Good Nonsense: August 2006

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Sacrifice and Civilized Countries

Via Digby, I find this great post by Bouphonia about American sacrifice:

[F]or all BushCo's talk of "homeland security," nothing has been done in the last four years to improve response time and efficiency in a disaster, whether natural or man-made. If you can't evacuate people after a hurricane - a hurricane that you watched travel towards you at twelve miles an hour - you can't evacuate them after a dirty bomb detonated with no warning. Any terrorist who is thinking of attacking us must be delighted to learn that Bush's incompetence will act as an awe-inspiring force multiplier.

It's often claimed that George W. Bush has asked for no sacrifices in this time of war. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice our humanity and our compassion. He's asked us to sacrifice our privacy and freedom, and our respect for our fellow citizens. He's asked us to sacrifice every irreducible ideal - and there were few enough of them, God knows - on which this country was founded, and whatever fragile steps we've taken towards implementing them under the law. He's asked us to sacrifice any religious truth that would interfere with the dreary, mechanical pursuit of redundant wealth and false security. He's asked us to sacrifice our souls and our conscience, in exchange for his snake-oil promise that we'll never have to suffer the consequences of our own inhumanity. He's asked us to sacrifice our present for his future, and our future for his present.

Bush admits that he didn't respond appropriately to this disaster, and we know that this failure - if it was a failure, and not a policy, or a whim - killed people by the hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands. In a "civilized" country, Bush would've resigned in disgrace by now. In an "uncivilized" country, he and his goldbricking cronies at FEMA would be hanging by the neck from lamp-posts. But only in a soulless country - one that's turned its back, essentially, on itself - could there be any possibility of letting him remain in power.

Yes, in a soulless country, this leader's henchmen get to go in front of military veterans and call the political opposition "fascists" (a continuation of the great political game of "I Know You Are, But What Am I?") without long-term consequences.

All Things Dylan

Here’s a nice trifecta from the Philadelphia City Paper (h/t largehearted boy)—an article that reviews Dylan’s new album, the new Dylan Encyclopedia, and an apparently interesting (and unauthorized) documentary, Bob Dylan 1966-1978: After the Crash. It’s Bob Season once again!

Fascism

Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Yeah, if that doesn’t describe Democrats and anybody who dissents, I don’t know what does.

I just figured that, you know, if they were going to use the word, they might as well know what it means.

Weather, Water, Energy 8-31-06

The big story, of course, is the bipartisan agreement in CA between the legislature and the governor to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, showing it can be done despite the best efforts of the feds. For better and (often) worse, CA sets the path for the rest of the nation. Let's see how long it takes Bushnev's DOJ and/or Supreme Sovi . . . Congress to pull the old "write a pretend federal rule to preempt progressive state action" stunt. . . . The bigger news, though, to me anyway, is this Climate Progress piece wherein one of the nation's chief skeptics about global warming and hurricanes has come in from the dark side. In fact, now he's saying, “I don’t see any reason why the power of hurricanes wouldn’t continue to increase over the next 100 to 200 years.” Now, is this good news or bad? . . . And finally, a weird story from the Kansas City Star on how gasoline in hot temps will expand but not be accounted for at pumps, meaning we're paying more than we should. Like $2.3 b. (that's billion) a year. Those of you not physics-challenged will probably get the details better than the rest of us, but it's another thing to brighten your holiday weekend.

You're welcome.

Olbermann on Rumsfeld

Well...Rumsfeld and everybody else, really. Via Crooks and Liars (which also has video):

That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused… is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count — not just his. Had he or his President perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience - about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago - about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago - about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one* year ago - we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have - inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically. And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused… the United States of America?

Read (and watch) the whole thing. He really didn't even need to quote Murrow at the end. His statements here were already more eloquent than anything I've seen on the news in quite a long time. Well done, Keith.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty) Mas Bella Update XVI

Bringing in Patricia Manterola for an extended cameo as they just have is one of those nice touches that you get in “La Fea Mas Bella,” and “Betty La Fea,” the original, that most telenovelas can’t do because of their narrative structure. Having the celebs on board, either as themselves or minor characters, is a way of winking at the audience and the telenovela concept itself. Manterola is one of the hardest of bodies in the telenovela world and, like many of its stars, doubles well as a singer and performer. Over the course of the serial so far, we’ve seen traditional novela heartthrob Jorge Salinas turn up as Luigi’s heartthrob in the most clever of the turns, but we’ve also seen veteran Paty Diaz (she played the snobby beauty in the hall at Lety’s old bank) and that singer guy whose name I never can remember. There may have been others I’ve forgotten, and it’s a safe bet there will be more turning up. In “Betty,” I recall Laura Flores at one point and newscasters, but I was just getting into telenovelas at the time and probably missed a ton.

This will be one way to keep tabs on how much the ABC version, “Ugly Betty,” will try to keep to the novela spirit, at least “Betty La Fea”s. Will they be bringing in stars for cameos the same way? We know producer Salma Hayek will be showing up as a character in Betty’s dad’s favorite telenovela. Who else could pop up? It would be wise for building up audience to use several Latino stars, at least those recognizable to non-Latinos. Why are only Daisy Fuentes and Eric Estrada coming to mind? Jlo wouldn’t do it . Oh, well. . . . wait, what about Shakira? Could they get her? Is Thalia well enough known? Paola Rey does hair commercials. Jorge Ramos, the newscaster? That Miss Universe Trump thought got too fat (she still looks mighty good at her size, by the way)? My personal choice would be Barbara Bermudo, the anchor of the early evening “Primer Impacto.” Non-Latinos aren’t likely to know her, but I guarantee that every conversation in the room would stop the second she appeared on the screen. (Disclaimer: On my list of celebrities my wife will let me sleep with, Barbara would likely come right after Salma, or maybe Carey Lowell. Of course, as I may have hinted in the past, Salma is, like, the first dozen names on the list. My problem is, I think Carey Lowell may be on my wife’s list. Wait, is that a problem?)

Uh . . . to get back to reality, having these celebrities on the show demonstrates the underlying playfulness of “Betty” and “La Fea” that “Ugly Betty” will have to “get” to have a chance of living up to the standard set. Manterola is a nice touch, and she’s playing to it well. I’m interested in seeing who else they call on in the next months (yes, it still has months) as the story progresses. If they follow “Betty,” there will be plenty of natural opportunities. And hopefully the people working on “Ugly Betty” are paying attention. A lot of the excisions they’re apparently making can be forgiven if they capture that playfulness. Maybe Manterola can do double-duty. I can’t think of much better, except, maybe, that Carey thing. . . . better go now.

Weather, Water, Energy 8-30-06

Quick links you should follow. Now. (Thanks to Avedon Carol for the first one.)

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Rumsfeld changes sides!!!

In remarks to several thousand veterans at the American Legion’s national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failed efforts to appease the Adolf Hitler regime in the 1930s.

“I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism,” he said.

...

“Can we truly afford to believe somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?” he asked.

“Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and lies and distortions being told about our troops and about our country,” he added.

Wow...very brave of him to stand up to the Bush Administration like that...and at the American Legion conference, no less.

What was that? He was defending the Bush Administration? Oh, so he was being ironic, I see.

What was that? No irony? Huh.

Weather, Water, Energy 8-29-06

Since I criticize our blogging community frequently for losing sight of the reality of the weather, water, and energy crises that face us and that should be the rallying point for the campaigns to reverse our political decline, I should also give credit where it's due. ThinkProgress, probably the best group blog on the topics, and Susie Madrak, probably the best individual blogger, both have posts up that should set you thinking. And even the estimable Digby turns her attention to the subjects, giving hope to us all. The best news is that ThinkProgress has created a blog specifically for the climate topic, ClimateProgress, to keep us all going. Now, if the big names could just start bubbling up the political strategy to make it stick, or at least to coax Big Al, the only credible political leader, into mobilizing the movement, there might be even more than just hope.

Has it been four years already?

Gee...seems like only yesterday...

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

...

As President Bush has said, time is not on our side. Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action.

Tuesday Pirates Rant™ - Best 51-81 Team in the League!!

Another normal week for the Pirates—a 3-game winning streak (prompting Bucco Blog to announce that they’ve turned a corner—“I'm sorry.. but even 14-year pessimist Joliet Jake here sees the light now. This is no fluke. My eyes are wide open.”) followed by a 3-game losing streak full of bad pitching, bad hitting, and bad defense. Your typical young team, or your typical Pirates? You decide.

Good

* The Pirates are 21-21 since the All-Star Break, which is better than the 30-60 before the Break, and therefore it counts as a good. It’s only August, and the Pirates seem to get fans’ hopes up by playing good ball in August after the season is lost, but hey, minor details. For most of the last month, they’ve played against teams who are still in the playoff hunt, and they’ve held their own...except against Houston, anyway, who has taken 6 of 7 against them in the last month. But these are happy bullets, so ignore that.

* Freddy Sanchez still leads the league in hitting. After going 3-for-5 against the Cubs yesterday, his average is .349. Miguel Cabrera is in second place at .337.

* Now seems to be a pretty good time to remind our six loyal readers that Jason Bay really is one of the best outfielders in the National League. This year he’s batting .291 with 29 HR’s, 93 RBI’s, a .401 On-Base % (meaning he’s gotten a TON of walks this year thanks to the fact that people like Joe Randa and Jeromy Burnitz have been batting behind him most of the year), and a .545 Slugging %. Great numbers. He’s streaky as hell, but those are great numbers.

* Damaso Marte got a win this week!! Why is that big news? Because the “solid ERA, but don’t you dare pitch him in a clutch situation” lefty reliever had started the season 0-7, that’s why. Losing streak over!

* Top prospect Andrew McCutchen, a 19-year old outfielder from Florida and the Pirates’ #1 pick in last year’s draft, was recently promoted to AA Altoona and, after a few weeks there, is still crushing the ball and batting .345. That can’t be a bad thing...as long as, as I said last week, he doesn’t get promoted to Pittsburgh too soon. Ken Griffey Jr. was able to jump to the majors at 19, but that doesn’t mean just anybody can.

* The Beaver County Times continues to press on with the "Dave Littlefield might be fired" angle. Honestly, I should probably put this under the 'Bad' bullets because it's just a big tease to GM-hungry bloggers like myself, but I'll be a naive optimist and put it here.

Bad

* After taking 2 of 3 in Atlanta, the Pirates came home and played four games against Houston, three of which were in front of sellout crowds. They were outscored 28-11 and lost 3 of 4, including a 13-1 Sunday debacle. But then again, Shawn Chacon started that game, so I guess that was to be expected.

Damn, and I thought I might get through an entire Rant™ without mentioning his name.

* The Pirates’ front office continued their ongoing trend of playing down injuries, then quietly putting a player on the disabled list when nobody is looking. In the last couple weeks, young starter Tom Gorzelanny went from “We’re going to hold him out a start—he’s got stiffness in his left arm” to “We’re going to skip him another start or two” to “Yeah, he’s going on the DL with tendonitis—he’s likely done for the year.” Closer Mike Gonzalez, who has 24 saves and a 2.16 ERA this season, and who absolutely dominated in his last three appearances went from “We’re not pitching him this weekend because his arm is tired,” to “Yeah, he’s going on the DL with tendonitis—he’s likely done for the year,” in about four days. Yes, it’s better to sit these guys than to risk injury, but after five years of this, you get kind of tired of the misdirection.

* Not only did the Pirates get dominated in front of record crowds last weekend, but they also hired a punk cover band to entertain the crowd during a fireworks show Friday night. This may be shocking, but...it didn’t go over well. What, you say? A punk cover band didn’t make a bunch of Western Pennsylvania families happy? Shocking, I know.

Seriously, whose idea was this? Why do they still have a job?

* Speaking of still having a job, here's a piece from Sports Illustrated (employer of a former roommate of mine, so I hate to bag on them...but I have to) in which Jon Heyman suggests that Dave Littlefield really is a good GM who just hasn't been given enough money to work with. All I can say is, he was given money this year. He spent $20 million on Jeromy Burnitz, Joe Randa, and Sean "Thrown out on a grounder to left field" Casey. When he was hired in 2001, they won 62 games. At the moment, they're on pace for 62.5 games this season. If they lose tonight, that pace is an even 62. That's an improvement of somewhere between 0.0 and 0.1 wins per season. He has failed his audition, and it's time for him to go.

Blog

Lots of good stuff from the blogs this week...impressive since most people have switched their attention to football season...

Here's Bucs Dugout on next year's payroll projections:

Dave Littlefield says that next year's payroll will be "plenty." Which, after the listener stops laughing, begs the question: "plenty" enough for what? Another 100-loss season? If it weren't so easy to call the Pirates on their BS, I'd be tempted to suggest that we look at this article again in a year, when the Pirates will again be near the bottom of the standings. By then it will have turned out that either the payroll was not, in fact, "plenty," or that Littlefield just can't get it done.

Here's Romo Phone Home about the "forbearance of the Pirate fan":

My keyboard player and I did an unplugged gig at Atria's next to the stadium after Saturday night's game, and after we were finished, I engaged in a friendly but heated discussion with a Pirates fan who disagreed with my propensity for going on the radio and berating Pirates management. To this guy, it seemed patently obvious that the Pirates are now doing things right, that they have finally distanced themselves from the mistakes of the past, and that with the young players now on the field, they are poised to contend in 2007.

I find this point of view startling. It seems that, by now, I should hardly have to verbalize a statement such as "We have the worst general manager in baseball," much less justify it with examples. That we have the worst general manager in baseball should be obvious to anyone paying the least bit of attention. 14 losing seasons. Craig Wilson for Shawn Chacon. Ed Creech. Brian Bullington and B.J. Upton. Tell me when to stop...

...

I don't claim any superior intelligence here. At best, what I have is a higher level of interest and engagement with the game of baseball than the average person, which may have as much to do with pathology as it does with intelligence, and the interest and engagement, I daresay, result in my paying closer attention and therefore being better informed than the average fan.

I had a similar experience at a preseason event at Atria's in March, in which KDKA ran a marathon pre-season talkfest in which I was asked to participate. The room was abuzz with optimism resulting, as near as I could tell, from the acquisitions of Burnitz, Randa, and Casey, and the consensus was overwhelmingly in favor of the notion that the Pirates were about to end their long run of futility. When I got up to the microphone, like Tobermory in the short story by Saki, I silenced the room when I said, "If the Pirates play .500 ball this year, I'll walk from here to Philadelphia."

If the Pirates continue their post-All-Star-break run of mediocrity (when compared to abject ineptitude, mediocrity impersonates success), look for the post-season optimism to arise again, defying all sense and reason.

Here's Where is Van Slyke, noting that it could always be worse:

I did a lot of complaining about Jim Tracy early in the year. Since about June he's tended to shut his mouth, stopped blaming his players for everything that went wrong, and stopped praising his staff for everything that went right. He's shifted towards playing mostly younger players, and in general given Pirate fans very little to complain about. I'm still not sure he's a great manager (and this isn't an analysis of his work this year), but as stupid as he can seem, he's never said anything as mind bogglingly stupid as this Dusty Baker quote:

"On-base percentage is great if you can score runs and do something with that on-base percentage," Baker said... "Clogging up the bases isn't that great to me."
Of course, a special thanks to Fire Joe Morgan to alerting the world to just how stupid the people that run baseball can be at times.

Until next week, when I'll have a nice, fresh sunburn from Saturday's tailgating. It's football season!!

Monday, August 28, 2006

Weather, Water, Energy 8-28-06

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a San Fran Chronicle article (!) on how energy industry executives are readying themselves for the inevitable regulation as a result of global warming, which they all but unanimously (if not cheerfully) accept. The options are going ahead and cutting the best deals v. prolonging the agony in defense of stubbor . . . the status quo. Looks like the former may win. A strangely encouraging article, actually . . . . UPI picks up a Guardian story on the shifting of Europe's seasons to earlier springs and later falls. . . . And finally, the Senate Repub's go-to guy on the environment, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, told a crowd this weekend that the Kyoto Protocol would shut down agriculture, military, and oil production in Oklahoma and that global warming is an issue exaggerated by "a liberal media who caters to Hollywood." His solution is to pull the US out of the UN.

Quick Notes

The Christian Science Monitor baits its readers with this headline--"Numbers Show a Second-Rate US." But then it stakes its claim. Out of 16 wealthy nations, the US is at the bottom (or top if you're a Social Darwinist) in people at or below the poverty line. Despite our wealth and power (No. 1 in defense spending!!), we're in the middle in educational outcomes, health care, job creation (great economy!!), productivity, and unemployment. On the positive side, we're No. 2 in income per capita (thanks, Bill Gates!! . . . but not you WalMart family) and NO. 1! in annual weeks worked!!!!!! The article gives the more objective commentary . . . . I don't mess much with U.S. News & World Barone, but it has a couple of quick notes itself on a frequent theme here--the way Repubs will win in 2006 by driving the negative campaigning so hard that "moderate" voters will stay home and the Dem bloodletting that will occur if the Repubs retain Congress. I disagree about which Dems will be the most bloodlet, but at least someone in the MSM has raised the warning flag for the Dems. Will any of them pay attention?

Unbelievable

Correction: totally believable.

The electoral court has dismissed all of the complaints filed in the recent election.

Considering that some of those involved precincts where ballots were completely missing, precincts with massive miscounts, and a shift of roughly 0.25% of the vote just from the recount, I don't see how the PRD can view it as anything except a corrupt decision. The court will annul a few precincts, but it is chopping down a couple of trees while pretending there's no forest.

I thought they would at least scold the PAN, to give some appearance of impartiality.

I can't read Spanish, and I can't find a word about it on cnn.com (but thank god they're covering every ounce of the new Jon-Benet developments...Nancy Grace's head probably just exploded), so I'll have to take Charles' word for it. Sad day in the land of telenovelas.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Sunday Blogroll!!

And how was everybody's Saturday? It finally rained hard in Missouri Friday night, but that didn't stop us from working outside on the new retaining wall.

Really, though, we only worked outside for a couple of hours...leaving plenty of time for all the other important Saturday agenda items: going to Barnes & Noble, reading the new Rolling Stone and Wired cover to cover, preparing for my Monday night Fantasy Football draft, watching Memoirs of a Geisha (not my choice, but it really wasn't too bad...one important question: why in the world was that movie in English? It was like a Japanese movie being filmed in Chicago...only with every American in the movie speaking Japanese...was just weird.), and finding and watching most of Fahrenheit 9/11 on one of the Showtimes (The Butterfly hadn't seen it). Good times. Anyway...on to the Blogroll...

De-coding Neocon proposals in one easy step (Debate Link). It makes total sense! Brilliant!

Live blogging from the NOLA Rising Tide Conference (First Draft...who actually has a series of strong Katrina posts...read them all). Meanwhile, Susie asks, shall we say, a pretty straight-forward question.

Atrios links to WaPo, and normally I'd be apologizing for doing the same, but this is a pretty decent write-up. Lots of people (my wife, for one) have been talking about debt and the over-extension of a normal family's income for quite a while, and it seems the first wave of consequences is hitting the shore.

I still haven't gotten around to writing another Fraud in the Land of Telenovelas post, but thanks to Mercury Rising, and the fact that Charles does a better job of summarizing it than I do anyway, I haven't been in much of a hurry.

Two great (and unrelated...mostly) links from this Avedon post: 1) I'm curious how much play this will get nationwide. An army lieutenant refuses to go to war because "A soldier has an obligation to disobey illegal orders." There's already been a Time article, which is always a good start. 2) Bush says "I'm responsible for the federal government," and Corrente Wire says "No, you're not."

Seriously, how inept are Joementum and his advisors...they've actually managed to alienate themselves from Hilary's people (FDL). Is she a crazed, angry liberal too now? Yes, but don't you forget--Joe is a tried and true Democrat (AMERICAblog), no matter what those crazy blogofascists might say...and no matter what his own actions may suggest.

The Boston Globe takes on evil incarnate (Gadflyer).

Dear Leader is just trying to protect us, so these two Americans must have done something wrong (Greenwald)."

"No no no, it's okay when we do it (Billmon)."

"I'm nothing like those crazed liberal blogofascists...they're so...so...angry (Digby)."

Going to great lengths to win hearts and minds...of our own troops (Booman).

Fear and tax cuts...for the good of the country (Existentialist Cowboy)!

Real Time is one of two reasons why I miss HBO (the other, of course, is Entourage), but thanks to C&L, I don't have to miss it quite as much. And speaking of C&L (and YouTube), Dana B. looks at the "Year of the Clip."

Here's the latest in Echidne's lovely Cootie Awards series.

I'll just take this time to say that my morbid curiosity meter is going off the charts for the '08 Republican Primaries, and I'm really not sure why. From TBogg.

Alter Destiny makes its debut appearance on the blogroll by mentioning something interesting--why in the hell isn't the "Wake Up Wal-Mart Tour" focusing mostly on the Midwest. I live in a mid-Missouri town (Columbia) run mostly by Wal-Mart money...91,000 people here, and one Supercenter is not enough...so they're building THREE more. They'll have covered all four corners, and it's disgusting.

Republicans feasting on each other in my home state (Fired Up! Missouri). Good times.

Wolcott takes on one of his favorite targets. Making fun of PM is like shooting dead fish in a barrel, but this post is worth it for the title alone.

Rosie Ruiz runs for office (Rising Hegemon).

Upyernoz is back from vacation! And he gets all scientific and stuff!

Mannion writes about Orson Welles.

If sarcasm is for losers, then the GN blogroll is screwed (Pandagon).

And finally, the Far in Lefarkins links to the most important issue of the week. I vote for That's Not Sangria!

Only Fair

If I'm going to rip on the bloggers, pundits, and politicians who don't realize that we have hit the tipping point of a five-decade infection of authoritarianism in our democracy, then I need to recognize the folks who do get it more often. Sara at Orcinus and Norman Mailer, via poputonian at Digby, get it. Go give them some love and then heed.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Welcome!

A hearty hat tip to Crooks and Liars for the link, and a welcome to all visitors who followed that link.

And while we're at it, thanks to Alter Destiny for the blog roll.

We're very much believers in quid pro quo, and therefore we've added two more sites to our own blogroll.

Albert O. Hirschman V (Finale)

I'll conclude the series I've been doing (finally) on the works of Albert O. Hirschman, one of maybe a half dozen economists sufficiently grounded to the planet enough to put confidence in their words. I want to spend a little time on a couple of compilations of his essays, Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond and Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. He apparently had other compilations earlier in his career, Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America and A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America, that I haven't read, mainly because I never saw them at the book store (like all the others I've reviewed here) at some point over the last decade or so (now only Exit, Voice and Loyalty is likely to turn up) and haven't really gotten online to track them down yet.

I haven't been as interested in the early works because, while the writings of his on development are extremely informed and thoughtful and predictably more insightful than most development writings, even with the recent critiques of the World Bank and IMF, I'm just not that interested in that topic. And that's also a problem for me with the two remaining books at hand here. Several of the contributions to both are on development and its problems, but, if you don't know much about the topic or only get your views from the economic press and pundits, you owe it to yourself to get an objective and experienced view.

What is good about Essays and Rival Views is the remaining writings. For one thing, many of them give him a chance to respond to critiques of his works like Exit and The Passions and the Interests, reviewed here earlier. Essays in Trespassing is essentially nothing but his chance to rethink his views on those works and other earlier ones, such as National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade and The Strategy of Economic Development (again, unread by me). The benefit, of course, is that you get his summary of his themes in the books as well as what others have said and how he has responded. Since Exit is my favorite of his books, one of my favorite of all books, hearing his addendums is especially helpful, particularly his expansion of the concept of "voice," which he tells us now is, compared to exit, richer, more modulated, exuberant, treacherous, and hazardous (which is why I've tended to opt for exit once it was clear the voice could cost too much and still fail). In Rival Views, he makes clear that more attention should be given to "voice" as it reflects the complexity of social life that many (most?) fellow economists have unfortunately missed in their simplistic modeling (my words, not his). His last couple of essays, on Passions, are a call for a return to the older, broader (more complex, again) view of econ and society exemplified by Adam Smith and dumped on by his devoted followers.

This understanding of and emphasis on complexity is the hallmark of Hirschman's work and what drew me to him from the beginning. His work in economic development, trying to apply simplified models to a complex world, made him able to see the application of the dynamic field of complexity theory to society, politics, and economics well before the discipline even got started. Reading his works, you see the contingency and power of social interactions with their flows and tipping points and unintended consequences, as well as the ways that streams of human events can produce similarities of thought and action. I realize that, in giving you just a cursory view of these two books' 22 essays plus intro notes, I've failed to convey what's in them much (but there are 22 essays plus intro notes!!!). I hope that the earlier reviews on his monographs will give you the flavor of what you find in these two. In fact, if you only have time for one Hirschman book, one of these might be what you should do (I'd go with Essays). You'll get his recaps and updates. And probably go ahead and check out the other books, after all.

I know I take shots at economists here without always explaining why. I find most of them, with their truncated views of reality and history and their exalted views of themselves and discipline, so limited and predictable in a world that's not that I groan when they open their mouths because they are just "capitalist" versions of the old, failed communists, similarly unaware of their ignorance and liabilities. But there is the alternative tradition, the way of the Smiths, Heilbroners and Galbraiths, Lindbloms and Hirschmans, to actually study the world as it is, not as their dogmas and gospels would have it. Hirschman writes the shortest, most densely packed with insight pieces, and his style is every bit as entertaining as Heilbroner or Galbraith. (I left the others out intentionally.) If you've realized yourself that economists are saying more about their religion than their reality but still want somebody to help you get to understanding, Hirschman is where you should start. You'll just feel smarter when you're done.

Weather, Water, Energy 8-26-06

January water skiing in WI? Maybe it's just a matter of time. (h/t Think Progress)

Friday, August 25, 2006

Props to Paul Hackett

Paul Hackett is doing some fundraising work for Sherrod Brown through Democracy For America, and that's very commendable. The way he was pushed out the door by Democrats (and some bloggers) for an establishment candidate like Brown was upsetting and disheartening, and I just assumed he'd be sitting this campaign out, but it looks like he's decided that, disheartening or not, the midterms are too important to sit on the sidelines. Kudos.

While Sherrod has stood up to the administration on things like the war in Iraq, he has always fought to protect our troops, to make sure our first responders have the tools they need in an emergency, to tighten our borders, and fix the problems in homeland security that Republicans have allowed to still exist five years after 9/11. But we don't have to take it lying down.
...
As an Iraq War veteran, I know what fighting for America's security means. Sherrod Brown opposed the war in Iraq from the start. Since the invasion, he's successfully lobbied to get body armor for our servicemen and women and he's held the Administration accountable for the $8 billion it spends on Iraq every month. We need leaders like Sherrod Brown who will bring real security to Ohio communities.
Republicans are going to come after Sherrod with their typical lies and false negative tactics. We need to strike fast and hard with the truth. This is a critical race that we can win, but only if we help Sherrod Brown back against Republican attacks.
...
I hope you can join me in supporting Sherrod Brown so we can take back the US Senate and restore honest political leadership to Ohio.

So...

...tell me specifically why a nationwide ad campaign of "Republicans have been wrong about everything for the last five years. Republicans cannot govern well," wouldn't work? Too tactless? Nah, that can't be it. Seriously, why wouldn't it work? People would feel sorry for Republicans or something? Here's one of their most highly-esteemed "experts" 3+ years ago:

This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon's Failed War Plan. . .

...
It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body.

...

But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it's the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld's view that one shouldn't do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.

Seriously, why?

Weather, Water, Energy 8-25-06

One step forward, two back. The Bushnev folks in DOE have finally come up with an energy efficiency rule that would save $9 billion in electricity costs and eliminate the need for 11 new power plants over the next 28 years. The problem is they scrapped a DOE rule that would have saved $11 b. and 16 plants in the same period (plus be more likely to stand up under peak loads), and no one seems to know why. . . . Science Daily reports that concerns about methane emissions associated with global warming 12,000 years ago came from tropical wetlands or plant products, not release of seafloor methane deposits as other studies suggested. There was fear that a repeat of the seafloor releases now might trigger far more massive outcomes than have been predicted. For now, it appears that possibility is off the tables. . . . Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla has a story on fish from warm water climes to the south now turning up off the Rhode Island coast. The seafood restaurant industry is undoubtedly thankful. . . . And, of course, British Petroleum was apparently warned two years ago of the pipeline corrosion problem that has shut down production in Alaska. Can the old "his lips are moving" joke apply to a corporation?

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING!! Mr. Cranky Pants

I'm tired....leave me alone...I just wanna go to bed

Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Lance Known as Mannion

Lance Mannion has had a run of eclectic and truly interesting posts in the last week or so, occasionally political but mainly showing what talent and diverse interests can create. Go read.

Willie Mays and Robert Reich

As someone who grew up watching Willie Mays, I found the end of his career difficult to watch, the once amazing skills eroded by time. I'm having the same feeling now watching Robert Reich. The man who gave us "knowledge workers" also wrote Tales of a New America, which should have been required reading for wannabe Dem powerbrokers for 20 years. But somewhere between there, thinking peopl would be interested in his getting lost at the Dept of Labor, and now, he's as self-deceived and helpless as Mays on a high fly in the sun that last year.

Joshua Holland at Gadflyer has reamed him better than I could, or want to. I'll just say that he is the perfect example of Beltway savants who don't understand how sick our democracy is and how it needs not a bandaid but a thorough cleansing of the toxins left by 40-50 years of authoritarian influence and power-grabbing. Reich's "advice" to Dems should they capture a house in 2006 is exactly the battleplan they followed after McCarthy, after Nixon, and after Reagan/BushI and Iran-Contra. And because the Dems failed to make the case that those people inflicted crippling wounds on our democracy and historical legacy, the Repubs came back into power each time further and further along in their quest to institute one-party authoritarian rule. The Dems had a chance to anchor Enron around the Repubs' neck, but, no, Reich-parrot Lieberman took the same tack. You wonder if they've lost the capacity to learn. (And don't get me started on nitwit Clinton preaching how he worked with Repubs in Congress. At least he's showing indelibly what a self-serving tool he's always been.)

We will not recover our democracy if the Bushnev Administration is allowed to walk away from its corruption, subversion, and destruction. Simple as that. If Dems follow Reich's "advice," when Jeb later inevitably takes office, he will pick up exactly where his increasingly demented brother left off. It's not about "payback." It's about our very future as a constitutional democracy. Tell Reich he's still lost and to STFU unless/until he finds his way again.

POSTSCRIPT: As if reading my mind, Matt Taibbi and Susie Madrak have the same wisdom for Robert and his idiotic ilk.

Time to Get Scared or Serious

Mary at Left Coaster has a linky story that should scare the urine out of you. Which Dana Blankenhorn is his usual demure, understated way supplements. Remember, we warned you.

Tough Dems v. What We Get

Over the last week or so Digby has continued to raise the point that other bloggers, much less Dem power-types, still don't seem to get. If the Repubs score even when their messages are a minority view, how does that happen? Cheating and deception? Yes. Compliant, retarded media? Yes. Lazy, self-obsessed citizens? By God, yes. But it's more than that. They understand that communication isn't just the message, it's also the messenger.

When they roll out the "manly" Reagans, McCains, and Codpieces, the blonde Aryan sisterhood, they're using channels that are reinforcing, counterintuitive and thus attention-getting, and hard to counter. "I may not agree with him, but I like that he stands for something." "Sure, she's as bad as Stalin with her rhetoric, but she's so pretty and look at how she's smiling. She's just entertaining us." And against these image-conscious spokespeople, the Dems continue to send out the Reids and Kerrys and Pelosis (who gives Joan Rivers and Victoria Principal real competition for scary). As Digby argues over and over, the Dems have people like Hackett and Waxman (maybe Webb, maybe Clark) who can fling the crap back at them in the same reinforcing, counterintuitive way, but look what they did to Hackett in the name of another blow-dried Beltway-ite who might not even beat DeWine. And for the face of progressive blogs to be a mousy Berkeley type who even some of us feel is dangerously short-sighted, predictably narrow-minded, and ethically challenged is an error beyond magnitudes.

Lakoff is wrong, as much as I've admired his work for two decades. Dems aren't seen as the nurturant mother. They're seen as MisterRogers, only on the make and without as much testosterone. If/when the Repubs really overplay their corrupt, undemocratic hands, and nothing else is going on, the public may, may, find the rubber-spined, feel your pain, keep me in power regardless of results guys more palatable. Otherwise, "he stands for something" and "she's just kidding."

Does anyone know what Digby looks like?

POSTSCRIPT I: After I finished this post in draft, I stumbled across this Science Daily article verifying the immediate and long-lasting impact of snap judgments about people based on how they look. Note the "direct correlation between how competent a campaigning politician's face was and how great his margin of victory turned out to be." But, by all means, let's let our focus be our six-point position papers.

POSTSCRIPT II: And, of course, Digby himself adds another layer before I can even get this posted.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty) Mas Bella Update XV

Okay, the deed is done. Boy has met girl, boy has gotten girl (really gotten girl), . . . . So let's look at who is really important here.

Marcia.

Both the original "Betty La Fea" and its remake "La Fea Mas Bella" have developed one of the better characters in television, the feckless (but becoming feckful) hero's fiance--Marcela in "Betty" and Marcia in "La Fea." Blessed in both cases with excellent actresses doing fine jobs (Natalia Ramirez in "Betty" and Elizabeth Alvarez in "La Fea"), the story takes someone who could have been the stereotype rich bitch fiance and makes her someone you genuinely feel sorry for as the first of two betrayals comes forth. Marcela/Marcia is an accomplished and confident woman who clearly believes in the importance of female independence and achievement (witness the advice given Lola). Yet, when it comes to Armando/Fernando, she ended up as smitten and helpless as Betty/Lety herself. It's much more nuanced than the hero deserves, and you wonder how either of them could fall for this guy so badly. Okay, Marcia has apparently loved him since they were kids, and Lety worships him for defending and supporting her despite her fea-ness. But still . . . .

You also wonder how the US version will deal with it, not being known for much nuance in its melodramas. Well, it sounds like we don't have to worry. Why not? Because it doesn't sound like that plotline will be there. According to advance synopses, the hero in the ABC show will be such a known hound dog that his father hires "Ugly Betty" because she's ugly and won't attract him. That's 180 away from the original. That tension between fecklessness and hound dog-ism and living up to his father's ideal of him is what drives Armando/Fernando into the wrecklessness that powers the entire plot. Maybe they'll get at that in some other way in "Ugly Betty," but they've already jettisoned a perfectly good theme. And, in doing so, it sounds like they've jettisoned the Marcela/Marcia equivalent, as well as the chance for bringing that wonderful character to a broader audience. Just like they've jettisoned Betty's/Lety's mother to give us that tired old "aging father/loyal daughter" plotline. I know I predicted they'd have to cut a lot to fit it into American formats, but does anyone know exactly what they're keeping?

In the meantime, enjoy Elizabeth Alvarez's performance as Marcia. She has even better coming up, and now I'm sure she will be up to it, if they follow true to "Betty," which they've done much better than it sounds like others I could mention.

Ready to Listen Now?

Let’s see—officials clearly ready to subvert the Constitution to get and/or retain great political power? Check. Same officials lie and concoct stories to mislead Americans about the truth of a history-changing event? Check. The enforcement and intelligence communities who were supposed to stop that event lead the investigations and inform a commission which issues a reality-defying report? Check. A compliant media dutifully parrots the official line and disparages and minimizes critics? Check. And Arlen Specter is right there to pretend objective, dispassionate pursuit of truth and justice while really selling out the nation to the powers-that-be? Check.

Iraq and its aftermath? Nope. The Kennedy Assassination. If anything good can come from the clear perversion of our democracy by self-aggrandizing zealots who take upon themselves the power to pursue their dreams of shaping the world their way, maybe it will be a greater sympathy among prior skeptics for those of us who have see everything related to post-9/11 happen before. In 1963.

Digby recently ran a post on how the Josh Marshalls and Kevin Drums of the world have awakened to how their beknighted and long-defended “moderation” may have been a bit misguided. Their “it can’t happen here,” “only paranoids believe conspiracies happen” attitudes have been shared among their “moderate” and “civilized” brethren about the reality of Kennedy’s death for decades and held back the true accountability that may have established better defenses against the post-9/11 debacle. People who suddenly realize just how dishonest, incompetent, and malignant government types can be with regard to the last five years might, just might, now have the same realization about the same motivations and even people who convinced “moderate” America that a third-rate prosecutor’s brief guided by an FBI and a CIA doing major CYA and written by, guess who, Arlen Specter might not have gotten at the truth. Certainly that naïve faith in Hoover and the Warren “Let’s not scare Americans into WWIII” Commission should at least be shaken a bit.

The truth of Kennedy’s murder may never be known. Likely few of those who know its components are even still alive. If rogue zealots and/or vengeful Mafia types did take him out when the FBI and CIA should have stopped them (9/11, anyone?), then we clearly can’t expect any revelations from them, then or now. Killing JFK wouldn’t have required a ton of people to cover it up, just people who could be blamed for not preventing it. People can’t keep secrets this long? Please. Direct me to the study that proves that, all the controlled experiments on what happens in a presidential assassination, especially when “moderates” claim anyone who does come forward is psychotic.

Ironically, the post-9/11 fiasco has made it clearer to me why people whom I would trust to demand a far higher standard of evidence than has ever been provided by Arlen Specter’s report instead joined the scoffers. When writers I respect, Digby and Krugman and Greenwald, publicly admit that it’s only been in the last few years that they had gotten their clue about power, politics, and deceit EVEN IN AMERICA when it’s been expanding from Nixon on, then no wonder the Armstrongs and Drums likely still roll their eyes if you suggest the same forces with the same self-serving evil might have been at work to remove a president seen as caving in on nukes, commies, Cuba, Vietnam, oil, and Negroes and then cover it up later when whole agencies and institutions were at stake. (Look at what the “sane” folks do when you suggest today that undemocratic, power-hungry officials would rig elections through machines they control.) No, it’s probably too late for reality to be rediscovered about JFK’s killing, but at least the “it couldn’t happen in America” crowd will now have to explain why what happens in the 2000s couldn’t have happened in 1963.

POSTSCRIPT: Or not. Check this story blowing a giant hole in Specter’s “magic bullet” theory. Think about all the blogs you read. How many of them, Armstrong, Drum, Digby, Greenwald, any of them, have commented, linked to it? (Even as Greenwald essentially makes my case regarding the recent NSA wiretap coverage?) The only ones I’ve seen are Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla and Will Bunch at Attytood. Blinders never come completely off, do they? And so the threat will never be overcome.

Weather, Water, Energy 8-23-06

Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe alerts us to a Weather Channel series this fall, "The Climate Code," that will stop hemhawing about global warming and start focusing on what we need to do, particularly inner-city areas whose residents will be unusually susceptible to heat, floods, and other predictables. It's good news and hopefully the start of reality in our media. . . . An Edmunds.com study shows that hybrid cars and their fuel efficiency will pay for themselves over time. So it's time to end the tax breaks that help them do so, right, DC? God, I hope future historians don't choke themselves laughing at our stupidity right now. . . . Meanwhile, a Christian Science Monitor editorial documents the dangerous effects of our pollution on our oceans and how the oceans may get us back if we don't get our acts together. It's not pretty, on so many levels. . . . And just when you think you know all the possible problems, here comes the release of mercury into that stuff we breathe by the drying of wetlands and peat that have absorbed it and burning them up. "Hundreds of years of mercury accumulation," we're told, will be released. Yum.

God: "I've Had It"

Really nice piece in the Boston Globe's op-ed section today by a United Church of Christ minister. A well-written, very humorous take on God's likely judgment of today's landscape, probably too true to be as funny as it should be. One excerpt to convince you to read it all:

Citing the recent war in Lebanon as the final straw, God declared that, until further notice, each of the world's major religions would be punished. God then sent the religious leaders, with their faiths, to their rooms so they could ``sit and think about all the ways they've been bad. They can take their sacred books with them to read," continued God, ``but that's it. No TV, no cellphone, and no iPod."

POSTSCRIPT: Turns out the Onion has done a similar take, of course.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Via atrios...

...any time someone mentions the worst, dumbest, most insane Senator this country has ever seen, I make sure to pass the word along (h/t Atrios).

Water, Water, Nowhere

Another couple of articles today on the need to start paying attention to water needs. This Reuters article goes into how much water is used in the Great Plains to produce food . . . and how that underground, aquifer water is being drained faster than replaced. Add in the growing non-food demand and uh-oh. This NM article focuses specifically on the state's coming problems and growing calls for "proactive planning." You think? I was teaching a summer course on water shortages and their political implications in the mid-'80s. Good thing we're such a serious people . . . wait, have to go. A Jon Benet story is on.

Tuesday Pirates Rant™ – Best 47-78 Team in the League!!

It’s almost football season, so there’s no sense in spending just a ton of time on an organization that doesn’t care about winning, so let’s cut to the chase.

Good

* Well, the Pirates did win a game this week (7-3 over the Reds Friday night). That’s always a good thing. And until Saturday, they were able to say they had a winning record since the All-Star break. They’ve since remedied that. All in all, they’ve lost 5 of 6 since winning a breath-taking (for this team) 4 in a row last week. But they did win a game, and Ian Snell did pitch well again, so I’ve at least got one good thing to mention.

* Another good thing: 2005 1st-round draft pick Andrew McCutchen, after doing quite well at Class-A Hickory, was promoted to Class-AA Altoona last week and has proceeded to rip the cover off the ball, batting .360 with HR power despite being a skinny 19-year old centerfielder. I could make a comment that this will just cause the Pirates to promote him to Pittsburgh too quickly and ruin him, but I won’t. These are supposed to be happy bullets.

* One more good thing: as bad as Jim Tracy has been as manager, at least he hasn’t gotten into a fist fight with one of his own starting pitchers.

* And one last good thing (I’m trying!): ESPN has a good piece on Freddy Sanchez, who is leading the league in hitting and doubles despite being benched in favor of Jose Hernandez and Joe Randa for the first couple months of the season.

"He's so competitive, he'll destroy himself to be better than you," says Freddy's agent.

Ouch. This season must be killing him then, eh?

Bad

* For starters, Shawn “I think I have a torn ligament in my shoulder, but the Pirates traded for me anyway” Chacon starts tonight. That’s never a good thing.

(Speaking of which, this is from The Onion: “Pittsburgh acquires Shawn Chacon from New York, prompting Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy to run around the office screaming, ‘We got a Yankee!’” Any time The Onion is making fun of you, you suck. Just thought I’d point that out.)

* Young players are falling left and right—rookie reliever Josh Sharpless and rookie-ish outfielder Nate McLouth both went on the DL last week, and promising starting pitcher Tom Gorzelanny is being held out while experiencing “stiffness” in his elbow.

* Here’s a bombshell that I didn’t even see coming—and I’m pretty damn cynical by this point. Headline: “Hernandez could be in the future plans.” That’s right. Soon-to-be-38-year-old Jose Hernandez has so amazingly well in stealing at-bats from Freddy Sanchez and other young players that Jim Tracy wants to bring him back. As bad a manager as I think Tracy is right now, I think it’s safe to say that he’s leaps and bounds better as a manager than as a talent evaluator. I’d say he has no future in the front office, but then again...I’m sure the Pirates will be hiring sooner or later…

* In today’s paper came news that GM Dave Littlefield is “in search of a left-handed power bat.” Well good. I guess it’s good to acknowledge that you’ve developed 0 left-handed power hitters in your five years as GM. You’re probably thinking that I’m about to mention that Littlefield could have traded Kip Wells for Ryan Howard last year for what would probably be the 5th straight Rant™, but the joke’s on you. I’ll mention no such thing.

Blog

Here’s Sam at BucsDugout, responding to the propaganda machine that is the Pirates’ MLB.com official website:

Read this really entertaining atricle. You'll laugh, you'll cry...probably just cry.I know that this is an article for the Pirates' website, so they are grasping at straws for good things to say, but this new article has crossed the line that separates stupid and insulting. In short, this article makes me want to vomit, then consume said vomit, then vomit the aforementioned vomit up again.

It starts with the title:

Pirates hope to Motor in Tigers' path
Blossoming talent, guidance of Littlefield have Bucs headed up
W-W-WHAT? "Blossoming talent" is a vague enough phrase that I could tolerate this writer using it, but why the hell does he have to include Littlefield in all of this? Is this man related to Littlefield, or something? It is strange how this verbal massage comes on the heels of news that the Nuttings may actually be (Gasp!) dissatisfied with their horrendously inadequate GM...is J. Edgar Hoover involved in all of this somehow, even though he is dead? That must be it.

Basically, the thrust of this article is that the Tigers went from worst to first, so the Pirates will definitely do that too. The author employs a variety of "evidence" that includes (willfully?) negligent use of statistics, obligatory stupid quotes from baseball managers, and optimism that borders on fanaticism. I am not sure why all of this burns me so much. I guess it is because I can see the Pirates justifying another five years of horrible baseball by constantly pointing to the 2006 Detroit Tigers and scolding fans for their impatience.

Here’s Where is Van Slyke’s preview of last night’s Braves-Pirates game. See, it’s not just me who’s turned unredeemably cynical!

Zach Duke and John Smoltz will face off tonight with Duke taking the place of the "glitch-elbowed" Tom Gorzellany. As we speak the scribes (or more accurately, the people who replace "Kris Benson" and "Jason Schmidt" in the form columns with "Ian Snell" and "Tom Gorzellany" and "10 losing years" with "14") at Pirates.com are probably churning out tons of tripe comparing the young Pirate staff to that of the Braves circa 1990 (I wouldn't know, I can't even bring myself to look).

Until next week, when I will care even less because we’ll be only four days from the college football opener...

Monday, August 21, 2006

The Real Must See TV III

In our second of this three-part series on the wonders that are infomercials, we left you with a cliffhanger, teasing you with a taste of the most ubiquitous of all the early morning, cable station fare--the diet and exercise infomercials. As I noted in concluding then, they are not always presented together even though their goals are presumably the same--the "sculpting" of a wonderful new you. The diet ones don't always emphasize workouts, just meal plans that have helped these so-personable women (and occasional man) lose the equivalent of an adult male in fat (old joke--how can you lose ten pounds of ugly fat in one second? Cut off your head. Bada-boom. . . . sorry). And the meals come right to your door!!! Or, if you prefer not to diet but actually exerting your muscles yourself is too onerous, try the electronic belt that will send currents of electricity into your muscles in patterned intervals. Surprise, they contract without your having to do a thing, unless that special gel doesn't prevent the third degree burns. Or the Parkinson's doesn't set in later. It's great to watch the models just smile as they're being electrocuted, like being administered shocks is cool. (If nothing else, you can put the belt on your dog to teach it not to jump on people. . . . please, don't call the cops on me. . . .)

If you want real tone, though, to look hot in your bikini or Speedo, you need one of many tried-and-true exercise programs (with "diet" in small print, like "caution: results may not be typical. . . no fooling, jack). The heavy duty machines for arms, biceps, pecs, and upper body tend to be more male-oriented, with bodies well-oiled enough to draw the Playgirl crowd. Abs, butt, and thighs? Women's territory (although there are definitely guys who should pay attention). Some of the upper body stuff looks pretty tough, but that 50-year-old grandma in the bikini can do it, macho man. The ab and butt stuff essentially use machines to help you do the crunch, donkey kick, or butt lift that Jack Lalanne taught 50 years ago (speaking of whom, he still gets wheeled out to animatronically do a juicer commercial) or Denise Austin does with that "want to wipe that smile off her face" perkiness even now. But how could doing regular exercises be as much fun as these people are clearly having with the Firm Body Beach Ab Crunch Lounge Doer Shaper in Six, Twelve, or Thirty Seconds, Minutes, Lifetimes?

After a while you get to know the personalities because they show up over and over. The Total Gym commercials (Personal Testimonial: I have one, and it works) with Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley are everywhere. I love watching little, round, potato-shaped Chuck in his tank top get to out-macho all these muscle-mag studs who marvel at his T-Gym prowess. He'll be the next Lalanne. Christie, of course, just has to look like Christie (and, while we're on the topic, WHAT WAS THAT GUY THINKING???? and don't get me started on Billy Joel), but she does the workouts much more impressively than Chuck or his scary skinny wife who needs less Total Gym and more Oreo.

Another ever-present guy is Body by Jake (don't know his last name but he's famous). He's got machines for everything, and he's sold them all on screen at one time or another. Deion Sanders swears by him, so what more do you need? This is just one of several exermercial (??) tropes--using the sports celebrity (or former movie/tv star or SI swimsuit model) to sell the product since they owe their professional careers to the machine. Okay. I like Jake, though, because he tells me "Don't quit" although lately he's started adding "on you" which seems too many words and a little colder and less personal. I don't know, it could just be me. I happened upon one of his commercials on Telemundo the other day, which was surreal (Jake in Spanish) but cool. The most obnoxious guy is Tony Little, who did do a funny GEICO commercial (and apparently wore himself out on his Gazelle (Personal Testimonial: I have one, and it works) and now is hawking pillows and juicers). Watch out, Jack. And Chuck.

There are female versions of these guys. Sometimes you already know them (Ali Landry, Daisy Fuentes, Charlotte Ross), but mainly they’re new faces, perky, perky new faces. Beach Body has a couple, one a spunky blonde named Chalene (I hate spunk) who will have knee joints the size of melons (which will go nicely with her chest, though) when her slim through kicking days are over. There's another one named Debbie who is into her third version of her routine now, at least since I've been watching, sidekicked by Julie Moran assuring us that the exercise helped her get rid of all that baby weight. (Which is a common gambit here--this woman lost 70 pounds!!! 10 of which turns out to be baby and placenta, and 50 more the baby weight coming off. Not that the exercise doesn't help, but 70 pounds worth? Please.) Debbie has undergone a chest area transformation herself since the earlier commercials. Maybe we’ll see her on those breast pill commercials next. One of my favorites is Darla Haun, a thirtysomething brunette who has sold pills, makeup, Gazelles (they tried someone else in the last one, lasted maybe two weeks), and Ab Lounges, although the last was with a Brady Bunch boy unfortunately (I thought they were all dead). She still looks remarkably good, thanks to the machines, no doubt, although the eye work has become noticeable. But, Darla, all these infomercials and we've never seen your legs, your clearly long, long legs? What's that about?

Of course, my academic interest in these particular infomercials is in the models, the female ones, many of whom confusingly got their perfect shapes from several different products apparently. You see them sweating to one machine/routine and then, ooops, there they are getting those great abs and terrific thighs and butt from something else. What gives? Do they think we're stupid? (Well, yes, actually. Practically every one of these has some scene which starts off with an overweight body then "melting" into the perfect shape promised by the machine, and in small print somewhere on the screen will appear the word "simulation." Really??? And does the US Patent Office really give patents for a revolutionary “sculpting arc”?)

For a long time there was a scary skinny but muscled blond female on everything who had moved over from the ESPN exercise shows (where are those things now???? In the soft-core porn section at SunCoast?). You can still see her with Chuck (if you haven't quickly changed channels). Right now there's a slightly better fed and more wholesomely pretty blonde turning up on everything from The Firm to Jake to Windsor Pilates, out-attracting Daisy Fuentes. For a while a dark-haired female broke the blonde stranglehold and did Jake (get your mind out of the gutter), Ab Rollers, and ended up in an anti-gas commercial (intestinal, not the other). That was disturbing, frankly, and made you wonder about the consequences of making yourself so skinny. It's bad seeing them hawking the exercise thing and then the next infomercial it's sound systems or "enhancement." Can they truly be so Renaissance, you find yourself asking, and then your skepticism begins to rise. (In the interest of gender equity, there is one guy, a “former professional soccer player,” who turns up with his Adonis body in everything. He annoys me.)

You might think, surely these things get old pretty quickly, and, in truth, most of them do, although not really watching them prop Jack up, like the Soviets used to do to Brezhnev. But, usually, just when you’re getting bored, something new pops up, a Time-Life series of 60s Beach Blanket songs or that software guy with the brunette in the tight knit white top and the tight split-side skirt . . . . Sorry. Right now there's a pretty good one about a moving seat that you can twist yourself back and forth on for your abs, although I think a bar stool would work as well, and one that takes off on the "Dancing with the Stars" craze that shows great abs but not much more. It's too much like "Yoga Booty Ballet," though. But now that I’ve found Jake on Spanish tv, whole new permutations are taking shape. I’m telling you, it’s neverending entertainment. Try it and see.

(You think I made that Yoga Booty thing up, don't you?)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Sunday Blogroll!!

That's right...everybody's favorite Friday tradition has moved to Sunday. How was everybody's Saturday? Let's see...mine was busily unproductive. I finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh, read 75 pages of Mind Game, read another 75 pages of On Writing, watched Dazed and Confused, tested the new Quiznos BBQ brisket sandwich (thumbs up!), watched two Simpsons episodes on DVD, caught every episode of Feasting on Asphalt on Food Network, worked for about an hour on a new song to post on MySpace, worked out for 90 minutes...I did everything, I did nothing. I laughed, I cried. Anyway...more of the same today, hopefully! On to the linkiness!

We'll start off with some strange polling (Digby). 35% of those polled are worried that Democrats will weaken our terrorist defenses, but 46% are worried that Republicans will involve us in more conflicts...thereby presumably weakening our terrorist defenses. Woohoo! We win!

Not saying Israel was ever particularly good at this stuff, but apparently when you side with the United States, you immediately become just as bad at diplomacy and public relations as we are (Susie). What a disaster. Susie's right--war doesn't work. But we'll continue trying it anyway. Speaking of public relations, what's sadder...a 38% dive in about a month, or the fact that he's still more popular than Dubya (Wolcott)?

Chris is right--Dems really are going to have to respond by playing hardball with their "good friend" Joementum, and I don't think they're capable of it. Dems are nothing if not "incredibly naive or purposely self-destructive." Meanwhile Atrios and Jane give their takes on the "What do we do now?" issues of Lamont/Lieberman, and both are worth reading.

All I can say about the TNR defending Coulter this week is that, well, it was to be expected. There's a reason they endorsed Lieberman in '04...they're supposed leftists who want to do nothing except take down the Left. Just like good old Joementum. It doesn't even make me angry anymore...it just makes me sad. Echidne, on the other hand, has plenty to say about it.

There are plenty of posts out there about the warrantless wiretapping issue, but Len's post here is one of the best. Love this:

If we had wanted a monarchy, we had one! It didn't work out! Moreover, the one we had —King George III —was better than the cretinous would be King that arrogates unto himself powers he doesn't have and doesn't deserve. King George III was wrong and mad, but George Jr is merely ludicrous and slow witted.

Up is down (TBogg)! Left is right! Black is white! Stable is unstable (Billmon)! Gaining in the polls is freefalling (Alicublog)!

Here's a nice "Iraq v. Vietnam: why they're different" post from Dana. Meanwhile, here's a nice "Iraq v. Vietnam: why they're relatively similar" post from BooMan.

Pandagon's always very reliable at discussing articles and issues about which I never would have otherwise thought. Here's one for the weekend. Hef's almost universally loved now, but this make me realize that I actually have no idea who/what he really is. The "Divorce in '54 is, like, so unfair to men" article tells me more than I wanted to know.

Karl Rove, comedian extraordinaire (Rising Hegemon)!

Gadflyer, in response to inevitable "lefties are conspiracy theorists" outcries, provides a nice summary of the shaky timing of the England arrests last week.

It's always sad when relationships end (Left Coaster).

Before going on vacation, David discusses being a radical moderate. A good friend of mine in Oklahoma is the same way. He wants to be bipartisan, and he feels he's pretty conservative on a lot of issues...but in the current political environment he ends up feeling just as mad and outraged as the so-called shrill left extremists do. As an anonymous poster wrote in the comments to David's post...the Bush administration 'radicalized' a lot of people.

Whenever I get around to writing another "Fraud in the Land of Telenovelas" post, I think I'll have to call it "Fraud, Corruption, Murder, and General Sleaziness in the Land of Telenovelas" (Mercury Rising). Seriously...there's some really creepy stuff down there, and nobody's paying attention.

Avedon has a great thought in regard to the bubble discussion I linked to yesterday:

[A]s we have seen time and again, these same pundits will go into optimistic overdrive over the next big thing, once again advising us that there can never be a crash because it's all different now, and then when their projections prove false, blame the rest of us for having (they claim) believed such an unrealistic thing.

Sometimes I think they must do it on purpose: Their claims about the wonderful, Everything Has Changed-type economic miracle-of-the-moment make no sense, so people get the idea that economics is way over their heads and don't bother to follow it. Then when some moron claims that the economy can never go bad again because It's All Different Now, their alarm bells don't go off, because they figure it's just too complicated for them to understand. (I guess it's kind of like our foreign policy, then.)

Via Lefarkins (and Roxanne), here's an excellent piece from the LA Times on a journalist who tried to expose something even other journalists couldn't get behind. This does remind me that I've been wanting to write a good post about the crack epidemic for some time. Time to put on in draft status...and likely forget about it for another 3 months or so. I suck sometimes.

I'm enjoying this far too much (Great Society).

I don't know what's sadder for me, that the fear mongering is working, or that, I admit, a small part of me would have reacted the same way (Greenwald).

This just further proves (via Fired Up! Missouri) my thoughts that Myspace and YouTube have allowed the Internet to change the world a second time.

Wow, is this funny (via First Draft). Denis Leary was by far my favorite comedian when I was in high school, and it makes me happy to see him jumping on good causes, from helping fire fighters to slamming Mel Gibson.

And finally...I'm sorry, but they really need to stop making these lists (Mannion). And by the way...Arnold Schwartzenegger and Ben Stein were in Dave for a total of about 5 seconds (honestly, I don't even remember Ahhnold being in there at all, but I haven't been awake for all that long), and that was enough to make this #2 on the list? Seriously, you're just embarassing yourselves. Please stop.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Most interesting posts of the week: #2

Okay, the other most interesting post of the week comes from Billmon: "Home is Where the Sink Hole Is." He's right--he hadn't written anything about the housing bubble in a while, and I'm glad he did.

Kevin Drum has a post that reminds me I haven't written anything about the housing bubble recently:

Here in paradise, the housing boom is over:

Southern California home sales fell to their lowest level in nine years last month as price appreciation continued to decelerate, data released Tuesday showed . . . .The figures could rev up the debate over whether the Southland's housing market will be able to navigate a "soft landing" that produces only moderate price declines, or face a brutal correction.
As Kevin notes, talk of a "soft landing" is one of the normal steps in a bubble addict's recovery program.

It goes something like this:

1.) We're not in a bubble. Prices are just recovering from years of underappreciation.

2.) It's a bubble, but it's a sustainable bubble because the fundamentals of the market have changed in the past decade. People need to recognize this. (Note: this stage is usually recognizable by an explosion in popularity of increasingly desperate and bizarre financing options.)

3.) Yes, growth is slowing, but we think we'll navigate a soft landing. It's absurd to think that housing in [fill in area where you live] will actually lose value.

4.) This is a disaster! Somebody better step in and do something! People are losing their life savings!

5.) Buyers have learned a permanent lesson this time. Homeowners need to accept the reality that the bubble of the past five years was a one-time fluke and we'll never see it happen again.
Rise and (eventually) repeat.

I think I might actually go out and get the Kindleberger book to which Billmon links here (Manias, Panics, and Crashes). It's always fascinated me--in a morbid sort of way--how the same cycle (Displacement -> Credit Expansion -> Euphoria -> Distress -> Revulsion) can repeat itself every time. How do so-called experts always manage to go "This time it's different! This time there won't be a crash!" every time? I guess it's a scary prospect to tell millions of excited Americans that they should probably pull back on the reins a bit because this is a cycle and not the dawn of a new time, but for their own sakes, it's still a good idea to do so. Billmon goes on.

In the stock market, the revulsion stage typically ends in massive panic-driven price declines, as everybody and their broker tries to crowd through the same small door. However, because real estate markets are less liquid and have higher transaction costs, and since houses are a consumption item as well as an asset, what traditionally happens when the bubble bursts is that sales just dry up. Nobody wants to buy at quoted prices (usually based on previous, overinflated appraisals) but sellers aren't willing -- and often aren't able -- to sell for less. So the market can't clear, as Southern California markets aren't clearing now.

This tends to make housing busts the economic equivalent of Chinese water torture: they generally begin slowly but last a long time, as home "owners" gradually capitulate to reality and lenders (or in the S&L industry's case, the federal government) slowly write off all that bad debt and dispose of all those foreclosed homes.

That's one reason why the collapse in real estate values that accompanied the Great Depression didn't bottom out until the late 1940s. It's also why it took almost ten years for the last home price boom/bust cycle in California to come around again. According to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the reg agency that tracks these things, home prices in the greater Los Angeles metro area didn't return to their 1990 peak until the spring of 2000.

But what makes things different -- and potentially more exciting -- this time around are the gaudy new financing gimmicks Kevin mentions: no money down loans, interest-only mortgages, ARMs that reset to truly usurious rates, etc. If and when these loans blow up, and they will, it could leave many home "owners" with no alternative but to sell and sell quickly -- or simply mail the keys back to the bank.

Combine that with the fact that this housing bubble, far more than past bubbles, appears to have been driven by the speculative investment demand of people who have no intention of living in the houses they've bought, and the finale could be much more spectacular, and play out a lot faster, at least in some markets.

And later...

But whether the bust is national, as opposed to just regional, may depend as much or more on our Chinese benefactors as on the Fed.

The chain of causation is somewhat perverse: The Fed's recent decision to at least pause in its tightening campaign has put downward pressure on the dollar, which is forcing the People's Bank to buy dollars to protect the "crawling peg" with the renminbi, said dollars then being reinvested in the Treasury market, which drives long-term yields down, which pulls mortage yields down, too.

As long as that particular windfall lasts, the prospects for a soft landing to the national real estate bubble look reasonably good -- that is, as long as the regional real estate busts, plus the overextended state of the American consumer and the mysterious reluctance of U.S. firms to funnel their bloated profits into capital spending, don't tip the national economy over into a recession.

You'd need a Cray supercomputer hooked up to a crystal ball to figure out the odds on that latter scenario, and I have neither. What I do have is a conventional 30-year mortgage at 6.12%, and a house with lots of equity located in one of the country's more stable real estate markets. So I'm personally not sweating the housing bubble too much. Yet.

From the mid-Missouri basement of my in-laws' house, I can say that I'm really not sweating the housing bubble much yet either. It's easy to not sweat anything when you don't pay rent, much less a mortgage. But this won't always be the case. And thanks to one of The Butterfly's two lifelong dreams--house flipping (the other is becoming an HR Director, and she recently got to check that one off the list)--this has been the source of many discussions. It doesn't appear that the mid-Missouri market is teetering on the edge of a cliff so much as starting to roll down the backside of a mountain very very slowly.

For the last few years in Columbia, houses have been built in pretty much every spot possible, and a lot of them are sitting empty (On the plus side, we've made friends with two different families of deer, one--a mama and her baby--come by every morning when I'm getting ready for work, and the other--a mama and her two babies--come by every evening. Of course, our grass is orange and crunchy at this point, which is what happens when you don't get rain for a month, and they haven't come by as often because of it. That, or they got hit by a car. But I digress. Big time.). If prices have come down, it's not all that noticeable yet--the market's still about twice as high as it was when the in-laws bought their house--but it's coming and everybody knows it. I don't expect the midwest to get hit like the coasts surely will, but the cycle is inevitable.

Anyway, interesting topic...one that's guaranteed to get more and more interesting as time goes by.

Most interesting posts of the week: #1

...as a precursor to tomorrow's Sunday Blogroll piece, I thought I'd point our 6 loyal readers to the two posts made this week that I found the most interesting. Not surprisingly, one's from Digby and one's from Billmon.

The first comes from Digby on Wednesday: "Terro-Hippies."

I think we may have underestimated Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney. All this scary dirty hippie talk isn't just rhetorical:

Last February the Department of Homeland Security oversaw a large-scale international cyber terror simulation involving 115 public and private organizations in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, all testing their ability to coordinate with one another and respond to computer-driven attacks. It was called Cyber Storm.

Nobody's said much about the results, or the details of the exercise scenario. But a newly-published DHS PowerPoint presentation on the exercise reveals that the real terrorist threat in cyber space isn't from obvious suspects like al Qaida types or Connecticut voters; it's from anti-globalization radicals and peace activists.

Wow. It's always an interesting day when neocons actually manage to surprise me, but this really did. But that wasn't the only surprise of the post.

According to the FBI, these hippie peace extremists are the most serious domestic terrorist threat we face. As opposed to, for instance, this guy.

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

This guy was arrested in November '03, by the way. I'd never heard of him. Gee. I wonder why that could be. Wouldn't want the world to be reminded that right-wingers can occasionally be murderous crazies. No, they're all good Christians. Every single one of them. As Digby says at the end...

There's no reason to make a big deal out of some white supremecist with a WMD in his living room when you have these SUV vandals on the loose. It's a much better use of government resources to run sophisticated war games and concentrate large numbers of resources on vegans.

Next up: Billmon and the housing market.

Friday, August 18, 2006

Three Visions of the Future

From the Guardian.

Albert O. Hirschman IV

In my last post in this series on the works of Albert O. Hirshman, I talked about his analysis of the intellectual and cultural evolution that led the West from a hostility toward the behaviors necessary for capitalism to succeed to the embrace of those behaviors to such an extent that we now consider them part of our natural explanation for reality. The basic point was that the unruly "passions" that had governed human activity could be channeled into "interests" that would allow those passions to have positive releases for the community as well as for the individual. These interests could be pursued personally through business or political enterprises. But which? And why?

Hirshman followed publication of The Passions and the Interests pretty quickly with the book I probably like best after Exit, Voice and Loyalty--Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. The thesis is deceptively simple: people will focus on either private consumption or public action to satisfy needs until the predictable disappointments with the choice become too great, at which point they will use "voice" or "exit" to move into the other arena. No surprise, the predictable disappointments in the new arena will also build, forcing a swing back to the original. External factors (strength of economy, group pressure, etc.) will tend to move groups of people in the same direction in the same contexts, creating the ebbs and flows of our investments in our private time versus public time that we see throughout US history. As he states,

"The world I am trying to understand in this essay is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don't want it nearly as much as they thought or don't want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want."

This "cycles of history" concept won't be profound to students formal or informal of history, but along the way Hirschman gives us tours through the intellectual history of econ and psychology and views of terms like "rebounding" (you rebound from the disappointment of a sweetie the same way you do from a lost cause or oversaturated consumption), "durable" and "nondurable" goods, "voting," and "collective action" (ripping the highly overrated Mancur Olson a nice one as he goes). Neither private consumption nor public service is free from those inevitable failures to live up to expectations, and failure to understand that is the constant human condition in these modern times.

Again, as with all his books, Hirschman is particularly prescient for today's times, although he was writing in part to explain how all the social energy from that amazing year 1968 had dissipated by 1978 when he was writing this book. The theme may be common, but I don't think we see its application at work as much as we should. The deflation of the civil rights movement, started by King's assassination through constant disappointment in the courts and legislatures, fits perfectly. The religiously inclined can see Christianity, I think, as the result of Jesus' turn to internal salvation and away from political action ("Give unto Caesar") after John had been killed for confronting the powers-that-were. (I promise I won't make religious references in the future if you promise not to rip me on this.)

The point for us today is to look at all the "activity" by individuals and groups in the political process--the "religious" right's shock troops, our new imperialism in foreign policy, Ned Lamont's ground forces in CT--and predict that the pendulum will swing again as the disappointments mount through the corruption, compromises, and hypocrisies that Hirschman says end up afflicting all these movements. Most of all, I think the predictable denouement is likely for bloggers. The rightists up in arms about the Hezbullah giveaway, if not already disappointment by other recent failures, may cave in on themselves. On our side, some of us have already moved away from the constant political emphasis (read the wonderful Mannion lately? where do Demosthenes and Charles Dodgson go for such long periods?). I realize my own negligible contributions after the disappointment in the outing of the Armstrong fraud and Kos coverup attempt, abetted well by the progressive blogosphere despite its claims to the contrary, haven't rippled much, but readership stats for our blogs clearly dropped in that period. Imagine what will happen if Lamont or Tester loses, both real possibilities, or votes that were widely expected to go one way magically(!!!) go the other because, drat, those darn exit polls and opinion polls just can't be trusted to match uncontrolled voting machines, or, worst of all in the views of many, neither house of Congress is captured by Dems. The A-listers will be there to assure us to all stand firm. Many of us will go see what Tivo's recorded for us while we were away.

Hirschman will be nodding.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING!!

Play with Stan before bed = sleep through the night.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty) Mas Bella Update XIV

Well, two steps forward, two steps back, I think. As Eduardo’s dissection of Fernando’s anomic condition and dreary future sets in and the latter’s point of no return nears with Lety in “La Fea Mas Bella,” the remake of the classic “Betty La Fea,” let’s catch up quickly on the latest with ABC’s coming version, “Ugly Betty.” Still not sure what to expect, still not comfortable with what I’m hearing.

What I’m hearing has certainly increased in volume in recent weeks. ABC liked the critical response to the show so much that it’s now moved it from its Friday slot to the same time on Thursday, leading off the evening’s fare, opposite “Earl” and others of repute. The New York Times did a nice story which would have been helped had the writer actually ever seen “Betty.” USA Today did the same. Local papers can be found on Google extolling its virtues and the star’s, America Ferrera. The “buzz,” as they say, is good.

We’ll see. Two things in particular make me think, beyond my previous misgivings, spread throughout the updates, that the “suits” have won with “Ugly Betty.” For one, the lesser evil, the news stories indicate that this Betty will only have a widowed father at home. And he will be ailing. Sorry. This is bad. Her father’s feisty health is one of the comic parts of the show, as the NY Times guy got completely wrong. But that’s not the worst of it. Betty’s/Lety’s relationship with her mother is one of the strongest points in the show(s), and jettisoning her to make this Betty somehow more devoted and self-sacrificing is cheap and unnecessary. You can see how Betty/Lety has the strength and conviction to overcome her fea-ness from the power of her parents’ love, both of them.

I can almost hear the “suits” at the meeting, though. “Well, we’re going to have the feminists and the weight-challenged all over us for making fun and extolling beauty and yada, yada. We can’t afford to get them riled over a frumpy, stay-at-home mom who’s devoted her whole life to her husband and daughter. Better pitch her over the side.” I’ve noted that time constraints will force ABC to cut secondary characters and plots, so my prescience amazes me again. But the show will suffer in comparison, no matter how much chemistry America has with her tv-dad, make that, ailing, widowed tv-dad. (Why not call it “Providence” or “Must Love Dogs”? God, the creativity in Hollywood.)

That said, those unfamiliar with the classic won’t notice the difference (which is likely the next thing the “suits” said). But the second thing they’ve done is just stupid, something only network executives are capable of. (Well, them and baseball owners.) They’ve scheduled “Ugly Betty” directly opposite “La Fea Mas Bella.” The latter, last time I saw, had over 4 million viewers a night. A built-in audience of 4 million all ready for the ABC version, and they schedule it opposite, as if the 4 million will drop an episode of an actual nightly serial to watch an iffy, probably watered down version of it that they can catch on reruns if it makes it. (Yes, I know TiVo, but ratings are off the times actually watched . . . aren’t they?) Have it start right after “La Fea” and you are a quarter of the way to a big network hit, but noooooo . . . . These genuises decide to “compete.” Well, maybe it will work a little, especially if the hype pays off. But I’ll never be convinced these losers didn’t step on their own success here. Then I remember this is the network that took off “Sports Night” and turned down “Cosby” and “All in the Family.”

Why am I not completely giving up on the show at this point? Especially after hearing also how the “suits” didn’t want America Ferrera as the star and that Salma Hayek, as a producer, had to fight to keep her? Actually, I just named the two reasons. America and Salma. In all the stories that have been coming out, it is clear that America gets “Betty” and wants her to do well, that she knows the story and how important getting “Betty” right is. We know she’s a very good actress, even if the “suits” didn’t, and that early “buzz” says she’s great in this. As for Salma, I won’t go into yet another embarrassing fit of adoration . . . sorry, had to go empty the drool cup . . . , but she also knows what needs to happen in the show, as shown by her insistence on America. The thing I like better, though, is that Salma will appear occasionally on the show in the telenovela that Betty’s dad watches, apparently as what one article called a “slap-happy maid.”

Now, I know you’re thinking, he’s just cutting it slack because he’ll get to see Salma on a regular basis, but that’s really not . . . sorry, cup again . . . what gives me hope. Not totally, anyhow. It’s the character she’s apparently playing. One of my favorite shows years ago was HBO’s “Dream On.” And one of the reasons was that I crushed on the lead male’s Latina maid, who wasn’t on nearly enough. That maid? Yes, indeedy, her first US role, I think. And now here she comes again, clearly riffing on that character, probably winking at us as she does. (Damn, the cup spilled.) Which shows just the kind of angled humor that will be necessary to pull “Ugly Betty” off. If they can pull that spirit into it with more than just Salma, they might have a chance. Only a month to go now. Time to get back to everything that’s about to happen to Fernando. It’s going to be mas fea, which is, of course, the point.

A Serious People

Actions of the President of the US denying basic freedoms to all of us potentially are found unconstitutional. The lead story, taking up the most minutes, in all the news you're watching, right? Right?

That spinning you're hearing is Ben Franklin. In Philadelphia.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

As soon as I give Democrats kudos...

...I end up wanting to take it back (h/t Avedon).

Ironically, a lawmaker with a good shot of replacing Lieberman atop the Governmental Affairs panel, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is spearheading the effort within the Senate to preserve Democratic support for Lieberman. Carper is the third most senior Democrat on the panel after Lieberman. But the two Democrats who outrank him, Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.) and Daniel Akaka (Hawaii) are likely to keep their perches as the most senior Democrats on the Armed Services Committee and Veterans Affairs Committee, respectively.

Carper, who like Lieberman often works across the aisle with Republicans, is one of a handful of Democratic centrists who have continued to support Lieberman since his primary defeat. The others include Sen. Ken Salazar (Colo.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).

Looks like the list of "major" Democrats shrinks by the day. I'm almost willing to give a free pass to Ben Nelson since he's from Nebraska and all, but you know what? He could have taken no stance at all...instead he went out of his way to support the de facto GOP nominee. You might live in a conservative state, but occasionally you have to back up Democrats. In a time when the GOP is fracturing into shards, some Democrats go out of their way to get a piece of the fracture action...

Weather and Water Again

Not sure if it’s coincidence but the two lead stories under “Science” on the Reuters website news page this morning were about the water crises facing rich and poor nations and the study finding that global warming does indeed affect hurricane intensity. This may be the last time I harp on this (no applause, please), but, really, will Lieberman being reelected, gays still not being able to marry, or even Social Security getting privatized come anywhere close to the impact of increasingly destructive weather and increasingly unavailable water on our civilization, on our planet? Dealing with these issues can be the unifying theme similar to WWII or civil rights in the early days that pulls people together and gets them to see the Liebermans and marriage amendments and greed of privatization for the divisive, destructive forces they are at a time when “united we stand” have never been more needed. In other words, we kill a lot of birds with one giant stone. Anyway, shouting into a wind here, I do realize, a hurricane, in fact. Only one guy could do it and Gore swears he's not running. Time to go dark on these things again at least until he decides otherwise.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

After the first barrage...

From Ken Mehlman using "defeatocrats" and "adapt and win" roughly 1,450,342 times, to de facto GOP nominee Joe Lieberman lying out of his incumbent anus for the last 7 straight days, to the Weekly Standard all but putting a "Yes, Massa" caption by the cartoon of Sharpton, to Chuck Roberts calling Ned Lamont the "al Qaeda candidate" on national television, I think it's safe to say that last Tuesday's Connecticut primary was the official "Game On" signal for the 2006 midterms. How have Democrats responded? I must say, I'm impressed.

* First of all, all major Democrats (from here on out, I don't consider Mark Pryor a major Democrat), including the majorest of major Democrats (h/t FDL), came out to stand behind Lamont and denounce (in some degree or another) Joementum and the Joementum candidacy. That's good.

* Then, Lamont and Howard Dean and Russ Feingold went on Sunday talk shows and did quite well, doing their best to tie Lieberman to Dick Cheney (which, not surprisingly, is quite easy)...an extremely smart strategy given Cheney's -36% or whatever approval rating.

* Then, Arianna Huffington went on CNN and chastized the network for Roberts' "al Qaeda candidate" line...eventually getting Roberts to apologize to Lamont on-air.

* Then, Chris "Bandwagon Whore" Matthews made fun of the dying Joementum candidacy on Hardball, which is always a verification of where the conventional wisdom is headed.

In other words, it's 1-0 Good Guys. Well played. There are 84 more battles to be fought, but well played nonetheless.

Oh, and E.J. Dionne has a pretty decent look (h/t Susie) at the Battle for Dollars between Dean and Emanuel. My initial instinct was "Dean good, Rahm baaaad," but Dionne does a pretty good job of showing the logic behind Emanuel's actions. I still side with Dean, mind you, but it's pretty well-written.

(h/t to Crooks and Liars for all the great video links, by the way. Great site...not real sure why they're not on the blogroll...)

TUESDAY PIRATES RANT™!! Best 46-73 Team in the League!!

Plenty of goods and bads this week, though I’m once again forgoing quoting Pirates blogs in the bottom section...there’s a pretty good reason for it, though.

Good

* Well, the Pirates swept the Cardinals this weekend for the first time in over two years. That’s always a good thing. I don’t want to make more of it than it is, but it’s most certainly a good thing, especially when you consider that three of the young pitchers (Zach Duke, Ian Snell, Paul Maholm) I bragged about last week combined to give up 3 runs in 3 games against a worst-than-in-previous-years-but-still-relatively-potent Cardinals lineup.

* Freddy Sanchez continues to lead the league in hitting.

* Remember Chris Duffy? If not, here’s a quick primer: he hit .341 last year and has amazing speed and range in the outfield and on the basepaths. This got him labeled as the Pirates’ centerfielder of the future. Well, he started the season terribly, providing no offense whatsoever and was sent down to AAA in May...he promptly disappeared for a month while considering whether or not he wanted to continue playing baseball. He finally reported to AAA, completely kicked ass for a month or two, and was recalled when Craig Wilson was traded. He then proceeded to cry and moan that he wanted to be traded or retire instead of going back to Pittsburgh. Good times.

Well, he’s gotten lots of playing time since his return (lesson for all you kids out there: quit, and your team will play you more), playing phenomenal defense (making an incredible diving catch at Wrigley when I was there) and doing absolutely nothing offensively. Well, against the Cards this weekend, he went to the plate 14 times and got on base 10 times. It’s a start. He’s playing “Willie Mays Hays” style now, knocking the ball into the ground and legging out singles, then stealing a base to get into scoring position. Hopefully this gets him going because he’s truly a fantastic defensive player...but you have to at least contribute something offensively...especially if your manager insists on you leading off.

* I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Pirates have a winning record (15-13) since the All-Star Break. That really doesn’t matter when you go into the All-Star Break at 30 games under .500, but hey...it’s something.

Bad

* Playing winning ball when your season is hopeless means you lose out on the opportunity to get the #1 pick in next year’s draft. That’s not a huge deal, but in a backwards way it’s kind of frustrating. You can’t win when it counts, and then when it would behoove you to lose, you win.

* Before sweeping the Cards, they were swept by the Astros, scoring 4 runs (and giving up 22) in 3 games. When you have young players, this is what happens...extreme ups and extreme downs.

* I can’t help it—I have to mention the amazingly putrid trades of GM Dave Littlefield once again. First, I’ll mention the good part—Xavier Nady has done slightly better than I anticipated. I called him “Craig Wilson without the walks” a couple weeks ago, and while I still say he’s slightly inferior to Wilson, he’s done well so far. For the sake of this bullet point, we’ll say that Wilson and Nady cancel each other out. Okay. So what does that leave for the trading scorecard? Well...

What the Pirates Gave Up:
Kip Wells (who could have been traded for Ryan Howard last June)
Oliver Perez (who could have been traded for Hank Blalock last December)
Sean Casey (2 HR’s in 37 AB’s for the Tigers after having 3 HR’s in 213 AB’s in Pittsburgh)
Roberto Hernandez

What the Pirates Got:
Shawn Chacon
2 minor league relievers

In case I didn’t mention it enough two weeks ago, that’s awful. Name my cat Stan as GM, and he could have gotten more for those players.

Oh, and did I mention that Shawn Chacon this week, after getting absolutely demolished by the Astros (7 runs, 5 outs), decided to admit that he likely has a torn meniscus and has been playing through pain all season? They couldn’t even get a healthy awful pitcher? As I said last week, as long as there is young, talented starting pitching, the Pirates have a chance to be competitive next season, but it is no thanks to Dave Littlefield, still the worst General Manager in sports.

BUT…

There is a silver lining. From the “I’ll believe it when I see it...but please oh please let me see it” department…

A source close to the Nutting family indicates that Pirates ownership is losing patience with General Manager Dave Littlefield and may fire him at the end of the season, even though they extended his contract one year through the 2008 season on opening day. If Littlefield is let go, his waterloo will have been acquiring $18.5-million worth of declining veterans in Sean Casey, Joe Randa and Jeromy Burnitz last winter and getting little production in return.

And if you need another reason why this should happen, and soon, check out two paragraphs down.

The Pirates are likely to try to make a deal with Cleveland for reliever Guillermo Mota, who was designated for assignment on Friday. Mota was a favorite of Pirates manager Jim Tracy when they were together with the Los Angles Dodgers.

Other Tracy favorites include Jose Hernandez (.238 average and thief of 105 at-bats that should have gone to Freddy Sanchez and Craig Wilson) and Mike Edwards (.188 average in Pittsburgh. If I were hired as general manager tomorrow, I would likely let Tracy keep his job for another year (just because of the cost of the buyout), but there is no way in hell I would let him contribute to personnel decisions anymore. Not even once.

Blog

Actually, instead of quoting blogs, I’ll use this space to review Clemente by David Maraniss. As I said in yesterday’s “When You Least Expect It” post, I finished it recently, and man...if I ever need affirmation for why I’m a Pirates fan, this book is a good one.

Hundreds of pages could be written about Clemente’s baseball accomplishments and skills, and his amazing on-a-rope throws from right field, and his good looks, and his pride, and the fact that fellow players loved him (especially as his career progressed)...but what makes Maraniss’ Clemente such a great read is the fact that Clemente’s flaws are given almost equal time. Heroes, to me, are fallible, just like every other human alive. What makes them heroic is the way they carry themselves despite their flaws.

Thirty-four years after his death, Roberto Clemente has turned into this mythic, perfect figure, but Clemente goes into detail about his at-the-time reputation as an aloof hypochondriac. Some players will play through pain and not let anybody know about it, which is both admirable and stupid. It seems like the current version of the Pirates has the same thing happen every year—a young, promising pitcher starts strong then begins to lose his stuff and get knocked around every time he’s on the mound. His ERA goes from 2-3 to 5-6, and it’s only after about a month of this that he admits that he’s been having discomfort...and inevitably, he ends up having surgery to rebuild his shoulder/elbow and misses the next 12 months, minimum.

Clemente, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. If you asked him how he was feeling, he’d let you know of every single nagging injury he had. And then he’d bang out three hits that night. If he needed a day off, he’d ask for it, and he’d inevitably receive flak for it in the media (and early on, he’d receive it from his manager too).

The most admirable and unique qualities of Roberto Clemente, for me personally, were his clutch play and his pride, especially his pride in his home country of Puerto Rico.

First, the clutch play—I could write paragraphs about this, but instead I’ll just mention that he played in 14 World Series games...and got hits in 14 World Series games. That pretty much says it all. He was MVP of the ’71 World Series and played an integral role in winning both of those series despite being devastaingly heavy underdogs. The offense of the 1960 Yankees and the pitching of the 1971 Orioles were supposed to crush the Pirates, and yet Pittsburgh emerged with World Series rings both times, and neither would have happened without Clemente.

Okay, I’ll write a second paragraph about clutch play. In Game 7 of the ’60 Series, Clemente singled in the 8th to cut the Yankees’ lead to 7-6, then scored the go-ahead run when Hal Smith homered. In Game 7 of the ’71 Series, he hit a HR in the 4th inning, giving the Pirates a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. The bigger the stage, the better “Momen” played. As a sports figure, it doesn’t get more heroic than that.

It was, however, his pride in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean nations as a whole that put him on a pedestal as a human being. His lifelong dream was to build a baseball city in Puerto Rico. His life’s motto was, if you have the opportunity to help people and don’t do it, you’ve wasted your life. Baseball presented him with the opportunity, and he ran himself ragged making sure that that opportunity was realized. In the end, his desire to help people got him killed.

Maraniss does an admirable job of piecing together the devastating earthquake that struck Managua, Nicaragua, right before Christmas in 1972, the corrupt (and Nixon-supported) government that prevented humanitarian aid from reaching those in need, and Clemente’s desire to help. He knew the only way he could be sure that the large amount of donations he’d helped collect in Puerto Rico would actually reach needy hands in Nicaragua was to go himself. He couldn’t find many friends to go with him on New Year’s Eve (only 1, in fact, went), but he went anyway. His desire to deliver as many goods as possible led him to making a deal with the owner of a larger plane, a broken-down, not-worthy-for-flight DC-7, to make the flight. It barely got off the ground and crashed into a lake at 200 mph. Maraniss’ description of the devastation of his family, friends, and the Pirates organization as a whole, was pretty gut-wrenching, but it drove home two points: he loved people and was loved in return, and the love of his homeland drove everything he did in his life. Great story...very much worth reading, Pirates fan or not.

Monday, August 14, 2006

I was really really hoping for (e) none of the above...

...or (f) don't be silly, a US president would never think to be this tactless and prickish.

Who is Peter Wallsten?
(a) the partially blind reporter whom George W. Bush mocked ("Are you going to ask that question with shades on?") for not removing his sunglasses while addressing the President
(b) The wheelchair-using senior citizen whom George W. Bush mocked ("You look mighty comfortable") for not standing in the presence of the President
(c) The CIA employee who, after delivering the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." briefing, was told by George W. Bush, "All right, you've covered your ass now."
(d) The Iraq-war amputee with whom George W. Bush tried to bond by telling him about a scratch he got during "combat with a cedar" while clearing brush.

As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.
-- George W. Bush, after visiting with wounded veterans from the Amputee Care Center of Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1, 2006
All of the possible answers are things that actually happened, but in this case "Peter Wallsten" is (a).

But at least he's not a damn defeatocrat.

The Real Must See TV II

I discussed intelligently in an earlier post the sublime appeal of infomercials to anyone of rational and genteel sensibilities. My previous post went over the basic categories of these underappreciated artforms--the ladders and air purifiers, the gurus of wealth, the mattresses of air. But the most prevalent, stylized, and necessary of all are those that appeal to that which matters most to us, that deal with the fundamental human value--us.

These infomercials understand that humans are ultimately flawed creatures. No, not with greed, lust, gluttony (well, maybe gluttony) . . . none of that "from the crooked timber of humanity" business. No, we're flawed with . . . zits, neuroses, wrinkles, unsightly bulges, and too little (or too much, depending where) hair coverage. But it is not for these advertisements a counsel of despair, for they have the answers to our problems. And for an unbelievable low price if we act now.

Historians will discover the underlying truth of the American mind at this time in these odes to our insecurities. Baldness? Throw away the caps and scarves, all those pictures with fuzzy scalps (and they can be pretty groddy, especially the women's), we have the cream (or pill) for you. Depressed? Why, this highly professional (and serious)-looking woman will teach you how she recovered (which might be a tad more convincing if she ever smiled). Clogged colon? There are pills and powders that . . . best not describe for a cultured audience (which doesn't really seem to be the ultimate target group here). Just generally screwed up? Take this combo of, like, 20 pills of all shapes, sizes, and colors, in a vacuum-sealed pouch, all natural vitamin-like things, we're assured, although there is no disclaimer on possible gagging or dying.

I've heard for years that it's difficult for older actresses to find parts, so to speak, in show business, but it's not so for Susan Lucci, Connie Selleca, that Laura Ingalls girl all grown up, Cindy Crawford, or Victoria Principal (who honestly looks pretty scary, Joan Rivers scary). They've all found a home teaching women which creams and covers to take away the wrinkles and years, not to mention savings accounts. The late Dana Reeve actually had one of these infomercials at one point, and I say in all sincerity how appreciative I am that the company didn't haul that effort back out to capitalize on her passing. If it's not makeup that you need, but zit-cover, here comes Vanessa Williams, or, over there, Jessica Simpson, to show you how to keep only those who get unsuspecting close-ups from knowing you have the problems. Not sure what will happen when HDTV takes over fully. To these infomercials or to the actresses.

As a rule, though, it's not the faces that generate the most action. The most ubiquitous infomercials, of course, are those that will get our bodies in the shape of our dreams, and others'. Some of the aids are not all that energetic, for the diet and exercise challenged. What used to be called girdles are now high-tech and creatively named, but you'll be amazed at the difference!!! "My friends and family can't recognize me now. They can't believe it's really me!!!" Which also sounds like the perfect tool for someone wanting out of a bad marriage. I especially like the Latino versions on Univision or Telemundo where they present with far less demurral than the middle-aged WASP-types we get on English tv. I know how stereotyped it sounds, even if a main reason I like Hispanic programs is that their women have curves and know how important they are (maybe someone should make a movie . . . .), but the women in these efforts don't seem to be apologizing for using the structural supports like the WASPs. Maybe they've been taking those depression pills more.

Occasionally we get pills that will do something to something in womens' breasts and increase them one to two cup sizes while they watch tv, put the kids to bed, or clean up the kitchen while the guy they're increasing them for sits on his fat . . . . Sorry. You might scoff at the claims, but it's on television and there are heartfelt testimonials. It must be true. The male equivalent of these enhancements (do I have to spell it out for you?) is done in one of two ways: tasteful (with a GQ-dressed guy and couples at romantic, candle-lit tables talking intimately) and borderline porn. (Really, when Ron Jeremy is the host of a "talk show" featuring mainly fellow female castmates touting the importance of . . . enhancement, it would be sleazy even if they were discussing their favorite yellow pages ads.) The latter are done with such camp that you almost expect them all to burst out laughing any second. These are rarely seen during children's likely viewing times, for some reason.

Most infomercial fans, however, are too intellectually discerning for these efforts. They realize that really transforming (or the usual synonym--"sculpting") your body comes only from one source: diet and exercise. Uh . . . okay, that's two, but you do have diet infomercials that stay away from exercise like a plague and exercise infomercials that only mention diet in the very small print at the bottom of the screen that explains that you'll still need to diet even if you do the exercises being sold. There are two whole industries here that do the infomercials and that need special attention. That comes in the next post.

When You Least Expect It

So where does a disenchanted Pirates fan/Democrat turn when he needs a hero? As has been proven to me repeatedly over the years, they come around when you least expect it.

I’ve been splitting time between two books for the last few weeks—David Maraniss’ Clemente and Jim DeRogatis’ Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips, and strangely enough I’ve found myself drawing inspiration from the subjects of both books. Roberto Clemente is to be expected...the Flaming Lips were a bit surprising. Flipping back and forth between the two books, I found similarities in these two most unsimilar subjects, and I found a muse in both.

When I purchased the Lips’ At War with the Mystics 3-4 back in April, I had no idea that this would be the beginning of one of my ‘phases’, where I eat, drink, and sleep every ounce of a band’s work/biography until another inspiration comes along. Over the years, it’s happened with all the usual suspects—there was the Beatles phase (that one’s never-ending), the Hendrix phase, The Who, Jeff Buckley, The Roots, Run-DMC, Dave Matthews Band, Pat McGee Band, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, …you get the idea. I didn’t see the Lips Phase coming. No, when Mystics came out, I just decided to get it because, while I’d always heard about their live prowess (and seen pictures of Wayne crowd-surfing in the giant inflatable bubble), I had begun to hear more and more good things about their last couple of albums, and it was getting harder to ignore (though I succeeded in doing so because, as I’ve said before, my moderate case of music snobbery prevents me from immediately jumping on bandwagons if I’m not the first one seated...I wish it weren’t the case, but alas...).

So I picked it up. Not since my discovery of Jeff Buckley circa 2000 has one performer/band so quickly changed what I value in music and how I listen to music, and it pretty much happened the first time I heard the opening notes of “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song.” As I mentioned in one of my first GN reviews, you can hear Frampton and The Who and Pink Floyd in their music, but their music remains a completely unique entity, and they make pulling that off seem natural and relatively easy. That’s amazingly difficult to do; trust me, I’m trying (albeit with a studio that consists of a guitar, a mic and two computers). It takes a level of patience, discipline, and skill that most musicians are incapable of producing.

In other words, I was impressed. So I pursued their back catalog.

After partaking in The Soft Bulletin and getting smacked in the face by “Waitin’ for a Superman” and “Race for the Prize” and “Suddenly Everything Has Changed”, I decided this was a group from whom I could learn some things. Bands like Guster and Barenaked Ladies are able to combine serious subject matter with humor and whimsy (BNL in particular...the same group that wrote “Be My Yoko Ono” and “Alcohol” wrote “War on Drugs”, which is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, and “Baby Seat”, the best, most gripping song ever about deadbeat dads), but the Flaming Lips seem to one-up them by creating even more distinct sounds and further extremes, both on their albums and on-stage.

After digesting Bulletin, it was time for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which takes total advantage of the emotional and musical leaps taken on Bulletin and takes them further. It is not an overstatement to say that “Do You Realize??” is probably one of the five most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1” is a remarkable work in that no other bands can make such a life-affirming song out of lyrics like “Yoshimi, they don’t believe me/But you won’t let those robots eat me”. You just have to hear it for yourself. It’s impossible to explain.

The same can be said for their live show. Impossible to explain. I was in attendance at Lollapalooza in Chicago last weekend, and I was a bit worried that I’d been hyping the Lips to my friends a bit too much...usually when I do that, the gigantic expectations are never met. But in this case, they were exceeded. Exponentially. There’s just nothing like 60,000 people chanting “FANATICAL F--K!!” or the aforementioned “Yoshimi, they don’t believe me” line in unison. And for me, even when you know to expect the giant inflatable bubble and the dancing aliens in babydolls and the dancing Santa’s and the inflatable astronauts and the giant balloons and the confetti gun and the bass player in the skeleton costume, you really don’t know what’s coming until you experience it. It sounds silly, and it is, but it’s as much of a celebration as a concert can be. If they put out a live DVD, it would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but honestly...this has to be experienced in a crowd—the DVD couldn’t possibly do it justice.

So, you’re saying, that’s great. They’re entertaining. That doesn’t exactly put them in the ‘hero’ category of Roberto Clemente, does it?

What exactly prompted me to even fathom this comparison? Honestly, I think it has to do with similar roots in Oklahoma and learning to value what you were taught and the people around which you grew up. Not saying that only happens in Oklahoma, but bear with me.

Wayne Coyne has all the political leanings of your typical jamband-crowd musician (as verified by his comments about Dubya and Israel/Lebanon during last Saturday’s concert), but he combines that with the personal characteristics of someone who grew up in the conservative Midwest. His values of family, pride, hard work, and responsibility are something that resonate when I look to the heroes around which I was raised. But that alone is not what made me admire him as much as I currently do—he goes out of his way to accept people for exactly who they are without judging them. When I say he loves his family, I mean he has a brother who goes to jail often, but he doesn’t disavow knowledge of him...he’s as much of the family as anybody else. He worked at Long John Silver’s for 11 years because it gave him the money to pay for what he loved—the Flaming Lips—and he wasn’t—and still isn’t—embarassed by that. When he suggests that they inflate 1,000 (or more) balloons for the evening’s show, he’ll be out there blowing them up with the stage crew. When he decides to pour fake blood on himself on-stage and gets it all over his suit, he personally hand washes the suit in cold water in the hotel tub.

It’s a strange life, to be sure, but the work ethic is undeniable.

In other words, when he’s doing something he loves, he doesn’t half-ass it. He doesn’t take shortcuts, he doesn’t feign entitlement (which was apparently what led to tension between Beck and him), and he doesn’t screw people. Let’s face it...in the music business, that’s heroic, and the fact that the Flaming Lips are still around after 23+ years is a revelation.

Pride in where you’re from and self-responsibility are what make me dare to compare Coyne and the Lips to one of the greatest heroic figures in sports history, Roberto Clemente. But I’ll get into Clemente during tomorrow’s Pirates Rant™.

The most gripping chapter in the story of the Flaming Lips is also the most telling in regard to Coyne’s own personality and valor. This chapter is about the Lips’ best musician, Steven Drozd, and his heroin addiction. As the Lips were growing in popularity in the late-‘90s, Drozd was broke, spending everything he had on his next hit and living in a small, near-empty apartment. His then-ex-girlfriend hated Wayne because Wayne was allowing this to happen. But Wayne believed that no intervention would work unless Steven himself was ready to quit and believed he could quit. And that probably wouldn’t happen until Steven hit rock bottom.

DeRogatis then does a fantastic job of describing rock bottom. The Lips were scheduled to drive from OKC to upstate New York for a recording session, and Steven showed up five hours late because he was trying to score a hit, swearing this was the last one, as he had many times before. Though Wayne was fuming, he didn’t leave without Steven because he worried what would happen if Steven no longer had the band to live for. From page 203:

The van pulled off with Wayne behind the wheel and Steven in the hot seat. They had only gone a few blocks when Steven tried to shrug off the delay, pulling out the road atlas and making a show of tracing the route, even though they had made the trip many times before. “Okay, so we’re a couple of hours late,” he said. “But we’re leaving now, so we should make it there by—”

Wayne grabbed a bottle of water out of Steven’s hand, threw it in his face, and unleashed a flurry of punches to his bandmate’s head before pulling to the curb. “Everything we’ve worked for is going to fall apart, and I’m going to have to make a choice before too long,” Wayne barked. “If these guys say, ‘We can’t in good conscience work with Steven anymore,’ I’m not going to side with you over Scott Booker [the Lips’ manager] or Dave Fridmann [the Lips’ producer]. You’ve got to get your shit together!” That night, Wayne called Michelle [his wife] and told her what happened. “He said, ‘I regret it,’ but I told him, ‘You weren’t just hitting him for you; you were hitting him for a lot of people.’”

“That was the turning point,” Steven said. “I had no more options except to quit doing drugs. When Wayne punched me in the head, that solidified my thinking.” Wayne downplayed his role. “I don’t believe me hitting him did anything; he had already started to convince himself. If he was nine-tenths of the way to quitting already, maybe hitting him just pushed him the last little bit. I was the one in the wrong—I hit him, he didn’t come at me—but there are people who are so civilized that they aren’t friends because they won’t punch each other, and then there are fuckin’ hillbillies who’ll be friends when they are a hundred years old, and they’re fighting every other weekend.”

This, to me, says everything you need to know about Wayne Coyne. On the outside, he’s something of a hippie-looking art rocker, but inside he’s humble, thoughtful, brave, loyal, proud, and responsible, and I think that rubs off on everybody around him. When you have those qualities deep inside of you, you can affect a lot of people’s lives in a very positive way, and that is, at its very core, what I look for in a role model...whether he/she fits into the generic role model stereotypes or not.

(On a side note, the documentary about the Lips, The Fearless Freaks, covers a lot of the same ground as Staring at Sound, only it actually has video footage of Steven getting ready to shoot up in his barebones apartment...done voluntarily...presumably to help shame him into quitting, which he said repeatedly he wanted to do. He just needed that turning point. This gripping footage, along with the fantastic live clips, make it worth watching.)

One more word about the Lips’ live presence. Actually, a picture and a few words.

Yes, those are female fans dressed as aliens stage right, and yes, those are male fans dressed as Santa Claus stage left. And yes, those are giant inflatable astronauts, aliens, and Santa’s behind the stage. By far, this is possibly the weirdest live act this side of Gwar, but as I said above, this is also the most celebratory live act ever. You embrace nothing but happiness, even during the sad songs.

Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe wrote about his trip to Lollapalooza with his 16-year old son. The performance that made the largest impact was, not surprisingly, the Lips. It was the same for me, and likely the same for the other 59,999 who passed up on seeing Common (which hurt...he was #2 on my list of must-see performers, but he happened to be on at the same time as #1) to watch the show.

Thank you, Flaming Lips. They deliver a knockout performance, and Matt and I are caught up in the ecstasy of the moment, our testy exchanges forgotten. Here's the thing about middle age: Time does its dirty work on us all, and we can develop layers of cynical detachment from some of life's primal pleasures. But rock 'n' roll has a power to transport us out of everyday life into a kind of secular rapture. It's the sort of thing you can forget unless there's a young person around to remind you.

Thing is, Wayne Coyne is in his mid-40s now, and he reminds you of that ecstasy more than any 16-year old I’ve been around.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

All eyes are on Democrats...

...man, just saying those five words gives me the heebee jeebees, but it's true. Three things are known about the November mid-terms:

1. Republicans are going to scream that Democrats are defeatists.
2. The Bush Administration will crank up the terror alerts every time a discouraging poll comes out.
3. Dear Leader will once again be painted as the John Wayne to America's Maureen O'Hara, saving the world with a strut and a drawl.
3. The liberal media will repeat whatever talking points are given to them.

No matter how much we complain, none of those three things are going to change. Sure, some folks might exceed even cynical expectations from time to time, but we know what game will be played here. What we don't know is, what Democrats will do about it.

Dana B. has a post up at the moment that looks at this issue. First, he gives a nice, hearty bitchslap to my own optimism about the current state of the polls and what it could mean for Democrats.

Anyone seeking a Clue as to Republican strategy for 2006 need look no further than here.
It's a 1971 poll showing that, at that time, 73% of Americans wanted our troops out of Vietnam.
Compare that to right now, when just 60% want our troops out of Iraq within a year.
Yet the Republicans won the next election, won it convincingly, won it so convincingly that to this day Democrats are scared of being McGovernized.

So there's no fear in the poll numbers for Republicans. They figure they can ratchet up the terror alerts on demand, keep interest rates from rising (despite inflation), depend on a significant number of Democrats being consumed with defending themselves against the false charge of defeatism, and gut out a narrow win with an off-year base vote.

I knew Vietnam polls were slanted in the favor of withdrawl by '71, but I didn't know they were that slanted. That really is kind of scary considering just how withdrawn and insecure Dems seem to get the moment the word "McGovern" is uttered. It's pretty Pavlovian by this point. Ring the McGovern bell, and Dem politicians nationwide will start shaking and wringing their hands.

Dana also lists five ways to re-label Iraq and the War on Terror, and they make perfect sense, but I must say...coming up with #-point plans has not been the Dems' problem. It's party-wide execution that has been the issue.

In high school, we used to play a game with one of my best friends. Every time she started telling a story, we'd start interrupting her every 10 seconds to throw her off and see if we could make her forget what she was talking about. I know...high schoolers are so cruel and all that...but apparently we were political visionaries. Every time a Dem gets brave, somebody yells the word "terror" or, again, "McGovern", and the brave Dems misplace their brains and their balls and once again start wringing their hands.

Digby has more on how the midterms are being shaped:

The constant reference to McGovern is this season's Swift Boat smear. Since Karl doesn't have a single candidate to tar with cowardly Vietnam stories he has chosen instead to run against the fabled "left wing" of the Democratic party circa 68-72. The point is less to convince the electorate than it is to trash talk the Democrats into backing off a harsh critique of the war. And it's remarkably effective. As we can see from countless articles and columns of the past few weeks, nothing sends the timorous insider Dems scurrying like an accusation that the Party is in the clutches of the crazy liberals. The man knows his adversaries.

But the other side of the coin is to present the Codpiece as grown-up contrast and rehab his reputation. Bush is, aftger all, remarkably unpopular and he is what's dragging down the party. Part of the plan requires him and all his minions to swagger and talk tough, of course. But this formulation of the hippie kids running amuck also needs something less confrontational: the patient parent who can calm the waters. Here comes Ben Cartwright, the pops of the Ponderosa whose credo was"A man's never wrong doing what he thinks is right."

I don't think it's going to work again. It's like the third sequel of a bad movie. The hippie extremist plot is absurd, the hysterical dialog is unintentionally funny and the actors are out of shape and looking old. Worst of all, the star is now box-office poison.

I dunno. I think a very large % of Americans seem to have serious long-term memory issues, and if the "defeatist hippies" and "Bush is a strong, manly leader" talking points continue without serious, ballsy opposition for the next 2.5 months, then I do think it's going to work again. Come on, Dems. All eyes are on you.

Albert O. Hirschman III

Sorry it's taken so long to get back to the series on Albert O. Hirschman's works, one of the handful of economists who actually thinks about the real world and manages to explain it well without "let's assume we have a can opener." Even the ones on "my side" fall into their theological training on the sacred "market" at too many key moments to ultimately have much of value to say to the vital issues facing us. (Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends know people who are economists.)

But Hirschman speaks across time and context because he understands time and context instead of bending them to his holy theories. He worked in developmental economics for a long time and saw the harsh effect of reality on comfortable academic theory. He even knows markets for what they are, as proven by another of his books, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.

Those of us in this historical period have grown up with capitalism and all its justifying dogma. We're like fish who don't realize they're in water. But it has not ever been thus. For most of human history, the idea that human greed and acquisitiveness were good things was abhorrent. Remember the prohibitions against lending money with interest? Shylock and all that? It took a full metal assault on that prior dogma to overcome the cultural restraints on implementing capitalism broadly and successfully. Which is what Hirschman, with his mastery of intellectual history and enjoyable writing matched only by Isaiah Berlin, does in this book.

He wrote the book in part to show why present-day social science was so bad at understanding and predicting the political correlates to economic development in newly developing nations. To do so, he looked at the understandings of the prior transition of the West. Where some see a sharp break between the earlier feudal systems and their rationales, Hirschman sees more continuity and an evolution of ideas that reworked the past into more attractive current containers. The main battle was over turning "passions," the fundamental energy of human nature (think Rousseau's "natives"), into "interests" by countering destructive passions with constructive ones, by structuring relations to allow the beneficial "interests" in bettering one's self economically to improve the overall community's health and wealth. There are obvious problems with reality here, which he notes with his customary thoroughness, but the point is success in tailoring a worldview that allowed society to back off of some of the prior cultural restraints on the "passions" in the name of furthering social as well as individual interests.

The book is amazingly packed with thinkers and their ideas, swimming together and apart, for its short and very readable length, and this quick hit doesn't do it justice. I bring it up now, though, to note that, once again, Hirschman wrote something of lasting relevance even to our current period. We are clearly going to need a similar change of worldview to deal with the civilization-threatening (at the very least, democracy-threatening) world changes that face us. My wearying litany of "weather, water, and energy" as the overriding concerns that should be driving our discourse over the smaller issues that actually could be subsumed within them is not driving the discourse. It will take a drastic rearrangement of our cultural vocabulary and stories to get us to address them and/or to deal with them effectively as their reality sinks in more and more. One might assume that, given our current failures and shortened time span to wake up, the cause is basically lost already, that the means to effect this change in perspective and thought will not appear.

Hirschman, however, shows us that this is not necessarily the case. Readjusting cultural memes to accommodate new ways of adapting to a changing world has happened, as his story of the triumph of capitalistic thought after its early restriction shows. He also shows, though, that it is not automatic and wrong paths can be taken, with success being lucky as much as rational. The first step to both luck and rationality is understanding how the process could work, why the proliferation of needed ideas and interactionsat this similarly historic moment is vital. The Passions and the Interests should be everyone's first step.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Quite impressive logic...

...I linked to a couple posts in yesterday's blogroll that dealt with the media's obsession with 1972. Apparently since a Democratic primary in a heavily blue state led to a candidate who supports the wishes of over 60% of the electorate being chosen to sit on the blue ballot over an 18-year incumbent means that Democrats are defeatist hippies. No matter how sad that makes me, it was predictable.

What was not as predictable, however (to me, at least), was the face of Headline News (seriously, he's been there forever, hasn't he?) calling Ned Lamont the "al Qaeda candidate" (h/t Avedon). I actually didn't see that one coming at all. Karl Rove doesn't even have to put in the work anymore. They just do the work for him. What's even sadder is that Chuck Roberts truly doesn't even understand the words that are coming out of his mouth, and he says them anyway. Al Qaeda didn't have much of a presence in Iraq until we showed up. If we'd just pursued al Qaeda all along (in places like, I dunno, Afghanistan), then Lieberman would have won his primary unchallenged.

Really, this is one ferocious "If -> Then" statement. IF Lieberman supports a war that 60% of the public hates, and IF he's every bit as stubborn and obstinate as Dubya when it comes to changing course and actually finding a strategy that works, THEN Ned Lamont is the al Qaeda Candidate. Makes sense to me.

UPDATE 10:22am - Eric Boehlert has the best take yet on why the media seems to be going out of their way to paint the picture that 60% of the country is defeatist hippies (h/t Atrios).

The Lamont media flailing truly was remarkable. How else to describe longtime Lieberman pal and DC corporate lobbyist Lanny Davis, trolling online through liberal comment sections in search of random anti-Semitic slurs in order to prove thoughtful progressives opposed to Lieberman were really filled with "scary hatred." Davis also trembled theatrically for a liberal Connecticut buddy who confided that he might not return to the state to vote on primary day "out of fear for his safety."

Meanwhile, the New York Times's David Brooks lashed out at the "liberal inquisition" unfolding in Connecticut, the type of phenomenon that could be understood "only [by] experts in moral manias and mob psychology." ABC's Cokie Roberts sang from the choir sheet this Sunday morning, announcing a Lamont win would mean "a disaster for the Democratic Party."

...

What also drove a lot of the animus was the growing tension between the Beltway insiders and the bloggers, who continue to grab more political authority at the expense of ink-and-paper pundits who are scrambling to maintain theirs. It was no coincidence that Brooks and Broder and Klein and the crew at The New Republic have all in recent months taken public whacks at the progressive netroots, trying hard to undermine them. For instance, Brooks dismissed Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas as the "Keyboard Kingpin," while Klein proudly announced on CNN, "I bow to nobody in my disdain for bloggers." For the last few years mainstream media pundits and reporters chuckled over the bloggers' dismal 0-16 streak in backing candidates in previous campaigns. But the Lieberman stunner (stunning, in that four months ago nobody thought Lamont could prevail), changes everything. As of right now, the bloggers not only have juice, but represent perhaps the most potent force in progressive politics. You don't think that scares Beltway insiders who for decades saw themselves as the de facto king makers?

...

But what I think is essential to understanding the Lieberman media phenomena is that, for the most part, the pundits who assailed Lamont's rise during the campaign were the same ones who signed off on the disastrous war in Iraq and now appear spooked that voters in Connecticut finally decided to hold Lieberman, the de facto Democratic co-sponsor of the invasion, responsible for that foreign policy debacle. They're spooked because for the last three-plus years there's been something of a gentleman's agreement that nobody inside the Beltway, whether at the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, or inside the corporate media world, has been asked to pay any sort of professional price for backing the disaster that is Iraq. But suddenly Democrats in the Nutmeg state have decided enough's enough. That's not a trend Beltway insiders want to see spread nationally, which is why so many pundits were eager to marginalize Lamont and his anti-war backers as "crazies" and "elitist" "bomb throwers."

The problem for pundits is that the November elections will offer a lot more referendums on the war--and nervous name-calling might not be enough to stem that tide.

Eyes on the Prize

This AP story is yet one more alarm bell about the fire that is starting to take down rooms in our planetary house. The sign of a serious people, a serious democracy is surely the ability to recognize such species-threatening activity and to undergo the serious discussion and programming necessary to cope with it. We, all of us, Dems and Repubs and Indies, blogs and MSM, are instead talking about gay marriage and Lieberman and throwing our resources and energies away on Iraq and toothpaste tubes. They should be the secondary themes to an agenda of uniting the country, the world in stopping the progress of this escalating tragedy (in the true sense of tragic).

And please don't tell me that the first priority is electing a Dem Congress or house and then we'll start talking seriously about doing something, baby steps or first steps or all that. Al Gore is the only Dem with the courage and common sense about the issue of our times, which, if Congressional Dems had any clue, would be the drum it home point of the whole election. Terrorism scares people into voting Repub? How about dead oceans, hurricanes, and The Long Emergency? A party that cannot see that by this time cannot be expected to confront it well, any more than blogs that ignore it can. (And a serious party (or blog) makes an issue of the demonstrated unreliability of the existing election technology so it's not reliant on the other side for the results it claims are most important.)

I know I'm shouting against a giant inertial, self-referential wind here (which is why I don't blog much on politics anymore), but nothing we say we want on the progressive side happens in a future dominated by failures to deal well with our non-linearly changing weather, water, and energy. The feedback loops are already kicking in and the dead patches are literally forming. There's no democracy under scarcity, rationing, and triage, and the only equality isn't a happy kind. History will not treat well people who see defeating Lieberman (if we do) or stopping some gay marriage amendments (if we do) as the biggest things we can get done at this point in ours, especially when they naturally happen anyway if we are effective in getting everyone's eyes focused on the prize.

Yes, I'm old and grumpy. That means I'm wise.

UPDATE: Yet another nail.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Berlin Niebuhr must be pretty smart then...

Older and Cranky May Mean Smarter

Next time grumpy Aunt Gertrude growls at her bridge partner or one of her well-wishing nephews, look at it from this angle: She just may be smarter than all the rest.

New research suggests just that, revealing that older people with above-average intelligence tend to be disagreeable.

Friday Blogroll! On Friday for the last time!

That's right, thanks to a change in my work schedule, I'll no longer be able to spend the first 2 hours of Friday mornings pimping the GN blogroll. From now on, that honor will go to Sundays. You're welcome, Sundays. It's your time to shine.

Leave it to Alicublog, the first blog on the list, to make the one single point I wanted to make today. "'THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS LOST ITS WAY' CRY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S MORTAL ENEMIES. The defenestration of every Republican's favorite Democrat has brought much wailing and gnashing of teeth." Go figure. But the liberal media treats it like a story. If Lieberman had won, the Republicans would say that Democrats are headed off a cliff, and thousands of reporters would begin to ask, "Are the Democrats headed off a cliff?" Lieberman lost, so the Republicans say that Democrats are headed off a cliff, and thousands of reporters begin to ask, "Are the Democrats headed off a cliff?" It must get boring for Republicans after a while. When your lapdog acts exactly how you want him/her to act, after a couple decades you'd think you'd lose interest. But they've definitely not lost interest. In fact, their desire for dominance has actually grown (AMERICAblog).

Speaking of Lapdogs, hello Mike Allen (Atrios)! And while we're at it...hello all major networks (Interesting Times)! And knowing they exist, Steve Soto tries to prepare Lamont for what inevitably lies ahead (Left Coaster). Lamont's stayed on top of things amazingly well so far...here's to hoping it continues.

Meanwhile, Avedon points us to a nice Gilliard post, in which he says exactly what I want to say to Marty Peretz and TNR: "Keep digging your own grave."

Dana expresses optimism about the midterms ("Voters vote the issues in front of them. You invoke their parents' time, you lose them. If that's all you've got, you're already lost."), and the only thing keeping me from thinking he's right is the deeply ingrained cynicism drawn from the last three election cycles. Anonymous Liberal (Greenwald) drives the point home: It's just not 1972 anymore (at least I hope so). Anybody with access to a keyboard (cough cough Weisburg cough Cokie cough) who try to appear like they actually understand history by bringing up 1972 (or 1968) probably need to prove they understand what's happened in the 34 years since 1972 as well.

And while we're on the topic, saying "Jonah Goldberg and TNR say it, so that makes it okay," is possibly the single-worst defense of someone I've ever read (Lefarkins).

And speaking of midterms, just in case you were worried that Democrats didn't have HUNDREDS of talking points they could be making, Christy at FDL comes through. And meanwhile, Cliff at Gadflyer tries to spell something out for Cokie. Note to Cliff: your words will never be small enough. I can't wait for "Why Democrats winning both houses of Congress is a bad thing for Democrats" take in mid-November.

Meanwhile, Debate Link reminds us that as long as faux-humans like this exist, then Lamont supporters aren't "angry" or "shrill" or "mean." But then, if you're on the right side of the aisle, you can actually get away with saying this. And not that anybody reading this doesn't know this already, but she's not the only one (TBogg).

BooMan expresses the skepticism that I feel but didn't want to acknowledge. I want to believe that the unveiling of the liquid explosives plot uncovered yesterday had nothing to do with the fact that Bush's favorite squeeze in the Senate was defeated in a primary, but I'm just hard-wired to be completely cynical about it. Especially after Susie pointed me to Olbermann's Coundown report. (And as Larry Johnson says elsewhere, the fact that Dubya and his boys apparently just discovered the threat of liquid explosives is just depressing.)

Oops, nevermind. Once skepticism is proven correct (Digby), it's not skepticism anymore.

Snow said Bush first learned in detail about the plot on Friday, and received two detailed briefings on it on Saturday and Sunday, as well as had two conversations about it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But a senior White House official said that the British government had not launched its raid until well after Cheney held a highly unusual conference call with reporters to attack the Democrats as weak against terrorism.

[...]

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains."

I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

Sigh.

And while Athenae is technically correct here, how great would it be if you could round them all up and kill them at once?? Talk about efficient!

Meanwhile, blue at Echidne posts a different take about the new "You can't even take a book onto a plane now" restrictions.

As for Israel...as Billmon has been saying for most of the past 2-3 weeks, it appears as if Olmert has overplayed his hand...his bluff has been called, and he's managed to give up the upper hand. That ain't good.

Wait...culture is supposed to make you more rational (Existentialist Cowboy)??? Well...somebody has some serious splainin' to do then. (While you're at EC, make sure to read Monday's "All the Bad News Has Come True" post. Excellent writing...though obviously depressing as hell...)

Sweet. Missouri's caught on to the winning ways of other states (Fired Up! Missouri). Goodie.

And meanwhile, yikes (Great Society). If the FBI were to actually start investigating the Wingnut Keyboard Commandoes, there's no telling what they'd find. Seriously, what kind of world do we live in if LGF posters couldn't make idle racist/genocidal comments??

Speaking of right-wing bloggers, Wolcott sums it up nicely:

The bloggers who deciphered the Reuters smoke signals: feisty, truth-driven, crackling examples of citizen journalism at its finest, and healthy for democracy.

The bloggers who championed Ned Lamont's candidacy and harried Joe Lieberman over Iraq: angry, spiteful, rabble-rousing, dangerous to democracy, and personally intimidating.

Once you accept that, life become a lot more clear. And speaking of accepting things, here's a note to all women: you must serve your man and pop out however many babies he wants, but if you don't enjoy every second of it, it doesn't count (Pandagon).

Meanwhile, Charles at Mercury Rising keeps an eye on the Land of Telenovelas...which is good, considering I've fallen down on the job and haven't written a "Fraud in the Land of Telenovelas" piece in quite a while. Blame Chicago. It knocked me out of commission.

Hopefully this is indeed why Maurice Clarett was thinking about going on a rampage (Rising Hegemon). If so, I suddenly have some sympathy for him. Seriously. When you're behind every country but Turkey in anything, that should be cause for a long look in the mirror.

And finally, Mannion writes 1,500 words about Miami Vice. I don't know what to say about that, other than that this proves he's a helluva writer.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING!! Even Satan Gets Sleepy.

If you go and start thinking she actually looks sweet, I'll take a picture of the scratches on my arm. And maybe one day I'll make a sound recording of the gutteral growl she gives every time I walk into a room.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Now I Can Stop Banging My Head

I have for years had a soft bruised spot in the middle of my forehead from the months I read Kevin Drum, thinking that he would someday grow a full-time brain and spine. Finally I gave up and took up meth. But greenboy at Needlenose has the definitive takedown of Professor Drum, and I have hope that my skull may begin to reform. Thank you, thank you. Now go read Kleiman and take appropriate action.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

A few thoughts about Nedmentum...

...Good Nonsense as a whole hasn't posted a lot about Lamont/Lieberman I in recent weeks, and for good reason. Others have pretty much done a knockout job of covering the race. I commend them for it. I was refreshing all of their pages minute-by-minute last night.

Here are my at least 1% original thoughts on Nedmentum and Joenertia.

* Here is a predictably lame "Republicans think Lamont's win is fantastic!" column from Time.

One of the nip-and-tuck Senate races this year is in Missouri, and backers of Sen. Jim Talent are preparing an attack on his opponent, State Auditor Claire McCaskill, that is emblematic of the sort that will be seen all over the country within 24 hours. "Does Claire McCaskill support the wishes of the angry left by endorsing Ned Lamont's candidacy or will she support the man who was chosen by Al Gore as the Democrat's 2000 nominee for Vice President?" the National Republican Senatorial Committee asks in a statement that will force McCaskill to talk about messy party business instead of her favored issues of government accountability and affordable health care.

If Claire or any other major Democrat candidate can't counteract this line of crap with a simple "I support the 60+% of Americans who think George Bush has done a terrible job"-type of line and actually let the Republicans recover, then the Democrats really don't deserve to ever be a majority part again.

* I don't think there's any way that Lieberman listens to his friends and decides not to run. I really really hope I'm wrong.

* The "Our site's been hacked" saga from Lieberman's campaign yesterday was one of the lamest things I've ever seen.

* Every time the netroots have thrown all their weight behind a candidate, that candidate has lost. Every time after the loss, a high-ranking blogger says, "The mere fact that _____ was in the race speaks volumes about the power of the netroots," and every time they've said it, they've been right. However, the netroots really, really needed this. You only get so many moral victories before people stop believing. This was a fantastic cause, Lamont really has turned out to be a fantastic candidate, and the result feels, well, fantastic. But it's only Victory #1. It needs to be followed by Victories #2-100, and they need to start coming in bunches in roughly 2.5 months.

* The fact that Lamont won didn't make me feel nearly as good as the fact that all the party's head honchos immediately came out in support of Lamont and asked Joementum to step aside. I was actually nervous that people like Schumer meant what they said about supporting Lieberman even if he ran as an Independent. This actually makes me believe 1% in the future of the Democratic Party. Not 2% yet, but 1%'s a start. Joe's actually alone on this one, and I don't think he can win now.

Mannion has a >1% original line of thinking about Lieberman, and since I haven't linked to him in a while...

There was a moment during the 2000 Vice-Presidential debate.

Joe Lieberman, making the case that having a Democrat in the White House had been good for the economy, turned to Dick Cheney and with a big Cheshire chat grin said, "Admit it, Dick, aren't you better off now than you were eight years ago?"

A dumb, dumb question, because there was only one answer a good Republican would give to it, and Cheney gave it.

"Yeah," he growled, "But the government had nothing to do with it."

But that was a dumb answer for Cheney to give because the comeback was obvious and I jumped up from my chair and shouted at the TV as if Lieberman could hear me.

"The government had nothing to do with making you a multi-millionaire? Haliburton exists to scoop up fat government contracts! They hired you for all your government contacts! You're rich because the government was backing trucks full of money up to your front door and shoveling the money off at you with pitchforks!"

Did Lieberman hear me?

No.

Did he hear the voice that must have been shouting the answer inside his own head?

No.

He sat there and chuckled. As if to say, "Good one, Dick. You really nailed me with that."
And suddenly I couldn't deny it anymore. I'd been trying, for the sake of Al Gore, to pretend to myself that Lieberman wasn't what he was, a toady to Republicans, but that's what he was.

It was more important to him in that debate that Dick Cheney like him than that he take-down Dick Cheney.

I think that's about it. Blogroll on Friday, baby.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Tuesday Pirates Rant™ -- Happy Happy Edition

So I went to Wrigley last Friday and saw rookie Tom Gorzelanny pitch 8 shutout innings to lead the Pirates to a 6-0 victory over the Cubs...pushing their all-time record to 4-1 when I'm in attendance. Think about that...the sample size is ridiculously small, but the odds of them winning four out of any five games can't be very large.

But anyway, it gave me an idea for today's Rant™. Coming off of the Rant™ to end all Rants™, not to mention probably the pissiest post I've ever written on GN, I decided that I should try as hard as I can to write something nothing but positive for today. Never mind that they've lost the two games since then (and they're down to the Astros as I write this), and never mind that the Yankees' GM said this week that he likely would have cut Shawn Chacon if he couldn't trade him...but then he found a GM dumb enough to not only take pay for the rest of his salary for the year, but also give him Craig Wilson in return. Nope. Today's Rant™ is all about positive vibes.

So I'm thinking...what can I write about that would be nice and positive? I obviously don't think that the Pirates will suddenly be playoff contenders in 2007, and I obviously think their minor league system is pathetic and barren thanks to the work of a GM whose name is best left untyped. How about this: let's fast forward 12 months. Instead of 42-70 (best 42-70 team in the league!!), they're 70-42 and in first place in the division. In other words, they pulled a 1991 Braves and went from worst to first. How did this happen?

(See what I did there? I didn't say "They'll be good next year," I just said "If they're good, here's why." Genius, if you ask me. And I'm going to try as hard as I can to be realistic about this. In other words, no "They signed Barry Zito and traded for A-Rod.")

1. Starting Pitching. In August 2006, the Pirates' rotation consists of 4 guys 24 and younger. All four have experienced the extreme ups and downs that young pitchers often experience. Hell, at Zach Duke's age, Tom Glavine was coming off of a 7-17 season. At Tom Gorzelanny's age, Glavine was 10-12 with a 4.28 ERA. Hell, Randy Johnson was a year older than Ian Snell when he got traded by the Expos while in possession of an 0-4 record and 6.67 ERA. In other words, pitchers grow. And the 2006 adversity could lead to some thriving in the near future. Snell, Duke, Gorzelanny, Paul Maholm, and Random #5 Starter (and no matter how much I hate it, chances are that #5 will be Shawn Chacon) could make for a pretty mean rotation in the near future.

2. Relief Pitching. A strength this year, the main cogs (Mike Gonzalez, 28 in 2007, and Matt Capps, 23) are young, have great stuff (Capps has walked 6 batters in 59 innings) and under contract for the near future. Add to that the likes of Josh Sharpless (who pitched a scoreless 9th on Friday), Jonah Bayliss (filthy stuff...even though he doesn't always know where it's going), and the old veteran, Saloman Torres (much less filthy stuff...though fortunately he doesn't know where it's going either), John Grabow (a lefty who's improved annually), and Random Veteran Lefty Reliever, and that's a pretty stout pitching corps, from ace to closer. Pitching wins championships, you know. Just ask the 2003 Marlins.

3. Experience Behind the Plate. Catcher Ronny Paulino started the year in AAA, likely wondering how he was ever going to break into the Pirates' lineup. In every level of the organization, he's been behind Ryan Doumit. Well...Doumit has had significant hamstring problems this year, opening the door for Paulino. Paulino's done well enough that when Doumit returns, he'll likely be tried out as a 1st-baseman or right-fielder. Never mind the fact that, as of this moment, he's batting .316 and hit three HR's in Wrigley over the weekend. No, next year the biggest contribution he will make is the fact that he'll have caught all these young pitchers for over a year. Plus, he's already gone from "defensive liability" in May to "stalwart" in July. Having a strong leader behind the plate makes a huge difference. Just ask the 2003 Marlins.

4. Actual Continuity. There is always the possibility that even an inept GM like Da...oops, almost mentioned his name. There is always the possibility that even the most inept GM could make some interesting trades in the offseason. Shortstop Jack Wilson will likely come up in trade talks, especially since Freddy "Little Ichiro" Sanchez (that's the nickname my buddy gave him Friday) is more than capable of holding down shortstop instead of 3B. Xavier "Little Craig Wilson" Nady could also be on the block...who knows. But if those trades fall through, then the Pirates are already possibly set at all 7 positions in the infield and outfield. Unlike previous years, when Dave Lit...um, the Pirates GM signed far-far-over-the-hill-and-too-expensive veterans to block younger players from getting experience, surely he can't make that mistake again, right? Ri...right?

Anyway, a lineup of Nady (1B), Jose Castillo (2B), Wilson (SS), Sanchez (3B), Jose Bautista (RF, .801 OPS as a rookie), Chris Duffy (CF), and Jason Bay (LF) could be pretty tough...especially if the manager (I can dream that maybe it won't be Jim Tracy) actually does the smart thing and bats Duffy at 8th instead of lead-off. As he proved on Friday, Duffy's range in centerfield is pretty much second-to-none. He gets to balls nobody this side of Andruw Jones can...and even Andruw's kinda packed on the pounds in recent years, so his range isn't what it used to be. Never mind that Duffy can't hit...he can still make a rock-solid contribution as long as others (Bay, Bautista, Paulino, Nady) pick up the slack with the bat.

Then again, Duffy's the one who was disappointed to be called up last week because he was hoping to be traded, so who knows if he's even around in '07.

5. Actual Good Luck. Yeah, I needed a fifth reason to make it an official Top 5. But hey, the first four were pretty good, right? You didn't think I could do it, did you?

Until next week, when this momentary optimism will be pounded back into submission by the overwhelming bullying abilities of reality...

I'm back from Chicago...

...and I'm ready to resume posting. Woohoo. Expect a couple posts here and there before things start picking up full-speed again around Friday. Thanks to berlin for the extra La Fea posts to keep people entertained while I was away.

Chicago rules.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty) Mas Bella Update (Lucky) XIII

I realize it may be getting old hearing me worry about ABC's "Ugly Betty" before it even hits the air, but recent turns on "La Fea Mas Bella," Univision's remake of the classic "Betty La Fea," have started the concerns again. Primarily it's because the creators of "Betty" and now "La Fea" have always been pretty interactive with the audiences, and I don't know how well a once-a-week show can do that.

What do I mean by "interactive"? Basically, that the writers know we already know how this story is going to go just by its premise, so they are constantly playing with that knowledge, weaving and re-weaving threads that we can follow and making them turn in sometimes surprising directions.

The recent sequence in which Lety decides to rework her "look," to horrendous results, is a good example. We know that it is fundamental to the story that Lety undergo her transformation from fea to bella physically before the show is over. So, by introducing this feint halfway through, they make unsuspecting (aka virgin) viewers believe that the change may be taking place now. And the scene in which she appears at "Conceptos" with her new look, mirroring the scene of her first appearance there in which everyone is taken aback, keeps up the suspense until the curtain is pulled and we become Luigi screaming "el horror!! el horror!!" But that just continues the thread they're building for devoted viewers because there will come yet another repeat of the scene, a triumphant but melancholy at the time repeat (if this is a spoiler for you, get a clue) that we share even more because of these careful build-ups before.

That's what I mean by interactive. The show takes care to engage you and build layers that keep a show of this length together. When Lety, Fernando, whoever, lapses into a daydream (a trick "Betty" made as popular as Ally McBeal did), the first few times we may get tricked, but then it becomes another running thread binding us to the previous times used. They introduce novelty and capture our attention while reinforcing all the prior episodes.

That's why I'm concerned about the ABC version. I've already talked about how the time limitations will force them to truncate, simplify, or just eliminate some or more of the characters and subplots that give "Betty" and "La Fea" their special ambience. Will a one-hour, once-a-week show have the time or interest to create the threads I'm talking about here and to rework and re-weave them as effectively? Maybe, as I've said, with a telenovela vet like mi novia secreta Salma Hayek at the wheel, but I don't see how it can be done well simply because of the structure of the US version compared to a telenovela concept.

I'm wishing more and more that ABC would have taken the risk and run it as a telenovela. That's expecting guts and imagination from business in which "Desperate Housewives" and "24" are considered creative. Maybe Salma gets it enough to make it work. She's certainly one of the brainier people in entertainment right now. (If everything balances in the universe, think how many other women are more unattractive and less intelligent than they would have been if Salma Hayek had never been born. And, no, we don't have plans for a shrine. Yet.) All this may be fruitless, needless worry. But "Betty" is such a treasure, and "La Fea" has done a nice job copying it (although, can anyone who saw both believe "Betty" would be on "Cantando por un Sueno" (tilde challenged), even in a daydream?) It will be hard to accept anything that waters them down.

Don't let us down, Salma.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

The Real Must See TV I

Our readers probably assume that the only television I watch is telenovelas. This is not true. Being companionable with mi esposa, I also watch the Food Network and HGTV (has Reverend Wildmon never caught the shows on these networks?), although the Barefoot Contessa makes me cringe and I worry that we'll never again see Rick Spence. But mostly, my main alternative to Latino tearjerkers and Saturday night Gigantes is another underestimated art form needing more recognition.

That's right. Infomercials.

Like you, I suspect, my early perspective of these little gems was shaped by pan flute recordings (cheaper for the cassettes than the CDs) and knives that could cut through cans (which was cool but not selling). That guy in the bizarre sweaters still reappears occasionally in dream sequences better left undiscussed. But early one morning, surfing for something among the 432 channels worth watching, I ran across Tracy Scoggins. In a bikini. Coming out of a pool.

This looked informative.

(Brief aside: You may not remember her, but she was a second-tier player on the Teri Hatcher Superman show and later on one of those syndicated sci-fi things with fans I'd normally raise an eyebrow at, but I watch infomercials. Ms. Scoggins turns out to be a proud Texas Republican, three things which tell you everything you need to know about her, except she claims to have, like, a 289 IQ, which, if true, demonstrates the idiocy of genius. I won't get into how I know these things.)

Ms. Scoggins was hyping some forgotten exercise program that had helped to achieve or maintain her impressive physical condition, as revealed by the strips of cloth she was "wearing." While I failed to purchase the product, she succeeded in making me slow down during my search of those higher channels and not assume the only things worth viewing were series, movies, or sports. (Notice "news" had already pretty much disappeared as required watching by then.) There was a whole other world out there to behold. And I do mean behold.

And really, it's fascinating, indeed another planet, a lot like the interactive shopping channels, only without the conspicuously sad and desperately lonely people (and I'm just talking about the hosts). Although ginzu knives have pretty much vanished, some of the products do still amaze, like the ubiquitous ladder commercial with that "Home Improvement/Family Feud" guy that can apparently be bent into S's, or Z's anyway, and still support a medium-sized house party (the ladder, not the guy). Food processors and air purifiers are big right now, as well as vacuums and some disturbing shows featuring Mr. Orick himself (see the ones with his lit-up hands--not as bad though as his regular 60-second commercial with him in a cowboy hat and fringed chaps. Please get counseling, sir). The tooth care ones show way too many open mouths for someone who admires but wonders seriously about dentists.

For a while now mattresses have been popular. Lindsay Wagner does the adjustable one, with the two air chambers and each sleeper can control the firmness of their side? She seems sincere, and it's nice she's found work, but wouldn't being bionic keep you from worrying about bed comfort? (And I get that TMI feeling when she describes why she's not.) The AERO bed, the one that blows up in less than a minute, actually lives up to its billing in my own experience. Along that same line, I was a little skeptical of those foam bed things, especially the ones that just cover a regular mattress, but, after getting one (from a store, not tv), ours at least has also been as promised.

There are websites that warn you about infomercial products (like you got through high school and still need to be warned?), and most of them deal with the "get rich quick" schemes. Inherently, there is money to be made in real estate if you can buy now, fix up, sell higher, turn the profits around, and do it again (unless you're trying this in Newark, apparently). Not real sure how much of this will hold true as the housing bubble deflates around us, but for the last few years you didn't need tv gurus to tell us the italicized, you just needed some capital and a little luck. These guys on tv have clearly made money through selling real estate . . . on tv, even the two dwarfs who were the most compelling, for a number of reasons. And the website complainers seem shocked by the perfidy when it's discovered. These are people we allow to vote, which coincidentally explains the last 40 years of US history.

The biggest huckster and usual topic #1 of the critics, on practically all the time, selling virtually everything at one time or another, is a guy name Kevin Trudeau. Right now, he's hyping the sequel to a top-selling book (even in book stores) claiming that natural remedies are better than medical ones and that's why THE ESTABLISHMENT IS OUT TO STOP HIM!!! I guess being put in prison for fraud and paying the FTC fines on later occasions is proof. His Wikipedia article is one of the most hilarious things I've ever read, and not in a good way. The guy must have testicles like watermelons, which is probably why we've never seen him standing. Still, it all makes him very entertaining in small, all-natural doses. You just have to sit in awe, until your bowels start turning. And there are infomercials for that, too. I think Trudeau does one.

So, see? Where else can you get such a wide range of fascinating, informative, and occasionally true fare, especially when "Survivor" isn't on? And I've left out the best ones, the ones that drew me to these mini-masterpieces to start with, the ones focusing on improving the most important things in our lives.

Us. Like Tracy Scoggins was saying from the very start. Those infomercials are the best.

And a later post.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Bumper Sticker Principles

Another view of Dem clueless with their unveiling of their "6 for '06" campaign. Six popular but pale issues to mirror the Repubs' "Contract on America" in '94. In and of itself, it's not that bad, like a national pabulum platform, but it shows not only that the Dems are still playing on Repub turf with Repub rules but also that they still don't get what their problem is. Senator Schumer (D-Schmuck) says people want to know what the Democrats stand for and now they will. Well, Chuck, anyone who pays attention already knew Dems were for a higher minimum wage, and those who don't pay attention . . . uh, won't pay attention to "6 for '06" either.

The problem isn't knowing what Dems say when they claim to stand for things but what they do. The problem is the perception, an accurate one in this proud Independent's opinion, that standing for anything is so hard for Dems, the party that could have stood against Roberts/Alito, the bankruptcy bill, bankrupting tax cuts, and, oh, yeah, Iraq. If a party refuses to stand for its ideals just because they might lose, if it only "stands for" something that has a focus grouped and opinion polled chance of winning (like tired and hackneyed gimmicks like "6 for '06" that remind people of bad sales--"Two for Tuesday!!", "Five for Five Dollars!!!"), then it's clear they talk but don't walk.

Given the choice between Repub talker/walkers off cliffs and Dem talker/no walkers who go nowhere in troubled times, voters might be a tad burned out and cynical and not all that thrilled or motivated. (Sound familiar?) Leadership and proving you believe in something even if it might lose ("Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," anyone?) might change that. "6 in '06," on the other hand? Uh . . . .

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Betty La Fea (Ugly Betty) Mas Bella Update XII

My wife has had it. Not with me, yet, but with Omar Carvajal. We've gotten to the place in the "Betty La Fea" remake, "La Fea Mas Bella," at which Omar's constant prodding of Fernando to seduce Lety has pushed my wife over the edge. She had been cutting him slack because the actor had played a really good guy on "Piel de Otono (tilde challenged)," but that's done. He's become a hot rock.

Of all the characters on the show, Oma (Mario Calderon in "Betty") really is the worst, and he doesn't get better (sorry, if you think this is a spoiler). In the "Betty" sequel "Ecomoda" (an unfortunate effort that should have been kept bottled somewhere, like the last seasons of "Friends" and "That 70s Show"), one of Betty's conditions on Armando (Lety and Fernando) was to stay completely away from Mario for what he had done to her/them. Mario, of course, insisted on being a bad penny, which caused problems that I didn't watch because (see above). Omar is just that kind of GUY. You knew it, didn't you?, when you actually felt sorrier for Alicia than for Omar when she was trying to trick him into marriage by faking pregnancy. (Don't worry--as far as I know, they do not produce offspring. "The Omen" has already been done.)

Omar stands out because all the other characters, good and bad, do produce sympathy. For instance, Marcia helps Lola and Paula Maria recognize their men problems as she desperately tries to hang onto a man she knows doesn't lover her. And they all display human frailty and failure--Marta and her diet, Tomas' unrequited (thank God) love (and Simon's, although you're beginning to see the turn there), Luigi's coming comeuppance. Lety, the good and noble heroine, is participating in cheating, about to become faux-adultery if Fernando can drink enough. In other words, they're human, some better, some worse.

And then there's Omar. He's not redeemable. He stays the serpent in the apple tree and gets the same fate, unless the writers change course from the original. As I've said before, this section of the show, with him as the catalyst, is the darkest and hardest part of the show, ending in real pain for both the leads. I thought my wife had understood that, but Agustin Arana, playing Omar, had been such a good guy before.

I hate to think he was just acting.

(Help us get the Betty La Fea Mas Bella thread going!!!! Click in on the link at the top left!!!!!)

Well, he's honest...

Ahh, yes...the father figure of the First Family of my state of residence...promising to do nothing about the destruction of the planet...

Today in Energy and Environment Daily (sub. req’d), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) said that if he remains in power after the November elections, there will be no action on global warming for the entire 110th Congress:

Continued Republican House and Senate majorities would likely mean more of the same on climate. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said he would oppose global warming mandates if Republicans control the 110th Congress. “I think the information is not adequate yet for us to do anything meaningful,” he said.

Proving once again that if you refuse to believe something, you will never find "adequate" evidence to support it. Amazing how that works.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Welcome Mannion-ites...

...thanks for the "Week's Guest Stars" link. For actual, worthwhile content, skip down to Sunday's posts. My sports- and music-nerddom kinda take over the front page from time to time. Just ignore me and I'll go away.

Tuesday Pirates Rant™ – The Long-Promised Rant™ to End All Rants™

One thing is preventing me from actually enjoying this. As you’ll see below, Pirates General Manager Dave Littlefield lived up (or down) to every single one of my Trade Deadline expectations. Every single one. It was a sight to behold. And if I knew that this was the final nail in his regime’s coffin, I would be taking the time to soak in the fact that my team has the worst, most openly-mocked general manager in baseball...and perhaps in any sport. But there’s been no hint that he’s anywhere close to being fired. In fact, as I’ve said roughly 463 times in the Rant ™, he got a contract extension at the beginning of the season. Plus, it would actually cost money to fire him, and tight-assed Pirates owners have proven consistently that they don’t necessarily feel the need to spend extra money for the good of the franchise.

So. Yesterday, as I mentioned above, was the Major League Trading Deadline. For some reason it was at 4pm EST. I dunno...midnight screams “deadline” to me. 4pm just screams “mid-afternoon”. Anyway, unlike last year the Pirates actually made multiple deals at the trading deadline. And Pirates fans were left feeling violated unlike they had been violated since the ’03 Trade-Aramis-Ramirez-to-a-division-rival-for-less-than-nothing-in-return debacle. Good times.

But first...I’m going back to the old Good-Bad-Blog format because I want to see if I can actually say something good right now. Wish me luck.

Good

* Since last week’s Rant ™, the Pirates have actually gone 5-0, first winning a road series for the first time since about 1993, then sweeping the Giants at home and ruining what was likely Barry Bonds’ last trip to Pittsburgh.

* Over the weekend, the Pirates drew over 100,000 fans for the 3-game Giants series, including sellouts on Friday and Saturday, proving that either Pirates fans are extremely loyal, or Pirates fans are gigantic idiots. Probably both. But it was nice to see. And though I obviously wasn’t there, reports said that the fans were actually quite exciteable and into the game. I thought about making an “the abused wife still loves her husband” reference here, but I’ll resist.

* Everybody in the rotation had a good start this week, which hasn’t exactly happened often. But with such a young staff (4/5 of the current rotation is under 25), ups and downs were to be expected. Just have to make sure to be happy with the ups.

* Despite every bitter, angry word I’m about to say about the trades that were made, the one positive is, the Pirates cut payroll by one-third. That’s not bad. Of course, considering the lack of talent on the team, the payroll shouldn’t have been as high as it was in the first place, but I’m coming up with happy bullets, so I’ll let that slide.

* The much-maligned (and deservedly so) Jose Hernandez, the 37-year old worthless veteran who has stolen 100 plate appearances from younger, more deserving players (and who new manager Jim “Tracyball” Tracy just insisted on signing when he came to Pittsburgh), came through with a game-winning RBI single Sunday afternoon to complete the sweep of the Giants. Hooray!

There. Five happy bullets. Go me.

Bad

So now that that’s out of the way, here are the four trades the Pirates made yesterday, complete with a letter grade and a “maybe/no” in parentheses. What’s the “maybe/no”? It’s the answer to “Will the player the Pirates traded for have any impact on making them better in the next few seasons?”

1: Sean Casey to the Tigers for Brian Rogers, a Double-A reliever with an 85-mph fastball (C/maybe).
2: Roberto Hernandez and Oliver Perez to the Mets for 1B/OF Xavier Nady (D/no).
3: Kip Wells to the Rangers for 153-pound Double-A reliever Jesse Chavez (C-/maybe).
4: Craig Wilson to the Yankees for pitcher Shawn Chacon (F-/NO!!).

Thanks to the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, I actually viewed Trades #1 and #3 positively. Since when are C and C- trades acceptable (especially since minor league relievers are the one thing the Pirates have in bulk)? Look at the other two trades and ask me that again.

As Dave Littlefield himself said in a fake interview yesterday, “jumping Jack Wilson on a pogo stick, what does a guy have to do to get fired up in here?”

The Mets were desperate for a right-handed set-up man because theirs (Duaner Sanchez, who Littlefield deemed unworthy to be a Pirate a couple of years ago) was injured in a car accident (separated shoulder) and is out for the season. In other words, Littlefield had leverage in Roberto Hernandez. He turned that leverage into Xavier Nady, described as “Craig Wilson without the walks”. But that wasn’t all. He couldn’t even get Nady unless he threw in Oliver Perez, the Pirates’ best pitcher two years ago. Perez has sucked for the last two years, but he has potential. In fact, this past offseason, Littlefield could have traded Perez for Hank Blalock, the Rangers’ two-time All-Star third-baseman, but he passed. Yup. Passed. On Hank Blalock.

But more importantly, Littlefield finally got Nady, the Craig Wilson-lite who Littlefield supposedly wanted instead of Jason Bay three years ago when he was trading Brian Giles to the Padres. Think about that for a second.

And while we’re on the topic, remember last week when I said that Littlefield passed on trading Kip Wells to the Phillies last June? Who would he have gotten in return for that trade? Some kid named Ryan Howard? I wonder what happened to him. But hey, they got a 6’2, 153-pound reliever for Wells...that’s almost as good, right?

Let’s move on to Trade #4. Actually, let’s not. I won’t actually dignify that trade with a response. Instead, let’s see what others have to think about Littlefield’s grand moves.

Here’s Ken Rosenthal’s “Winners and Losers” column from this morning. I’ll give you one guess whether the Pirates were Winners or Losers.

So much for the talk that Pirates GM Dave Littlefield was too unrealistic in his asking prices to complete a deal. Littlefield made four trades on Monday. Two of them, unfortunately, were horrible.

None of Littlefield's veterans was anything more than a complementary part, but there's simply no way to defend trading outfielder Craig Wilson to the Yankees for right-hander Shawn Chacon.Littlefield almost certainly could have gotten more for Wilson, a potential free agent, last off-season. Obtaining a mid-level prospect from another club would have made more sense.

Outfielder Xavier Nady, acquired from the Mets for pitchers Roberto Hernandez and Oliver Perez, is Wilson with less service time. As one rival executive notes, the Pirates could have obtained three or four prospects for those pitchers.

But really, who needs prospects when you can obtain another already-over-the-hill-at-28 starting pitcher to replace Kip Wells?

And here are two quick blurbs from Keith Law at ESPN. I’d give you more than blurbs, but about 90% of ESPN’s content is “Insider only” now, and screw that.

About Wilson-for-Chacon: “The Pirates-Yankees trade was probably the most puzzling deal of the day -- since no one can understand what the Bucs gained from it.”

About Nady: “The two problems with Nady are his inability to get on base -- he has just 15 unintentional walks this year in nearly 300 plate appearances -- and his age.”

But other than that, he’s top-notch. God, this is painful.

And what about my favorite stat nerds at Beyond the Box Score?

The Abreu deal was topped only by the heist for Craig Wilson, as Dave Littlefield severely undervalued his low-cost slugger (just $3.5 million for the season and he's hitting .267/.339/.478). Shawn Chacon, whose utility had formally worn off with the acquisition of Lidle, was sent to Pittsburgh for Wilson, who will fit in as a great bat off the bench and a DH/1B/OF option.

Okay, to summarize…

What the Pirates gave up:
- Two starters (Kip Wells, whose lights-out Saturday performance was thought to up his trade value considerably, and Oliver Perez, who struck out over 200 batters in 2004 and was this year’s Opening Day starter).
- Two first-basemen (Sean Casey and the much metaphorically-defecated-on Craig Wilson).
- Their right-handed setup man (163-year old Roberto Hernandez).

What the Pirates got in return:
- One starter (Shawn Chacon), with a lower ceiling than Wells or Perez.
- One first-baseman (Xavier Nady), with a lower ceiling than Casey or Wilson.
- Two AA relievers who were high on nobody’s prospects lists.
- That’s it.

Did I expect the Pirates to obtain the next Roberto Clemente during this trading season? No, of course not. The quintet of Wells, Perez, Wilson, Casey, and Hernandez aren’t exactly going to set the world on fire and carry their new team to a World Series title. But to the right teams, they could be pretty valuable pieces. There were decent offers (for actual living, breathing prospects) on the table. I’m sure of it.

The whole point of being a “seller” at the trading deadline (which is what the Pirates have been for all but one of the last 14 seasons) is to get young prospects who can help you in the future for your own proven veterans who can help a playoff contender right now. Being a seller, in theory, makes your organization better (and younger) down the road. Well, Nady is almost the same age as Craig Wilson and is not as good offensively (or, for that matter, defensively). Shawn Chacon is almost the same age as Kip Wells (and four years older than Oliver Perez) and has a worse ERA than either one of them this season, and with Perez that’s really saying something. While either or both of the AA relievers could eventually make the Pirates’ roster, neither are expected to be more than situational relievers who come in to maybe get one batter out. And that’s all they got for 5 everyday players. The Pirate organization as a whole is officially in worse shape than it was 48 hours ago. That’s really, really tough to do. The Devil Rays got better. The Royals got much better. The Pirates got worse.

And Dave Littlefield still has a job. He will tomorrow, too. And that’s what keeps me from basking in the incompetence.

Did I mention that he failed to trade soon-to-be free agents Jeromy Burnitz and Joe Randa? Hopefully he can still dump their ridiculously big salaries before the August 31 deadline for clearing waivers (if you don’t know what that is, don’t ask), but the odds are slim.

The Pirates’ current record of 40-66 (best 40-66 team in the league!!) puts them on pace for 61 wins...which is 1 less than the 62 they had when Dave Littlefield took over five long years ago. In a perfect world, Dave Littlefield would be fired before the end of the season. Hell, in a mediocre world, he would. But at this point, even if he did get fired, looking at the roster on hand...looking at the lack of proven talent at the major league level...looking at the complete lack of major league talent (other than relief pitchers) in AA and AAA...the incoming GM would have almost no choice but to do something ballsy like trade Jason Bay or something to develop any kind of depth at all in the minor league (or major league, for that matter) system. When you’re a small market team, it’s all about depth. The Pirates have none.

Oh, and one more thing. When Wilson was traded, the Pirates recalled outfielder Chris Duffy from AAA. Duffy, you may remember, hit .341 last year in his rookie season before Jim Tracy got a hold of him and adjusted his batting style. Duffy, you may also remember, was hitting .194 this season before being sent down to the minors in mid-May and disappearing for a few weeks while evaluating whether he actually wanted to continue playing baseball. Well, I guess he decided he did want to keep playing, went down to AAA Indianapolis, and tore the cover off the ball (.340 average, .505 slugging %), and when Craig Wilson was mercifully traded, he was recalled to Pittsburgh. Redemption story of the year! Right?

Here’s what he told Baseball Prospectus yesterday about his return to Pittsburgh:

How bad is it in Pittsburgh? Chris Duffy, who took a month off after getting sent down, was angry to be called up! He was expecting to be traded. "I don't like it there," he told Pirates officials. "I did all this hoping to get traded."

That’s right. Retiring at 26 actually sounded more appealing than having to play for Pittsburgh again. He’s thinking about not reporting to Pittsburgh. Awesome. And four months ago, he was the Pirates’ center-fielder of the future.

Blog

Immediate post-deadline reaction from Pat at Where Is Van Slyke?:

I'm going to go think about something else for a while, possibly puke, and maybe make a Dave Littlefield voodoo doll. I will be back later with a final analysis on what's happened today. Thanks to everyone in the comments for all the help in keeping up to date on what was going on today, the flurry of Littlefield bed-shitting between 3 and 4 was certainly tough for one person to keep track of.

Romo Phone Home:

This reminds me of the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired Archibald Cox, Elliott Richardson, and William Ruckelshaus. You watch something like this the way you watch an automobile accident--astonished that what is actually happening is worse than anything you could have imagined in your darkest, most paranoid fantasies. As it happens, you think, "It really is as bad as I feared it was."

Craig Wilson for Shawn Chacon. Just stop and ponder that for a moment.

The only hope: If you really believe that regime change is the only possible hope for the Pirates fan--and I do really believe that--then what happened today can only hasten regime change. This makes the team worse in the short term and worse in the long term.

I am going to start eating sensibly and exercising. I want to be alive in 2008 so I can root for the Pirates when they have a new general manager.

Honest Wagner:

After further reflection, the sheriff's sale strikes me as a good metaphor for today's trade deadline activity. Sorely deliquent in the win columns, the tawdry Pirate household endures foreclosure. The rest of the league showed up, sniffed and poked, shook their head. They took much of the furniture. There goes that pool table, there goes that hot tub. There goes the crystal, the everyday china, that sports car which looks good but cannot get you to work and back reliably. And so and so forth. Some of the items got more than I might expect. Others got about what I expected, but nothing got more than twenty cents on the original dollar. It was sad.

Mondesi’s House:

Have you ever gone to a big Steeler game and saw hopeful fans poking around the Heinz Field parking lot looking for tickets after kickoff? They're looking for a bargain. The scalper usually is desperate and doesn't want to eat the tickets, so he starts slashing prices to try and salvage some cash. At this point, it's a buyer's market; they have all the leverage over the seller.

Are you familiar with Dave Littlefield? He's the General Manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

And finally, Charlie at Bucs Dugout summarizes so I don’t have to.

First: The Pirates got ripped off. They got two mediocre minor league relievers for Sean Casey and Kip Wells. Minor league relievers are a dime a dozen, and even before today, the Pirates had several (Josh Sharpless, Jonah Bayliss, Scott Strickland and so on) ready to step in at the major league level. They're easy to acquire. So unless you can grab a potentially great one, they're no big shakes. Casey was desired by several teams. Wells has had some success in the big leagues and has been good in his last several starts - if the Pirates hadn't shortened his minor-league rehab stay, he might have been a very valuable trading chit, and he might have landed the Pirates a solid prospect. Jesse Chavez, who the Pirates got for Wells, throws hard and has an okay statistical record, but so what? Guys like him are a dime a dozen, and even if everything breaks well for him, he'll only improve the Pirates by a few runs a year over a freely-available Strickland type of pitcher.

Those were the good trades. Xavier Nady, who the Bucs got for Oliver Perez and Roberto Hernandez, is not a great player in the best of circumstances, and he's damaged goods - he has a "cracked bone in his right wrist." Like most hitters good enough to play the corners in the big leagues, Nady might have a 25-homer season in him. But so might lots of guys who can't play defense. Heck, Jody Gerut hit 22 homers in 127 games one year. Besides - Perez may have frustrated us all, and his velocity probably isn't going to come back, but he's 24. Someone pointed out earlier today that at age 22, Perez was having a better season than Scott Kazmir is now having at age 22.

Shawn Chacon for Craig Wilson is just so preposterous and awful that it's not worth even bothering to analyze. So instead I'll say this: I think we should nickname Chacon "Busted Paperclip." Busted Paperclip Chacon. Not only does it remind us that Chacon was traded for Craig Wilson, but it also abbreviates to "B.P."

Second: the Pirates' trades need to be put in context. I've seen a few posters on message boards write approvingly of the fact that these trades save the Pirates money. To which I respond: so? Who gets that money? Where is it going?

Aside from money, the Pirates' owners have been without a plan to win for so long, it can be easy to forget they're supposed to have one. When are the Pirates going to contend? With what core of players do they plan to do that? The entire organization, from top to bottom, is so hopelessly screwed that I just can't imagine how that will ever happen. Today's trades didn't improve that situation. The relievers they received are fungible; Nady is an injured mediocrity in the baseball equivalent of middle age; and B.P. Chacon is good for, well, B.P. Not one of these players is a potential core member of a playoff team.

Good times. We’ll see if I’m up for a Rant™ next week or whether I take a couple weeks off from the horror.

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