The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 02/05/2016 - 2:55am |

[transferred from comment - think everyone could use a dance break...]

Important subliminal issue related to Woodward's "tone issue" - 

Hillary finishes 3rd from last

By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/02/2016 - 3:46am |

Checking out updates, CNN writes about the challenge Hillary will have going into New Hampshire, having essentially lost Iowa that she was supposed to win. It's that "essentially" part (my summation) and ignore that she either slightly (votes) or largely (delegates) won that reflects the fickleness of expectations. Sure, if you believed polls from Iowa 3 months ago, it was game over. If you have any experience in this, you know that polls can close rapidly as the day comes close. In any case, it's funny to see CNN treat it as a loss.

What Matters Most?

By PeraclesPlease on Mon, 02/01/2016 - 10:30am |

Yesterday Hillary got her 200th (out of ~250 possible) endorsement from a sitting Congressperson or Governor, weighted-wise according to FiveThirtyEight giving her the strongest backing (and superdelegates) of any candidate ever except George W Bush - and he had a House majority to work with. Bernie hasn't had such an endorsement since October, with a total of 3.

Pandering to the 1%

By PeraclesPlease on Sun, 01/31/2016 - 9:16am |

We've made it part of our DNA, our running commentary that we shouldn't be pandering to the 1%, the white well-connected who seem to get all the favors from government.

Yet here we are, after a year of pandering to 1% of the population, 2 of the whitest states in the Union, 1 of which subsists on government corn subsidies, ethanol supports and other handouts that would make a supposed welfare queen blanche, 3.4% unemployment. Its industry pretty much all revolves around food and livestock production, including supporting manufacturing, with typical huge industrial agro firms progressives love to hate (and the leading hog producer and egg producer that animal rights advocates love to infiltrate - now largely illegal), along with a strong Des Moines insurance industry. Central to Iowa's survival is the atrocious modern "factory farm", along with key enablers like exemption of "agricultural runoff" from the Clean Water Act, abetting the high level of nitrates and animal waste flowing into Des Moines water system. While corporate farms for produce are largely prohibited, they instead exist as "contract farms" that look but don't behave like private farms. The conservative governor has opted out of Medicare expansion (1 of 15 states to do so).

Millennial Volgon Conspiracy

By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 01/29/2016 - 7:40am |

[to trkingmomoe & that millennial getting buzz around the tubez. "Conspiracy" is a reference to Volokh Conspiracy, just because. Millennial Volgon, I hope you can guess.] 

I appreciate your posting and appreciate your support for Bernie. I even appreciate the millennial's post as kind of a prompting of nostalgic memories.

Tear Down The Wall

By PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/21/2016 - 1:16am |

[started off as followup to rmrd on Coates & Sanders]

1) there is no path to a Democratic presidency without the black base. Hispanics are important, and of course whites are still the majority, but for the Democratic core, African-Americans are the sine quo non. Which makes New Hampshire and Iowa largely humorous.

2) Sanders hired a BlackLivesMatter activist as national press secretary, so Flint should have been a no-brainer, as should responding to Coates - though maybe the the BLM playbook calls for resignations, rather than pressure to solve problems. 

MLK: Traitor and Conformist

By PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/20/2016 - 4:09am |

Martin Luther King was a traitor. As was John Brown, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, Mandela, Biko, and many many others we admire.

Robert E. Lee was also a traitor, as was Lincoln, as were the US colonists in 1776 and the first settlers leaving England and Holland, as was Sitting Bull, as was Gandhi and Xanana Gusmão and Vaclav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi and Wang Dan of Tiananmen.

As Good As It Gets

By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 01/19/2016 - 7:07am |

[started as a response to Barefooted's "Hillary Clinton's New Progressive Alignment"]

1) I think we're seeing a Clinton thing where she also doesn't do well unless under pressure and in trouble. Sure, organized and all that, but not inspiring.

2) In the case of Bernie, he's had the message, something of the synthesis without the details. Hillary's been the opposite - all the tools in the toolkit, but no obvious picture of what the job is, who the customer is.

Hints for Hillary

By PeraclesPlease on Sun, 01/17/2016 - 9:54am |

Now that polls are tightening, the internet has exploded with amateur campaign experts to explain why Hillary's sunk, what she should have done, how she should behave. They rightly note that this has happened before - but not just 2008. In 1992, in 1996, in 2000, in July of last year and again in October. Deconstructing Hillary is a cottage industry that's made many rich. Trump draws crowds by saying outrageous things, Sanders draws crowds by stirring outrage, Hillary on her own is simple outrageous.

State of the Manufacturing Union?

By PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 3:40am |

As Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump pile on the loss of manufacturing jobs, it's interesting that manufacturing seems to have rebounded significantly since, adding maybe 800K jobs by now, according to 2014 analysis & one from ESA out last year.

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Defies gravity Can spit really far Almost touch my toes Can cut a fly's legs off with a beer cap from 20 paces Know how to say useless stuff and prattle on in a dozen languages Don't know when to shut up
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To be for or against the Plague, it's much the same thing. Fiddledee, how a body shure do get around - just 2 weeks ago I was in Mississippi and now I'm all the way to Tennessee... Eat or Be Eaten Better to be pissed off than pissed on.
Biography
Born in swaddling clothes (designer, of course) at the confluence of big waters, my first recorded words were "Dad, can I have the keys to the car?" Raised a Southern Pedestrian, my musical talents were recognized at an early age, leading to my being exiled to the shed out back with a stack of books that became my eddykayshun - advanced readin', writin' & ritmytick, creating a major quandary of "what will I do, oh what will I do?" (Gunslinger) As an old black man advised in song, "You Gotta Move", so move I did, traveling the byways sideways even a lot of driveways, picking up sticks and psychological tics, even movin' to Beverlee through a quaint misunderstanding of the seriousness of TV series, until finally I blew up so big the carry nation incarnation tarnation couldn't hold me no more, so I fixed my sights on yonder sitar, and like Queequeg and Paul Bowles and one of those abducted kids by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, I ventured forth to the larger world, pickin' and grinnin', doin' me some reckonin' and naughts from naughts, occasionally rightin', building me some buildings and wiring and just trying to understand the babble comin' out of people's mouths and heads, I finally ended up in what Rummy quaintly calls "New Europe", which ain't so new from what I sees, but that pit in my stomach from lack-of-moving-sickness finally disappeared, and instead I sit behind a whopping big desk stacked with missives from all the chiefs with big whampum around the world telling me "what's going on". Which seems like a load of boolshit to me, but I guess that's what keeps me busy and entertained now, separatin' the weeds from the chapstick. So my name is Perry Keys, or Peracles to you, and since my mammy always said, "say please and thank you", I added the please, but I'm holdin' back on that thankee until I feel you've earned it. But do welcome, and I hope we's a gonna have a real good time. It all starts with, "I wuz born a poor young white chile livin' in the South..." and we cycle through again, like Nietzsche and his infernal regurgence. So enjoy, and let's spin a spell...

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