BUT THIS TIME THE ADVANTAGE IS MINE. All respect to Jack Steuf of Wonkette for introducing us to The Young Cons' honky rap "Obama, Reid, Pelosi," in which the three-headed Democratic menace is said to be "easily combatable by Ryan, West, and Christie/That's the crew who's dirty filthy" (and with a Ricochet meme-check, yet). But in the spirit of the great Sadly No battles, I produce my trump card -- a 9/11 truther rap video:



When I talk about it, you call me a conspiracy theorist/ Your body doesn't need to listen, I need your spirit to hear this/ And once you learn the truth, you'll never look back/ I just get pissed off when people don't look at the facts/ Steel buildings don't just fucking collapse…

Also, "The (craziest?) forces/ Are givin' rabies to horses," and "We gotta band together, do what we can to spread the knowledge/ Pass out documentary DVDs at every college." Celebrity citations: Alex Jones, Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Seth Green, and Erica Jong. Why, it's practically Rosicrucian.

Your move, Steuf.

MORE NOTES FROM THE URBAN HELLHOLE. Here's one of those staples of modern social discourse, the weeping over gang-infested urban hellholes, where "drug addicted young women desperately sell their bodies in the age of HIV; their unwanted, uncared for children grow up as best they can," and "children and teenagers can be fooled into thinking that the images generated by our pleasure-seeking and irresponsible commercial entertainment complex define the meaning of life."

Author Walter Russell Mead posits the "failure of the blue social model" to prevent the Warriors hellscape in which I supposedly live. (As a marginally-employed New York City resident, I assume his concern extends to me.)

Reading these things from New York is always amusing, and Mead may have sensed he would have this effect, as partway through he expands his purview to embrace slummy cities worldwide, so my own Lefferts Gardens address gets lumped in with Kibera and City of God. Looks much worse now, doesn't it?

Here's another good bit:

Restless, violent and poor urban communities have been with us for a long time. What often seems to happen is that poor people migrate to the cities in hopes of more exciting and rewarding lives...

But many of those migrants found sadder fates; cities were not very healthy places, and the combination of poor sanitation and sewer facilities, bad diet and poorly preserved foods, poverty and violence meant that many cities had to constantly draw on the countryside to keep their populations up. In the last 150 years, the flow to the cities increased with the mechanization of agriculture and improvements in transportation — and developments in public health meant that more of those migrants lived and had children, even if they failed to find the kind of upward mobility they hoped for.

What this means, not only in the United States, but in cities around the world, is that we now have something new: vast urban conglomerations whose populations include second, third and even fourth generations of people who know nothing but the city — and lack the opportunity and ability to earn their way out of the slums through normal, legal channels.

Two words that do not occur in this historical analysis: "labor unions." You will be unsurprised to learn that the author is unconcerned with any means of providing jobs and decent livings to underprivileged urbanites. In fact, it kind of sounds like he's not sure those "developments in public health" aren't a mixed blessing at best, seeing as they curse future generations to life in metropoli.

What's Mead want to give them instead of the "Great Society blue social model," then? Jesus.

If we are serious about changing lives in the inner cities, we need to think about strengthening the capacity of these churches.

He does suggest that these God squads dispense social services along with the Gospel, which is a good idea, as Republicans are working hard to make sure that the government can no longer do so.

Link found via Ole Perfesser Instapundit. I assume he was just attracted to the city-hating, though it's possible he was trying to shore up his libertarian cred.

UPDATE. Like the crackling of thorns under the pot is the laughter of our commenters. "I've been waiting thousands of years for someone to suggest religion as the answer to social problems," claims Nom de Plume. "The major portion of Mead's research was listening hard to Stevie Wonder's 'Livin' For The City,'" hypothesizes Glenn Kenny. And mds sees the solution: "You know what a godless urban wasteland like Lower Manhattan needs? A religiously-motivated community center!"

More seriously, R. Porrofatto directs us to Mead's "Black And Blue 2: Blacks Flee Blue States in Droves" (the folks in my neighborhood must be holdouts, then), where Mead does in fact refer to unions, thus: "high public union membership," "high costs of public union urban services," "the interests of teacher unions," "high wage scales for unionized public servants," etc. So he's not unaware of ways to improve poor people's wages and hopes for the future -- he just doesn't approve of them. He does recommend "more effective government... to ensure that American citizens are not undercut in the labor market by desperate illegals," and of course Jesus, who must be wondering about now what he did to deserve this kind of treatment.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF CONCERN TROLLING. So Michelle Obama was talking about this childhood obesity thing:

US First Lady Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity took a personal turn when she said she is paying more attention to a key body fat measurement for her own daughters.

Obama said she was surprised to learn that her daughters' body mass index, or BMI, numbers were "creeping upwards," she wrote on yahoo.com's website.

"I didn't really know what BMI was," she said.

"I certainly didn't know that even a small increase in BMI can have serious consequences for a child's health," she added, recommending that all parents inform themselves about the vital weight statistic.

To rebut, ladies and gentlemen, TX Trendy Chick, whose "heart breaks for these little girls":

This is how distorted self-image and eating disorders come to be, Michelle. It’s bad enough when you’re picked on by the kids at school or the boy down the street, but to have your own mother leading the charge? Shame on you. President Obama has gone out of his way to address bullying and its consequences – what happens when the bully is the woman he’s married to and the victims are his own children? Words have power and they can cut so deep that the wound will never completely heal. I’ve been there; I know. And I know these children deserve better.

So I guess the next Tea Party thing will be to demand Sasha and Malia be removed from the White House by Child Protective Services, and placed with some nice hillbilly couple who will let them have Fudgsicles for dinner.

To be fair, George W never pulled this kind of thing on his own kids.

UPDATE. Some commenters are against BMI as a standard of health, an arguable point. This post is not about nutritional science, however, but about the TX Trendy Chick's accusations of child abuse against the First Lady, and by implication the thinking behind it.

Conservatives are generally crazy on this issue. You may have noticed the recent Matt Ridley Wall Street Journal editorial on "Free-Market Solutions for Overweight Americans," including "healthy living vouchers." Commentary has focused on the imagined efficacy or lack of same of such schemes, but no one says anything about the alleged non-free-market approaches Ridley wants to supplant:

School posters, virally marketed videos, healthy-eating classes, mandatory swimming lessons, minimum school-recess times, celebrity chefs in charge of school-meal recipes, bicycle lanes, junk-food ad bans, calorie-content labels, hectoring physicians, birthday-cake bans, monetary rewards for weight loss—they've all been tried, and they've all largely failed.

First of all, this list conflates foreign and domestic programs -- there is no U.S. ban on junk food ads, so far as I know -- and I don't know what the fuck he means by "mandatory swimming lessons" (phys ed, maybe?). Secondly, Ridley seems to think handing out government vouchers, which are worth money, is more "free-market" than tweaks to government advertising budgets, public school policies, etcetera. By the wingnut handbook definition, I guess, everything the (Democratic) government does, even at the most local level, is socialism, while the giveaways Republicans approve are free-market.

As for BMI, when the government moved to include these figures in children's vaccination records, conservatives cried double secret Hitler. We sane people can argue about the usefulness of the measurement and the psychology of health programs from children, but the conservative position on such matters is basically, "Black preznit wanna pour sociamalism on mah vittles."

I WROTE ABOUT SOMETHING BESIDES POLITICS and it felt pretty good.

My essay is but a modest accompaniment to the Village Voice comics issue, out now, in which boring old words are replaced by beautiful graphic novellas. Michael Musto as comics! Robert Sietsema food review as comics! Etc. Get it in print if you can, confuse your grandchildren.

THE MANSION ON THE HILL. Kathryn J. Lopez gets one of those poetic patriot emails about how America has been plumb took over by folks what hain't got no right:

Imagine the Republic as a “mansion on the hill”.

The mansion was built with the blood of the current owners’ forefathers.

The heirs to the mansion, with no personal investment in the property, became complacent and lazy leaving the mansion for days and weeks at a time only to find increasing disrepair of the building and grounds when they returned from time to time.

The heirs spent more and more time away on hedonistic journeys.

Finally the heirs came home to find mansion occupied by squatters of all types from leftist politicians to pot smoking aging hippies & revolutionary cadres.

A small group of the former residents evicted (some of) the leftists politicians and retreated to discuss what to do next.

Some began to form groups to plan restoration of the property, others to evict remaining squatters, others to plan fumigation — most continued their hedonistic pursuits...

K-Lo sees this as a sign that people are "impatient" with her Republican buddies for not moving faster, and takes in stride the idea that "leftists politicians" come to power by squatting rather than by election, and must be removed (poetically, you understand) by "former residents" who own the house by right.

This is the thinking behind all the claims of Obama's illegitimacy, from plain birtherism to the more high-flown claims that Obama is an "alien" (again in the poetic sense). They worked it with Obama's Inauguration (where's the Bible?) and his appointment of Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State (no emoluments!), and every so often gin up another crisis of legitimacy in which an unremarkable Executive action is portrayed as the Thin End of the Wedge.

The punch line? When issues do come down the pike in which the President's Constitutional authority or lack of same bears discussion -- e.g. Libya -- what we get from conservatives is mostly self-serving bullshit. You really have to throw up your hands when the Cato Institute comes up with howlers like this:

It is probably naive to think that Congress would have blocked this war, but by exercising its atrophied war powers Congress at least might have caused the war to be waged with more wisdom and forethought.

Words to stir the soul! Well, I guess you can't get the yokels to the barricades with an anti-war pitch. So keep telling 'em about the mansion on the hill.

UPDATE. Lots of fun comments ("Ironically, this is also the story of the Playboy Mansion" -- Jay B). Some of you, though, have the impression that K-Lo wrote the email herself, which I hope you didn't get from me. Then again, maybe she was just being modest, and wanted The People to get all the credit.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A COMMAND ECONOMY. Rising food prices nationwide, exacerbated by crop shortfalls (including a disastrous wheat failure in Russia), combine with high personnel costs to cut restauranteurs' margins in San Francisco, so the cost of dining out there is going up.

The Lonely Conservative knows how to interpret this: "Everywhere you look, we’re paying the price for central economic planning... If the environmentalists, unions, anarchists and other progressives get their way, we’ll be living in the dark ages." Curse these union thug schoolteachers and their high food prices!

Also, a special note to his readers:

On the bright side, you can sign up for daily deals through Groupon for discounts on eateries and plenty of other establishments in your area. These days you have to save a buck wherever you can.

**Note, if you sign up for Groupon through the link above I will receive a small referral fee. But I do recommend it. We recently purchased lift tickets to a local ski mountain for half price...

Well, it's more dignified than Goldline

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Donald Trump's Presidential-slash-guerrilla marketing campaign. It'd still be a gift that keeps on giving even without the birtherism, but fortunately our national descent into lunacy assures that we get the amusing add-ons, too. (Bonus track: Trump is telling people Bill Ayers wrote Dreams for My Father. Maybe for an encore he'll tell us he's heard the Michelle Obama Whitey tape.)

GRANTLAND RICE CAN REST EASY. National Review Online now has a sports blog. Here's something by Fred Schwarz:

You won’t see many cricket items in this blog, but yesterday’s India-Pakistan match, which India took by the narrow margin of 29 runs on its home pitch at Mohali (there, don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?), had geopolitical ramifications, as these two fierce rivals (in sport and everything else) completed the event peacefully and amicably, with the two nations’ prime ministers watching the action together. Predictably enough, the Obama administration has released a statement praising the match as a diplomatic breakthrough; soon, presumably, we can expect the president (who must be quietly mourning the loss by his beloved Pockystahn) to announce a global sports initiative aimed at building world peace through hitting, kicking, and throwing balls.

These people ruin everything they touch.

LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus is trying a new approach, at least so far as I know:

The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of Georgia seeking to dissolve the city charters of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton and Chattahoochee Hills. Further, the lawmakers, joined by civil rights leader the Rev. Joseph Lowery, aim to dash any hopes of a Milton County.

The lawsuit, filed in a North Georgia U.S. District Court Monday, claims that the state circumvented the normal legislative process and set aside its own criteria when creating the “super-majority white ” cities within Fulton and DeKalb counties. The result, it argues, is to dilute minority votes in those areas, violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

DeKalb's mostly black; Fulton's more mixed -- per Wikipedia:

The demographic make-up of Fulton County has changed considerably in recent decades. The northern portion of the county, a suburban, predominantly white area that is mostly Republican, is among the most affluent areas in the nation] The central and southern portion of the county, which includes the city of Atlanta and its core satellite cities to the south on the other hand, is predominantly African-American, overwhelmingly Democratic, and contains some of the poorest sections in the metropolitan area.

The new cities were all created since 2005, and are very white. At issue is whether the courts, which have ruled on traditional political redistricting under the Voting Rights Act, can also do so on the incorporation of new cities.

Let's see what the brethren have to say about it. Occidental Dissent:

A bunch of African-Americans (niggers) think the new Atlanta suburbs in Fulton and DeKalb counties are “too White” and have filed a frivolous lawsuit against the State of Georgia in federal court to revoke their city charters.

The African-American plaintiffs claim their “voting rights” are being violated, not because Bull Connor or the Klan is stopping them from voting, but solely because they are outnumbered by racially aware, White conservatives who understand the politically incorrect connections between “diversity,” crime, and fiscal irresponsibility in Fulton County...

No one in their right fucking mind wants to live under the incompetence and corruption that comes with an African-American controlled city government. While niggers aren’t exactly zombies, they have overrun Atlanta in much the same way. They also have reinforcements coming from up North.

Up next:

JEW-AMERICAN GOVERNMENT INCITES NEGROES TO ERADICATE WHITES IN GEORGIA

But let's not judge the issue on these fringe figures. Let's look at what mainstream rightblog Jammie Wearing Fool, frequently linked at Memeorandum, has to say about it:

Black Legislatures File Lawsuit To Disband Majority White Cities

No, that headline is not wrong. Now I don't want you folks in New England or the Midwest getting too excited just yet. This sort of thing can only happen in the south because of the most onerous piece of legislation ever passed, which is used until this day to keep whitey in his place, called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By the time it filters up to Ole Perfesser Instapundit and the other big-timers, of course, it'll be about "hypocrisy" or some shit.

JUST SO LONG AS YOU SPELL THE NAME RIGHT. I guess the big news is Bill Maher working blue. Here are some of the rave reviews, accent on the rave:

"Bill Maher doubles down — calls Sarah Palin the ‘c’ word," breathlessly reports The Daily Caller. "It’s a liberal favorite and they are nothing if not predictable," says Lori Ziganto. "Foul mouthed name calling from the LEFT," hollers Flap's Blog. "Bill Maher, Turd Merchant extraordinaire," says the self-unaware Underground Conservative, "is all yours, members of the Hate Left. You own him." "Always interesting when people struggling for acceptance and tolerance are so flippant about the trashing of others," says Howard Portnoy of a positive review of the performance. Some of the brethren call for Maher to be beaten up.

Glynnis MacNicol is on the right track for a while: "Sounds like a typical comedy show, which obviously is not to say it's okay, simply that comedy shows are frequently raunchy, offensive, and in bad taste." But then: "It's not like there's a lack of substantial ways in which to criticize (and mock) Palin." It seems she, like the rest of them, believes a comedy act should be like Meet The Press.

I guess they've somehow managed to miss Richard Pryor, or they'd be posting bleeped-out videos of him and complaining about Obama's reverse racism.

THE LIBYA SPEECH. Obama made his case for intervention, and along with Juan Cole's it looks pretty good. But I still respectfully dissent.

Though the differences between this action and the Iraq invasion are obvious, so is at least one similarity: The likelihood that, however much we tout the handoff to our allies, we will remain involved in Libya for years. Bosnia is the more positive example, and Obama hinted that Libya, tucked between two nascent democracies, would go similarly. This is a fond hope, as the region remains volatile, and I fear the new Libyan government will have need of our "intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications" -- and some other things that went unmentioned this evening -- for a long time to come. And under the circumstance I don't see how we could refuse.

I do see the benefit in our involvement, and appreciate Obama's kinder-gentler model of support for home-brewed revolutions as opposed to the Orwellian "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country" approach of Bush and the neo-cons. And it's certainly consonant with what Obama laid down in his Cairo speech. It'd be nice to get people on that side of the world thinking of us the way South Americans thought of us in the days of Simon Bolivar, rather than the way they thought of us in the days of Pinochet.

But for all its advantages, this approach still leads back to the same place we've been stuck for nine years -- and, seen a certain way, for much longer than that. I can believe Obama is very different from the imperialist Westerners who've been fucking over small states for generations, and still believe that the best way for him to show his difference is to stay out of their affairs insofar as possible. We don't have a great track record since World War II, and while Obama appears to think that the best way to fix that is to do foreign intervention right this time, I would prefer a cooling-off period. Always leave 'em wanting more.

The thing is on, anyway, and we'll see how it goes. Maybe it will turn out that "the values that we hold so dear" can be transmitted by targeted bombing runs. I hope so. It would certainly be a new thing in my lifetime.

BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG. The passing of Joe Bageant at a relatively young age is a damn shame in any case, but it's sad for more than his fans that his work hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. AlterNet has several of his articles, any of which could be recommended, but I especially like the one about the sex offender in whose Kafkaesque post-release treatment Bageant found a case study of the efficiency and cruelty with which the state squeezes citizens whose rights no one will defend. It's least-of-my-brothers stuff in the manner of Nelson Algren from a self-proclaimed redneck who saw how inhuman our way of life has become, and how good we've gotten at fooling ourselves about it. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he looked at the world as if he were part of it, a perspective conspicuously absent from the writings of most of the manicured sociopaths who get taken seriously these days.

UPDATE. Speaking of sociopaths, though I can't vouch for the condition of his nails. Sample: "Much like Adorno’s 'Authoritarian Personality' or Hofstadter’s 'Paranoid Style,' Bageantism is a faux-analysis, a make-believe political sociology..." This by way of explaining that Bageant didn't know what real people were like. Self-awareness is not McCain's strong suit. Neither is class.

ROLLING BLACKOUT. This weekend I told you that World Net Daily heard Bill Ayers making a blazingly obvious joke about writing Dreams for my Father and reported, in all seriousness, that it meant "Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio." Though I doubt such people listen to me, I figured word would get around somehow, common sense would prevail, and that would be the end of that.

Guess what's on Memeorandum today?


From super-edumacated Jeff Godlstein to the shortbus commuters Weasel Zippers, nine out of 10 wingnuts agree: It's not a joke unless it's about Michael Moore being fat.

Sadder still is Freedom Eden, who seems to sense that something's amiss but won't say so, and goes for the bank shot in desperation ("Ayers had to know that bringing up the controversy at all was not something that would help Obama"). Tell the truth and shame the devil, FE.

Kudos to John Hawkins for gently telling them what the joke was and whom it was on.

UPDATE. I see at Right Wing Nut House that Goldstein is defending his position the way all great men do --

As someone who knows a thing or two about interpretation...

-- by asserting his credentials. Schoolly G continues:

...I don’t need John Hawkins or Rick Moran to point out Ayers’ tone of sarcasm. What I’m interested in is the rather pointed tone of the sarcasm - it’s too deliberate, and the question seems too staged - and suggesting that, while Ayers wants to joke it all away, he also very much wants credit. It’s who he is. It’s who they all are.

Goldstein should consider a new career as an Investigative Heckler. He can go around to comedy clubs and yell, "I KNOW WHY YOU SAID THAT, YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYBODY!"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative answer to Earth Hour, called Human Achievement Hour, in which the faithful blazed their lights and fired up their appliances to demonstrate opposition to environmentalism.

In a late entry I missed, Peter Karwowski declares victory:

I did notice that common sense is definitely taking hold.

Driving home at about 9:00, I didn't notice any lights dimmed along the stretch of Yonge Street between Richmond Hill and North York. In fact, when I got home at about 9:15, I took a spin around the block and lo and behold, lights were on everywhere. In fact, it seemed that some houses aside from mine had extra lights turned on to celebrate the occasion.

It was heartwarming.

At that point, I got home and turned out the lights. The point has been made.

My own neighbors were wearing jackets or coats outdoors today, which they must have meant as a sign of disbelief in the Global Warming Fraud. I mean, what else could it mean?

RENT SEEKING. Nicole Gelinas is still beating the drum for an end to rent stabilization in New York, but now she has a new angle -- stabilization advocates should give up because anti-stabilization has already won:

If you look at how much government-protected tenants pay, they’re not getting a break. Sixty-two percent of “rent-stabilized” households paid between $800 and $1,750 monthly in 2008. But 56.8% of vacant non-regulated apartments rented in the same range.

Man bites dog: What the pols and the market have done worked.

Former Gov. George Pataki allowed vacant apartments to escape regulation above $2,000, so between 1994 and 2009, nearly 100,000 units have become unregulated — spurring landlords to invest and compete for tenants. Government bureaucrats have been reasonable about allowing landlords to raise the rent on “stabilized” units, and landlords have maintained them better.

New York has what the pols have long said was their goal: a healthy market...

If the rules expired (with some exceptions for the elderly and poor), chances are things would remain much as they are today.

That is, the apartments still cost an arm and a leg to rent -- and you're much less likely to luck into a deal than you used to be -- but every so often your landlord might re-grout your shower tiles. Thanx, free market! You're every bit the miracle we expected.

So why is she even talking? I thought at first she just wanted to gloat at the rent-poor peons (this is a person, after all, who thinks New Yorkers don't pay enough to ride the subway). But it soon became clear she's in it for the class war:

New Yorkers have gotten tired of people who’ve gotten cheap apartments because of connections or luck...

No poll data cited, of course. This is conservative boilerplate on the order of their anti-union propaganda -- it's based the notion that, if someone else is getting a break, citizens ought to feel resentful and punitive, instead of asking why the system can't be fixed so that they could get similar breaks for themselves. Don't ask for more, in other words -- only ask that others get less.

And in case you were tempted to take her seriously:

In “mixed income” buildings, one person can pay $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom while the person down the hall pays $1,200, not because of appreciable differences in income but because of chance. If the market was allowed to do its job, that $1,200 may go up — but that $3,000 would also likely go down.

Does anyone on God's green earth believe that a landlord getting $3,000 a month in New York City is going to lower the rent, ever? Only if the city collapses -- which a few more years of this bullshit might accomplish.

YA GOTTA DUMB IT DOWN FOR THEM, BILL. You may remember the conservative notion that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams from My Father for Obama. Back in 2009, Ayers joked with a wingnut about the claim ("if you can prove it, we can split the royalties") -- which the wingnut took as an admission of guilt.

Like many such articles of faith, though its media moment in the sun has passed, the brethren still believe, and collect signs and portents they imagine support it. Now there's this joking exchange at the end of a recent Bill Ayers appearance:



From the transcript :

Ayers: I think [Dreams from My Father]... is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …

Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?

Question: What's that?

Ayers: I wrote that book.

Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.

Question: You wrote that?

Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.

Laughter and Applause

Guess that joke never gets old. I got that transcript, and the video, from World Net Daily. And guess what their headline for it is?

Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio

It's too bad Ayers didn't think to say that if anyone believed he wrote the book, he had a bridge he'd like to sell them; he'd be a rich man now.

STAND UP AND CHEER. The makers of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie are soliciting video clips of fans saying "I am John Galt" so they can be "part of Atlas Shrugged history," i.e. marketing.

Having seen these entrants, I will say that if they scrapped the story and just strung together 90 minutes of these clips, I believe we could get it into some European festivals.

TEA PARTY POOPERS. At Big Whatever, Phillip Dennis tells those RINOs to shape up or ship out:

“What is it about the November election that Republican leadership doesn’t understand?” That is the first question I ask any Republican elected official who works in Washington. Each response from the numerous conservative Congressmen has been some variation of “they just don’t get it.” The [unnamed] Congressman who I met with said basically what I already knew, “House leadership has no plan to cut spending, repeal ObamaCare and is not conservative"...

I asked a few friends in November if they really believed John Boehner or Mitch McConnell would ever vote to defund or repeal ObamaCare. Each said “not a chance” at that time. So I give a final word of warning to the Republican leadership: The tea party is not your friend nor are you ours!

Meanwhile at National Review:

Tea Partiers Favor Romney

Mitt Romney captures 24 percent of the Tea Party vote, according to a Pew poll released yesterday. Mike Huckabee came in second...

Some revolution.

LANFORD WILSON, 1937-2011. He died yesterday morning. Wilson hadn't brought out a new play in years, but a revival of The Hot l Baltimore is now in previews at Steppenwolf in Chicago, and his most popular plays are still done regularly by resident theaters. They're crowd pleasers, and they come by their pleasing fairly. Wilson had a great gift for what you might call poetic realism if that term didn't sound so high-falutin'; his characters are grounded and believable even when (as often) they're eccentric, but their language is musically, painstakingly tuned. Any of them -- a stoner musician, a mountain man, an accountant, a prostitute -- might suddenly launch into an aria that will have you momentarily forgetting everything else, immersed in the power and beauty of the words.

Back in the late 70s I had some friends at the Circle Rep, and so got to see Fifth of July and Talley's Folly in their first incarnations, sometimes from the tiny lighting booth in the back. The Wilson play that knocked me out, though, was a little-known one-act called Brontosaurus, about a wealthy, worldly New York antique dealer who takes in her teenage nephew, who has become a suburban mystic-ascetic and a living rebuke to everything the dealer believes. I don't know if anyone can match the fire Jeff Daniels and Tanya Berezin brought to it, but someone ought to try.

UPDATE. The playwright Robert Patrick (Kennedy's Children, The Haunted Host) lived and worked with Wilson back in the day, and has a lovely video reminiscence here.

FORTUNATE IN HIS ENEMIES. In case you're wondering why Obama's doing well in polls despite the fact that America is a fucking mess, take a look at this report from Brian Bolduc at National Review's The Corner:

I just spoke with Michael Openshaw, a member of the North Texas Tea Party. Because I couldn’t fit his comments into my story, I thought I’d add them here. Like other tea partiers, Openshaw takes a pass on the constitutional question — “I’d leave that to constitutional lawyers” — but jumps at the chance to reprimand President Obama for his recent behavior: “You launch a war and go off to Rio?”

More interesting, however, were his comments on the prospect of a Tea Party protest of the Libya campaign. “To go out and publicly rally while our service people’s lives are on the line is not something we’re willing to do,” Openshaw says. “We respect them too much — not the so-called commander-in-chief. You will not see us out there waving signs.” For more tea partiers’ reactions to the military effort, see here.

Not everyone will recognize that "launch a war and go off to Rio" as part of the curious propaganda drive to present the President's recent diplomatic mission as a vacation. But the "so-called commander-in-chief" bit will certainly stir in the imaginations of many normal, middle-class Americans an image of a guy wearing a Napoleon hat and a strait-jacket.

Openshaw clearly can't help himself, but if you read The Corner regularly, you know that such news-like dispatches as Bolduc's are not so much journalism as company-newsletter copy -- they usually consist of a NR guy asking a prominent Republican why Obama sux, and the Republican going on about why Obama sux for several paragraphs, with the NR guy occasionally inserting stuff like, "Prominent Republican cautioned his fellow Republicans against over-confidence" and "Prominent Republican pointed to a recent Rasmussen poll..." etc.

That Bolduc or whoever thought Openshaw, an obvious crackpot, would make a good representative of a major conservative constituency goes a long way toward explaining why people are reluctant to turn on Obama.

UPDATE. Much argument in comments as to whether Obama in fact sux. To badly paraphrase an old saying, he's worse than anything except the current alternatives. But that may not be good enough in 2012; the traditional triangulation devices by which Democratic presidents survive may not function so well in a crap economy. Then all the Republican candidate will need is a convincing line of bullshit -- not a sure thing from what I've seen so far, but doable.

This is why I'm not counting out Palin, despite her current trench in the public's affection. If things stay/get bad enough, even her mindless optimism may convince a desperate nation to take a chance on her. Hell, a few years ago they voted for a black guy!