Obama & Hamilton

First of all, Happy 59th Birthday to President Barack Obama.

What better way to celebrate than with one of the greatest cultural events in White House history from the first spring of the Obama presidency. On May 12, 2009, 'An Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word' gave us a sneak peak at a song from a proposed hip-hop album that would become the Broadway classic 'Hamilton' six years later.

Will we ever have a White House that has such cultural highlights again?

Who, for example, visited the current president for a photo op (there are no musical or poetry performances there since 2017) during his first spring in the office?

Donald Trump, Art Lover

Defender-of-Nazis Donald J. Trump took to Twitter this morning to defend Confederate statues again, typing a string of tweets with an unexpected and completely out-of-character lesson in art history and the appreciation of beauty.

August 17, 2017

June 6, 1980

The first time that Donald Trump's name was linked to beautiful statuary in the news was back on June 6, 1980 when an article about Bonwit Teller on the first page of The New York Times ran with the headline, "Developer Scraps Bonwit Sculptures." Trump's name itself didn't appear until the sixth paragraph about the landmark Fifth Avenue department store that was being razed to make room for a "$100 million 62-story bronze-colored glass tower of apartments, offices, and stores" that we now know by its shorthand name, Trump Tower. Trump had promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he would donate two 15-foot-tall Art Deco bas-relief panels by Rene Paul Chambellan if the cost of removing them was not "prohibitive." In the next paragraph, Trump's fictional "vice president of the Trump Organization John Baron" explained, in a voice that sounded very much like Donald Trump's, "the merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them." Even though the Met was anxious to add these pieces to their collection and the appraiser consulted by the Times valued them at "several hundred thousand dollars," the unnamed three independent appraisers that "John Baron" cited had valued them at "worth less than $9,000 in resale value" and not worth his estimated $32,000 cost of removal. So the Trump Organization removed the sculptures with jackhammers instead. The Met was interested in acquiring the decorative metal grillwork above the main entrance as well; Trump sold it for its scrap value.

Would Donald Trump or his spokesman "John Baron" have taken more care if the sculptures depicted Robert E. Lee or Nathan Bedford Forrest in "beautiful" equestrian poses?

Another #WarOnChristmas Post

Fitting with the current commercial season, this War on Christmas post is of a totally mercenary nature. Here are new products for proud soldiers in our great liberal War on Christmas to display on their clothes and holiday trees:

• War On Christmas Snowflake Ornament
• War On Christmas Round Ornament

• Proud Soldier in the War On Christmas 1" button
• Proud Soldier in the War On Christmas 2.25" button
• Proud Soldier in the War On Christmas 3.5" button
• 10 Pack of 1" War On Christmas buttons
• 10 Pack of 2.25" War On Christmas buttons

Eric Idle's Theme Song for Our Annual Liberal #WarOnChristmas

Will we still be allowed to sing our favorite carol (or find it on YouTube) after our Christmas-absolutist President-Elect takes power next year?

A Banner Day in the History of America's Gun Culture

A DESPERATE STREET-FIGHT.
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Marshal Virgil Earp, Morgan and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday Meet the Cowboys--Three Men Killed and Two Wounded, One Seriously--Origin of the Trouble and its Tragical Termination.
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[Tombstone Nugget, Oct. 27.]

The 26th of October will always be marked as one of the crimson days in the annals of Tombstone, a day when blood flowed as water, and human life was held as a shuttlecock, a day always to be remembered as witnessing the bloodiest and deadliest street fight that has ever occurred in this place, or probably in the Territory. ...

You can read the continuation of the detailed description of the event from 134 years ago that has come to be quaintly marketed as "The Gunfight At The OK Corral" in the October 30, 1881 issue of the Arizona Weekly Citizen (click here and start at the top of column 7). Three dead and two wounded? That might not even make the news in 2015, and if it did it would be a minor mass shooting (though the NRA would probably object to the use of "mass" as prejudical when used as a descriptive adjective for such an everyday American event).

Did Donald Trump Just Attack a Fetus?

Earlier today NPR News posted this Trump quote from last night's speech about his courtship of the Nixonesque/Spirovian Silent Majority as "The 1 Passage You Need To Read To Understand Donald Trump's Appeal":

"The 'silent majority' believe me is back, and I think we can use it somewhat differently. I don't think we have to call it a silent majority anymore, because they're not silent. People are not silent.
"They're disgusted with our incompetent politicians.

"They're disgusted with the people who are giving our country away.

"They're disgusted when they tell the border-patrol agents, who are good people and can do the job — they're disgusted when they allow the people to just walk right in front of them, and they're standing there helpless, and people just pour into the country.

"They're disgusted when a woman who's nine months pregnant walks across the border, has a baby, and you have to take care of that baby for the next 85 years.[emphasis added]

"They're disgusted by what's happening to our country. And you're going to look around. You're going to remember who the people are that are here, because we're doing something special.

"This is a movement. We're going to make our country great again — believe me. We will make our country great again."

The tone of resentment is perfect for his target audience, but he should know by now that, according to the official Republican Manual of Cultural Warfare, you can attack anybody but a fetus.

I'd actually be more impressed than disgusted by a nine-month-pregnant woman able to walk across our southern border (although am I out of line assuming he means the Mexican border and not the Canadian border?).

And I'll say "Happy New Year" to You Even If You Insist on Living in the Past

Here's the bumper sticker of the day in the ongoing "War On Christmas" seen leaving Yankees Stadium after the Pinstripe Bowl on December 28:

This cheery red and green Comic Sans "Merry Christmas, whether it offends you or not!" bumper sticker was on the back of a dirty black Ford Raptor pickup truck with Connecticut plates that looked as if it might be Darth Vader's gas guzzler of choice.

The Culture Wars of a Simpler Time (Are you a Jerry or a Hef?)

I ran this question with another version of this video in the year of the last Presidential election, but the video was taken off YouTube and the posting seems appropriate again. When one political party is looking back to their halcyon days in the 1950s (or 1850s), many of us look back to another golden age, located squarely in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Here are the Grateful Dead playing Mountains of the Moon and St. Stephen on "Playboy After Dark" in 1969:

At the two minute mark, be sure to catch Jerry Garcia explaining to a clueless Hugh Hefner and his entourage, with appropriate smiles and hand gestures, "... they more chase each other around. It's kinda, it's like, it's like the serpent that eats its own tail, y'know. And it goes round and round like that and if you, if you could stand in between them, uh, they, they make uh big figure eights on their sides, in your head." Of course Jerry's elucidating why the Dead have two drummers, but Hugh seems to be having some trouble following this crystal-clear explanation.

So what side of this culture divide do (did) you come down on? Would you be wearing a Mexican poncho or a black tuxedo in 1969? Riding in a psychedelic bus or a black Mercedes limosine? Would you rather be Hugh? Or Jerry?

The "War on Christmas" explained by a Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

Daisy, Bo, and Luke Duke's disreputable cousin David Duke explains who is really behind the Christian right's imaginary "War on Christmas".
The Jews.

Our Annual Liberal War on Christmas (LWOC) will start early this year

The Liberal War on Christmas is not (like Iraq) an offensive war of choice.



It's entirely defensive when you walk into a store on October 2 and it's already filled with Santas and nutcrackers and ornaments and candy canes and monogrammed red
stockings and aluminum Christmas trees in multiple unnatural shades. These pictures were taken by my phone at a Kohl's in New York State, but I'm sure that the same premature display of Christmas commerce is taking place all over the country, long before the traditional start date of Halloween (and I'm old enough to remember when you didn't see any Christmas crap on public display before Thanksgiving).

We're going to be sick of hearing Jingle Bells by Halloween.

The Culture Wars of a Happier Time : Are You a Jerry or a Hef?

You've got to love how befuddled the poor suits look in this priceless video of the Grateful Dead playing Mountains of the Moon and St. Stephen for Hugh Hefner and his friends during a taping of Playboy After Dark in 1969!

At the one minute mark, be sure to catch Jerry explaining to Hugh, with appropriate smiles and hand gestures, "... they more chase each other around. It's kinda, it's like, it's like the serpent that eats its own tail, y'know. And it goes round and round like that and if you, if you could stand in between them, uh, they, they make uh big figure eights on their sides, in your head." Of course Jerry Garcia's elucidating why the Dead have two drummers, but Hugh seems to be having some trouble following this crystal-clear explanation.

So what side of this culture divide do (did) you come down on?
Would you rather be Hugh? Or Jerry?

(and don't you need to watch this conversation and hear this music to cleanse your soul after watching the video in my last post??)

SpongeBob, Yellow Gay Heathen (via Mark Morford)

Click here for Mark Morford's latest: SpongeBob, Evil Gay Heathen / How sad to be a right-wing Christian in a world full of homo cartoons and scary nipples.

I really didn't want to add anything to the whole easy target of joyless fundamentalists attacking the happiest, most porous yellow fictional being on the planet, but Mark Morford, as always, does a great job of connecting the threads here to show (in his humorous & outraged way) that the connections among all these elements on the Right are far from humorous. And there was also the added appeal of his comment on the primary color tangent I went off on at one point last week. In the end of his discussion of the yellow sponge, the red and the blue make a prominent symbolic appearance, playing their customary roles as fear and hope.

"Note the connection. Note the blood-red thread of fear and dread and homophobia, the brutal irony throughout all these stories. Shrill extremist sects and small-minded leaders with too much control, saddled with self-righteous and outdated doctrines that refuse to allow the culture to progress, to laugh, to moan in joy and sticky happiness.
Note the people who look at hilarious children's cartoons and see only sinister mind control, who look at their fellow human souls and see only an army of debauched heathens, who look (reluctantly) at their own genitals and see only a gnarled clump of pain and confusion, who look up at the beautiful blue sky and see only a massive canopy of daggers."

Once again, proud to be, True BLUE Liberal (a.k.a. one of the Right's daggers)