Shakesville

Grab Yer Ankles, America

Because here it comes, without a reacharound:

Alaskan Pipeline Closure May Fuel Motorists' Ire

"May." How cheerfully optimistic. And nothing like a headline pun for a story this serious.

The Bay Area will not face an oil shortage, but gas prices may jump in the weeks to come following a shutdown of Alaska oil supplies, experts said Monday.

London-based BP Amoco PLC, the world's second-largest oil supplier, is shutting down half of its production on Alaska's North Slope to repair rusted, leaking pipes. As a result, BP said, output will be reduced by 400,000 barrels a day, close to 8 percent of U.S. production.

The disruption should not immediately reduce the supply of gasoline from California refineries, state energy officials said. California gets about one-fifth of its oil from Alaska.

But oil prices already have risen, jumping more than $2 a barrel to almost $77 a barrel, on Monday.

For the record, on September 11, 2001, oil prices were $19 a barrel.

Local energy mavens urged consumers not to top off their tanks out of panic.

"There's two ways to react to this news: You can be part of the problem or part of the solution," said Sean Comey of AAA of Northern California.

"If you run out and start topping off your tank, it could create an artificial surge in demand, which would drive up prices," he said.

Instead, consumers should make an effort to conserve fuel by telecommuting, taking mass transportation and carpooling to work, Comey said.

"This would relieve pressure on the system and help keep prices stable," Comey said.

Yeah, I'm sure your average American will get right on that. When your big gas saving measure is to buy a Hummer H3 instead of a Hummer H2, I don't see too many people carpooling or hopping on a bus.

And, of course, nothing from anyone in Washington calling for more responsible energy policy, or new, renewable energy sources.

Having all of our eggs in one basket works so well, doesn't it?

(Come on baby, light my cross-post...)

Schlock and Awe

If these terror profiteers were clever, they'd price their "2001-2006 World Trade Center Commemorative," complete with "Certificate of Authenticity verifying its 24 KT gold and .999 pure Ground Zero recovery silver content" for $9.11. Then no one could resist this fabulous offer.

Says Matt, who gets the hat tip: "[T]hese coins are sure to please the dim-witted jingoist in your household. A whopping $5 of every $30 order will be donated to 9/11 charities. That's 17%, for those of you counting at home. The National Collector's Mint would have increased that percentage, but a shyster's gotta live, you know?"

Sure. But what does he do to sleep at night?

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)

The greatest threat to America's military

(Hint: It's the GOP.)

Driftglass pulls together a couple of news stories on the state of our military, which reveal that the U.S. National Guard is "$23 billion in the hole after five years of war and national disasters" and of our standing military, "the Army alone needs $17.1 billion to reset its force in 2007 and anticipates an annual yearly bill of $12 billion to $13 billion until two or three years after the Iraq war ends to reconstitute its equipment back to fighting form." In what I imagine will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention, Congress has not, of course, provided anything remotely close to the necessary funding.

One of Bush's key planks in 2000 was needing to rescue the military from its neglect under Democratic leadership, but the state of preparedness of our armed forces has worsened significantly in the last six years.

Bush told the Republican National Convention in 2000: "If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report ... 'Not ready for duty, sir,'" he said.

"How many divisions will we have to report that way to that question today based on the reporting system, General Pace?" said Rhode Island Democrat Sen. Jack Reed.

Pace confirmed that two-thirds of the brigades in the Army would now report as not ready.

Insert your own grousing about tax cuts during a time of war here.

Says Drifty, "So we know what one problem clearly is: The armed forces are broke and on the verge of being broken. By Republicans. By the Party of God which is now, in effect, crying poormouth over having to find enough money to fund the military at the level it needs to if it wants to win the war in Iraq (whatever the fuck that means anymore), preserve the military, and be ready for future threats. It is that simple. So what are they willing to spend -- and spend lavishly -- on? Tax cuts for billionaire. Throwing money at men already wallowing in more cash that any thousand people would know what to do with."

There's more, oh so much more, at the link.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Welcome Back, Kotter

Question of the Day

What's your favorite way to spend a lazy day?

Mr. Shakes had the day off work today, hence the relative paucity of posts. See you tomorrow.

WTF

The military court hearing has begun for the US soldiers who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then set her on fire, killing her, and murdering her family. The hearing will decide whether the soldiers should be court-martialed. And it looks like both the accused and their defense attorneys are taking the whole thing pretty seriously.

Defense Attorney Captain Jimmie Culp was blowing chewing gum bubbles while Yribe, sitting to his left, began sucking on a red lollipop during the testimony.

Apparently, these guys just like mixing rape-murder and snacks.

Green said he wanted to go to a house and kill some Iraqis, Barker wrote in his sworn statement.

After the rape and murders, he wrote that he began to grill chicken wings.

Assholes.

Caption This Photo

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, left, looks on as President Bush holds a news conference on Monday, Aug. 7, 2006 in Crawford, Texas. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke about the Mideast during a meeting with reporters at his Texas ranch. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Kids These Days

Hughes points to an article that reports only 20% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 21% of 12- to 17-year-olds have a favorable view of Bush. They’re pissed off about the war (“Young people take it very personally. They feel like it’s their generation that’s been asked to sacrifice.”) and about social issues (“The very cultural issues the president wants to use to rally his party’s base are exactly the issues that are alienating younger voters. Across a broad swath of social issues, younger Americans see the administration as being out of line with what they believe.”)

Darn those kids and their not hatin’ the gays and shit.

I hope the Bush administration leaves this upcoming generation with an inextricable association between the GOP and the callous disregard for life, liberty, and equality that is their true legacy, all pretensions to principled conservatism notwithstanding. Even principled conservatism, which in its naked application facilitates a plutocratic social Darwinism that is a blight on a democracy which enthuses equality, is a gross failure when left unchecked. Conservatives now suggesting the need to re-embrace an abandoned strain of libertarianism are fools if they believe it will compensate for the ugly destination of their movement’s economic and cultural injustices, now revealed so evidently.

The kids are on to them. Let’s hope they send these avaricious, opportunistic, conformity-charmed bastards back to the wilderness for another 40 years where they fucking belong.

Total Scumbag

If you haven’t yet read this profile of Girls Gone Wild magnate Joe Francis, give it a look, and then check out the commentary by Jessica, Amanda, and Zuzu.

I don’t really have anything to add, except that I had the distinct misfortune of watching the despicable Joe Francis in action once, and he is truly even more odious than the article manages to convey, if you can believe it. I’ve met some real pigs in my day, but that piece of shit takes the cake.

America 2.0: The Wild Frontier

I’m not an anti-gun nut; my brother-in-law is a hunter, who hunts only what he can eat, wasting nothing, and I have no compulsion whatsoever to take his rifles away from him. But this is just fucking madness:

In the last year, 15 states have enacted laws that expand the right of self-defense, allowing crime victims to use deadly force in situations that might formerly have subjected them to prosecution for murder.

…The Florida law, which served as a model for the others, gives people the right to use deadly force against intruders entering their homes. They no longer need to prove that they feared for their safety, only that the person they killed had intruded unlawfully and forcefully. The law also extends this principle to vehicles.

In addition, the law does away with an earlier requirement that a person attacked in a public place must retreat if possible. Now, that same person, in the law’s words, “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” The law also forbids the arrest, detention or prosecution of the people covered by the law, and it prohibits civil suits against them.

In one case, a guy was shot twice “during a dispute over how many garbage bags [he] had put out.” The shooter, his neighbor, wasn’t arrested. Give me a fucking break. What defines being “attacked” and having “force” used against you? If someone verbally threatens you, or even throws a punch, you now have the right to use “deadly force” to defend yourself? Yeesh. Does this mean I get to shoot aggressive panhandlers? Can I shoot a guy at a bar who won’t leave me alone? It seems to me the defensibility of either of those acts is determined singularly by my own assessment of how at risk my personal safety is, giving jumpy, prejudiced fuckwits a rationale for shooting to assuage their own cultural anxieties. The same idiot knob-ends who feel compelled to lock their car doors when driving through a poor neighborhood now have carte blanche to shoot first and ask questions later. Superb.

Breaking News: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Retrofuck jackholes take over state; gays hit the road.

Twenty states have amended their constitution to ban same-sex marriage since 2004. Virginia state legislators passed a law two years ago that prohibits "civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage." A proposed constitutional amendment, which will go to voters in November, excludes any "unmarried individuals" from "union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage."

Many gay people in Virginia and some family-law attorneys say they worry that the state law and proposed amendment are more far-reaching than simple bans on gay marriage -- that the measures could threaten the legal viability of the contracts used by gay couples to share ownership of property and businesses.

…Married people get these rights automatically through long-established common law.

LGBT folks are increasingly moving out of Virginia for the more legally supportive D.C. (or elsewhere). Fuck Virginia; there is no sanity clause.

Emmanuel Vaughan, who writes customer-service training scripts, is another transplant. He moved to a place in the District in October, putting his Arlington house up for sale. He said he moved because he became angry over what the state legislature was doing, and he worried that he and his partner, Drew Lent, an international trainer, could be in legal jeopardy.

"As an African-American, having grown up during the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, Ala., I am not willing to have my rights taken away from me by ignorant, religious zealots who don't respect the constitutional understanding of separation of Church and State when scripting laws," he wrote in an e-mail. "It was apparent to me that things weren't getting any better, but worse. Why should I continue to pay taxes to support such a hateful government?"

Why indeed. When even your basic rights of inheritance, hospital visitation, joint property ownership, parenting, marriage—all the things straights take for granted—are not guaranteed, and are in fact targeted for prevention, you’re being subjected to no less than taxation without representation. Gee, didn’t we fight a war over that once…?

It’s precisely this kind of backwards, regressive, punitive legislation directed at gays, and its counterpart regarding reproductive rights (including conscience clauses and the sale of emergency birth control) directed at women, that will divide America into two countries. There will be states in which people are truly equal, and states in which people are not, forcing them to seek out a full life of realized potential and opportunity elsewhere. And it’s not difficult to see what that means for the economies of those respective states, as educated, upwardly mobile, independent, creative, forward-thinking people turn the blue enclaves even bluer, and leave the puritanical, ignorant backwater states from which they come even redder, wallowing in a brain-drain and an environment hostile to modern corporations who assert the need to treat all employees equally.

There was a time, not so long ago, that a state could get away with shit like this and not suffer for it, because nowhere else was so much better. That’s just not true anymore.

(Pam’s got a great rant on this one. Head on over and check it out.)

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Golden Girls

Averting the End of the Affair

Colin, dear, come sit beside me and take this old woman’s hand. Yes, I know I’m only two years older than you, darling, but for the purposes of this conversation, I am a wise and wizened dame of a noble Southern tradition, and you must fix your dark eyes upon me, still and attentive, while we have a wee chat.

Not so many years ago, you launched into the collective consciousness, seemingly from the ether, with nothing to sustain your reputation for greatness. You, and your stories of debauchery and rebellion, were everywhere. Overexposure, thought I, thy name is Colin Farrell. For this, young lad, I unfairly dismissed you, hated you even. I was tired of you before I ever saw you in a film, and for this I apologize.

In Tigerland, you gave a hint of the talent that laid beneath your rather lovely skin, suggesting that the smoldering eyes were more than a mere aesthetic charm. A gateway, perhaps, to something real and raw. I began to reconsider my assessment. Then, there you were in Minority Report, a film for which I had no love at all, my pet, except for the opportunity it granted me to broaden my hopes for you that much more. You could hold your own against a certified star, and effortlessly upstage him. My heart opened a bit more with Phone Booth and The Recruit—not great films, but fun enough, and you were, I reluctantly admitted, captivating, even in films that did not aspire to greatness. Still, I was not wholly convinced, but then—then, Colin darling—was A Home at the End of the World. And you slayed me.

By the time the credits rolled over Bobby Morrow, you had reached through the screen and drawn me toward you, and I was perfectly content to never leave.

And that’s when everything started to go horribly, horribly wrong.

I watched you in the wreck that was Alexander, fighting to retain your dignity among its ruins, and you did an admirable job, but it was, in the end, a wretched failure. Well, everyone stumbles now and again, love. But you picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, rid your hair of its horrible brassiness, and careened headlong into another disaster. I’ve just spent two hours of my life that I shall never get back with the horrendous mess that is The New World, and though every scene worth watching had you at its center, your soulful eyes conveying precisely what they were meant to convey and probably more, it was, quite plainly, another dismal flop.

And you’re following it with Miami Vice. This, sweetness, will not, I fear, rekindle the waning embers of your fire.

Beyond that, I see Pride and Glory, a film about cops with a costar called Edward Norton, who shares the name of another once-great actor full of spectacular potential. Whatever happened to him? I’m not sure two lost souls can arise from the ashes of the Phoenix. You ought steer clear of has-beens.

Speaking of which, we must talk a moment about this Woody Allen project. Can Woody deliver both you and Ewan McGregor from your chains? There may be an audience who yearn to see Sonny Crockett and Obi-Wan Kenobi waxing neurotic, but I struggle to define the demographic.

And the pinnacle of the dreadful trifecta of upcoming projects—another Terrence Malick film. As if The New World weren’t bad enough alone, you’ve got to add another of his meandering, dialogue-starved filmsongs to your teetering résumé, co-starring with Mel Gibson, to boot. This is not what I had hoped for, dear.

I’m going to give you a few names, my love, and commit them to your mind. Jane Campion. Sam Mendes. Damien O’Donnell. Marc Forster. Stephen Daldry. They are directors who need you, and whom you need. Chuck your agent. Get a new one who will phone these directors and endeavor to restore your luster. You won me over once, darling, but even true love fades with inattention. I am longing for our love affair that began at the end of world. Take me back, Colin. Make this old heart flutter again.

Hurricane Katherine

The first disgruntled ex-staffer to market a tell-all book on the Category 5 disaster known as the Katherine Harris campaign will end up rich, rich, rich. Richer than Croesus, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. And it still won't be adequate compensation for having had to work for the Senate candidate they call the Hurricane.

The former aides said their differences with her were over personality, not politics. Several said they continued working for her, despite the way she treated them, because they believed in her mission.
"I have never in my life worked for somebody like her — ever — and hopefully I'll never have to again," James Dornan [Harris' first campaign manager] said.

Jamie Miller, Harris' second campaign manager, who quit in April, said, "It's almost like she won't allow herself to be successful with someone else helping her.

"Any time it's not about her, she makes it about her."

More:

Dornan recalled another incident when Harris arrived at a major rally after most of the guests instead of being there to greet them as they arrived.
"She went ballistic," he said. "She told me I'd ruined her life," and screamed and cried in frustration. "It was a performance that will go down in history."

Harris micromanaged every aspect of the campaign, campaign managers and staffers said. Dornan recalled that after he'd shown Harris the campaign's headquarters, she gave him a diagram the next day showing where every staff person's desk should be located.

"I was just flabbergasted that a candidate of this magnitude was digging this deep into the minutia of the campaign," Dornan said.

I'm making room on my bookshelf right now.

(Hat tip to Ron Davis. Cross-posted back at the shack.)

And then you see it

A far white country, under a swift sunrise.

Susan Butcher, RIP.

Travesty of Mirth

I was invited to hold a symposium with Yale drama students. The symposium was arranged by the genial head of the Department of Theatre Arts at Yale. I found myself entering (through a door marked EXIT) an auditorium considerably smaller than the Shubert but containing a more than proportionately small audience. I would say roughly about twoscore and ten, not including a large black dog which was resting in the lap of a male student in the front row. My own position was in a folding chair behind a folding table on which was set a tumbler of what appeared to be plain water and which I immediately discovered to be just that. Furthermore, the young faces before me were uniformly inexpressive of any kind of emotional reaction to my entrance through that side door marked EXIT. In fact, the only face that betrayed a real interest was that of the dog.

I am not much good at disguising my feelings, and after a few moments I abandoned all pretense of feeling less dejection than I felt. I was talking. I was making these tired old jokes that come off like the destitute man's Bob Hopeless at an encampment in some failed war. I found myself sinking lower in the folding chair, and that slumped position, combined with fits of wheezing, sniffling, and coughing, encouraged some of the small assemblage to get up and walk out on me, a thing that stirred in my heart no sense of the favorably providential. Still I continued to hear myself talking but no longer telling old jokes. I heard myself describing an encounter, then quite recent, with a fellow playwright in the Oak Room Bar at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. I told them that this encounter had been inadvertent on both his part and mine, but since he happened to be my old friend Gore Vidal, I had embraced him warmly. However, Mr. Vidal is not a gentleman to be disarmed by a cordial embrace, and when, in response to his perfunctory inquiries about the progress of rehearsals of Out Cry I told him that its two performers, Michael York and Cara Duff-MacCormick, and the director, Peter Glenville, and the producer, David Merrick, all seemed a dream come true after many precedent nightmares, he smiled at me with a sort of rueful benevolence and said, "Well, Bird, it won't do much good, I'm afraid, you've had too much bad personal exposure for anything to help you anymore."

Well, then, for the first time, I could see a flicker of interest in the young faces before me. It may have been the magic word Vidal or it may have been his prophecy of my professional doom. At any rate, a young lady student of drama in the diminished group stood up to ask me if I regarded Gore's assessment of my present situation in my profession here in the States as a reliable one.

I looked at her in silence for a moment while wondering if I did so regard it, and I came to no conclusion about the question.

My eyes drifted from her face to that of the young man in the front row with the big black dog in his lap.

Laughter has always been my substitute for lamentation and I laugh as loudly as I would lament if I hadn't discovered a useful substitute for weeping. Usually I laugh longer than I should, as well as more loudly than I should. This time I cut short my travesty of mirth and said to the young lady, "Ask the dog."

(From Tennessee Williams' Memoirs, which I'm currently re-reading. My copy is a hardcover British first edition from 1976 that I picked up in a musty London bookshop for £3.50, which I adore, but a new edition in paperback is now available for pre-order, with an introduction by the splendid John Waters. I'll have to get that, too, someday.)

Yeesh

At a certain point, I don’t particularly care if these blowhards are deliberately misrepresenting policies to obfuscate their appalling realities or if they’re just being alarmingly obtuse. The intentions cease to have any relevance when you say something this fucking dumb:

”[W]e are turning our back on the middle-class and poor people in this country who depend on the minimum wage and death-tax relief.” — Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas

The proposed “death tax” (or, as it is known by anyone who favors integrity over hyperbole, “estate tax”) relief to which Hutchison is referring would exempt $5 million of an individual estate from taxation.

Now I grant you that I’m not the most well-connected girl in the world, but, in all my many years, I’ve yet to meet a middle-class or poor person who has $5 million lying around. In fact—and again, I admit I’m no genius—I’m pretty sure not having anything close to $5 million, on which deriving benefit from the estate tax proposal the GOP attached to the minimum wage bill is predicated, is sort of what makes someone middle-class or poor.

But maybe I’m just being too literal. Maybe what old Hutchy meant is that middle-class and poor people are dependent on the estate tax relief given to the wealthy, because that just means there will be more to trickle down on them. Though, still, I wonder if minimum wage workers would have time to collect all those pennies from heaven, what with the wanton spending sprees and luxury vacations they’d be taking with that extra two bucks an hour burning a hole in their pockets.

(Hat tip Jill. Crossposted at Ezra’s place.)

The Virtual Bar Is Open

As you can see, the alcoholic reinforcements have arrived. The stocks of the virtual bar are fully stocked and awaiting your orders. As always, drinks are on the house.

What's on your mind, Shakers? Don't be shy. There's nothing but love at the Virtual Bar. Lurkers, step on in. It's always more fun inside than out on the sidewalk.

Modification of Body Electorate

So I’m reading this story about the growing popularity of body modification, and I learn that some states are starting to criminalize procedures like tongue bifurcation. In my typical MYOB kind of way, I’m like, “Why the fuck should it be illegal if someone wants to split their frigging tongue in two?” I can understand regulating where something like that can be done, but banning it outright? Weird. Especially since “Many artists also won't do them for fear of lawsuits or insurance fiascos.” Isn’t that precisely the kind of self-policing by the marketplace which conservatives are always advocating? If no shops will do it, or only shops with properly trained staff and appropriate self-protections, then there’s no need for “Big Government” interference.

But, you know, only maladjusted, nonconformist freaks do body modification, and most of them—with all their high-falutin’ notions of personal freedom and whatnot—probably aren’t Bush voters, so like the dirty gays and uppity women, all sense of conservative principle can be damned when it comes to considering legislation to limit the pursuit of their particular happiness.

Everywhere you look these days—from hospital beds to tattoo parlors—is evidence of the abandonment of true conservatism in favor of the creeping fascism that the conservative movement has become. It’s not about small government; it’s about using the government as a weapon to limit the rights and freedoms being expressed (or fought for) by people with whom they disagree. Forget keeping the government out of our bedrooms—they’ve turned the government into a dirty little panty-sniffer.

And, somehow, this notion has gone mainstream in America, Land of the Free, in spite of most Americans’ declaring their commitment to its opposite, and what we’re left with is an electorate who doesn’t want the government sticking its pervy little nose in their business, but cheers when the government sticks its nose in someone else’s. The GOP has perfected the exploitation of this dichotomy, framing the denial of rights as a protection of existing rights, declaring the need to meddle in others’ lives as imperative to improving yours. Freedom is a zero-sum game—there’s only so much to go around, and if Joe Gay or Jane Feminist or Jamal Suspected Terrorist get theirs, Joe Straight gets a little less of his—and hey, if we need to expand the government to do it, it’s cool. It’s all in the name of Freedom.

All while they trumpet their credentials as the party of privacy and limited government.

All I know is that I’m so bloody sick of the hypocrisy, evident—so painfully evident—in nearly everything movement conservatism does, that I could puke. And I’d take all the beautiful, independent, bifurcated-tongued freaks in the world over the forked-tongued miscreants who would see them legislated out of existence.

What's Good for the Goose...

I'm sure you all remember the "Brooks Brothers Riot" during the 2000 election, when Republican aides posed as "local supporters" and tried to stop the recount.

Well, if it worked once, why not use it again?

More here.

Republican "tactics." Nice.

(Tip of the energy dome to Tom Tomorrow. Cross-post in the outlet by the light switch...)