The Visual State of the Blog on the Fifth of January Twenty Ten

This representation of the current content on TrueBlueLiberal.org was created at http://www.wordle.net/. Images of Wordles are licensed by a Creative Commons license.

Try it for your own site. It's fun, and I've discovered that I need to use a slightly less pedestrian vocabulary.

In Case You Had Any Doubts About the Republican Game Plan for Twenty Ten....

Here are the quotes of the day to remind you of the Republican game plan for 2010. Don't expect any change from 2009's stage-setting remark from the Republican Party's chief over-the-air gasbag, which appeared just before President Obama's inauguration:

I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: "Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails." Somebody's gotta say it.

--Rush Limbaugh, 16 January 2009

There's a preview of the coming continuing obstructionism in an article from this morning's Washington Post about the current state of California's finances. There's no reason to think that Republicans in Congress and the media will do anything more than follow Nancy Reagan's old drug advice to "Just Say No," hoping that any resulting government gridlock will be blamed on the Democrats in November:

[...] The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.
That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

--Ezra Klein, Washington Post, 3 January 2010

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Knowing that the writers of the right-wing blogosphere and twitterverse have already set their CAPS LOCK keys and turned off their spelling and grammar checkers in order to jump into the fray with attacks and made-up "facts" in twenty ten, I thought that it was time to start writing more regularly here at http://TrueBlueLiberal.org and I even opened up a new presence on Twitter at @TrueBlueLiberal , largely for the same reason that I started this blog in 2004: to help protect the label "Liberal" from those who have no understanding of its meaning, but are happy to hurl it as an insult.
Happy 2010.
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TBL Helps You with Your New Year's Resolution (if your resolution is to become a vegetarian)

To reinforce your resolve to stick to a diet in twenty ten that's better for you and animals and the planet, you don't even have to read all of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Simply read this short article on AlterNet today: "Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef."
Actually, maybe you don't even have to read the whole article, just read the title of the article again.

You're Welcome.

Happy New Year [1986] "IT'S GOT FDR! IT'S GOT FDR! IT'S GOT FDR!"

Somewhere in the basement of a house in which I once lived there may still be an old VHS tape with the whole second set from this concert sitting on a shelf (of course, I no longer have a VHS player).

If I remember correctly, we had just bought our very first VCR and this concert was broadcast on a New York UHF station (because I don't remember having cable at the time). We got home from a New Year's Eve party at 2am and this concert was being broadcast live from the Oakland Coliseum, long after all the other prepackaged time-shifted New Year's Eve shows had been off the air.
This video contains "In the Midnight Hour," which was the first song of the second set, preceded by the arrival of the giant New Year's cake and balloon drop at midnight (3am EST) with the classic commentary from Ken Kesey and Fr. Guido Sarducci (a.k.a. Don Novello). Brilliant! What was Ken on?

For political bloggers who have considered e-suicide when the apathy is enough.

You have to admit that it's sort of cool (and a little clichéd) to see that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is crashing from overuse today, in this festive week between Xmas and New Year's Day.
You might have to wait until after the holidays to off your Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn selves.

". . . commanding his very own tank . . ."

Here are the Jefferson Airplane performing "Lather" on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS in 1968.

I guess I can blame network television in the nineteen sixties for turning me into the liberal that I am today.

Happy New Year. Feed Your Head.

Comedy Writers Take Note.

If you're looking to imitate a freelance conservative commentator on your own comedy website, you can't do better than the comedy writers behind the site that I just stumbled upon this afternoon: http://www.us4freespeech.com/. Here are a couple of randomly-selected run-on sentences from the center of their long Christmas Eve entry.

"[...] REMEMBER: MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING = CO2 REGULATION = CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION = OBAMA, AL GORE, CHAVEZ, MUGABI, BARBRA BOXER, THE EPA AND ANY OTHER LIAR, BECOMING THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE WORLD! GLOBAL WARMING PREVENTION, CARBON DIOXIDE REDUCTION, CO2 EMISSION CONTROL REGULATION ALL HARMLESS TITLES REQUIRING THE EPA, FORCED BY THE UNDOCUMENTED CONSTITUTIONAL THREAT TO AMERICA OBAMA, TO KILL AMERICAN TAX PAYERS BY MEANS OF ANNUALLY GENERATING FALSE REPORTS OF ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 LEVELS REQUIRING A REDUCTION PERIOD EVENTUALLY BECOMMING A LAW. EXCITING! DURING THESE REDUCTION OR CLEAN PERIODS, AMERICANS WILL BEGIN TO DISAPPEAR WHILE THE FAKE NEWS STATE CONTROLLED MEDIA REPORTS IRONICALY HOW KIDNAPPING IS ON THE RISE, WHEN ACTUALLY IT WILL BE OBAMAS FUTURISTIC RED/GREEN "NEW NATIONAL ARMY" COMMITTING MURDER. THE DEMOCRATS WILL NOT ALLOW ANY INVESTIGATION OF THE FALSE ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 DATA FOR FEAR OF THE TRUTH BEING TOLD ONCE AGAIN LEADING TO THE DEMOCRATS BEING EXPOSED AS THE RACIST ROBERT BYRD KKK PARTY SEEKING TO DOMINATE THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE. EXTRAVOGANT WORDS TWISTED AROUND MEANINGLESS LANDSCAPES OF HARMONY AL GORES POEM REFERS TO PREACHERS BEING MURDERED AND HORSEMAN RIDING.[...]"

Don't hurt your brain trying to make logical sense of it. Simply admire the flow, the unrelenting unreadable BOLD ARIAL CAPS, the exclamation points, the creative spelling. Priceless. It's right up there with the comedy writers behind @SarahPalinUSA who celebrated Christmas Eve with the following joke posting. Note how brevity and random capitalization and punctuation can be used just as efficiently as screaming run-on caps when imitating the comic reactionary voice. A freedom from standard orthographical rules is mandatory though.


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(And for those of you who may be reading this on a device that doesn't show images, the text of "Sarah Palin's" Tweet reads: "c tomrrw's Healthcare Takeover vote=the sleeping giant will awaken&action will b takn by"average"Americans as lite shines on big govt growth")

TV Free for > Six Months

The plug was pulled on my fringe-area television on June 12, 2009, so I've been living without broadcast or cable television for a little over six months now and I see these as the major effects:

1) I find myself less angry, especially on Sunday mornings with no talking heads spouting the right wing's talking point of the week and their "liberal" opponents responding weakly to that orchestrated message.
2) I find myself much less alarmed than my co-workers by the weather (ohmigod, didja hear about the nor'easter on its way?!?) or the latest health scare (ohmigod, SWINE FLU!!) or crime scare or terror alert or whatever the fuck it is that the local newscasters are using as their tease to keep us tuned in and concerned that day so that we can hear the hypochondria-inducing pharmaceutical advertisements between overhyped scare stories.
3) I have no desire to buy anything. OK, if the average boobs who are glued to their tubes did stop watching at any point, the useless-crap bubble that is our economy would definitely collapse. But there's no reason that every single one of us needs to participate in that game.

Does anyone have a good reason why I should pay to watch real-time television? Have I missed anything vital in the past 6 months? (I do watch DVDs of my choosing [from the free public library, not a store or paid online rental service], but don't tell me that I should watch network television online. I don't have a broadband connection either.)

It's officially the naughties.

When I first asked the question back in July 2005 about the lack of an accepted name for this decade following on the heels of the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, I never thought that the lack of an official moniker for the naughties would still be continuing with less than a week remaining until ones replace zeroes in the third digit on our calendar headings.

The Washington Post confirms the continuing uncertainty about the name in an article today by Michael S. Rosenwald today titled "21st century's first decade is slipping away without leaving its name":

"Dictionary editors, linguists and even radio DJs say we have entered a semantic black hole in which the English language failed to produce a term for the outgoing decade in the same way it has failed to find a catchy moniker for your former in-laws. (Out-laws never stuck.) The language is stumped. The Zeroes? The Ohs? The Oh-Ohs? Help!"

So, since the mainstream media cannot decide on the name that we should be using, I'm officially making "the naughties" the name for the waning decade in the True Blue Liberal dot Org stylesheet. It's not up to "the English language...to produce a term for the outgoing decade." It's up to us, the speakers and writers of our language.

Now, what's the name for the next decade? Should we start calling it "the teens" before 2013?

Happy Liberal Xmas

I and all my liberal friends would like to thank our Christian neighbors for giving us a day off today.
I'm spending my lazy secular day away from work in my totally undecorated liberal hideout (unless you consider the obligatory photos of Mao and Che mere "decoration") listening to NPR, typing leftist propaganda on this computer, and taking breaks to play "Friend of the Devil" on my guitar.
Later, after downing some festive pre-Perestroika Soviet vodka, I hope to be able to finish my application form to sit on the local Obama Death Panel early in the New Year.
Happy Holidays (as we who have declared War on Christmas like to say)!

(OH NO -- WNYC just started playing Christmas songs, so now it's time to put some Ornette Coleman on the turntable.)