Rudy has failed

Boy’s got no stomach for a fight. Remember how he bailed out of battling Clinton for the US Senate seat? A gutless wonder, buoyed by the shouts of the mob, hoping to be put on the balcony by acclaim. But the mob is fickle… after all, who was the last Catholic Italian American nominated for President by the GOP? Or even broader, the last white ethnic? Um, have they ever? But don’t cry for Rudy, he'll go back to exploiting the dead of 9/11 with his whorish consulting firm, enriching himself and his cronies by bilking the gullible. Tonight, he's said to begin licking McCain's ass, building those bridges to suck up those national security contracts. Soon after, he'll trade in his latest wife for a new model.

In reviewing 4 Monthes, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the new film about a woman trying to get an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania, Hoberman nails Waitress, Knocked Up, & Juno as movies which present women as being without agency, as being fated to give birth after unwanted pregnancies. Acts of “God,” you might say, or “nature,” or in Waitress, brutal spouses. The endless drumming from America’s Taliban, who use the Orwellian phrase “pro-life” to describe their fundamentalist/misogynistic/anti-sex/anti-contraception agenda, has mostly drowned out the reasons why reproductive freedom is such a touchstone for women’s liberation. But not all of us have forgotten, and as cute as Ellen Page is, I’m not buying the sugarcoated fantasies of the patriarchs, fascists, fetus-fetishists, and priest-mullahs. The dictatorship of "God/nature/men" looks like this: half a million Romanian women are estimated to have died from botched abortions between 1966-89, and the infamous orphanages were overflowing hellholes.

Go-go

Wooo-wee! The hysterics running the markets, that o-so-rational beast, are frothing at the mouth after a bomb run of a Monday in the international gambling pits. “Wall Street” is yo-yoing after a Fed rescue mission; must be those damn unflattering smocks they are forced to wear on the floor.

This traitor-to-his-class has a great piece in Harper’s on our bubble economy. Others call it casino economy, gambling nation, or lottery fantasyland, but whatever you want to call it, it’s all about speculation and the hysteria of mobs. That is our only growth mechanism. Janszen breaks down the internet bubble (glory days!), the bursting-as-we-type housing bubble, and wonders what’s next. The alternative energy market!

Cloned fecal-meat product, yum!

The industry-friendly (if not industry-enslaved) FDA claims cloned animals are the same eatin’ as natural animals. In way, they’re right: the stuff is as tasteless, poisoned, and nasty as the shit that already comes from the industrial food complex. It’s not meat anymore and hasn’t been for ages; it’s meat-like product.

Cloning is a form of in-breeding; it defeats of the genetic point of reproduction, which is to mix genes and throw a new toss of the dice into the evolutionary gamble. Cloning thus reproduces the errors, breakdowns, and corruptions of the past. Of course, it’s inevitable that h. sapiens will be cloned. All is vanity, after all. People are going to be surprised how different these clones turn out to be from their models, though. “From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,/But as the riper should by time decrease,/His tender heir might bear his memory;" (W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 1)

Michigan

Man, isn’t the economy talk from the GOPpers in Michigan sickening? This is the party that has led (and make the mistake, the Democrats have followed) the assault on the working class and the undermining of the middle class; this is the party of oligarchy, of heredity elites, of channeling money to the top. This is the party that has looted the commonwealth and gutted our health, welfare, and environmental safe-guards. Sure, the GOP’s numbers come from cannon fodder among the proletariat and the white ethnic working class, but that’s because they’ve been suckered by the god-talk and the covert race talk. God-damned fools keep voting against their interests; perhaps one day they will realize you can’t eat culture or the Bible.

And what's up with the Democrats in Michigan? The national party got pissy (and suicidal) because the state wanted to move up their primary and "threaten" the nonsense of Iowa and New Hampshire; so the bosses stripped the state of its delegates. Only Clinton and Kucinich are on the ballot (and there's no write-in). God-damned losers, those Democrats.

Tom Engelhardt’s one of the best commentators on our appalling times that I know. Here he reminds us that the US has been long been using waterboarding (since at least the long war to colonize the Philippines a century ago), that torture has been standard operating procedure for the national security state (either directly or through trained surrogates), that projects like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of Vietnamese. But most of these things were far away, marginal to the general run of the American fantasy, and, of course, officially deniable. No longer. Now the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of enemies (or as Abu Ghraib and our own domestic criminal justice system reveal, alleged enemies), is right out in the open, acceptable and official. Concentration camps, torture centers, and extrajudicial execution are a given. Politicians lobby for it. It’s permeated our culture, our politics and of course our entertainment. GOP candidates, to show how “tough” they are, boast that they’ll be the ones to expand the camps, torture more people, and make habeas corpus but a dream of pussy fifth-columnist liberals. Even third party dreamboats like Mike Bloomberg have accepted it; his instant prison camp during the GOP convention was a squalid containment of legitimate and vital dissent.

Don't you love Torture Guy extoling his hollow version of democracy amidst the kleptocratic/theocratic/feudal bandit kinglets of the Oil Kingdoms?