Which of These/My Clumps Do You Want Me to Be (Say)?

Either Obama's stupid or Obama's following orders or Obama's running for reelection and figures his best strategy is if he can't get everyone to love him better everybody hate him or all of the above:

Smarter conservatives already claim - with some evidence - that the White House and the Democratic Party are pawns of the big banks, or that Big Government and Big Business are in a mutually beneficial corrupt relationship. (Ahem. And who would argue with this?) Picking the JPMorgan Chase exec -- who sat on Fannie Mae's board -- doesn't prove the president loves unfettered free markets, it "proves" that the elites are still enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The Mobamafucker and the motherfucking Democrats are going to flanked on the left by the Right on demagoguing Wall Street, which is either stupid or flowing orders or Obama's best chance for reelection or all of the above.

Doopty:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO -- two powerful players that are often at each other's throats -- are considering teaming up for a campaign against the House GOP's planned cuts to infrastructure spending, spokespeople for both groups tell me.

The two groups rarely agree on anything, and frequently target each other in the harshest of terms, but one thing they agree on is that they don't want the House GOP to make good on its threat to subject highway and mass-transit programs to budget cuts. GOP leaders announced earlier this week that such cuts could not be taken off the table in the quest to slice up to $100 billion in spending.

Who's more Fredo in a rowboat, the CoC or the AFL-CIO?

Gah, political duh, though those pint bets that Obama is reelected still stand, yo.

• End of New Deal Liberalism.
• On the above.
• On the above.
• We're number one (in self-promotion).
• DOD dog and pony show.
• Asshat show.
• Alligator Boehner.
• Boehner says lalala.
• Class conflict in the GOP. 
• Lindsey Graham, wrong again.

• Too many cats out of the bag.
• Fuck the media.
• Pastor Sanctimonious bleats his most disingenuous scribble yet. 
• That sounds about right.
• Pakistan is whack.
  MOCO's fire department operations are whack.
• Olde Towne!
• Crisis in Chevy Chase!
• Aqueduct Bridge, whose remains I can see out my window at work.

• Bookshelf porn. (h/t)
• On fucking with Huck.
• Best of 1961. Interesting project, though I'd not play - holyfuck, Rabbit, Run is 50. I know I've said this a hundred times, but Janice accidentally drowning the daughter is as harrowing a scene I've ever read.
• Best Bond line ever? 
• I read The Man Without Qualities twenty-five years ago, serendipitously found my copies a week ago looking for something else. Maybe again, someday.
• In a word, in a world.
• 2011: A Year in (P)review.

EVERYONE IN THE ROOM IS A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE WORLD AT LARGE

Catherine Wagner

Things mean, and I can’t tell them not to.
Things       they moralize, to meet
my expectation, because I want advice
on how to live. The seaweed says:

This is a river; I am river-weed.
Which of these/my clumps do you want me to be (say)?

The closest one. That more animated brown one
rolls and unrolls its lengths of hair
and makes me feel unwell.
You quieter green clump, why don’t you speak. 
Then

A most beautiful bright blue bird
knifed down the stream
and veered left at the oak,
where the stream bends. A
male bird. He says: I am the
excellent wanderer 
flashing above
the stream,
a blue muscle that centers past
and future

a blue muscle roping future in
as past behind me cedes

blue muscle flying future into past

blue muscle flashes future

instantaneous wingbeat pasts.

Under the bird, forest and water. Above 
the bird, forest and cloud.

The twig trails in the water.
Twig-end disappears, twig resurrects
in reflection and continues down,
leads back to the tree, the undertree
that lives on the top of the water.
If I penetrate (look beneath) the water, the twig end
dangles and the forest
disappears.

The bird was a flying fist

It smashed up nothing

I pursued it round the corner,
a blue punch

my violence goes on out along the stream.