Joe the Plumber is Amazing

I want this man in Congress.

I want him given a limitless soapbox to say this kind of shit, forever.  I want Americans to know how juvenile, anti-intellectual and bloodthirsty the Republican party is.  Now that it’s a lot smaller than it used to be, the profoundly evil people have total control over it.  Four years ago, a Joe the Plumber peregrinating around the country like a wingnut errant would have really upset me because it seemed then like the Permanent Republican Majority was actually happening.  But if the economy can contract 6.2% in the 4th quarter while Obama’s approval actually climbed over the past week, I think the time when these people hold sway is over for good.  It’s for real now, and Americans prefer leadership over stupidity.

They’ll never stop, and actually, they’ll probably get worse for awhile as their waning influence dawns on them.  I honestly think what killed the GOP is that their Us vs. Them mentality expanded Them until it included almost everyone, leaving Us painfully frightened and alone.

Sweet Old Lady (and Her Creepy Owl) Cookin It Up

OMG, I love her.  She even tells a boring story.

Just when you think she’s more amused by this than you are, you get, “Put the cover on and let that boil until it cooks.  We’ll have to wait awhile.”

I love everyone over 85.  Her show should be called “The Watched Pot.”  It’s that good.  She even checks her rice for bugs.  Television gold.

Eurovision

James Dobson’s Letter from the Future includes a resurgent Russia reabsorbing Eastern Europe into a new Warsaw Pact. That might actually happen if the Eurovision Song Contest goes as planned. Did anyone see this? It didn’t seem to get much attention. I totally love the idea of Eurovision as a forum to needle one another, and nothing riles authoritarian governments more than other people’s pop detritus. Of course, Russians seem to enjoy their regime so naturally there are calls to ban the song because it insults the country.

There is simply nothing remotely like Eurovision in the United States, which is a shame. The fifty states need to compete against each other in more televised spectacles. You know the other Georgia–that is, ours–would have some crossover country mess extolling Cobb County’s anti-evolution stickers on the inside covers of biology textbooks.

The song isn’t even that good. It’s a waterless Boney M derivative that steals from Disco Inferno. But the kerfuffle is enjoyable.

James Dobson Did Not Fuck the President of Taiwan

Repeat, he is not resigning from Focus on the Family because he had sex with Ma Ying-jeou.  That was a DJ from Tennessee who has been expelled from Taiwan because he fucked somebody while knowing he had syphilis…?

Salacious!

Instead, James Dobson is transitioning out of Focus on the Anus because even among evangelical dead-enders, he’s becoming a dinosaur–although he was influential in getting Richard Cizik to resign from the National Association of Evangelicals after he said global warming was an issue Christians might want to care about.  This is one of the best secondary effects of the Democrats winning two-in-a-row: their aged enemies start to give up.

How stupid is James Dobson?  Well, in reply to a question about why F on the F can’t support teh gay, he mentioned:

Have homosexuals faced this kind of uphill battle? Perhaps in the past, but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that they are disadvantaged now. The average homosexual earns $55,000 per year, compared with $32,000 for heterosexuals.

The source for this statistic is a 1991 Wall Street Journal article on companies like Columbia House marketing to gays–ostensibly because they’re sophisticated nad upscale, although to my knowledge no sophisticated person ever fell for Columbia House.

Here are some delicious highlights from Dobson’s amazing “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” that he wrote last year (which should be read in full).  It’s straight out of Left Behind.

After the Supreme Court installs gay marriage in 2010, the Boy Scouts nobly and voluntarily disband “rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision
that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.”

There are also no more Catholic or evangelical adoption agencies anymore.  Not only is teh gay gleefully killing Muslims with his straight brethren, but “homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service (to attempt to compensate for past discrimination).”  Then they take away your guns (and give them to teh gays in the army?) and the right to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Then terrorists blow shit up and Russia re-invades Eastern Europe.  Health care becomes universal, but waits are long and “because medical resources must be rationed carefully by the government, people older than 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their “duty” is increasingly thought to be to go home to die, so they don’t drain scarce resources from the medical system. Euthanasia is becoming more and more common.”  And of course, in 2011 gas is $7 and the Supreme Court finds that all pornography has artistic merit.

Obviously, most everything bad about the future happens because Obama doesn’t hate gay people–even though most of the court cases cited in the letter already occurred (i.e., under fag-loving George W. Bush’s reign of left-wing terror).  He also cites a court judgment in England, as if that mattered.

Hello, Dobson?  This isn’t 1996, when there’s no war and no economic panic.  Kthxbai.

I love their logo, too.

You can tell that the moral order endures because this Christian child is supported by a beefy male forarm and a slender, feminine forearm.  You don’t want similar ulnas rearing your silhouettes.

The overall effect looks more medical than religious to me.  The typeface is crisp, the colors are balanced between neutral and bold and the crayoned-effect suggests something you’d see in a pediatrician’s office.

“Withdrawal” from Iraq: Updated

UPDATED BELOW

So the “withdrawal” from Iraq is scheduled for late 2010 and will leave in its wake a “residual” force of some 50,000 soldiers.

First, there are God-only-knows how many contingencies that could arise in the next nineteen months to push that target date back, so I won’t hold my breath for the end of this war.

Second, if 50,000 is residual the world is upside-down.  Our military presence in Germany is 56,000 strong; that’s hardly residual.  It basically anchors American reach in Europe and the Middle East.  There are only 30,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, which is the war Obama was ostensibly trying to redirect his Administration’s focus towards.

I don’t it.  Aside from the hubris of thinking we’re magically exempt from Afghanistan’s tendencies to being the Graveyard of Empires, in what universe is 50,000 soldiers not occupation-lite?  No one’s asking for an embarrassing retreat like the helicopters on top of the embassy in Ho Chi Minh City, but I don’t see how you leave behind a presence that mammoth, indefinitely, and declare the war over.  One bullshit “Mission Accomplished” is plenty.

Our bankrupt empire has got to be kidding itself.  I can think of far better ways to hemorrhage what remains of our prosperity than maintaining a garrison state.

UPDATE: I can’t believe Harry Reid, who never stands up to anybody, might actually balk at the 50,000 figure.  And Nancy Pelosi wants it to be 15-20,000!  If only they talked back to the Republicans the way they stand up for their principles when liberal Democratic presidents get in the way…

Tom Friedman Approves Of, and Believes In, America.

The world is flat.  Get rid of GM, it’s a dinosaur.  To hell with its millions of workers and retirees and the people who depend on their wages and pensions; to hell with the entire state of Michigan.  Find a new Google and give it a bailout while it’s still a nonexistent start-up.  Asia is coming.  Must clobber Asia.  America: yea!

These the basic theses of Friedman’s last year or so of columns.  Today’s is a real doozie: it’s all that and more.  He’s in Seoul, chatting with “thinkers” about how awesome it is for America to be more powerful than everyone.  Meanwhile, the South Korean currency has plummeted by 40% and it’s economy has hit the shitter.

Perhaps his most breathtaking bit is our sudden need to attack North Korea, because God knows the US doesn’t have enough on its plate right now.  While refraining from telling North Korea to “Suck. On. This.” in reference to American power, Friedman openly advocates raining war on an alread-isolated nation should it launch another ineffective rocket, as if that were the option left to us after years of sweetheart deals and the Candyland diplomacy we’ve been playing.

But way, way before that is a series of paeans to American greatness and how the present crisis, with its global consequences, cries out for American leadership to solve it.  That’s not how things work.  That’s the plot resolution to “Independence Day.”

Behold the elegant cadences as he elucidates the need for perpetual American dominance of the globe:

It was always easy to complain about a world of too much American power as long as you didn’t have to live in a world of too little American power. And right now, that is the danger: a world of too little American power.

And reporting verbatim an anonymous Korean functionary’s breathless praise for America [ellipsis his].

“No other country can substitute for the U.S.,” a senior Korean official remarked to me. “The U.S. is still No. 1 in military, No. 1 in economy, No. 1 in promoting human rights and No. 1 in idealism. Only the U.S. can lead the world. No other country can. China can’t. The E.U. is too divided, and Europe is militarily far behind the U.S. So it is only the United States … We have never had a more unipolar world than we have today.”

Umm…2 of the 4 things in which the US is number 1 in are actually unquantifiable.  And I hardly think we’re the number one in promoting human rights.

The big trading nations, like South Korea, are particularly nervous that America will succumb to economic protectionism, which would undermine the global trading system.

Right: the rest of the world is quaking because the less powerful a country is, the likelier it will be that the economic calamity will do serious damage.  And a tool in our arsenal to help us weather the storm we’ve created might compound the harm to others.  So naturally there are government officials in South Korea and other places quivering with fear over what the US might do.  It’s in their interest to blow some smoke up our ass via this douche from the Times when he passes through on one of his lucrative peregrinations extolling America’s amazingness.

But it’s the emphasis on military power that’s most disturbing.  This is a financial crisis!  Why do we need to remind everyone of our big stick so badly?

Well, if the Friedmans of the world would have it, it’s nice to have comforting theories about world affairs like how countries that have a McDonald’s never fight each other.  But when push comes to shove, that flattened and globalized world of ours responds best to force and the treat of the US using it to get what it wants–but since we’re so amazing, our interests align rather well with what’s best for the continued flattening and globalization of the world, of course.

That’s why raw, naked applications of the US’s unrivaled ability to maim bodies and turn middle-class countries into corrupt hellholes always linger in the shadows of any Thomas L. Friedman column.  That comes with the territory of being the gentlest neocon, and the one with the most prominent soapbox.

Friedman is both blind and twisted.  His benevolent-sounding, platitudinous regard for the US and its continued role in the world are goals shared with the Project for the New American Century: unending dominion over the earth.

Even when the need to reassert our ability to do it originates in a crisis of our own manufacture.

Nerdiest Post Yet: How long until each state’s population doubles?

The US, being alone among industrialized countries in that it’s growing, is actually growing quite quickly.  High rates of immigration plus a relatively high rate of childbirth among a religious population make the possibility of twice as many Americans as there are now during my life time conceivable.  (Although every American will be an atheist, an evangelical, a Mormon or a Hasid by then).  But some states are growing faster than others.  If you average the growth rates since 1980, some states will double quickly and are likely to do so, and some would take several centuries.

Nevada, 2026. As discussed previously.  At this rate, Nevada in 2195 will have more people than the earth does now.  But its collapse is imminent.

Arizona, 2031: population, 13 million.  That many people living in a big desert with lawns and air conditioning sort of embodies a problem with this country that underlies the financial crisis.  This is significant because I think we’re about to see a drastic slowing of growth in–if not an exodus out of–the southwestern states.

Florida, 2038: population 38 million.  A Florida the size of California in less than thirty years.  This won’t happen.  In 2009, Florida may actually record a net loss because of the foreclosure crisis.  Still, it’s rate of growth extrapolated over thirty years is intense.  It will surpass New York soon enough as the third most populous state but it was the least populous state in the South as recently as the 1930s(!)

Utah: 2039: population, 5.4 million.  Fast-growing, but Mormons are there for keeps.

Alaska, 2042: population 1.4 million.  I see no reason why Alaska shouldn’t become the Florida of the 21st century.  As the global climate changes, it will only become more hospitable–and while a warmer world won’t alter a sunless winter, should things really go to hell there’s a whole lot of water up there, and near-infinite space.  I don’t see why Alaska couldn’t have a population numbering many millions in fifty years.

Georgia, 2042.  Population 19.2 million.  How many more counties can metro Atlanta absorb?  There is no question that the Atlanta-Charlotte corridor will become an uninterrupted belt of development (paging William Gibson).  Georgia is scary.

Colorado, 2044: population 9.8 million.  The gap with Wyoming only grows.

Texas: 2045.  It is currently growing by 1300+ people every day.  That’s an extra Austin every year and a half.

Idaho, 2049: population 3.1 million.  If you take its post-1990 rate, it would double by 2038.

Washington, 2050: population 13.02 million.

North Carolina, 2051: population 18.4 million.

California, 2054:  a monstrous state-nation of 73 million people.  That would be gruesome.  Even at its slower rate of growth during this century, there will still be 59 million Californians by 2054.

New Mexico, 2055: 3.9 million.

Virginia, 2056: population 14.4 million.  By then Richmond will be a DC suburb.

Delaware, 2058: population 1.75 million. Fastest-growing state in the Northeast.

South Carolina, 2061: population 8.8 million.

New Hampshire, 2062: population 2.6 million.

Oregon, 2062: population 7.6 million.

Tennessee, 2072: population 12.4 million.

United States, 2072: if we don’t abort almost everybody, there could be 616 million Americans in only 63 years.  I can’t think of a worse nightmare, unless the global economy is carbon-negative and nobody eats.

Maryland, 2075: population, 11.2 million.

Hawai’i, 2078: population, 2.6 million.  You’d think more people would live in Hawai’i.

Minnesota, 2087: population, 10.4 million.

Arkansas, 2096: population 5.7 million.

Montana, 2101: population 1.9 million.

Vermont, 2102.  Population, 1.2 million.  By that time, it will have become the smallest US state.

Oklahoma, 2114.  Population, 7.2 million.  Why anyone would want to live there, I just don’t know.  It’s absolutely the worst state.

Missouri, 2115: population 11.8 million.  Right behind Oklahoma in more ways than one.

Wisconsin, 2116: population 11.2 million.

Kansas, 2125: population 5.6 million.

Alabama, 2129: population 9.3 million.

New Jersey, 2130.  Population 17.3 million.  This is impossible, even if its bafflingly depopulated cities regrew.  The state should be completely built-out in twenty years’ time, and that many people living in such a tiny state would give it a population density–which already exceeds that of India, Japan or the Netherlands–approaching that of Bangladesh.

Kentucky, 2134: population, 8.5 million.

Maine, 2135: population, 2.6 million.

Mississippi, 2135: population 5.9 million.

South Dakota, 2136: population 1.6 million.  But if you take post-2000 growth, it would double much more quickly, by 2095.

Indiana, 2141: population 12.75 million.

Massachusetts, 2162: population, 13 million.

Wyoming, 2162.  After losing people in the 80s, Wyoming was one of the fastest-growing states last year.  Averaging post-1990 growth it would double by 2086–still going to take a while to hit that magic million mark.

Nebraska, 2163: population 3.5 million.

Illinois, 2168: population 25.8 million.  Averaging post-1990 it would be 2113.

Connecticut, 2172: population 7 million.

New York: 2193.  Population, 39.5 million.  Although New York’s rate of growth, currently .0375% per year, should probably increase as people hunker down during the economic disaster.  In other words, fewer people will be fleeing the Empire State for warmer climes as they have for the last half-century; almost 200,000 New Yorkers jet each year.  Extract that dynamic and the state would double by 2060.  50,000 people annually leave New York for Florida alone.  Take that away and NY doubles by 2119.

And while 40 million New Yorkers sounds impractical, it still wouldn’t make the state as dense as the Israel or Japan.

Rhode Island, 2204: 2.1 million.  Not likely.  That would be more people per square mile than the Palestinian territories.

Michigan, 2264: population, 20 million.  At the rate Detroit is shrinking, it will have only 75,000 people left by then, so everyone will be living in Grosse Pointe Arcologies.

Ohio, 2323: population 22.9 million.  Mostly Terminators.

Pennsylvania, 2406, population, 25 million.  It’s just a depressing place.

Louisiana, 2413: population 8.8 million.  The state was hardly a magnet for growth before Katrina, but ignoring figures for this decade it would probs double by 2240.  But I’m sure the future holds more hurricanes.

Iowa, 2645.  Even Captain Kirk will have been dead for hundreds of years before Iowa doubles to 6 million residents.

North Dakota, ?? It has almost the same number of people as it did in 1920.  It’ll probably keep fluctuating within the same narrow band, but technically, at current rates, fewer than 500,000 people will remain by the early 24th century.

West Virginia is shrinking even more quickly, although equally inconstantly.  By 2250 its population of 1.8 million, down from a 1950 high of 2 million, will have shrunken to 999,000.  It will be the least populous state long before that.

This took longer than I thought.

RuPaul’s Drag Race Episode IV: A New Hope

There is just nothing to say except that Ongina‘s breaking down after winning the MAC Viva Glam challenge and admitting that she has HIV and her parents don’t know might be the singularly most intense moment of reality television I’ve ever witnessed.

Let’s face it, “Reality TV” is as scripted as anything else, the producers of any elimination-show have the final say–which they probably exercised this week, since Jade was superior to Rebecca Glasscock in every case, except for the ability to produce drama.  So for something so honest as a nationally televised admission of a person’s HIV status to emerge is startling.

I’m not suggesting that TV people would generally self-censor something like that, but it’s still uncommon.  Even RuPaul was a little taken aback.  So while I’m not sure Ongina can or should win the competition, I think she’s pretty courageous and I love her.  She got a little lucky with the screen test, though, because it called for jubilation and bubbliness, and that’s what she brings.

Bebe Zahara Benet, though.  Whoa.  I think her downfall might be the inevitable realization that this piddling little show on a mediocre niche cable channel is kind of beneath her.  If this were Italy or Mexico, she would be hosting a primetime show where she would interview political figures and could torpedo their careers.  I don’t care if she has only one facial expression.  She’s an empress.  And she’s only 23?  She looks simultaneously older and ageless.  It’s entirely possible that she’s a crazy person, though.  I just get that vibe.

God, could Shantelle be more self-important?  Given the opportunity to be glamorous and fun, she squandered it on literally lecturing the camera for ten whole minutes without even coming to the point.  She even dressed like an old maid schoolmarm.  How revealing.

Nina Flowers has been getting rickety.  I think she has the best look, but everything she does is a variation on it.  As odious as Shantelle may be, her versatility is formidable and I see the two of them vying for the third spot in the finals, since Ongina and Bebe have probably clinched the top two.  Nina’s non-facility with English hasn’t hampered her so far, but it might.

I wonder if Nate Silver win analyze the probability of each queen winning…

Oscars: The Curious Slum-Milk of REVOLUTIONAR-E/Nixon

There is no reason to get irritated when mediocrity triumphs; that’s what the Oscars are for.  Of all the movies that have won Best Picture there’s really only about 3-4 that actually rank among the best of American film.  The last 15 years, starting with Forrest Gump, have been particularly egregious.  Now let’s dish.

Kate Winslet looked outstanding.

Tilda Swinton now occupies a nice of androgyny that even Annie Lennox would envy. She had no tits!

Freida Pinto was also totes beautiful.  Asymmetrical haute couture sari.  Rad.

Penelope Cruz is really hot but I don’t get the appeal of looking like a bride.

Meryl Streep had a cottage cheese stomach under that bland dress.  Sophia Loren looked like a Superfund site.

Jessica Biel looked like an ugly Evangeline Lilly in something Vanna White would wear on a Tuesday.

Natalie Portman might be the worst actress around but she’s very pretty.

Sarah Jessica Parker grosses me out.  Matthew Broderick is fat.

I actually liked what Miley Cyrus was wearing.  I hope she’s in on her own joke.

Amy Adams‘s necklace was totally hot.  At first I thought it was dumb to wear a dress the same color as the carpet but maybe she’s cool like that.

Beyonce is kind of in her own category.  I just don’t think it’s tenable to dismiss her in any way.

Anjelica Huston is arch-fabulous but she sort of looked like she was in character for a third Addams Family movie.

Marisa Tomei doesn’t age.

The only word for Viola Davis is radiant.

I honestly have no feelings toward Angelina Jolie whatsoever.  I don’t feel the glamour and I don’t care how many kids she adopts or how quickly.  Joan Rivers called her lips “an inflamed anus” and I can’t think of anything to top that.  Brad Pitt is starting to look a little busted.

Josh Brolin is a babe.  He’ll always be a Goonie to me.

I would bottom for Daniel Craig at a moment’s notice.

Ryan Seacrest is going to be a fixture at everything for the rest of our lives.

Mickey Rourke looked like he had some real trouble dressing himself after lavishing all those years in isolation, making Chinese Democracy.  He tacked more crap on himself than a Latin American military dictator reviewing troop formations.

*********************************** Milk

I’m glad for Sean Penn but Dustin Lance Black is gross!  Religious gay people possess an alarming selective blindness.  They can go through their lives with the knowledge that virtually everything monotheistic religions have to say about sex–especially the kind of sex they like to have–is wrong, but somehow they still believe in the bearded cloud who watches over us.

And the way in which DLB, like many gay “persons of faith,” pompously brandished his religiosity in a way that is “moving” and “poignant” was tedious.  There was no mention of how or why a gay person should embrace God in the first place, just a mild celebration of his declawed deity and Black’s own painful adolescence.  Yawn.  It’s like this piece in today’s Times, which goes out of its way to state the obvious and unnecessary point that no church should have to recognize any federal same-sex marriage.  As if that were the issue with marriage, ever.

Just as when middlebrow films “speak to” some important issue and leave their sentimental paws all over it, Dustin Lance Black’s speech will probably be taken by boring homos and by the gay-tolerant public as some kind of landmark oration.  Even though he didn’t advocate anything or advance any intellectually cogent way to reconcile his sexuality with his religion, he probably played a major role in normalizing deviance, at least to people who believe in the transformative power of commercial movies and who assume the road to equality runs through an awards show.  “Touching upon” the issue by mentioning it is sufficient.

I can’t think of a better example of the Death of the Author, or the complete disconnect between a text and its authorial intent, than between Black and Milk.  Milk was way more progressive than people are giving it credit for.  Harvey Milk slept with boys he pulled off the street and put them to work in his campaign.  That’s amazing, and the film didn’t shy away from it.  The specter of the sexual faggot, unlike images of neutered public homos like the guys on Queer Eye, remains transgressive.

Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech and Milk‘s general reception remind me of another dynamic.  It gets under my skin when people refer to my boyfriend as my partner after I just used the word boyfriend.  Because while they’re telegraphing their facility with being around gay people and their gay relationships, and they want me to know that they respectfully believe my love for him deserves the same dignity as anyone’s love for anyone else, the word boyfriend still makes people uncomfortable.  It suggests kissing and possibly fucking, and people prefer to desexualize the bestowing of dignity.

Get over it, people.  We fuck.  And get over it, Dustin Lance Black.  There’s no God.  And your movie wants to be our boyfriend but you, your God and the movie-going public who share your belief in Him want Milk to be our husband.

More Sexy Obscure Flags of the World

Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina

Asymmetry in flags is hot because it’s so rare.  This looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey decloaking, or something.

West Flanders, Belgium

Sunny.  Bright.  Flemish.  It could be a detergent.

Tuzla Canton, Bosnia and Herzogovina.

Dynamic.  Looks like a still from an introduction to a reputable state-owned media’s nightly news.  This just screams, “WE WANT TO BE IN THE EU!”

Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Union Jack has deconstructed and is launching a cock rocket towards the right.  Or, Newfoundland got a boner and the rest of the flag exploded into its component parts.  Either way, the province’s name is satisfying to write and say.

State of Pernambuco, Brazil.

Hi, I’m the most hilarious flag ever.  If I existed in the US, liberals and conservatives would both have huge problems with me.  And the writers of Left Behind would think I heralded an apocalyptic future where hippies, pagans, Catholics and astrologers joined forces in a spirit of ecumenism to worship Satan.

Flag of the Assyrians of Iraq

This is so incredibly amazing.  The blue-and-orange compass rose is emitting quasi-psychedelic, crypto-feminist bunting and the top looks like a passport stamp you might have gotten from a Nazi puppet state in Great Britain under Oswald Mosley.

I think this is just hot dog!