We got through about 3 songs before it died again, so I had to very quickly attach the opening band’s bass pickup to my instrument, which is about when a drink spilled on my head and my Ampeg went “poof” (that part’s my fault, and I have an extra amp to hold me over).

So today during lunch, I brought the busted pickup to my local instrument repair shop. Where, of course, it worked fine. I won’[t be so lucky at practice tonight, I can guarantee that.

Someone re-program the president:

President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia by the end of the year appeared to come undone on Tuesday as the chief Senate Republican negotiator moved to block a vote on the pact, one of the White House’s top foreign policy goals, in the lame-duck session of Congress.

The announcement by the senator, Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican point man on the issue, blindsided and angered the White House, which vowed to keep pressing for approval of the so-called New Start treaty. But the White House strategy had hinged entirely on winning over Mr. Kyl, and Democrats, who began scrambling for a backup plan, said they considered the chances of success slim.

Who. Could. Have. Predicted. THAT. One?

Adding:

Looks like someone has the same idea I had: I sure wish Mr. 11-dimensional chess could figure out the the Republicans one-dimensional game of NO. He keeps falling for it though, and I really do wonder how long it’s going to be before someone really DOES stick a kick-me sign to his back.

I think Barack Obama should change his name to Captain Caveman. Not because he’s a wacky cartoon super-hero who solves crimes with attractive underaged girls, with a penchant for smashing his enemies with a giant club, but because the dude does nothing but cave. he’s got all the spine of a jellyfish, all the spunk of Ron Jeremy after 9 sex scenes in an hour, all the fight of the world’s worst boxer. Actually, scratch that last one: Peter Buckley may be a shitty boxer, but at least he fights. Barack Obama? My 6-year old could steal his lunch money. Behold, as Barack Obama caves on letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire:

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers…

“We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office. “The world of what it takes to get this done.”
[...]
The White House has failed utterly on a goal that it tried to make its signature issue right before the midterms. Now the administration is clinging to a very slender thread — the notion that if Congress makes tax cuts for the middle class permanent, while only allowing a temporary extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, it will force a vote further on down the line on whether or not to continue extending tax cuts for the richest Americans.

Get ready for those Social Security cuts kids: Captain Caveman’s already surrendered. And don’t expect a DADT repeal: Cavey’s ready to cave on that too. Bet on it.

“Oh Jesus-fucking-Christ,” I said, bolting upright in bed. It was 6:20 this morning, and the neighbor’s grandson was pitching one of his legendary psychotic fits. The banging on the wall suggested he was trying to dislodge whatever was in his skull through sheer force of impact. He was jumping up and down so hard, the floorboards on our side of the parti-wall were shaking. OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD PLEEEEEASE GET OUTTA MY HEAD GET OUT GET OUT! If we could hear him that clearly through a brick wall, I can only imagine what it was like for the people who are on the window side of my neighbor’s house. OH GOD OH GOD. SLAM SLAM BANG CRASH! SLAMMITY SLAM SLAM SLAM.

I rolled over in bed and muttered to Christina, “I think I’m going to call the cops”, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I decided not to.

Why? because less than a week ago, Philly cops responding to a call about an out-of-control teenager with mental health issues Tasered the kid until he died.

I feel bad for my neighbor: raising your grandchild as your son can’t be easy for anyone, and when it’s complicated by mental health issues, it’s even harder. I hate what’s going on next door (and i really hate that it wakes me up at 6-fucking-20 in the morning), but what’s gonna happen if I call the cops? The poor woman has enough on her hands without grieving for a dead kid (and i certainly don’t want the guilt of being the catalyst for that death on my shoulders). Furthermore, what kind of ill-will will it breed if I call one of the city’s mental health agencies on my neighbor?

It’s a real clusterfuck of a situation. I have a huge load of brain-intensive activities tonight too, which require me to be intellectually sharp. I’m on 5 hours of sleep or less because of the maniac next door, and I’m not sure if there’s even a solution.

Dear William Saletan:

Your tired diatribes on the ickiness of abortion are bad enough, but the last thing I want to read from you are your thoughts on anal sex and how many women are engaged in it. that’s why I’m not linking to it: I don’t want to send any readers your way.

Your photo shows a man who looks like a king snake that goes through a pack a day of Pall Mall unfiltered, and who just sucked on a lemon. I don’t think you’ve ever had sex in your life, anal or otherwise.

Please, keep it to yourself: no one’s interested in reading your bizarre fantasies masquerading as research.

Kthxbye

UPDATE: I just discovered shocking footage of William Saletan engaged in anal sex. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!

I think everybody knows I’m pretty critical of the Obama administration, including this week’s “buck up/get over it” comments, but after a brief tour around the blogosphere today, I’m beginning to side with Joe Biden: jesus fucking christ, STOP WITH THE FUCKING WHINING.

I’m not even going to link to these people. Cenk Uyger’s raging about “scapegoating the base”. The comments at firedoglake, a site I actually enjoy, have been nothing but whining for days now. Oh did i say “days”, i meant months, to the point where i read the articles and ignore the rest.

Susie Madrak gets props for her well-earned hippie punching question, but that has led to the pixelated equivalent of reams of whining: Mithras whines about Susie, Susie whines about Mithras, Booman whines about both of them, and then whines to me about being negative, while I in return whine at him about his mancrush on Obama. And don’t get me started on my own fucking whining: if whining could heat my house, I’d tell the gas company to go pound sand.

In the meantime, Jane Hamsher whines about how the shitty health insurance reforms are shitty and calls out John Cole from balloon-juice. Not to be outwhined, Cole retorts, whinily, that Jane is not only mischaracterizing him, she’s also a whiner. Dougj, who writes about economics at balloon-juice, makes fun of the Cole-Hamsher whinefest by posting a video clip from the 1980s sitcom “Cheers”, in which Sam and Diane scream at each other before realizing they’re in-love and start making out. The response to the video by balloon-juice commenters is, unsurprisingly, more whining about how sexist the video is.

Frankly, the only blogger who has a right to whine at this point is atrios, and yes he’s getting in on the act too (albeit without being as whiny as everyone else, because as he says here, “If they’d listened to me things would be better.”

And this is not to give any quarter to the whiny fucking whiners in the White House. “Oh boo hoo, those bloggers are being MEAN to us, whine whine whine fucking whine.”

It’s like the whole commentariat needs a fucking pacifier. It’s getting really really fucking old.

I swear to God, men are conditioned to behave like animals when it comes to basic bathroom hygiene. I use that word “conditioned” deliberately, since your average men’s room is a fucking disgrace: there’s typically piss all over the floor, unflushed toilets, stalls that afford you barely a modicum of privacy. So given the disgusting conditions in which we’re expected to relieve ourselves, perhaps it’s not surprise that men typically piss all over the toilet seat no matter where they go.

But to THIS guy, it’s fucking disgusting: not two minutes ago, I took a bathroom break here at work when my coffee kicked in and did what it’s expected to do. Since we had a run-in over the summer with a seat-pisser (in an office filled with women), there’s a sign prominently posted above the toilet:

EVERYONE uses the toilet.
So Please: REFRAIN FROM URINATING ON THE TOILET SEAT OR WIPE OFF YOUR MISFIRES.

NO ONE likes to sit in a PUDDLE OF URINE.

IT’S GROSS!!

I don’t recognize either of the guys doing work in the data department next door to my office, but I suspect one of them is responsible for the practically invisible droplets of piss that I sat in when I took my morning shit, since there are only three other men on this floor (counting me) and we all have wives and/or live-in girlfriends and know a thing or two about being considerate.

I don’t have much sympathy for women who don’t bother to check whether the seat is down when they use the toilet: it’s a pretty big component of the commode, and one that can’t escape the naked eye.

But despite its rich golden color when it’s collected in a toilet bowl, individual droplets of urine are generally clear and difficult to detect unless you’re willing to get up close and personal with the shitter seat, and most people aren’t up for that. And why should they be: decent people don’t piss all over a communal toilet seat and leave it wet for unsuspecting victims to sit in. It’s as if there’s this population of men that think no one takes a shit at work, so they just spray their fucking urine all over the place.

I just don’t get it, especially when the toilet seat is the crescent-shaped variety, with a little wedge cut out of the front from the inevitable last drops. It’s not like pissing accurately into the bowl is some kind of physical challenge: I manage to get all of my urine in there without getting it all over the seat, and on the occasion where I do misfire, I grab a sheet of toilet paper and wipe it up out of consideration.

Not so hard fellas. It’s called “acting civilized”, and maybe you should consider it.

That’s the Democratic Party’s new logo. Seriously: I’m wondering when Target’s going to sue them for copyright infringement.

For that matter, it actually LOOKS like a target, and not something I’m going to display. Not when the right-wing nutballs are putting stickers like this on their cars:

I mean seriously: is everyone just asleep at the wheel at the DNC, or what?

As Barack Obama appeared on television Tuesday to declare the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, were viewers happiest in Baghdad, Washington, D.C., or Tehran?
The obvious answer would seem to be Washington or Baghdad. In fact, some analysts believe the real winner of the war in Iraq is neither the Iraqis, nor Americans, but the Iranians…

The spring’s election and its aftermath, Bazzi said, underscored how effective Iranian influence has been, especially with maneuvering between Iraq’s Shiite factions. “I’d argue that Iran started filling the political void that the U.S. has left in Iraq years ago, and now it becomes even easier with fewer U.S. troops,” he said, noting that the 50,000 U.S. troops that will remain on the ground concern the Iranians. “On a political level, Iranians have played politics in Iraq much more effectively than the U.S. Part of that is that all the Iraqi factions recognized that Iran is not going anywhere, but the U.S. was going to leave, but the Iraqis are stuck with their neighbors.” The Iranians, he said, are “getting a little concerned about the political stalemate in Iraq.”
Iranians, Bazzi said, are “keen on playing this role of the political broker.” To that end, they called almost the entire Iraqi leadership to Tehran right after elections. “The Iranians view their strategic interest in Iraq on several levels. Immediate, of maintaining a friendly government in Baghdad, because they don’t want to go back to the days of Saddam where there was an extremely adversarial threat next door. The Iranians will want a friendly, Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and they see that as the new reality.”
A weak Iraq is also in Iran’s interest, Bazzi explained. “If Iraq is not as dominate as it once was, if it is friendly and compliant, then it enables Iran to maintain regional dominance in the Persian Gulf.” Finally, he said, Iraq has become a “bargaining chip and a proxy in their conflict with the United States.”

You wanna know how many times people like me pointed this out this likely outcome? More fucking times than I can count. And you know, I’m not some kind of foreign policy genius. I’m not a diplomat or a career employee of the state department or an ambassador. I wasn’t educated at some ivy league school. I’m a common, run-of-the-mill idjit.

And it’s like this for everything: the economy’s not picking up steam? Well maybe the stimulus shouldn’t have been weighted so much in favor of tax cuts. People are pissed about the shitty health insurance reforms we got instead of the health care reforms we were promised? Ya don’t say: maybe you should have had that public option that 66% of the country favored. The Democrats are perceived as weak? Well gee, maybe it has something to do with letting the Republicans steamroll you without fighting back.

You watch these institutions makes predictably bad decisions over and over again, and you don’t care to write about it anymore. The fact that people like Tom Friedman and William Kristol still have jobs says all I need to about the state of our discourse and our national conversation.

In short, it’s one driven by dishonest hacks who may be smart but don’t seem to know anything about anything, abetted by a media that’s more interested in spinning stories and ginning up opinion debates than in reporting actual facts.

And that’s why it’s getting difficult to keep up a steady stream of bloggery: every post boils down to “duh gee, no shit, sherlock.”

Anyway, some stations do a better job at getting the information across effectively, while others do not. For example, KYW 106-0 in Philadelphia and WCBS 880 in New York City are reliable, easy-to-use stations. Philly broadcasts traffic “on the twos”: 1:02, 1:12, 1:22, and so on. WCBS reports road conditions “on the eights”. This schedule makes it possible to tune in for the news you want and need, and filling the spaces in between with music or programming of your own choice. I listen to KYW religiously in Philadelphia for this reason, and always tune into 880 when I’m driving into or around New York City.

New Jersey has its own traffic and weather station too: 101.5 WNJN. By all measures, the station is exactly what you’d expect of New Jersey: awful. First of all, the programming that’s not weather and traffic is piss-poor: the music selection is “classic rock”, which means buckets of “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog”, “Stayin’ Alive”, and “hits” by Springsteen and Bon Jovi, while the talk show programs boil down to “deliberately stupid and offensive right wing garbage by Casey Bartholomew” (recent topic: “have you, as a white person, ever experienced racism from black people?”) and “let’s wreck a marriage” by Michelle Jerson, who won’t be satisfied until the divorce rate in NJ is 100%.

And all of this would be fine, except the traffic reports are not tied to any particular time you can remember. They air every 15 minutes, so you would figure “traffic on the quarter hour at 1:00, 1:15, 1:30, etc.” But no. It’s more like “traffic at 1:03, 1:18, 1:33…” The end result is that it’s difficult to predict when the traffic report’s coming on, and so you end up sitting through Juice Newton sing “Morning Angel” followed by Batholomew hating on teachers while you wait impatiently to find out if you should take I-295 or the Jersey Turnpike.

It’s maddening and almost certainly a deliberate policy to force more people to listen to their shitty station. It’s the only one that covers the entire state, and by god, you’re gonna sit there and listen to casey bartholomew insist that white Americans are being victimized by black people when all you want is to know whether the 42 freeway’s backed up.