Happy 75th to Mick Jagger

Happy 73rd Birthday to Keith Richards.

In a year during which we lost a lot of great musicians, at least we know that Keith Richards, thanks to the long-term preservative effects of tobacco and heroin, will be with us until well past his hundredth birthday.

You got my heart you got my soul
You got the silver you got the gold
You got the diamonds from the mine
Well that's all right, it'll buy some time

Happy Birthday Keef.

On the Bus

All the talk about Mitt Romney on his bus tour of the US is making me think about THE bus trip (at least for those of us who came of age in a certain era), so I sought out this video of Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show discussing the Acid Tests (and is it just me, or does Tom seem like he's doing an animated impression of Dan Ackroyd doing an especially clueless Tom Snyder?):

 
 Even with Tom Snyder's strange reference to the antichrist of rock, Ted Nugent, this helped me detox from seeing Republicans on my television and computer.

 
Escapin' through the lily fields
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

Language Matters: "Self Deportation"

Last night's GOP Debate at the University of South Florida - home of the Bulls(hit) - was refusing to live up to NBC's pre-fight teasers, but one memorable bit of language will survive the event.  I watched the whole thing, where the main early rounds revolved around Mitt and Newt sniping about each other's unfitness for the office of the Presidency. All of my nodding in agreement, "Yes, you're both right about your opponent's inability to hold any position of authority," started acting as a soporific, as it also did for the sideshow acts of Santorum and Paul who stood there trying to keep their eyes open as they waited for the stray question that might be thrown their way to uphold an appearance of evenhandedness.
The fact that the crowd was instructed not to clap or give rebel yells also contributed to the lullaby effect of last night's festivities (though they couldn't help but cheer when Mitt mentioned Fidel Castro's death, or when Newt doubled down by saying that Fidel would go to hell -- you can't stop Republicans from cheering death and holy retribution!), but I was roused from my stupor when the topic turned to immigration and Mitt Romney said, "The answer is self deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here...We’re not going to round them up.”

Though all the first-page Google results for "self deportation" are about Romney's undocumented immgrants' honor system announced last night, it seems he didn't make up this innovative concept.  The government under George W. Bush (the one man NEVER mentioned at a 2012 GOP event) proposed the same thing in 2008, as shown here in this Houston Chronicle article, "ICE offers details about self-deport program".  And what is the incentive for undocumented workers reporting themselves to ICE and sending themselves back to their home country? "Should they ever want to return to the country legally, the application process wouldn't be as lengthy because the government would know their specific departure date." Not an incentive that would lead to widespread self deportation.
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Beyond the policy arguments, there's something about the word that really caught my attention on more than a political level as soon as I heard it.  If this were an era of a thriving hallucinogenic subculture, I could see "self deporting" and "self deportation" as great evocative euphemisms for tripping. At least in that context the concept makes sense.

President Newt Gingrich will be coming after your Doublemint gum next

From my trip to Asia's friendliest police state in 2010.

When liberals point to the more humane and equitable healthcare systems in other nations we're accused of all kinds of unpatriotic sins and politely asked (or told) to leave the country if we like someplace else better than we love the U.S.of A. But Newt Gingrich has no problems telling us that we need to be more like the autocratic city-state of Singapore in his doubling down in the so-called "war" on drugs.

Q: "In 1996, you introduced a bill that would have given the death penalty to drug smugglers. Do you still stand by that?"
Newt: "I think if you are, for example, the leader of a cartel, sure. Look at the level of violence they've done to society. You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.' If you're serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we're going to have drugs in this country.
Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They've been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country."

In this same interview with Yahoo from last Saturday, he talks about mandatory drug tests before collecting unemployment insurance or food stamps, "aggressively" undermining the Cuban government (using the word aggressive 4 times), undermining Social Security with private accounts for young workers, and flip-flopping on his pro medical marijuana stance of 1981, having decided now that it is wrong to be "compassionate toward a small group at the risk of telling a much larger group that it was okay to use the drug."
In short, he's trying hard to outflank his opponents on the right (or at least prevent them from outflanking him by pandering more effectively to the nutjob base). If necessary, he'll extend the Singapore model to all illicit substances and start ranting about the dangers of gum chewing soon.

Jonas Salk, M.D., and a fiftieth anniversary well worth celebrating

Here's a golden anniversary worth celebrating. I was born in 1955, so I don't remember a fear of swimming pools and urban crowds. I don't remember polio as anything but as the disease that crippled FDR, all because of the discovery that was announced by Jonas Salk on April 12, 1955:

"He further endeared himself to the public by refusing to patent the vaccine. He had no desire to profit personally from the discovery, but merely wished to see the vaccine disseminated as widely as possible."

Exactly like all those selfless capitalist drug companies today.

-TBL