration was premature. And those voices were correct. Graham/Cassidy, by just about any account (except the GOP's, of course), is even more dire than the so-called "skinny repeal" that was denied passage by the scarcest of margins--the votes of just three GOP senators.

My fellow blue-collar Americans, it's time more of you started to wake up and smell the coffee. Republicans are not your friends. In fact, they keep trying to tell you that they would prefer you to just crawl off and die. But somehow you're not getting the message, because they also want to keep Mexicans from moving in down the block--which seems ultimately more important to you than your own life.

You've got the world's biggest target painted on your back. Are you really, really too ignorant to see it?

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

August 2o17

08/17/2017:

  

TONY AND TRUMP: I had a good friend in high school named Tony (not his real name).

Tony is dead now... he died penniless and alone. Which is a tragedy, because he had quite a bit to offer the world.

A brilliant artist, poet and singer (think a young Jim Morrison), Tony grew up in a dysfunctional blue-collar household and was plagued by the bottle from a very young age. Both of his parents were hard-core alcoholics, and we used to pick them up almost nightly at a bar in Pearl River, New York.

Tony was a wonderful guy to be around, except when he'd been drinking--which, as we went through high school together, was more and more of the time. Once he'd had a couple of beers, Tony was that guy who couldn't control his mouth, always saying the first words that came into his mind with absolutely no governor. Case in point: He once approached a table full of off-duty Marines with the words, "You guys think you're so tough." I bailed at that point, having been pointlessly beaten by the police a few weeks earlier when Tony threw a typewriter at them.

Those Marines whupped Tony's sorry ass. But did he learn from that experience? Of course not. I finally figured out that I could not be around Tony if he'd had even one beer.

Which brings us to the President.

I have no reason to believe that Donald Trump is a problem drinker, but that's beside the point. He behaves just like my old pal Tony when he'd been drinking. Imagined slights from imaginary bogeymen (the police, the Marines, school officials) drove Tony into uncontrollable piques of rage. Had Tony shown any interest in running for a position as lowly as the village board--to say nothing of the Presidency--I've had said, "Tony, don't even think about it. You can't control your mouth. You shouldn't be holding office."

I think it is rather incredible that the first person who comes to mind when I think of President Trump is my old buddy Tony.

You just don't think of the President of the United States as someone who can't control his temper AT ALL. Just like Tony, Trump goes off the rails (usually, but not always, on his beloved Twitter account) at all kinds of people who have made the cardinal mistake--in his own tortured mind--of being "against" him.

As other pundits have pointed out, the terrible events in Charlottesville last weekend were in some ways a gift to the beleaguered commander-in-chief, who could have used them as an opportunity to unite a sorely divided nation.

But nooooooooo.

Being too cowardly to alienate that segment of his base that can best be described as toxic Nazi thugs, Trump lamely laid (not once but TWICE) equal blame on those who had come to Charlottesville as counter-protesters. I wonder what he would have done if he was in the pilot's seat during WWII--I suppose he would have equated the Hitler regime with the British and the French, because the British and the French weren't perfect either, and they said Not Nice Things about Hitler and his goons.

It's the same equivalence, folks. There's no way that it isn't.

Tony used to say awful things about blacks and Hispanics when he'd been drinking. I always called him on it. Unlike me, Tony had never known any blacks or Hispanics, so he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. But I still felt it was my duty to call him out and try to enlighten him.

That was Tony. Now it's the President of the United States. I should not have to explain to a grown man how cruel his comments were, especially one who holds the highest office in the land.

Look at it this way. Trump's closest natural allies -- the CEOs of companies like Merck, Intel, Walmart, and IBM -- somehow found the courage to directly confront the President on his noxious statements and disassociate themselves from him. Ditto (incredibly) the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who normally -- and generally wisely -- don't involve themselves with politics. But Trump can't find the courage to admit how deeply wrong he was. Instead, he goes prattling on and on about "beautiful" Confederate statuary and how those CEOs are mere "grandstanders."

This man is no more fit to be President than my old friend Tony. Donald Trump should step down immediately, before he does any further damage to this country.

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

July 2o17

07/27/2017:

  

TRAITOROUS VERMIN:

 

 

It's like trying to kill a vampire: You drive a stake through its heart. You set it on fire. You drop a nuclear bomb on it. And still, STILL, it comes oozing through the cracks like the Terminator 1000 and reassembles itself. Granted, that's a pretty far-fetched metaphor... but really, how isn't that like what the Republican Party is doing to dismantle Obamacare?

Almost nobody wants what the Senate (to say nothing of the House) is "offering."

Almost everyone was glad a week ago when it seemed that the Senate's monstrous, draconian attempt to take healthcare away from 30,000,000 Americans had finally bit the dust.

And yet, here we are again. And again. And again.

This seems like it's been going on forever. And Americans across the nation are starting to feel the (needless) hurt, and building up to a full head of righteous anger.

I am beginning to feel vindicated in my earlier pronouncements here that the GOP has embarked upon a eugenics program targeting the working class, the poor, and minorities--all of which will be unduly affected by the removal of any reasonable option to receive healthcare. Basically, the GOP is saying: "If you're not well-to-do... just crawl off somewhere and die."

That, of course, was the master plan all along.

I'd love to have Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and all their running dogs shipped off to Gitmo for a little question-and-answer session, until we learn just exactly WHO IN THE HELL THEY ARE WORKING FOR.

Because it sure ain't the American people.

 

"Have you seen this American?"

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

June 2o17

06/23/2017:

  

WHEN DID THE GOP BETRAY THEIR COUNTRY AND THEIR COUNTRYMEN? All my life (and I'm 60 years old), this country has had two main political parties. And for most of my life, you could say they've had a kind of yin-yang thing going. The Republicans were "more conservative," the Democrats were "more liberal," and they both had their share of good ideas. And in the hallowed halls of government, they often had to come to some kind of consensus--which is what kept the country functioning as well as it did.

Those days are gone.

The first inklings of something seriously amiss manifested themselves during the Clinton adminstration (for which Bill Clinton, with his nod-and-wink amorous dalliances, bore much of the blame). Things got much worse during the George W. Bush years, when the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" was coined--now applicable, with appropriate name change, to a growing roster of politicians--and Americans started to grow fond of the chant NOT MY PRESIDENT (as if voting against a particular candidate meant that you were not stuck with them if they won--hey, folks, that's democracy).

But things really came to a head during the Obama adminstration. It was then that the right wing of the GOP seemed to come completely unglued. Hey, a long perusal of this blog will show that I was never a fan of Barack Obama; in fact, I used to call him the Obamessiah. I never liked his aristocratic aloofness, and I hated his association with crackpot characters like Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But the way the GOP went on about him, you would have thought that Obama was the second coming of Satan, which is manifestly crap. We have had worse Presidents, even in my lifetime (Carter? Nixon?). It's very hard not to reach the conclusion that Obama Derangement Syndrome was based at least in part on Obama being black, because Jimmy Carter was a much worse President than Obama and he didn't cause the Republicans to take total leave of their senses. And, indeed, their very duty to their country and its citizens.

Because we are now seeing a whole new breed of Republican that has no apparent connection or commitment to what is best for America. Quite a few names leap immediately to mind: Scott Walker. Paul Ryan. Ted Cruz. Sam Brownback. Mitch McConnell. Anyone who voted for the GOP's healthcare plan in the House. Anyone who will vote for the GOP's healthcare plan in the Senate. All of the state-level GOP lackeys that enabled Walker and Brownback to wield absolute power over their citizens. Our Vice President, Mike Pence. And last but not least, our President--Donald Trump.

None of these people give a tinker's damn about what is best for this country and the vast majority of the people who live in it, or they would not have sold their souls to the Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Bradley Foundation, and other tools of the richest 1% of Americans. If you do not possess the skills or at least the interest to better the lives of your constituents, you don't belong in government and should accept, for the good of all concerned, that you need to find employment elsewhere. What is distinctly un-American is relying on a shadow network of mega-wealthy enablers to buy your way into power and keep you there, or worse yet (as seems to have been the case in Wisconsin) to rig election results to guarantee that the interests of the wealthiest always come first.

Let's just take a look, for example, at the GOP's feverish efforts to undo Obama's signature achievement, the American Health Care Act.

Bottom line: 23 million Americans lose their health insurance and the rich get a tax break.

I think any reasonably rational person can agree that everyone needs health insurance, and that the rich don't need (yet another) tax break.

I can only reach the conclusion that the GOP has become not only irrational, but deeply un-American. This legislation has absolutely nothing to do with the good of the country (again, Republicans know as well as anyone that EVERYONE needs health insurance, and that the rich don't need [yet ANOTHER] tax break--especially considering that the rich have done absolutely nothing with their vastly increased earnings over the past decade except vastly enrich themselves, instead of creating the jobs that the GOP keeps telling us they're going to create with their great big piles of tax savings).

Obamacare may not be perfect, but at very least--right now, this very minute--23 million Americans have health insurance that will not have it if the GOP passes its ill-conceived, no, make that MALEVOLENT, "healthcare" plan. So why, WHY, would anyone with a conscience vote FOR this plan?

Is it worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of American citizens to stick it to the Black President?

I shouldn't even have to ask that question. Shame on the GOP for betraying their country and its people. History will show this to be the moment when the Republicans dropped off the cliff and plummeted to hell.

And good riddance.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

May 2o17

05/24/2017:

  

WELL, IT MIGHT EXPLAIN OUR DECLINING TOURIST TRADE:

 

Posted by Alois on

05/01/2017:

  

HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL: Pity poor "Governor" Scott Walker for a minute. Okay, you can stop now.

He lives in a shadow world inhabited by demons that exists only in his own tortured (between beers) soul. Remember the "big government labor bosses" that were hounding him?

Walker recently flew (on the Wisconsin taxpayer dime, of course) to Omaha to help its conservative mayor in her bid for reelection. And he couldn't help uncorking this gem:

“Do you want Midwest common sense?” Walker asked about 250 attendees. “Or East Coast radical values?”

I don't purport to speak for Omahans, but I did grow up in the Midwest and I have also spent more than a decade on the East Coast. I have no basis to accuse Scott Walker of anti-Semitism (although on a trip to Israel, he was surprised to find that the West Bank and Gaza actually border Israel--that's probably only the ignorance Walker has illustrated in abundance), but any Jew in the audience would have heard this as a dog whistle to anti-Semites--since Jews played an active part in advancing trade unionism on the East Coast, especially in the New York City area.

Again, I am not accusing Walker of anti-Semitism. Just frightful ignorance of our nation and its history, especially the fact that the America these East Coast Jews envisioned was a hundred times more healthy and egalitarian than Walker's Dickensian nightmare.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

ALEC/AFP'S REAL AGENDA EXPOSED IN WISCONSIN: I have written here before that the agents of the American Legislative Exchange Council and Americans for Prosperity are very bad people who, instead of pledging their public service to the nation and its citizens, instead have prostituted themselves quite openly to the Koch brothers and the other oligarchs who run these two organizations. And obviously, the interests of the upper tier of the upper one percent overlap practically nowhere with the interests of other Americans. That doesn't stop the prostitution, because these "civil servants" like their comfortable lives and Cadillac benefits at the public trough (i.e. they themselves are the people they claim to hate the most... government leeches) and most of them aren't really fit for other (real) jobs. Joining ALEC and/or AFP all but guarantees that the oligarchs will dump vast amounts of money into their campaigns come reelection time, making victory for their opponents quite unlikely.

These proponents of "small government" and "local control" (*cough hack choke*) have lately shown a nasty predilection for exerting communist-style central planning mandates over actual small governments (read: municipalities, townships, school boards) when these tiny electoral entities fail to toe the Party Line. Most recent case in point is State Rep. Michael Schraa (affiliated with ALEC) and State Sen. Duey Stroebel (Persuasion Partners, an affiliate of AFP), who are pushing for a bill that would severely restrict the ability of communities to put public-school referenda on the ballot. This is apparently related to two recent events: the sweeping reelection of popular State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers over ALEC water boy Lowell Holtz (as I have noted before, Holtz was hung out to dry by the oligarchs as a lost cause after "Governor" Scott Walker threw a bone toward public schools, thus representing one of the only "liberal" victories in Wisconsin since Walker's inauguration... and since the victory was 70%-30%, it makes one wonder about the legitimacy of any state election since the Koch cabal took over), and also the success of local referenda in Wisconsin in continuing to fund public schools.

The intrepid reader might well ask, "How is this any of their g-ddamned business? If people want to raise their own taxes to have good public schools, they should certainly have that option."

And the intrepid reader would be correct in asking that question.

The answer is that, once again, ALEC and AFP are engaged in un-American activities (we had the House Committee on Un-American Activities [HUAC] back in the day to investigate the activities of so-called subversives, even though these "communist plants" were usually just ordinary Americans engaged in liberal causes like opposition to the Vietnam war--where is HUAC now when we really need them?). There is nothing more American than local citizens banding together to save their public schools, especially when their state government has been knee-deep in a shadow campaign to hand the reins of public education over to shadowy voucher-school contractors with no accountability to the people.

Never forget that the oligarchs' ultimate aim is to decide which American children will receive a quality education that will guarantee them high-paying employment for life... and which children (the vast majority) will be consigned to working in Dickensian sweatshops and dying early deaths. Anyone interested in democracy needs to nip this little experiment in the bud right now (good job, Wisconsin, in reelecting Tony Evers!).

If anyone doubts the real endgame of the oligarchs and their lapdogs in government, look no further than this nefarious bill. And expect to see more of the same in other states that are basically controlled by the Koch cabal and its enablers.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

April 2o17

04/07/2017:

  

PRESIDENT TRUMP GETS IT RIGHT: One thing I hated about Barack Obama was his eternal politeness to the world's criminal thug leaders and his "lines in the sand" that could always be crossed with impunity--which is why Bashir Assad no doubt figured that a new era in American "leadership" had arrived with Obama. Certainly Trump would look the other way too and whistle Dixie while Assad unleashed a murderous cloud of sarin gas upon his own people (naturally) earlier this week.

Assad was wrong.

I won't go as far as some pundits and get up on my soapbox and say "American power is back!"--but Trump's correct read on the situation and what it required was encouraging. If even tinpot dictators like Assad think they can scoff at international law with no fear of American power, then American power doesn't mean much.

Liberal blogger Greg Humphrey's take has some similarities to my own.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

04/05/2017:

  

WISCONSIN: DID PREP SPORTS DELIVER A BEAT-DOWN TO ALEC? In the same manner that Paul Ryan was seen as a great guy until he was finally identified by the "angry white male" as the "guy who wants to take away my ObamaCare" (see post below), the Wisconsin GOP has had an incredible run of luck for six years now, unseating Democrat after Democrat as well as most Republicans who weren't far enough to the right for them (i.e. didn't take their orders from ALEC and/or Americans for Prosperity cough cough DALE SCHULTZ). But in what I refer to as the "Don't-Take-Away-My-Tigers Syndrome," lately more and more has been heard from rubus Wisconsinus along the lines of, "Sure I hate teachers an' them, but for crying out loud, don't take away our Tigers." It never occurred to these smart guys (and gals) that seeing their local public school get boarded up for lack of funding--an ever-looming possibility in the state's smaller school districts as Commandant Scott Walker proceeds gleefully with his ALEC-boilerplate plans, starving public schools to death while steering taxpayer funding toward predominantly "Christian"* voucher schools--means that their beloved Tiger teams are going the way of the dinosaur, never to return. And as anyone who has spent any time at all in rural Wisconsin can tell you, prep sports are everything. If Johnny and Susie don't get a real great education in their local public school, well, that's too bad, but it can be blamed on those no-account lazy teachers and what matters more is that Gub'ner Walker is giving those pointy heads what-for. But if Johnny and Susie don't get a chance to play for the Tigers? THAT, friends, is a national fucking tragedy and the howls will be heard as far away as West Palm Beach.

Walker, who is almost certainly going to seek a third term as Commandant, has felt enough elbows from his "constichents" to realize that shuttering public schools in rural Wisconsin is making him wildly unpopular (if only because Johnny and Susie will never play for the Tigers). To that end, he has lost his mind and done the ultimate--proposing a token increase in public school funding. I can't even imagine the shrieks of outrage that this modest proposal must have engendered from Walker's money machine in the voucher-school lobby (another fully-funded Koch entity--remember, part of the Koch platform is that they want to decide who does and does not get a functional education in America).

So, to that end, ALEC errand boy Lowell Holtz was trounced by veteran educator (and incumbent) Tony Evers in Wisconsin's race for Superintendent of Public Instruction... to the tune of 70%-30%. "Liberal" victories in Wisconsin have been unknown since 2011, because the Koch network has dumped so many millions of dollars into GOP candidates (or, because as many Wisconsin voters believe, our elections have been hacked). But obviously Holtz, who blames Evers' superior funding for his loss, was left twisting in the wind by the ALEC/Koch machine, probably because Walker insisted on going off-script to save his own job. If a public-schools champion really and truly and in true life managed to raise more money for his campaign than the voucher-schools candidate, that can only mean that Wisconsinites (if left to their own devices) will overwhelmingly go after the guy who wants to take away their public schools.

I'm not kidding myself, though. Education had nothing to do with it. It was prep sports.

But hey, at this point, I'll take any victory I can get.

*Adherents of the WiGOP's inverted brand of Christianity: "Call me Robbin' Hood. I robs from the poor and I gives to the rich. HAW HAW HAW!"

Posted by Alois on

 

 

04/03/2017:

  

BAD PAULIE GETS SPANKED: Hey, hey, my, my, couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

 

The "zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin" and full-bore Koch/ALEC operative was so intent on getting his middle-of-the-night, kill-the-poor "Ryan(Doesn't)Care" replacement for ObamaCare to the House floor that he didn't notice all the warning signs--most ominously, that congresspeople from hyper-red districts that had voted heavily Trump were suddenly abandoning Ryan(Doesn't)Care in droves because their constituents were threatening full-fledged revolt over losing their health insurance coverage.

Yes, I see the irony. Hard not to.

But if this is what it took to make the American people wake up to Ryan's endgame (and that of all other ALEC lackeys), it was worth it. Nothing like realizing that you've got some skin in the game--pun intended.

Now Ryan is disgraced before the entire country and especially his own party, who have been made to see what a grub-for-hire he really is (and that he has no one's welfare in mind but his own). Of course, I've been saying that all along. But, well.

The New York Times editorial board says it all in this towering recent opinion piece.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

Febuary 2o17

02/20/2017:

  

JAKE NAILS IT: Democrats have become fond of blaming the Electoral College for Donald Trump's victory. As usual, they don't seem to possess a mirror that might show them pretty plainly who the culprit really is.

It was Democratic operatives who thought it would be a good idea to ditch Bernie Sanders just when he was really catching fire, and bet it all on the "safe" Hillary Clinton (who turns out to have been not "safe" at all, and represented a truly disastrous decision for both the Dems and the entire United States of America).

We had a preview of same here in Wisconsin in 2014's gubernatorial run-up, when the local Democratic geniuses had the opportunity to throw their weight behind firebrand speaker (and farmer! from the rural west of Wisconsin!) Kathleen Vinehout, a woman who was more than willing to take Scott Walker to the woodshed and call him on every single bit of bullshit he dribbled out (and, since nearly everything Walker says is bullshit, imagine how fun to watch it would have been). But noooooo.

 

 

Instead, they groomed Trek bicycle executive Mary Burke to take on Walker, ostensibly because her wealth and ties to the business community would somehow endear her to Walker backers. Epic fail. Burke, who had no stomach for confrontation, let the nasty, vindictive Walker walk all over her (pun intended). And we got a preview of the presidential race, when angry voters in rural Wisconsin--the same ones who swung the state for Trump--refused to abandon "their boy," Scott Walker... because he had given those highfalutin teachers and state workers what-for.

Economist Jake at one of my favorite blogs, Jake's Economic TA Funhouse, really has the whole thing nailed down. It's not just Katherine Cramer's "politics of resentment" (although I couldn't agree with Cramer more); equally important in the long history of Democratic failure against the far right is that the Democrats no longer have a coherent message (a failure that can be laid directly at the feet of their so-called leadership--see above).

Jake tells you why:

No matter how unrealistic, racist or flat-out lying GOPs are, at least these individuals  [rural and/or blue-collar voters] think they are getting an answer from them, whereas Dems are shrugging and saying “You know, if you retrain yourself, you might get a slightly better-paying job if some other newer technology comes in to your town.” Or even stating a fact like “hey, this Obamacare is great and more people are getting covered” when Joe Ruralguy was already covered, and now his insurance company is using the excuse of “Obamacare” to continue to jack up his rates or deductibles. That’s not what people want to hear, that’s not relating to their particular situation, and that’s not what they should expect to get as a reply from their elected officials.

You need to reach into people’s lives, and give them hope that there will be a reward to their hard work. They can see that corporate slimeballs and rich donors take more and more while the blue-collars work as hard as ever and fall further behind, so why don’t Dems STEP UP AND SAY “THIS SITUATION IS WRONG AND UNACCEPTABLE”?

Also, why aren’t Dems telling rural Wisconsin that the reward to investing taxes into public schools is because it makes for a better community that their kids would want to stick around in and raise their new families in. Instead, Republicans rob those schools of funding to funnel money into unaccountable voucher schools in big cities and suburbs, to subsidize schools that those parents are already sending their kids to. Maybe we should point out that being a decent person who pays their bills and believes in honest and clean government is an ethos that still has value in the 2010s, and that politicians should reward those values when they get into office.

Instead, the Anson Kayes and the rest of the suit-wearing consultant class say “Well, that’s not going to happen. big Big money is just the way the system is these days. Sorry about that, try this subpar option, since us urban educated types know the better way for you to succeed.” And you wonder why this party keeps losing when party hacks like that continue to pull fat paychecks from candidates as “experts”?

DEAR GOD Dems, clean house and throw these losers out!

Amen.

We need to face facts. Americans have become a civics-challenged bunch. We are sated with our gadgets and our reality TV--which is why a reality TV star is now our President, and why, like most reality TV stars, he doesn't have the faintest idea of how to improve the lot of lower-income Americans. The GOP has coasted on this tide until it rules damned near everything--never mind that even a cursory examination of the facts (see Speaker of the House Paul Ryan) quickly illustrates that the GOP wants nothing more than an early death for the people who put them into office (again, see "politics of resentment"). We need to make the common man and woman in this country come to grips with actual reality. Beating up on teachers and snow-plow drivers and minor bureaucrats is not going to better anyone's lot in life. We need to show Americans who the real enemy is--and that would be the paymasters of the Paul Ryans and Scott Walkers. There's your agenda, Democrats. Now get to work, or get lost--while the rest of us create a real opposition party.

Posted by Alois on

 

02/16/2017:

  

THOUGHTS ON IMMIGRATION: Boy, it's been a long time since I agreed with Mitch Berg on anything.

Mitch and I go way, way back... as a matter of fact, he was one of the original voices that inspired me to start blogging (which means, of course, that his blog is even older than mine, which certainly makes it one of the very oldest on the Internetz). At that time, immediately post-9/11, he was one of the brave conservative voices speaking out to help pull our country together against a common enemy (he also was, and still is, an accomplished historian and not too bad of a music writer, as well as being a fellow guitarist). Mitch, Michele Catalano, and Charles Johnson were daily reads for me. Charles has morphed into an angry leftist. I have no idea what Michele is doing these days, but I don't think she's blogging. And Mitch? When the GOP went off the deep end, Mitch went right along with 'em. Hell, he was even willing to support Scott Walker for president. I still read Mitch's blog out of a probably misplaced sense of duty, and because I think it's good to read people you don't necessarily agree with. But mostly, it's painful--especially if you read the comments, an endless circle jerk among alt-rightists and gun freaks. Or when Mitch bemoans the fact that he lives in librul Minnesota and not Walker-GOP-throttled Wisconsin (I've noticed that he hasn't moved across the river, though, even if he could live in Hudson, WI and still commute to his job in St. Paul if he was the true believer he paints himself as).

So there's your introduction.

Mitch has long had an alter-ego on his blog called "Joe Doakes from Como Park," who e-mails him daily with pithy (and usually lengthy) comments. Let's just say that if Joe Doakes isn't Mitch, he's his long-lost brother from another mother.

The other day, Joe Doakes e-mailed this.

I don't agree with everything "Joe" says, but I agree with most of it.

Let's start by saying that I am not as upset as many liberals are by President Trump's order that halts immigration from countries that are known hotbeds for Islamic terrorism (although it pisses me off that Saudi Arabia, the country that nurtured the terrorists that brought us 9/11, is conspicuously absent--OIL cough cough cough). Why in the hell do we want these people here? For what? If any of these countries had a long and reliable history of producing patriotic Americans (like the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, and many other once-despised immigrant groups), I might reconsider. But what we're getting is terrorists and people who hate our culture and our way of life. I'm perfectly aware that some immigrants from these countries may make perfectly fine Americans. It's the rest who worry me.

Folks, we can't be letting folks from these hostile nations into our country until we have a very thorough idea of exactly who they are and what they stand for. That is our RIGHT as a sovereign nation. We are under NO obligation to grant citizenship or permanent-resident status to people who hate the United States of America, or those who have no intention of respecting our laws and culture.

I feel more kindly toward the Mexicans, who for the most part are able and willing to integrate into American society. But I don't want any Mexican gangsters here, and I don't want Mexicans here who feel that we are obligated to speak Spanish and overhaul our culture to accommodate theirs. If I was to emigrate to Canada or Poland (just picking out two nations that I admire), my first order of business would be to remake myself into the very best Canadian or Pole I could possibly be. Yes, I would probably seek out the company of other American emigres because we would have so much in common. But I would never forget my debt to my host country, and it would certainly never occur to me to insist that native Canadians or Poles remake themselves in my image.

All I am asking is this: If you want to come to America, you should be ready to become an American. If you want to be a Somali or a Mexican who has an American address but no respect for our culture, please stay home. And, as Mitch would say, that is all.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

02/10/2017:

  

THEY WERE FORGOTTEN: Reader(s) may have already gathered that I am not a fan of President Trump. There are about a million reasons why I am not, starting with the fact that I went to high school near New York City and later lived in the city for 7 years--so I am more familiar with The Donald than most Americans. It's not that the man has never done any good things; it's just that with The Donald, it's always about him and I don't think that's a very good trait in a President (it also applied to Obama but in a much more limited sense--and it wasn't a good thing then either).

I choose to believe that, on some level, Donald Trump does care about all those blue-collar Americans who sent him to the White House. He's certainly not like Hillary, who could never stand to be around working people (witness all her meet-n'-greets with wealthy donors) where Trump would take selfies with crazed Green Bay Packers fans wearing cheeseheads.

Here's the problem: Hillary Clinton knows full well about the plight of working Americans and what caused it (a lot of that had to do with her husband) and probably could think of a couple of ways to make their lot better. But she doesn't care, because she's all about the dollar bill--witness her coziness with Wall Street.

And assuming as I do that Donald Trump really does care, his unique brand of self-centered cluelessness more or less guarantees that he isn't going to do much for Joe and Janie Lunchbox either. Want proof? If The Donald had any idea about how to improve the lot of the working class, he 1) never would have picked Koch stooge Mike Pence as his Vice President; 2) would keep even more dangerous Koch stooge (i.e. as in Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan on a very, very, very short leash--this is, after all, the man who wants to gut Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of Obamacare; 3) would never have even thought of dismantling the protections that could serve as a stopgap against Wall Street ushering in another global financial meltdown.

I am beginning to feel bad for American workers who voted for Trump, because I do not believe that everybody needs to be a swell college-educated know-it-all who lives in Seattle or New York and drinks ten-dollar cups of coffee* to have their opinion count in the American conversation. I do know that life improved for those kinds of folks under the Obama presidency--because it is those kinds of folks who ushered Obama into the White House (twice) and saw their stock portfolios grow and grow while he was President. But Obama wasn't known to spend so much time in, say, Sharon PA or Huntington WV or Spokane WA--blue-collar towns where people were hurting, and hurting badly. Hillary Clinton showed zero interest in those Americans too. Only Bernie Sanders was talking to them, and the Democratic National Committee stripped away his chance of being President by throwing all their weight behind Hillary.

So go and figure why these desperate people threw in their lot with Trump. It really doesn't matter in the end that they have probably been hoodwinked (I am still hoping that Trump at least restrains Paul Ryan from leaving working Americans literally dying in the streets, because I know that Ryan would like to do just that). But I do know that Trump needs to distance himself from the dipshit wing of the Republican party, the Scott Walkers and Sam Brownbacks and Bobby Jindals and Paul Ryans, because these monsters represent the complete antithesis of helping working-class America get back onto its feet--the very idea that propelled Trump into the White House, and one that I think is a worthy idea (for all that almost all liberal pundits disagree with me).

Working-class Americans have been excluded from the American discussion for far too long, and that is exactly the reason why we now have to deal with a Trump presidency. For all of you armchair liberals, "funsters" with your mountain-bike racks and cushy geek jobs, ultrarich assholes who don't care a whit about your suffering countrymen--the rent has come due. And don't say you didn't see it coming.

*full disclosure: I am a college-educated know-it-all who has lived in both Seattle and New York, though you won't ever see me paying ten bucks for a cup of coffee.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

January 2o17

01/30/2017:

  

I AM THE MIDDLE: Pratically anything you read about the state of American politics these days will use the words "polarized" and/or "polarization" at least once.

And it's true that the American electorate seems to have morphed into two camps of roughly equal sizes. There is the modern-day GOP, which has devolved from the "neocons" of George W. Bush's day into a nasty fever swamp of Koch-funded oligarchs and robber barons, alt-right ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, anti-government teabaggers and secessionists, Jesus-challenged evangelicals, and the large bloc of Trumpists--mostly blue-collar white people who feel that they've been screwed by the power structure (and they have). Then there are the "progressives," which include, in addition to the various identity-bloc cartels and appeaseniks of all stripes, a new group that includes anyone in the country who refuses to pledge allegiance to the GOP. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in states like Wisconsin, where for six years now anyone who dared speak against the all-GOP regime is either completely ignored or (if they get too vocal) tagged as an enemy of the state. I now find myself in the "progressive" camp, but that's not because I'm really a "progressive" so much as a citizen who refused to drink the WiGOP Kool-Aid. There's a lot of items on the progressive agenda that I won't carry water for. For one thing, I refuse to subscribe to identity politics; as far as I'm concerned we Americans are all in this together and I lose respect for you when you feel the need to put a descriptor and a hyphen in front of "American." In essence, that implies that you're just a little bit better than the rest of us, or that you require special attention.

And I'm tired of hearing about "white privilege." I have, as a white man, the same target on my back as anyone else in the "other 99%"--and I've got decades of financial torment to prove it, courtesy of our ruling class. Ask your neighborhood Trumpist what a great privilege it is to be white these days.

Then there are "microaggressions," a term I hadn't even heard until last year. Actually the term implies its own definition--these are slights so small or so unintentional that the pre-Millenial generations would not have even registered them. Remedy? How about growing a spine.

This blog is a pretty thorough document of how I became disillusioned with the conservative movement over the course of several years, but I still cannot find a home with the progressives except inasfar as they are fighting the WiGOP along with me.

And here's the reason why: I am the center. Remember us? We were the Americans who tried to see wisdom on both sides of the fence, and who voted accordingly. Those people don't exist in places like Wisconsin anymore--the last public figure was State Sen. Dale Schultz, who was basically run out of town on a rail.

And then there are a smattering of people like me, but we don't talk politics to anyone anymore because chances are excellent that we will arouse the ire of one or the other extremist camp.

Welcome to today's America. Thanks a lot, GOP. And thanks a lot, Dems--you had a hand in it too by playing to all the lowest-common-denominators listed above.

Posted by Alois on

 

01/09/2017:

  

NEW YEAR'S PREDICTION: At some point during 2017, I have a feeling that the remaining members of Pink Floyd--David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Nick Mason--are going to put aside their longstanding animosities and reunite for an album, a tour, or both. I think that the impetus will be the rightward lurch of much of the Western world; as longtime lefties from Cambridge, I imagine all three members have strong opinions on the subject, and in the case of Waters I suspect that they will be so strong that he may even see his way clear to dropping his feud with Gilmour to give maximum heft to his statements (i.e. when the Floyd speaks, people listen).

OTOH, it could be something as simple as another (let's say "more formal") tribute to poor old Syd Barrett.

We shall see.

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

December 2o16

12/13/2016:

  

IT MIGHT BE A START: I think the answer isn't necessarily lying, but Democrats need to stop playing nice, and start using shocking language. It's time to rattle some cages, because using facts and figures doesn't work, especially with working class voters.

My idea would be that since Republicans act like rapists when they govern, we should start talking about, "The Republican Rapist Mentality". They expect people to just "lie back and take it", while they rape education, our infrastructure, and middle class jobs.

Offensive? Maybe! But maybe it's time to offend people so much that they start to listen and wake up to the horrible realities of Republican governance, if just a bit.

--poster "guyfromwi" weighing in at Jake's Economic TA Funhouse

 Posted by Alois on

 

12/10/2016:

  

JOHN GLENN 1921-2016: One of our greatest Americans. I wish he was younger and could have survived to lead our country now. He's exactly what we need.

Enjoy your view from Heaven, Colonel Glenn. You've certainly earned it.

 

(hat tip: dekerivers)

 Posted by Alois on

 

12/05/2016:

  

WHY BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT OUR NEXT PRESIDENT: As I have said numerous times, I have never liked Hillary Clinton (although I think she would have made a better President than Donald Trump, that still isn't saying much). But post-election news has been coming out that shows more and more clearly how, at Clinton's behest, the Democratic National Committee abandoned Sanders just as he was attaining critical mass (they hung me out to dry with Obama and I'm sure as hell not gonna let it happen again!). The number one problem with Hillary Clinton as a Presidential candidate is that her main reason for wanting to be President is that she figures it's her turn. Doesn't work that way, ma'am.

If you've spent as much time reading discussions with Trump voters as I have (or talking to them in person, for that matter), it's patently obvious that, had Sanders been the Democratic candidate, he would have easily peeled enough votes away from The Donald to win the election. Sanders is far more likeable, has his temper and mouth under control, and more than anything (this one's the kicker) HE IS DEADLY SERIOUS ABOUT TURNING WASHINGTON UPSIDE DOWN. Look at Trump's cabinet picks and it's already obvious that, if you were a desperate working-class voter, the joke's on you. Paul Ryan, Charlie Pierce's "zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin," now has more power than he ever did. And if you liked to rip on Obamacare, imagine the unbounded joy you're gonna feel when you find out you don't have any health insurance at all. Hey, it's gonna be great!

Jeff Simpson over at Cognitive Dissidence breaks it all down for you. Pour yourself a stiff drink first--you're gonna need it.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

November 2o16

11/21/2016:

  

ELECTION POST-MORTEM: SELF-EXAMINATION REQUIRED. Eventually, I was gonna have to say something about Donald Trump winning the Presidency.

I did not share the view of the New York Times or the Washington Post that Hillary's elevation to the throne was all but a foregone conclusion. I live in the heartland. There are an awful lot of angry people around here, and wishing won't make them go away. Hell, I'll even grant you that in many cases their anger is perfectly legitimate.

But this election threw a new monkey wrench into the workings of democracy: The arrival of the no-information voter. These people showed up (many of them for the first time) at the ballot box to vote for Trump, because they were inspired by his promises to "make America great again," and that "it's gonna be beautiful." Never mind that Trump never quite explained how, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, these good times would be something that was really happening. Everyone who's run for President in recent memory could tell you with spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations how they were going to do this or that, and all the average Joe or Jane knew is that nothing ever seemed to get better. So maybe this crazy businessman with no political experience whatsoever might know something that the politicians didn't?

Hey, really, I sympathize. But how much research did it take to find out that what Trump was saying was all smoke and mirrors? Even if I grant that Trump wants to make things better for Joe and Jane, he still doesn't have any idea of how he's going to do it. [Hint No. 1, Mr. Trump: Gutting the Affordable Care Act isn't going to help, unless you replace it with something that's gonna be beautiful.]

It's no secret that Donald Trump has a bad habit of saying things that just aren't true. In the days before the arrival of the no-information voter, a habitually lying Presidential candidate would have absolutely no future. But perhaps Trump took a close look at some of his fellow GOP candidates--creepy charlatans like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz--or the Speaker of the House, a man known far and wide as "Lyin' Paul Ryan"--and realized that there are a whole lot of voters now that have zero interest in what we used to call The Truth. Walker and Ryan, chronic liars of a stripe that Trump can only aspire to, are reelected again and again (by comfortable margins) by the same voters they lie most egregiously to (Walker: "Our big bold conservative reforms are moving Wisconsin forward!" Ryan: "I really care about the working class.") Again, even the slightest amount of research would indicate that the exact opposite of these statements is the actual truth. But it doesn't seem to matter.

I had a good friend from my dog-training days, a highly intelligent woman with a great sense of humor who was unfortunately co-opted by the Tea Party movement. "Pam" used to send me breathless chain e-mails: Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The US Postal Service is going to charge all Americans (retroactively!) for every e-mail they've ever sent. Facebook is going to charge all its users (retroactively!) for using its "free online service"). I would go onto Snopes.com and send her a link that debunked each one of these myths, but to no avail. When someone has no interest in the truth, you have no basis for argument.

The second group that ushered Trump into the White House was your garden-variety white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen--a much bigger part of the electorate than any reasonable person might want to admit. Well, they all turned out in force for The Donald, and at first I wasn't inclined to really hold that against him. But when he appointed Steve Bannon to oversee his new administration, I started to have my doubts.

Now. On to us "liberals"*.

My home state of Wisconsin is really a microcosm for the nation at large right now. We have a lying governor, a lying congressman who is now Speaker of the House, and a lying senator who thinks climate change is caused by sunspots. All of them were comfortably reelected. If that isn't the best argument for the existence of large numbers of no-information voters, I don't know what is.

But, in order to win over the no-information voters, we "libruls" (the no-information voter's preferred spelling) are going to have to come up with something compelling that addresses their concerns, which are largely economic. It will never be enough to put our noses in the air and whine about their lack of education, true though that may be. If the DNC had let the people have their choice, Bernie Sanders may well have been our next President (I'm guessing that roughly 1/4 of Trump voters would have stood with Sanders had he been the Democratic nominee, which should have put Bernie over the top). There's another failing of the "libruls", who failed to understand how thoroughly fed up Joe and Jane are with the status quo.

Bottom line: We "high-information voters" can't blame all of this on Donald Trump or neo-Nazis or people who didn't go to college. We need to look in the mirror first.

*Even though anyone who reads this blog knows that I am anything but a classic "liberal," I was forced into that camp by the Tea Party movement and the GOP's increasing interest in voter suppression and one-party fascist rule. That doesn't make me a liberal--but the Tea Party has decided that it does. So be it. Better a liberal than a brownshirt.

Posted by Alois on

 

11/14/2016:

  

QUOTE OF THE DAY: None of the bands we saw were well-known but almost all of them were better than we were... There was the Source (New York City version) with future New York congressman John Hall of the band Orleans on vocals and guitarist Teddy Speleos playing Jeff Beck as good as Beck himself. Teddy was an outstanding whiz. Steve (Van Zandt) and I made the bus trip on many afternoons just to sit there slack-jawed at his sound, technique and nonchalance. He was just a teenager like us but became a huge hero to Steve and me. We were never going to get within fifty feet of Jeff Beck, but this kid, there he was, inches away from our faces, and like the monkeys starting at the monolith in 2001, we sat there primitively hypnotized by style, substance and flash we could not comprehend. Steve and I rushed home to our guitars, hoping to catch some of the richness of distortion, the molasses thickness of tone Teddy was squeezing out of his Telecaster. Unfortunately we'd end up with a howling, screaming, murdering chain-saw massacre of sound squealing up out of the basement from our Teles. How did he do it? He KNEW how, THAT'S how!

--Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

October 2o16

10/31/2016:

  

A GOVERNMENT OF STUPID: You can't tell me that in a country of 300,000,000 people, the best people we can find to represent us in the Presidential race are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

And yet, that is precisely what has happened. What does that say about our current condition as a people and as a nation?

I think, more than anything, it says that we're lazy.

Reminds me of that old saying that you get the government you deserve. And no matter who wins on November 8, that is certainly the truth.

There are certainly failures on the left, and this blog has thousands of examples of them for anyone who cares to look.

But Donald Trump is an example of failures on the right, of which I have also documented many scores if not hundreds of cases (especially since 2011, when the Walker administration began its choke-hold on the state of Wisconsin). I'm thinking especially of a self-employed dump truck driver who was quoted in last Sunday's Wisconsin State Journal, the newspaper of record in Madison. He was talking about how much less money he makes now that people aren't ordering sand and gravel to upgrade their homes. He says that (paraphrasing) "This election for me is all about economics."

His solution? Voting for Trump.

If this man had paid any, and I mean any, attention whatsoever for the past few years, he would know that Tea Party Republicans, spearheaded by so-called "rock stars" Paul Ryan and Scott Walker, are precisely the reason he is hurting in the wallet. One doesn't have to read deeply or intellectually to glean the heart of the entire GOP/Koch/ALEC/Tea Party philosophy: Call us Robbin' Hoods. We robs from the poor and we gives to ourselves!

Whether the Democratic Party has any real arguments to better the lot of this working Joe is another story entirely, and yet another issue that we've talked about on this blog ad infinitum. My personal take is that Bernie Sanders was the way to go (another side of the Trump coin, without the racism and xenophobia. But that ship is sailed).

I thought Trump might be just the guy to put income inequality front and center. But now that he's zeroing in on the Presidency, I can see that he won't do anything about it either. He's too beholden to Wall Street (that finances all his crazy schemes) and even the Koch brothers, via Mike Pence. When  I think of all these rust belt Americans, thinking that Trump will bring back the good old days of automakers and steel mills, it breaks my heart.

But it doesn't forgive voting-age Americans for not putting their freaking iPhones down for just a few minutes a day and doing their duty as citizens. And that is why we are presently facing a stark choice between two people who should probably never be President.

I'm afraid that a majority of my fellow citizens have become so deluded and easily led that they've let this contest devolve into a reality show that could be called "Who's The Worst President We Could Possibly Imagine?"

And, as an American who has never minded doing his civic homework, I'm sick of the whole goddamned thing.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

10/26/2016:

  

TODAY'S MUST-READ: I think I've made it pretty clear on this blog that I have a good understanding of what motivates Trump voters. A couple of examples here and here.

I grew up in small-town America. I have seen the American Dream dwindle and die for the people who live there. Yes, I managed to tear myself away and finally earn a college degree (from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the age of 39). And for all of that, I wound up as a school bus and truck driver. I might have a small idea about what's gone wrong here in the forgotten hinterlands of these United States.

But for the final postmortem, you really, really need to read David Wong's How Half of America Lost Its F**cking Mind. Once again, we see one America that lives in or near a big city and is college-educated (think "latte") and another America that lives "in the sticks" and is lucky to get an $8/hr job at Wal-Mart. As things stand now, there is no future in rural America, folks. And when you look at Wong's map of American counties that vote Republican (the vast majority, except that they're not near big cities), you begin to understand the magnitude of the problem this country faces.

And we're not going to solve it through the glib prescriptions of Kevin Williamson, the guy who says "rent a U-Haul and move." I may have done that myself, but I don't think that's a realistic assessment for the vast majority of the people who live in "Red America." What I want is a Presidential candidate who will offer some real solutions about how to get these folks weaned away from crystal meth and heroin and back to work at family-supporting jobs. Bernie Sanders had some good ideas. Donald Trump, as it turns out, has none (and I was waiting to hear from him, and I waited a long, long time). Hillary Clinton pays lip service, but at least she isn't bat-shit crazy.

We can't afford to let this go for another four years, folks. Assuming that Clinton is our next President, I for one intend to hold her feet to the fire on this issue. It matters to me. It matters a lot.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

  

FOR THE THIRD TIME IN 159 YEARS... The Atlantic has made an endorsement for President of the United States.

The magazine, one of the oldest in the country, usually stays out of the endorsement game for reasons it iterates in this article. But let's put this in the context of their previous endorsements: Abraham Lincoln (self-evident) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (the importance of the Civil Rights Act).

This time, they have been moved to step up to the plate and endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton. Guess why?

Hillary Rodham Clinton has more than earned, through her service to the country as first lady, as a senator from New York, and as secretary of state, the right to be taken seriously as a White House contender. She has flaws (some legitimately troubling, some exaggerated by her opponents), but she is among the most prepared candidates ever to seek the presidency. We are confident that she understands the role of the United States in the world; we have no doubt that she will apply herself assiduously to the problems confronting this country; and she has demonstrated an aptitude for analysis and hard work.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.

Need I go on?

Please RTWT... especially if you're thinking of voting for Trump.

Posted by Alois on

 

  

DAILY GAAAAAAZ-O-LEEEEEEN! AWARD: "That Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Donald Trump should be evident to any mammal." -- James Kirchick, Los Angeles Times

 

Posted by Alois on

 

10/18/2016:

  

TAIBBI GETS IT, AGAIN: Illustrating an almost Einsteinian understanding of the dynamic underlying Donald Trump, Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi is once again a must-read. Small sample:

There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism...

The party spent 50 years preaching rich people bromides like "trickle-down economics" and "picking yourself up by your bootstraps" as solutions to the growing alienation and financial privation of the ordinary voter. In place of jobs, exported overseas by the millions by their financial backers, Republicans glibly offered the flag, Jesus and Willie Horton.

In recent years it all went stale. They started to run out of lines to sell the public. Things got so desperate that during the Tea Party phase, some GOP candidates began dabbling in the truth. They told voters that all Washington politicians, including their own leaders, had abandoned them and become whores for special interests. It was a slapstick routine: Throw us bums out!

Republican voters ate it up and spent the whole of last primary season howling for blood as Trump shredded one party-approved hack after another. By the time the other 16 candidates finished their mass-suicide-squad routine, a tail-chasing, sewer-mouthed septuagenarian New Yorker was accepting the nomination of the Family Values Party...

Trump's shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America's two-party political system for what was probably a half-assed ego trip all along, adventure tourism for the idiot rich.

That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation's history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. Trump picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.

The only thing that could get in the way of real change – if not now, then surely very soon – was a rebellion so maladroit, ill-conceived and irresponsible that even the severest critics of the system would become zealots for the status quo.

 

RTHT. Mach schnell!

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

10/17/2016:

  

A DESPICABLE MAN: There is no way I can vote for Donald Trump.

And it's not for any lack of having given him a fair hearing. Having had more familiarity with Trump than most Americans--I went to high school in New Jersey and later lived in New York City for much of the 1980s--I was used to Trump's bombast, his impatience, and his great skill in making the powers-that-be look foolish and inept (Google "Trump Wollman Skating Rink" and read all about it). Of course I knew he was a braggart and a blowhard (or a "puffoon" as we might say hereabouts, a word that defines itself). But he helped make the dreary reality of the Eighties in the Big Apple at least a little bit humorous.

You could say that I lost touch with Mr. Trump after I moved to Wisconsin nearly 30 years ago. All I can recollect from that period Trumpwise is a young starlet named Marla Maples (who shared a name with my then-girlfriend) and some scuttlebutt about "The Apprentice"--coworkers laughingly shouting "You're fired!" at each other. And that's about it.

Then the Donald suddenly appeared at the GOP Presidential debate with two creatures I thoroughly despise (Scott Walker and Ted Cruz) and a bunch of others I can certainly do without. It was high humor for me; I knew enough of Trump's braggadoccio and self-referencing to know he would make absolute mincemeat of dangerous but wooden demagogues like Walker and Cruz, who probably spent many miserable schooldays with their heads in the toilet. Donald Trump was no doubt the guy who would have inflicted every possible schoolyard indignity upon them. Since it wasn't my fault that the Wisconsin GOP have foisted all manner of hardship upon the citizens of Wisconsin (I never once voted for any of the Tea Bagger posse that rules our state with an iron fist), it was kinda fun for me to watch the bully that is Donald Trump take the little wussies to the woodshed.

Heading into the Republican convention, I was one of those waiting with baited breath to see if the oligarchs would find a way to deny Trump the nomination that he obviously deserved. It was really a test of American democracy. And I certainly breathed a sigh of relief when the real nominee managed to secure the nomination.

Then the campaign began.

I thought Donald Trump was a gate-crasher who might be the perfect man to bring my longtime concern with income inequality to the fore (see any number of previous posts on this blog, although in my feeble defense I have always preferred Bernie Sanders, if for no other reason that he is a modest, decent, well-reasoned man). But I was kind of pulling for Trump against Hillary Clinton, a politician whom even a modest perusal of this blog will prove that I strongly dislike.

I don't like Clinton now more than I ever did, but at the very least... she's not insane. That's a real important point when you're electing a President, and one I never thought I'd have to descend to. There have been lots and lots and lots of Presidential candidates I've seen over my sixty years... but Trump is the first one who really and truly belongs in a nuthouse.

I started to have serious doubts when he denigrated the Khan family, whose son had died a combat hero in Iraq. Gee, yeah, that's a real great message to send to Muslim-Americans... your son or daughter can make the ultimate sacrifice for this country, and you will insinuate that they still somehow, as a Muslim, haven't done enough.

And I don't want to see every Mexican who came here illegally deported. Some of my favorite people are Mexicans who skirted immigration issues at first (Carlos Santana, Cesar Millan). And who in the hell do you think cooks you those great steaks in practically every restaurant from one coast to the other? That's right. Without Mexicans, you'd better develop a taste for oatmeal. Hey, I'm all for them taking legal paths to citizenship, and making that a priority. But deporting them all as "rapists"??? Puh-leeeeeeze.

Or what about begging a foreign government--in this case, RUSSIA--to help his campaign by "finding Hillary's missing e-mails"???

And finally... and most importantly... there's this little problem Trump has with women. Let's just say that I do not share his little problem. I have lived, worked with, and loved women all my life... all without complaining about how "vagina is expensive." And then there was the "grab them by the pussy" tape. Locker-room banter, sez Trump. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the last time I heard a guy talk like that in a locker room, I was a freshman in high school. And we avoided the guy who said it, because in blue-collar Jersey parlance, he was a dooooouuuuuuuuuuche.

And then he was caught live, sizing up a ten-year-old girl.

Sorry, folks, but Donald Trump is a run-of-the-mill perv and groper. I wouldn't want a guy like him living on my block. And voting for him as President of the United States? HELL NO.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

10/03/2016:

  

IMAGE OF THE DAY: Troubled skies over a troubled state. Taken in eastern Dane County, Wisconsin.

 

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

INTERESTING FACTOID: I've always known that the Texas Panhandle is rather isolated from the rest of the Lone Star State, but this will give you a good idea of how isolated:

 

Dalhart is located closer to six other state capitals than to Texas' capital of Austin. In surface mileage (over major highways), Dalhart is 570 miles (920 km) from Austin, but is 261 miles (420 km) from Santa Fe, New Mexico, 313 miles (504 km) from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 348 miles (560 km) from Denver, Colorado, 448 miles (721 km) from Cheyenne, Wyoming, 461 miles (742 km) from Topeka, Kansas, and 544 miles (875 km) from Lincoln, Nebraska.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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September 2o16

09/08/2016:

  

BACK TO SCHOOL: It has been a long time, hasn't it.

No, I have not abandoned this tottering geriatric blog. Let's just say that it has been an interesting summer in the Chinese sense of the word. First there was the summer-long decline and eventual death of my widowed 92-year-old, WWII aviator father. That necessitated two 2000-mile round trips to New Jersey. And when I wasn't traveling to or from New Jersey, I was up in the Lake Superior regions of Wisconsin delivering school buses. As my faithful reader(s) know, I've had this gig for quite a few years and generally speaking we have as many deliveries here in southern Wisconsin as we do up north. Not this year. I was in Shell Lake, Superior, Ashland, Phillips and many other destinations in the great North Woods. By the time school started up on September 1, it seemed as if I hadn't been home all summer long.

Blogging fell to the wayside. Most times I wasn't even remotely aware of the goings-on in my home state (although when I'd have time to gulp down a few news bites, it always showed the WiGOP brewing up new and shockingly misguided ways to screw an electorate that had never requested any of these "Big Bold Conservative Reforms"). And in national news, we had what just might be the most loathsome male and female politician in the United States of America squaring off for the Presidency. Gee, nothing depressing about that.

So now that school's back in session, I can return to semi-regular blogging. I'll have a few words to say about "microaggression," a term that reconnected me with what made me a conservative years and years ago. I'll have some remembrances of my dear departed father. I may have some commentary on the Presidential race (although I won't have any suggestions or enlightenment, since both candidates are idiots). And I intend to shine a spotlight on a little-recognized group that has as much to do with Wisconsin's downfall as Scott Walker or the Koch brothers: the group I call the "funsters."

Stay tuned. I will try to make it worth your while. Honest.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

June 2o16

06/03/2016:

  

AND THEN THERE'S WISCONSIN: Where else would a semiliterate college dropout get to tell one of the world's major research universities, "This is how we're gonna do things!"

I really like the part about "performance reviews". Baaaarf.

 

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May 2o16

05/24/2016:

  

TAIBBI GETS IT! It's been so tiresome during this presidential election cycle to read the whining of pundits and editorialists basically saying the same thing over and over again: "Oh me oh my, why are so many people voting for a wild-eyed socialist like Bernie Sanders or Putin's brother-from-another-mother, Donald Trump? Can't we just go back to the days when we had a Predictable Democrat facing off against a Predictable Republican?"

No.

Matt Taibbi tells you why. Pull quote:

Th[e] sense of noblesse oblige disappeared somewhere during the past generation, when the newly global employer class cut regular working stiffs loose, forcing them to compete with billions of foreigners without rights or political power who would eat toxic waste for five cents a day.

Then they hired politicians and intellectuals to sell the peasants in places like America on why this was the natural order of things. Unfortunately, the only people fit for this kind of work were mean, traitorous scum, the kind of people who in the military are always eventually bayoneted by their own troops. This is what happened to the Republicans, and even though the cost was a potential Trump presidency, man, was it something to watch.

....

Th[e] avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.

There never was any real connection between the George Wills, Andrew Sullivans and David Brookses and the gun-toting, Jesus-loving ex-middle-class voters they claimed to embrace. All those intellectuals ever did for Middle America was cook up a sales pitch designed to get them to vote for politicians who would instantly betray them to business interests eager to ship their jobs off to China and India. The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty.

Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the liberals hell and bring the pride back.

Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black "race hustlers," climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls...

 

RTWT.

 

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05/14/2016:

  

RIP PRINCE 1958-2016: I'll start off by saying that, unlike so many others (not that I'm dissing them), I was not Prince's Number One International Lover Fan.

I'll break it down for you. As a guitarist, you'd have to be tone-deaf not to appreciate Prince Rogers Nelson's enormous contributions to the lexicon of the instrument. And as a (former) drummer, Prince never got nearly enough respect for his mastery of the trap set. Think you're a badass groovemeister? Let's see how you do on Tamborine.

I never went much for the orgasm-on-vinyl sex stuff; maybe I'm just a Lutheran prude, but I have always been of the opinion that some stuff is better left in the bedroom or to the imagination (and that goes for everybody, not just The Purple One). Since that encompassed a lot of what Prince did, I guess you could say that I found a good percentage of his catalogue needlessly flawed.

But then there was the other stuff, and that includes for me many songs that are indispensable and will live forever: 1999. Raspberry Beret. Purple Rain. Baby I'm A Star. Condition of the Heart.  Pop Life. Colonized Mind. No More Candy 4 U. Temptation. Lady Cab Driver. Back 2 the Lotus. Little Red Corvette. 77 Beverly Park. Let's Go Crazy. The Beautiful Ones. And that's just from my somewhat limited personal Prince catalogue. I had that kind of relationship with Prince; once in awhile I'd stop in at a CD store, go to the Prince section, and pick up something I hadn't heard before or something I thought I really ought to own. It didn't make me a huge fan, but this leads me to the final point I want to make.

I live just a couple hundred miles from Minneapolis and have been past Paisley Park numerous times (usually when travelling to the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre just down the road). As this blog has borne ceaseless and probably at times relentless witness to, the past few years have not been good years to live in Wisconsin. And especially in these dark times, it was always comforting to know that this crazy little musical-genius-par-excellence was ensconced in his studio up there in Chanhassen, cranking out music that was completely unpredictable and that, even after a bad day, would make you wanna dance (or, if you dance as terribly as I do, at least smile). And then you found out things like the fact that he paid "Funky Drummer" Clyde Stubblefield's medical bills anonymously, or built libraries and music venues that he didn't want his name on either.

I thought he'd always be there, but I was wrong. I already miss the hell out of Prince Rogers Nelson.

 

 

 

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05/05/2016:

  

IT'S WORSE THAT WE THOUGHT: By pretty much any yardstick you care to use, Minnesota is performing a severe economic whupping of its neighbor to the east. This has become especially noticeable since Scatt Wanker became governor of Wisconsin in 2011.

Although the WiGOP has done its best to suppress or discredit this interesting factoid (interesting because Minnesota has a liberal governor and the GOP there has little clout since the Gophers rose up and threw them out at the same time we installed King Scatt), it's gotten to the point where just about every Wisconsinite knows someone who has pulled up stakes and moved to Minnesota. That cow, as they say hereabouts, is out of the barn.

Along with the major outmigration to the Gopher State, another trend since the WiGOP assumed its stranglehold on us Badgers is a large influx of people from rural Wisconsin moving to our cities, looking for some work... any work. Things are especially bad out there in the rural areas, where many people don't even have Internet access or must drive scores of miles to indulge in things like, um, grocery shopping.

As one might expect, things are radically different in rural Minnesota.

That's right, our neighbor to the west is growing so rapidly, and seeing its economy actually "taking off like the rocket" Wanker promised us after he prevailed in the recall election, that outstate businesses have to offer lavish perks to get people to apply for their family-supporting jobs.

Any governor worth his salt would take a look at news like this and say, "Gee, how could I get this to happen in my state?" Well, of course, you start by not having a Terminal Case Of The Dumb-Ass. But since all of Wisconsin government is controlled by Terminal Dumb-Asses, I'm not getting my hopes up. As the WiGOP and its backers always say, "If you don't like it here, move."

 

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April 2o16

04/26/2016:

  

WISCONSIN ELECTION POSTMORTEM: I was hoping that I'd be able to title this post "The Fall Of The Wankerites"... but that's not how it went down.

Not all the news is bad, either (which is unusual in itself).

But first we'll deal with the really bad news: In the race for a 10-year seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, psycho gay-basher, adulteress*, and "contraception-is-murder" princess Rebecca Bradley narrowly eked out a victory over quintessential Democrat JoAnne Kloppenburg. The numbers broke down roughly the same as they did in the last gubernatorial election and the Wanker recall, with the non-KochThugs going down roughly 48% to 52% and being outspent a billion to one (thank you, Citizens United! ).

The bad news: Ted Cruz easily bested Donald Trump in the Rethuglican Presidential primary. (Some of you are saying to yourselves: And this is bad news exactly why? Because it shows the extent to which voters in Albonsin still take their marching orders from Scatt Wanker--which is to say, the Koch brothers and Diane Hendricks--and Wisconsin hate radio, whose ultimate aim is to turn the state into an economic hellhole with a population of expendable serfs to work in various toxic business schemes. As the beaten-down and resigned citizens of Albania said in the bad old days of their rule by an authoritarian madman, "We owe it all to Enver Hoxha.")

Trump voters, on the other hand, take their orders from no one... which is why the GOP is not going to let him win the nomination of his own party. With all the crazies and xenophobes that Trump has attracted, it's hard for me to see him as a good thing for the country. It's kind of like saying, "Who do you want leading the country? A handful of obscenely wealthy people or a crazy man?"

Speaking of voters who take their orders from no one, on to the good news. Bernie Sanders soundly trounced Hillary Clinton (IMHO, another tool of the banks and the oligarchs--just watch who gets the billions if Trump is the Rethuglican nominee) in the Democratic primary. It's been a very long time since we heard from the plurality of Wiscosinites who still care about their fellow man, who don't subscribe to the "hate thy neighbor" that has been peddled by Wanker and his GOP cabal in the southeastern part of the state for the past six years.  The number of Wisconsinites turning out to "feel the Bern" has been amazing--obviously very few of the hate-radio-addicted Good Germans in the GOP's "WOW" counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington), but a pretty good sampling of the rest of the state.

And maybe the best news of all is the huge number of school referendums that passed, all over Wisconsin (including the school district that I drive for). This amounts to a grassroots revolt against Wanker's not-so-secret wish to destroy public schools and replace them with private "voucher schools" accountable to no one. Think of what this means--these people voted to raise their own taxes (how anathemic to the GOP!) to defend their schools from Wanker's continued evisceration of public education.

Of course, the Rethugs saw this coming and quickly drafted a bill to prevent school boards from floating referendums (again, the GOP in Wisconsin doesn't care about the public wants, only their paymasters). Strangely enough, a bitter outcry from the public, including scathing editorials in most of the state's media, caused the Rethugs to back off--saying, as they always do when caught with their pants down, "for now."

I have no doubt that they'll be back, just like the Terminator; one thing you can always count on is the Walkerites' fanatic dedication to changing any law they don't happen to like, or that gets in the way of channeling public funds to their masters. However, even if it's true that (as my Wisconsinite wife says) losing control over their local schools is only disastrous because the locals see it as an attack on prep sports**, anything that wakes people up to the true intentions of Wisconsin's fascist leadership is a good thing.

Bravo to the huge numbers of Wisconsinites who voted with their own wallets to support Wisconsin's terribly vicitimized public schools. That's a slap in the face that the fascists have long had coming.

*Normally I would not have mentioned this, but it turns out after her excoriating of adulterers that Ms. Bradley is guilty of the same sin herself. Go figure.

**This has been repeatedly documented in Sam Brownback's Kansas, where public schools are in even worse shape

 

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04/01/2016:

  

IT'S ABOUT ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, STUPID: "Are you a have or a have-not? Because if you're a have-not, you've probably had it... whereas if you're a have, you've got it and are going to give it up sometime in the near future." -- The Clash

You can be a have or a have-not, but you don't have to be especially prescient to see where America's future is headed if we don't do something about our now early-1900's-robber-baron levels of income inequality, where upper-level corporate executives typically make hundreds of times what their rank-and-file workers do. Our middle class is rapidly disappearing while the rich enjoy undreamed-of lifestyles (even by the standards of the rich) at the expense of their countrymen.

But the desperation of oligarchs like the Koch brothers, Diane Hendricks, John Menard, Sheldon Adelson and their peers, who have steered our nation toward its ruin in order to make themselves obscenely wealthier, is beginning to show.

Rich Republicans successfully hijacked the Tea Party movement by convincing working Americans that their real enemy was public employees, not the extremely wealthy class that shipped their jobs overseas and steadily whittled their employment benefits down to nothing (the poster boys for this movement are, interestingly, both from Wisconsin: Scatt Wanker and Lyin' Paul Ryan). That bought the oligarchs another few years while angry working Americans started beating up on state employees, county health nurses, and (especially) schoolteachers... while the GOP continued to rob everyone but the rich and give all the money to (you guessed it) the oligarchs.

The GOP even managed, brilliantly, to build a reinforced shield around their treasonous employers: Instead of robber barons, they became "Job Creators"! Never mind that the majority of the jobs these folks created were either minimum-wage-slave toil or in some third-world nation--it was a great tag line, and just like the government-employee heist, working America fell for it. Lyin' Ryan used to get the masses pretty worked up with his "makers" (oligarchs) vs. "takers" (government workers, anyone on any type of public assistance) shtick.

But that couldn't go on forever. Eventually, even the least politically astute working American was going to start to smell a rat, especially as their lot in life continued to decline (this was especially true for the working class in GOP-ruled hellholes like Wisconsin, Kansas, and Indiana). It was only a matter of time before the forbidden question got asked: Hey, what the hell is going on here?

Enter two guys running for President: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

I have been saying this just about forever, and as a few voices in the media and the blogosphere begin to pick up my theme, I feel vindicated. Basically, the stunning success of both men--both of whom appeared completely out of left field--is largely due to their willingness to bring income inequality front and center, something which the mainstream candidates (Hillary helped her husband Bill, our 42nd President, restructure American banking law in favor of Wall Street--which was like handing the keys of an Indy car to a drunken high schooler--and ram NAFTA through Congress; Cruz/Rubio/Bush/Wanker is a generic sock puppet working only for the oligarchs) have "cleverly" steered away from.

But that ship may have sailed.

We are currently watching the extraordinarily painful (and in many ways, amusing) efforts of the GOP to put out the fire of the Trump rebellion. I suppose they will have their way in the end; after all, right here in Wisconsin we have seen how far the Rethuglicans will go (fixing voting machines, passing voter-suppression laws, changing any law that doesn't suit them) to please their corporate masters. Problem at the end of the day is that they're still stuck with Ted Cruz, a slimy snake-oil salesman hated by almost everyone who knows him, who makes up for being a little more cerebral than Scatt Wanker by being even less charming--and that is one hell of an "accomplishment".

And on the Democratic side? Everyone, everyone knows that Hillary is in bed with Wall Street. Oh yeah, she talks a great game about how much she cares about working Americans. So did her husband, who did much more to cripple blue-collar America than George W. Bush ever dreamed of (actually, Dubya seemed to genuinely like blue-collar people--I know, I've watched him mix and mingle with them).

These are the facts as I understand them: If Hillary Clinton--or, certainly, Ted Cruz--are elected President, we're just going to get more of the same old oligarchy. Nothing is going to change for the working man or woman, not one little thing--except that our lives are going to get even worse. The oligarchy knows this; if Cruz looks to be a loser (which is almost certain) in the general election, watch them go all hot and heavy for Hillary. Seriously. I stand on these words. You read it here first.

Because they will not, cannot, accept a change in the status quo--a change that would have working Americans have a real voice at the bargaining table. What do you think is behind Scatt Wanker and his systematic destruction of both public-sector and private-sector unions? It's all about the oligarchs setting the prevailing wage--and that, friends, is the minimum wage. Which is not going to be $15 per hour, so get over that little notion (here, the oligarchs have helped to insure that our minimum wage will not rise above $7.25 per hour. Try feeding yourself--let alone anyone else--on that).

I have some problems with Trump. I think he should be more accommodating of the Mexican illegals and at least offer them a path to citizenship. I don't think all Muslims are bad people (I have met a few who aren't, including the guy in my 92-year-old father's Veterans home). And I don't like the way he sneers at women.

But how is Trump more manifestly evil than people working full-time for the oligarchs? Answer: He's not. I think he genuinely cares about America, and that means he cares about the men and women who go out and do a hard day's work every day and don't expect a whole hell of a lot in return. At least he's listening to us--and in return, I'm listening to him.

But Sanders is really my man. As much as I might like to go after the uber-rich with a pitchfork and take back the money they stole from me and from so many millions of my fellow Americans, I know this is not what's best for the country. We want to avoid another French Revolution or Russian Revolution. The only way to avoid that now is to put either Trump or Sanders into the White House. Another four years of the status quo is a virtual guarantee that the pitchforks are going to come out, and the rest of us are going to take back what's rightfully ours. And it won't be pretty.

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March 2o16

03/24/2016:

  

INTERSTING READING: I was a kid in middle school when I stopped in at Osco Drug and bought Quicksilver Messenger Service's "Happy Trails" album, mostly because I liked the cover painting of a fair damsel waving goodbye to a galloping horseman... and because the guys pictured on the back of the sleeve had really long hair (the year was 1968 and these guys looked more like wild Indians* than the Beatles). A couple of years later I took up the guitar, and when I had attained a modicum of proficiency I began to deconstruct the guitar solos of QMS's ace axemen John Cipollina and Gary Duncan. It was not easy going. As a matter of fact, I am still at it today--although I like to think I could take a pretty good stab at playing in a Quicksilver tribute band. I would certainly recommend the project to any of my fellow guitarists, since learning this stuff is infinitely broadening and introduces one to a vastly expanded tonal and modal pallette.

Cipollina and Duncan were both heavily influenced by jazz, although they came at it in different directions. Cipollina had been equally impressed by the work of psychedelic contemporaries like Jorma Kaukonen and Jerry Garcia, and it shows in his shrieking soloing. Duncan was more traditional, his angular melodic constructs showing a dense knowledge of jazz scales and non-blues-based modalities. Put them together and it made for guitar pyrotechnics unlike anything that has been heard before or since... and certainly far, far ahead of its time.

But most people have forgotten Quicksilver Messenger Service, if they ever knew of them at all. And only the band's congnoscenti know the strange story of Quicksilver's total sound overhaul beginning with their fourth album, "Just For Love." Turns out that the band recorded their first three albums (the ones most fans consider their masterpieces) while erstwhile band leader Dino Valente did time in prison for marijuana possession. As luck would have it, both bassist David Freiberg (he of later Jefferson Starship fame) and Gary Duncan were good singers. All four "surviving" members of the band were first-rate musicians as well. And they were under contract to Capitol Records, so they couldn't just twiddle their thumbs waiting for Valente to get out of prison.

The guitar-driven, jazzy output that fans came to know as classic Quicksilver came screeching to a halt when Valente was released and "reclaimed" (many fans say "hijacked") his old band. Best known as the author of the hippie anthem "Let's Get Together" (the Youngbloods, Jefferson Airplane), Valente wasn't much for lengthy guitar explorations--or, for that matter, jazz, since he was a hardcore folkie. Although there is no doubt that he could write good songs, his nasal, affected singing was definitely an acquired taste. I'm still getting used to it 40 years after the fact.  He may have been a "singer-songwriter," but as far as singing goes both Freiberg and Duncan could have handed him his ass.

After Valente's return, there was still some brilliant guitar work if you listened for it (I especially like Duncan's dreamy interplay with pianist Nicky Hopkins on the spectral ballad "Gone Again," or Cipollina's psychedelic stomp on "Cobra"--one of the most fun songs a guitarist can play with a whammy bar). But the days of listening to Cipollina run through hundreds of jazz chords while Duncan explored everything from Indian raga to heavy metal on "When You Love"--a live performance, yet--were gone.

Well, to get to our subject, I unearthed a couple of fascinating pieces on Quicksilver's guitar aces: Gary Duncan (who never liked to talk) on his hard-bitten life, and the late John Cipollina, who battled health problems all his life and died at the age of 45 in 1989. Enjoy.

[RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

Who Do You Love Suite (from "Happy Trails") recorded live.

("When You Love," Duncan's extended outing, is the second movement.)

 

 "Gold and Silver," from Quicksilver's first album. Written by Duncan. Check out the jazz structure and the fiery interplay between the two guitarists.

 

  "Gone Again," from the Dino Valente era (that's Dino on lead vocals).

 

  Finally, "Cobra"--the late, great John Cipollina shakes it loose.]

  

*As I learned yesterday in my readings, Gary Duncan actually IS 3/4 Native American.

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03/23/2016:

  

TODAY'S MUST-READ: If you've ever wondered about "the Donald Trump phenomenon"... if you're one of those people who really doesn't understand where Trump came from... you'd better read this.

At the end, it was never about racism or sexism or American exceptionalism. It was about people watching the likes of Scatt Wanker and Lyin' Paul Ryan, year after year, tell them that they have to live "austere" lives and not count on Social Security and Medicare in their waning years, because we've shipped your jobs overseas and given your hard-earned money to a lot of rich folks.

These people are majorly pissed. And this is what they're saying: Give us our goddamned money back, or we're going to vote in someone who will.

Did I stutter?

 Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

DAILY GAAAAAAZ-O-LEEEEEEN! AWARD: I believe he was speaking from his secret bunker somewhere in Minnesota. He likes to see what the good life would have been if he hadn't played the "Hate thy neighbor card." Not to worry though, he has a secret router system hooked-up so his propaganda can be sent out.

--Poster "youlose," commenting on Scatt Wanker's sudden interest in upholding open records laws

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03/15/ 2016:

  

WHERE DOES HE FIND THESE PEOPLE?!?: Sometimes it seems as if Scatt Wanker is staffing his cabinet (and now, courts) with creatures from some kind of parallel universe that exists to make a mockery of democratic government and prudent hiring practices.

How's about Brian Deschane for starters, appointed as a state supervisor in environmental and regulatory matters? Deschane has no college degree, no relevant experience, and two DUIs.

But his father is Jerry Deschane of Wisconsin Builders Association, a big Wanker donor. Go figure.

And then there's Tim Russell, Kevin Kavanaugh, and Brian Pierick. The first two were convicted for embezzling funds from a Wisconsin veterans' fund, the last took a plea deal to avoid charges for felony child enticement. Nice people to have hanging around the office, eh?

Let's not forget Cathy Stepp, the head of Wanker's "corporate-friendly" Department of Natural Resources. Although not charged with any crimes--yet--Stepp is another appointee without a college degree put in charge of an agency of scientists and engineers (many of the former of which have been laid off since she took charge, since they have information that would have conflicted with Wanker's "corporate-friendly" mandate).

As if he hadn't done enough damage to the state and hadn't sufficiently insulted its reasonably intelligent remnant, Wanker must have crawled through the depths of Hell to find his current plant on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Rebecca Bradley.

Bad enough that she is an obvious tool of ALEC (just like her boss) and has been working to advance their agenda for years.

But it has come out in the news of late (thank you, One Wisconsin Now) that Bradley wrote some things in her college newspaper that were truly worthy of the blood-curdling anti-homosexual rants you might have heard at an SS rally.

Bradley's response? "Oh, so sorry, I had a bad hair day, I must be going."

Fellow Wisconsinites, listen up. Have we really devolved to a point where we go to the ballot box and have to choose between a Democrat and someone who equates pharmacists to baby-killers for filling birth control prescriptions?

And to think I moved here 30 years ago because I thought this was an enlightened state.

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February 2o16

02/24/ 2016:

  

LUCKY 13: Hard to believe, but this is S&G's 13th blogoversary.

What does this mean? In addition to the fact that this blog has been running more or less nonstop for 13 years, it means that we have outlasted a great many of the bloggers who inspired me to start  blogging when the medium was so shiny-new, your average citizen had no idea what a "blog" was.

There are only a handful of my original inspirations still blogging. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. Kate at Small Dead Animals. And not to forget Mitch Berg, a fine conservative mind who was inexplicably hoodwinked by Walkerism, at Shot In The Dark.

I know that blogging has lost some of its cachet, but that really doesn't matter. It's fun to be able to read the evolution in my own thinking going back over 13 years. We long ago bid farewell to Deb, whose stout Republicanism began to flirt with authoritarianism, and to Klaus, who for his own personal reasons didn't want to be involved anymore.

That leaves me, your resident lunatic Alois, to carry on.

More than anything else, I believe in FREEDOM. Not in the way that the libertarians/neofascists who call themselves Republicans today believe--that freedom means a large arsenal in every home, seeing "government" as an eternal enemy, and that every man (and woman) must fend for themselves. That's not freedom. That's what we had back in the days when we lived in caves.

If you want to know what "freedom" really looks like, our neighbors to the north have a much better idea. Not that Canada is perfect, but at least they've got the basic idea down. You're not really free when the lunatics at the NRA are dictating national gun policy, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks are holding the country hostage, and one President's mild attempt to insure that all Americans have access to affordable heathcare is seen as treason committed by a black Marxist communist from Kenya. You can't really reason with these people. You've just got to convince as many people as possible that they're wrong.

This blog was a lot more fun back in the days when we weren't living under the totalitarian regime of Scatt Wanker, überführer of Wisconsin. Perhaps we were spoiled growing up with Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford and Tommy Thompson, reasonable men who actually listened to their constituents. Now more and more of America is run by treasonous scoundrels who seek only to pad their pockets by doing the dirty business of a handful of billionaires. And you might have noted that they all have an "R" after their names, and that for the most part they had their origins in the "Tea Party" movement.

It is my duty as an American to do as much as I can to alert my fellow citizens of the malevolent intentions of this renegade and frankly un-American movement, which is precisely why I have treated Donald Trump with kid gloves (he's clueless on a lot of issues, but he's not going to sell us out to big banks and industry) and why I like Bernie Sanders more than Hillary. I want to see America be great again, not a groveling subsidiary of some very, very evil people and the feebleminded shadow of what used to be our "little brother" to the north.

Happy thirteenth, and thanks for sharing in the journey.

 

 

 

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