Question

Why do I have to get my political/disaster analysis from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone?

(Thanks to Driftglass and probably several other noteworthy folks, because I'm always the last to know.)

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough.

Leaving aside an inexcusable metaphor or so, this article Explains It All For You.

Play Architecture!

The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger on the new stadia in New York (but the Giants and Jets still have to play in New Jersey.  Where's the microscopic violin?) which are totally coincidentally designed by the same outfit and opening in the same year.

ETA:  Metsgrrl had noted this article Monday (3/16) and has since Been Inside.  With Pictures (Club Mets tour).

Classical Musicians with Laptops

Emanuel Ax has a blog, and he'd like you to applaud when you please.

Hat tip & thanks to Iron Tongue at Midnight.

Spring is Here

Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

Surreal World

CIA recruitment radio spots.

Really.

Highway's susurrus 

Indistinguishable from 

Soft showers of spring.

Resource for African News

Noli Irritare Leones has aggregated some websites close to the source reporting on news from Africa.

Because the BBC World Service might be a tiny bit biased.

A Story. Tell Me Another Story

Stories are important. Stories, in fact, are life. They are what is left of our unique experience in this world. They speak--no. They scream. And when an author sits down and constructs a completely imaginary world in their heads, if people like me, people like us, do not exist in it, or exist only to be ridden like animals or raped or murdered or humilated or destroyed so that an audience can acheive catharsis via symbolic annihilation of our lives, bodies, and souls, well, certainly, we can sit down and look at the floor and say: yes, you're right, that is what we deserve.

Or we can stand up. We can scream back. We can band together. We can demand our right to exist, to take part in humanity, to learn, to grow, to evolve, to self-examine.

Stories are survival.

Serious Business

The Republic of T. sounds off against domestic violence.

Money quote:

Like any parent, I hope it doesn’t, but the day will almost certainly come in your life when someone else thinks you deserve all of the above and more. And chooses to dish it out to you. Perhaps your children will even watch it happen, and suffer for it later.

If that day comes, I hope you are met with a lot more compassion than you are choosing to dish out to Robyn Fenty. She deserves a lot more than that.

Yahrzeit.

Dear Dave:

Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" is already a cover.

(Dave is doing "Covers From Hell" and has already flayed the covers of Pat Boone.  Was that just Dolly Parton [it was Faith Hill]?  And, oh dear, is that Shatner?  And Cartman, and Sinatra mangling "Mrs. Robinson," and the horrible Pearl Jam version of "Last Kiss."  Britney Spears applying sexy voice to "Satisfaction" is Wrong.  "Light My Fire" is beyond covering [Mae West, not the Feliciano version].  Tiffany sounding like Pat Benatar and adding nothing to "I Think We're Alone Now."  Pat Boone?  "Exit Lights Enter Sandman" in full big band treatment?  Mercy!)

I need to wash out my ears with soap.

(ETA:  That's what I get for not knowing my Metallica.)

Before Bernie Madoff,

...there was Ivar Kreuger.  (I had heard of him because every so often the play his life inspired, Ayn Rand's Night of January 16th, gets produced somewhere.)

Best Line Today

Cookie Jill:

at least it was better than last time i dealt with edd....at that time they told me i was an attractive girl...i could figure out a way to get money. nothing like a government agency to tell you to go prostitute yourself. (i didn't by the way...i didn't want to become a republican.)

In Memoriam

Randy Bathurst.

Single Payer

(Damn.  I keep missing Frankie and the Knockouts.)

Article from Harper's on single payer health care.  A brief quote:

This preference for markets is common, but it is not wise. The health-care system is not at all like other markets, because health, for obvious reasons, is not at all like other goods. (The demand for not dying, to give just one example, is pretty much unlimited.)

This is a Watchbird Watching You

So I've seen Watchmen.  (Matinee prices are my friend.)  And I'll have to see it again, probably on DVD where I can mute the sound and fast-forward.  Somebody commented (and I wish I could remember where) "Would you like to see graphic representations of murder, rape, or [something]?" and I can now say, "Have you seen Watchmen?"

I read that at least ten-fifteen years ago.  It says something (probably embarrassing) that the only thing I could remember was the scene with Rorschach in jail.

Yes, every so often there was a scene that looked like a frame from the graphic novel.  Yes, I was very impressed by the sealed-off subway tunnel.  Yes, I thought the [spoiler] folder was unnecessary; I also think that that character (almost spoiled ya!  Ha!) was very much coded as a '50s villain.  There is also a fight scene during which the heroine's high-heeled boots are actually flats.  (You try fighting in high-heeled boots.  Honey.)

I don't get to too many movies lately.  (Money and dearth of intelligent product.)

Coincidence

David Denby doesn't like snark, either.  (Link goes to review of book.)

Amour de Dieu

God's love is reflected back from us, and onto others.  Only less like a polished mirror, more like a moon.

The Commish'

An overview of Bud Selig, Commissioner of Baseball, by way of Mike's Mets.

(It's just that there is all that unemployment, and yet foxes get jobs guarding henhouses all the time...)

Live Journal seems to be down at the moment.

(ETA:  Back up.)

Monday, Monday

Other stuff percolating, but this headline caused giggles, and then the rest of the article caused more giggles.  Zuzu of Kindly Póg Mo Thóin rocks.

We Bow to The Sensei

Skippy's Quote of the Day.

Musical Interlude

Suzanne Vega on melody.

Present Location

Melina of RIPCoco posted this monograph at Brilliant at Breakfast.  It's not angel-food cake.  It's heavy, fact-laden, and long, and worth it.

One paragraph:

The deregulated government and waning culture seems to ultimately free the barely contained id usually contained by the weak vessels of theory proven wrong, to wreak havoc on those who might trust in the logical and empathetic order of things. You would thinkthat in absence of some superego, a social structure might come forward to keep this all in line so that no one gets hurt. Where is the superego or even a little regulation? When did it become OK and even just part of business to state that you screwed people over but it was lawful? If the conflict of interest is between the patient in the hospital and the shareholders....when does it stop? when you've denied care because your first responsibility is to the business dealings of the shareholders? The answer is that it doesn't stop, and it may signal the end of the cycle of pure unfettered capitalism...which might mean a sharp turn back with a new administration or possibly that a tipping point has been reached and the whole thing is gonna come crashing down.

Link to Review of The Yankee Years

Review by Roger Angell of Joe Torre/Tom Verducci's narrative of the former's years as manager of the New York Yankees, in case you need more cowbell baseball. Even if it's the Yankees.

Quote of the Day

My cousin's marriage and long term commitment to his partner show more "defense of marriage" and more demonstration of enduring and pure love than my four tawdry debacles of drunken cruelty, faithless and indulgent recklessness which all resulted in hurtful, and messy divorces.

--Minstrel Boy, Group News Blog.

An Inevitability

Liverpool Hope University has set up a Master of Arts program studying The Beatles and their effect on culture.

A lot of the primary sources have died, but many are still around, and they're going to get interviewed into comas by graduate students.  

Wonder if they need a guest lecturer on the state of rock and roll in 1961?

Aide-Memoire

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast (yes, I quote her entirely too much.  Deal) on the Bush Administration's near-usurpation:

And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.

We do, you know, easily forget. And we posterize the Big Picture; there's something to be said for low contrast shadow-detail worldview.  This went on within living memory; and anyone who can hold the plots of the six Star Wars movies in memory should be able to hold at least current history in the same place, if not on the same bunch of neurons.

ETA:  Avedon Carol, The Sideshow, adds this:

But in a free country, you don't prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you're trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don't refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn't a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don't personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.

I remember knowing people who hung out with rogues because, well, the rogues hadn't tried to rob them, up until the rogues robbed them.  (No one you'd know, thirty or so years in the past, in another country, wench moved to Coruscant.  I mean Beta Colony.  Yes, Beta Colony.)

Speaking of the Porcelain Goddess...

Helen gets metaphorical.  (Also scatological.)

Why They Lie

Amanda Marcotte points out some things that that run counter to alleged Republican values.

Truth is, if you’re a lover of liberty, the corporate grip on our lives is much more restraining and humiliating than the government grip. The number one reason people self-censor and carefully hide who they are and what they believe is not fear of government censure, but the fear that you’ll never be able to get paid employment. Obeying a speed limit is less demoralizing than peeing in a cup for a job. The grind of the cubicle life saps the spirit more than arguing with the guy from the Metro offices ever could. But conservatives happily submit to the much more oppressive corporate authority because it’s legitimate, male authority. Federal authority is seen as feminine and illegitimate, especially if Democrats are in charge.

(Yes, I know. I'm adding nothing to this as there is nothing we don't already know, except that the rank and file (the non-rich followers) are terrified of losing their "privilege," even though said "privilege" is the size of a sugar cube and as durable.)

(It has been my unresearched and undocumented observation for a long time now that people with real power tend to be quieter; people who are or think they are powerless tend on average to be noisier--it's a compensation thing.  Shrieking conservative harpies are definitely broadcasting lack of power.  Don't tell 'em I said so.)