Sunday... ;)

From the sweet little Galveston beach getaway (or, it was .. pre Ike) that bay linked to the other day, Texas White Pelican B&B

You have to love the “change” that is coming, from the Politico email:

‘Like the apostles of Jesus who expected their Messiah to return in triumph before they themselves died, many liberals are almost certain to be disappointed in a President Obama. ‘I think right now people are in a pragmatic mood, not an ideological mood,’ says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. Perhaps, but on the off chance that ideology is on the mind of a voter or two, Axelrod’s candidate has taken care to avoid the L word.

Obama opposes gay marriage; talks about tax cuts, God and veterans’ benefits; and is spending money to try to remain competitive in traditionally Republican states such as Virginia, North Carolina and even West Virginia, where Hillary Clinton trounced him earlier this year.

‘I think he will govern a little right of center,’ says Harold Ford Jr., the former Tennessee congressman and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. ‘He is not an ideologue.’

… Understanding the forces behind the usual Republican hold on the White House explains much about the country, and is essential to Obama’s potential success if he were to win, for the most effective presidents have had an appreciation of the nation’s intrinsic tendency toward conservatism.

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AND I do believe The New Yorker has hit bottom.  Packer embraces Frum.  It’s been a long and greasy slide to the magazine being nothing other than election season, shallow, party affiliated shills devotees masticating.  Packer is a cowardly standard bearer and, in this, two greased pigs consummate congealment.  Three, actually.  The magazine, Packer and Frum – and there is not enough butter sauce on earth to make that meal taste good….

Frum is doing something that’s quite rare across the spectrum of American politics: holding his side to the same standard as the other side. I was happy to read him firing back at his new detractors on the right; I was also happy to see him telling Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC, to elevate the tone and substance of her new talk show. Having written a mistaken book about his former boss (Frum was a speechwriter during Bush’s first term), he has reckoned with a core reason for the failure of Bush’s Presidency: the White House worshipped at the false altar of strategic communications, asserting its own version of reality rather than grappling with contrary arguments and facts. The fact that Frum is now being attacked for asking his party to stop doing the same thing shows how long the road to recovery is going to be for Republicans.

This is the magazine that consistently, across the years, opposed the Vietnam war.

Bravo!  Punditry, and it’s bawling baby wars, is the Colossus of the transformational New Newer Newest World.

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From bay, from the previous thread:

its a mark of “distinction” for the democrats to be lauded by a former officer who, in response to the 1968 letter informing gen creighton abrams of “routine and pervasive brutality against Vietnamese civilians” is on the record saying:

“In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

*** close of comment ***

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And Madman had this link, I have added a snip or two…

Cronytopia: What the World Knows — and Americans Don’t — About the Bailout

So while Americans looking at the nations’s “leading newspaper,” the New York Times, found a vast belching of psychobabble and personal gossip about Cindy McCain taking up the front page, the rest of the world was learning this:

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

The Guardian errs a bit in that last sentence, of coure. Almost all of the “conditions” mentioned in connection with the bailout have no teeth whatsoever, no enforcement mechanism, no real penalities. They are more properly termed “suggestions,” or rather, “PR exercises that we hope our Wall Street lords will deign to at least pretend to follow for a short time, until the heat is off.”

And Chris Floyd is right, up there, in identifying the diversion, one of the big ones this year, was Woman, in all her parts and pieces. Splayed and displayed. I don’t have to agree with them politically (and I agree with NO ONE on the political scene) to see what is happening.

As an antidote, I’d recommend renting Bardot’s Et Dieu … crea la femme [And God Created Woman]. It helps to view it with other than a scorched earth creating/desecrating American eye…  It’s not a Christian film, to say the least. It’s 52 years old and, under a harsh gaze, suffers for it, but one of the reviews I popped up today had this observation:

Coincidentally, the script shares several elements with another film that came out the same year, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. Both have at their center wild young women characters who, jilted by unrequited love, use tantrums, lasciviousness and wild mambo dancing to disrupt the equilibrium of the social network depicted in each film. (It so happens that both films locate industrial capitalism as a locus of power in which women are largely marginalized).

Bingo on the last line, and in an era of global militarisation, women (and gays and children, it is all linked) will take it in the teeth.  As much as ever.  We just don’t fit in (they say), no matter how hard we try — witness the thoroughly corporatised Carly Fiorina, probably wintering this year in Tulsa, or Timbuktu, shamed and absolutely banished.

And yes I know all about Bardot’s politics, known it for years, watched her be tried – for defamation, inciting race hatred -  and pay fines in the French courts… I could not care less.

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