grisly

Sarah Palin... backed five candidates in Arizona, Florida, and Alaska—and they all won.... Twenty of the candidates she's endorsed have won. Ten have lost. [slate.com and washingtonpost.com]

If she runs in 2012, and I think that "if" is looking weaker and weaker, she'll have tons and tons of advertising and astroturf support, thanks to oil infrastructure billionaires and the Citizens United victory in the Supreme Court.

Sarah Palin is your next George W. Bush.

a vile deed

A friend/associate's very clean and tasty site design for http://jaxvineyards.com/ has been ripped off. A boo and a hiss for the ripper-offer.

catch-up 22

Usually I write these posts directly in the blogger online app. It’s a little balkier and likely to fubar than a desktop word processor, but like a hanging in the morning, I find it tends to concentrate the mind.
I have a lot of bibs and bobs to catch up on, tho, and I’ll feel more free to just catch up if I write and revise this entry offline.
Joseph Stack, for example, remember him? Flew his airplane into an IRS building last summer, killed an apparently nice guy named Vernon Hunter? I felt that Stack might be the starting pistol, so to speak, of informal violent reaction to a Black president, right-wing propaganda, and a failing economy, but if so, it’s taking its time kicking out the chocks.
I was dead wrong that vilifying Elena Kagan would be this summer’s death-panel march, and I’m still surprised by this. It seems such an obvious play for the Right, a way to add to their governmental cock-blocking an actual assertive attack on the Obama administration.
They haven’t been able to make much partisan hay of the Gulf oil spill - and remember, how much of a weapon they can try to make of it has nothing to do with the actual foundation of blame, which is still more W’s than O’s.
I also don’t know that the positing of all Muslims everywhere as The Enemy is going to get much mileage out of the so-called “9/11 Mosque,” although the marketing so far has been a great success. (Quick, what’s the real name of the proposed cultural center?)
I was pondering and pondering the lack of Kagan vilification - what was I missing? - when I realized that maybe the Repubs had simply erred, that I had identified the best play based on their performance in the last 30-40 years but they had not. Evil does not mean omniscient, perhaps they will regret this in retrospect.
It may also be that they are afraid of riling up their Tea Party minions, who have actually been exercising their franchise rights, as if they had a right to choose their representatives or something. The serfs are revolting, and also not obeying their party/corporate masters. The latter don’t want to accidentally further empower the former, lest they lose the whip hand.
...lost track of myself. What was I asseverating? Oh yeah. The sleep of reason producing monsters.
“Sarah Palin will be the Republican candidate for President in 2012,” I wrote, on May Day, and very soon Andrew Sullivan and any number of other folk on right, left, and horseback have dared to utter the same. I see no reason to retract. I’m still not saying she would win. And I have never said that she would lose. It’s crazy, isn’t it? But do not despair. Remember when everybody was talking about that crazy global warming thing? And that never came true.
More fun TK.

doldrum

The doldrums I refer to are personal, haven't been stirred by anything much the last week or so. No biggie, 'cause not a depression. But I think this is the longest between posts (and the previous one was a shortie) since I began blogging regularly.
Extremities of weather continue. Virtually nothing new has made it to the American media about the unusually low temps causing deaths in Peru, part of a general South American cold snap. Meanwhile, Pakistan is flooded, the death rate in Moscow has been doubled (think of that, twice as many people dying than usual) due largely to smoke and smog from raging forest fires, extreme swimming is now possible in newly melted glacial pools in the Himalayas.
I think there's a local symptom even more alarming than the high-temp summer days of this past North American July: unseasonal breeze.
In my experience, the typical NYC summer of the last 20 years has been hot and stifling - the immobile and often massively humid air has been dreadful. A couple of times last summer I remember noting that the temp was up in the 90s, which would usually poleax me, but a pleasant zephyr was keeping the air in motion - I felt a little cooler and a little drier. [Cliche regarding humidity vs heat]
This has become more common this summer. I'm sure an examination of weather records would bear my observation out. The air has been in motion even on most of the hottest days, anything from a breeze to a downright wind that made tree branches sway back and forth.
I'd be personally grateful, but I think it is a bad portent. Global climate change is a disruption in equilibrium. When forces shift that have formerly been in balance, energy is redistributed, and until it settles down, hot areas become hotter, cold ones colder, temperate realms become a little differently temperate, in timing, in distribution, and when the breeze blows more constantly than it did before, energy somewhere is finding new places to distribute itself. Oh yeah, things like unusually powerful windstorms and oddly located tornados, they happen, too. And the disequilibria proliferate.
Assuming everything is about to go out of balance, eventually everything will come back into balance again. But there's no obligation for the weather to do so on a human timetable, or to suit human needs.

killing

Hundreds of people freezing to death in Peru, due to lowest temperatures recorded in 50 years. As of this posting, no Google News links to this story lead to U.S. newspapers. Found on truthdig.com.