Busted

The blind fiddler

I lost my eyes in a blacksmith shop
in the year of 76
while working on a revolver
and it was out of six ...

I've been down to Knoxville
had a talk with Dr Lane
he operated on one of my eyes
but nothing could he gain
oh I'm so sad and lonely
and I am condemned to roam
well I am a blind fiddler
I'm a great long ways from home ...

Draft dodger rag

Sarah Harrison has a bad habit of misrepresenting facts:

Um, no. Manning was sentenced for the unauthorized bulk release of approximately 730 000 restricted documents. Manning arrived in Iraq in October 2009 and was arrested in May 2010 -- a period not exceeding eight months. If, for sixteen hours a day during this eight months, Manning had done nothing but read those documents, Manning would have had to read and assess about 200 documents an hour, which is an impossibility The only conclusion is that Manning engaged in an unprincipled document dump

Um, no. Hammond was indicting for hacking. He pleaded guilty in May, at which time he also admitted his involvement in multiple additional hacks, including: the June 2011 hack of computer systems used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Virtual Academy; the June 2011 hack of computer systems used by the Arizona Department of Public Safety, a state law enforcement agency in Arizona; the July 2011 hack of computer systems owned by Brooks-Jeffrey Marketing, Inc., a company based in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and various law enforcement-related websites; the August 2011 hack of computer systems used by Special Forces Gear, a company based in California; the August 2011 hack of computer systems used by Vanguard Defense Industries, a company based in Texas; the October 2011 hack of computer systems used by the Jefferson County, Alabama Sheriff’s Office; the October 2011 hack of computer systems used by the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association; and the February 2012 hack of computer systems used by the Combined Systems, Inc., a company based in Pennsylvania.

Hammond is a troubled man. He has in the past pleaded guilty to battery. In 2006, Hammond pleaded guilty and received a prison sentence for hacking activities and possession of stolen credit card information. In another case, he was convicted participating in a mob action with property damage

Um, no. Brown's first three indictments were for making an online threat, retaliating against a federal officer and conspiring to release the personal information of a U.S. government employee. Then he was indicted further for possessing stolen credit card numbers and CCVs. His third indictment was for obstruction of justice and concealing evidence

Um, no. Assange jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced prosecution for sexual assault. The legal process for his extradition took about a year and a half, and Assange chose to jump bail, rather than to continue his appeals. There is no reason to think that United States has ever threatened him. There is no universally recognized right under international law to diplomatic asylum in an embassy. Although Ecuador is itself party to some Latin American treaties governing diplomatic asylum between the signatories, the UK does not officially recognize diplomatic asylum and is not party to any such treaty, with Ecuador or anyone else

It's a sloppy analysis. What happened is that the GOP became more and more reliant

on modern advertising tricks to ensure it would win

This began when Nixon first decided to hire professional ad-men to design his campaign. Part of the game was to target new demographics for the GOP to activate. In Nixon's case that meant an appeal to Southern racists who willingly fled the Democratic party of the once-solid South, angered by the Federal-level successes of the anti-Jim-Crow movement

Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign with a coded bow to the racists, by traveling to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were infamously murdered in 1964, and giving a speech on "states rights" -- the old language of the Confederacy, which had later been taken up anew by the segregationists. But Reagan also began reaching out to the right wing religious fundamentalists, as a demographic that could help the GOP win

The negativism of the GOP under Gingrich's leadership also reflects an advertising technique. The ad-men do not want the potential customer happy and comfortable when the sales pitch begins, as then there is no motive to buy: what is desired, instead, is a potential customer who is somewhat anxious and unhappy, because the pitch can then be framed as "a cure for your troubles." The GOP tried harder and harder to make America jittery and nervous, rendering it more likely to buy the pitch for the GOP brand

By the time of Bush II, Rove had carried this combination of modern advertising outreach and careful bean-counting to an extreme: the GOP purchased and analyzed extraordinary amounts of detailed personal information to help them target and motivate potential GOP voters in a fine-grained way based on individual data. They also increasingly reached out to the rightwing fringes, hoping to engage them once again in politics on the GOP side. And the fringes brought with them a rhetoric that produced anxiety, which was useful for selling the GOP to the public

The old-style business Republicans were not at all innocent in this regard: independent of their social or religious beliefs, they supported and funded such outreach as part of a strategy for winning elections

The problem, of course, is that the GOP thus alienated more and more of its centrist support in the process. The party figured it could do so safely, since it seemed a net gain if they lost only one centrist for every two or three disaffected xtremists brought from the fringes into the GOP fold. But the increasing extremism of party loyalists began to fuel centrist flight. Today the GOP has much less centrist support than it once did, and the extremists are much more visible and vocal

An important thing to recognize is that the bizarre GOP coalition does not represent a natural coalition, formed by interest groups with similar material interests coming together to work for a common goal: it was deliberately and cynically forged by advertising methods, bringing together fringe groups to vote in support of the GOP. It is not a stable coalition, and as it unravels the GOP has resorted to vote-suppression to attempt to maintain control

Another important thing to recognize is that one cannot persuade ideologues, whose world-views are separated from reality: it is simply impossible to engage in meaningful dialogue with the diehards, whether they be laissez-faire anti-government libertarians, Christian dominionists, neo-Confederate racist secessionists, atheist Randian objectivists, corporate authoritarians, anti-feminists, or whatever. And the worst of the diehards will never hear anything except what they want to hear -- so they will always rationalize contradictions in statements from candidates whom they believe might hold their views. The game, as always, is in the center -- which is to say, the game consists of redefining the center, reconstructing the center, and holding the center

I myself do not particularly like the Christian rightwing. I regard the Christian rightwing as potentially dangerous, and as decidedly culpable in the deterioration of modern US politics, but it is certainly not the only player here, and in many respects it is not really in control of this process. The Christian rightwing has easy access to many butts sitting in pews, and that gives it some clout, but many of those butts are probably reachable by outsiders, if approached properly. To simply blame the Christian rightwing requires that we overlook important features of our current political pathology

Gone gone gone

No more store-bought teeth

How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? (1929)

Crimson Parson

... all the way up to sitting bull
they told their bloody tale
and the warpipes smoked
as they hadn't smoked
since they cut the oregon trail
indian wars
for just twelve years
scattered about the land
and the reverend colonel chivington
done it all with his little band ...

How Can I Keep From Singing