Enjoy the Ride Back Down, Boys!

That there is Theodore Roosevelt IV, managing director of Lehman Brothers. Or should I say, former managing director...

In what has to be a contender for the best blog post ever, courtesy of sorryimissedyourparty.com, the vacuous foiblery of Wall Street is laid bare by way of its own imagery. The schadenfreude of this is just priceless. The best thing about it is imagining each and every one of these half-witted frat boys in their ill-fitting Men's Warehouse suits desperately scrambling to find work at their local Starbucks.

I'll have a venti half-caf skim white chocolate mocha with 2% foam, Teddy. And hop to it, boy, I have a job to get to!

Turns Out, I Don't Hate Poets After All...

I should probably apologize in advance, as you're not really gonna find a whole lot of meat in this post, until the end, but bear with me here for a bit, folks. I need to vent my spleen.

You may have noticed that the Dow Index closed at below 8600 today, from a high of somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 earlier this year. That's a drop of more than a third. After the crash of 1929, it took months, if not years, for the stock market to lose that much of its value. Nowadays it's happening in a matter of weeks. Days, actually... The fallout of all this, aside from the foreclosure nightmare of course, is that nobody can get any credit right now (including employers - yours, perhaps - who rely on short term loans to make payroll), or that none of our retirement accounts will be worth anything for a good long while. I could go on, but I'll spare you. This is scary stuff, and one of the questions that's rattling around in my head right now is "What the hell have these people done to us?" And by "these people," of course, I mean the Reagan Revolution, Republicans and Democrats alike, and its bastard neo-con spawn: the deregulators, the Friedmanites, the free market evangelists...

Then again, maybe there's another way of looking at this. Maybe, as Pogo said, we have seen the enemy and he is us. While we should have been paying attention, we instead did what we were told. We studied hard. We paid our taxes. We obeyed the law and we even sent our kids off to war. And we consumed. In short, we closed our eyes and put our faith in the system. We ignored the warnings of our poets, our philosophers, our rabble-rousers, and put our collective nose to the grindstone, all for the privilege of having the rug pulled out from under us yet again. And truth be told, we've earned it. You would think we'd know better by now. And yet there are still people out there who plan to vote for McCain and Palin, despite the best efforts of Tina Fey! Not that Obama and Biden are in any position to help us now, even if they wanted to... But at least we've still got Andrei Codrescu.

I've been thinking recently that it might not be a bad idea to acquire some skills in say, the blacksmithing arts. Or the coopering trade. Or cobblery. This afternoon Codrescu put these thoughts of mine into some very amusing, if not necessarily reassuring, words. Worth a listen for sure. Funny how our poets have a way of reminding us, now and again, just why it is that they're relevant...

Putting the Lie to the "Drill, Baby, Drill" Myth...

Back in July, I caught an interview with Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, in which she discussed, among other topics, energy poicy. About halfway through the interview Klein laid out why lifting the congressional offshore drilling ban would, in fact, not lower oil and gasoline prices. It's an issue I hadn't understood very well up to that point (truth be known, I still don't understand it all that well), and it was quite an eye-opener. One of her arguments against increased drilling revolved around the industry's practice of stockpiling and trading drilling leases as a means of controlling prices on the world market. This is, of course, only one facet of one side of a complex argument, but I found it a fascinating one nonetheless. As the debate over drilling emerges as a major point of contention in the current presidential race, on the face of it the logic of increasing the supply of oil to put downward pressure on gasoline prices would seem fairly straightforward. The reality of it, naturally, is much more complicated and as it turns out, largely counter-intuitive.

I would try and explain it here, but there's no way I could do justice to the complexity of the subject. Antonia Juhasz, of the Institute for Policy Studies, on the other hand, can. She made the rounds on the interview circuit today, appearing on both Fresh Air and Democracy Now. I highly recommend following the links and having a listen to her take on all of this. Then tell everyone you know whose vote may actually be swayed by the "Drill Here, Drill Now" argument to check it out as well.

A Little McCain/Palin Inspired Poetry...

You're gonna love these. But first, some backstory:

I got a phone call about a couple weeks back from my 98 year old great aunt, Virginia Paris Campbell. "Jinj," as we in the family know her, is a lifelong Republican who's become so disenchanted with the Neo-con takeover of the party that she changed her party affiliation to Democrat this past spring so that she could vote for Obama in the Oregon primary.

Allow me to reiterate that: 98 years old. Lifelong Republican. Changed her party affiliation and is now an ardent Obama supporter!!! Her husband, my great uncle Herald, is also a lifelong Republican (and served for a number of years as mayor of Lake Oswego - an affluent suburb of Portland, for those of you not familiar with the area - where the two have lived, and raised three daughters, since leaving Portland's Irvington neighborhood in 1946). Now Jinj and Herald, it should be noted, were liberal Republicans. Yes, there is such a thing, and it's a tradition particular to Oregon politics, more or less what we now know as "Libertarians." Think Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, etc... But they were dedicated Republicans nonetheless, so for Jinj to take that kind of a bold step is really something in my book.

You'll notice from the photo above, by the way, that Jinj's left hand is abnormally large. This unusual trait, passed down through the Paris family for generations, earned Jinj in her youth the nickname of "Lefty." Oh, and speaking of photos, here's a composite of two of Jinj and Herald that I dug up on Reed College's online archive (both of them, like my grandmother Emilie - Jinj's little sister - are alumni of the school):


Jinj looks a little Bjork-like in that photo, wouldn't you say? She always was ahead of her time...

At any rate, the reason for Jinj's phone call, and the reason for this post, is that in recent weeks she's been spending her time writing limericks about John McCain and Sarah Palin. LOTS of limericks. She's apparently cranking out five or six of these a day, and wanted to know if I'd post a few of them on my blog. Why she doesn't just set up her own blog I can't quite figure - Lord knows she could do it - but of course this was a request that I couldn't refuse. So I've picked out a few of my favorites to share. Enjoy:

As Republican I am appalled
By the cynical pandering, bald,
Of McCain in his pick,
A bootlicking trick;
If he could be, he should be recalled.

Well, we’re hearing the “maverick” refrain
In the young woman picked by McCain,
Right out of his hat,
A circumstance that,
Underlines his bad judgment again.

She’s smack in the media spot
And admiringly touted as “hot”
But she hasn’t yet felt
The polar ice melt
And she claims global warming is not.

A pit bull with lipstick is she.
A bull dog unmuzzled is he.
Their kind of campaign
All teeth and no brain,
Is one I’m disgusted to see.

Copyright Virginia P. Campbell

Yes, you read that right, she even made reference to Palin's "hotness." Jinj is so much younger than her 98 years... And yeah, I was kidding about her left hand. That photo was obviously taken with a very wide angle lens. Anyway, hope you enjoyed these, and feel free to pass them along (just make sure to include the copyright when you do).

Too Many Headlines To Choose From...

...here are just a few:

"Sarah Palin: the William S. Burroughs of Contemporary American Politics" (due to her rhetorical style of cutting and pasting her talking points)

"Will Somebody Please Tie a Tournequet Around Sarah Palin's Neck?" (because Biden hit not just the jugular, but the carotid as well)

"Nice To Meet You. Hey, Can I Call You Joe?" (uh, that's his name)

"Drill, Baby, Drill!" (kinda speaks for itself, don't you think?)

Take your pick...

I caught the vice presidential debate last night at Beulahland, which as it turned out was a great venue for it, even if the sound and video weren't synched up perfectly. And I've gotta tell ya, I think it was an absolute bloodbath for Palin. Biden was on point and in full command of the facts, and generally focused his attacks McCain rather than Palin herself, alleviating fears on the left that he'd come out of the whole thing looking patronizing or condescending. Palin, to her credit, managed to avoid falling down or comparing herself to John F. Kennedy, but she was scattered and evasive at best, and wrapped all of her points up in dodgy grammar and bizarre Alaska-speak. An interesting exchange came about eleven minutes in:

Gwen Ifill: "Governor, please, if you want to respond to what he (Biden) said about Senator McCain's comments about health care?"

Sarah Palin: "I'd like to respond about the tax increase..."

Joe Biden: Flashes first toothy grin of the evening.

Then she did it again two minutes later! Another notable punt on Palin's part came almost thirty minutes in when, after mangling her answer to a question on the current economic meltdown ("It's a toxic mess on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street"), she changed the subject, for the third or fourth time up to that point, to energy policy.

It pretty much went on this way for the next sixty minutes.

I'll give Palin at least one thing, though. She did call Biden on his support of "clean coal" technology, asserting that Biden himself had said that there is no such thing as clean coal. His response that she was taking his position on exporting said technology to China out of context wasn't very persuasive, and I haven't been able to dig up anything to confirm whether or not he's denied the existence of clean coal, but I will say that no matter how you slice it, coal is ultimately a very dirty energy source. Of course, offshore drilling isn't the obvious answer to rising energy costs as many assume it is, but that's another subject altogether...

All things considered, I'd definitely call the debate for Biden, and not just because I'm firmly planted on the far left of the American political spectrum (if anything, Biden and Obama are a little too close to the center for my taste; I'm particularly disappointed in their stance against gay marriage). Not that being on the far left really means anything in the context of American politics, but hey, Bob's yer uncle.

Incidentally, a friend recently sent me the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart, which is hilarious! Have a look:

THE GOLDEN DOGS!!! meh...

So I headed out this evening with a blind date to see my favorite Canadian band, the Golden Dogs, who are currently on tour as the opening act for Sloan (who, it should be noted, are themselves apparently about as big as U2 up that way). The Dogs are known among Canadians for their energetic live shows - and are known to your humble author as one of the best power pop bands ever - and as they have no appreciable fan base in the states, they NEVER make it out to the pacific northwest, unless you count Vancouver, BC. In fact, tonight may well have been their first ever show in Portland, for all I know. So needless to say, I was pretty jazzed about this.

Well, lemme tell ya, people, this was the most disappointing set I've seen in a good long while. The drummer was doing his job, but the rest of 'em were just totally phoning it in. And can I say I blame 'em? I mean, really, Portland? Where's that? Who lives there? Nobody who appreciates a good performance, right? Why bother to put on a decent show for a bunch of hicks in some podunk town like Portland, Oregon? Do they even have indoor plumbing there?

C'mon, when did Dead Moon, or the Dandy Warhols, or Everclear, or Modest Mouse, ever put on a bad show in Toronto? Yeah, that's right: NEVER... You've all had experiences like this, and I'm sure you can agree with me that there's little worse than finding out that your heroes are a bunch of hacks. SO below par! On the upside, by the end of their set, my date was so trashed that she thought she'd just seen Sloan. Which was fortuitous for me, as I really wasn't in the mood to stick around for their set anyway (by the way, if there are any Canadians out there reading this, could you please explain to my readers and myself the appeal of Sloan?), so off we went for a round at the Bridgeport brewpub...

Moral of the story? Well, there is no moral to the story, really, unless it's to not invest too much hope in untested performers. Of course, that notion will rob you of the joy of discovery, so I guess finding those hidden gems is worth putting up with the occasional disappointment...

Letterman is Angry...

You've probably all seen this by now, but I just had to post it anyway. I've never seen Dave this chapped before. You can almost see smoke coming out of his ears. Hilarious stuff, especially the Keith Olbermann/Katie Couric bit. Enjoy: