This is REALLY Special

Last night, I went to see Tina Turner perform at The Staples Center. She's amazing - really connected with the crowd, despite the size of the venue. And, at 69 years of age, she clearly loves what she does. Her version of the Beatles Song "Help" was amazing - completely re-invented the song.

So that made the following message from Ringo Starr REALLY special. Pay attention, he says it's really important.



Well. Isn't that just so perky? Asshole.

His Name is Mr. Bean

And he's a love muffin who purrs all the time, and has made sitting in my lap his number one priority.

Pictures will follow. Thank you all for the suggestions. He's a bit of a clown, too.

Name the Cat Contest

I adopted a 7 month old male kitten today. He's at the vet being neutered, I bring him home tomorrow. He's black, with gold eyes, very playful, very affectionate, and sweet. However, I need to name him. The Shelter is calling him Ooogey, which doesn't fit.

So I am holding a "Name the Male Kitten" contest. Winner will be awarded the cereal prize (nothin, honey) unless I design an appropriate award. Help please.

Mellow Sunday Sounds

It is one of those weekends where I feel disconnected, strange, and distant. The election has me unsettled. In 2000, I was certain Gore would win; I could not imagine a nation so superficial that it would allow Frat Boy George W. Bush to take the White House. In 2004, I was convinced the people had had enough, and that Kerry would win. I will continue to do all I can to help Obama win the election, but the truth is that at this point I don't hold out hope. I don't, and it's because I think that the majority of our citizens are driven by fear.

We demand our sports heroes be elite, the best of the best. We expect our entertainers to live an elite life, to be unobtainable so that we can fantasize. But when it comes to our Nation's leaders, we think it's okay to turn the reins over to somebody we might like to have a beer with. I don't want to have a beer with my President. I want him, or her, to be smarter than I am, to understand complex world issues, to be calm in the face of conflict and to inspire. I want my President to be visionary.

But today I don't hold out hope. And so, I give you this lovely song:

So My Campaign Manager Doesn't Get Worried

I recently raised a question about why certain images are posted more frequently than others. My campaign manager suggested that I use the interwebs to do a google search (thus distancing myself from John McCain) specific to my own preferences.

So I did that search. Handy little tool, those Googles. Really.

I thought if I started small, with this lovely little self-portrait my heart-throb dashed off, it would make this post have at least a semblance of intellectual versisitude.



That makes it easy to slide into a man in kilts. Nice legs. Really.



From there, we can segue into the shy guy, hiding behind the bust, keeping it all modest and coy:



Before leaping into nearly naked man at the beach with friends:




Oh, well, as much as I adore Alan Rickman, he just is not the beefy stud I know many of us long to gaze at. I personally would love a committed relationship with Mr. Rickman, complete with regular sex, but for just gaping, please god, give me this:

A message from the secretary of Strawberries and cream

Gramma likes this pikshure ame coz it looks like I giving a speech. I like it too coz I rode my big wheel an I like it it pink. I made a apple pie with my mommy we went to the apple fesval, an I go downa really big slide. So we made a pie. An we don't much like the new ads Senator McCain is running coz they aren't true about Bill Ayers an Rezko an The Bailout an as much as I like Strawberries I think Senator Obama has to talk about McCain's scandal. I mean the S&L scandal but so Obama's got a new ad that starts today about it. It's long. I don't have time to look at it now, I have to go to skool.

Onze upon a time

Monsieur Graves has tagged me with a charming little meme that asks for eleven things you might not know about me. Well, of course you wouldn't know them, unless you've been to my house, and no, I cannot see Russia from my house. Hell, I can barely see Catalina Island, due to the fog, but that's weather-related. So, but, I have to answer these one-word questions, which I am certain are a nefarious plot to link my candidacy to William Ayers.

1. Clothes Shop: Turley Road in Chicago. Yes, it's true. A hip designer in the Windy City. Also, caBI.

2. Furniture Shop: Hmmm. I haven't got a clue how to answer this. I used to like antiques, so I would rummage various antique stores. Now I want to sell everything I own, every stick of furniture and start over with just a more relaxed, beach-cottage look. So I dunno.

3. Sweet: are ya kidding me? Chocolat. It's a food group.

4. City: Well, I live in San Pedro, California, which is really Los Angeles. I LOVE Chicago, but it's too fucking cold. So there.

5. Drink: well, not since July 18, 1988. Oh, that's not what you meant. Okay, then it's gotta be Root Beer.

6. Music: I could listen to Yo-Yo Ma all day long. I mean, forever.

7. TV Series: toss-up between Sex and the City and The Sopranos. Oh, unless you mean currently? Um. Oh. Er.

8. Film: This is really, really, really hard. I love films. From Casablanca to Lawrence of Arabia; from Oklahoma to Singin in the Rain; from It Happened One Night to Gone With The Wind; from Dogma to Die Hard - I really can't pick just one. However, for 2008, I really loved Burn After Reading.

9. Workout: I walk. I try to get in 3 miles every day. Really.

10: Pastries: Chocolate cake. Yum. Yum. Yum.

Update: Dammital, Distributorcap noticed I forgot #11. Here it is:

11. Coffee: not for me. Tea all the way. Robust, Irish Breakfast. Yum.


Now I have to pick five suckers bloggers to play along. Hmmm. Sort of a "tic-tac, no trade-back" sort of thing, eh? Okay, Katie Schwartz, Border Explorer, Liberality, Susan, and Dianne.

Go forth, spread the meme.

A Cool Hand At The Tiller

Last night, during the debate, John McCain said "we need a cool hand at the tiller." Hmmm. People who know him say he has a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty. John McCain is a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.



I don't want the McCain/Palin team anywhere NEAR the White House. We must act decisively November 4th. In Ohio, you can already vote. Go DO it.

Leave it to the British to say what the US Media will not

Normally, I never take a complete article and reprint it. Today I am, because this about says it all. Friday, October 3rd, Michelle Goldberg of The Guardian writes:

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.

It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.

In pronouncing upon a debate, they don't try and determine whether a candidate's responses correspond to existing reality, or whether he or she is capable of talking about subjects such as the deregulation of the financial markets or the devolution of the war in Afghanistan. The criteria are far more vaporous. In this case, it was whether Palin could avoid utterly humiliating herself for 90 minutes, and whether urbane commentators would believe that she had connected to a public that they see as ignorant and sentimental. For the Alaska governor, mission accomplished.

There is indeed something mesmerising about Palin, with her manic beaming and fulsome confidence in her own charm. The force of her personality managed to slightly obscure the insulting emptiness of her answers last night. It's worth reading the transcript of the encounter, where it becomes clearer how bizarre much of what she said was. Here, for example, is how she responded to Biden's comments about how the middle class has been short-changed during the Bush administration, and how McCain will continue Bush's policies:

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Evidently, Palin's pre-debate handlers judged her incapable of speaking on a fairly wide range of subjects, and so instructed to her to simply disregard questions that did not invite memorised talking points or cutesy filibustering. They probably told her to play up her spunky average-ness, which she did to the point of shtick - and dishonesty. Asked what her achilles heel is - a question she either didn't understand or chose to ignore - she started in on how McCain chose her because of her "connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?"

None of Palin's children, it should be noted, is heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq, and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described "fuckin' redneck". Palin is a woman who can't even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn't show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

In Beauty and The Beast, we knew which one was the Beast

JoAnn Wypijewski's September 10th, 2008, article in The Nation shows John McCain's rampantly hypocritcal morality for what it is. As I read through the article, once again I was infuriated by his cynicism. He didn't pick Sarah Palin for her qualifications. He picked her because 'Palin is the sex symbol they've been waiting for, better looking and more real than the ghastly gasbags Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.'

Remember John's first wife? Carol? The one he dumped because she was in a wheel chair when he returned from Viet Nam, and the 'sight of her appalled him?' He replaced her with Cindy. Wypijewski writes:

At 42 McNasty, as he was called in high school, took up with 24-year-old Cindy, a former junior rodeo queen, and, having boosted his image and his net worth via a marriage vow, soon reverted to the pattern of insults and macho egotism that has typified most of his life. He denigrated her education at USC as a tour through "the University of Spoiled Children." For all but one of several miscarriages, he left her on her own. When she was popping ten to fifteen pills a day to mask her pain and "do everything he wanted," he never noticed. In 1992, in a rage over her gentle teasing about his thinning hair, he exploded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt," a one-two punch hurled in front of three journalists and two aides but unreported until recently, by Cliff Schecter in The Real McCain. On the campaign trail in June he joked about "beating my wife" and took umbrage when others failed to grasp the simple good fun in the remark. In early August he said he'd encouraged Cindy to enter the Miss Buffalo Chip beauty pageant at the high-revving, flesh-swinging biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. It might have been a fine quip except that up on the stage with her daughter Meghan, staring out toward the throng where a sign urged Show Ur Tits 4 McCain, Cindy had the thin, fixed smile of endurance, not joy. Just before the Palin pick, Mrs. McCain was so brittle that a supporter's energetic handshake put her in a cast. With the press and vast swaths of the country swooning over the Obama family, John needed a new queen.

And the new queen is Miss Wasilla 1984, a woman who believes dinosaurs and man walked together on an Earth created 6000 years ago. Lovely. Even Cindy McCain feels this is a perfect match.

She is Rush Limbaugh's wet dream. "Sarah Palin: babies, guns, Jesus, hot damn!" he crowed. "We're the ones that have the babe on the ticket!" Never before has a political woman been pictured so often in a T-shirt, armed--Rambette. Never before in a major political figure has the image of Mother been merged so readily with fantasies from porno. "You Go, GILF," proclaim buttons on Republican chests, that is, Governor (or Grandmother) I'd Like to Fuck. McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis said that "this election is not about issues; this election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates," as cynical a statement as any Republican has made. This election is not about issues, it's about personality.

JoAnn Wypijewski refers to the Biblical Book of Esther. King Ahasuerus dumped his queen, Vashti, and held a beauty pagent to replace her. Esther was his Miss Wasilla, 1984. However, Sarah Palin, a biblical literalist, will know the outcome of this story. Esther enables her people to engage in bloody slaughter against the king's other subjects, maneuvers for the public execution of his closest adviser and the man's sons, sees her de facto father become the de facto king; in sum, sabotages and unmans Ahasuerus.

We have seen Sarah Palin in action. She ranges between absolutely idiotic to charming and cagey. She's played all sides against the middle, from using sexuality as a tool to claiming her Christian values, from supporting the Bridge to Knowwhere to opposing it when the politics of that support became untenable. She's Anita Bryant with a high-powered rifle. And, she can stick the knife in your back, and twist it with a smile.

John McCain may have met his match, and he may have unleashed this disaster on all of us.

Diva Jood's Campaign

This is the BEST News Coverage Shit from Shinola has had. I'm so impressed. (hat tip to Betmo

A Cub Fan's First Sentence: Wait til next year.

Truly, the worst fold of a team since the 1969 Cubs. Or maybe the 1984 Cubs against San Diego. Or, perhaps the Cubs vs. Steve Bartman. Or... year, after year, after year. After year, after year, after year...

My clothes are torn, I'm in black, I'm in mourning. Don't gloat, I'll call out a hit man on you.

So You Think You're Jackson Pollack?

You can be Jackson Pollack for a minute but not really. Try it, it's fun!

A Message from the Secretary of Strawberries and Cream

My gramma is deserpesed depersed sad. Don't make her sad. She's sad because the Chicago Cubs forgot how to play baseball and aren't doing too good. I can sing take me outa ballgame take me outacrowd real loud but it isn't helping. And gramma is sad because John McPain's runner mape isn't too smart but she was winking at everbody when she debate Joe Biden and talking about Joe Sixpack but Joe Biden is kind of Joe Sixpack and it scared Gramma to see Sarah Palin ack sorta like Raygun. All charmy chummy cute. It was icky.

But gramma had lunch with Alicia from Last Left Turn Before Hooterville and they had fun and got hand massages and ate sammiches and salads and had cookies. I like cookies too. That's them in the picture below.


They look happy, but it was before the debate and baseball.

Declare Yourself

h/t to D-Cup. Now, pass it on.

How to prepare for tonight's debate

I've been a bad Diva. I've not visited anybody, and didn't blog at all yesterday. The reason is because tonight is a big debate, and my running mate, Nunly hasn't been invited. Still, I wanted to find a way to help everyone prepare. Here it is: You can channel your inner Sarah Palin and get ready for ANY debate.

But it is also October, and yesterday, an October Surprise. The Cubs were bludgeoned by the Dodgers in game 1 of the Division Series, and dug themselves into a pretty deep hole. Where in the world was Ryan Dempster? The man who never walks anybody walked seven, and gave up a Grand Slam in the 7 - 2 loss. I'm sick. Who gives a shite about the World Economy and various Creditors when baseball is at stake? (Randal, you knew I would have to get an Alan Rickman reference in somewhere.)

Nevertheless: IF someone asks YOU about your foreign policy experience, you can always respond

**Alaska that we work with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy independence that I've been working on for these years as the governor of this country, and victory in the stringent oversight, making sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would allow terrorists to be able to go back in history and if you really think I can give you examples of things that can be looked to as the solution to the mission, the mission is to control and to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world is and how important it is about doing a lot of background work first and shoring up our economy.

**computer generated response based on probabilities calculated from Sarah Palin's actual speech.

The Price of Right, by Alicia Morgan

Alicia Morgan, of Last Left Before Hooterville has raised a compelling question in her book, The Price of Right. The question seems simple: "Why do people consistently vote against their own best interests?" The answer seems simple as well: FEAR.

But Alicia shows us, chapter after chapter, that this response of fear is much more complex than we realize at surface. She talks about the language of fear. She talks about the personalities of self-described Conservatives and self-described Liberals, equating them with Farmers and Hunters in an archetypical sense. Traditionally, the Farmer had to follow a strict schedule as set by nature. The Hunter had to rely on lightening fast reflexes, instinct and the ability to change. These personalities are quite different; the Farmer will respond to an Authoritative figure while the Hunter will not.

Alicia has done her research, and she has written a compelling tale of how the Liberals have lost their "hunting" muscles - how we liberals have gotten lazy with mind-numbing comfort in an essentially "farming" community. How we liberals must begin the hunt for Truth and Change in earnest. But what I like most about Alicia's book is this: she's one of us. She's a musician, a mother, a wife, a blogger. She's struggling to make ends meet. She's not loaded with degrees and credentials and fancy language. She's one of us, and she's channelled her impatience into answering the question. She does it in language that is compelling in its accessibility. Follow the link. Get the book. Read it, and give it to an "undecided" friend. Give it to a Republican who is becoming afraid of his or her own party. Give it to a Hockey Mom who is appalled by Sarah Palin. Give it to a Democrat who puts their dislike of Obama ahead of the outcome of the election. Give it to anyone who can think.

Alicia has spoken for many of us, and I am proud to call her my friend.

Henry Paulson, Mortgage Broker

Looks like Henry Paulson's going to have more than 7 houses on his hands. Yes, it's true. Treasury Secretary Paulson is about to become the most powerful mortgage financier ever.

Paulson's plan has gone from an eco-friendly three pages to over 100 pages of detail, supposedly putting all kinds of restraint and oversight on him, but the dead trees give him mostly what he wanted: $700 billion, and the authority to spend it has he sees fit.

(dream sequence: Sarah Palin calls Henry Paulson: "So, Henry, ya know, Todd's back has been killing him and he wants to get out of the oil fields, so can ya give him about a billion to start a bank with? He doesn't know a thing about banking, ya know, but hey, we can see Russia from our house so that's gotta count fer something." Paulson responds, "Of course, Sarah. I'd do anything for you and First Dude.")

Under the terms of the "compromise", and I use that term loosely,

any firm selling troubled assets to the government would have to give Washington the right to take an ownership stake in the firm -- a more sweeping requirement than had been expected.

This doesn't please the administration because they fear that healthy companies will not participate (translation: Paulson can't acquire healthy companies), which will reduce the effectiveness of their attempt at world domination the rescue effort.

On the one hand, the legislation requires him to combat the nationwide wave of home foreclosures by pushing mortgage service companies to rewrite some loans and to cut the interest rates or even the principal for financially strapped homeowners. On the other hand, it gives him the politically explosive power to cut deals with foreign, not just U.S., banks in some cases.

It gives Paulson unprecedented power. And it makes me nervous that the Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, at the end of Bush's disasterous administration, is being given the reins.

"This is not about a bailout of Wall Street," declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). "It's a 'buy-in' so we can turn our economy around."

Geeze, I want what she's been smoking.

The measure's centerpiece -- its "troubled asset relief program" -- Paulson "is authorized to take such actions as the secretary deems necessary" to carry out the effort, including hiring, contracting and assigning companies to act as agents of the government, as well as buying, holding and selling assets.

This makes me nervous. Very nervous. To paraphrase the kid in "The Sixth Sense", I see greedy people. I see Halliburton. I see Blackwater marching into banks and taking over. Yes, I own a lovely tin foil hat.

And while the measure requires Paulson to "maximize assistance for homeowners . . . and minimize foreclosures," the very same sentence says the Treasury has to make sure that taxpayers are not stuck with any additional costs, which makes any substantial additional aid to homeowners unlikely.

Hey, I thought Republicans wanted LESS government, not more. If this "compromise" bill is approved, it will extend the Government's reach well into the mortgage business. I'm very nervous.

More on the economy

The Economy, by Diva Jood

Once upon a time, the US Currency was linked to gold. But on August 15th, 1971, President Richard (I am not a crook) Nixon had the bright idea to close the gold window and take the US Currency off the Gold Standard, to which it had been linked since 1782. The rule was that we could only print up to four times the value of what was in our gold reserves.

By unlinking US Currency from Gold, Nixon effectively defaulted on our promise to foreign lenders to redeem dollars for gold. Now, we could simply print money whenever we felt like it. Need to pay for a new war? No problem, let's go down to the basement and print up some new trillion dollar bills and bomb the bejezus out of Iraq.

Some of our creditors aren't happy. "The Dollar cannot remain solely the problem of others," said Nicholas Sarkozy before a joint session of Congress in November, 2007. Nicky was referring to Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, John Connally's remark that the Dollar was America 's currency "but your problem." Sarkozy said "monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be its victims."

Did he have a Crystal Ball? Could Sarkozy, that Frenchman, have predicted this current economic meltdown that threatens our very large way of life? I mean, really, what happens when Governor Schwartzenegger cannot afford his Hummer, and has to actually take a fuel efficient car to work?

Whatever. I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I'm stretched pretty thin at the moment. I have bills and sporadic income. Still, I have hope. Didn't Obama tell me to get hope? I did, I went to the store and got me some hope and took a tremendous leap of faith to work independently.

But if McCain pulls this election out of his ass and winds up in the White House, I'm going to sell my hope for gold.

thanks, Dcap