116 million

The number of Americans -- 40 percent of the U.S. population -- for whom the president has always been named Clinton or Bush.

Time to Say Something Nice About California

Much As I Hate to ...

Effort to Change California Electoral Votes "All But Dead"

The Los Angeles Times reports that the controversial proposal to change California's electoral vote allocation from winner-take-all to by congressional district "that could have helped Republicans hold on to the White House in 2008 was a shambles Thursday night, as two of its key consultants quit."

"There remained a chance that the measure could be revived, but only if a major donor were to come forward to fund the petition drive. However, time is short to gather the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed by the end of November. And backers said Thursday that they believed the measure was all but dead, at least for the 2008 election."

Said Democratic consultant, Chris LeHane: "We want to to make sure this is not the Freddy Krueger of initiatives that comes back to life. We'll continue to monitor it."

If There Is A God ...

Cornyn is a special sort of fundy doofus

Cornyn May Be Vulnerable

A new Research 2000 poll found that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is currently leading a relatively unknown challenger -- Rick Noriega (D) -- 51%-35% in his 2008 reelection bid. However, only 40% of constituents said they wanted to reelect the Senator, while 35% said they were ready for someone new. This leaves a possible opening for Noriega to exploit. Cornyn is one of the more unpopular Republican Senators and has been made a target by Democrats for 2008.

Wait A Minute

Shake Up Coming in New Hampshire?

Interesting quotes from the Times of London:

"There is going to be surprise -- there always is. Someone leading now in the polls will not necessarily be leading in January."-- Ray Buckley, Chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

"The Democratic race is about to become more competitive here. People want to see a contest, they want to see candidates tested. They don’t like the idea that one of them is walking away with it."-- Fergus Cullen, Chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.

Moving On ...

Clinton Expands National Leads

A new Fox News poll shows Sen. Hillary Clinton expanding her lead in hypothetical match ups with every Republican presidential candidate.Clinton now leads Rudy Giuliani, 46% to 39%, Fred Thompson, 48% to 35%, and Sen. John McCain 46% to 39%.

Sen. Barack Obama also leads each GOP candidate, but by lesser margins.

Bill Kicks Ass

No Torture and No Smart-Ass Catholic Boy Tricks Timmy

She's made me smile. An unthinkable possibility ...

"We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March."

G W Bush to José María Aznar, then the prime minister of Spain, in a prescient moment during a February 2003 , when 'diplomatic efforts' when our adventure in Iraq was still supposed to be only a last ditch effort.

Bush Makes Surprise Visit To Work

WASHINGTON, DC— Dressed in a special suit-and-tie uniform, Bush entered the East Room at about 3:30 p.m. and greeted an enthusiastic crowd of staff members.

Pictures Of Lily ... and That Neighbor Boy Nicky

A new Dachsund on the block. Lily is beside herself.

Not To Fear ... I Think

GT12 Central has been w/o internet connection for the last 24 hours or so. "They" tell me it's OK now. But "they" are still sending somenone out on Monday ...

A Fine Example

... of the hypocrisy and amorality (if not just authoritarian lemmingishness) of the GOP.

Hillary Can Change This!

The Polical Reviews Are Positive

Even if the new single sounds just like Tommy Tutone ....

From Salon's War Room:

Greetings from Asbury Park

ASBURY PARK, N.J. -- Late into the first set of a concert tour that began Monday night and will stretch well into election season, Bruce Springsteen tore through his 9/11 anthem, "The Rising." Three or four years ago, that might have been the rollicking end to things. Now it's just the beginning. Before the last "li, li, li" of Springsteen's paean to the NYFD echoed down the Asbury Park boardwalk, the E Street Band had rumbled into one of Springsteen's newest songs: a full frontal attack on the Iraq war built around John Kerry's 1971 testimony on Vietnam.

The kids asleep in the backseat

We're just countin' the miles you and me

We don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore

We just stack the bodies outside the door.

Who'll be the last to die for our mistake

The last to die for our mistake

Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break

Who'll be the last to die for our mistake?

In the summer of 2004, Springsteen toured swing states with the "Vote for Change" tour, then followed it up with appearances alongside John Kerry in Wisconsin and Ohio. The change Springsteen wanted didn't come, of course, and his new album -- the not-yet-released "Magic" -- focuses on what we've lost as a result.

In "Long Walk Home," a father tells his son that the flag flying over the local courthouse means that "certain things are set in stone: who we are, what we'll do and what we won't." But introducing "Magic's" "Livin' in the Future" Monday night -- "Woke up election day, sky gunpowder and shades of gray" -- Springsteen said that some of those things we'd never do are the ones we're doing already: illegal rendition, voter suppression, the torture of people in the custody of our government.

Springsteen's list drifted off as the band started to play; at this, the first "rehearsal concert" for a tour that will last months, Springsteen's indictment of the current administration hadn't yet developed into the full poetic bill of particulars he delivered during the Vote for Change tour in 2004. But it's there nonetheless, fleshed out in the songs Springsteen sang and the way he put them together. Early on Monday night, he played "No Surrender," the hold-your-dreams-tight rocker Kerry chose for his campaign theme, then followed it with the mournful, Iraq-tinged "Gypsy Biker": "To the dead, well it don't matter much 'bout who's wrong or right ... To him that threw you away, you ain't nothing but gone."

On those autumn nights three years ago, Springsteen told us that the "country we carry in our hearts" was waiting for us. His show Monday night was a reminder that it's still there but only there, and that the long walk back hasn't even yet begun.

Oooops!! Honesty Slip

Wherein, Dear Leader points out one our most defining liberties, and then admits he's not so into it.

“When you really think about it, he’s the head of a state sponsor of terror, he’s—and yet an institution in our country gives him a chance to express his point of view, which really speaks to the freedoms of the country. I’m not sure I’d have offered the same invitation.”

No Gays, No Torture, No Hanging, No Problem

Mr. I'm-a-dinner-jacket is everybit as honest as our dear leader:

“We were eventually all taken to court, and cross-examined. The judge sentenced four of us, including me, to public flogging. The news was printed all over the newspapers that a group of homosexuals had been arrested, with our names. I got 100 lashes -- I passed out before the 100 lashes were over. When I woke up, my arms and legs were so numb that I fell over when they picked me up from the platform on which I’d been lashed. They had told me that, if I screamed, they will beat me even harder -- so I was biting my arms so hard, to keep from screaming, that I left deep teeth wounds in my own arms.”

After this entrapment and public flogging, Amir’s life became unbearable -- he was rousted regularly at his home by the basiji and by agents of the Office for Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice [which represses “moral deviance” -- things like boys and girls walking around holding hands, women not wearing proper Islamic dress or wearing makeup, same-sex relations, and prostitution.

But after the hangings of two gay teens in the city of Mashad in July of this year (above) -- and the world-wide protests that followed those hangings -- Amir says that things got even worse for him and other Iranian gays. Amir was under continual surveillance, harassed, and threatened: “After the Mashad incident, the ‘visits’ from the authorities became an almost daily occurrence. They would come to my house and threaten me. They knew everything about everything I did, about everywhere I went. They would tell me exactly what I had done each and every time I had left the house. It had gotten to the point where I was starting to suspect my own friends of spying on me. On one of these visits, Ali Panahi --the one who’d arrested me the last time -- grabbed me by the hair and asked me if I’d suck his cock if he asked me to. One of my friends was raped by Ali Panahi, who fucked my friend in exchange for letting him go without a record.

It's all here.

Chinese Authorities Execute 10 Million Recalled Toys

BEIJING—So far, 9 to 10 million faulty toys have been kicked, shocked, hanged, pounded with nails, had their ears severed and eyes gouged out, and then shot.

Heartbroken Bush Runs After Departing Rove's Car

WASHINGTON, DC—"Why can't I go with him? When is he coming back?" a tearful President Bush asked advisers as Karl Rove's sedan disappeared over the horizon.

In Defense Of Alan Greespan

Look, the best reason to go to war in the middle east is to protect our oil. Maybe that's not good enough for you (or me), but any liberal parent who drives an internal combusiton engine should look in the mirror and ponder their denial of where all that gas comes from for their min-van or SUV.

ThinkProgress posted this I think as a way of enraging their leftist readers. One is tempted to use the 'H' -word.

Greenspan: Because Of Oil, Saddam Was ‘Far More Important To Get Out Than Bin Laden’

In his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan writes that he is “saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Greenspan later clarified his remark in an interview with the Washington Post, saying that while oil was not “the administration’s motive,” it was “essential” to remove Saddam Hussein because of it.

In an interview with Charlie Rose last week, Greenspan went even further in his defense of the Iraq war, saying it was “far more important to get” Saddam Hussein “out than bin Laden”:

ALAN GREENSPAN: People do not realize in this country, for example, how tenuous our ties to international energy are. That is, we on a daily basis require continuous flow. If that flow is shut off, it causes catastrophic effects in the industrial world. And it’s that which made him far more important to get out than bin Laden.

Oh???

Already planning her transition. (sigh)

Clinton: I won't fund Iraq war without withdrawal plan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said Sunday she won't vote for any more money to support the four-year-old war in Iraq without a plan to start bringing U.S. troops home.

"I've reached the conclusion that the best way to support our troops is begin bringing them home," the New York senator and former first lady told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

"I don't believe we should continue to vote for funding that has an open-ended commitment, that has no pressure on the Iraqi government to make the tough political decisions they have to make, or which really gives any urgency to the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts."

Clinton's declaration comes as the Senate debates the Defense Department's 2008 spending authorization bill. It follows her vote against a $120 billion war-spending bill in May, when Congress dropped a call for the withdrawal of American combat troops by March 2008 after President Bush vetoed a bill containing that provision.
"The president has no intention of changing his policy in Iraq," she said. "He's now talking about leaving it to his successor."

Meanwhile, the Senate's Republican minority routinely filibusters Democratic proposals to wind down the war, which is costing the Treasury about $10 billion a month and has claimed the lives of nearly 3,800 American troops.

Why OJ Is Still Out There

Everybody Needs A Home

I See A Reason For A Sequel!

Wholesome former THE BRADY BUNCH star MAUREEN MCCORMICK is set to reveal the beloved 70s TV series' most shocking secret in a new book - she and her on-screen sister had a lesbian fling. MCCormick's tell-all, Here's The Story, won't hit bookstores until 2008, but publishers are already buzzing about the big reveal. As well as talking candidly about her well-documented eating disorder and drug problems in the book, TV's Marcia Brady will come clean about a romance she had with co-star Eve Plumb, who played her sister Jan on the hit show. A source tells America's National Enquirer, "The most explosive comments will be how the then-blonde, blue-eyed cutie developed a crush on Eve Plumb, which led to some sexual play. "This book will certainly come as a shocker. While Maureen is not a lesbian, she reveals there were some sexual hijinks going on behind the scenes. "It's bizarre because she played such a virginal character on the show."

What About The Pina Coladas? The Walks In The Rain?

Andrew Sullivan reports:

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage," - Sana Klaric, 27, who found out that the anonymous stranger she was chatting up on the Internet was her husband. They're now divorcing.

Goddam Democrats

From Salon:

Number of the Day

72: Members of the U.S. Senate -- the same body that couldn't manage a vote Wednesday on habeas corpus rights for detainees or time off for troops -- who voted today in favor of a resolution condemning "personal attacks on the honor and integrity of Gen. Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces."
The Senate resolution didn't name MoveOn or its "General Betray Us" ad, but the group and those aligned with it were plainly the target.

Who gets the credit for this important legislative accomplishment? Democrats Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Ben Cardin, Thomas Carper, Bob Casey Jr., Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Dianne Feinstein, Tim Johnson, Amy Klobuchar, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Patrick Leahy, Blanche Lincoln, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Ken Salazar, John Tester and Jim Webb and independent Joe Lieberman joined every Senate Republican in voting for the measure.

Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd voted no. Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn't vote.

What Do You Do When Your Blog Makes You Sick?

No, that's not the reason we've been off ...

BUT,

GT12 has started pondering what it will do if Hillary gets the nomination. We are rabidly anti-monarchical here. We really know that all of our current difficulties are not just a result of W's anti-intellectualism.

We don't know what we will post between February and November of next year if HRC is the nominee.

And if she runs against Rudy? ... We're leaving.

I Guess The Yellow Stars And The Gas Chambers Weren't Warning Enough

Joe Lieberman may be the worst human being in congress ...

From Salon:

Joe Lieberman and three Republicans

Human rights supporters -- and we'd like to know who isn't one -- needed 60 votes in the Senate today to restore habeas corpus rights to detainees the United States is holding at Guantánamo Bay. They got 56.

Six Republicans -- Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, John Sununu and Gordon Smith -- joined every Democrat in voting for cloture on the habeas corpus provision. Joseph Lieberman voted no.

Keeping Truthiness

During her appearance on the NBCC's panel "Grub Street 2.0" on Friday, (thanks Emily), Emily Lazar, producer of The Colbert Report, made it clear that Stephen Colbert needs books, but he doesn't really read them. That's her job. "Stephen doesn't read books. [His character doesn't read books.] Most of the ideas we discuss on the show start in books. Book reviews are hugely important to me. I get sixty books a day, and it would be impossible to read all of them. Book reviews quickly gve me the idea behind the book and how the idea fits into the context of other books on the subject, whether the book goes over old ground or advances ideas. We don't usually allow novelists on the show, because you can't usually understand their ideas off the bat. We're not about storytelling. We're about entertainment. We had Garrison Keillor on the show because he's an iconic figure. He represents folksiness, banjo playing public television folksiness, something Stephen could easily make fun of. Salman Rushdie was on the show not for a specific novel but for an idea. [Rushdie appeared in support of the NBCC Campaign to Save Book Reviewing]"

It's my job to figure out who will be a good foil for his character and figure out a way in. If it were up to me, I'd have bumped Garrison Keillor. But Stephen said, 'I'm going to outfolksy him.' He likes nothing more than the challenge of a situation when it seems he has nothing to say to this person. The hardest person to interview is the one he likes to interview the most."

Lazar also commented on the tone of some reviews. "I'm the wife of a writer," she said. (Her husband is Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.) "Have any of you reviewers written a book? I read all the reviews of my husband's book when it came out. Some of them were so petty, trying to find minor factual errors to discredit the book. A real problem with book reviews is some reviewers feel pressed to feel superior to the book."

Eau De China White

Who thought that this would be a good idea?

Courtney Love to launch her own perfume

Courtney Love wants to launch her own perfume but is worried nobody wants to smell like her.The former Hole singer - who has battled drink and drug addiction - wants to lay to rest her rebellious image and reinvent herself before she brings out the signature scent.Courtney said, "These days stars make money by marketing their own clothes and fragrances but I've been reading a lot of books and attending a lot of marketing conferences before I go down that route. No one wants to smell like Eau de Controversy!"

Good News For The In-Laws

Mr Dan has a cousin in San Diego. Cousin and Partner must feel good today (From Andrew Sullivan):

The Republican mayor of San Diego just reversed himself on marriage equality and agreed to sign a a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California's gay marriage ban (also opposed by the state legislature). Moving video moment here. He'd previously vowed to veto it. He has a lesbian daughter, it turns out, and like many other parents of gay children, simply didn't believe it was a positive step to keep her segregated from her own family and community and stigmatized as inferior. Here's his full statement.

With me this afternoon is my wife, Rana. I am here this afternoon to announce that I will sign the resolution that the City Council passed yesterday directing the City Attorney to file a brief in support of gay marriage.My plan, as has been reported publicly, was to veto that resolution, so I feel like I owe all San Diegans an explanation for this change of heart. During the campaign two years ago, I announced that I did not support gay marriage and instead supported civil unions and domestic partnerships. I have personally wrestled with that position ever since.

My opinion on this issue has evolved significantly -- as I think have the opinions of millions of Americans from all walks of life.

"everybody knows they suck."

OK, this is the type thing that catches your eye.

Personally, I give John Lennon credit for most of what is good and bad about me.

But that was a long time ago.

It would appear that to the kids today The Fab Four are about as relevant as Sinatra and Hank Williams were to me when I was a kid.

This is both refreshing (at least the kids have their own music) and everybit as ill-informed as my '70's attiude toward Old Blue Eyes and lonesome Hank.

The New Republic examines this version of the age-old conflict between earnest, artistically interested youth's fresh hearts and ears and their equally limited sense of the world from which they sprang. (a major problem in the new tesxt-based world of contemporary art).

In case you hadn't heard, the Beatles blow. They're overrated lightweights who aren't as influential as certain pivotal punk bands, and they're to blame for all that soft rock commemorated in the latest Time Life Music infomercial. And those Sgt. Pepper costumes are, let's face it, cornier than any boy-band outfit of the '90s.

...
In a New York Times op-ed, no less a pop classicist than Aimee Mann admitted she loved the album as a child but now feels it's missing "emotional depth," that "John Lennon's melodies feel a bit underwritten while Paul McCartney's relentless cheerfulness is depressing." On Salon, rock writer Gina Arnold weighed in, "There's a number of current bands that you can say, 'These guys like Sgt. Pepper,' but they're oddballs, like the Polyphonic Spree." So the album's legacy amounts to a bunch of toga-clad, faux-cheery ironists: Ouch.

Simultaneously, the Internet burst with "Beatles are overrated" threads that went to the heart of the band itself. "When you really think about it, they were a good but not great pop band," wrote a Slate letter writer: "A little lite [sic] and fluffy, a bit quirky, but not much else," and certainly, the writer added, not nearly as good as the Stones, the Clash, Jeff Buckley, or Radiohead. On the same page, another reader argued that Beatle music "has not aged well" and that their influence "has been limited to soft pop acts and perhaps Oasis.[Perhaps!!!!???? -GT12]" Others called their music irritating--or, in the words of a 27-year-old writing to Salon, "a bore, a relic, and decidedly tame."

My first encounter with this mindset occurred not long ago, when I was working at a national entertainment magazine. During a group email exchange about which boxed sets to include in a roundup, our thirty-something editors explained that a Beatles collection could be excluded--not because it was a repackaging of old albums but because, as one said, "they're the worst band in history" and, the other added, "everybody knows they suck." They are? and we do?

...

Up to a point, the Beatle bashers make persuasive arguments. As more than one blogger has proclaimed, the Ramones feel a lot more influential these days; you can hear their aural footprints all over grunge, Green Day, and emo. The Beatles' influence amounts to ... Fountains of Wayne? Look at what melody has come down to in pop: the smarmy come-ons of Maroon 5. Sgt. Pepper itself is responsible for enough bad knockoffs to fill an iPod, from XTC to Madonna's "Dear Jessie", quite possibly the most cloying thing she's ever put on record.

...

Yet what's absurd about the current argument--what truly sucks, as my former editor would've put it--is that it amounts to an attempt to rewrite history based on a generational grudge. To be annoyed by the Beatles is one thing; it would be nice indeed if classic-rock radio wouldn't play "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a daily basis. But to dismiss them?

All the grousing made me dig back into records I hadn't heard since the CD came into play. The band's early covers, like "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Please Mister Postman," still sound insubstantial. To modern high-fidelity ears, albums like Help! and Revolver feel as crudely made as Dust Bowl ballads--or, in the case of the White Album, as disjointed as a latter-day Wu-Tang Clan disc. But an equal number of rediscoveries awaited me: the ominous, bad-day-coming vibe of Lennon's White Album songs, the unashamed (and glorious) sentimentality of "The Long and Winding Road" (the orchestrated Phil Spector take, incidentally, not the emaciated version on Let It Be ... Naked), the still-rousing "It's Getting Better," the exquisite melody of "She's Leaving Home," the snarl always tucked inside Harrison's songs. We can only hope OK Computer sounds so good in 2020.

Rehearing the music made me realize that what's suspect about the Beatles these days isn't their image, or even their ubiquity. It's what else I heard in those records: beauty, sincerity, earnestness. You can still hear that impulse in the indie balladeer wave that began with the late, Beatle-admiring Elliott Smith and has been carried on by the Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, and Sufjan Stevens, among others. But in the culture at large, they all still feel fairly marginal, and in an age where everything cheesy is revered--where the likes of Bret Michaels and Scott Baio are faux-celebrated kitsch icons largely because they're associated with utter crap--the Beatles and everything they stand for can feel hopelessly outdated. Listening back to Sgt. Pepper, I was nostalgic not for the Summer of Love but for humanity and soul--music that didn't glorify hostility or rage but looked for a way to imagine it all getting better, all the time.

Back

It has been a time of trial at GT12 Central but we shall persevere.

Thanks for all the concern and statements of support. Our fave has been "The Internets is boring without you".

Fair enough.