We Are Not Alone...

A Picture With A Thousand Words On It...Is Worth Ten Thousand Words

In a previous post, I took the media to task for its appalling myopia about the full-throated roar of the crazies railing against President Obama and why said crazies are doing so. I said...

“Now, the news media beyond Lupica for the most part has been reluctant to look this stuff straight in the eye and call it for what it is, preferring to take the false equivocation / Sgt. Joe Friday “Just the facts...even if one side's 'facts' are clearly made-up bullshit” tack to cover their asses against I suppose...a Limbaugh-led boycott of sponsors...or some such nonsense.

They don't want to point out the big, scarlet-necked, angry elephant tearing the Goddamned room apart with its wild charges into the walls.

That dam may indeed be breaking, as evidenced in the cover story in New York Magazine last week, with said cover art shown above in this piece.

The caption accompanying it?

“The Obama Crazies, And Why They're Not Going Away”

And a taste of the story itself...

A burly Pennsylvania correction officer named David McElwee held up a poster of Obama photoshopped as a half-naked African native in a hut with a grass skirt and a bone in his nose. (Emphasis LM's) That was Obamacare, “voodoo” health care, McElwee said.

This wasn’t politics, exactly, or at least it didn’t start as politics. It came from deeper down, from a stirring pot of disaffection and resentment that made the president a kind of fantasy villain. They dreamt about him. Obama was, quite literally, their nightmare.

---------------------------------

Nuts. Yet what did that word even mean now? “In the early sixties, you had the John Birch Society saying the same kind of nutty things. It never made it into the mainstream,” says Robert Shrum, the longtime political consultant. “The editors of the New York Times or L.A. Times or Washington Post decided what was going to appear.” Reporter Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org says, “We used to be gatekeepers, back when there were gates. But now you see elected officials standing up and echoing some of the most bizarre, weird, false information we see on chain e-mails.” The left blogosphere spent a lot of energy refuting the crazies—but even as they refuted them, their alternative reality grew, and maybe their power too.

For those of you thinking we here at Group News Blog and the other places where discussion of this “phenomenon” has gained currency were just some hyper-sensitive wackos with an overactive persecution complex, I direct you to this story. It probably won't change your mind, as your hatred of us is just as irrational and rooted in the same loopy biases and misplaced anger as the nuts described in the article, but hey—there the damned thing is. It is the first of many articles like it to come. What has caused this alarm to gain traction is of course the usual gang of idiots overplaying their hateful hand—proudly sporting guns at peaceful gatherings, chucking common and well-established decorum in debate out the window like slovens heaving refuse street-ward during the Middle Ages, and the absolutely craziest overreactions to the most nothing of things.

Note again New York Magazine's coda on the cover blurb—“And Why They're Not Going Away”.

They're right. They're not.

Unfortunately for them, neither are we.

There is a hard-core twenty to twenty-five percent of so-called Americans (“so-called” because real Americans would actually recognize and try to live by what the Bill Of Rights says) for whom this President cannot fail fast enough, be mud-dragged often enough, or in the darkest pit of their sick little hearts, be dead fast enough for their tastes. And every day he wakes up and they see his face sticking out beyond that white collar of his—that face being some seven shades darker that what they've seen all their lives doing what he's doing now, they go just a little bit more crazy.

It will be the job of folks like you, and us—to remain super-sane in the face of these screeching tantrums. These wild outbursts that have given the likes of the dipshit-teous Glenn Beck currency in the daily discourse. Crying, kicking, screaming, wailing, breath-holding, self-punching, clothes-ripping crazy designed to wear and wither the resolve of the “adults in charge” so that we might relent and give them that little break—allowing them to claim a victory and grease that slippery slope where all they have to do is bitch and moan loud enough to keep getting over just enough to rightfully deem our side as “weak”.

FDR fed on this sort of hatred. Where we look at him now as a beloved, patrician, fireside-sitting salve to what ailed us during the awfulness of The Great Depression and the ensuing trials of World War II, during his actual heyday he was utterly reviled by a solid chunk of the more retrograde among us in America. The article sagely notes:

Thirty percent of the country hated Roosevelt, and that number never really went away, Shrum points out. Ultimately, FDR made hay of this rage. In a 1936 campaign speech in Madison Square Garden he castigated the right as “organized money” and declared: “I welcome their hatred.” Shrum says it took FDR four years in office to arrive at a “progressive confrontational politics.”

Sometimes when a kid goes berserk in a tantrum, the thing to do is to just let 'em go off and embarrass themselves for a while—the crazier they get, the calmer you get...and you simply do not give in. You let them shame themselves. And then comes the time when you eventually have to do what you have to do and you take Junior by the hand and go where you have to go...fuck if he's got a snot-soddened face and only a hoarsened howl left for words. You make the moves grown-ups have to make and that's all there is to it in the end. The hope here is that President Obama doesn't have to spend his (hopefully for him) first four years like FDR did converting all that nutty caterwauling to so much white noise (pun unintended).

I'd like to see more of what Shrum so perfectly described at the end of that piece—“progressive confrontational politics.”

It's getting to be about time to just drag Junior's ass along, people...and to not worry about what his fellow immature knuckleheads may think about it. He's a spoiled, irrational brat. Case closed We've known that for the longest and the New York article is the bellwether that those beyond us are realizing it as well.

So we're going to keep on pointing it out here at Group News Blog.

Because it's absolutely necessary to keep 'em honest.

Because they need to know we're not going to let them get away with it.

And because sometimes...just shining a light on flip-nut, batshit crazy can be almost as entertaining as it is as scary-truth-revealing...



Yikes.

There's more...

The “Bitter” End II: This Time It's Personal

“Cause The Brother Is Madder Than Mad At The Fact That's Corrupt Like A Senator”

And our long national discussion on bitterness continues...

ANNOUNCER VOICE OVER: Last week on “Bitterness” we heard:

“And bitterness is an ugly thing indeed. It twists you. It curdles your soul and hardens your heart. It deadens the eyes and rots your relationships. It will drive you to say and do things that a clear-minded person wouldn't dare. Senator Obama's statement about what bitterness brings echoes like a brick ricocheting down an elevator shaft. People will cling to polarizing things as a way to express their frustrations.”

In the Fall of 2006, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut—(and the “I” stands not for “independent” but rather, “In It For My Got-damned Self”) you will ruefully recall, found himself in the race of his life for the Nutmeg State Senate seat against the “Netroots”-backed newcomer Ned Lamont. We all remember “Holy Joe's” whiny, bleating pleas to Dems in the state and beyond to put aside their huge objections to his Lon Chaney-esque transformation (or bandages-removed revealing...) into a Yankee-accented “Zell-wolf”, thanks his open embrace of the WORST elements of President Bush's most damaging, and anti-progresive policy endeavors.

It was as if he was asking for “a humble”, or a pass basically, on his one-time drift—now a headlong rush—into Lower Wingnuttia. 'Allow me this thing...this one thing as I ride off on my saggy-backed, cross-eyed mule into the political sunset' was pretty much his sad call to political comrades and Connecticut's voters. And when those Nutmegger voters rejected his selfish request in the Democratic primary, along with the nascent and table-upsetting left blogosphere, a slow curdling that had been happening inside Lieberman went into hyperspeed. He would abandon the Dermocratic party he claimed to be a member of (but for years had been sneakily jail-shanking whenever he got the chance) in a fit of rejection-fueled pique, and selfishly, willfully, and spitefully hamstring the party's thread-thin Senate majority with a so-called “Independent” general election run post-his Dem primary defeat.

Wa all know to our eternal regret how it turned out. With the aid of the GOP and more than a few DLC knuckle-dragger buddies in the Senate, he would win re-election, kind of caucus with the Dems (to hold onto some power as part of a slim majority), but because of his newfound 'freelancing fossil' status, have carte blanché to pal around with his choice of whatever wingnut he wanted and nad-kick the Dems publicly while voting out of caucus on specifically anti-GOP pieces of legislation.

What has happened since then is a textbook lesson on the “Altered States” dysmorphia that bitterness can wreak on a public servant. Lieberman is supremely aware that this is his last go-round as a Senator. His craven power-playing from '06 notwithstanding, his constituents are now experienceing “New Coke” levels of vocal buyer's remorse. Except there's no “old” formula for him to go back to as he's trashed it utterly—and in that old formula, he was no liberal firebrand to begin with. The political ground has shifted under his orthopedic-shoe clad feet. His victory in '06 was a last burp of major-state, old-school DLC acceptance before the projectile voiding of all of that thanks to the influence of internet activism and the result of nausea from too many poilitcos who should have known better enabling the 7 1/2 years of the failed Bush presidency. He's been disninvited from varfious key caucus strategy sessions as it's pretty much known that he will go back to his GOP pals and drop Sacajawea dollars—fuck dimes—on the discussions. And as he's no longer considered a power-broker on the party's PR / talking head / prestige front lines, this spoiled, spiteful, sanctimonious, hypocritical and mean-spirited attention whore has opted to go out in a blaze of glory—standing alongside the Republican standard-bearer as a pathetic human crutch, should he stumble. (And oh how he has.)

He is effectively, the guy at work who's been there forever, not really doing very much of note, who has gotten wind that he...is...done. There is no department to move him to as the company is changing drastically. His ineffectiveness and long-time non-team playerism has been noted and figured into the decision.

So what does this embittered, political, human out-take from “Office Space” do?

He “trashes” the place. He does the political equivalent of maliciously wiping his computer of necessary company files, Then tries to do the same to his co-horts' 'puters. He willfully inserts a nasty virus to infect everyone's terminals. Squirts Krazy Glue™ in the printers, sets fire to the copy paper room, and makes toxic pots of coffee with ammonia instead of water. He clogs the toilets after-hours, unplugs the refrigrator and takes a dump in the conference room and hides the evidence so it'll reek for hours, if not days—and no one can find it.

That's what he's doing as he “works out the string” when he stands with McCain and disses his one-time party. And the worst thing he does is rent himself out as an attack chihuahua against the Democratic party's presidential candidates, as he did this past week when he went into his bag of smeary tricks with his mealy-mouthed concern-trolling about ties between Hamas and the presumptive nominee Barack Obama. Via Talking Points Memo:

“It was only a matter of time, really. If you ever doubted that Joe Lieberman would be using what's left of his "Independent Democrat" credentials to legitimize the GOP's bogus "Hamas endorsed Obama" attack, here he is on CNN doing just that...

----------------------------------------------------------

When Wolf Blitzer pointed out that Obama also labels Hamas a terrorist organization, making his position the same as McCain's, Lieberman said, "that's true," adding that Obama "clearly doesn't support any of the values and goals of Hamas."

Then, with depressing predictability, came the inevitable caveat:”

“But the fact that the spokesperson for Hamas would say they would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question, "Why?"

And it suggests the difference between these two candidates.”

That was exceptionally shady shit from the wrinkled nad-faced little hit man. In that droning, faux-gravitas tone of his, he farted out the ugly spectre of “Oh nooooooes! Beware the Black dude with the funny name! He iz down with the terra-iztz I will remind you about once every seventeen seconds!” He's taking up that mantle to allow his fellow bed-wetting fear-o-con™ plausible deniability to say, “Hey, my friend! I didn't say that. Joe Lieberman, member of the Dems Senate Caucus did. So it must really mean something! Now excuse me as I go yell at clouds.” But even the craven little Lieber-bot knows he has as much of a real, listening constituency as a field mouse in a bobcat's den.

No. I take that back. He does have a constituency. A small number of fear-addled, single-issue, small “r” moder-racists™, and of course, the rope-belted, foot-slapping mob who cheer him on one minute and then would dance like they were on “Soul Train” the second Lieberman and everyone like him God forbid were to disappear from the face of the earth, as that would herald a prophesied paradise where a glowing Jim Caviezel hands out candy apples and fat-ass tax cuts. Praise the Lord and pass the xenophobia!

This is all he has left.

Say what you will about Senator Clinton's noxious doings of late as a result of bitterness (and boy, there have been some doozies), at the very least, and being fair—her creepy deeds can at least be traced to some core sense of abandonment and a feeling (justified or not) of having been “wronged”. People once steadfast in her corner walking away. Whether just to try something different, or out of upset with intransigence on her part over important issues, I can empathize with her having angry feelings about her change in status. Lieberman on the other hand abandoned his party, and is angry that they will not continue to support him—as if he's accumulated a cache of “asshole points” over the years that would allow him in his puke-green, pre-storm sunset years to be as big of a retrograde jerk as he pleases and not see any repercussions for it.

Senator Clinton is the paramour now spurned, who after years of companionship is angry that things seem to be over. And if in the end she can't get what she feels she deserve for her service, she'll do what she can to get what she can, even if the getting is a bit unseemly. Lieberman is the flighty, annoying not-so-significant other who walked away on his own accord, but still wants an allowance. And access to the house. And car. And wants to fuck everyone you hate, but wants you to cuddle and tell him how much you love him. And when you don't—he'll try to screw things up for you at work, will put out rumors about you and sneak by at night to key your car. Just a nasty piece of work.

His bitterness (“This Time...It's Personal”) is the sequel that is so much worse than the original. It has absolutely twisted him into a grotesque caricature of what he was—which quite honestly wasn't all that great to begin with, and I fairly thirst—and know I'm not alone—for an increased Senate majority that would enable him to lose his chairmanships, cushy committee seats, his sprawling office that goes with all of that, and be relegated to legislative “armpit” status. I want him in the fucking basement of the Russell Senate Office building. Next to the boiler and a supply closet of foul smelling, toxic solvents. Not even an office. A cube. In fact, a crappy, bile-green half-cube to be shared with whoever maintains the building's sewer traps and that person's work equipment.

And spare us please, the droning “But I marched with Dr.Martin Luther King” drivel. Again, a symbolic “good deed” in the past does NOT accumulate one an allotment of down-the-road “asshole points” to be used for those moments when you want to throw ostensible comrades-in-arms (however weakly you've locked arms in the past) under the Goddamned bulldozer. The hell with your progressive “moment”. I prefer to let a lifetime of deeds stand as the measuring stick. And Lieberman has spent the last ten years or so committing a slew of anti-progressive acts and jail-shanking people he should have been supporting, or at least been fair with. (Remember, he became a Senator via a vicious, right wing-financed campaign against then sitting Senator Lowell Weicker) Chuck Heston also marched with Dr. King, but it is his final years incarnation, of ugly, retrograde opinioneering and championing that many see him in the harsh light of. Lieberman's bitterness over the Dems not being cool with his hard rightward swing and his naked perfidy in taking down his “fellow” Dems shows through in his spiteful, nyah-nyah-ing daily acts of subterfuge and outright hostility.

There is bitterness you may grudgingly forgive, and there is bitterness you fight a son-of-a-bitch over. Lieberman's is the latter. And I won't be satisfied until he is politically headwhipped so much that when three fingers are held before him and he's asked “How many?”, he says “Mallomars”. You want to call it a purge? A litmus test? Fine. Call it that. I say this—A “friend” who keeps kicking you in the nuts, not softly and for play, but to cause pain and help out an enemy—is not your fucking friend. And that person should be dealt with accordingly. Screw his pious mewlings about “feelings”, and “history”.

That person needs to be punished. End of story.

And for all this talk of “Dr. King, who I marched with...” I think that a lout like “Short Ride” Joe would probably make even the non-violent MLK have the occasional fantasy of cracking him across his lying, evil-enabling lips. He wouldn't actually do it. But bad people sometimes make you think bad things about them.

Me? I have no such scruples. And a rap in the grille would be getting off easy from me. Besides...why sully your hands when a well-and-swiftly placed Size 12 will do?

There's more...

Nah...I Don't Like Macs

Look Who's Ba-aaaaaack...

Death, Taxes, Rudy Giuliani being an asshole, and lots of sparks, flames and smoke in comments on a post on anything Apple computer related.

All of these things are inevitable.

As Hubris pointed out here, there is a bit of history massaging with this new Disney (Urrrrrgh. Sorry Jesse, in spite of some wonderful product—and I can normally overlook issues and focus directly on ‘product”—the company's been a bad actor in too many ways of late for me to dig on 'em) ride exhibit where the history of communications/computing will be depicted via the use of animatronic figures—but one specific animatronic “*LMD” has got some folks in an upoar.

It's the one of Apple's Steve Jobs—to the exclusion of his fellow midwife at personal computing's true birth, Steve Wozniak.

And it's true as Hubris says that “one of the benefits of being on the board is that you can indeed “write people out of history.”

But a ride at a Disney theme park is hardly Stalin's crew of airbrushers removing no longer favored cronies with a poof-poof-poof of gouache.

Wozniak, post his plane crash in 1981 has been a bit of an eccentric (a mother-of-all-concussions after plowing his aircraft into a steep embankment shortly after liftoff fucked him up pretty badly insofar as all manners of amnesia and odd brain fucnctioning) and withdrew even further (he was already quite the introvert) from the public spotlight cast on those then-young masters of Silicon Valley. He was a brilliant software/hardware designer and builder who simply tired of the rat race shortly after his initial, but mammoth engineering successes.

The whirring and clicking Jobs at the Disney ride will do nothing to dim Woz's accomplishments. They're too well documented and so much the stuff of can-do legend. If the “Hall of Presidents” exhibit was all we had to go by to learn about Abe Lincoln, well...it'd be one sorry-ass world we lived in. It isn't., and Wozniak's legacy is safe.

Plus, even though he's no longer a day-to-day employee at ol' Infinite Loop, he still draws a paycheck and is a shareolder—which is kind of scary to think about how wealthy he must be, having gotten in at the ground level and seeing that stock split, and then double its worth again in the last three years. Maybe that brag of his about always carrying at least $20,000 in cash on him is true.

I mean...Goddamn!

But the fact remains that Jobs is the company's public face—like it or not. Woz's retreat into the shadows may have been a factor in fueling Jobs seeming ubiquity. But remember, he booked up too, and was coaxed back after the Gil Amelio debacle of the mid-nineties. The company was damaged goods and he put his face, name, and ass on the line when Apple needed to pull itself back from the brink. Perhaps he got lucky. Maybe it was good timing, and he sold his soul to the devil for a machine that allowed him to simultaneously tap the brains of superior computer intellects for their ideas, and mass-delude millions of people into believing the resulting products integrated better with their lives than what they were using. I dunno. What I do know is that he NOT a technical genius or the second coming of Modok, The Living Brain.

What he is a genius at is in marketing, style sensibility and trend-sniffing.

Madonna didn't invent “The Vogue”, she just packaged it and sold it perfectly.

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile. What he did was perfect it's production and market it phenomenally.

Jobs is an iconic figure in that sense—the Ford/Madonna sense. I tip my cap, there.

What strikes me is the venom against him, though. I, and no one else for that matter saw him bounding across the stage screaming “I love this COMPANY!”, in full, crazed Ballmer-mode. That smug, self-assuredness may come off like a screaming boast, but in the end, it's just smug, self-assuredness. The “Come on, you want this stuff and you KNOW IT” smirk sets a lot of people off, evidently. Me? I could care less. There's a lot of “hateration and holleartion up in this here dancery” over Apple's “marketing”. I don't understand it. The company's still in a single-digit share of the market, so why so much venom instead of what should be ridicule? I could see it f they were going all “GoDaddy” with trashy promotions and the like, but that's not it. If there's a “problem” with their marketing, some major annoyance that is patently egregious. I'd love to know just what that is.

I mean...Is it the “cool” factor that so sends people 'round the bend? What makes for that “cool”? Is it the “Reality Distortion Field” button on that machine Jobs got from the devil? Or is it the fact that Apple routinely ties a certain elegance of operation—software, to an equally elegant physical aesthetic—hardware design, and that draws a definite, maddening distinction between them and the competition?

Maybe it's that whole “cult of personality” thing, and a lot of folks just find Jobs' confident soft-sell stealthily arrogant. Crazy-making, in fact.

Again, I don't care. I met the guy and talked to him for a few minutes when they opened the Apple Store here in NY. Went for the opening day free swag, saw him and said ”Hi. I like your company's products.” Told him some ways he could improve on iMovie and Final Cut Pro, and to maybe inform consumers better about the short life of his computers PRAM batteries and how when those cheap items fail, they cause no end of trouble. How they should maintain them to maximize their life. He listened, said they were looking for a way to do away with dealing with that old technology altogether and that they had some ideas on that.

Shook my hand, got an extra free T-shirt and he had a floor person give me a 20% discount voucher for my next purchase. Seemed decent enough.

And I wasn't kidding. I very much like—no, let me piss off the detractors here—LOOOOOOOVE Apple's products.

Why? Because they work consistently—unlike the Windows stuff I've had to use when under a deadline. Maybe it was bad luck on my part, but I had four major failures of Windows-based items during four major projects, and I have come to not trust the stuff. Never liked the A,B,C,D drive set-up. Drivers (Sweet Jesus...DRIVERS!) and their machine and project-wrecking instability—Urrrrgh! The needless difficulty in doing simple tasks?

I walked away easily to Macs. Even with the instability issues of some iterations of OS's 8 and 9, they still worked far better for me. I'm a graphics/audio/video professional, and the Mac was seemingly made for me, and people like me. My brother switched after an album he was working on ran away to hide in a Windows-seizured system. A teacher friend I gave an old Mac to switched and bought a G5 when he started work on a chlldren's book he was creating. He got tired two years ago of his Windows computers (2 of 'em in three years) barking at him and going down at inopportune times. I have found that if you DEPEND of a computer for your graphics and art production (audio/video/film/multimedia), a Mac just seems to do that better.

If you're a gamer, and don't stress your computer with all the dedicated horsepower, and data path zipping that high-end creative applications require, a Windows box is probably more your speed.

But in the end, both camps are beginning to meet in the middle—the Windows stuff is getting better at system reliability for creative professionals, and the Mac stuff is doing much better at general computing beyond the creative.

I just need something that consistently works—and in my personal empirical dealings, the Macs are it.

They're NOT trouble free. You have to maintain 'em, just like a car that needs oil and an occasional tune-up. You have to mind your free drive space. Occasionally rebuild permissions. Keep your desktop cleaned up and so on. That being said, my problems with them have been miniscule compared with other platforms. I did have a problem with my old PowerBook 540C, where it kept forgetting the date and needed a double start-up to get going. I took it to a repair facility here in NY that shall remain nameless, and I saw the technician do a key command and I was charged $49.00.

I said never again, and I set out from that day to learn more about the damned things so I wouldn't get ripped off by another tech. Two years later, I could tear a machine down to the Mother Board and rebuild it or upgrade it. Ram, processors, video cards, hard drives, ROM swaps, overclocks—I could do it. I haven't been to a repair facility since, and began to make money troubleshooting on my own, though I mostly worked for free for friends doing upgrades and customizations.

Yesssssss, you can customize a Mac. I've done several. Started out with a shell or laptop case with no HD, processor, RAM or anything and rebuilt the damn things to newer, more powerful specs. Steve featured my re-tooled old Wallstreet PowerBook at the New Blog two years ago. Pimped the shit outta that one. Swapped out the G3 for a G4 brain, maxed the RAM, swapped in a DVD burner, made her wireless, added Firewire and USB and ditched the old 6GB HD for a 60GB.

Even pimped the case. Machine's corporate code name was “Wallstreet”, but I wanted it to look not like a broker's hoopty, but something a CEO would rock, So I tricked it out with a case customization. Deep red to simulate the leather of a bigwig's office couch, and a mahogany inlay to get that wood-paneled “club” look. I changed the machine's name from Wallstreet, to “Mogul”

That machine is pictured at the top of the post.

And in my troubleshooting, hobbyist travels over the years, my red beauty is not alone here at Casa de LM. So many Macs have passed through my hands—cast-offs that people handed me, trades from other repair folk, and my own curiosities that I've gathered out of my collector's spirit (Computers, vintage sports jerseys, vintage radios, records, and action figures), that I've got quite a group of Macs of my own—not including the numerous ones I've rebuilt and upgraded and given away to schools, friends and family.

This picture is of the various Macs in my personal collection. More than enough to make an Apple hater sick for months. And every one of 'em works!

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)


Clockwise from top left:
A.) My workhorse Graphics Dual 1.25 GHZ G4—tricked out with 3 HDs (one for system, one for media, one as a scratch disk), then my son's tricked-out GarageBand G4 Dualie (3 HDs also), and my first truly powerful desktop, a G4-upgraded Blue & White “G3” (with 4 HDs). All had their old optical drives swapped out for DVD burners. The Quicksilver and Blue & White I got from a swap list. So cheap, it hurt! :)

B.) The displays for those machines—one's an Apple monitor, the other a castoff Dell I rescued from a canvas dumpster.

C.) My workhorse PowerBook G4 1 GHZ. maxed out the RAM, dropped in a 120 GB HD...Ohhhh, she runs sweet. Note her twin in the BG at left. Got 'em both free for brokering a deal with a guy who had a surplus of 'em gently used and I put him in touch with a program that needed laptops.

D.) My red beauty “Mogul”. Steve was gonna clonk me on the head for this baby when I let him hold her in his hands. He and I had gone back and forth “nyah-nyah-ing” each other online about Macs supposed inability to be customized. They can be. This was an old 233 MHZ G3 when I got her from eBay for $150. Two months later it was a 550 MHZ G4 with a DVD burner, monster HD, maxed RAM and the custom case pimping. Pop ya' collah, son!

E.) My wall of vintage PowerBooks. from L to R, the aforementioned 540C (“Blackbird“), as featured in Mission: Impossible I (Ving Rhames used that model), my beloved 1400C (“Epic”) that started life as a 133 MHZ but got Frankensteined into a 466 MHZ G3 with a fat HD, and lastly, my still awesome 3400C (“Hooper”) 240 MHZ sub-woofered monster. Some of the best sound of any laptop ever produced—4 speakers! (and the model Jeff Goldblum used in “Independence Day”)

F.) The same 1 GHZ Titanium as shown on the opposite side—except the desktop pic of a Bond-era Jill St. John is visible minus the browser window. Redheads...“sigh!”. (Mrs. LM never sees that desktop pic. I switch to my Dodge Charger from “Bullitt” when she strolls by.)

And G.) The Wonder Twins at the bottom—2 Mirror Drive Door G4s. One is my main A/V machine (I do the YouTubes on it), a Dual 1.4 GHZ rip-snorter with 2GB of RAM, three HDs, Two burners) and the backup/loaner (for friends) machine, a total twin. Atop the twins are the fraternal twins—the aforementioned “Mogul” PowerBook at left, and at right its twin under the hood, but with a shiny black marble inlay. My brother's getting that machine for Christmas.

Just fell in love with the look of 'em, and how they worked. Not pictured—my first PowerBook, a 145B with a B&W screen. That one's packed away at Mom's house in the attic. Also not pictured, the display for the A/V machine.

As you can see...I don't like Macs even a little bit. :)

Okay, I'm being facetious. I love my Macs. As for Jobs? Eh. He's just a dude.

Put him in an animatronic exhibit? Don't really care. Want to impress folks? Truly represent computer/communication history with a Cheeto-chomping (with cheesey scent piped in) animatronic internet troll. Yeah!

There's more...

WORLD PREMIERE—Popcorn Time! Say Hello To Another New Group News Blog Video Production!

Shhhhh! Turn your TV volume down! And your iTunes. Hey, kids! Keep it down in there! I said, Shhhhhhhhh!

Listen.

Can you hear it? Off in the distance?

“Pop!” “Ker-ploomp!” “Blammm-O!” “Boom!-Boom!-Boom!-Boom!-Boom!-BOOOOOOM!

No...it's not a fireworks display...or the local bomb squad's live-round training day. That sound...is one thousand conserva-bots' heads exploding over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to one Albert Arnold Gore Jr., Earth-2's 43rd President of The United States, and this Earth's loved-by-forward-thinkers, and hated by dinosaur-riding wingers leading proponent of saving the planet from its destructive self.

Down the line—from the unmedicated rage-a-holic Malkin, to the pissy and unctuous Reynolds, Gun-nut B-levelers, and everyone on the NRO “Ship of Fools”—various keyboards, monitors and 99¢ bags of Cheetos were splattered with bits of skull and bloody dura when the news hit about Gore's nabbing the prize. The most ammonia-pissy of the lot—the “Thunder Twins” (“Whining powers—activate!”) Limbaugh and his mono-browed pal Kathryn Jean Lopez both floated out a pink, cottony-candy fantasy where General David Petraeus should have been awarded the Nobel—for all he's done for “peace”. Oh yeah, and they feel Bush deserves part of the award, too. At which point, magical blue faeiries and sparkle-horned unicorns came down from the clouds, dispensing candy, Oxycontin, books of Sonic coupons and nubile, young Latinas all in a row.

“Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM!”

Lot of hateration and holleration up in this here dance-a-ree.

And it's so very, very enjoyable watching them just lose their minds all over the walls and linoleum-ed basement floors over Gore's accolade. So enjoyable in fact, that I figured we might as well see the action, as well as read their bloody-fingered ranting about it.

Thus, The Group News Blog proudlly presents—with no commercial interruption...

“Boom! The Gore Effect”

“Whooooo-wheeeee! They blowed up good.

REAL GOOD!”

There's more...

Eat Our Dust.

Po' ol' Harold Ford...workin' his hands to the bone—for absolutely nothin'.

About a week ago, I found myself in the supermarket. Grabbed some pasta. Grabbed butter, and then...I picked up a carton of milk, and placed it into the basket. I looked at it and immediately thought about the poor, missing kids you often see on the sides of the container. You cluck your tongue, you shake your head sadly, and mutter a pity-filled “Oh, that poor child! What could have become of him?”, and then you go on with your day as best you can.

Imagine my surprise when the very next day, a certain “missing” kid—disappeared from the face of the earth it seemed—lost since last November actually—miraculously turned up! I'd found him! I'd found him! Crawling around in the dankest sewers of TV! Thank God for John Amato at Crooks and Liars and his flashlight which helped me find him!

The new chairman of the DLC said he doesn’t know who’s been right about the Iraq war. No, I’m not kidding. And he wonders why most of the presidential candidates stopped at YKos and left the DLC conference blowing in the wind. He was there (on FOX!—ed. note from LM )to talk about Obama’s foreign policy ideas and answered this way on Hannity and Colmes last night:

Colmes: Barack Obama had a great point when he said those who voted for the war in Iraq and then had to apologize for that vote should probably be the last people to criticize he—who was right about the war in Iraq all along.

Ford: I don’t know who’s been right about this war all along…

Colmes: Sure you do…

Ford: That’s open for dispute.

Colmes: You don’t know who’s been right about the war all along?

Ford: One thing is clear. What we’re doing now is not working.

Okay...I love Crooks and Liars, but I swear, I almost wanted to bop John over the head with his trusty media flashlight until the batteries exploded out, for his exposing me—us—to the reason why the pitiful, toadying, little gnome that is Harold Ford, was away for so long.

He wasn't missing. He was “away”” of his own volition evidently—hiding under a fucking rock with the rest of the pillbugs, and worms and all manner of many-legged creatures/pests you never see until you trip over said rock, and “ewwwwwww!”, there they are, exposed—all slimy and twitchy, and crawling around until you can get that rock back on top of 'em—hard, thank you very much—so you don't have to see them again.

Alas, not only didn't we get the rock back down—HARD!—quickly enough to re-acquaint ol' Harold with his natural habitat, but apparently, the annoying little bug wants to hang out in the light for awhile, and is scuttling for all he's worth to stay there. See, he'd been under that rock since November—after progressives, liberals, dirty fucking hippies—and yes, a few right-tacking opportunists rode the lefty wave in, and shifted the balance of power in Congress from those compassionate wingnuts who let Ford's and his DLC'ers suckle at its diseased teat—to people who rather openly detested said DLC'ers and their teat—and other appendage suckling.

So, as the election—while still far off—still nears, what with the uncommonly early ramp-up of interest, much focus has shifted to the Netroots, and the activist/activated wing of the Democratic party, which is driving the debate these days. So much so, that the ridicule we once drew—“Tin-foil ha-aaaats! Tin-foil ha-aaaats! What have you won?"—has now shifted to a scorched-earth campaign to destroy us entirely. Recall those thrilling days of three weeks ago, during O'Reilly's cartoonish, exploding-cigar-in-his-own-mouth of a campaign to “destroy” YearlyKos '07 and its namesake Markos. ?

I sure do. And so too, does Harold. You see, the shit backfired on O'Reilly and the right so badly that it ended up turning Kos into an even bigger celebrity—and honestly, much to Kos's chagrin, more of a power-broker, thanks to one unfortunate side-effect of YearlyKos '07.

Um, well...it's like this—you know the DLC? Well, they kinda like...had a convention scheduled for the week after YearlyKos, and uh... heh! The damndest thing—all the candidates who showed up at YearlyKos? Not a one of 'em showed as much as a stray kinky hair or millimeter of cleavage at the DLC's fine, little shindig, leaving the what—six attendees or so, to watch as Joe Lieberman and Harold Ford were the lone participants in that convention's three-legged race and roll-over-on-your-back-like-a-punk-ass-bitch competition at its all-day picnic.

Owee!

But with that, and the general ash-heaping of even the “need” for a DLC in today's anti-GOP climate, all manner of warning bells, sirens and batshit-screaming Connecticut losers down at capitulation central went off.

“Oh fuck—I mean fiddlesticks!—we're civil, remember? The Netroots is drawing all the heat! O'Reilly's after 'em, and it's only making them look tougher...stronger...more formidable! Ain't nobody thinking about our jackleg shit—er..stuff anymore! What do we do?”

“I've got it! let's send Harold out on a whirlwind tour to champion and defend our tepid...bull-defecation! Yeah, that'll work!”

And thus, we got the sad spectacle of Harold Ford, sitting there glassy-eyed and slack-jawed—wanly defending his atrophied wing of the party's stance on the war, as noted above. It was sad, watching him in the clip. Out there, ass hanging in the breeze, with no reasoning whatsoever to back him up. Just contrarian bullshit for the sake of contrarian bullshit. In that moment, Ford annoyingly became John Cleese in the infamous Monty Python "Argument Clinic” skit. Arguing his point(?) not out of any sense of conviction—but because it is his job, a job he desperately covets—to do so.


Yes Harold, you've become–or rather, matured into a whole new level of farce—in your attempt to make the DLC fucking matter again. I laughed at the Joe Klein article in Time about the horror of the DLC being deemed a ”pariah” by many in the Democratic party, and I'm sure you piddled your J. Press khakis when your boy Joe dared out that out there for public consumption, too. It's real...and true. And you're desperate. You know what's coming in '08, and you've gotta try to do something to make your crew at least appear to be players again when your patrons on the right are moved into super-minority status. So, you come out with this shit...on the one cable news net that you're most comfortable on—FOX, of course. Came out swingin' too...with soft, downy pillows. Mewling your lukewarm-dishwater natterings on the things that really matter.

And then, you upped the ante. You got booked on “Meet The Press” opposite Kos. Which must've galled you to no end, man. You guys are about a year apart age-wise, yet for all your so-called “youthfulness”, you came off as hip, and as tuned in to the political landscape as Grover-fucking-Cleveland had he been time-snatched by Bill and Ted.

You tried to play the gravitas card—which failed.

You played the “Hey! It was the DLC what won the '06's!”, which was almost “I'm Rick James, bitch!”, in terms of hilarity.

You stumbled badly with your “I'm a truly honest Dem” shit, when you wouldn't back off of going on FOX to criticize fellow Democrats.

And when you realized how bad you looked, how woefully out of step you were, you went to the Lieberpublican/Foxocrat playbook of snippy bitch talking points:

MOULITSAS: Will you stop going on FOXNews and attacking Harry Reid for abandoning the troops, betraying the troops? Because you just did that a couple of days ago…

FORD: Markos, in all fairness, your site has posted awful things about Jewish Americans…

MOULITSAS: That’s not true…

FORD: Your site has…now you have a site about…something about Cindy Sheehan, she uses it as a…she has a heavy presence there in talking about running against….

MOULITSAS: It’s called “democracy.” If you don’t like regular people, hundreds of thousands of people…you’re gonna have…

FORD: No, I love it…but you can’t be critical of us…

MOULITSAS: Of course…you’re not going to control hundreds of thousands of voices. Your organization has a dozen people, you CAN control that message. And you don’t need to attack Democrats.

You sad, silly, fucking boy. You even went back on FOX two days later (back to the minors-tsk-tsk!) where the even the bubble-headed Laura Ingraham schooled your ass on the idiocy of your middle-playing.

And it was then that it hit me—what the deal was with you, and how you're acting these days and why.

You Harold, are the poor, dumb fool who took over your boss's grand, old horse-shoeing business, thinking you had it made!—You da man, now, br'uh! Woo-hooo!— except...except...well...

Nobody really rides horses anymore, Harold.

You're mad about it. So...you throw your archaic, little horseshoes at the passing cars. You whip 'em at the anti-war left, at the Netroots, and at Kos—Kos, the peppy, ascendant yang to your tired-ass yin.

And still, they pass you by. Vrrroooooooom!

I get it. We get it. You fucked up and now, now?...Now you have to justify your existence. “Protect your phony-baloney job! Harrrumph!”

Somehow, you've gotta move all of those stupid-ass horseshoes you bought.

Well...I suppose there's one saving grace.

FOX "News” demographic is just the crowd you can unload 'em on. I hear it's a real popular game at the old folks homes. :)

There's more...

The Monkey Hates You For Your Upright Stance

And That's Why He's Wildly Flinging His Feces At You, Markos—You And The Netroots.

One of the things that Steve and I used to e-mail each other about back in the days of the original News Blog, was the futility of the right in its efforts to replicate the grass-roots success of Daily Kos. We'd laugh, and joke about the tepid, jackleg efforts—the weird, red-headed stepkids like RedState and Tacitus, (both started oddly enough, by a really weird, red-headed kid) where the well-known 'top-down" style of wingnut idea management and corraling the community were writ large, and hammer-to-the-head stupid. The cheap, KOOL welcome mat, astroturf/activist sites like the embarassing "Victory Caucus", and perhaps worst of all, the re-launched, much-hyped, Edsel-with-the-fins-sanded-off of a site—Townhall. Run by the amazing, breathless fellatio machine that is Hugh Hewitt, just before its scintillating un-cocooning from dormancy, we heard this, about its wonderful future a year ago:

"While on the air, Hewitt uses the first to surf news sites, then swivels to the second during breaks to update his well-trafficked blog. "Both spoken words and written words are powerful," he says. "Acting in harmony, the effect is exponential." Just ask Rick Santorum. In May, he urged Hewitt's listeners to fork over campaign funds, and the host, ever eager, posted a link. Donations shot up 500 percent.

_________________________________________

The hope? That "Web 2.0" wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall's 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and you've got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web's biggest political blog. "We will overwhelm them," he says.

Steve and I laughed our asses off when Hewitt put that steaming pile of idiocy out there for all to see. "We will overwhelm them"? Excusemeplease? The only thing missing from that nutty rant was Hewitt whipping off his 38C Maidenform-brand "Mansiere" and banging it on the desk angrily for emphasis, to the whir-and-click of Black and White news cameras.

The issue though, is not a laughing matter for the right. People had plans. Big plans—big, dreamy, cotton-candy on trees, sillyfuck plans to just run shit for-ever, as evidenced by the laughable curio that is Hewitt's Regnery joke book from last Spring, > Painting The Map Red: The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority. You had Rove on the election's eve, angrily crowing about how those who doubted the GOP's chances didn't have "THE MATH". And then... 48 hours later, the flaming windmill fell in on old Frankenstein on November 7th, as the elections upset all that silly-ass map painting, and "math" figuring.

It didn't happen in a vacuum. There were reasons behind it—the souring of opinion on the GOP's lockstep backing of the clusterfucked Iraq war, the corruption as evidenced by the many-tentacled Abramoff/Cunningham/Foley Cover-Up scandals, and yes—the naked racism on the part of the GOP in their ham-fisting of the immigration issue, just to name a few.

But the factor that wounded them the most painfully in the '06's—and the one that scares them more than anything else, is the rise of the Netroots. Liberal, Progressive, Dirty Fucking Hippie online activism kicked the scoffing wingnuts dead between the pegs in '06. The Netroots coalesced into a fact-checkin', investigative journalism-in', story-drivin', candidate-houndin', fund-raisin' machine that the internet right could only wet-dream of being. And DailyKos, with its massive readership, stable of talented scribes/thinkers/members, and sense of actual community was the big, orange lightning rod for the right's bitter "hateration", post-that '06 ass-whipping. Daily Kos' championing of candidates like Montana's Jon Tester, and VA's Jim Webb, along with its ability to get the word out on Dem campaigns needing help, damaged the wingnuts' chances in a big way, and they haven't forgotten it. Add into the mix, the Dems and their '08 candidates realizing the potency of the Netroots in '06, and responding in tangible ways to that concentrated influence on things such as the various war votes, and the folly of kow-towing to the right—i.e. dissing the Fox-"sponsored" Dem debate, and you have a pissed-off, one-time kingmaker/ball-breaker who's desperate to matter again, and willing to scorch the whole fucking earth to make it so.

Which gives us O'Reilly's crazed attacks on Kos and YearlyKos '07 in recent days. Oh, it has been rich, too. There's jealousy, and-and spitefulness galore in this fest of drama-queenery-cum-high dudgeon. Again though, at the core...fear drives this enterprise. A fear spawned by a sad realization of the right's fateful dilemma in an every-possible-way-changing world.

You see, the nature of politics itself has changed. With the internet, and its instant feedback, as well as the ability of its users to create and distribute content, gather in a "space", and commiserate and act, a fatal flaw of the way the right-wing operates was exposed. That fatal flaw being that "community", where people act was never a part of the way GOP politics was supposed to work. Again, their paradigm is the old, "top-down" school of thought, where the "people'—or folks like you and me are supposed to do what the command structure says to do. And the command structure is the typical gathering of jowly, gout-suffering bigwigs who've always run things. The Dems had to get their DLC-worshipping asses kicked for a decade before their "Top-down" paradigm shifted. As such, that kind of style inhibits thought, and imagination from the "community". It locks people in to tired, and ultimately past-their-shelf-life ways.

It relegates the GOP faithful and their "activated" online community to little more than drone status.

Because you can be one of two things as a politically involved person. You can be a carpenter, and actually come up with things to build, and make those things using tools...or you can be a fucking tool that somebody uses to build something.

A tool...a nail, doesn't control its own destiny. It's just a thing to be used. A nail has never built a Goddamned thing it ever wanted to. A carpenter on the other hand... :)

No, I'm not going all messianic or anything like that, with a whole "Jesus/Carpenter" thing, but I think you get the picture. The GOP hierarchy doesn't want carpenters—they are the carpenters. They want nails they can hammer. Which is why in this interactive age of politics and activism, the right lags so far behind. "Top-down" sucks, baby.

I saw Kos at a New York "Drinking Liberally" function last year, and clearly remember him visibly blanching at the idea of his being called "a leader" per se. He stressed the idea of there being a "community of leaders" where everybody does their part towards a group of common goals. He totally eschewed the whole "Dear Leader" mantle some would like to ascribe to a person so they don't have to take responsibility. That stuck with me. Because in the '06's, it all came together. Down the stretch, every batshit freeper on earth was looking to Rove, and Mehlman and the upper end of the GOP power spectrum for guidance when those same people were the ones who had fucked the party raw and ungreased into the painful position they were in as the election neared. The Dems were responding to the grass roots, and squeakiest of wheels online—squeaky wheels representing numbers beyond comprehension.

The people, if you will.

And you see how that turned out. :)

Now you have an angry GOP leadership. Angry because they've lost control of the government. Angry at the Netroots and in shorthand for them—Markos—for soundly whipping their asses while changing the political party paradigm. And angry at a flailing, desperate constituency that wonders "What went wrong?", and is increasingly blaming them for the policy-stalling loss. Included in that GOP leadership is their pundit class, who can only snipe pissily as their Pollyanna, Niedermeyer-"all-is-well"-ing blew up in their faces and tainted what was left of their credibility with "the drones '.

O'Reilly is in that pundit/leadership class...and he's verrrrry angry about how things are going. He sees his nemesis Olbermann, gaining cachet daily, and Keith's rising star hitched directly to the sentiments of the Left's online "community". He also KNOWS about the right's fuck-up with its "drone"/Queen Bee setup, and that they don't dare walk away from it.

Why?

Because that wouldn't just upset the applecart of GOP command and control. To see that pissed-off "base"—what there is of it that could actually emulate a Kos-esque community, potentially drive debate—and hold politicos responsible—and fund-raise with gusto, well...that would effectively render the Republican Party's kingmakers in places like The Carlyle Group, its silent, but powerful oil and energy oligarchs, and, and media giants like his fucking bosses Murdoch and Ailes null and fucking void, baby.

It would render Bill-O himself, null and fucking void, too.

He can't let that happen. You helped whip his beloved party's ass. And your success at that risks showing "the drones" how they too can bypass the bullshit we did, and directly impact the landscape—so uh-uh, fuck all that, Kos—you've gotta be stopped now. He's gotta come at you in desperate full-bore, keening all the way. You/The Netroots—FDL, Crooks & Liars, AmericaBlog, Atrios, Greenwald—you've all gotta go down. And if it means jumping up in your face like a an idiot screaming on the playground as his pants fall down, revealing a skid-marked ass, then so be it! They used to mock you, and then you knocked 'em the fuck out, so respect must be regained somehow. Even if it's via hysterical raving about bullshit, and using third parties like sponsors for the dirty work, instead of coming at you like a fucking man.

The best part though, is the utter ineffectiveness of O'Reilly's monkey-scat tossing—1200 whopping responses to his call to drown Yearly Kos in the bathtub, and then of course, the inevitable, embarrassing blowback of his dipshittery.

He screwed up and brought the whole Mackris/Falafel/Dildo thing back into the discourse and saw the words of posters on his own site come back to bite him when Home Depot ditched his show as a sponsor, because of Liberals alerting them.

The stupid monkey hates you for your upright stance, Kos. So he tosses shit at you willy-nilly. And then? Then, he sniffs his own scat-covered finger and passes the fuck out.

Stupid monkey. doesn't he realize how the internet cuts both ways?


But you know what? Bill-O's venom may have another basis as well. We all know about his jealousy, and raging ego, and how he hates to be trumped. I got word that the raging succes of YearlyKos really pissed O'Reilly off.. Primarily because it eclipsed his own secret convention of the faithful.

Yup. He had to scrap it. I grabbed a screenshot he had up for the secret site for it. Here it is:

(Click to enlarge)

Sad, isn't it?

Enjoy YearlyKos '07! :)

There's more...