As you can see from the crudely pasted banner below...

Today is that day of days, National Gorilla Suit Day.

And...predicatably, Channel Zero has gone completely over the top in respect of this modest holiday.

Meanwhile...Senator John McCain

comes in for a solid debunking from this useful website.
Many thanks to the gang over at Toughenough.org for the link, glad to see they are keeping up their anti-McCain bona fides.

Note to New Hampshire Primary Voters...

of all persuasions.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is allegedly facing a budget deficit whose estimate runs as a high as a billion big ones...whatever it is, it is a lot of moolah.
Yet even as I write this, Former Massachusetts Governor Willard Mitt Romney stumps the Granite State proclaiming himself to be a hairy chested he-man fiscal conservative.
That billion or so in red ink flows despite the Governor's line item veto and the tacit alliance Romney had with such notorious Beacon Hill conservatives as then House Speaker Tom Finnegan.
Now no doubt, Willard will blame the state legislature for any bad news emanating from Boston and vicinity, but that is an excuse...not an answer.
Anyway if those deficits are really all the legislature's fault, then that doesn't speak well for Mitt's leadership skills. However if Romney couldn't reign in the entirely provincial democrats of Massachusetts how will he fare against serious playas like Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy?
Think about that.

Isn't it funny,

In today's column, Jeff Jacoby argues that health care premiums are too low and are unfairly subsidized by private companies that offer said benefits to their employees.
The private citizen should pay more this will lead to more competition and diversity sayeth Jeff with an oracular sneer.
Pay more?
Wow...Like we aren't paying enough already.
This is funny, we don't shell out enough for health insurance, but if Jeff's state income tax went up so much as one red cent this year, you can bet he'd scream like an infant on vaccination day.

Funny how that works eh?

Moreover, if Jeff thinks negotiating one on one with an insurance company for health care coverage is a good thing, then surely he has opted out of the Globe's health benefits plan with his head held high?
At the very least he ought to set an example for the poor pampered troglodytes of Massachusetts and bravely march down to his local Mom-n-Pop Insurance Agency and try to get a better rate than what the Globe offers.
might make for an interesting column.

Diane over at Tough Enough

Seems pretty busted up about Senator Kerry's disavowal of the Presidential race in '08.
Why not drop her a kind note in the comments section....yes and I do mean, a kind note sans ugliness and triumphalism.

Amidst our disappointment over JK's withdrawl yesterday...

let no one forget that Terry McAuliffe, who criticizes our Junior Senator's performance in '04 is coming to Northeastern tonight to shill his new book "What A Party: How I took the Democrats off a cliff without breaking a sweat".
Anyone out there who is going, whether you are for Kerry or against him, for the sake of clarity ask Terry about his own crippling electoral losses in 2000 and then again in 2002?
I'm sure his response won't make a lick of sense but as a means to remind him someone other than Tim Russert is watching it'll work like a charm.

Alas and Alack

Senator Kerry has declined to run for President in 2008.
Hard to put into words one's disappointment although his refusal is perfectly understandable given the current toxic political climate.
There are the usual triumphant noise from on and off line lout who so hate losing that they will make life pretty miserable for anyone who dares to actually lose.
Fortunately, John Kerry is bigger than that...but then he has heard real gunfire at close quarters what does all this yapping mean to him, patently nothing.
Ahh but this begs the question as to how these other candidates will deal with the sort of abuse and fraud that JK was faced with back in '04?
There is the political challenge of getting the nomination, the electoral challenge of winning the election and then the ideological challenge of dealing with the institutional biases against democrats within and without the opinion industry.
Candidates who don't get that and don't have a plan to deal with that won't win no matter how fervent their on or off line support.

Well we will find out won't we?
Meanwhile Kerry isn't running and something intangible is lost to the debate (such as it is) as a consequence.
Clinton has a pedigree, Obama gives a good speech, Edwards is energetic and optimistic, Vilsack, Biden, Richardson and Dodd are all keen as razors, but Kerry had gravitas, he was a serious man with a serious mind.
And the fact that is no longer considered an advantage in a presidential contest is a loss for us all.
Dunno how we will handle it, but we're gonna have to.

John, I'm sorry fer yer troubles (as my esteemed ancestors put it)...don't let the sniveling bastards get yuh down.

Sotu this will pass...

Just think only one more State of the Union with the Manchild in Chief before the whole country move's right along.
Although from the tepid looks of things last night, the whole nation is gradually leaving GWB behind.
Oh he can still maunder away in the House every year with his ever lengthening list of unrealized promises and vague sympathetic noises...but no one was paying attention save only to the parts where Bush had to plead on behalf of his escalation scheme in Iraq. That boils down to a whining pout "just let me get another thousand kids killed and then we'll see if diplomacy will work".
Senator Webb on the other hand made a straightforward and manly impression as the democratic respondent, his rhetoric was blunt without being strident and remarkably free of focus-group driven bromides.
I caught a bit of Chris Matthews afterwards and by 10pm he had long run out of sensible things to say and was reduced to chuckling like an old teachable.

Just one more SoTu with Bush... and then we can forget about him and Dick Cheney everseated behind him glowering murderously at the American Electorate.

Terry McAuliffe Redux

Here is a link to the Former DNC Chair's appearance on Friday at Northeastern University.
If anyone is going, then do take time out to ask Terry how he can slag John Kerry for losing in '04 when McAuliffe himself as DNC chairman presided over back to back electoral debacles in '00 and '02?

Meanwhile check out this link for a fawning appreciation of Senator Hillary Clinton courtesy one Terry McAuliffe.
"Fawning" being the polite term for what he does.

This is pretty symptomatic of the flawed logic that characterizes the embedded DC "consultantocracy"...i.e. that somehow the likes of Tim Russert will grant Hillary Clinton a fair hearing once Terry McAuliffe has demonstrated his bona fides by stabbing John Kerry in the back.
We have got to stop playing this game, it only empowers and comforts our enemies.
I don't think Terry gets this, he may well think that Hillary can triangulate herself into office past the Chris Matthews' and the Tim Russerts...bite off just enough of the wavering center in Florida Ohio and Arizona to sneak into office if it rains enough in the right places.
That kind of thinking is naught but a curtain-raiser for catastrophe.

Check out page two of the Globe today...

specifically the article aout Bill Richardson's announcement that he is running for President. Why does the Globe illustrate this piece with a big ass picture of Senator Hillary Clinton pressing the flesh at an event?
Off to one side there is a staid campaign shot of Governor Richardson but it's about a fifth of the size of the Hillary pic.
Don't look for this in the on-line addition of the Globe it is strictly a phenom to be found in today's hard-copy...

I mean, what is Morrissey Boulevard trying to tell us?

It is comforting to know that someone on the other side

loathes Mitt Romney has much as we do.
Granted Camenker is a freeper with usual queer-adverse bona fides, but he is bracing contrast to groveling conservative twits like Jeff Jacoby who make the stupefying argument that Mitt Romney was somehow always a deeply closeted ultra-conservative on the order of Achille Starace.
Me, I don't know...that vote Mitt cast for Paul Tsongas back in 1992 just seems so irrational from the prospective of a rising man in the ranks of freeperdom.
Could it be, that Romney whom I always dismissed as a preening conservative matinee idol is really nothing but a opportunist?
Well if he is, keep in mind he is still a GOP opportunist, that means if elected he'll happily sign off on the entire conservative eschaton up to an including the legalization of witchburning as long none of it harms his political prospects or popularity.
This makes him a useful quisling in office but only if movement conservatism can muster serious political pressure on congress and executive.
And those days may be drawing to a close...who can say?

Former DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe is a-comin' to town...

that would be Friday January 26th 7pm at Northeastern University in "West Village F 020". He will shilling on behalf of his new book "What a Party, My Life as a Clinton Family Latah" in which he lovingly depicts Senator Kerry as an indecisive loser.
Well what can Humble Elias say?
A lot of people got their hearts broke on election night '04, but the democrats and progressives of Massachusetts require no special instructions from the likes of Terry McAuliffe on the delicate art of losing, up until quite recently we've had enough to make us experts.
I very much doubt Terry has much he can teach us having helped bungle the Florida recount in 2000 and then with a smile and a wave managed to lead the entire party right off a cliff in 2002.
So where he gets off jumping ugly on John Kerry I do not know...
Other than the fact that this sort of groveling reaction-formation type behavior seems to be necessary if you are gonna get repeat business from all the trendy political chat shows in Washington DC.
Cause' the DC consultant class and the embedded punditariat just luu-uv it when we go after our own, it reinforces their own poorly hidden partisan prejudices.
So for once let us try and break the cycle...
I'm asking anyone who attends the above confab, just ask Terry one question, "Just who is he to judge John Kerry on the basis of McAuliffe's own ruinous electoral performance as DNC Chair in 2000 and 2002?"
If asked, I doubt his answer will make much sense, but it will be sufficiently loaded with bromides and unction to keep him in good with the "Meet the Press" schedulers.
Just ask him...and don't let him evade the question thats all.

"Whatever you do, don't piss off President KooKoo Brains "

Or so the White House Correspondent's Association asked this year's headliner Rich Little..."Tone it down" so they allegedly begged.
Usually at this point, I riff on the National Press and it's compulsion to grovel at the feet of a President with an approval rating that would provoke a palace revolution in a less sanguine nation.
However today Humble Elias just wants express amazement that Rich Little is still working at all.
I mean last I saw, Rich was doing his Reagan impersonation on the Tonight Show and that is before Hinkley tried to snuff the Gipper.
What deep Castle Keep within the SAG Old Ham's Home did they have to penetrate to get Rich on the bill?
I guess it was either this or Mickey Rooney and his All Wife Orchestra.
Who wants to work a room full of such miserable fearful stiffs anyway? Even Mickey Rooney would thrown in the towel.
My advice, is forget Bush, go after Cheney, the day some washed up impressionist can't denigrate a Vice President with a popularity rating on a par with Lex Luthor is the day we need to shut up shop and decamp for the caves.

Nothing to listen to in the Morning

now that Air America Radio has gone for the terminal dirt nap in here in the Hub.
NPR is naught but the "Morning Misery Channel" taking a feral delight in broadcasting bad news during drive time. Meanwhile Don Imus soldier's on ever the stupid racist old pimp who should've been quietly restrained in a padded cell years ago.
Howard Fineman was his guest today, and during the short drive from the Magickal Village of Menotomy to Alewife station I learned that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama don't much care for each other.
Fineman is otherwise, the same smug unctuous jack off with his trademark iron grip on the blatantly obvious.
Dunno what the answer is folks, we are in need of some kind of refuge during morning drive time, preferably local and decidedly progressive in scope. Where it will come from I cannot say.
Although...some sort of single source for local liberal podcasts might be a good start.
Think about that.

Idol Entertainment Blogging

I just link to it really....

Dinesh D'Souza seems to make the argument

that Al Queda is in the end, nothing more than the ultra extreme right wing of the GOP in this interview found on Newsmax.

Does this mean Osama Bin Laden will be invited to address the Dartmouth Review?

All easy shots aside, it's been an article of faith for years among American liberals that an unstated confluence exists between American Xian Supremacists and Islamic Fundamentalists, they are both intent on creating societies dominated by revealed religion and are contemptuous therefore of secular democracy.
The fact that they are, despite many outward similarities, at each other's throats is one of history's happy accidents.

MLK...Blogs

(I just love this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, it pretty much says it all)

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid you will be criticized, or that you will lose your popularity, and you’re afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you, or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

Something bizarre in today's Globe...

By that I mean, Jeff Jacoby waves his lily white hands in a pontifical fashion over the bowed head of Mitt Romney and blesses the ex-governor's clumsy lurch to the right as 2008 Presidential Primary opens.
It is Jeff's thesis that Mitt was always a conservative, he merely made the youthful and rash decision to pretend to be a gay friendly social moderate in order to win in 1994 and again in 2002.
What Jeff is saying here in other words, is that it is "permissible" if distasteful for conservatives to lie in order to gain office.

Be that as it may, Jeff Jacoby has expended a lot of brainpower trying to excuse the rampant excesses of conservatives and conservatism...He certainly cannot stop now.

What Humble Elias wants to know is, when did Jeff Jacoby become so strangely tolerant Mitt Romney's political transvestitism?
Given what we now know...how can anyone believe Romney's sudden wingnuttery no matter how much he bats his eyes, swishes his skirts, tosses his hips and crashes his castanets?
I mean, Candidate Willard threw on some pretty gaudy pro-gay drag back in 1994 kids, promised the South End it's own New Deal and more besides.
has Jeff forgotten this guy voted for Paul Tsongas in 1992? At a time when he could have thrown a vote down for either GWB's father or Pat Buchanan?
Now Mitt is all over New Hampshire pretending to be a bloodthirsty freeper of long vintage, and Jeff Jacoby seems to be the only guy in the punditariat to believe it all on face value.

Representative Jim Marzilli

makes an uncommon amount of sense in an editorial in today's Globe.
Political junkies will recall that Marzilli was a classic "E.F.D." (Early-For-Duval) who earned his bona fides back when Citizen Patrick was twenty points down in the polls and derided as a liberal twerp by the likes of Joanie Vennochi.

Surge Time

Last night, The President, looking like a horse player who owes too much to the wrong people, announced he was sending 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

It occurs to Humble Elias that we are all paying a very dear price for GWB's tawdry Oedipal rivalry with his Father. Now, at some point in this process, the diplomats are gonna have to be sent in, when that happens it'll be under disadvantageous terms to this Republic. Coming to our collective senses now might obtain a better diplomatic situation as we slide towards the coming regional Shi'ite-Sunni Civil War, but believe me, Bush doesn't care one whit about any of that.
No, he has apparently resolved on a policy that makes him appear heroic to a bare 31% of the electorate, the rest is up to God.

Like Eric Alterman sometime sez Thanks Ralph!

War Drums from off Beacon Hill?

The Washington Post reports that JK...wants in for 2008.
Ahhh...one last bid to overthrow destiny and restore the Commonwealth to it's rightful place in the sun.
What could be better?

Romney shakes down 6.5 large from the usual

suspects in a marathon fundraising session yesterday at the Convention Center. So I read in the Boston Metro, two of his phone bankers were Lex Luthorish multi-millionaire Sean Healey and his hapless wife, Kerry the Former Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth. Clearly, Scary Kerry was working off some of the debts she ran up last year running for Governor on the Hubby's dime.
Meanwhile, Humble Elias suspects Sean wants to be Ambassador to Jamaica in a Romney Administration...his wife can always telecommute to whatever criminologist gig she ultimately lands.
6.5 million though, is a LOT of money kids, don't mistake that. As a fundraising operation yesterday's marathon was a sccess...but as far as scaring anyone out of the race it's a flat bust. While Mitt was piling up the shekels, Senator Brownback was calmly calling the Former Viceroy a faggot-coddler and a frequent eater of babies.
Which raises an interesting question going forward, can Willard realy stand up to a serious negative campaign, repleat with accusations of war crimes, cannibalism and necorphilia?
I say no.
The guy has one win under his belt and one big loss...he has never experienced the sheer tsunami of rage and hatred that can define a contested GOP primary. I say he folds like cheap suit when the harsh political language starts up.
Alan Cranston and John Connolly both raised a lot of money on their way to political oblivion...don't forget that.

Good for Nancy

she finally got some sh*t started.
Of course, the Grovel Patrol will be simply horrified, you know the David Broders, the Chris Matthews' and the Tim Russert types. That benighted lot have been just full of solicitious advice to democrats nigh this past month that inevitably boiled down to "don't do anything to oppose the failed war policy we ourselves have unfailingly enabled from day one".

One good thing about Speaker Pelosi and the House Leadership they aren't currying favor with the usual crowd of idiots. It will, alas, do them no good in the short run but at least some lines have been drawn

It is just a damn good thing that

Jeff Jacoby and Vice President Cheney don't believe in Global Warming, otherwise today's balmy sixty degree temperatures (in the depths of January no less) might be ever so disquieting.

Oh and Jeff's column today is a masterpiece. It can be summarized thusly: Liberals are hateful towards conservatives because they claim to care about people...conservatives might be able to demonstrate they care too if they weren't so busy policing the morals and patriotism of everyone around them.

This angers Jeff for some reason.

I wonder how angry Jeff would get if someone questioned his patriotism for seven long years?
I'll bet that would really set him off.

Knife Season

That notorious latah for the Clintons and former Chairman of the DNC Terry McAuliffe has a new book out "What a Party" which apparently takes John Kerry to task for threatening the party's sexuality by not winning in 2004.

Jesus will we ever be free of this nonsense?

Turning on a defeated nominee is a form of democratic reaction-formation that only aids and abets the GOP in the long run.

Hell, the last time I checked Terry McAuliffe wasn't he-man enough to elect Gore in 2000 or do any damn good for the democrats in 2002 for that matter.
Who the hell is he to lecture anyone about winning? Without Bill Clinton Terry McAuliffe is the political equivalent of a panhandler.
Yet for all that, the Globe sez McAuliffe is about to embark on a twenty five city book tour, a sort of "hate Kerry" fest for democrats and a nice gratis warm up act for Senator Clinton's presidential run in '08.

I shall speak bluntly...if Terry McAuliffe shows up in Massachusetts to pimp this book I say we fill the room and speak aggressively to the matter.

Ben Posts a Tearful Farewell to Mitt Romney

over at Romney is a Fraud.
Cheer up big guy, the big sap is running for President after all, we aren't quite done with him yet....and who know? By January 2008 he might be pro-queer again, things could change...whatever happens it'll be fun to watch.

The Deval is in the Details...

A hearty congrats goes out to our new Governor Deval Patrick. He is, alas, faced with a raft of problems from revenue issues to same sex marriage most of which have come to hellish fruition via the ineptitude and sloth of his esteemed predecessor.
However, "victory creates it's own dynamic", change is our over-riding need and Deval at least made a good start...job will be half done if it is well begun, so to speak.

The Viceroy walks

By now Willard Mitt Romney has passed into the Commonwealth's gubernatorial foot-notes mourned only by perhaps Brian McGrory and a few nameless others.
he goes out the way he came in, as a mercenary, an expensive and opportunistic player dedicated to naught but his own good.
Willard was a governor who got fatally bored with his job about a week before his 2003 inauguration.
Romney started his term making diresome threats against the culture of nepotism on Beacon Hill and ends it by appointing his churlish lackwitted Lieutenant Governor and sundry other lackeys to various boards and commissions.
Mitt started his term as a "moderate" (or so, Lehigh and McGrory sighed) and ends it as a witchburner and a latah for the wowsers.
In 2002, Romney was a friend to the gay community, now he leaves office preciously proud of his fag bashing bona fides.
We will have little else to remember him by save a thirst for cheap applause and a long long list of abandoned policy initiatives.
He won't be missed.
Still and all that, I am grateful to Romney for one thing, he did inspire me to start blogging. As a politician he was strictly amateur night in Dixie, but as a veritable straw-that-broke-the-camel's back he was very much a success.

The Anti-SSM Amendment edges closer to the

2008 ballot.
To put this matter to a vote come 2008 would be an unmitigated catastrophe for the Commonwealth. It would be an engraved invitation to every wowser and shaman in the land to invade Massachusetts and attempt a new lasting ideological colonization therein.
Moreover it is simply wrong to put the rights of our fellow citizens up for a vote. What shall be done next? Reinstitute Baptist purdah?
Abraham Lincoln once opined that to put the rights of one's fellow citizens up to a vote on grounds of "popular sovereignty" is the very negation of any concept of sovereignty at all.
The antis keep harping on this spurious notion of "letting the people" vote as a means to obscure the entirely religious basis of their opposition. The constitution is entirely inhospitable to the desire of wowserdom to police the nation's morals...so of course up goes the cry for a "vote". No one voted to grant them their rights, Thomas Jefferson that deist that denier of revealed religion asserted that said rights were inalienable. But somehow now, the inalienable right to marriage have to be first vetted thru a wowser approved ballot initiative.
As far as Humble Elias is concerned, Lincoln made all the pro-gay marriage arguments one needs in his famous "Peoria Speech".
Furthermore, to put this thing on the ballot spells an early finish to any hope that Deval Patrick might truly change the tone of state politics.
I do not believe that the right of gay marriage will make much progress outside Massachusetts for a generation or more. It cannot be exported owing to the electoral power of revealed religion beyond the borders of the Commonwealth.
This I accept, it is a fact.
However, to invite these people in to ideologically colonize the Commonwealth with respect to a matter of settled law is damnable.
And in the final analysis to take away such above noted inalienable rights would damn Massachusetts in time and eternity.
I say to the legislature, vote no, vote to recess, table it, bury do whatever you have to do but keep it off the ballot!

Taxes went up under Governor Mitt Romney

property taxes that is...The Boston Globe reports the average tax bill for a single family dwelling has gone up some 5.3% over the last year.

Well...there are many reasons for this, some of it quite beyond the reach of any Governor let alone a detached arrogant viceregal amateur like Willard.
Nope, Humble Elias posts this merely as a gentle reminder to voters in the upcoming New Hampshire Primary to think twice and check the record whenever Romney lurches into town belching his patently fraudulent anti-tax bona fides.

What did we learn in 2006?

Damn near nothing, the Chimes at Midnight still prides itself on a certain degree of continuity with respect to it's "sarcastic rant driven chatter".
In the meantime, Gerald Ford, James Brown, John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Viereck, Lloyd Bentsen and Mickey Spillane all left us. Even that axiom of regional chaos, Saddam Hussein caught the last train to Tartarus.
Movement Conservatism after a backlash that commenced in November of 1968, finally peaked and dare I say it, even receded just a bit.
And for sheer schadenfreude you couldn't beat watching Rick Santorum and George Allen and Ken Blackwell all being swept away into the footnotes of US History in one single night.
Indeed it was an uncommonly bad year for the rightical chic ideologues, the men-MUST-fit-the-mold types and the praetorians.
Hell, We may even be able to speak of a "Post Conservative Civilization"...who knows?

Locally, Deval Patrick overthrew destiny with all the ease and inevitability of Bill Goldberg spearing a last minute mid-carder.
We lost local Progressive Talk Radio...for now.
This is a pity because I really enjoyed Stephanie Miller, Ed Schultz and even Randy Rhodes when she was laying off the aggro.
Otherwise, Jeff Jacoby kept trying to ease his cheeks onto a seat at the Praetorians table...didn't success but it was fun to watch.
Scott Lehigh pontificated and made entirely inaccurate predictions, Joanie Vennochi shrieked spun around so fast she drilled a foot deep hole in the floor and Brian McGrory made soft puzzled naive-type sounds.

In all, it was another year in the Commonwealth, we finally got some change lets see if we can hold on to it.