“Comedian Greg Giraldo tragically passed away this morning, shocking the entire comedy community and prompting an outpour of sadness online. A genuinely hilarious and intelligent stand-up comedian, Giraldo had a degree from Harvard law, was a longtime member of the Comedy Central family and is leaving behind a wife and four children.”

giraldo was without fail always the funniest guy at those roasts. and four kids? degrees from colombia and harvard law? sad.

~lee.

part two of two.

“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about.

…

[T]he Tea Party doesn’t really care about issues — it’s about something deep down and psychological, something that can’t be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are (‘radical leftists’ is the term they prefer), and they’re coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do.

…

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will ‘take our country back’ from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don’t realize is, there’s a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren’t yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it’s only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.

…

[H]ow does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul ‘Tea Parties,’ but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey ‘unconstitutional’ orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (‘Not me — I was protesting!’ is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. […]Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill ‘cracker babies,’ support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called ‘White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo,’ checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

…

Of course, the fact that we’re even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter’s unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party’s incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.

The bad news is that the Tea Party’s political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That’s the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It’s just that it’s a lot of noise, and there’s no telling when it’s ever going to end.”

~lee.

part one of two.

“What [is] going on? Had decades of sucking down so much high-fructose corn syrup not only made Americans incredibly obese, but also messed with white brain chemistry to the point that some sort of tipping point had occurred?

Not a bad theory, but no, there’s a simpler explanation, with two parts: For the first time in their lives, baby boomers are hard up against it economically, and white boy is becoming outnumbered and it’s got his bowels chilled with fear.

…

White people have simply gone sheer fucking insane.”

~lee. 

your tax dollars at work, folks.

“In a tape acquired by ABC News and CNN, Specialist Jeremy Morlock, who faces murder charges in the case, tells an Army investigator that the team’s decisionmaking process amounted to asking, ‘You guys wanna wax this guy or what?’ It was, apparently, that blase a process, lending evidence to the theory that the team — which apparently photographed their kills and kept body parts as souvenirs — killed for little more than sport.

…

Winfield, Morlock, Gibbs and two others, Specialist Michael S. Wagnon II, Private First Class. Andrew H. Holmes, face murder charges before a military tribunal at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Twelve others alleged to be part of the Kill Team face lesser charges.”

jesus christ. rest assured i’ll have more on this in the next few days.

~lee.

david simon, creator/ head writer of “the wire,” was given the $500,000 macarthur “genius” grant today. justice is served for once.

~lee.

smug alert!

“Like most religious people, Americans are breathtakingly ignorant. We already knew we were ignorant about science and other factual matters, of course—but it turns out we’re equally ignorant about religion! Except for the atheists.

A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that most religious Americans don’t know shit about their own religions. Sample fun finding: ‘A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation.’

…

So if you have a question about god, ask an atheist. If you can’t find one, a Jew will do in a pinch.”

~lee.

‎”Vice President Joe Biden yesterday said we must ‘remind our base constituency to stop whining.’ Last week, Obama condemned ‘Democrats griping and groaning,’ and the day before he mocked Democrats who ‘just congenitally, tend to get — to see the glass as half empty.’ That, of course, was preceded by Robert Gibbs announcing that liberal critics of the President who complain about continuation of Bush policies ‘need to get drug tested,’ while Rahm Emanuel had previously shared his view that dissatisfied liberals are ‘fucking retarded.’ Echoing those sentiments almost verbatim, Matt Yglesias called this week in The Daily Beast for a ‘little less whining and a little more cheerleading from the left,’ and accused those who fail to comply of ‘self-pity and self-indulgence’ on the ground that the enthusiasm gap could jeopardize gains in health care coverage.

Obama supporters often claim that those who object to this White House messaging are reacting emotionally and personally because they’re ‘offended’ by these criticisms. Speaking only for myself, that has nothing to do with any of this. I’m not the slightest bit ‘offended’ when Obama officials and their apparatchiks voice these accusations. They have the same right to condemn their critics as their critics have to condemn them, and it’s hardly a surprise that Obama officials harbor these thoughts about the ‘left.’ Contempt for the left is one of the unifying beliefs of the Washington establishment, which is why most conventional establishment journalists — Maureen Dowd, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank — cheered Gibbs’ outburst about the ‘Professional Left.’ None of that is new; none of it is a surprise; and none of it is ‘offensive.’

What is notable about it is what it reveals substantively. The country is drowning in a severe and worsening unemployment crisis. People are losing their homes by the millions. Income inequality continues to explode while the last vestiges of middle class security continue to erode. The Obama civil liberties record has been nothing short of a disgrace, usually equaling and sometimes surpassing the worst of the Bush/Cheney abuses. We have to stand by and watch the Commander-in-Chief fire one gay service member after the next for their sexual orientation. The major bills touted by Obama supporters were the by-product of the very corporatist/lobbyist dominance which Obama the candidate repeatedly railed against. Rather than take responsibility for any of this, they instead dismiss criticisms and objections as petulant, childish, ‘irresponsible whining’ — signaling rather clearly that they think they’re doing the right thing and that these criticisms are fundamentally unfair.

That is what makes these reactions significant: not that anyone’s feelings are hurt by the name-calling, but that they believe that this record merits gratitude rather than valid condemnation, and that anger over the state of the country is nothing more than irresponsible whining. It’s fine to tout accomplishments and try to unify the base behind them — it’s election season and they ought to be doing that — but it’s just mystifying that they think they’re going to accomplish anything other than feeling better about themselves with these incessant, name-calling attacks on those who are dissatisfied with their behavior — their policies — in power. Talk about ‘self-pitying and self-indulgent.’

…

Democratic voters aren’t unenthusiastic because they’re reading too much blog criticism of the President; they’re apathetic because they see what has happened in their own lives over the past 2 years and see little reason to work for those who have been in power during that time.

And it’s even more baffling that they seem to believe that insulting their disappointed supporters — rather than addressing the source of their critiques or, even better, doing something about them — will generate enthusiasm to go vote.”

~lee.

‎”Larry McConkey (Steadicam operator): The impression I had when Marty walked us through the Copacabana shot was that this is going to be the most boring, worst thing I’ve ever done. We’re walking across the street, down the stairs, down a hallway, in the kitchen…. What is this shot about?

Douglas: They didn’t know that the Copacabana tracking shot was going to be such a big deal. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do the greatest Steadicam shot in history.’

Reidy: It’s probably the hardest orchestrated single shot I’ve ever been involved in.

McConkey: There were 400 or more absolutely precise timing moments. It was totally impossible, mathematically.”

~lee.

“Neil Young’s new album, ‘Le Noise,’ was produced by Daniel Lanois, who tweaked and toyed with Mr. Young’s guitar sounds, processing multiple signals from each instrument.

…

‎The latest songs by Mr. Young, 64, ponder mortality, love, history, memory and faith.

…

Young performs alone, on electric or acoustic guitar, in eight tracks that total 39 minutes.”

~lee.