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Best of the Week That Was

Toronto Subway Buskers – Mumbly interviews with near-indigent artistes.

Chowhound Sold – Grandaddy of eating forums sells itself.

Jacktracker: Day 5, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. – Big Jack stays put, Mini-Jack hits the shore.

Gawker Stalker Google Map – Celebrities cartographed.

Vegas Hooters: No Knockers – Hooters hotel hosts highbrows.

United Premium Cabin Upgrade Puts Squeeze on Steerage – Rich folk just need to lie down.

No Crusading Please – Dubai metalheads not interested in tasting Saxon steel.

Stewardess Uniform Freak – Hundreds of fly girls, dressed and on display.

Dueling Architects – Someone had to build Kitchen Stadium.

St. Pat’s Evidence, Beerless – Just enough and exactly too much Irish in you.

Friday, February 04th, 2005

In Garofalo’s World

I saw the Jeanene Garofalo segment Captain Ed writes about today when it aired live on MSNBC Wednesday night, but had forgotten about it. It is sad that a comparison of Republicans to Nazis has become so commonplace that I just completely forgot about it.

In the transcript excerpt that Captain Ed quotes I noticed today for the first time what Garofalo said about pooh-poohing that the Republicans had anything to do with the people voting in Iraq. No, they had nothing whatsoever to do with it. They only voted for the $87 billion and other funding that made it possible for us to stay there long enough to make it happen. And they only supported the President’s decision to make it politically possible for us to still be there to finish the job.

No, I guess is was really the UN(ron) that sent a few people in at the last minute that all the credit should go to in Janeane Garofalo’s world.

— Lorie Byrd

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=91088

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Just Shoot Me Joe Klein jumps the shark.By Charles P. Pierce Web Exclusive: 02.24.06 Print Friendly | Email Article So, I had a bit of free time at the end of a long couple of days, and I’m floating around the Web, and I come upon this little masterpiece from the man who wrote a book about Woody Guthrie that damned near ruined Bruce Springsteen’s music for all of us. Look down there, Joe. See it? Way down there below where you’re at right now? That’s the shark. I despair often of my Beltway brethren. Most of the time, I feel it’s time to march most of them out of Washington forcibly and intern them in a work camp and re-education center somewhere in the northern Smoky Mountains. But that’s just me. Occasionally, however, one comes upon such a perfect fractal symptom of the overall contagion that it seems more than worth it to start building rude huts and stocking farm implements for the eventual inmate population. Peggy Noonan and her magic dolphins were one such pustulating example a few years back. Howard Fineman on Bush’s comfort in denim and ermine, or whatever the hell he was talking about, was another. And now we have this. Sweet mother Mary, Dick Cheney performing for Brit Hume and GUYS IN VIETNAM? An aging corporate carnivore downing beers and stalking farm-raised game, and some poor young guy drafted out of Butcher Holler and dropped into a jungle kill zone? Dick Cheney, as a boomer, learning the lessons of An Loc on the killing fields of some plutocrat’s toy wilderness? And being sadder and wiser for the experience? And Bob Kerrey, who’s said enough flaky stuff in his day to take a job with Kellogg’s, chiming in with some look-there’s-a-unicorn psychedelia about how this may make Cheney “have a better sense” of what he’s asked other people’s children to endure? What kind of mushrooms do they serve in the dining hall at The New School anyway?

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbol/us/whv/med/empire_records/empire_records1_300.wmv

Brad Delong on Peggy Noonan’s About-Face  

  

Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself–and Says That She Wouldn’t Have Voted for Bush If She’d Known Who He Was

She looks at Bush fiscal policy and joins the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the shrill, saying that if she’d known who George W. Bush really was she wouldn’t have voted for him:

OpinionJournal – Peggy Noonan: Hey, Big Spender Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST: This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised…. Everyone murmured about… how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That’s not what I understood him to mean. If I’d thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican…. I wouldn’t have voted for him…. I didn’t understand Mr. Bush’s grand passion to be cutting spending…. But he did present himself as a conservative… conservatism is hostile, for reasons ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and practical, to high spending and high taxing….

How did this happen? In the years after 9/11 I looked at Mr. Bush’s big budgets, and his expansion of entitlements, and assumed he was sacrificing fiscal prudence–interesting that that’s the word people used to spoof his father–in order to build and maintain, however tenuously, a feeling of national unity. I assumed he wanted to lessen bipartisan tensions when America was wading into the new world of modern terrorism. I thought: This may be right and it may be wrong, but I understand it…. Mr. Bush will never have to run again, and he is in a position to come forward and make the case, even if only rhetorically, to slow and cut spending. He has not. And there’s no sign he will….

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar–and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:

1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there’s more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a “compassionate conservative” to convince voters you don’t want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: “Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all.”

That’s the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else–that, as Andrew Sullivan liked to put it:

Some… get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond…. [T]hey miss the deeper point… Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of ‘compassionate conservatism’…. B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state…. I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now they are surprised–and shrill–to learn that George W. Bush was lying to them too.

http://www.skylook.biz/