It’s ass-cold here today and the temperature is dropping. The news is filled with the Palin custody battle, Rovian divorce, a lot of stuff about Iran and Yemen and terrorism, and generally nothing that is of much interest to me at the moment. So, what do you want to discuss? There must be something interesting? Besides Zinc Fingers, I mean.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Our personal crisis this week is the closure of a local bank, where our investments (both accounts and stock) lay. Popping over to Huffpo, I see the advice I’d been giving people for a year–“Move your money from the big guys to the locals”–and yet, the big guys survive and there’s no bail out for local banks whose communities can’t make the payments on their mortgages and lines of credit. Our local bank had resisted lucrative offers to sell out for years. In the end, the big banks won; the local went extinct.
The system is so complex and corrupt that it’s no wonder Obama can’t change it in a day, a week, or a year. But how can we encourage folks to pull their money out of the “too big to fail” banks into smaller banks, if the predators are out there applauding their failure?
Check out your local credit union. Here’s one of several sources for locating one:
http://www.creditunion.coop/cu_locator/quickfind.php
Nowadays you’re much more likely to be investing in your community and your neighbors with a credit union than with a bank. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act pretty much opened the way for eliminating all but one of our local banks from local ownership and control. But all of the credit unions are community institutions in every sense.
I always want to talk about the same thing; autocross!
haha!
You people back east are freezing, and in the meantime our season starts back up in Jan. So while you are huddling indoors, I will be doing this;
Why anybody lives where it snows is beyond me.
I’m talking about Michigan, but sitting in Del Boca Vista (Hypocrite,yes!)
But for those who can afford it, I’d recommend sun over muddy melting snow any time.
Tonight my dad and I are going out to a Doobie Brothers show and do a little gambling afterward. Should be fun.
Sounds great. My very first concert was the Doobie Brothers at Red Rocks. Or so they tell me – if only I could remember it…
He/She should be arriving any day now…
just twiddling our thumbs here.
Fun and games with big momma
Get all your twiddling done now because there won’t be much of it after the arrival.
Just don’t forget to post an update right before you leave for the hospital…. š (Just skip all that “news” blogging and keep us informed as to what Really MATTERS!)
what? no contraction-by-contraction live-blogging?
Umm, you might want to run that by CabinGirl first…
Do you want to live to see this baby? š
I just wanna know if he pops out with a full beard.
I’ve wondered that, too. And used about the prospect of seeing a photo of yet another BooGuy passed out in a diaper. š
“used”? Where the hell did that word come from?
from the ‘unintentionally hilarious’ file folder
My diversion from the rather boring news today has been the Wonkette comments on the story around the ABC photo of the ripped up but unsoiled underpants of the failed bomber. Comments including:
Clancy_Pants says at 11:46 am, December 29th, 2009
I just found a bomb in my 5 week old’s underpants. Why? He has everything!
http://wonkette.com/412949/these-are-the-underpants-of-an-ineffetive-terrorist
Heh, I like the one about it looking like a Christmas underpants angel.
one for manny and the folks over at the sanctuary…l thought this was pretty neat: transborder immigrant tool
and for amusement, write your own caption
via mike thompson freep.com
I hope that you’ve seen the FDL/Hamsher meltdown over at dkos, BooMan.
All Your Bases…?
Well done by Cedwyn.
Yes, that one and the Hamsher thread adjacent to it. Slinkerwink’s daily thread got ugly.
Ugh, I’ve stopped clicking on sw’s posts – they’re automatic flame wars these days.
I’ve never once read FDL and don’t plan to. But reading about Jane Hamsher on DKos these last few days, seeing her on Maddow’s show during the election and since and reading slinkerwink’s diaries for a year, I find it to be a very obvious and simple case of Jane Hamsher and slinkerwink STRONGLY hating anything Obama does. I have no idea if it’s because he’s a White Sox fan or black or that he’s left-handed or they were/are PUMAs or whatever. But the reason they hate him is beside the point. They do hate him and it colors all their so-called progressive actions. That they attempt to disguise their hatred has to be called out. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. And DKos definitely has a bad infection right now.
Wow, what a rats’ nest.
Nope. too busy watching Fletch and, now, Fletch Lives.
Check out Cedwyn’s on the rec list.
Ok, I read it. Too many comments for me to bother with.
If I am not mistaken, you me CG and Cedywn have engaged in debauchery in more than one city. So we must be biased.
For sure.
The best info was in the comments. It was an instruction course in how to hijack dKos… There have always been ways to game the rec list system but the FDL crew has apparently taken it to the level of an organized assault. And on individual commenters, too. Me thinks Markos is gonna do some banning again… Pass the popcorn.
Just want to say God bless all you folks who for some reason choose to stay up north in the cold. It’s already way too crowded down here as it is. Having a bar-b-que for Christmas dinner while dressed in shorts and flip flops is one of our best kept secret traditions. Don’t tell anyone. Please.
You must not be in Dallas – it snowed there…
Believe it or not, there are people who like the snow, and then there are the real radicals, like me, who actually prefer the winter to the summer. Give me a lovely snow storm and a walk through the crunchy snow on a sunny day over mosquitos and sweat and annoying neighbors spreading poison over their lawns any day.
Hear hear, Mum!
Considering the fact that every airplane, every house, every letter of the Constitution, every history that we tell ourselves, lands flat square upon the dead backs of the Native Indian, we’re sitting in pretty good clover, actually.
Aren’t we?
feeling chipper, are we?
Chipper is not the word I would use, no.
ok. I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense to condemn our entire society because it came at the expense of a native population that was at a completely different level of technological development when it unfortunately clashed with Europeans. We should never forget what happened, but we can’t go on in perpetuity beating ourselves over it either.
Whatever you say, Booman. You know best, of course.
Iraq has nothing to do with anything. Imperialism? We laugh, don’t we?
I try not to beat myself up over it, and try to rationalize it by saying that my relatives, at least, didn’t come over until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so at least I don’t have to worry that some ancestor contributed directly to the genocide. But then I read something by the excellent Sherman Alexie and start beating myself up again.
The history of the European subjugation and near extermination of the native peoples of the Americas is an epic, shameful tragedy. We should never forget or excuse what happened, but we should also keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing unique or particularly noteworthy about that history. It is but a recent chapter in a human story older than the Pyramids.
Back in my high school days my best, almost my only, friend was of profoundly mixed heritage but considered himself a Native American. At first the only thing we had in common was a love of reading and a passion for sci-fi. A shared love of Heinlein and Asimov grew into a deep and abiding friendship. That and a mutual sense of the value of honest discourse got us past the usual ethnic barriers.
Whenever that particular topic of American history came up, I would always offer to help him throw the Europeans out of the Americas if he would help me throw the Romans out of Britain.
You lost me at “but”.
Sorry, but this society already stands condemned. That’s my point.
Heaven forbid I be anti-corporate!
It would be hard to get more off-topic, even in an open thread.
Right, Booman. Of course. I forgot my place.
Is an eye for an eye (nose-for-a-nose, actually) appropriate?
Booman,
the one that irks you the most is at the top of the list.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling
+ terrorism, eh?
And you’re not interested?
Hmmmm…
You’ve got a child coming, right?
And a group of seriously heavily armed people who are more “fundamentalist” than the most ravening hellfire and brimstone US preachers…people who are daily increasing their control of any number of states in the world through the use of not only violence but the ol’ ultraviolence of which the prophet Anthony Burgess spoke in his God-given vision “Clockwork Orange” way back in good ol’ 1962 (YOU know. 1962. Before the rash of assassinations that turned the United States into a massively armed banana republic?)…this group of people have found a chink in the armor of the US (media-driven paranoia) and are at present brilliantly exploiting it with minimal damage to their own interests and maximum damage to our own.
And you’re not interested?
Lord, Booman!!!
One poor, sad little Nigerian rich boy who can’t even properly light his own pants on fire has single-handedly resuscitated the Ratpublican Party from its doldrums and given it a wedge issue with which they can quite likely…if they are not so bone-deep stupid that they can’t take advantage of this kind of golden opportunity…destroy the Dem congressional majority for which you worked so hard. Which victory will send the US even deeper into the totally unwinnable and ever-expanding (Now Yemen? What’s next? Somalia? The Philippines? Pakistan? Absurdistan? Stay tuned. News at 11. Bet on it.) foreign war tar baby that the Islamic fundamentalists have so cleverly set up for us so that our entire system will continue on its downward path until total collapse happens somewhere around your child’s 5th birthday if not sooner.
And you’re not interested?
Check your pulse, Booman.
There must be some sort of systolic disconnect going on.
Oh.
Dkos and Jane Hamsher have all of your attention?
Is that it?
Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore friend…
Emily
It’s my unwillingness to participate in the hysteria that explains my apathy. Why should I help push the cart off the cliff?