1. I’m really hoping to see some Republican flack characterize her as an illegal (besides reliable fascist G. Gordon Liddy) in the next couple of months, because
(a) it’s the single dog-whistle they seem to get the most mileage out of; and
(b) it’s legitimately and infuriatingly easy to get Latinos to accept tirades about filthy illegals at face value instead of recognizing the entire genre as one blatant ethnic slur after another.

2. Obama’s choice to go through the nomination process in the traditional timeframe is a good one, especially in light of the serious cross-purposes the Republican Party and its constituents are working at in re. despicable wop-a-doos. While it might be somewhat challenging for a White House which has yet to fully acclimatize to the relatively glacial pace of news and opinion outside of the Internet to spend seventy whole goddamn days on this one issue, that cuts both ways – there’s a long, long time for the miasma of The Base to seep out, and two months is a long time for the Republicans – whose strategy so far has been one of constant escalation, stoking an entitlement to fascist outrage as politics – to keep shit under wraps.

3. In light of the recent tragic murder of one of the country’s three late-term abortion providers by a survivalist lunatic, I have to wonder if as moderate a justice as Sotomayor seems bound to be on abortion is wholly appropriate, even in light of the benefits that exist in her presence. I like to think that sharing the court with misogynist jackasses like Scalia & Son will radicalize her a little, but I’m not holding my breath.

4. It’s a pity that with God as his witness Jeffrey Rosen will never blog again. Now who is going to get paid by a liberal institution to imagine that sensible centrist Obama will finally have his Sister Souljah moment rebuking this terrible identity politician and her extreme brownness?

5. If the phrase “we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Obama for helping us out the extremist bigots who helped shatter our solid national majority and lose us elections from Alaska to Virginia” or some variant of it fails to come up among Republican political veterans or commentators during or after this fracas, the Republican Party is a walking corpse.

Enraged Citizens Stage ‘Tea Party’ Protest Over Tax Increases For The People Who Take Four Fifths Of Their Money Plus Interest

America’s Heroic Businesses Help Millions ‘Go Galt’ In Spite Of Government Interference, Temporary Stipends

“Expert” Testimony From “FBI” On “Torture” Refuted By Special Episode Of 24

Cheney Acknowledges Grievous Error In Denouncing Robert Downey Junior Before Finishing ‘Tropic Thunder’

I’ve got a bigger post on green culture on the way, but in the meanwhile (and because I’ve lost his name before) I’d like to direct your attention to Wang Chong, an obscure Taoist who – in addition to having a name which we must find hilarious – was not only one of the few Chinese philosophers to come from humble origins but also profoundly skeptical, coming to incorrect conclusions frequently but tearing the superstitions of his time a new asshole. From Wikipedia:

People say that spirits are the souls of dead men. That being the case, spirits should always appear naked, for surely it is not contended that clothes have souls as well as men.

I’m Glenn Beck / and I’m here to say
The IRA are smuggling drugs in my mouth / On Kolob I will be Jesus’s favorite wife
Bamboo, Obama, connect the dots people / Oh God the Arabs are watching again

Prophesy is an interesting word, partially because it doesn’t actually mean anything*; it is the verbal form of prophecy, and a fairly predominantly American Evangelical phenomenon. It rests on a wackily fundamental misunderstanding, and it’s everywhere.
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OH SEATTLE-CHAN

Any one of the millions of men with sufficiently non-nasal alto voices and severe delusions about the American class system burst into a kindergarten, set a succession of children down on their knees, and told them one of two stories.

1) “Well, we spent years training and outfitting the Georgian army, to the point that they yelled and cheered like Americans as their troops poured into a breakaway area with a long history of ethnic conflict with Georgians and bound by treaty to remain demilitarized. They got as far as the capital, and held it for two days, before foul interloper Putin – completely without warning and cause – invaded, slaughtering armed Georgian innocents en masse and driving thousands of military refugees behind the Ossetian border. But they had done work we could be proud of – in those two days in the capital they left no stone unturned in the Jewish quarter, and it seems that the Caucasian state would have exercised its precious sovereignty to purge Georgia of the last Russophile Semites befouling their territory with Marxism.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Putin, the swarthy traitor, opposes America in its quest to free Earth of Jewish tyranny.”

2) “Well, after the twin humiliations of the long-demonized Hamas winning Palestinian elections insisted on by Bush and a failed neocon-backed invasion of Lebanon, Israel decided it had had enough of failing and invaded the Gaza Strip in an effort to make the politics of Israel’s Palestinian wards more Israel-friendly. The completely spontaneous combined-arms assault surgically neutralized hundreds of deviously unarmed Hamas militants and eliminated what little infrastructure Hamas, in its perfidy, had built up to circumvent Israel’s democratic, self-determining decision as a free nation-state to completely blockade Gaza to any and all traffic, including “food”, “water”, “humanitarian aid”, and other vital Islamofascist instruments. To this day, Gaza remains under heavy occupation by Israeli forces, a historical first that will surely disarm the nationalist radicals dominating their local politics.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Don’t fuck with the Jews.”

(BONUS FUN STORIES to come when a cartoon defaming symbols of Israel warrantlessly attacks the Jews for the Israeli state’s behavior; when long-term US ally Uzbekistan makes rootless Bolshevist radicals wear yellow badges to ensure the continued freedom of world markets; and when Israeli dissidents treasonously abandon the quest to destroy Islamofascist children wherever they be born.)

(EDIT: By some inexplicable thinko, I managed to misname the principal subject of this article – and in spite of looking at it repeatedly for some time have only just now realized. Outside of the vague resemblance between ‘k’ and ‘d’ and the fact that this article was dashed out fairly quickly, I can offer no real excuse for this; it is simply unfortunate that it fell into the beginning of a long period of personal infirmity and I didn’t notice earlier. MGC. AK)

1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Madoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Madoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues – and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US – are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews – and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel – a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism – to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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THESE United States have provided to the world, as shall doubtless pale in comparison to posterity, the very model of the geometric growth of men and wealth, & all respectable populationists assert that, should we as God made manifest close our shores to the Celestial and Slavic menace, the corrupt fecundity of to-day’s Papist and Deseretman shall be drowned as surely by our swelling numbers as the same heathens shall in good time be drowned in the Colorado & its tributaries in the coming century of good government.
But even this grand growth of the number of Christian men shall not compare to the eternal surge of white betterment by means of the rail-road. I shall withal to all men of good wisdom reveal the nature of the coming rail-transit singularity & conclusively prove that to all human misery, Marxism & Georgism & other anarchists, and alternative modes of transport (including even the grand and glorious tall-ship) the engine bears in its consist a doom as sure as the late end of Massa’s wantless provender for the Negro race. And though we shall doubtless face all manner of challenge and terror in the coming dominion of the steam engine – as those innocents quailing in the pacific Germanies at Napoleon’s relentless sponsorship of the chemin-de-fer would readily confide – it is worth it simply to stand at the boundless frontier of a promised-land free of rivers, women, and the loathsome opium tariff. Join me, your humble & obedient servant and engineer, when next ☞Dancing!!! sees fit to serialize my work.