Who leave their kids in the car! I did this all the time with my kids. I’d come home from work and drive to the 7-Eleven to get milk or whatever. I was supposed to pull my kids out of the car and drag them in for me for five minutes — especially when I could see them?
Crazy. Just crazy.
One of the weird ADD symptoms I have is constant tightness in my upper back, always. It’s always been that way. I can get a therapeutic massage and on the way home, it’s right back to the status quo. The only time that stopped it was when I used to be on Ritalin (which I can’t take because it was starting to cause Tourette’s symptoms).
But my friend Maya, God bless her, turned me onto passion flower tea. (They call it “the herbal Prozac.”) When she made me try it, I did not believe it would work. But it did. So I don’t care what they call it, this shit works. When I drink it, my neck gets all loose-y goose-y and I feel like I just took a Xanax — which, under the right circumstances, is not such a bad thing.
So if you have a high-stress job, bad relationship, poverty, anger with your elected officials, etc. and want to feel like you took a Xanax, you should try it. Here’s the kind I use.
Oh, come on. If he’s serving vegetarian food, it’s because it’s cheaper and the more profit there is for Joe’s pals! The bigoted blowhard sure does know how to distract people from his legal problems:
Only a marketing magician like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio could transform an all-vegetarian meal into a bunch of baloney.
But that’s what he did last week, staging one last publicity stunt before he is scheduled to appear Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow in a contempt hearing.
Arpaio tried to divert attention from his troubles with a made-for-the-media event featuring former “Bay Watch” actress Pamela Anderson, who serves as a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The idea was to provide a photo opportunity for Arpaio as well as a chance for him to speak about the cheap, meatless meals he’s serving to those detained in the county’s jail system.
Media outlets in town could not resist covering the event – although we should have.It was harmless enough, I suppose, except perhaps to the sensibilities of those who believe they’d been targeted and discriminated against by Arpaio’s department and wonder why the media still falls for his self-serving antics.
Continue reading “Sheriff Joe and his PR machine”
Via Digby, some interesting news:
So what to make of Mike Huckabee coming out swinging on this issue on Friday and taking Christie and the others to task in no uncertain terms?
“I don’t know why Republicans want to insult Americans by pretending they don’t understand what their Social Security program and Medicare program is,” Huckabee said in response to a question about Christie’s proposal to gradually raise the retirement age and implement a means test.
Huckabee said his response to such proposals is “not just no, it’s you-know-what no.”
“I’m not being just specifically critical of Christie but that’s not a reform,” he said. “That’s not some kind of proposal that Republicans need to embrace because what we are really embracing at that point is we are embracing a government that lied to its people–that took money from its people under one pretense and then took it away at the time when they started wanting to actually get what they have paid for all these years.”
He added that he had no intention of endorsing Paul Ryan’s plan either. This is very unusual for a Republican. They may not want to take that vote for cutting the program, especially since their base is very much among those who benefit from it, but they are never this unequivocal about it. It’s extremely rare for them not to issue any disclaimer about The Deficit and The Government Spending Too Much, etc, etc. To come right out and take the retirement age and means testing off the table — that actually is the “bold” and “authentic” breaking-with-conventional-wisdom for which the beltway media had already Christie all the credit.
Have the progressives finally made some headway on this issue? Lindsey Graham came out against cutting SS too. It’s hard to imagine, but if there’s actually some open discord on this issue among the right wingers, we may finally turned the tide. They’ll never quit, of course. And Wall Street wants that money. But what this does is put a lot more pressure on Democrats to keep their grubby hands off the program. And that’s a big relief.
Art-itorial by Barbara Broido. Visit Barbara’s Doodle Blog for more of her art, design work and socio-political commentary.
Isn’t that sweet? Good boy, Scotty! Good boy!
Charles G. and David H. Koch, the influential and big-spending conservative donors, have a favorite in the race for the Republican nomination: Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker was the Republican Party’s best hope for recapturing the White House.
“We will support whoever the candidate is,” said Mr. Koch, according to two people who attended the event. “But it should be Scott Walker.”
The remark — made before dozens of top New York donors who had gathered to hear Mr. Walker speak at the Union League Club — could effectively end one of the most closely watched contests in the “invisible primary,” a period where candidates crisscross the country seeking not the support of voters but the blessing of their party’s biggest donors and fund-raisers.
Ignore the distracting photos, this is a beautiful live rendition. Linda Ronstadt:
Rita Coolidge:
https://youtu.be/A1pnyh-hFRM
Ben Folds Five:
Here’s the speech Paul McCartney made at the induction ceremony:
OK. Ringo Starr was born in Liverpool at a very early age, and he had a hard childhood. Real hard childhood, but he had a beautiful mom, Elsie, and a lovely stepdad Harry. Both of them had real big hearts, beautiful people, and they loved music. So at some point during this difficult childhood, Ringo got a drum. Ringo got a drum! And that was it. He was now a drummer.
Later on he joined a group called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. And we saw these guys when we were out in Hamburg, we were playing out there. And Ringo was like a professional musician. We were just like, slamming around and doing stuff, but he had a beard — that’s professional. He had the suit. Very professional. And he would sit at the bar drinking bourbon and seven. We’d never seen anyone like this. This was like, a grown-up musician.
Anyway, we got friendly with him, and he used to come in late night when we were playing, and he requested a couple of songs, so we got to know him. And one night our drummer then, Pete Best, wasn’t available, so Ringo sat in. And I remember the moment. I mean, Pete was great, and we had a good time with him. But me, John and George, God bless ’em, were on the front line singing, and now behind us we had this guy we’d never played with before, and I remember the moment when he started to play – I think it was Ray Charles, “What’d I Say,” and most of the drummers couldn’t nail the drum part, it’s a little bit [sings a bit of it]. It was a little difficult to do, but Ringo nailed it. Yeah — Ringo nailed it! And I remember the moment, standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like, fuck you. What is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.
Anyway, then we started this great journey for these four guys from Liverpool who were . . .we just set off on their journey. We did ballrooms and clubs around England, and we got a little work in Europe, and then we eventually came to America. And here we were, we were staying in rooms together. And I wasn’t a sheltered kid, but I just had my mom and dad growing up and my brother. So I was staying in a hotel room with a strange man. This really brought us together. We lived like in each other’s pockets, virtually. But it was a beautiful thing, a wonderful thing. Eventually we got on The Ed Sullivan Show, and we got really famous. It was just so beautiful. As all the other drummers say, he just is something so special. When he’s playing behind you, you see these other bands, they’re looking around at the drummer, like, is he going to speed up, is he going to slow down? You don’t have to look with Ringo.
It’s a great honor for me to be able to induce him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland tonight!
