Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

This is not good.

By now, most of you have heard that Michael Jackson has died. Oddly enough, he died the same day as Farrah Fawcett. Both were icons of their respective decades. This post is about Michael as he was my THE icon of my formative decade: the 80’s. I needed to wait a day to fully collect my thoughts.

Michael was a musical genius. And yet, as with most geniuses, he had a tortured personal life. Rumors of abuse by his father; bizarre man-child behavior; charges (and an acquittal) of child sexual assault. But he also sold 750 million albums. 750 million!! And what a musical legacy: Thriller, Beat It, Billie Jean, Off The Wall, Smooth Criminal, Dirty Diana...the list go on and on.

So how do we choose to remember him? Musically or personally? Or Both? I am going to remember the music. In that respect, he will be missed.

A defintion? Me enjoying this:

Social conservatives, the once-powerful force that focused the Republican agenda on moral virtue and family values, have suffered a diminished brand on the national political landscape as a steady stream of their icons have fallen prey to the vices they once preached against.

Extramarital affairs, gambling, alcohol abuse, prostitution and sexual pursuit of minors have taken a toll on the GOP

I love Mr. Reich. He is a gift intellectual and apparently very funny too. Enjoy!

Can some one they right please tell me again why we don’t need major medical insurance overhaul? And don’t talk to me about letting the marketplace sort it out without government interference. That is what we have already tried. And we see how well that works.

From C-SPAN:

H/T to Time’s Swampland blog for point this out.

Um, WTF is this all about?!?!

Sharing an obscene sexual fantasy over e-mail is a federal crime that enjoys no protection under the First Amendment, a federal appeals court said Monday, in a decision that drew sharp dissent from one judge and potentially set the stage for a Supreme Court appeal.

In a 10-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear the case of Dwight Whorley, a Virginia man whose criminal trial marked two firsts for the American justice system: the first conviction for possession of obscene Japanese manga, and the first for authoring pornographic fiction and sending it over e-mail.

Report from CNN.com about today’s protests in Iran:

Security police made “a very large show of force” in midtown and southeastern Tehran, using tear gas and clubs to beat back protesters as clashes erupted during the unrest.

This comes as demonstrators emerged on city streets to protest last week’s elections in defiance of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Friday pronouncement that protests must end.

Police fired guns in the air, and Iran’s Press TV also reported the use of water cannons to disperse protesters

Billy Mays- ICan Health Care Commercial - The most amazing bloopers are here

I am pretty sure I would not be most things Billy Mays endorses...especially health insurance.

If you aren’t following the riots in Iran, I think you should be. Right now, Twitter’s #iranelection hash is about the best place to get real-time information from people on ground. The Boston Globe also has some outstanding pics.

The election in Iran is over and their is chaos. Reports like the following:

Iranian authorities criticized international media reports and took steps to control the flow of information from independent news sources as anti-government protests raged in the country for a second day Sunday.

The British Broadcasting Co. said that electronic jamming of its news report, which it said began on election day Friday, had worsened by Sunday, causing service disruptions for BBC viewers and listeners in Iran, the Middle East and Europe. It said it had traced the jamming of the satellite signal broadcasting its Farsi-language service to a spot inside Iran.

And reports like this:

Thousands of protesters roamed through Tehran Saturday, waging hit-and-run clashes with police and setting trash bins and tires ablaze

Today’s NYT has a very interesting piece how who we ended up with a $1.2 trillion deficit over the decade:

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

It can be a bit wonkish, but is a good primer.