Glenn Beck

My goodness, this dillweed is the worst of them all. He's smug, self absorbed, uses "humor" as a cudgel and reduces his guests and audience to the lowest common denominator.

He's the poster boy for the new American Media splooge.

I'm all for sustainabilty

But I'm not into ugly.

Goodbye Marcell, indeed.

iPod output

Here's my Friday random ten...

Fight Test-------Flaming Lips
It's Alright------The Redwalls
Pony St.---------Elvis Costello
Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?-----The Cramps
25 Minutes to Go-----Johnny Cash
Spanish Bombs-----The Clash
Father Oblivion-----Frank Zappa
Steam Engenius-----Modest Mouse
Chocolate Jesus-----Tom Waits
Sinsemilla-----Black Uhuru

Speaking of the Cramps, Here's a nice piece about Lux, Poison Ivy and growing up weird in Ohio. Somebody really ought to write the authoritative study on the Ghoulardi/NE Ohio Punk scene one of these days. It's really quite a remarkable linkage.

As Atrios likes to say

Rock On.

I just was listening to, "Living through Another Cuba". XTC is, and will always be, one of the best bands in the world.

Yep

Yeah, yeah, I know that many of you find the Rude One to be over the top. Not me. Fuck off.

He's a plain spoken man with some sound ideers. Plus, he can really put a sentence together.

Go into the light...

It's your next best hope my bitches. All are welcome...all are welcome.

They're the Modern Stone Age Famaleee...

I don't know which is scarier to me. The fact that I find all of this hilarious or that there are religious zealots force feeding the youth of this country these candy coated fabrications.

'Murka is going to be one wacky place once this latest generation of schoolkids are old enough to drive and vote. It'll make the Scopes-Monkey trial look trivial.

Spoon

Oh, I almost forgot, Spoon announced the release date of their new album. The working title to my knowledge is Ga, ga, ga, ga, ga.

No..seriously.





Britt sure does love that big body Guild. (h/t to Mike R.)

Century mark

Hey everybody! This is my 101st post since starting LMS back in January. Huzzah for me.

And on top of everything else, it's a glorious Spring day here in NE Ohio.

TomDispatch

As always, Tom Engelhardt brings it home. It's a long piece but well worth your time to read it. What a horrible waste this war is will forever prove to be. As my Molly Ivins quote at the top of the page says,

... every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.




Raise hell.

Size matters

At least down under that is. Check out the beast that those cheeky Aussies have labeled...you guessed it,

Toadzilla.

Chirpy li'l Katie

Hey ya know what?...Fuck. Katie. Couric.

Of course David Sirota puts the same message out there a bit more eloquently than I.

I am so bloody tired of the "some would say..." tactic of introducing false talking points into issues that shouldn't or couldn't be raised in a rational dialogue. It's as if America's perky little sis have morphed into one of Limbaugh's flying monkeys.

Katie is teh suck.

Ziggy

No...not him

This guy.

I've been saying for a long time now that the Cheney Administration has succeeded immeasurably well at one thing and that thing is selling fear. Brzezinski captures the whys and the wherefores quite artfully in this Op-Ed from yesterday's WaPo.

Andy Kohut

Regular viewers of The News Hour with Jim Leher will recognize handy Andy.

He gives good poll.

TDS

Well, it's official. Jon Stewart is hands down the funniest muthafucka in the history of the known world.

You needn't look further than this clip for proof of that declarative statement.

Vic-TOR-ia

Vic-TOR-ia

Long ago life was clean
Sex was bad and obscene
And the rich were so mean
Stately homes for the lords
Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my queen
Victoria, victoria, victoria, ’toria

...with all due credit to Ray Davies.

With that, I link to the ever clever photoshopping skills of Watertiger. I'm a huge fan of both WT AND the Kinks. It's a double word score..

Tony Blow

I've been busy at Clark Kent duty all morning.

Regardless, this crossed my gaze just now and put me in mind of the Mr. Burns/Wrath of Khan quote that indeed, "Revenge is a dish best served cold".

'Murka Uber Alles

Just in case we're all not fully aware of what we're all up against, here's a post from our old pal, David Neiwert.

Heavens to Murgatroyd, these folks just aren't delusional, they're psychotic. Exit stage left indeed.

Tonight

Here's some events to attend in case you're interested this evening.

Oh, and by the by, this was taken 3 years ago at the first rally protesting the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, I'm no less happy about it now than I was at the time.

Luckovich

A friend of mine has been upset of late as her oldest son just landed a job in Atlanta and is moving away. She will miss him terribly but there is an upside.

I must say that Hotlanta has never been one of my favorite towns in 'Murka, but at least you get to read Mike Luckovich every day in the paper...

Rock Show

Oh, by the way, Mark, Tim and I are going to see Of Montreal at the Beachland tonight.

They're a bunch of indie pop weirdos from Athens, GA. Should be fun.

Kunstler

Ol' Jimmy boy spreads his particular brand of sunshiney joy. Man, I wonder what he's like before he has coffee in the a.m?

Bob Herbert Link

Damn. I'm angry.

Deluxe Cool

Check this out. Paul Weller and Amy Winehouse on Jools Holland's teevee show.

Hold me, I'm gonna faint.

Errrp

This stuff doesn't write itself ya know...

Oh, wait a minute, maybe it does.

What a deal!!

Hurry up folks, there's only two days left to bid on this very special piece of history.

I'm certain that Ted would appreciate that his legacy would be kept by a loving family of X-tian purists rather than thrown on the scrap heap of lost artifacts. Maybe Mann Coulter could use a nice lavendar accoutrement for her lair.

Give til it hurts, folks.

Steverino

From your pen to G-d's ears Mr. Bell

Tupac Redux

The Onion remains the funniest thing on the tubes of the Internets.

Novackula

He lives! Listen, as long as Novack continues to foment this kind of inter-party feuding among the Republican-American minority, I'll lay off the garlic wreaths.

(Instead of a link, I've lifted the text and pasted directly into this post). Read it and weep...with joy.

The Wrath Of Tom DeLay
By Robert D. NovakThursday, March 15, 2007;

Newt Gingrich's attempted phoenix-like rise from his own political ashes to a presidential candidacy will run next week into a harsh assessment by his former House Republican colleague Tom DeLay. The former majority leader's forthcoming memoir assails Gingrich as an "ineffective" House speaker with a flawed moral compass.

Gingrich is not the only erstwhile political ally to feel DeLay's wrath. In "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight," DeLay is even more critical of his predecessor as majority leader, Dick Armey, and assails George W. Bush as being more compassionate than conservative. Even the man DeLay handpicked to succeed Gingrich as speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, is accused along with Gingrich and Armey of opening the door to the Democratic purge of DeLay.

DeLay is an angry man after being driven from the leadership, from Congress and, so far, from public life by "a concerted effort to destroy me legally, financially and personally" through a 2005 indictment in Texas. DeLay's response to Democratic District Attorney Ronnie Earle is familiar. What is unusual are his claims that "pre-existing tensions I had with Gingrich and Armey" partially explain their role in kicking DeLay out of the leadership.

DeLay admits that the Republican leaders empowered by the 1994 elections -- comprising himself as majority whip, Gingrich as speaker and Armey as majority leader -- "were not a cohesive team, and this hindered our ability to change the nation." He puts most blame "at Newt Gingrich's door."

In describing Gingrich as an "ineffective Speaker," DeLay writes: "He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda." He adds: "Nearly every other day he had a new agenda, a new direction he wanted us to take. It was impossible to follow him."

DeLay also declares that "our leadership was in no moral shape to press" for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Writing well before Gingrich's admission for the first time last week, DeLay asserts: "It is now public knowledge that Newt Gingrich was having an affair with a staffer during the entire impeachment crisis. Clearly, men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis."

DeLay refers to Armey as "so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause" and a "poor leader" who had "few fresh ideas." He adds that Armey "resented anyone he thought might get in the way of his becoming speaker of the House. Beware the man drunk with ambition." He pleads innocence in his version of the failed 1997 coup attempt against Gingrich and accuses Armey, after realizing that he would not succeed Gingrich, of telling the speaker that DeLay was plotting against him: "He had lied to cover his ambitions, betraying both his movement and his fellow leaders."

DeLay, who was forced to step down as part of a politically motivated prosecution, is angry that Republicans, pressured by Democrats and the news media, retreated from a party rule that an indicted House Republican need not resign from the leadership. Gingrich and Armey (both out of Congress) opposed the rule. More significantly, to DeLay's dismay, so did Hastert, his former lieutenant.

The memoir ends DeLay's reticence in criticizing President Bush. Deriding Bush's self-identification as "a compassionate conservative," DeLay asserts that "he has expanded government to suit his purpose, especially in the area of education. He may be compassionate, but he is certainly no conservative in the classic sense." He also charges that Bush has failed to stress the role of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, adding, "typically . . . no one at the White House was listening" to his advice.

DeLay has been a subject of controversy on the right before. When American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene attempted to make DeLay the organization's Washington operative, four members of his board resigned. Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a leading conservative reformer, describes DeLay's leadership as concentrating on redistricting, fundraising and distribution of pork.

Notwithstanding Flake's criticism, DeLay was the most conservative congressional leader I have witnessed in 50 years covering Capitol Hill. I rate him with Lyndon B. Johnson as a dominant legislator. But his revelation that GOP leaders did not constitute a band of brothers helps explain why 12 years of control produced much less than was anticipated.

Sy Hersch

Tom Engelhardt wonders aloud for the rest of us.

Of course Seymour Hersch is a stinking liberal hippie with a known leftist agenda, so that should perfectly explain why we don't pay him any mind.

Right? ...right?

Arcade Fire talker

Win Butler spreads his word.

Worst.President.Ever.

I love how the press tells us that Miserable Failure is only experiencing run of the mill "second term blues". That is seriously bat guano talk.

The Cheney Administration has fouled the nest for our country once and for all. My advice to our beleaguered educational system; start learning them young'uns Mandarin right quick. That way, The Transition won't be so hard once the offical langauge changes.

But while we're still speaking the English, let's savor the fine words of Mr. Tom Waits at his raunchy, bluesy and organ grinding best...

A Good Man is Hard to Find

I always play Russian Roulette in my head

It's seventeen black and twenty-nine red

How far from the gutter

How far from the pew

I'll always remember to forget about you

A good man is hard to find

Won't let strangers sleep in my bed

And my favorite words are good-bye

And my favorite color is red

A long dead soldier looks out from the frame

No one remembers his war

no one remembers his name

Go out to the meadow

Scare off all the crows

It does nothing but rain here

And nothing will grow

A good man is hard to find

Won't let strangers sleep in my bed

And my favorite words are good-bye

And my favorite color is red

Patti

Here's a nice little tribute to everyone's favorite punk poet who graciously accepted her induction into that silly pyramid shaped building on the lake last night.

Patti Smith introduced me to Rimbaud. She's cool.

Hilarious

Resident fat fuck, Bill "Million Dollar" Bennett gets all puffed up in this clip from Press the Meat last July. I swear, when you've got the Editor of the WSJ and William Safire arguing that you're beginning to border on Stalinist media techniques, you've got a problem.

Anyhow, check out the clip and the faces that Billy boy pulls at the ever gracious Dana Priest, who if the timeline is right, was probably working hard on her Walter Reed hospital story at the time.

Notices and Reviews

There's a new Blogger in town. And I'm very fond of their opinions...

Steve Bellicious

Here's another one from across the pond.

I can't tell who the dead Tinman is in the background.

Anybody?...

Bob Herbert

He's really become one of my favorite columnists during the past 6 years. (Via jurassicpork)

And just in case you wish to do something about it, here's a link to an important petition.

Album of the Year

And the award goes to Arcade Fire for Neon Bible

These wacky Canadian Quebecois kids are once again turning heads.

It's perfectly challenging to categorize them, so I won't bother trying.

But I were to, it's kinda like Eno/Roxy Music meets ELP with a titch of Gruppo Sportivo. Oh, and with some Chris Isaac thrown in...

Why not indeed

Nobody can bring it home like the Rude One.

Libby Verdict in in!

Well, 4 of 5 doctors recommend a nice long sentence.

Now if only this would come to pass next.

Ummm, hey Ann Coulter

Who's the fudge packer now?....

Bono is Boffo

Sometimes, actually all too frequently, I'm afraid I see Bono as a self aggrandizing poseur more intent on promoting his band and personal agenda than doing the good work for which he has become so famous.

As is increasingly the case in my life, I'm wrong again about something as evidenced by this award acceptance speech at the NAACP event last evening.

I may not like U2 or Bono's take on what he repeatedly refers to as G-D, but give credit where it's due. He's working very hard to improve the lives of millions of extremely poor people. Good on him.

And he gives good speech.

Ted's reach

Well, mebbe they too, like the ever classy MAnn Coulter, don't like the faggots.

At least not anymore anyway.

Oh, and by the way, this was one of Ted's more popular tomes that he wrote. I wonder what inspired the title for the book? Huh.

Max Blumenthal

This is some pretty good stuff. Yes, more of this please.