Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

it would be amazing to see obama propose something fresh. tax the rich? ok, tax the rich: ain't gettin no further this year than last. really, our politics is frozen where it has been since the new deal: tax the rich, no don't etc. regulate, don't. government is your friend, your enemy. i don't know: give me something, anything. you've got all these supposedly smart people, but they can't think of anything, maybe cause they think in herds or parties. who speaks for the middle class? dunno, really, but i know who speaks for the mediocre ideas. shit is boring. let's say creativity is lacking. it'll be the same little catch-phrases, produced mechanically. that's one thing about newt; even the little dose of something fresh he provides is thousands of times greater than a figure like obama or the clintons etc. i don't know that you can really give people hope and be utterly without imagination. obama ought to put on a tape of last year's speech and hit the sack.

the only really watchable part of a state of the union is the red-carpet phase: walking in, shaking hands, scanning the supreme court, the joint chiefs, whatever emblematic peasants michelle will be dragging along. it is our most monarchical moment.

you often hear the term 'tragedy' used to mean almost any bad thing. but aristotle could have used joepa rather than oedipus as his model.

blogging for the first time from my new place: a little one-room schoolhouse in adams county, pa.



obviously i am less of an obama fan than most of the people around me, even the disillusioned, perhaps, though i did vote for him. i hope that i have a chance to vote for paul this year, as i did in 1988. for example, i oppose an individual mandate to buy health insurance. but i have to say that these repubs are jacking up the rhetoric to insane levels, and that this level of rancor is itself destructive. so watching the tea party congressman wilson on msnbc: 'i truly believe that he is destroying the country.' gingrich (typically): 'sometimes when you listen to obama talk, you wonder what country he can possibly be talking to.' this is vicious hyperbole and it just cannot help anyone accomplish anything except (they must think this) getting elected. i would say that it shows clearly that the people who speak it don't have the truth or the best interests of america uppermost in their minds. also i don't actually remember this level of rhetoric before, as brutal as some of these campaigns have been. soon it will be 'execute obama for treason'; already it amounts to that. i'm pining for the palin era, when things were remarkably civil: "how's that hopey changey thing working out for ya?" suddenly it looks painfully nice.

daily beast: exclusive! newt's ex-wife's lawyer on his narcissism. now i would say few of us would really be satisfied to be portrayed in the media by our ex-spouses. (mine - one of mine - just sold a book including an account of our break-up; i intend to ignore it unless pressed, then launch the nukes, or at least the blog posts.) but your ex-spouse's lawyer?  christ, tina, that's your idea of journalism?: a first-person account of somebody's marriage by a person who is actually being paid to eviscerate the person she's writing about? your ex-spouse might be bitter, might have what you take to be a distorted view of events, etc., but at least she's going to be more or less sincere. this is more like hiring lady gaga's producer to review her next album.

you'd think that the volatility of the situation would give even dan balz pause. but no.

A week ago there were six candidates still standing in the GOP race. Now, though technically there are four — the others being former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) — the Republican race is now the two-person contest that many once anticipated. 

look ten minutes ago these people were saying that it was all over and romney was the nominee. i guess they just sit around their hotel rooms nodding at each other as they declare the winner in advance etc. believe it or not, i think there is some possibility that santorum could still be the nominee. more rich-boy slop from romney and you can stick the fork, and of course newt can self-immolate at any moment. the evangelical community is still crystallizing around santorum; they are not going to find romney or gingrich congenial at all, ultimately.

you know on espn they always focus on 'predictions'; their experts always have to declare who is going to win each game, right up to gametime. almost always, they just predict that the fave will win. i love, say, dick vitale predicting the final four; at any given moment he just takes the top four teams in the poll and then reveals dramatically that they're the best teams in america. see, that's 'expertise': mumbling or yelling what everyone else is saying: the safety dance

so, balz, what say we wait and see what happens?

9:51pm: i think for the many leftists who have been disappointed with obama, newt's claim that a second obama administration will be 'unimaginably radical,' and his constant claim that obama is a radical leftist, will be deeply puzzling.

9:45pm: also he's running against food stamps incessantly. i happen to know the woman who runs the food stamp program; a better-hearted, sweeter, harder-working person you will never meet. i imagine that as jessica dodges the projectiles and firebombs, while also trying to keep people from starving, she may be just a bit disconcerted, or even a bit pissy.

9:41pm: newt: 'i believe this capaign will come down to american exceptionalism against saul alinsky radicalism.' i could never have imagined that someone would be running for president against saul alinsky in 2012. one thing i can guarantee: saul would be proud.

8:52pm: santorum has the cutest wife, by a ways. that is how i pick a candidate.

8:50pm: we'll see if this is the pin that pops the romney balloon. also i will say this: the longer it goes and the more divided it is, the better it is for paul, who has a delegate-accumulating strategy, and who could get leverage and speaking time at the convention etc. i think ultimately his idea is to turn the republican party into the libertarian party, which would amount to a radical reconfiguration of the american political scene. that would be in many ways a more important accomplishment even than being elected president: leaving libertarianisnism as an enduring mainstream current in american politics. well, no doubt the repubs are going to have to get younger somehow, and more diverse. i think ron wants to leave rand with a platform from which he will be heard.

8:43pm: that newt has more lives than a hindu cat. though i am not necessarily eagerly anticipating the gingrich administration, i am very happy to see romney not only get beat, but stomped.

it's remarkable that etta james died almost simultaneously with johnny otis: they showed the hybrid vigor of miscegenation. they almost seemed to want to switch races, with etta going all blond and stuff and johnny preferring to be photographed with his face in shadow, so he could pass. i do think etta was at her best as a pop/r&b singer rather than in the straight blues.

the associated press: "James had been suffering from dementia and kidney problems, and was battling leukemia," while her husband and kids went to war over her estate. dude, that really, really sucks.

must be hard. i'm watching john king debriefing the open-marriage fest last night. as gingrich and then the crowd slapped him around, king looked like he was absorbing body blows. today he was visibly bitter, ragging on gingrich for using the age-old political ploy of turning against the media. ok but he ought to have acknowledged that gingrich did it with consummate skill. people today were saying he had his answer ready, but just one remarkable thing is that his responses obviously weren't canned; he directly responded to the particular ways king formulated the questions.

honestly i can relate to newt's whole schtick except the doing-callista part.

i think of mitt romney as the reverend doctor martin luther king jr., jr., of inanimate objects. it all started when someone left a fob in the living-things-only section of the stretch hummer. ever since, inanimate objects have become more and more obdurate, more opaque: in short, more free. waxworks may not dream, but they make fewer mistakes.

one way parts of history are sometimes narrated is as an expansion of the categories of things that can be owned. maybe nomadic tribes don't think you can own land. maybe we developed ownership for what's under the ground or bits of the atmosphere or expanded ownership or sovereignty over the waters etc. pretty soon we'll be staking claims to interstellar space, or to pieces of the past and the future or something. now, it is not clear that the expansion of what can be owned is an unalloyed good. the idea of ownerhip in abstract objects such as ideas, words, musical tones and so on might seem obvious or inevitable. but what if the situation started to reverse and we started to delete items from the list of things that can be owned?