Mau-Mauing the _Fehrnstrom Fishwrap_ Part 3.14164[b] of an occasional series)

Dear Dr. Bones,

sunapee ? +3 -1 Let me get this straight. If I vote for Romney than I Am being a bully? Never heard of an opposing vote being described that way. How about ,Obama had 4 years,we are not better off,so I will vote for the candidate whom I think will do the job? No bullying here, unless it’s being done by desperadoes. Posted 4 hours ago Reply Link Abusive

Q. "If I vote for Romney than (_sic_) I Am being a bully? (( fold here )) A. Not exactly. Your Fehrnstrom Fishwrap Republicanines an kiddie selfservatives are virtuous despite themselves, as it were, for ’tis not easy to bully anybooby *too* dreadfully in the politics of a democratic province where the wreckin crew of choice cannot enroll one whole voter out of every eight who register Or elect one Congresscritter in a delegation of nine. Still, who can listen to talk radio funded specifically for the benefit of Louisedayhicksvillains and not get the impression that alottavolks would sure LIKE to bully? Indeed, anything else would make no sense. Why be even nominally affiliated with America’s Otherparty unless "NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY!!" presses most of your buttons? NMMNG! a long-term Utopia perhaps, around here, rather than some real-an-present redstatist nightmare down in or near dirty Dixie or AK-49. But ’tis NMMNG! all the same. Big Paddy -- "For those of you at Rio Limbaugh": Eye refers to the Governor of us all, successor to your guy (hah!), Mittius Coriolanus Pompo of Mass.-medical memory -- can pass for Mr. Nice Guy. In a lot of ways. Up to a certain point. And especially by comparison with. Your 2010 Peanuts character, Charlie Brown, or Scottie Baker, or whatever that clown’s bobhancock was, exactly, did his best to terminate the niceguy infestation, but Baker’s Best turned out to be remarkably far from good enough. Doubtless your Dr. Limbaugh will bark that if only Master Zeroe had let his inner nastiness rip, Big Paddy would be on the outside looking in, Dixie-fashion, where we Irish all belong. However, your Fabulous Fernie Fehrnstrom, who certainly knows our poor MA better than the Witchdoctor of Democracy, a Fruit of Cape Girardeau, knows Her, did not campaign it that way. Fernie wouddabin an idiot if he had. At the moment, Fabulous Fernie is layin on the niceguy with a dumptruck so as to smooth the path of his second-string Charlie McCarthy, the much-esteemed People’s Seatwarmer. Hard not to think about half the ’hicksvillains barf into their cabbage an potatoes every time they hear yet another "Scott Brown radio minute." Poor betrayed Wally Wombschool ferociously craves a stout Slayer of Niceguys, an’ what does Fabulous Fernie have to give him? A Folder of Laundry! Why somebody even took his freeladyship, (( Jasonne, Dukess of Sanseverino-Wellesley, by Ignoto )) off the air again! (That schedule change must, Eye thinks, have been the fingers of Fehrnstrom at work somehow. Still, there IS such a thing as paranoia.) ¡The Bestembrightest are become a leaderless flock of wolf wannabes once more!. Her freelordship was a sort of walkin, squawkin Apotheosis of Disnicety. S/he/it gave Paddy and Eye a lot of innocent merriment along ¡NMMNG! lines, though of course we cannot feel too sorry to lose one who might conceivably have had a bad influence on dittopans of immature age. If this keeps up much longer, we may all die of a political sweet tooth. The only silver lining Paddy and Eye can descry is the llBU, little lady from the BIG UNIVERSITY. Though undoubtedly part of the Intellectual Bottom of icky Mass. niceguyism, Citizeness Warren of H*rv*rd has a definite edge to her. Don’t take our word, just go ask Howard Laurence (?) Lewis (??) Carr to tell you a few tales about his granny’s Edge. Too much of an edge for her own good has the llBU, who is probably doomed unless the Good Guy High Command can find her a Fehrnstrom-class handler pronto. So maybe there is hope for us all? Happy days. (( PS. If you do see Massa Howie, tell him we are STILL waiting for that birth certificate. ))

Nostalgianomics in One Lesson

Dear Dr. Bones,

Would you, Dr. Bones, or one of the Muses, happen to  remember who the original "in-one-lesson" Peruna salesman was?    I think vaguely of Henry Hazlitt, but so vaguely that it would be easy to be quite wrong.

And, speaking of "quite wrong," 

Reviving Caring Capitalismjconway   |   Mon, Sep 3, 2012 1:04 PM EST This Op-Ed from today’s edition (sic) illustrates where America was and what we can do to get back.  Henry Ford, no socialist, realized that if his employees could afford to buy his cars it would help his business, other executives in a variety of sectors followed.  Most making executives made “only” 4-5 times what their employees made, paid very high income and estate taxes, and viewed themselves collectively as pillars of their community and country.  The idea of an American CEO making millions off the backs of American workers and consumers and then high tailing his citizenship to another country would have been anathema in another era and is common place today.  Just compare todays Governor Romney to the Governor Romney in the 1960s who as a CEO made small, affordable cars right here in the US instead of just manipulating money like his son.  The best quote from the OP ED (sic [1] ) Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today. The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.” And some countries like Germany still do this In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.” In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. It is high time for the President to harness this spirit that drove Midcentury capitalism and the liberal political consensus-in both parties (when even the 1956 and 1960 Republican platforms called for socialized insurance, ‘progressive’ taxation and increased unionization) and highlight some of the companies that still follow this model-Costco, Mondragon Inc, the Evergreen Cooperative, In and Out Burger, and many others. Recommended by christopher, jasiu, kbusch, liveandletlive, paulsimmons, petr.

As you can see, the sky-blue nobility and gentry have turned out en masse to subscribe this pious tripe and viennasausage.
 
And the moral of that is, Volks can sincerely think they are soaring when they are sinking.  And not just anyvolks, mind you, but our own Aunt Nitsy along with a small zoo of probable H*rv*rds.  Plus Comrade Hedrick Smith, who actually barbecued the tripe in question.   As The Master did not say, "Let the cooks, not the guests, be the judges of the feast."

(( Perhaps home-aching could start at school, where, as I recall, we were supposed to mention the name of the author of  the goodstuff we scribbled onto 3"-by-5" cards.  I daresay that musty practice will have gone out the window with Dean Whatzizname in ’69 and the oblongus pie.    Since, however, at present Ye Goode Olde Dayes are that in which we wallow, ¿perhaps an obol for Auld Lange Syne?  ))


As usual when Their Worships start gertting to me, Eye tends to lapse into whightist-like attitudes, as for instance reflecting that it is easy to see how a 'jconway' might find practical bicycle parking a challenge.  I doubt it does much good to glower at the refractory two-wheeler and observe "It is high time for the President to stable this steed . . ." &c.   Without, that is, the faintest hint that one has any idea how the trick is to be done.  "Shut your eyes and clap your hands and tomorrow will be Wednesday, 31 September 1957" does not sound very promising.  But Houdini knows best.

St. Rudyard of Kiplin’ made his self-sorrowful civil engineer complain that the Government of India was under the impression that bridges are cut out of paper; the jconwayesque notion of what History is made of must be pretty similar.   Paddy and Eye do not mind the "social construction" line of patter that drives many whightist intellectualoids up the wall, but perhaps as against ‘jconway’ the Redarkenment may have a point.  Viewed from the sane side, this point is that few suppose that to say "The Pyramids are a human construction" implies they could be moved to Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie FL in twenty-four hours.   The flip side is that the fact the transfer would take a cast of thousands six to eight weeks on a cost-plus basis scarcely proves that extraterrestrials must have built the damn things.  Or that they grew there like Topsy.

There are reasons, that is, why Baincappin’ now differs from the well-tailfinned Ikecapitalism of 1957 and reasons also why the one changed into the other.  And these are tolerably weighty reasons, for all that they have nothing to do with either Enthusiasm or Superstition.  To say that we can re-institute Ikecapitalism, or Fordianity, or ¿why not the Holy Roman Empire of the Yankee Nation?, any time we like because, after all, these arrangements did exist once, a well-attested fact which establishes that they are not logically or physically impossible -- to talk like that is not exactly false, but, for bicycle-parking purposes, I fear it might as well be. Should you actually  try to get there from here, you would not make it in this lifetime.  
       
   Happy days.
--JHM

___
[1]  Mister Poster "doubles down" on the void where his Intellectual Bottom ought to be.  

September 2, 2012When Capitalists CaredBy HEDRICK SMITHWashington IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day. Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts. This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today. The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.” Earl S. Willis, a manager of employee benefits at General Electric, declared that “the employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.” From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. At the same time, corporate profits were booming. In 2006, the year before the Great Recession began, corporate profits garnered the largest share of national income since 1942, while the share going to wages and salaries sank to the lowest level since 1929. In the recession’s aftermath, corporate profits have bounced back while middle-class incomes have stagnated. Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits. Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t. In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interest.” In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors. Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that. Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?”

Nostalgianomics in One Lesson

Black Mooonday

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Great Pumpkin of selfservative journalism in the Heimatland G*ttes

(( Full Mooon Settin’ over Christokorea by Ignoto  ))

has left the brier patch:

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon died in Korea on Sunday at the age of 92.  He founded America’s Mooonpaper in 1982, and through it maintained a strong voice at the highest levels of national and international affairs.  Over 30 years, the preeminent challenges of the day have changed ... [but H]is vision ... continues to provide the motivating force for this moonpaper, [which] is committed to continuing the fight for what is right that [H]e laid out.  There is plenty of work yet to be done....

¿Ain’t there always?

Reaction to this lugubrious intelligence will, Paddy McTammany predicts, be divided into three Gaul-like parts, of which one (1) consists of your top-drawer señoritos (a.k.a.  " ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’ ") who will shrug Sun Myung ¿Who? off even quicker than we do.   Nobooby with enough self-gumption to be a Leostraussian, even just a Kissingeroid, can care deeply about a humble popular entertainer.

Down below the iceberg’s waterline,  where the late Rev.’s target audience dwells in factious self-darkness,  there will be (2a) a small band of grief-smitten bozos, the epicentre of whom we have already visited, an’ (2b) a much larger band of utterly indifferent bozoes.  For on the whole this is one Profit that managed to pick up not a whole lot of honour in othervolks’ country either.

The latter are bein’ just a tad ungrateful, it seems to us.   Presumably the dawnin’ of the Age of Breitbartius -- ¡Age of Breitbartius!, ¡¡Bright BAAAAAAAAAAAAR-Tee-Yuss!! -- would be afflicting us even if the Rev. ¿Who? had never been hatched.   Swiftboaters an’ eno-reactionaries would be out doin’ their expletivest for political indecency an’ *lysdexia the way their ideo-ancestors used to under Sennacherib of Assyria.   Under King Uggh of the cave community.

Nevertheless, things happen the way they happen, an’ most whightists / serviles / neoserviles in our own neck of tradition, at least, have assumed that their Father Zeus wills humanoid events to come to pass as they in fact do, not some completely different way instead, even if it comes to much the same thing in th end.  Or even well this side of the end.    In which case, neoserviles (an’ palæoserviles, an’ all the vast host of whight-winged nutbats) surely ought -- ¿no es verdad? -- to show some respect for those whom Himself has plainly appointed to be instrumental.  His now-eclipsed Effulgence bein’ patently among them. [*]

(( Full Mooooo by Ignoto ))

Happy days.
     --P. Aloysius McTammany

___
[*]  ¡Wunnerful word, ‘effulgent’!  Single-handed, it almost makes one believe Cicero never died, but is living incognito in Buenos Aires.

Diocletianus Redivivus

Dear Dr. Bones,

Let’s raise prices seascraper | Fri, Aug 31, 2012 5:40 PM EST Quantitative Easing is a confusing subject. Let’s make it simple. Quantitative easing means raising prices. In the current economy, you can see the effect. Monetary stimulus has raised the price of gold from $800 to $1600, the DJIA from 7,000 to 13,000 without adding any actual value. When you read that the Fed will attempt further monetary stimulus, know that all it means is the Fed will attempt to raise prices and hope that has some kind of positive effect on the real economy.

To be randy is so unbecoming, so laughable, (( fold here )) viewed from the outside, that naturally one wishes to accuse ALL political badvolks of it, be the true nature of their self-servicement what it may. Mow if Eye were out to annoy Freedame Seascraper, I would leave the late Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mister Nozick of H*rv*rd well out of it, and discover ostentatiously that her freeladyship is the sole remainin’ exponent of Diocletianomics. Everybody with even the faintest beginnings of Intellectual Bottom is aware that His Majesty, whose seventeen hundredth anniversary we were all recently celebrating, was first to market with a crank system [1] in which to raise prices, simply as such, is diabolical; to fix prices, salvific. First to market that we are significantly aware of, anyway. Seascrapernomics is only another pea from the August (in the strict sense) Imperial pod, quite a different crankcase than that in which Ayn an’ Bobby an’ "adult-onset adolescence" were hatched. Her freeladyship’s ideological age is no doubt neither a sedate 1701 nor a lusty 16.88, but even a native taste in concepts, completely uninformed with / polluted by Intellectual Bottom, ought to judge that ’scraperism falls far nearer the former than the latter. Her freeladyship scribbles in a thoroughly old-maidenly tone. If poetic justice reigned, her freeladyship would be "Miss Brill" in the Katherine Mansfield story, a living (?) antithesis to all things randy an’ nozzicky. [2] Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff will not be taking advice from the likes of me, but they might find somebody better-credentialled to suggest that, if worst comes to worst, Q.E. might conceivably be defended by a strategy parallel to that of "Living Constitution" lieberals. Though doubtless a little more challenging to live in, ¿would not a world where prices remain alive and kicking be better for everybody’s moral fibre than some sad an’ dismal Planet Seascrape where continental drift an’ vulcanism ceased aeons ago, where nothin’ remains to be creationalistically destructivated between now an’ the heat death of the universe? Seascraperanity is beneath grown-up notice, except from a Comp. Lit. perspective, yet the gruesome twosome might conceivably advise our All-Highest One to deploy something vaguely similar against orthodox whightist economic reaction of the kind that thinks we ought to shut our eyes an’ clap our hands an’ REALLY BELIEVE in Comrade Krugman’s "Confidence Fairy." It appears that our bright-eyed, steel-claptrap-minded entrepreneurs won’t be steerin’ many pennies back into specuvestment an’ jobcreation until they are perfectly sure the future has been nailed dead as a dodoe. Among the more obvious symptoms of American Decline is this Miss-Brillish or Seascraperoid unwillin’ness to take a few chances. If the Mallory Factors of great wealth indeed refuse to start blowin’ us a new bubble before they detect what the freelordly baincounters take for an Absolute Sure Thing -- an’ see their fresh A.S.T., moreover, in an environment at least ninety-nine percent free of discouragin’ words against or about "The One Percent," -- why, we may languish in a bubble-free doldrums for whole decades and degenerations to come. "¡Hello there, Japan!" This last, I repeat, has nothing to do with her freeladyship the NeoDiocletian, whose economic courage-challengedness is entirely a demand-side phænomenon, an’ therefore howlin’ly heretical by the standards of the received AEIdeology an’ Heritagitarianism an’ Hoovervillainy. Diocletianomics 1.0 was heretical as well, for, despite His Imperial Majesty’s hard-to-deny personal connections with The Wicked State, the purpose of the exercise was clearly to reduce how much Diocletianus had to shell out when he went shopping exactly as Miss Brill’s will have been. The two protowhightists would have been equally astonished to be accused of jobcreativity, or destructive creationism, or any other supply-sider jazz. They simply never heard of fancy-dan neostuff like that. Freedame Seascraper, bein’ both nonfictional an’ contemporary with ourselves, can scarcely have failed to have heard of supply-sidin’. Obviously she has not profited. This obtuseness (or whatever) separates her freeladyship from the vast majority of original-thinkin’ whightist bozoes quite as much as from economic neoörthodoxy as parroted by the dupes of TopPercenterdom to lure the marks thereof. Probably the fact that her freeladyship is neither (A) a decent political grown-up nor (B) a duped kiddie selfservative of the ordinary type is what has lead Comrade Horatio to assimilate her overhastily to (C) Miss Rand an’ Master Nozzick an’ all the pomp an’ panoply of Planet Dilbert. Actually, the vast empire of economic self-crankiness is no tripartite Gaul of Cæsar, ’tis far, far wider than that, though admittedly many provinces are lightly inhabited, or even, in this age, depopulated altogether. At least (D) through (ZZZ) exist as well as { A, B, C }, with Mme. la baronne de Seascrape located out somewhere around (XX). You need not pardon my French, I shall defend it myself. The keyword to all ’scraperoid mythologies is, pretty plainly, rentier, with poujadiste running a respectable second. Comrade Keynes had her freeladyship’s number proleptically when he spoke of inflastion being "the euthanasia of the rentier." Her freeladyship would prefer not to be put down like a Seamus or a Rafalca, and really, ¿Who can blame her? As for le poujadisme de Mme. la baronne, you may read about in her freeladyship’s own words. She gave a sort of after-dinner address to the BoZo Skipper’s wardroom the other day in which there ies enough self-anecdotal evidence to begin to make NeoDiocletianomics intelligible. Indeed, her freeladyship has a marked tendency to honor the WhightGuard Officers Mess with fuller accounds of what washes ashore here at the foot of the Great Blue Hill as merest CliffsNotes™. As mentioned, Seascraperanity is utterly unorthodox by WhightGuard standards, so heathen an’ alien that Robertus Feldadmiral von Eno merely promioted the freeladylike scribble without comment, whilst the couple of ensigns an’ J. G.’s who tried to make a little conversation about it afterwards quickly lapsed into vulgar union-bashin’. Apparently the youngkers were unable to grasp that two-hundred-proof demand-siders still exist. ’Tis the "History is bunk" crew of which we speak after all. ¿What is Diocletianus to them, or they to Diocletian? The ignorance is so blank an’ virginal an’ (one must charitably hope) blissful over to WhG GHQ that the selfservative kiddies would never detect her freeladyship’s horrible heresies just from the heresy. As long as she pretends a little [*] to run with the neopack, Freedame Seascraper is extremely unlikely to be unmasked an’ burnt for what she is. By the same cause, naturally, her freeladyship’s influence on what the neopack thinks (?) an’ barks is bound to be indistinguishable from zero. Hence "beneath grown-up notice, except from a Comp. Lit. perspective." Happy days. ___ [1] Hardly anybooby in eighty-fivescore years has had a good word to say for Diocletianomics 1.0. Paddy McTammany attributes this upshot to incompetence in the way the price-shrink product was packaged and shrink-wrapped. That is to say, ¿Would YOU stand in line half the night in the chariot lot at your local ValMartium all agog to clamp your paws down on a new goodie called Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium? Me neither. I just checked out what my old pal Sappy (Ms. Sapientia Conventionials to strangers) attributes the universally supposed failure. Her freeladyship of SS will be horrified to be informed that "the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low." ¡Too LOW, for Pete Peterson’s sake! As if His Imperial Majesty had taken Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff for his braintrust. Now if Freedame Seascraper be as prone to self-sorrowin’ as are most of her fellow whight-wingnuttes an’ -wingnuts, it ought to keep her whinin’ happily for a month to discover that even in the Ancient Bunk Department, pretty well the last ditch conceivable for any crankery to take cover in, wild-eyed rule the roost.

[*] Her freeladyship did not in this case post something less cryptic to her suppossed ideobuddies, but in looking to see whether she had, Eye encountered the following bit of self-camouflage:

Democrats' Medicare by Napster by: seascraper Fri Aug 31, 2012 at 00:06:15 AM EDT The Democrats aren't cutting money to Medicare recipients -- they're only cutting to providers! Doctors and hospitals will treat Medicare patients because they love to do medicine! If they are worried about giving away their product, then they can sell T-Shirts at their live shows!

Nobooby amongst the base an' vile of America's Otherparty is likely to find that anythin' but highly edifyin'. Only an icky Psocialist would come back with "If they want to keep their licenses to practice, perhaps they had better comply with certain . . . " &c. &c.

Not bein' a brand-name Dilbertarian, her freeladyship most likely thinks there is in fact somethin' to be said for licensin' quacks, though for obvious reasons she did not care to say it there.



This one illustrates rather the poujadiste side of Mme. la baronne than the rentier side. Whatever pricey luxury items it may be, exactly, that her freeladyship flogs personally or microcorporationally do not, I presume, require special dispensation from The Wicked State. How it worked for medicosunder her freeladyship's economic guru C. Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus, I do not happen to know, and would not be surprised if nobody knows. No doubt the victim or patient’s heirs could sue after the fact for poisoning or the like, but that is not licensing as we understand it.

For that matter, if a nifty whzbang from Seascraper Inc. landed some TopPercenter señoritoe's yacht on a reef several hundred kilometers in the opposite direction from what Don Avarosito de Murdoch y Bahamonde had typed in, well, little Donnie could sue her freeladyship under the existing régime also.

Tír na nÓg

Dear Dr. Bones,

[new] The Clint Eastwood Revelation Last night Mr. Romney tried their best to put a good face on their intentions. Mr. Romney peered into the audience and camera and promised jobs, a strong America, and a decent life. But for whom? The answer showed up in the “secret guest,” Clint Eastwood. Steve Schmidt on MSNBC tried to wipe it away by reminding the TV viewers that the movie star was 82 years old. We know better than that. Mr. Romney’s oath to revive America does not extend to everyone. Even those who sung his praises as a business person or as a humane person belonged only to certain tribes. You had to be a member of the Church of LDS and not deviate form its dogma, you were struggling and not poor, top associates in his business world, a community member traveling in similar circles. No evidence that there is help coming if you are poor, struggle with behavioral issues, or if you are female that you get any recognition of needed rights. In short his tolerance only goes so far. As a more global scale his jingoistic talk should disturb anyone. There is a complete lack of responsibility of what caused this nation’s economic and social woes and as part of the problem he rejects that his business world had anything to do with it. He was successful and made lots of money, that’s what counts. He is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. oetkb @ Fri 31 Aug 5:45 AM

Considered as the poster boy for American Decline, however, (( fold here )) as an emblem of everything that "America's Throwback Team" would like to throw us back to -- though of they won't be able to -- there is quite a lot to be said for Citizen Clint. I wonder, though, what Fabulous Fernie Fehrnstrom or any similar high-up Republicanine ‘operative’ makes of it? Paddy McTammany's views on how to win friends and influence voters are not to be taken seriously, yet even an ignoramus can ask an occasional question. In this case, "Your freelordship, ¿What appeal, exactly, was that sideshow supposed to have for members of either the female or the Blacks-and-Tans community?" American Decline is herself nonpartisan. Almost certainly, therefore, Fernie an' the b'hoys will be able to get some mileage out of portrayin' us donkeys as the Geezer Defense League, who only want to tell wicked, demonizin' fibs about how Citizen Clint's Medicare--¡even his monthly pension from the Ponzi Security Administration!--would lapse into great an’ imminent peril, should the POTUS of us all not be reëlected. Since Paddy (who date from 06 October 1945 and even have the papers to prove it) has been sucking at those twin Fedguv teats meself for a couple of years now, I suppose one should be flattered to find that the pols of all persuasions have agreed that Clint and I are really "What America looks like." However attractive obsolescence may look, though, especially when skillfully packaged for delivery via the MacL@@han Tuba, it certainly does not feel all that great. Rarely has better free advice been given an ignored than "Don't ever get old!" Here is a good test of Mr. Blake's "to generalise is to be an idiot." ¿Was Paddy being an idiot?, then, when I just got struck by the idea that a gerontocentric politics is among the features that one certainly should have -- but as usual did not -- expect American Decline to include. I am for our team, right or wrong. That, after all, is what "McTammany" MEANS Nevertheless, I sincerely think that we do our gerontocracy better than America's Otherparty do theirs. With us, those not gifted at the moment with senesence/senility may look forwards to qualifying for it (¡and its rewards from Uncle Sam!) at a latter date. The Smirk of Janesville, on the other hand, in the "Thirty-Year Plan for OnePercenter Ascendancy" that he keeps tryin' to market as a Fedguv budget for whatever FY happens to be next, envisions a split-level genrontocracy. Only those born before 1958 (were SmirkCare™ to be promptly enacted in 2013, which is not likely, even if Mittius Coriolanus Pompo makes it), would get all the bennies. Latecomers would be decidedly second-class gerontocrats. Forever. [1] [2] Assuming that gerontocentricity is unavoidable under conditions of American Decline, clearly the good guys would do it better. However, Paddy and Eye are not yet willing to admit that unavoidableness. Possibly no previous set of Decline victims has actually managed to avoid such gracelessness, but there is always a first time, ¿no? Moreover, unlike, say, the Madrileños of 1650, we possess a couple of centuries' worth of Social Scientism. Unlike our ignorant ancestors, we can at least recognize the edge of a cliff after we fall off it. Maybe even shortly before we fall off. [3] ___ [1] Naturally with a Peruna like that to flog, the Otherparty cannot bark an bellow loud enough about how ‘divisive’ Barák Husâyn O’Bama and the whole "Democrat Party" are, what vile underminers of opportunity. [2] Dear Kruggie really nailed the bustards for once this morning: [T]he promise of unchanged benefits for Americans of a certain age just isn’t credible. Think about the political dynamics that would arise once someone born in 1956 still received full Medicare while someone born in 1959 couldn’t afford decent coverage. Do you really think that would be a stable situation? For sure, it would unleash political warfare between the cohorts — and the odds are high that older cohorts would soon find their alleged guarantees snatched away. (( Kruggie is not 100% sound on American Decline, which, properly factored in, turns these ‘odds’ around. In fact, the ‘cohorts’ of Tír na nÓg would be clobbered badly. )) [3] That is a qualified of expurgated ‘we’: anybooby who cannot spot Anthropogenic Global Warming at ten paces in the afternoon of a late August day will sincerely have no trouble believin' that to speak of "American Decline" is not just factually mistaken an’ ethically immoral, but positively self-contradictory. "¿What do you mean, this is not the top? ¿WE are here, aren't we?" &c. &c.

Funnin' It with Fatsoe

Dear Dr. Bones,

After composing what follows, Paddy and Eye decided that most of it would only perplex the Fehrnstrom Fishwrap Fan Club, and so did not pass along to the kiddiecons everything after "the Smirk of Janesville" and before our little ditty for His Immense:

What kind of nogoodnik grouch wants to poop the Rio Limbaugh doo-doo by dragging in a dead cat like "a national and an international regulatory scheme" just as the merry revelers at America's Otherparty are gettin into full swing? There will be time for all that eye-glaze, and much more, once Mittius Coriolanus Pompo -- "Demander of Apologies, ..., Stepmaster to Rafalca, ..., Possessor of the Golden Birth Certificate, " &c. &c. -- has actually taken US over. Not unassisted ably, as Paddy McTammany ventures to anticipate, by the Smirk of Janesville. 'Tis not as if American Decline will suddenly rush off to a forgotten appointment in Samarra, you know. PLENTY of time, we shall have, whole decades and degenerations, centuries maybe, in which to moan and grovel on the economic dungheap, weaving straw into the Homeland ic hair. Only to find there is no market even for so characteristic a modern yankeefacture as the hairstraw shirt. For nowadays, even hairstraw can be produced much cheaper in Cathay and in Ormuzd and in Ind. "After me, the deluge," predicted little Louie, son of Big Louie. Deluge Isaac, however, has chosen to visit concurrently with His GardenStatist Excellency's stemwinder, whatever that coincidence may signify. Probably it does not signify "the second time as farce," exactly, though if there be any vulgar Marxists left, betcha they will indeed have the poor taste to dust off that wheeze from 1799/1852 and see if they can get if off the runway this time around. "Hey there, Charlie Brown, kicked any good footballs lately?" 'Mittens' Romney, an The Smirk, even Citizen Chris (blood pressure and sudden cerebral events once firmly put out of mind) do have their light side as well as their whight side, no doubt about it, but nothing that amounts to 'farcical'. Or even comes close. So, then, come along, sir, the only decent thing to do this unlovely morning is sing along with the selfservative kiddies, an their Kiddiemasters, an their Kiddiemasters' Firstlords--with the Fearless Funders of Freedumb on high, an, down to earth, with all the Jay School fruits an frathouse babes over to _The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap_--in honor of The Otherparty's much-to-be-esteemed Keynoter: For he's a jowly good fellow!, For he's a Jowly good fellow!!, For he's a JOWLY good fellow!!!, As nobooby can deny. Happy days.-- P. A. McT. P.S. To deliberately overshoot Louisedayhicksville a bit, if one may: the late Mr. Auden spoke of Rainer Maria Rilke as "he Santa Claus of loneliness. (Hmmm. Should not that have been "the Father Exmas of loneliness"? Must be late Auden, then, generally reragrded as inferior.) Be that as it may, Party Neocomrade (second grade) C. J. Christie, Jr., Esq., Satrap of Neojersey, might usefully be engaged by some eagle-foresighted Corporate Citizeness to portray, in his political retirement, The Santa Claus of American Decline.(Pat. Pend.) on festive occasions. And why not on analytical occasions as well?  His Excellency has only the semi-education of a cut-rate shyster, to be sure, but ..............

St. Bridget of the Lace Curtain, who mostly does business as "Marjorie Eagan," just remarked on WKKK-FM 96.9, Boston an Rio Limbaugh, that her principal thought whilst watchin' His Obesity perform was to worry that H. O. might drop dead on the spot.

Comrade Braude, being sensible as well as male, pooh-poohed this admirably pious an charitable baloney. Poetic justice is rarely that poetic. Were somebody to tell us that such a thing had actually occured, we should at once assume her to be a huckstress out to huck The Memoirs of Rabbi Ben Trovato.

Speaking of "such a thing," the received account of the Death of Arius, in Mr. Gibbon and others, has always seemed a little suspicious for this reason to Paddy and Eye. Let us know if you disagree.

Happy days.
--JHM

Hodie mihi, cras Howie

Dear Dr. Bones,

Hodie mihi, cras Howie. Howard Lawrence Lewis (an/or "Howard Louis Laurence") runs a Death Pool, so for his freelordship to make these little nursin-house jokes is low-level professional practice, like a pianist playing scales and arpeggio(e)s. Not like, say, Howie eatin his political peas with a knife just to rile the H*rv*rds. Still, Time and Dr. Alzheimer and ... what's-his-name? ... will not be making special exceptions just because nobody can find the whight birth certificate. His freelordship is already in the sixty-first year of his exemplary self-existence, 'exemplary' assuming one prefers that sort of example. And "self-" because of course Massa Howie built himself from scratch, utterly undefiled by Affirmative Action. Or the laws of physics. Or . . . . It is worth pointing out, though not here, that his freelordship is already too closely subsenile to be able to look forwards to SmirkCare, properly speakin. The premium-support or voucher scheme will only create the medical happiness of those under the age of fifty-five at (I presume) the date of its enactment. (Which may Father Zeus forfend!) Like it or not, then, on the dark day when Massa Howie finally totters into the nursin house himself personally, we the taxpayers will be robbed to pay the dole. Doubtless his freelordship will NOT like it, DOUBTLESS his freelordship will protest vehemently that he would much rather those who worked all their lives, played by the rules, yimmer yammer, never asked for a yada, should not have to fund the senility an imbecility of H. L. L. Carr. But protest won't do his freelordship any good, I fear, for these arrangements are not left up to the whim of the individual geezer. And that won't change even when the Smirk of Janesville becomes dictator in its own whight, startin in January 2021 after Mittius Coriolanus Pompo has been carted out to pasture with Lady Rafalca. At that point, his freelordship will have been suckin at the Fedguv trough for at least four years, probably rather more. (( H. L. L. Carr )) Meanwhile his freelordship seems a little neglectful of his own groupies, who consist chiefly (IOAO) of the circle of Archie Bunker's crusty greatuncle, you know, the one who still had the Gaelic back before that mean Dr. Alsoranner finally took it away from him (along with most of the English) sometime about 1937. Paddy and Eye have no idea where the cuttin-edge brat pack -- THE Bestembrightest, as his ladyship was forever flatterin em -- have gone now that they cannot sip (chaw?) tee putty with (( Jasonne, Duchessa Sanseverino-Wellesley )) every weekday afternoon at 1500 hours.. WRKO AM 680 is not likely to be the younger degeneration's new Mecca. Kind of a pity that La Sanseverino won't be available to explain to Paddy and Eye, as the Great G.O.P. G-hod of 1433 (the former 2012) climaxes, exactly what Fabulous Fernie would do next for Coriolanus Pompo an Senator Fratboy -- if only poor Fernie were half as bestembright as her lordship is himself. As the degenerated have been informed many times, Wendell Wilkie would not be where he is now, was it not for Il Sanseverina. Eye digresses. Though not more than his freelordship does, draggin in Alcalde Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa (nacido Antonio Ramon Villar el 23 de enero de 1953) . He's got us doing it too. Talk about 'exemplary'! Happy days.

Ordinarily, Dr. Bones, we would not waste your time and the Muses’ with anything dredged up from so far down in the e-gutter of reaction as The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap.

This morning, though, it appears that the Thought Police are out in force. In fact, after the peanuts started wonderin’ in subsequent posts why one of their number, supposedly innocent, had been clobbered, the ideocops cleared the whole gallery so we are back to "(0) comments" on a silly scribble concerning which there had been more than fit on one page an hour or two earlier. (( The time is now [08/28/2012 06:01] -- obviously everything of this sort has to be datestamped carefully. ))  (( UPDATE [08/28/2012 06:14] -- two comments, both from the same peanut, one ‘j5truth’ )) 

So Paddy and Eye hope you won't mind holding on to this item for us just in case it evaporates over where it fits in.

On a related front, we have been making progress with our research into the mysterious behavior of the Heraldic whightware.  Just now we established that simply changing "Ramón" to Ramo'n" made the whole of the above McScribble acceptable to the mechanical branch of the Th. P. Naturally a more humanoid neocensor could probably work out eventually that it comes to the same thing.

On the other hand, perhaps it does not.   Presumably your echt crimmigrant or criminalien or ‘Spaniard’ would never in a million moons resort to our far-fetched and klutzy orthography, so in a certain sense the whightists did indeed manage to keep out the Indocumetado language, which Paddy and Eye were, of course, rather citing from a distance than actually deploying.

Next on the e-genda is to find out whether the Thought Police dig gràvès, to which Indocumentol happens not to run.

Moreover, we mean to take a look at the whightists’ shysters’ own "Terms an Conditions" for peanut-gallery peanuts,  to see whether "¡DOGS and SPANISH need not apply¡" would be permissible if *we* barked it.

Happy days.
--JHM

P.S.  The way we are headed, the smûggled circumfl'e'x will be rather ridiculous than sublime.

(( idols, icons ))

[1] For those of them at Rio Limbaugh, plus everybooby demented by the dulcet strains of the MacL@@han T@@ba, Eye thinks we had better assign idols to the various items in H. M. E.'s ever-expandin’ formal style. So, then:

(( Mighty Wielder of Percentages ))

Each idol can be linked to a prose explanation for grown-ups. In this case, to the complete transcript of H. M. E.'s ever-immortal Geheimvorrede.

(( Baincapper Extraordinaire, ))

(( Patroniser of All Progressive Public Transport ))

 

ALT="On the Superiority of Prose Over All Idols and Icons, Be They Static or MacL@@hanoid" WIDTH="573" BORDER="3">
(( "Words fail me, my Lords" ))

¡Look Who’s in the Tank for Mittens!

Paddy McTammany set out behind the pet g@@gle in quest of today's Bosstown (NY) Globe, I really did, ¡Eye swears it! --so as to keep oneself in due compliance with Kravitz, Esq., by having read all about how exotic, out-of-commonwealth journalism reads the mind of Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Demander of Apologies, Master of Seamus, Stepmaster to Rafalca, Baincapper Extraordinaire, Possessor of the Golden Birth Certificate [1], &c. &c. &c.

But a funny thing happened on one’s way to the e-kiosk, one was suddenly floored by stumbling over ... over ... well ... like ... Yoo knows ... kinda ... uh ...

"Words fail me, my Lords. Nothing that I might [scribble] could possibly match the depths of my feelings in this matter."

***

UPDATE [08/26/2012 16:01] -- Eventually one gets over almost anything. The above document is to be titled "Amazombies for Romney." And while Eye was putting names to idols and icons and graven images, it seemed not amiss to revisit an old friend:

(( Allegator Tears ))

***

Happy days.
--JHM

Oh, by the way, some of us geezers can still remember back to a whole different kind of tank narrative:

(( Dukakidoid Days ))

___
[1] That last bit is a fresh addition to His Excellency's ever-expandin’ formal style.

Technically, the wording perhaps ought to run "Possessor of the Certificate of Golden Birth," but it would take a lot of fuss to explain why Heinrich von Kissinger, for example, has only a Silver or Bronze Certificate, the POTUS of us all, one of lead or maybe SillyPutty.

The Scraper Scraped

¿Why is this baloney here? (( fold here )) (( ¿¡Kikunomics?! [0] )) Seventeen hours of stubborn silence is enough, I think, to establish that mainstream Blue Class Groupies do not propose even to nibble at it, and neither does Paddy McTammany, actually, who stand poised a couple of paragraphettes back from the brink of a metadiscourse. First, though, comes the WHY question simpliciter: what can goodvolks like Freedame Seascraper be thinkin’ ’bout when they ‘borrow’ three hundred and fourteen (314) pearly words -- "1,610 (non-space) characters" -- from a great sage [1] of America’s Otherparty an’ toss ’em out in front of swine an’ donkeys with no explanation. ¿Without so much as a WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! PIG! SOOIE! It is not as if there were some obvious public occasion, say news that Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff are thinking of advising the All Highest to make jello, or possibly slinkies, legal tender in the Heimatland G*ttes. Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Demander of Apologies, Master of Seamus, Stepmaster to Rafalca, Baincapper Extraordinaire, Possessor of the Golden Birth Certificate, ... ¿perhaps in this context one may reverently add "Vanquisher of Land-Based Auditors" to His Excellency’s received style? ... &c. &c. dreams of a steady-state--nay, ¿why not a deflationary?--Universe at least three times every night, but the great thing is, Coriolanus Pompo keeps his avarice’s dreams strictly to himself. (Well, pretty strictly. One certainly have to admit that H. E. is tryin’ not to disclose.) Despite the dread-inspiring M.B.A. from the H*rv*rd Victory School, Coriolanus Pompo is probably not in fact scheming to be the New McKinley or the Mark II Hanna. Like another distinuished H*rv*rd-Y*rd Republicanine from not too long ago, the Herr Prof. Dok. Heinrich von Kissinger, Coriolanus Pompo firmly believes that what Amerika needs is not so much this policy or that as that policy-makin’ be placed in the whight hands, in the hands of One Who will work whighteousness. It is not hard in either case to guess what that would comes to if crudely spelled out. Still, ‘Hank’ an’ ‘Mittens’ are not interchangable volks. The good Doktor , after all, notoriously failed to possess a Certificate of Golden Birth, bein’ stuck, ¡Life is unfair!, with more like a bronze. To express the same thing another way, Coriolanus Pompo does not simply want policy-makin’ concentrated in his own personal paws. That arrangement will have to do temporarily for a start, no doubt, but for the long haul what Amerika needs is to be ruled by a whole Class that is whighteous collectively. Like ‘we’ used to be back in Ye Goode Olde Dayes. Bein’ a foreigner, naturally Dr. Kissinger knew little und cared less about our sort of YGOD. His own version of the product prominently featured a certain (( Klemens Wenzel Lothar Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein )) In the absence of any idol or icon, I suspect your moderately gifted guesser could guess correctly from that john-hancock that H. E. would prove to not look a great deal more like Amerika than Baràk Husâyn O’Báma, to pick an exotic specimen at random, looks like Amerika. (( Leucodermatitis is a necessary, but far from a sufficient, indicator for LLA Syndrome. )) Mme. la baronne de Seascraper could plausibly maintain that I have inadvertently been bolstering the freeladytlike goldbuggery, as follows: assuming (as Paddy and Eye do assume), that Coriolanus Pompo looks forwards to establishin’, not just himself an’ Seamus an’ Rafalca an’ the rest of the Serene House of Romney, in seats of power, but rather at a TopPercenter Ascendancy that shall endure, would not a national currency strictly linked to the Avogadro number (or possibly to the Planck constant) be just the thing? If The ©lassmates could be perfectly sure that there portfolioes will be worth as much, or maybe just a tad more, three hundred years from now as they were at NYSE closing time last Friday, ¿Would not The ©lassmates be in a position to spend far more time worryin’ about the whighteousness of the Yank Republic? Whatever the secret-sector consequences in particular cases, all the time that goodvolks like M. Coriolanus Pompo spend conferrin’ with their brokers, an’ their C.P.A.’s, an’ their blind (or sighted) trustees, &c. &c. are can scarcely be said to create any public happiness worthy of note. The obvious objection is that most ©lassmates would probably just seize the opportunity to mess about more in boats, plus get in some extra golf an’ poloe an’ maybe even AstroTurf™baggin’. Of which the obvious response ("Hey, ¿it’s a free country, innit?") sufficiently disposes. Those who agitprop for America’s Otherparty have lately taken to rehearsin’ completely ridiculous ideas of the Psocialism advocated by us jennies and jackasses: as if we propose to lock M. Coriolanus Pompo, and Messrs. les Frères Koch, and Freelord Trump of Jersey Shiore, and Tio Ruperto (when his firstlordship is in the country), and lesser ©lassmates in a pen and threaten to cut off their supply of pre-owned carrots and turnips if their freelordships do not keep their noses to the jobcreationist grindstone absolutely without a break. Plain plebes and proles don’t mind if Ebb Scrooge an’ Ollie Warbucks takes the occasional day off from scroogin’ an’ warbuckin’. If they did object, ’twould be like Reynard reprimanding the huntin’ and shootin’ people on Airstrip One for honouring Boxing Day by staying home inside their stately houses. Proles and plebes don’t much mind not being hunted. "The Middle Class" Paddy and Eye are not so sure about, but then we admittedly have no idea what, if anybody, The Middle Class™ may be, exactly. (( ¡Golly! ¿Do you suppose TMC™ might be Freedame Seascraper an’ her mates, if there be any mates, an’ her ideobuddies? )) ___ [0] The wingnut quotee appears to have reversed the two syllables of "kooky" an’ then neospelled a little, presumably so as to assure everybooby that his stuff is sterlin’ indeed. His freelordship’s wingnutette quoter may not be quite so sure: Mme. la baronne omitted to supply the link, which suggests to the low minds of Paddy and Eye that the bits not swiped may contain some really delightful goofiness. [1] Conceivably her freeladyship is attemptin’ to win more recognition for the Great Sage. One fears "Nathan Lewis of New World Economics" is not a name many sorcerers conjure with on a regular basis.

Agitprop for Dunmmies Chapter XIII: Quotation & Context

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Blue Blazers’ taste in trolls does not much commend itself to Paddy and Eye, though of course one must bear in mind that the unjoo-bito do not get down here under the cloud deck often enough to know whight-wingers the way we know whight-wingers.

Anyhow, the current illiberal antidemocrat not from Waltham, call him "John D. Geckefeller XIV," condescended to recommend a Party potboiler to Their Worships, completely disregardin’ such well-thought-out adverse opinions as the following:

Voice of the People v. "Mallory Factor" (( fold here )) (( Demoncratic Vista )) 2 of 18 people found the following review helpful 1.0 out of 5 stars PANDERING AND ONE-SIDED, August 24, 2012 By Chris - See all my reviews This review is from: _Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind_ (Hardcover) Yes, there are problems with unions, and this book takes a look. But Gvmt Employee unions are not destroying our country. There are many factors contributing to the corruption of our government. Instead of looking at the top-down problem, this book focuses on unions as though John Birch himself was the author. If you believe that communism is still a threat to America... If you believe that capitalism is incapable of corruption... If you believe the Republican Party would save America from misguided liberals if only the unions would get out of the way, this is your book. Then again, if you believe the problems in America are more complex than that, pass... Don't waste your time. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink ******************* 1 of 17 people found the following review helpful 1.0 out of 5 stars MORE FAILED RIGHT-WING TRIPE, August 24, 2012 By MrObvious - See all my reviews This review is from: _Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind_ (Hardcover) This book is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt by conservatives to bury their enemies in a mountain of lies. If that's what you're looking for, save the money and just tune the radio to Rush Limbaugh. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink ******************* 15 of 67 people found the following review helpful 1.0 out of 5 stars RIGHT WING MOUTHPIECES, August 23, 2012 By M. Powers "Music Expert" (Rochester, New York United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) This review is from: _Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind_ (Hardcover) All you have to do is look at all the right wing nuts who love this book. Malkin, Hannity, and all the rest are anti-labor and anti-free thought. DON'T BUY THIS BOOK! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | Permalink Your honours, the persecution rests. Happy days.

Local Microbe Goes Viral

¡Not to condemn even Bozo the Sassenach unheard!

I Must Be Doing Something Right In Ireland

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

On George Hook’s show Friday, I debated Labor Party Deputy Michael D. Higgins—affectionately known to his supporters as “Michael Dee.” He, in turn, gave me my own pet name:

“Wanker.”

Specifically, Deputy Higgins accused me of being “a wanker who’s just whipping up fear.” Fear of the massive debt the US has added since Obama took office, fear of our inability to pay for the monstrous ObamaCare system that’s already failed the “won’t add a single nickel to the deficit” test, fear of whackjob Islamists who use murder to pursue their aims, etc. etc.

I find it completely rational to have some fear—or at the least grave concern—over all these things. But the Deputy, a far-lefty, disagreed in the strongest possible terms.

Now, regular listeners to the show know I get called far worse than “wanker” on a regular basis. So I barely noticed it. My response to the Deputy’s comment was to apologize to the audience.

“I know a lot of you tuned in to hear a right-wing nut spew ignorant, uninformed insults,” I said, “but unfortunately Deputy Higgins beat me to it.”

What’s interesting has been the reaction from the NewsTalk listeners. Some of them are absolutely outraged. Deputy Higgins has an official position in Irish government and, they feel, it was unacceptable language for him to use. Several listeners were so outraged that they attended my tea-party meeting in Dublin today specifically to apologize to me on behalf of the Irish people and let me know how offended (_sic_) they found his comments.

Personally, I found Deputy Higgins’ weak logic and unwillingness to acknowledge facts far more bothersome than the name calling. But once again, I’m a conservative talk host in America, so I’m used to being insulted by government officials.

I’ll leave it to the Irish to decide if the Deputy’s comments were out of line. Regardless, I am grateful for those who’ve risen to my defense.

And a proud, American “wanker.”

Okay, NOW you may condemn.

'Tis not often that the Irish Times link next to Paddy McTammany's e-gloo actually get used, so, presuming on your kind indulgence,

Higgins Tea Party smackdown goes viral
GENEVIEVE CARBERY
Thu, Aug 23, 2012

A two-year-old YouTube clip, of President Michael D Higgins debating with a US conservative talkshow host and Tea Party advocate has gone viral.

The clip has been viewed approximately 200,000 times in the past 48 hours and Mr Higgins is garnering much positive reaction from US-based users of social media sites.

In the 2010 Newstalk radio clip, the then Labour TD Michael D Higgins tells talkshow host Michael Graham to “be proud to be a decent American rather than being just a w**ker whipping up fear.”

Mr Higgins said Graham was using the same tactics as former Conservative vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “to get a large crowd, whip them up, try and discover what is the greatest fear, work on that and feed it right back and you get a frenzy”.

Much spike in traffic was generated after the clip was linked on social media sharing site Upworthy with the headline: “A Tea Partier Decided To Pick A Fight With A Foreign President. It Didn't Go So Well.”

Posting a link to the clip in the past 24 hours, Mansur Gidfar of Upworthy wrote: “Michael D. Higgins (who was elected President of Ireland last year) is fed up with over-the-top Tea Party rhetoric, and he isn't afraid to show it. Listen to him call out radio host Michael Graham on everything from health care to foreign policy. Trust me, you don't want to miss this one”

Mr Higgins' comments have garnered much reaction online, particularly among US tweeters, some of whom are calling the clip a “Tea Party smackdown”.

The clip “Michael D Higgins vs Michael Graham” is taken from a debate between Michael D Higgins and Michael Graham on foreign affairs broadcast on George Hook’s programme The Right Hook on Newstalk in 2010. The clip was originally uploaded in February.

Graham hosts a show on a Boston radio station 96.9 WTK (_sic_), is a former political consultant for the Conservative party (¿huh?) and has published a book on the Tea Party movement. He was one of the earliest organisers for the Tea Party.

Reacting to the popularity of the clip Graham tweeted today: “If opposing Arab terrorists and supporting Israel’s right to self defense still means I’m a 'w**ker', nothing’s changed".

Broadcaster George Hook tweeted today: “Glad to hear people enjoyed the debate between President Higgins and Michael Graham although it should be remembered it was two years ago”.

The hits on the video stand at over 430,000 but a spokeswoman for Google was unable to release any further information on the number of views.

Happy days.

Bottom, Bottom, ¿Who's Got My Intellectual Bottom™ ... [0] ...?

Dear Dr. Bones,



Among pro scribblers about the Spiritual [1] History of Greater Europe, it is, or used to be, a commonplace that after a few centuries have elapsed, ‘our’ ancestors’ ding-dong intramural set-tos become unintelligible at the hormonic or unbewusste or so-called ‘intuitive’ level: ¿How, after all, are ‘we’ to sympathize sincerely -- not to speak of ‘enthusiastically’ -- with either BigEndians or LittleEnders, now that poached and scrambled between them have entirely conquered The Magic Market?


Like alchemy and phrenology and Methodism, even Chicagonomics, these FFWW, Famous Fusses of the Western World, still possess a gigantic bibliography that will endure for ages to come [1] and can easily be resorted to by Dr. Dryasdust and Perfesser iGlaze at a purely conscious and cognitive level. Provided, naturally, that one does not require anything more exciting for tenure in Tert. Ed. than a modicum of eye powder, sometimes a tad slightin’ly referred to as "Fordian Bunk,"

(( Henry Ford slept here ))

CBO says “Fiscal cliff” is coming, recession, 9%+ unemployment… johnd | Wed, Aug 22, 2012 10:08 PM EST The director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, said Wednesday that currently planned sharp cuts in spending and increases in taxes at the end of the year would cause “a dramatic reduction in the federal deficit” and “a significant tightening of fiscal policy” which would “probably lead to a recession early next year.” Analysts refer to this as the “fiscal cliff.” President Barack Obama and Congress face the question of whether to step back from the fiscal cliff by not allowing the current tax rates to expire at year end and by postponing the spending curbs mandated by last summer’s Budget Control Act. Before year end, Congress must also decide whether to allow a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors to take effect – as required by a 1997 budget law — or whether to put it off, as it has done for the past several years. SO… unless these morons in Congress do something, we’ll have another recession, 9%+ unemployment and Americans may not be able to handle it well. How do you think Doctors will react to a 27% cut in Medicare payments? I can a lot of Doctors not taking Medicare patients any more. What’s going to happen? Recommend 0 Tweet Discuss 3 Comments [3 new] . Leave a comment below.

[new] Depends what the GOP does, in large part Since they are the ones who created this manufactured crisis in the first place. If they would just be sensible, adopt comprehensive health care reform with a public option, or even better Medicare for All, and embrace stimulus spending, we’d have been out of this recession a long time ago, and well on our way to restoring fiscal health to the national economy overall. The GOP created this “economic crisis” under Bush, and they are the main reason it has been sustained. Bob_Neer @ Thu 23 Aug 12:18 AM

[new] They will as long as it doesn’t mandate abortion and IVF and genetic engineering and cloning and all the other controversial things. Trade same-sex reproduction for a public option. Ball is in your court. dont-get-cute @ Thu 23 Aug 1:49 AM Reply (...) Bad Behavior has blocked 21005 access attempts in the last 7 days

.





Happy days.

--JHM



___


[0] A running title long enough to exhibit Twainian perspective after the manner of Century XII-XVII-LIII no doubt can be tarted up in HTML soo as to look tolerably acceptable, but we prefer not to spare the research time just at present. So please imagine that we called this one


"Bottom, Bottom, ¿Who's Got That Intellectual Bottom™ Product that the little lady from THE Big University

(( E. H. Warrenbuffet (left) collaged with H*rv*rd colleague ))

Graciously Recommended to Everybody Just the Other Day?"


[1] ¿Where are the (literal) bookworms when they might really do some good? And the tapeworms? And the CD/DVD worms? And . . . ?


[2 Paddy and Eye are thinking of die Geistesgeschichte Grosseuropas, you understand. All of it ‘superstructure’ for your Unreformed Marxist, meaning NOT meat-and-productivity economic, yet of little or no special interest to First-Estater Revs or ecclesiatical hack pols. If you like, feel free to think of ‘our’ former religionism as Dean Swift thought of the Hen of Lilliput and all Her productions.


The ever-immortal Hen of Plato, on the other hand, is still alive and rather too well for our taste, Paddy and Eye being, as you know, disciples of The Master of WYSIWYG and therefore averse to Parmenidism and Leostraussianity and everything similar in between.

... the best lack Intellectual Bottom™, while the worst [0] . . .



Dear Dr. Bones,

In this episode, our common bluecquaintance, the Patroniser of Public Transport, spots an opportunity to dynamite himself some fish in a barrel.  And promptly takes it:

(R) for Rationalization charley-on-the-mta | Mon, Aug 20, 2012 11:29 PM EST This very thought occured to me. A tweet by Bill McKibben: @billmckibben feeling more sympathetic to GOP: if how babies get made is hard for you, I guess climate science really might be too tough to follow And let’s remember that Rep. Akin is on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Gulp. So, here’s how these things go. Let’s keep a good deal of There But For The Grace Of God Go I about this … * Rep. Akin believes Life Begins At Conception — that every zygote, every embryo, every fetus is a full human being, possessing moral status, and any abortion is murder. * And then he’s made to answer a question about whether the case of rape might allow for abortion. * But a zygote as a product of rape is every bit as innocent as that created in the confines of marriage! So that can’t be allowed. *Akin understands on some level, however, that there must be consideration for a rape victim who did not wish to become a mother. (Internal conflict is brewing: Cognitive dissonance!) Through the magic of rationalization, Akin decides that such pregnancies can’t really exist! Conflict resolved! Whew!

There’s a good deal more than that, to which we shall perhaps eventually get. Meanwhile, the Eyetalics and the blackface above are His Worship's own.  These banausic things seem to Paddy and Eye to form part and parcel of the Worshipful notion of how the lower orders think. At very least, they convey potentially significant inflections of the Worshipful voice as it struggles to grok the mental Umwelt of the less expensively educated: ¡Yoo wouldn't wanna miss ’em either way!

Still at the low, mechanical level, the Worshipful header looks to Eye like an unhappy mating of "‘R’ is for 'Rationalization'" with "Rx for Rationalization."   If the much-esteemed PPT privately ranks his students, and his peasants, and the service in spas and restaurants, on an A-to-Z scale, Eye supposes it could be that he assigns Representative Aking a letter grade of ‘R’ [1] in biology. Yet it is not likely that even a Day One Blue Blazer would tacitly assume general familiarity with so un-Homeland™ic a system. [2]

In theory, "(R)" could be a slightly ahoo stab taken at "(®)," marca registrada.   But such a stab is pointless and meaningless, as well as harmless, in the absence of any antecedent.

Of the two serious contenders, "Rx for Rationalization" seems distinctly preferable, even though what follows affords no general prescription, really, only one alleged specific example. "R is for Rationalization" would be pretty much unintelligible, coming at one utterly Out of the Blue Void, as it were, no particular 'R' having been previously mentioned at BMG, nor, as far as we know, become generally associated with Party Neocomrade (ninth grade) W. T. Aking of the Missouri Second.

Happy days.



___
[0] On the whole, ’twere better not to speak of the worst at all. Except on the witness stand under oath or possibly at gunpoint.


[1] I guess an ‘R’ would be about the same as a conventional D- . Or possibly that "jocose and sarcastic E+" that you no doubt remember from the well-thumbed pages of our H*rv*rd Book. Which, by the way, ¿Whatever became of it?  ¡Alas, poor Bentinck-Smith!


[2] One the other hand, Paddy and Eye agree that the Patroniser of Public Transport probably knows the way from Alewife to Braintree and back better in kilometres and hectares and joules &c. &c. than in those far less accurate and wissenschaftlich units understanded of the vulgar.


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Obviously most of us don’t go as far as Akin. Most of us feel at some level that even though we were all zygotes and embryos once, a woman’s wishes ought to be given at least some weight, at least some of the time. Is a zygote a human being? Most of us would say, Not really. Is a viable fetus of 28 weeks a human being? Most of us would say Mostly or Definitely. But in much of this range stands It-Is-And-It-Isn’t.

But some of us do not see, do not want, do not believe in the legitimacy of ambiguity. And in order to keep that one thing constant (that a fertilized egg in whatever stage of development is fully vested with humanity, as it were), everything else must turn around it. Like light around a black hole, science itself must bend. Ethics must bend: Regard for women, their freedoms, and their bodies, must bend.

I keep thinking of Yeats, in the poem so tritely over-quoted: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” It is, I think, merely a normative description: That to be ethical and good means to consider consequences; to be full of doubt, fear and trembling. Rationalization such as Akin’s takes one horn of a dilemma and pretends the other doesn’t exist.

And sadly, our media’s attention span (140 character limit) allows for nothing else. The sound bite culture in fact wildly encourages such rationalization and elision — until someone like Akin rather ingenuously tries to talk it through publicly, and puts it in such naked and grotesque fashion.

Discuss: 2 [1 new]

Mau-Mauing the _Fehrnstrom Fishwrap_ (Part 3.14159 of an occasional series)

"The Associated Press contributed to this report."

Contributed quite a bit, Paddy suspects, for surely none of the Jay School fruits -- no frathouse babes immediately in evidence, Eye notices -- can wish to interfere with Citizen Fehrnstrom's plans to create our political happiness on the adamantine foundation of the neodictatorship of Mittius Coriolanus Pompo, Demander of Apologies, Master of Seamus, &c. &c. &c.

¡With the Smirk of Janesville substarrin as Master of the Horse!

¡¡Plus Senator S. Philip Fratboy off to one side lookin shirtleessly cosmopolitan!! Or perhaps, considering the little laddie's present chronological age, shirtedly.

None of this triune happiness of ours can ever happen, though, unless the Fearless Funders of Freedumb manage to stuff scads an scads of carpetbags full of boodle by the behavior here described.

The question before us, accordingly, is whether it helps to allure the meatheads of Louisedayhicksville by going on at any length about the sausage-maker's craft.

Now your really konsequent whightist señorito of the 'conservative' 'intellectual' (a.k.a. "intolerable whippersnapper") variety would suppress the Campaign Styles of the Rich and Famous even in such temptin' cases as Big Paddy (the Governor of us all, sucessor to M. Coriolanus Pompo) or what's-his-name, the senior Sen., the one with the yacht.

ENVY is a four-letter word, doncha know? A four-letter peccatum capitale, even, as it were.  And the theory is, or used to be, that nobooby is immune, not even at LDHV an/or Rio Limbaugh. Wally Wombschool an Cindy from Wasilla certainly could start hankerin after spectacular locations as dazzlin, in their stodgey, real-estatey way, as is the candidacy of M. Coriolanus Pompo on the loftier an more spiritual plane of humanoid events.

Quite apart from the dogmatic mythology, it would be a serious inconvenience for the Fearless Funders an for Kiddiemaster Fehrnstrom if LDHV an RL were to start envyin those Bettters for Whom

it is their appointed station in life to scab. ¡Not far would the kiddiecons wander down that road before most likely turning Bolshie!

A vague theoretical knowledge that Ebb Scrooge, an Ollie Warbucks, an Tio Ruperto, an the Freres Koch, an . . . consume material goodies on a level that makes even Brookline lace curtains look pretty shabby is harmless. Probably it is harmless.

But your whight-wing agitpropper is definitely temptin Fate when she succumbs to some silly Jay School notion that absolutely everythin should be brought vividly before the selfservative kiddies' dittopans by means like "nearly 300 guests [who] dined on lobster, seafood salad, a raw bar, roast beef, salmon and blueberry cobbler with breathtaking views of the ocean and Farm Neck Golf Club."

(Incidentally, GULA used to be a four-letter theoword too, did it not?)

Let us hope, then, that the AP is solely responsible for at least the FNGC Three Hundred and their [exp. del.] blueberry cobbler.

Should that gaudy bit prove to have been stuck in gratuitously at The Fehrnstrom Fishwrap, well, Paddy and Eye will have to subtract even more points from Fabulous Fernie's runnin score, a score which has been declining of late for other reasons. (( See http://j.mp/P4B4SE for our attempt to convince political grown-ups that Fernie is, or once was, moderately formidable. ))

Happy days.

-- Patrick (Pádraig) Aloysius (Chlodovechus ) McTammany (#$@%!^&*)