I AIN'T GONNA WORK ON GEORGE'S FARM NO MORE

Barack Obama loves "Maggie's Farm", endorsed by Bob Dylan.

Ever wonder what McCain grooves to?

(One of) My Alma Maters

Xavier University, once again, proving that rigorous Jesuit skepticism is no match for ideological posturing:

"Republican presidential candidate John McCain to hold town hall meeting at Xavier on Thursday

Attendance at the event is by invitation only for undecided voters; extra tickets are not available
06/24/08

2008 Presidential Candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ) will hold a town hall meeting at Xavier University on Thursday, June 26. Attendance at the Town Hall is by invitation only from Senator McCain. This is a pre-ticketed event with undecided voters. Extra tickets are not available.

Senator McCain’s staff approached Xavier earlier this week about using a campus building for the event. The senator was already scheduled to be in Cincinnati on Thursday for a private campaign finance reception and dinner.

Xavier is working with McCain’s staff to coordinate the event, but is not providing any financial support. All expenses will be paid for by McCain’s campaign. To be balanced, Xavier informed Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) that McCain is using a space on campus for his event and would provide him with the same opportunity if he so chooses.

This event falls within Xavier’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and to the orderly discussion of issues confronting society. We are proud to serve as an educational and cultural resource for Cincinnati, our surrounding communities and, indeed, for the entire world into which our students will go to find their futures. "

Georgie...

"And my head is down and I'm called a clown by comedians that grace/ The living stage of every page of worthless meaningless space/But I swear to you before we're though you're gonna feel our every blow/We ain't bleeding you we're feeding you but you're too f*cking slow" ("The Moon Upstairs" from Mott The Hoople's Brain Capers).

I learned my Carlin like many of us did, born later into his prolific career: I found Class Clown on vinyl among my parent’s stuff. At the age of six, there stuff was my stuff to, and I loved looking at all the big covers of those vinyl records, wondering at a world that bore no relation whatsoever to the Great Space Coaster (oh, if only I had known! exactly how much of a relation there was.

I loved the fact that, an adult was picking his nose (clean up to the elbow, it seemed), and that, from what I could glean from all of this, that this record was probably “dirty”. However, I didn’t listen to George Carlin at that time, which is good, because, like the time I tried to read Eliot when I was 15, I wouldn’t have understood a goddamned thing.

My mother was big Carlin fan, as I found out later, for a couple of reasons;
1. He was Irish.
2. He was a recovering Catholic.
These were reasons enough, given that my mother was Irish and her side of the family had been Catholic until my grandfather had a beef with a Priest over tithing, and thus, my brother and I were never baptized into any religion, thus, damning the both of us to forever walk outside of the light the Lord.

I didn’t really notice, and neither did my brother, aside from never having our friends around to play with until much later on Sundays. My parents made this up to us by getting jelly donuts on Sundays, which we would eat with big glasses of milk, while my parents read the paper, watched Meet the Press, drank coffee and smoked Marlboros.

My father, he who would fetch the donuts, was also a big Carlin fan, and, in fact, owned the aforementioned copy of Class Clown. My father, whose father was an Episcopalian for two minutes sometime in 1909, was not religious in any sense of the word, but instead an idealist for whom the world always disappointed, loved Carlin’s “fuck you” world view.

My mother and father split up about eight months after I graduated; evidentially, my mother, too, was even more of an idealist for whom the world constantly disappointed, and this included my father, and our house, and me, I felt. Nothing like working ten hours at Taco Bell and come home to a collapsing marriage that isn’t your own, but your sense of family, and self, and history.

It is necessary to give you the background on all of this, because, by this point, my brother had moved out by this point, and it was me and my father in the house that was still haunted by my mother, because it was full of her stuff. She decorated it, after all, and we had to live in the womb she’d created called home. Except that instead of warmth and home and hearth, it was rancor, confusion, and the cold spot where someone used to be.

The first order of business after my mother quit home and the town where we’d lived, was to get cable. Indiana was finally getting cable (yes, this was the Nineties!!!) One of the first things my newly single father and I did together, in our new status as a duo, was get hammered and watch George Carlin’s 1992 special Jammin’ In New York, on a rerun, as I recall…

Wait! By then, I had gotten hammered on premixed screwdrivers with the Deacon, and listened to Class Clown, no, wait it was AM/FM, but whatever…

Anyway, while drinking beer with my Dad, and howling ecstatically at Carlin’s riffs on language, realizing that he possessed a poet’s love of the symbol (by this time, I did understand Eliot’s attention to symbol) as well as linguist’s ability to dismantle the assumptions about phrase and instead, work with the actual information, to find truth in humor and humor in truth.

Zesty! Tangy!

Carlin possessed the rarest of gifts; He was confrontational without being cruel, prickly without being a prick. He understood, as well as anybody, that the institutions we hold as sacred cows are just as good eating any other cow. He understood, better than most, the nature of the New Right, and spent the better part of his career cataloging every shoddy shitty thing they did. Carlin eruditely pointed out on Maher’s Show that “Germany lost the war, but Fascism won”. How true is that shit?

So, as Carlin hits his stride with his deconstruction of Gulf War I (DICK Cheney and COLON (sic) Powell), I looked over at my Dad, the Goldwater Conservative, laughing his balls off, and I knew, I knew, that this Magic User, the lefty that he is, and his father, had transcended the ideological, and that my Dad and I were essentially sharing a world view-we just differed on the ways and means that people are fucking stupid-just like Carlin.

As the show wound down, my Dad, semi drunkenly, shambled down the hall, and a few minutes late, shambled back. He brought two cans of beer into the living room, and a stack of vinyl records. On top, was a vinyl copy of Class Clown, and underneath that was the Allman Brothers Band Live at the Fillmore East. He handed me a can of beer (Coors, if my memory serves). We partied. Everything was gonna be alright.

As I woke up this morning, and blearily read the ticker at the bottom of MSNBC’s tragicomic Morning Joe, I just layed there, broken, sad. Then the texts came.

You know somebody like Carlin would not likely out live you, yet, I have not really known a world where he was not there, touring, putting out comedy specials, making me laugh. I know that when I go to see my Dad later this week, its going to be sad, but, in all likelihood, we’ll do his bits for each other just as we always have since that night all those years ago.

Georgie…

Oh Georgie…

UPDATE: Via The Deacon...

Carlin's Obituary...By Carlin.

Steny Hoyer is Bush's Gimp

Yup.

You heard me. This FISA legislation is a piece of shit that gives King George everything he wanted, including telecom immunity.

Good work, you spineless turds.

Unfortunately, my guy is on the shit list too. Barack, buddy... I didn't get flipped off by the elderly and told to "go fuck myself" a couple of months ago (and soon again) to have you pulling shit like this.

Get it together, man. Do the right thing.

You too. Contact your Senators NOW.

The Massive Understandment of the Year.

"McClellan called that kind of response to sensitive questions by Bush and other politicians 'essentially evasion'."

Office 2007 Can Suck It!!!

Fully compatible with Windows XP

Granted, with my institutional discount, it only cost 10 bucks, but after 9 months of trying to get the slow as molasses thing to work, I have given up, and reverted back to Office 2003, which I am pleased to report, is lightning quick.

Certainly, there were things to like about 07, particularly Word. I liked the flexibility of typing my blogposts in Word, and being able to post to this blog. I also like the multipanel compare and merge function, which made grading revisions much easier.

These wonderous features hardly justified the enormous amount of time and memory it took to save a file to a location not "My Documents", for examples. We are talking minutes here!

However, a note of caution: going back to Office 2003 is not a matter of slapping the disc back in, and voila! Oh no...see Office 2007, particularly if you use Outlook, changes a certain .dll so that, when you return to 2003 Outlook, with functionality, you will be greated with this message:

"Mapi32.dll is corrupt or the wrong version. Please reinstall Outlook."

Here's the cruelest part: Reinstalling Outlook doesn't fix the problem. Reinstalling Office doesn't fix the problem (unless, of course, you reinstall 07!). Hell, doing a repair reinstall of XP doesn't fix the problem.

Guess what else: The Official Microsoft help suggestion(s) DO NOT fix the problem, either.

You know what does fix the problem, which I discovered after literally 9 hours of going between safe mode and regular, logging on as the administrator, etc. This does:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033. Rename the MSMAPI32.DLL to MSMAPI32.OLD

This is, of course, typical for Microsoft (anyone remember Millenium?), a VERY BIG CORPORATION who will take something reliable, like 98SE and introduce Millenium,or XP, and replace it with Vista, all in the pathetic attempt to be all flashy and slick like Apple, except they invariably fuck it all up.

At any rate, here's to the end of the nightmare of Office 2007. Anybody know how to get the blog functionality in 2003?

I'm Glad They Apologized...But...

In a year in which we look toward a real transformation politic, and by extension, the evolution of our country from good hearted, though petulant teenager to an adult among nations, willing to treat its citizens, and all citizens, with basic dignity, I was really sad to hear that the blatant discrimination against Muslims is going on at campaign rallies.

But not McCain's. It happened at an Obama rally.

Is this "other" that Edward Said wrote so eloquently about so powerful a gravitational pull that, even in the air of change, it still stinks up the joint?

Whoever the volunteers are that did this...

You embarrass me.

You embarrass yourself.

You embarrass this country.

It's All Really Happening, Isn't It?

Kind of after the fact, Al, but better late than never.

For the last week or so, I have been up to my beard in work of all kinds(end of the quarter work, prepping two courses for the summer, taking classes, grading, rehabbing an ankle) and have disconnected from the political world, and missed somethings (the death of Tim Russert, who, frankly, I didn't care for all that match).

One of the things I didn't miss was the ever continuing chicken little wailing of some of the Hillaristas (check the comments out here):

"The night of June 3. the laurels of victory should be hers but the ghosts of Caesar's assassins haunt the public forum and have succeeded in yet again attempting to bring to power an unworthy Brutus. Mr. Obama and his accomplices should not rest easy on any night.Their actions of gaming the very undemocratic caucuses to run-up their man's delegate numbers have made a mockery of the public will."

No, I didn't miss this shit one bit.

The Post Mordem/HOPE

Over at the Daily Kos, they have broken down the crash and burn of the Clinton campaign in four steps:

1. Why Clinton Lost
   

   "How, though, did Hillary Clinton go from presumptive frontrunner to a pummeled second choice? The most obvious answer: people started voting, instead of just talking about voting, and that right there is when things went off the rails. But could she have pulled it off? How close was she? Was it gaffes and botched strategy that landed her behind Obama, or was Obama simply an unstoppable force? Or were her presumptive chances simply that -- presumptive -- a fiction of media supporters who simply assumed the most well known figure was the inevitable one?"
   

2. Change and the Bush Legacy
   

   "My sense is that voters - including some Independents and Republicans - are so angry at George Bush that in addition to looking forward to new (and actual) leadership, they'd like an opportunity also to hit the "smite" button on Bush's legacy. They want a chance to voice their disgust and to reject everything he stands for as he heads out the door. By trying to straddle a line on using force against Iraq and then Iran, Clinton made it more difficult for them to feel like a vote for her was also an unambiguous rejection of Bushism - however much she differs from Bush in most respects."
   

3. Supporter Passion
   

   "But in a campaign that ran short of money and dragged on for months longer than expected, even without the Obama campaign's innovative channeling of the passion of its supporters, the Clinton campaign's business-as-usual approach to rank-and-file supporters represents a resource squandered. This was crucially about campaign organization and strategy. But watching Clinton's supporters, online and off, it seems to me something deeper happened. As long as Clinton was inevitable, and the establishment candidate, and getting her money from big donors, she didn't ask for her supporters to do much, and they, as passionately as many of them felt about Hillary Clinton as a candidate, did not fully buy into her campaign, did not feel responsibility for it."
   

4. Too Soon a Bulldog
   

   "But for me, the show ended in South Carolina.  It was there that the Clinton campaign took two unfortunate and related turns.  One was a shift away from ideological differences with the Obama campaign, and a turn toward basing her case along demographic lines.  The second was the full emergence of Bill Clinton, bulldog.
   

   In many presidential elections, the vice-presidential candidate often gets that bulldog job.  It's the veep who throws out the tough statements, allowing the presidential candidate to glide along above the controversy.  The veep who says the things that may be below the belt, but which leave doubt in the voter's minds.  This season, Bill Clinton took on that role."  
   

Lookit…

I've been rather critical of the Senator from New York for the whole season, but I must concede the fact that her Concession and Support speech was excellent, giving me hope that this turning point will not be a further turn to the right. I think what she did, ultimately, may help Obama by taking away McCain's most potent weapons against him. It maybe, in the course of time, that though we will speak of President Obama in reverent terms, but know that it was Hillary Clinton who saved the Democratic Party with her tireless championing of her party's candidate, and her unwavering devotion to the cause of us all, and not just its embodiment in a "leader".

The history to be made here (and I think that we may have lost sight of this) is that we, as a country, maybe finally growing up, and now longer acting like a petulant child abroad, and a spoiled, selfish brat at home. Instead, we turn away from the disastrous narcissism of Corporate Conservatism, the sanctimony of the Social Conservatism, and all other bastardized branches of Goldwater's thought, which, reduced to its essence in the virtual personhood of BushCo, is at best Corporatist and, and worst, Semi Fascist. The history was never going to be the gender or ethnicity of the candidate; It was, a priori, always about our Constitution, and its restoration. I hope, really, that all Americans, understand this (and if you don't understand that this needs to be done at all, then…um…well, you probably have already stopped reading).

Summer's Here and the Time is Right…Let's turn this fucker around already!!!

FINALLY!

MSNBC JUST REPORTED THAT HILLARY CLINTON IS THROWING IN THE TOWEL, AND WILL ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA FRIDAY!!!

Cognitive Dissonance

Via Tom (over at Radio Free Newport):

"Obama will either concede now or in November.

Obama won’t win Democrats he needs to win (like the Democrats on this very website). In state after state many Democrats clearly state they will either NOT vote, vote for the unacceptable John McCain, or write in Hillary’s name. That Democrats, many who have never voted for a Republican or nightmared about voting for a Republican, to say they will vote for a Republican is shocking and foreshadows doom for the Democratic? Party in November - if Superdelegates actually vote for Rezko/Ayres/Pfleger/Wright/Farrakhan’s friend - Obama.

Hillary supporters will not vote for Obama on any ticket. Last night, at the Hillary rally, the shouts were Denver, Denver - not tears nor surrender.

No tears nor surrender came from the voters of South Dakota either. No matter how much Big Media insisted Obama was the nominee the people voted for Hillary. Big Media cannot force feed Obama to “bitter” small town America. "

Come for the Right Wing Talking Points. Stay for the Looney rants in the comment section.

To Paraphrase: YES WE CAN

WTF?!?

From the Belly of the Beast:

"MI & Fla
I watched the 9 1/2 hour R&B meeting. Hats off to Tina and Harold for speaking out! I am so disillusioned with our Party. Why vote when the r&b can take your votes and apply them as they see fit.

Why be on the ballet? They will just take votes from somewhere and give them to you to equal things out. Is this democracy? This entire election is so unfair to Hillary. I can honestly say that if BHO wins this I will not vote for him. 4 more years is not that long to put up with McCain. I guess it's the principle of the entire process. R&B committee has people so angry we will never be united. I will keep praying for Hillary. She is the best! She has the vote of the people, this should count for something! Keep donating to help Hillary. We can still win this election!! AZ, your video made me cry! It's beautiful!

by joanna0902 at 6/1/2008 10:04:24 AM"

"I just had a nice chat with the DNC via e-mail.

I doubt that they will like my quick note to them about democratic principles and the lack there-of by the party today. Any candidate who professes to be Presidential would demand that every vote be counted. I will say this, Karl Rove and Richard Nixon would be proud of Senator Obama for his "new style" of politics. I am done with the party. America is far more important than a party anyway. I believe that I might just have to make contribution number 24 for the good of the cause.

by drbodkin at 5/31/2008 10:24:33 PM"

Emptywheel chimes in with some food for thought. Meteorblades has some thoughts as well.

Not that I probably have any Clinton supporters left who read this blog (if I ever did), but if I do, and you are just passing by...

Please tell me why you are doing this, and what fuels your anti- Obama hatred?