perfidy

According to the press release for his book, Music Lust,

"After listening to just one radio show from Nic Harcourt - Music Director at LA's KCRW and host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" - you'll not only have discovered new music, you'll be introduced to an artist or album that you may have missed in years past. Harcourt is arguably the most savvy tastemaker to grace the airwaves these days.

Ever read High Fidelity or seen the film? Remember how the guys in the music store would sit around and endlessly count angels on the heads of turntable needles? You know - "name your all time top five side one, track ones." "Name your top five country songs about death." Now Nic Harcourt has now made a book out of his particular lists. From what I've heard of him and his output, Harcourt has good (if quirky) taste in music, so this an interesting notion.

The idea for Music Lust comes from an idea by a Seattle librarian named Nancy Pearl, who wrote a book called Book Lust, a set of recommended-reading lists that updates a venerable library tradition of culling the good stuff according to a given librarian's quirks and considered opinions. Pearl made a splash recently in the library field with that book and with the accompanying "shushing librarian" doll modeled after herself. The title Book Lust is itself a pun on the American Library Association's trade publication Book List, which reviews new and forthcoming volumes of interest to all sorts of libraries, both of which have in turn inspired a much snarkier version of Book Lust in the online magazine Bookslut.

It is from this ongoing dialogue of belletrists and literary enthusiasts that Harcourt drew his inspiration, even borrowing his subtitle nearly intact from Pearl's volume: "Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment and Reason."

The trouble is, the longer one spends with Music Lust, the less likely it appears that Harcourt grasps the true spirit of the tradition he is engaging, and the more likely it appears that he has instead produced a well-meaning but shallow quickie that does little to help the noble cause of introducing good music to good people.
It's not that Music Lust is a bad book. In fact, to be actually bad, Harcourt would have had to have failed much more spectacularly. For example, Martha Bayles' 1996 Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music is a bad book. Exhaustively researched and carefully argued, Bayles nonetheless manages to misconstrue nearly every single salient point about the development of American pop music in the 20th century, ultimately coming to the conclusion that but for African-American musicians, American pop traditions would have long ago become brutal, spiky creations of the dry European intellectual pitfalls of modernism and postmodernism. I mean yeah, I guess, but... no. That's a bad book. Music Lust, which aspires to nothing so lofty, is instead well meaning but superficial and fundamentally confused.

A number of years ago, a good friend of mine who chose to forego college in favor of the thousands of books he was already reading, gave me a gift. It was a sheaf of closely typed pages containing what he felt were the best and most important books he had read - ones that he thought everybody should read - along with brief and penetrating paragraphs about who each author was, how they had touched him, and why we should read them. It was all there from Paul Auster to Emile Zola, a pearl of great price bestowed upon me by a good friend who felt he had something important to share with the people in his life. I read from that list for years and discovered some authors (Bukowski and Chandler in particular) who changed my life.

Music Lust aspires to be something like that but on a grander scale; a best-friend list for the whole wide world. Organized alphabetically, the book contains short essay-lists on subjects like "Headbangers Ball" and "Jazz Vocalists: The Ladies," intended to serve as letters of introduction for uninitiated listeners searching for a point of entry into new and intimidating territory.

Unfortunately, there are some problems. Let's begin with the way the book is organized. Although the book's alphabetical structure makes good sense when you look for entries like "Icon: Neil Young" and "Icon: Frank Zappa" toward the end, it makes less sense when "Happy Trails: Cowboy Singers" shows up under "H" and "Livin' Large: The Big Band Boom!" appears under "L." While I suppose the argument could be made that the book is organized like this to encourage accidental encounters, the argument could also be made that such a scheme means that to find anything dependably in this slender and alphabetical volume, one must consult the index.

Some of the lists themselves also raise the question: "why?". For example, "The Call of Wales," a review of Welsh singers (filed under "C"), includes four entries total: Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Jem, and Charlotte Church. Of those, Jones and Bassey are legitimate classics. Everybody should know who they are. Jem is a relatively unknown new singer-songwriter for whose US success Harcourt is partly responsible; to each his own, and fair play. Charlotte Church... well, a few years ago she released an album of pretty schlock titled "Voice of an Angel." Although it's Harcourt's book and therefore his perogative to do what he wants, this just feels like he's padding out a slim list.

In a similar vein, much of the text accompanying each list is too brief and shallow to convey enough information to do the job Harcourt wants. For example, this is the description for Neil Young's Zuma, one of Harcourt's top-choice Young albums:

"This album finds Crazy Horse accompanying Neil as he hits his stride with a batch of songs that feel comfortably inhabited."

While factually accurate, the same exact sentence could apply without a single change to Rust Never Sleeps, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Ragged Glory, Sleeps With Angels and even the live Weld. Nothing there tells us why Zuma is special and more worth your time than Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which does not appear on the list. A more apt description, placing the album in the context of Young's career arc and giving the reader some clues as to how it will sound and feel might be

"This album finds Crazy Horse accompanying Neil as he digs into a batch of songs that seem in all their winsome noisy charm to be a defiant rebound from his recent beautiful bummers On The Beach and Tonight's The Night."

In general, Harcourt's writing seems "surfacey" often enough as to make me wonder how much time he put into the project. There are dozens of excellent books out there to tell readers who John Coltrane was: why praise him with a vague and fluffy capsule bio only to recommend, of his entire output, A Love Supreme? Although Harcourt does mention that that record was Coltrane's musical and spiritual rebirth after kicking heroin, that assertion lacks heft on its own. Three more sentences would probably have been enough to guide the interested listener through his early days with Miles (with recommendations, say Kind of Blue!), his early solo work (My Favorite Things!), and his struggle with smack, magnifying A Love Supreme within its glorious context for the cost of 100 extra words or so.

One difficulty any author of a book like this faces is resistance from the congnoscenti, e.g.; me. Harcourt is walking a thin line between promoting the Nick Harcourt Experience As Heard On KCRW and providing a broader overview, a Rough Guide to What's Good as it were, and sometimes the tension shows.

Why, for example, does the Heavy Metal ("Headbangers Ball") section contain mentions of Zeppelin, Sabbath, Maiden, Priest, and Metallica, but also AC/DC (who are NOT METAL)? That's the entire list! Could the metal list not have included quick mentions of, oh, I dunno, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer or Sepultura, just to name four great examples of the diversity of the genre? Given that Harcourt's Afrobeat list contains exactly four entries (Fela and Femi Kuti, Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Brooklyn's Antibalas), I wonder if Harcourt did a little digging first or just phoned it in. If AC/DC can be metal, could not (for chrissakes) Afrobeat pioneer Hugh Masekela not have rated a sentence?

While I recognize that a book like this really can't be all things to all people, that is the book's explicit mission and principle, and it simply doesn't deliver. Why leave Marty Robbins off a three-man list of essential "Cowboy Crooners" (Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers)? Is Nick Drake really perfect nighttime driving music, or did Harcourt just watch that VW commercial a few too many times? Why a section on poets/lyricists that includes only Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll? That's three... why not pad it out like Wales and throw in Jim Morrison, Laura Nyro, and... and... frickin' Jewel?

In keeping with the High Fidelity spirit of the affair, here are my top five beefs with Harcourt's editorial decisions:
5) When making a list of recommended music by bands with food names, is it too much to ask that Bread be left off the list entirely on general principles? At the very least, could we have avoided writing the phrase "take a bite out of Baby I'm-a Want You?" Also: "The Jam" is not a food name.
4) In a list of "Great First Albums," does it really make sense to include Funkadelic's shaky debut but leave off Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True entirely? (And does it make sense to leave Elvis Costello out of the book altogether? Maybe coulda lumped him together with David Byrne, Dave Thomas, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist and Kingsmen singer Jack Ely in a list called "Nervous!")
3) Was the list "It's Raining Cats and Dogs" strictly necessary? What do Josie and the Pussycats, Skinny Puppy, Cat Stevens and Cat Power have in common except the cute concept? Many of the lists are of this kind, lumping together bands named after chocolate, or with "twins" in them (The Breeders, Cocteau Twins, the Stones ("Glimmer Twins")) in ways that are probably meant to be lighthearted and revelatory but come across as just pointlessly random.
2) Although hip-hop, disco, metal, Madchester, jazz organists, and Afro-beat each get their own lists (and punk, country and jazz get at least three lists each), there is no list for "funk."
1) Finally... the index contains two entries for Tangerine Dream and none for James Brown.

Let's dwell on that last one for just a moment. In a book which purports to offer music for "every mood, moment, and reason"... Tangerine Dream: 2, James "The Godfather" Brown: 0. Arty proto-techno collective without whom every boutique on Bleecker street would be without the incessant "BOOMchkBOOMchkBOOM" of their acid-house sountrack: 2. Arguably the most important musician in all of pop music of the second half of the 20th century whose music is the very embodiment of joy, sexuality, and defiance: nada.

Anyway, that is all angels-on-heads-of-pins stuff that every music lover will go through when reading Music Lust. I'm sure ten different critics would have ten different beefs. Safe to say I think the book is often lacking; I will move on.

Ultimately this collection of all of Nic Harcourt's recommendations of what to listen to any time - both those picks which are clearly close to his heart and the ones he had to research a bit - leaves the inescapable impression that just about any serious music writer could have written this book and done almost as good a job. The main selling point, the true attraction, is in Harcourt's individual style as a DJ and a tastemaker. Harcourt seems to realize this and plays that part to the hilt.

But, this approach has its serious downside. To begin with, although Los Angeles is a very large place and KCRW reaches therefore a large radio audience, Harcourt is still only a recognized authority on "what's good" to about 3.4% of the country. Therefore outside Los Angeles county, his opinions for the most part are exactly as good as the grizzled guy in hornrims and vintage Stooges shirt at your local record store. Also, Los Angeles as a place, as a cultural landscape, is not like anywhere else, and it's not a sure bet that Harcourt's Angeleno hipsterisms will play in Peoria.

The main drawback, however, is that to dig Nic Harcourt you have to dig his stock in trade, which is shiny and atmospheric downcast adult-oriented pop. I like such noises as much as the next guy (in fact much more than the next guy!), but a steady diet of Harcourt mainstays Badly Drawn Boy, Air, Zero 7, Starsailor, Jem, Coldplay, and a little Nick Drake for historical color quickly ends up feeling like an air-conditioned Swedish furniture showroom - everything of neat and curvy chrome, of plastic and blonde wood, and a little too cool for me.

In trying to be all things to all people Nic Harcourt has overreached his goal and produced a well-intentioned volume guaranteed to completely foil its own ambitions. As the personal "what I like" essay of one British DJ who lives in Los Angeles, Music Lust is beyond reproach. Who can say how useful that is to me and you, but fair enough. He's a very good DJ and has a faultless ear for the kind of thing he does. But in trying to assemble a masterful list of everything that's good in pop music for an entire country, an entire world, full of his best friends, Harcourt has managed to prove that he is, in fact, a very good DJ with a faultless ear for the kind of thing he does. Although people sincerely looking to broaden their musical horizons could do worse than Music Lust, they could easily do better too.

And they could start with James Brown.

Full disclosure: I once worked for a company that put out a compilation of live performances from "Morning Becomes Eclectic," and I once worked for Nic Harcourt's boss' daughter, though I was not involved with the project and never met Harcourt or his boss. Absolutely outstanding compilation, though.

Scene: FEMA offices, int. day. GARETH sits at his desk shuffling papers and playing with a toy ambulance. Michael Chertoff approaches.

MICHAEL: Uh, Gareth, something has come to my attention....

GARETH: Can't talk; busy. Saving lives.

GARETH makes ambulance noises.

MICHAEL: Actually I think we should clear this up. It's about your resume.

GARETH: My resume? Why, do you have something for me to put on it?

MICHAEL: Well, here's the thing. We called your old boss in Edmond Oklahoma, and there seems to be some discrepancy.

GARETH: Discrepancy?

MICHAEL: (sighs) ... Can you just read me this line here?

GARETH: (reading) "Assistant City Manager"

MICHAEL: Well, in Oklahoma they say you were Assistant TO the City Manager. That's a bit different, don't you think.

GARETH: (mumbles) Same thing.

MICHAEL: What?

GARETH: Same thing.

MICHAEL: No, they're not.

GARETH: What?

MICHAEL: Assistant TO the city manager is a different job than the one that's on your resume. One involves budgeting, administrative coordination and regulations compliance. The other involves coffee and Xerox. Which was it?

GARETH: It's a typo.

MICHAEL: What's a typo?

GARETH: In Oklahoma, it must be a typo.

MICHAEL: ...

GARETH freezes a moment, than bolts from room. From EXT we hear sound of a car starting and tires squealing.
Uhhh.... what, Johno?

Well, first, go rent The Office, both series, and watch them. I'll wait.

You back? Good.

Now: from Time Magazine:

Since Hurricane Katrina, the FEMA director has come under heavy criticism for his performance and scrutiny of his background. Now, an investigation by TIME has found discrepancies in his online legal profile and official bio, including a description of Brown released by the White House at the time of his nomination in 2001 to the job as deputy chief of FEMA. (Brown became Director of FEMA, succeeding Allbaugh, in 2003.)

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

In response, Nicol Andrews, deputy strategic director in FEMA's office of public affairs, insists that while Brown began as an intern, he became an "assistant city manager" with a distinguished record of service. "According to Mike Brown," she says, "a large portion [of the points raised by TIME] is very inaccurate."

Under the "honors and awards" section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists "Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University". However, Brown "wasn't a professor here, he was only a student here," says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). "He may have been an adjunct instructor," says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of "professor."

. . . .

Speaking for Brown, Andrews says that Brown has never claimed to be a political science professor, in spite of what his profile in FindLaw indicates. "He was named the outstanding political science senior at Central State, and was an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City School of Law."

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce that today for the first time I benched over 200 pounds. Well, it was 210 pounds on a machine, since I don't have a regular spotter and I'm accident prone enough to kill myself good if I try to bench with freeweights, but still. Freeweights, I could probably do 200 for a rep or two, but I'm probably not going to try and find out any time soon, so let's call it the nice round psychologically significant 200 and have done with it.

This is especially gratifying considering that when I started lifting eighteen months ago I could bench about a third of that, so I think we can say that progress has been made.

I'm gonna be ri-ri-rrr-ri-ripped!

When guns are outlawed, only bodyguards for business and the wealthy will have guns. Although the waters in New Orleans have left behind a santorum of deadly chemicals and viruses, it seems to have washed the area clean of its rights as well. From the New York Times, which if anything is probably halfway in favor of this kind of thing, if you got the grey lady drunk enough to let her guard down.

Meanwhile, the city is confiscating firearms from civilians, including legally registered weapons, Mr. Compass said. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom hotels and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who work for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16's and other assault rifles.

h/t to the Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr.

So far I haven't had the most respect for Arnold Schwarzenegger as governer of California. Maybe it's having seen him in "Kindergarten Cop," or maybe it is his inability to singlehandedly lift the slcerotic legislature of our nation's most populous state out of its doldrums as he promised.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's crapola like this.

California lawmakers became the first in the country to approve a bill allowing same-sex marriages.....

The legislation could be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has expressed an acceptance of gay marriages but said it's an issue that should be decided by voters or the courts.

So, wait wait. Let me get this straight. The question of gay marriage, according to leading Republicans and sundry conservatives, is a matter that must be left to the people and their representatives and not imposed by fiat by activist courts, unless it is a matter that must be left to the people and the courts and not imposed by fiat by activist... people's representatives.

Right. So, activist courts are a threat to the republic except when they are defenders of our liberties and legislatures are the duly designated voice of the people except when they are loose-cannon petty tyrants who must be stopped by the courts (threats to the republic and defenders of our liberties, Amen) and the people (who, as we know, also buy Franklin Mint commemorative plates and Beanie Babies), which people are in turn morally suspect sheeple who (per Rick Santorum) must be protected from themselves by legislation (passed by loose-cannon petty tyrants or sacrosanct conduits to the Will of the Populace) and upheld by judges (threats to our republic or defenders of our liberty, yr pick).

Three thoughts spring to mind like Spaniel pups who've been into the Maxwell House tin again. Big thought the first: NO WONDER the Governator never gets a damn thing done! He doesn't even understand how his state's government works! And for a guy who could lift like ten thousand pounds in his prime, he sure has experienced some scary bone loss in the spinal region. Better get that checked out before he hurts himself.

Outsize mental bolus the second: ...or maybe he understands too well how his state government works in all its resplendent contraditions and is playing a deeper game, one that he and his friends at the Heritage Foundation call "freeze the beast" in which the size of state government is reduced by grinding the parts against one other, much like throwing a '65 Charger in reverse at highway speeds, causing the drivetrain to leap out of the car and onto the road, stopping the car's forward progress in a spectacular fashion. Rhetorical tricks like the one above amount to a dazzling shell-game of trickery and misdirection designed to confuse everyone - the citizens of the Golden State, its judges and legislatures, and even the big-government conservatives in the Republican leadership - long enough for Schwarzenegger to grind the gears, strip the transmission, and spirit California's government away to two cabins on a small ranch outside Fresno connected to the outside world by a single dialup modem. Brilliant!!

Johno's Brain Poop the third: While it is a little unfair to take Schwarzenegger to task as a spokesman for his party as a whole, I'm not above being a little unfair, and he is one of the most prominent Republicans in the country. The way I see it, either gay marriage is an issue better left to the people (and, dammit, their duly elected representatives who speak for them) than to a judiciary whose powers do not include drafting new law, or the people need to be saved from themselves by all-knowing judges and/or legislators. For the record, the second option there wouldn't pass the guffaw test if Moses (or Confucius, yr pick) were the judge and Solomon were Speaker of the Heezy, so let's focus on the first option, the one that Schwarzenegger has discarded.

Even though I am in favor of gay marriage, I'm not dumb enough to miss the fact that the Massachusetts decision last year set the cause across the country back about fifty years. So while some of the Republican party are all like "step off yo, courts!," Arnold seems to have strayed off the reservation far enough to send exactly the opposite message which, although possibly politically expedient in the very short term, is in the long term a maneuver of monumental stupidity. The Republicans can stay in power only so long as their main messages remain widely appealing, inoffensive, and not confusing. Two legged stools aren't so good for sitting.

In other news, it looks more and more likely that the Massachusetts State Legislature and voters will eventually end up endorsing the Commonwealth's Supreme Judicial Court decision from last year, thereby putting the cart back behind the horse where it belongs. Currently, there is a proposed Constitutional amendment before the State Senate which would ban gay marriage but uphold civil unions. That amendment is losing support from both sides as the dedicated opponents of gay marriage show their true colors and back a total ban on legal gay unions of any stripe, and as supporters of gay marriage abandon civil unions as a half-measure. Given the climate of the state now, I strongly doubt the opponents of gay marriage have a shot at getting a total ban into the Constitution. The so-called Travaglini amendment (after the Senator sponsoring) is, politically speaking, their last good shot. They will radicalize themselves right out of the argument.

[wik] In the comments, Patton points out that in the bizarro-world of California politics, the courts *really do* have to decide this issue. Because the in/famous Prop. 22 was a ballot initiative and not a piece of legislation, it is up to the courts to deal with it. Which, when you think about it is even more delicious... I now fully appreciate the rich irony inherent in the fact that in California, in order to satisfy the beautiful symmetries and patchwork of federalism, the courts really do have to decide the issue of gay marriage.

One good piece of news out of Lake Chemipoo: reclusive indie-rock icon Alex Chilton has been found alive and well and acting all cranky in an undisclosed location.

I would like to take a moment to recommend any of Big Star's output to all and sundry. Sure, their first couple records and Chilton's stuff with the Box Tops is nice and all, but Third/Sister Lovers is the world-beater. If taken in small doses on (say) an iPod, it becomes clear that that record, recorded at a time when the band were barely speaking, is a gem.

Also nice: ex-Big Star guitarist Chris Bell's post-Beatles weepie, I Am The Cosmos.

That is all.

[wik] Ok, ok ok. Radio City also takes the cake, being more Chris Bell and less Chilton. The two make a nice contrast.

I looked up some figures, ran some numbers, crunched others, and made what I think is an interesting model.

First, consider the world-wide Zionist conspiracy. You know, the one that has Jews running the entire world and, in the process, slowly exterminating Muslims. THAT Zionist conspiracy.

Next, consider the populations in opposition. As best I can determine, there are about 12 million Jews, total, on planet Earth. Yes, that includes populations both in Israel and Manhattan. There are between 1 billion and 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet, again, as best I can determine. But that's a much easier figure to remember, since it's thrown into to virtually any press relating to the Muslim world in general.

Now. According to the CIA World Factbook and just about everywhere else I cared to look, China's population is about 1.3 billion. There are about 6-odd million people, total, in Israel. Not all are Jews, of course, but for purposes of this exercise assume enough of the 6 million ARE Jewish that they might as well all be Jewish. There are about that many people in Massachusetts, and in terms of land mass Israel and the Bay State are close enough to call them the same size. Actually if Mass lopped off Cape Cod and gave a sliver off the west side of the state to New York, it'd come closer to Israel's land area. But I stress we're talking generalities here.

So dig it: The subjegation of the entire Muslim world by Israel would, in a demographic sense, be like Massachusetts enslaving all of China.

That well-established and robust theme of the Muslim world doesn't make a lick of sense, even on its face, let alone in terms of utter kookiness from its conception. And even if you consider the entire global Jewish population, they'd have to each be personally responsible for ruining well over 100 Muslim lives, while at the same time living their own.

Does it bother anyone else that it is impossible for such a tiny number of people to be responsible for keeping 1/5 of the world's total homo sapiens in misery, yet are continually blamed for it? And worse, that people believe it?

Or, perhaps not, since spoofs don't count.

In Tuesday's UK Telegraph, a story entitled A-Z of Rock Biopics. Among its more helpful bits, in random order, you'll find encyclopedic entries like this:

Dylan, Bob: Some critics maintain that the great English classical actor Sir John Gielgud was mis-cast as Bob Dylan in the 1975 biopic "A Tiresome Rain Is Expected Shortly".

Or this:

Edelweiss: Perhaps the most catchy and popular of all the tunes in The Sound of Music (1966). This is often seen as the very first rock biopic, telling the story of the Von Trapp family singers and their flight from Nazi Austria.

The original director, Alfred Hitchcock, had planned to make it a much darker, more disturbing film, with the ageing Joan Crawford as the drink-addled Maria, Edward G. Robinson as her sadistic employer and the Von Trapp children played entirely by surviving extras from Tod Browning's classic 1932 movie Freaks. In the original screenplay, Maria attempts to get rid of the first Countess Von Trapp by cutting up a clump of poisonous Edelweiss and baking it in a chicken pie.

But my favorite?

Choking on one's own vomit: The current wave of rock biopics has made one British company, "Vom of Norwich", a world leader in the production of artificial vomit. "In the old days, producers of rock biopics found it impossible to find a product with the right texture and consistency, but since 1999 we've changed all that," says chief executive Brian Spanner. "We make it to our own unique recipe, and are now producing 10,000 gallons a month. It's a great British success story."

A great British success story, indeed - because I don't think you can do rock biopics without vomit. But, dayam - 10,000 gallons a month?

Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies at His Home

This, of course, was utterly predictable as a short-run event right after Rehnquist said, several weeks ago, that he was not planning to retire, and would serve as long as he was able.

The shit, as they say, is fixing to hit the fan, and the partisan flames will be doused in Sterno starting Tuesday. Soon, everyone's going to be wondering why they made such a big deal about John Roberts. I await with great anticipation and not just a little trepidation the name of the nominee for this new vacancy.

No anticipation, only trepidation, regarding the soon-to-be-unleashed heart-rending flood of messages from special interest groups wanting money from me to fund their campaigns in support of/opposition to whichever poor bastard is nominated.

Marvelous.

[wik] It's started. Alan Dershowitz & Chuck Schumer have lit what appear to be the first two bags of dog poo. After perhaps one more such prank from the Left, I'd expect that Pat Robertson or some such other wingnut drops the first stinkbomb from the Right prior to end of day, Sunday.

[alsø wik] Well, damn - that was clearly one of the strategic possibilities, but not guaranteed in any way, and not one that I thought would be chosen - Bush Nominates Roberts for Chief Justice. Notwithstanding that there's still a lot of chaff emanating from the right about Roberts being "another David Souter", Bush claims that the people have had a chance to see him and they like him. This, therefore, will make filling the Chief Justice's slot all that much more efficient. Mind you, Harry Reid says this changes everything in the confirmation process, but also mind you, Harry Reid is an asshat.

As for people getting to know about Roberts these last several months and becoming comfortable with him: That may be true, but in my case, the thing I think is most attractive about him is that last I checked. Ann Coulter doesn't like him at all. Not to pick on Ann, whom I find bright, articulate, endlessly amusing to read, and generally wrong in intensity if not direction, but I try to only allow myself one standard deviation from the center, and if Roberts is on her shitlist for not being radical enough, that might make him good enough for me.

Also, perhaps unlike those better informed on matters than I, I don't consider there to be much practical difference between an Associate Justice and the Chief Justice, beyond ceremonial matters. Having had Rehnquist, whom Alan Dershowitz called "a right-wing thug", in the Chief Justice's seat hasn't had any absolute impact in the direction of the Court's rulings.

Nevertheless - I think it appropriate to row back. Roberts' confirmation will clearly get even more interesting, and the choice for the other open slot, the better to let Ms. O'Connor retire, will be comparatively boring. Just to retain symmetry, however, maybe they can choose a woman who used to date John Roberts. What are the odds of that, I wonder?

(I'm reposting this from a comment on Patton's post)

Please.

oil : 70 / 60 = 1.16
local gas price: $3.75 / $2.19 = 1.7

Did the wholesale price of gasoline just rise? We don’t have figures there. If the wholesale price rose by 70%, then the oil companies ARE gouging, because their piplines are full of $60 oil. If the wholesale price has stayed the same, then the stations are gouging the public, by 50% or more. Oh wait—almost all stations are owned by the oil companies. So that’s them again.

Don’t pull out your “short bus” metaphor unless you pull out a calculator at the same time.

Yes, big oil is looting the nation. Per barrel shifts in oil prices have lengthy, delayed effects, not instantaneous market reactions down to the _pump_ level. Psychologically, the oil companies saw the opportunity and took it. They know they’ll have no reaction from this administration, and an innumerate citizenry will...do nothing.

I’ll agree with you on one point—price controls are not the answer here. Nationalizing some of this certainly is. I don’t have a problem with states (or the federal governmen) owning refining capacity and stations. Leave the private sector pirates in place; if they’re truly as “efficient” as claimed, then they’ll be just fine, and no government-run entity could possibly compete with them. They’ll earn their business the old-fashioned way, with lower prices and better service.

Yeah, right.

Hey, fuck it. Doesn’t affect me—it’s just those poor people who are going to have trouble paying the gas bills, getting to their increasingly shitty jobs, as the GOP chops the budget for public transportation into non-existence. 50% of the national guard’s equipment is over in Iraq, and unavailable for disaster relief.

Think about this: This is a much bigger disaster than 9/11. We have potentially (and quite probably at this point) thousands of people dead. We have a major city _destroyed_, mostly by inaction and incompetence at every level. The hurricane left the city generally intact!

And if you think this country has done a great job preparing for “terrorist attack”, exactly what would have happened differently if Al Qaeda had detonated explosives at the levees, instead of the hurricane?

Michael Brown, “director” of FEMA, said two days ago (on Thursday) that he was “unaware” that there were people in the Superdome. The fucking director of FEMA didn’t know that there were thousands of people there.

Michael Brown was Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. GOP-activist Michael Brown’s prior experience was running the “Arabian Horse Alliance” or some silly bullshit like that. Some reports indicate Brown was “invited to resign” from that job amidst accusations of incompetence.

Brown’s FEMA placed Pat Robertson’s (yes, the same crazy-ass Robertson we know and love) “Operation Blessing” at the number two position on the cash giving list, before the Salvation Army, before just about everything else you’d recognize. Brown’s speeches have him complaining about the fact that he can’t be “spiritual” in public.

I know exactly what kind of “Republican” Michael Brown is, and there’s exactly _nothing_ conservative about this man. He is either a smart man who is a nasty fucker, or he is sufficiently stupid and egocentric so as not to have an understanding of his own deeply _lethal_ incompetence.

Patton, he is not like you. At the heart of it, I _respect_ the conservatism you represent. It’s a conservatism derived from realism, that wants restraint, that wants a government to do less, and give its citizens more freedom. That is a genuine and respectable goal, and when the country votes for it that’s fine with me.

This cabal of entitlement frat-buddies has hijacked the GOP, and this country desperately needs its real conservatives back. Please, please, find some...beg them to come back. There’s little elsewhere to turn.