wax works 6 December 2008
Posted by marisacat in 2008 Election, DC Politics, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, UK.trackback
On The Campaign Trail
In this image, clay head molds of U.S. presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, are displayed at Madame Tussaud’s Studios in London, Monday Oct. 23, 2008. The artists studied hundreds of photos and watched hours of video footage to create the clay head molds, and will use their research to ultimately finish the figures as well. The figure creation process is incredibly intricate, with artists inserting each strand of hair individually, creating just the head of the wax figure can take up to five weeks alone. Materials, such as red silk, are used to create the veins on the eyeballs and knotted rope is used to create the look of veins.
(Madame Tussauds, via AP)
Luv the chit chat on veins…
Marisacat 
LOL David Horowitz. Last three grafs. He’s luving the Obama moves and picks. No really. I got it from Angry Arab.
LOL David Horowitz.
Reading that thread made my brain hurt, especially this guy (you say you want a revolution?):
VERY soon, they are simply going to tell Obama and his supporters that they don’t recognize their authority anymore. With the most heavily armed populace in human history spread over an incredible distance, and distance impossible to hold by any military…..what can they do?
A country like ours requires the vast majority of people cooperate and work together, most of the time. It can’t work any other way. Obama has undermined this to an extreme extent. You see it everywhere in our economy and in the extreme hatred directed toward the man outside any area without high minority populations.
To be blunt. He is not MY president. Increasingly, the US is not MY government. I refuse to cooperate anymore. Millions upon millions agree with me. Obama may have won by a modest majority but still it is only basically half the population. But the other half simply won’t accept him as president and won’t accept a conversion of our democracy into some sick form of marxism. It won’t take much before those sentiments are acted on. We have months, not years.
But I think the point is obvious. “Movement conservativism” is dead and isn’t anything to be afraid of. There will be a lot of fear mongering about people like the one quoted above in order to head off criticism of Obama. But Horowitz is just a joke. He can’t even hold his own “base”. The hard right is in complete and pathetic disarray.
Wowza – what an image!
Presidential prosthetics!
Read a thread over at Movement Kos lately?
Don’t make me laugh TOO hard.
I never buy the labels people put on themselves. That side the Other side. The Whatever side.
Down to saving Kabul?
Read a thread over at Movement Kos lately?
They’re celebrating Nancy Pelosi’s underdog victory over Cindy Sheehan.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/6/55328/2947/214/669991
And alerting the world to the menace posed by David Sirota and Ben Affleck.
One thing I will admit about the right wingers at Horowitz’s site, they do a better fantasy of violent revolution than the left does.
The left thinks you organize big protests behind police barricades that suddenly turn into (undoubtedly color coded) mass insurrections.
The right actually talks about getting out the Constitutionally protected firearms and shooting it out with the Sea Smurfs.
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2008/10/2/amy_goodmans_latest_column_invasion_of_the_sea_smurfs
Three people ran agaisnt La Nan… neither SF Chron nor the SJ Mercury ever acknowleged them. NOR did the major alternative media in SF, THe SF Bay Guardian.. tho it endorsed Sheehan. No interviews and no reports but a single blog entry that I found at some point.
This looks promising. I’ve been reading about this on Indymedia sites and now it’s a featured Yahoo headline.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081207/ap_on_re_us/workers_takeover
CHICAGO – Workers who got three days’ notice that their factory was shutting its doors have occupied the building and say they won’t go home without assurances they’ll get severance and vacation pay.
About 250 union workers occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in shifts Saturday while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind.
Another interesting Yahoo article.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081207/ap_on_re_as/as_korea_mass_executions
The investigative Truth and Reconciliation Commission has thus far verified more than two dozen mass killings of leftists and supposed sympathizers, among at least 100,000 people estimated to have been hastily shot and dumped into makeshift trenches, abandoned mines or the sea after communist North Korea invaded the south in June 1950.
This was actually pretty commonly known among US troops in Korea. Not that they knew any of the specifics but there were always rumors and conspiracy theories and grumbling about it.
I grew up listening to my grandfather talk about it. But it never made it into the general historical consciousness. And most of the Korean war vets I heard talk about this generalized it into racism against Koreans (as in “those animals killed their own people”).
This is the really damning part.
Other once-secret files show that a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel reported giving approval to the killing of 3,500 political prisoners by a South Korean army unit he was advising in Busan, if the North Koreans approached that southern port city, formerly spelled Pusan.
Nir Rosen has a piece up in Times Online:
I would say he tucked Ob in… and got a job out of it.
Might as well laugh… I was about to say Jodi Kantor got paid for this puff piece, but of course she did… :
LOL we’ll be lucky to survive the mess we are in.
Wm Jefferson in LA went down, fwiw...
” With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Cao had almost 50 percent of the vote to Jefferson’s 47 percent.
The 2nd Congressional district, in and around New Orleans, is mostly African-American and heavily Democratic, and Jefferson appeared to be favored to win re-election going into the election.
“The people of the second district were able to transcend party, transcend race,” Cao said after claiming victory Saturday night.”
Last Stand at Kabul–movie title.
Dozens of NATO Supply Trucks Torched in Pakistan–this vulnerability was written about in Asia Times months ago. Somethings are just so predictable.
Putin must be grinning.
The latest from the holy lands:
Hebron settlers accuse IDF of collective punishment
http://www.freespeechzoneblog.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1623
….sleepless in seattle.
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I remember that one at ATImes mattes, I had posted it then. Sometime in Nov they also had an article on how many roads are compromised in Aghanistan… posted that too.
War is not a laughing matter.. but about a year or so into this fucked mess… Harper’s had a long report. I thought it revealing, we had nto even been able to knock the Taliban off the radio. For about two months in the wake of our invasion, air bombing. Then they were back on.
Pretty clear where this was all headed.
More on the Chicago takeover.
The ex-workers say they found out only three days before Friday’s closing that they would be without a job. Some of them also learned they would not get the vacation they’ve earned to date or the insurance coverage they were promised.
These grey areas are ugly. Had the company just held back wages, the workers could have gone to the state labor board but vacation days and insurance?
transcript of Ob on MTP, if any one is interested. He’s back on “glide path”… retracting on those taxes on the rich… shifting on withdrawal from Iraq (by now does anyone even lift their head, I wonder.) and so on.
Well maybe thirty years… rather than 8. LOL
the whole thing was pretty much like that.
The piece de non resistance surely was this:
You bet we are. Down every gully and into every cave. Bunker busters for everyone! what ever makes the MIC happy. Check.
**
as for the Chicago revolt… insurance and paid vacation, which is earned, are covered by state and federal regs. Which is not to say that people don’t get shafted, they do. But by this act of sit ins, or whatever the appropriate term is, they may get some oversight. They certainly are required to give proper notice of a lay off (think it is 60 days, they said).. and they did not.
**
Elsewhere I see that one of the pre orgasmics for Ob, David Corn, has a lament in the Wapo. LOL.
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal
The link to the Corn weep
as for the Chicago revolt… insurance and paid vacation, which is earned, are covered by state and federal regs. Which is not to say that people don’t get shafted, they do. But by this act of sit ins, or whatever the appropriate term is, they may get some oversight. They certainly are required to give proper notice of a lay off (think it is 60 days, they said).. and they did not.
And upaid employees are basically creditors right? Dunno. I’m not a labor lawyer. What happens when a company declares bankruptcy?
If the police try to remove them in a certain president elect’s hometown with the coverage this is getting? That might spark something as the recession starts rolling over the whole country.
Corn:
RFLMAO! Sure, THAT’S gonna happen.
Rev. Jesse Jackson meets with laid-off workers
And Corn is about the 200th person to offer that religious interpretation. Believers. LOL.
”Magical Negro”, as Davd E said in his LAT opinion piece March 2007….. but all the blogsnotteries could call David Ehrenstein was was “racist”. The very same thing Rush Limbaugh called the piece. As did “liberal” commentators. Last I looked he, DE, was black, jewish and whatever else.
I think the greatest tedium is the flatness of response to everything. Locked in by TV and punditry. Flat.
That’s the same line Steve Clemons was using on Democracy Now.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/2/change_or_more_of_the_same
Obama kind of carved out a McCain-like position on Pakistan, on the role and future of the Pentagon. He actually wanted to increase the size of the military force, etc. I think we are going to see a lot of Pentagon hugging strategies from this group. What is interesting though, it is not a status quo preserving group. I think if you were to imagine some of the big Nixon goes to China moments that this country needs, particularly with Iran, with countries like Cuba, delivering on Syria and getting on a Libya- like tracks, this team seems to me more able to do that kind of thing than many other assemblies.
Dunno why these guys are being so clueless.
I still think McCain’s losing was a good thing but there’s a real difference between thinking that Obama’s winning makes it easier to organize on the left and actually expecting him to do anything.
A best case scenarior, it would seem to me would look something like this.
(From corporate America’s perspective) Obama’s job is to control the labor bureacrats.
(From Obama’s perspective) The labor bureaucrats are there to control the workers.
(From corporate America’s perspective) Obama’s job is also to squeeze the workers. At some point, you squeeze the workers so hard that they rebel. Then the labor bureaucrats and, in turn, Obama have to give concessions before things get out of hand (either that or use out and out repression).
If things really do get out of hand, Obama has to make concessions very quickly and start squeezing the corprorate class or he has to roll out the troops.
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there are different kinds of bankrutpcy. I don’t know what type the business has declared.
There’s an open Senate seat in Illinois.
Challenge Jesse Jackson Jr. to campaign for it at the site of the factory sit in.
If he won’t, what are the rules for Senate appointments?
Is there any third party candidate who can go down to the site and campaign for the Senate seat?
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LOL he’ll say he is from hawai’i … or Indonesia. A staff person was mistaken and said he was from Chicago. he’ll side step it somehow.
If MTP had traction or was in any way real, he would have been asked about it today.
well frankly Gettelfinger does not make “labor” look any smarter than the 20 mil a year hogs that lined up in front of the government pay hogs in the hearing room.
I am calling for cannibal hogs. Send all these shits to a factory farm and let reality take over. In the pens.
LOL he’ll say he is from hawai’i … or Indonesia.
He’ll produce a Kenyan birth certificate and get on a plane to Nairobi?
It strikes me that the absolute best case scenario over the next year (and I’m not fooling myself that it’s likely) would be a rolling wave of takeovers like this supported by mass protests on the scale of May 1, 2006.
I think there was probably more central planning for those protests than most people think but you could still work around the labor bureaucrats using Myspace, Facebook, etc.
Fineman says Don’t Worry Be Happy Ob is Selling Brands. Ingredient brands, driver brands, legacy brands.
As I said, I am calling for shipping all these perfumed and periwigged louts (that includes political leadership) to factory farms.
LOL He’s all about saving the greenback. Suuuure.
Spying on Pacifists, Environmentalists and Nuns
I think there was probably more central planning for those protests than most people think but you could still work around the labor bureaucrats using Myspace, Facebook, etc.
The planning was discussed at the time. Spanihs language radio, they went around politicans…tho they did in some ways cut the Church in. Archbishop Mahoney played it up. Then seemed to step back.
The boomerang payback (because old print media was quite nice, at the itme, LOL, they simply waited and as one person reminded me, no one wants to screw with Latino enlistment) was the hideous vicious raids that have been almost non stop. And not too much from Mahoney. Must be busy diddling boys.
Reports are mixed, but it seems that a significant number of illegals have vaporised, back over the border. Some reports say fewer come. But not too many reports because god knows we have pinned our soul of liberty on that fucking wall.
So it is all a mixed bag. I hope for a breathru someday.
Oh this will sting.
LOL if CA does not place in the top 10, on its own, we will be weeping. Too.
wow, below FRANCE?!?! You can almost hear the wailing clear across the Atlantic.
Taleb suggesting Roubini is an optimist
In another post about Rev JJ visiting the strikers, I found:
I wasn’t clear on where the 60 day thing was coming from.
oops, screwed up the blockquotes
On Heels of Bailout, Citi Raises Rates on Millions of Cardholders
Hell. Maybe they could post
WORK HARD AND DON’T FUCKING STEAL.
As a rule. Tentative. Try it out for a week see if the gaseous hogs could do it.
It was Carter that cut off the hard liquor in the WH. he wanted to cut wine too, but someone forcibly stopped him.
LOL. Truly the American people should live with their Jesuses. All of them.
I don’t even smoke, but you gotta love their priorities. Preaching first. Keep your hand in the till and your thumb on the scale.
who the fuck cares is he smokes? They don’t seem to care that Bush is occasionally photographed with drinks in his hand (which I don’t care about either, but …).
Jeez, I don’t care if he has orgies while stoned on hashish … if he does his fucking job.
Well, they all – the Obs – swore on Bibles they are the Cleavers. Which has so many jokes inside it…
I have to say when Carter cut the hard liquor I laughed like hell. From grizzled old media types and industry people to ambassadors. No highball for you sir!
Montana Judge Rules Doctor-Assisted Suicides Are Legal
Neoliberalism and its consequences
In one way, not bad on Obama’s part.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/1318766,barack-obama-republic-window-doors-120708.article
“When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right,” Obama said Sunday at a news conference announcing his new Veterans Affairs director. “What’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.
A head of state coming out and openly supporting a factory takeover? That’s not something I could imagine from Reagan.
But of course he doesn’t acknowledge that his (and McCain’s) “bailout” could more accurately be called “squeezing workers to support bankers” and that he’s partly respnosible for these people not getting paid in the first place.
In another way, he sounds a bit like Bush talking about the “bad intelligence” that “led us into Iraq.”
When you have a financial system that is shaky, credit contracts. Businesses large and small start cutting back on their plants and equipment and their workforces. That’s why it’s so important for us to maintain a strong financial system.
I think this NY Times editorial is probably right.
The Mormons pushed Proposition 8 through but the resulting fallout was to make the split between blacks and gays a lot worse.
They came to the polls in record numbers to support Barack Obama, and they brought with them a fiercely held and enduring antipathy toward homosexuality: 7 in 10 blacks voted in support of traditional marriage. Whether that was the game-changer or not is a question for near-constant debate. Many gay activists have begun quietly to suggest that had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic nominee, Prop 8 would not have passed.
Stealth liberalism.
If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard of this concept in the past ten years. And jiu-jitsu. The relentless search for hidden meanings in politicians’ very clear actions and intentions. A curious malady of the white male intellectual (or those just playing the home game).
I once worked with a guy who was very sharp, well-read, and a deep skeptic about a lot of things… but oh he loved his X-Files. And not just for the jokes or chemistry — no, he was a True Believer in some sort of grand and brilliantly convoluted long-term story arc that was going to have a big payoff at the end in which all loose ends would be neatly tied up.
I’m not mocking the search for meaning; I believe it is part of the human condition. I just wonder what people’s threshold for bullshit is. When do they finally give up and try something else?
7 in 10 blacks voted in support of traditional marriage.
This has been disproved over and over again. It was drawn by CNN from a ridiculously small sampling. Which is not to say that black churches (and Mormon and Catholic and evangelical and rinky dink storefrotns and fucking religious communes of nuts) did not hideously preach for Prop 8 and against humanism.
They did. it was religion that won Prop 8.
***
Sorry for delay on moderated snags. I had to shut down and reboot several times.. think it is a cache problem. ugh.
I’m not mocking the search for meaning; I believe it is part of the human condition. I just wonder what people’s threshold for bullshit is. When do they finally give up and try something else?
Well, in this case it will come when there are actual grassroots social movements that have enough clout to influence the political establishment.
Hoping for some sort of “stealth liberalism” is simply a form of passivity. It’s worse than the idea that a network of websites can “push the political establishment to the left” since at least the latter assumes some kind of active role on your part.
Nobody on the “left” in the late 1960s cared whether or not Nixon really had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam because they were mobilizing millions of people to protest the war in Vietnam.
Eviction Day: Foreclosure Crisis Forces Man From Home
This has been disproved over and over again. It was drawn by CNN from a ridiculously small sampling.
What was the actual percentage of blacks who voted for Proposition 8?
But Obama COULD bridge the conflict between the two groups by giving a speech on “black homophobia” similar to the one he gave on race back during the Jeremiah Wright fiasco.
After all, he did give a speech on deadbeat black fathers.
He points to the fact that in his black fathers ‘come home why dontcha’ shit.. (page 15 A of the Wapo has the same slobber today, quoteing Moynihan, Ob is such a breakthru) that he also tells them to be nice to the gays. he says this is doing a lot. Maybe he sprinkles out that DNA when he preaches.
And he tells the gays, when they ask why he declines interviews to gay publications and groups (he gave one in the dead of the night to Advocate, I linked to it at the time, it was hilarious, he said the Fed governemnt leads and has lead on Civil Rights), that he does more and better. He tells blacks to come home ot the chilluns and be nice to the gays. Then he tells the gay critics that he does that.
Come on, keep up with Ob. He plays the same games with all groups. It’s a s l o w game but it sells.
Royalty must stick together:
Hillary Clinton — A Champion for Human Security by Queen Noor of Jordan
All typed by her PR assistant w/ a straight face, I’m sure.
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Go look up the diary that Shannika did at Dkos on the sampling that produced, quick as propaganda, the 7 in 10. Once it made it ot mainstream media it was used over and over again. Because it served a purpose.
If you want to believe that because you read it, fine.
Or, spend some time at the interactive maps, LAT or SofS. Counties with no blacks in them went overwhelmingly for 8. YES blacks, some and church going overwhelmingly, are homophobic.
Quel news. We have ebvangelicals up the wazoo out here. Filipino, Asian mission converts… S American pentecostals..
We don’t have enough black to MATTER.
You can find it (the diary). I don’t keep links anymore, I put them here and move on. Plus I had to fully reboot from the original CDs, a few weeks ago.. what little I had saved went…
That figure appeared over night. If you cannot spot clear propaganda I sure can.
I think a lot of gay activists are actually being simplistic when they blame black homophobia on religion.
Religion’s part of it but there are secular reasons also.
1.) A racially oppressed group is usually desexualized in the dominent culture. A lot of the leftist and black nationalist culture in the 1960s was pretty violently homophobic. Blacks fear homosexuality partly because of the specter of being “unmanned” or castrated.
2.) Simple political oppression. The FBI forced MLK to distance himself from Bayard Rustin. He was never able to address the issue honestly and never tried to the way he did about Vietnam.
Shannika
Is that the correct spelling. I’m not getting anything at
shannika.dailykos.com
and nothing is coming up on a search
Two “k”s
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/7/34645/1235/704/656272
OK. I’ll read this.
Simple political oppression. The FBI forced MLK to distance himself from Bayard Rustin. He was never able to address the issue honestly and never tried to the way he did about Vietnam.
Well if you want to go back to the 60s and fight two big battles at once… when there was barely any groundwork laid for CR for the formerly enslaved.. be my guest.
Coretta came out fully, publicly, for SSM in 2005 iirc…no one cared, the black preachers sure did not carry the message. After her org was one fo the very few in the south, much less GA, that would help gays fired from jobs. For which, iirc, the majority of states have no protections.
The paucity of secular black leadership is a shame. A real one.
I skimmed shanikka’s diary.
She definitely refutes the idea that blacks were the deciding factor in Prop 8’s passing.
But I don’t see her arguing against the 70% to 30% figure.
But looking at the CNN poll, it seems they sampled 31% of white men and 6% of black women, so I guess I stand corrected.
I guess the black vs. gay split is a nice pat concept I wanted to believe.
She definitely refutes the idea that blacks were the deciding factor in Prop 8’s passing.
As I said. The demographics of the state deny it. If you want to believe it was 7 out of 10, that anyone knows… go ahead.
The definitive reality was the conjoint interests of Archbishop Niederauer, who used to preside over SLC, the Elders of Utah and the big money that poured in. Less talked about is the ground game the Mormons ran. Addin evanglicals and other fundies… and .. bingo.
The lousy campaign from the No on 8 – leadership, sucked in Dems… gays lulled to believe it would come out their way, bad media, Gavin a sell out – could have been foretold. Collusion and sell out.
Well, if I believed the propaganda in that NY Times editorial (and if the editorial writer believed it), I’m sure a lot of gay activists believed it too.
That makes proposition 8 a pretty good work of “divide and conquer”.
I don’t want to read through the 2000 Kos comments because I have a feeling how ugly it got.
I did not say people did not believe it. HOWEVER by now it is pushing a lazy lie. Esp in an editorial in the NYT. Not that they have standards. But they are working to keep it going.
Not like division – and diversion – is new.
Americans believe all kinds of stupid shit, which is why we have the kleptocracy we have running nearly every institution in this country.
Myth of the Black Gay Divide
Sherry Wolf
Banking spins destruction myth: Hoocoodanode?
NAMBLAthon Man
Decides to step up, after the national media starts paying attention:
Interesting if they took what was left and ran to set up a new company.
Wright visits Trinity pulpit, lashes media
Citing the revelation to Mary by the angel Gabriel that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God, Wright said Mary’s disbelief was similar to the doubts some faithful shared about the future of Trinity after Wright’s retirement and the possibility of a black man being elected president.
“Our legitimate questions tend to be asked from the vantage point of limited horizons,” said Wright during the 7:30 a.m. service. “Mary had a limited horizon. She couldn’t see how it was possible.”
LOL Blame the woman. Even if she is the mother of Gawd all fucking mighty. Fortunately I never could stand the Rev Wright. Or his ilk. Even hawking weekend suburban militancy and “liberation”, as far as the collection plate.
I notice at the end he is confused as to Hiroshima dates vs Pearl Harbor dates.
Oh well he bears the weight of teaching what’s right to “god’s people” as he put it. So very busy. Busy.. busy.
.. and again…
He implied that his previous use of derogatory language to describe Italians in a past sermon referred to the Roman oppression Luke condemned.
“Emperor Augustus in Rome–that’s in Italy, dizzy blond on the View,” Wright said, presumably referring to conservative television personality Elisabeth Hasselback, who has railed about Wright on the ABC daytime talk show.
LOL … he’s a funny one, that Reverend.
new post…
LINK
:twist:
I trolled thru the comments to the Wright piece: