Goes To Twelve

Monday, September 14, 2009

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Teach Your Children

Stupid is as Stupid is raised.

These pictures captures perfectly the complete freedom from historical knowledge that is the Hallmark, no, the Rallying Point, of the administration's opponents.

Where I come from, you have to have to know something before you graduate.

Friday, September 11, 2009

TMI?

Gawker:

Levi Johnston Is Actually Going to Strip Down for Playgirl

After reading on Gawker that Levi was game for posing nude, the guy who puts together Playgirl's photoshoots, Daniel Nardicio, emailed Johnston's manager Tank Jones about having his client pose nude for their website. (The print version of the magazine closed earlier this year). Tank referred the matter to Levi's lawyer Rex Butler (how many handlers does one Alaskan babydaddy need?) who emailed back: "There are people out there that want to see such a shoot of Levi and we are ready to do it if the proposal is right." The only hitch, Levi's not willing to do a nude shoot, only pose in his skivvies.

And since a nearly nude Levi is better than no nude Levi at all, Playgirl's down and there's an agreement in place to do the shoot. They're in final negotiations to get the thing together right now.

Funny thing is that Playgirl's biggest get in years doesn't have a clue about who reads the male flesh mag. As he and Tank joke in the Vanity Fair video, Levi says, "I'm assuming it's where a dude poses for women."

Have We Learned This Yet?

As we reflect on the Post-9/11 world:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate....Returning violence for violence multiples violence,adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes We Are

"Every year on this day, we are all New Yorkers."--

President Obama, in an op-ed for the New York Daily News.

Wonkette Approved

After reviewing a bunch of dreadful PWT-aesthetic 9/11 tribute vids, Wonkette suggests that there really is a good one....

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

Thursday, September 10, 2009

To Barack, From Ted

Mostly we've been too disgusted to post but this needs to be read.

Full Disclosure: we miss Ted.

Kennedy's Letter
President Obama ended his speech tonight talking about the legacy of Sen. Ted Kennedy and his lifelong fight for health care. It was a very powerful way to end the speech.
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me - and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.
On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.
You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.
When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.
There will be struggles - there always have been - and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat - that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.
And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family's health will never again depend on the amount of a family's wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will - yes, we will - fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.
In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America's behalf inspires the entire world.
So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.
At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.
And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.
With deep respect and abiding affection,
Ted

Friday, September 04, 2009

I really thought that the whole Al Franken-as-a-senator was a bad idea.

Instead, what I see here is, well, Al beng able to do what no other politician seems able to do: simpley have a real discussion with his constituents about Health Care Reform.

Al Franken 2016

Back In The Day, This Would Be Grounds For Detention

Speaking as an ex-Psychologist, This is crazy talk. This is how Paranoid Schizophrenics think.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Sweet-n-Creamy

Wonkette:

OH WHAT SO NOW WE CAN ALL MARRY PINTS OF ICE CREAM?? In celebration of Vermont’s starting to issue same-sex marriage licenses, radical snacktime propagandists Ben & Goebbels will be calling Chubby Hubby, one of their lesser flavors, by the similar name of “Hubby Hubby.” The ice cream will only be gay for September and then it will go back to its wife and kids. [Times Online]

I'm Gonna Live Forever

Mail On-Line:

Being bad is good for you: Playing blaring rock music and skipping the housework can actually boost your health

We've been told not to get angry - because it raises blood pressure. While fizzy drinks do nothing but rot your teeth and make you fat. But new research has shown that many of our bad habits may also be good for us. Here, VICTORIA LAMBERT presents the Good Health guide to when and why our bad habits can be positively virtuous...

According to researchers at Manchester University, music fans are stimulating part of the inner ear known as the sacculus, which responds to the beat in music. This gives the brain pleasure and makes us feel good - during the music and afterwards.

The sacculus, which is not thought to have any hearing function in humans, appears to be sensitive only to very loud volumes, above 90 decibels.

Neil Todd, an expert in the scientific study of music, explains that the sacculus seems to be part of a primitive hearing mechanism that has slowly been lost as humans have evolved.

He said it has a connection to the part of the brain responsible for drives such as hunger, sex and hedonistic responses.

When these desires are satisfied, the brain is stimulated into releasing feelgood hormones that make us calm, happy and responsive. So to trigger a dose of happy hormones on a Monday morning, you should, in theory, choose Black Sabbath over chamber music.

AND...

People who get up early and busy themselves all day long are heading for an early grave, says public health expert Professor Peter Axt. He believes lazing about is the key to a long life and an antidote to professional stress, provided people are otherwise healthy.

He suggests: 'Waste half your free time. People who would rather take a midday nap instead of playing squash have a better chance of living into old age.' Research shows that people who run long distances into their 50s are using up energy they need for other purposes such as cell renewal and fighting disease, he adds.

As examples of his thesis, he has pointed to the increased longevity of zoo animals - for instance lions in the Serengeti live only eight years, but can live to the age of 20 in a zoo; Arctic polar bears last 20 years in the wild, but 40 in captivity. Human examples are priests, nuns and monks, who tend to live quieter lives.

Can't Be Said Enough

Top 10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal

1.Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2.Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.

7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in North America.

9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans

This Is Us This Week

Dickless

Proto-Birther

Pat doesn't have time to worry about birth certificates, he's got a holocaust to deny.

TPM

According to Buchanan, Hitler's invasion of Poland -- which led to Britain's declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II -- was motivated merely by Germany's desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty. Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted. In fact, Hitler wasn't bent on world, or even European, domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland, you see. Hitler "wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 -- including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust -- are on the Allies' heads.

In fact, the column is just a bite-size version of an argument Buchanan made last year in book form. (Really, it's a chance to tout the book.)

Other comments here and here

And MSNBC still keeps this guy on as a respectable politcal analyst.

Really, Project Runway and top Chef at night, West Wing re-runs in the AM.

Who needs MSNBC?

Monday, August 31, 2009

Chanel 1988 - 2009

Chanel, the wirehaired dachshund who held the Guinness World Record for oldest dog, died Aug. 28, PEOPLE Pets has learned. The pooch celebrated her 21st birthday on May 6 — that's 147 in dog years, according to the Guinness Web site.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

C'mon down to the Batcave Rob'n Honey..... (ed note: this is an allusion to Fiedler's famous essay)

And it wasn't just them, now was it?

Ellie Greenwich, a songwriter who collaborated with Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and others to create a greatest-hits list of 1960s teenage pop songs like “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Hanky Panky” and “Leader of the Pack,” died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 68.
Ms. Greenwich was among the songwriters, music publishers and producers working at the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway in Manhattan, which (along with 1650 Broadway, across the street) became a center of pop music in the early 1960s.
The buildings were home to the songwriting teams of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin, among many others, and from their offices and studios came a flood of teenage anthems, story songs and achy love songs fraught with the hormonal angst of the young.
For a time Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry, who was then her husband, were the most successful of the teams, especially when they wrote for the girl groups the Crystals, the Dixie Cups, the Shangri-Las and others.
In 1964 alone, 17 singles by Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry landed on the pop charts, according to “Always Magic in the Air,” a 2005 book by Ken Emerson about the Brill Building days. They included “Chapel of Love,” a No. 1 for the Dixie Cups, and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” which became a No. 1 for Manfred Mann.
Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry also wrote “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You” and “River Deep — Mountain High” (all with Mr. Spector). They were also singers, recording their own songs and those of others as the Raindrops.
Perhaps their most famous song was “Leader of the Pack,” which Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry wrote with the producer Shadow Morton. His previous hit, for the Shangri-Las, was the idiosyncratic “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” a song about a girl’s heartbreak that included sound effects and spoken words.
“Leader of the Pack” made use of similar tools, creating what Mr. Barry called “a movie for the ear.” Telling a soap-opera-like story of a girl who is in love with a biker but forbidden by her parents to see him, it ends with the biker’s death as he speeds away from her after their breakup and crashes. The music is melodramatic — “I met him at the candy store” was its signature wail — and woven into it are the sounds of a revving motorcycle, the fatal crash and the cooing, speaking voices of the girl’s friends.
“Leader of the Pack” was a No.1 hit for the Shangri-Las in 1964, and it became emblematic enough to be lampooned almost immediately by a band calling itself the Detergents, which recorded a song called “Leader of the Laundromat.”
Bette demonstrates:

And, we can't forget:

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Larry Knechtel 1940 - 2009

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) — Larry Knechtel, a Grammy Award-winning keyboardist who played in the 1970s soft-rock group Bread and accompanied a long roster of big-name performers including Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and the Doors, died on Thursday. He was 69.
Mr. Knechtel, who also played bass guitar and harmonica, performed live and in the studio with a wide range of artists. Others included the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Duane Eddy, Neil Diamond, Randy Newman, the Beach Boys, Hank Williams Jr., Elvis Costello and the Dixie Chicks.
He shared a Grammy for the arrangement of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Bridge Over Troubled Water“ (he also played piano on that record). He also played keyboards on the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy-winning album “Taking the Long Way” and played organ for the group’s tour of the same name.
He joined Bread, a Los Angeles-based quartet, in 1971, replacing Robb Royer. Beginning in 1969, the group had a string of hits including “Make It With You,” “Baby I’m-a Want You” and “It Don’t Matter to Me.”
Early in his career Mr. Knechtel, who was born in Bell, Calif., was a member of the Wrecking Crew, a group of West Coast studio musicians that also included Glen Campbell and Leon Russell.
“Larry’s résumé is a history lesson in great American music all unto itself,” reads Mr. Knechtel’s biography on the Dixie Chicks Web site, dixiechicks.com.

Slap The Moron

NPR's Inskeep does what no body else has done: Just pucnh the shit out of Michael Steele's stupidity.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Ted Two

Two Great Things You Won't Hear Much About:

1. In 1971, as a senator, Kennedy opposed ending the draft and going to the all-volunteer force.
If you think that he was wrong, then you haven't thought it through.

One of the great liberal knee-jerk missteps was the 'all-volunteer', responsible-only-to-itself army.

Ted saw that.

2. He stood up as one of only fourteen Senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. An act that Saint Bill Of Clinton proudly ran on.

Ted

Thanks.

One year ago today:

My Life Rules!

Monday, August 24, 2009

Great Moments In Christianity

"You want to know who the biggest hypocrite in the world is? The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals. Hypocrite. The same God who instituted the death penalty for murderers is the same God who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals - sodomites, queers! That’s what it was instituted for, okay? That’s God, he hasn’t changed. Oh, God doesn’t feel that way in the New Testament … God never “felt” anything about it, he commanded it and said they should be taken out and killed,"
- Pastor Steven L. Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church.

Jim Dickinson 1941 - 2009

GT12 is ashamed to have missed this.

Jim Dickinson, a pianist, singer and producer who helped make Memphis a hot spot for recording artists and who played as a session musician with Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder, died on Saturday in Memphis. He was 67 and lived near Coldwater, Miss.
The cause was complications of heart surgery, said his wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson.
Mr. Dickinson spanned several rock ’n’ roll eras. He sang and played piano on one of the Sun label’s last great records, the 1966 song “Cadillac Man” by the Jesters, and, as one of the Dixie Flyers, an Atlantic Records house band, he backed up Aretha Franklin on her 1970 album “Spirit in the Dark.” His piano is heard on the Rolling Stones hit “Wild Horses,” and his producing work with Alex Chilton and Big Star put him in demand as a producer for younger acts like Willy DeVille, the Replacements and Mojo Nixon.
In 1997 he played keyboards on Bob Dylan’s album “Time Out of Mind,” which was named album of the year at the 1998 Grammy Awards.
After graduating from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), Mr. Dickinson worked as a session musician at several Memphis studios. At the Sound of Memphis studio in the late 1960s, he and other session players formed the Dixie Flyers, which backed up Atlantic artists like Ms. Franklin, Sam and Dave, Carmen McRae and Jerry Jeff Walker.
During an interview with swampland.com, Mr. Dickinson described his involvement with the Rolling Stones as an accident. At a recording session in 1969 at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama, Ian Stewart, the Stones pianist, abruptly left when it came time to record “Wild Horses.” Mr. Dickinson sat down and filled in.
“After we’re doing it for about 45 minutes, Jagger’s in the control room, listening, and he says to Keith, ‘What do you think about the piano?’ ” Mr. Dickinson recalled, referring to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. “I thought: ‘Well here goes. I’m going home now.’ And Keith says, ‘It’s the only thing I like so far.’ ”
Ten years later Mr. Stewart told Mr. Dickinson he left that day because he did not play minor chords.
One of his most productive collaborations was with Ry Cooder, with whom he produced several albums, including “Into the Purple Valley,” and collaborated on music for “Paris, Texas,” “The Long Riders” and other films.
Mr. Dickinson recorded several solo albums, beginning with “Dixie Fried” in 1972.
After performing with and producing for the Memphis group Mudboy and the Neutrons in the 1970s and 1980s, he began producing records for groups including Green on Red, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and Mudhoney.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his two sons, Luther, of Cochran, Miss., and Cody, of Southhaven, Miss. Both are members of the North Mississippi Allstars, a blues-rock band. Mr. Dickinson played keyboards on many of their records, some of which he also produced and recorded at Zebra Ranch, a studio he set up at his home.