From "Daily Negations"

Insecurity, Social January 31

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He that dies pays all debts.

-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

On January 31, 1940, law clerk Ida M. Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, received the first monthly Social Security check (check number 00-000-0001) in accordance with the Social Security Act of 1935. Although Ms. Fuller only paid a total of $22 in Social Security taxes throughout her years of work, she lived to be 100--and therefore collected some $20,000 in benefits.

Negation:

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Crank up the respirator. Somebody owes me money.

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This was the negation for the day as printed in Daily Negations: A Malcontent's Book of Meditations for Every Interminable Day of the Year, by Barbara Lagowski and Rick Mumma (Perigee Books, 1996).

We venture to guess that Ida Fuller wouldn't have done quite as well (or lived half as long) with Dubya's privatized Social Security.

- True Blue Liberal

"Proverbs for Paranoids, 3"

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Thank you [Mr. President]. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.

--"Reporter" Jeff Gannon asks George Bush a tough question at a news conference on 26 Jan 2005 [click for more details at Media Matters for America]

How much, to continue the entry from a couple of days ago, is HE being paid to help keep us all in the dark?

-- True Blue Liberal

A Gate out of BushWorld

Please click here and enlarge some of the drawings: The Gates.


Imagine yourself in the park (The Park) three weeks from today with Christo's river flowing above your head.


Politics? What politics? I have to remember sometimes that there is a world out there that is not all war and commerce.

- - True Blue Liberal

One more media whore

Proving once again that Republicans have to pay for it: Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract (The Washington Post / 26 Jan 2005)

In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families. ...

You (or at least I) always wonder how or why any columnists can be stupid enough to fall for these idiotic Bush Regime schemes ($300 million to encourage marriage??). But maybe none of them do ... as the Post article continues ...

...But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal...

Oh.

If someone in the Bush Regime were to give me $21,500 I might (MIGHT) stop referring to them as murderers and torturers.

Hint hint.

I might even start calling it "The Bush Administration" rather than a Regime.

But, as everyone on the Right will tell you, all liberal bloggers and websites are already being financially supported by George Soros and Fidel Castro (and very handsomely, if you don't mind my bragging), so never mind.
--True Blue Liberal

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)

By the light of Gravity's Rainbow

A month ago I couldn't help quoting a passage from Moby Dick with eerie relevance to today. This morning I read this from another big encyclopedic American novel.

... Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. ... [note the interesting capitalization]

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.122 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Thomas Pynchon didn't know about Dick Cheney & Halliburton in 1973, but he certainly catches the current tone of war as business, and war as business that can only be understood by the ex-CEOs of Halliburton & sons of privilege. The rest of us are mere pawns in their games. But I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that the preceding passage represents the dominant tone of the novel. It's as lyrical as any novel written in some passages, dense in others, and stylistically (though never intellectually or morally) silly in places like this when it lapses into song or verse:

There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to---
You just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin'
But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.355 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Which is the perfect description of George the First's bloodless Gulf War I with its made-for-CNN Smart Bombs® and Patriot Missiles®.

--True Blue Liberal

The View from Left Field

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve…"

--- Rush Limbaugh's immortal resignation statement from ESPN

This will be a rare, for me, entry about sports, but it's hard not to gloat when Rush's idiocy & racism are exposed so nakedly. As someone who was born and spent his first eight years in the City of Brotherly Love, I couldn't be happier to see Donovan McNabb and the Eagles in the NFC Championship Game again this coming Sunday, where not one, but both starting quarterbacks will be African Americans who got to their lofty positions not by leading their teams to victory after victory, but because, as every dittohead knows, they were artificially lifted there by that damned liberal media. Of course I'm rooting for the Eagles, but I won't make a prediction in Sunday's game (oft-burned Philadelphia sports fans sharing certain superstitions that Red Sox & Cubs fans would certainly understand). But I will predict that either Michael Vick or Donovan McNabb will easily win the Super Bowl a week (two weeks?) later, trouncing either the Irish kid leading the Patriots or the big kid with the long German name leading the Steelers. And Rush Limbaugh will take a couple of pills late on Super Bowl Sunday and curse the fact that he won't even have Janet Jackson's halftime wardrobe malfunction to fantasize about as he slips into his chemically-induced unconsciousness, or to criticize from his pulpit on Monday's radio show (does he still have a radio show?).

Bonne nuit,
True Blue Liberal

Spread the Word that THERE IS NO CRISIS (except in Iraq)

Click Here:Social Security: There Is No Crisis

"There Is No Crisis" needs to become our simple mantra as the Bush Regime ratchets up their attack on a social program that has worked well for our grandparents and parents, and will work well for us and our children too, if we keep our message strong and simple (see the entry below about the inherent argumentative strengths of the Right). They hate Social Security, to paraphrase Paul Krugman, because it works. If one social program works so well, maybe we'll want more of them, god forbid.

Please go to thereisnocrisis.com and add this advertisement to your blog or website:

à bientôt,
True Blue Liberal

We need a dittohead to pick the best of "The 34 Scandals of George W. Bush"

You can't read the Salon article without a subscription, but Truthout has it here: t r u t h o u t - The 34 Scandals of George W. Bush.

One of the things that you have to envy about the Right is that they seem naturally very good about getting in line and marching in [goose]step, but we liberals tend to avoid unpleasantries like marching and cheerleading and team sports and following blowhard radio hosts. So some of us are most upset about illegal wars and some of us are most upset about the suspension of constitutional rights and some of us about the rape of the environment and some of us about the reversion of the cultural clock to 1953 and some of us can't speak because of the tortures being committed in our name or are livid about the gutting of social programs to give tax breaks to billionaires. But the Right, under the leadership of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Rupert Murdoch, can get together and climb aboard one non-issue like the "Oil for Food Scandal" and ride that Trojan Horse for all its worth in their latest attack on the United Nations.

We're not going to take down the Bush regime on war crimes charges. If it's done before the natural end of this second term that begins today, it will be done on one of these little scandals, just like Nixon was taken down for the coverup of a botched burglary rather than the bombing of Cambodia, just like Al Capone was taken down for paperwork irregularities rather than his murders.

But where's our oxycontin-addicted loudmouth to tell us which of these many scandals is the scandal that will bring down Dobeliou & his crew. Of course, tactically, nothing can be done unless Bush Junior's Spiro Agnew is removed first. As long as Cheney retains his place in the line of succession, Bush is safe from any serious attack (notice how the Republicans use unattractive Vices as presidential protection?). But this shouldn't be a problem, look at the list again and see how many of the scandals are more Dick's than George's.

And remember, it's Inauguration Day. Do not turn on a television today. You might turn to stone.
-- true blue liberal

Nixon's Second Inauguration Day in 1973 -- Where were you?

Here's a relic of where I was proud to be on January 20,1973: eBay item 3952876670 (Ends Jan-22-05 11:56:04 PST) - SDS Inauguration Day Sticker 1973 Indict Gov't Genocide. Anyone else remember being around the Washington Monument on that day when the flags were turned upside down, and some were replaced with Viet Cong banners?

This year maybe I'll just sit alone in a dark room.

-- true blue liberal