Clearly, Heebie Jeebie should be relocated to the throne at the Cathedral of Junk.
That show sounds great. Actually. I love outdoor sculpture.
"heebie geebies" just means something like shivery, slightly fearful goosebumps, doesn't it? Overtones of the occult.
Cheapskates give me the niggardly-diggards.
Now we can all nod sagely at one another and rock our chairs a few more times.
"Rock, rock, nod, rock" is the new "cry, cry, masturbate, cry".
Wait, I looked at the picture... and it's a metal dildo in a bird cage?
I know why the metal dildo in the bird cage... actually, I have no idea where this is headed.
By the way, if anyone was masturbating to Bill Safire, they should stop now.
Damn. I did look around before posting, but in retrospect it makes sense to put the Safire obit announcement in with the catastrophe presidents.
a man of steel with an irrepressible libido.
Laydeez.
||
German elections. The SPD (think US dems, blue dog led, but in a country where universal health care has the status of medicare in the US) just got slammed. The neolibs, led by the better looking and gay Grover Norquist did amazingly well. The CDU/CSU had a mediocre result (think Olympia Snowe type Repubs with some Tom Tancredos thrown in), the Greens did well (think generic cautious liberal democrats with a strong environmental streak and a couple Noah Chomskys in the mix). Die Linke also did very well. (think a mix of Bernie Sanders, old school left wing union dems, and a dose of apparatchik and ANSWER types)
>
Can we have a multiparty system over here? Please?
(Yeah, I know.)
15: My vague understanding was that any and all incumbents were about to get slammed for, among other things, the country's Afghanistan involvement. Is that what happened?
There are a bunch of German exchange students in my program. They had a barbecue today to watch the election results. They invited me, but I didn't go, because the dorm where they live is kind of far and the party I went to last night was intense enough that I wasn't up for another so soon. And because I know virtually nothing about German politics.
16: I'll send you an e-mail with directions to the meeting.
17 Nope. The SPD is generally for the Afghanistan involvement and that definitely helped draw votes to Die Linke. The Greens are hopelessly divided on the issue with the 'Realo' wing lukewarmly for it, and the 'Fundi' wing strongly against. (These are formalized factions with a double leadership structure in the party to keep infighting to a minimum). The CDU/CSU are for it and tread water. The FDP are fine with it but what they really want is to cut taxes for the rich, eviscerate labour laws, and take the heat off the poor maligned bankers. So it helped Die Linke and hurt the SPD, but that's about it, and even there the SPD's neolib reforms of the Schroeder era (cut taxes on the rich and corporations, cut benefits for the unemployed) hurt them as well.
Just to clarify the above - the Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan is fairly unpopular in Germany, but relatively few votes seem to have been affected by it.
16 Germany has a de facto mostly PR system with a five percent threshold. But strictly speaking half the seats are from individual districts and you vote both for an individual within your district and for a provincial party list. If you win less districts than your percentage of the the 'second' (party list) vote you get topped up from the PR seats. However, if it's the reverse you get so-called 'overhang' seats. This is done by province. So in Baden-Wurtenburg the CDU won 34.4 % of the party list vote, but 37 out of 38 districts. It will get that many seats. The other parties will get their percentage of 76 seats (38x2) according to their second vote totals meaning the total number of seats will be higher than 76 and the CDU will have more than 34.4% of the total
[maybe an excess of detail?]
But Germany is so far left of the States that the party stuff doesn't match up like that, yeah? I mean, nobody wants to kill the universal health care system, and everybody agrees that global warming exists, or so I'm told by Ygz who is over there right now.
Sure, which is why I said with UHC having the status of Medicare. If we didn't have it the Repubs would be screaming Stalin-Hitler, the Blue Dogs would be looking out for the insurance companies, etc. The Schroeder SPD explicitly modeled itself on Blairism and his lieutenants remain in charge (though perhaps not for long after Sunday's vote). The FDP really does have radically neolib views. Merkel simply wants the status quo, but there is a neolib faction in her party. The Christian right equivalent is pretty weak in Germany, though not non-existent (and they're often on the left wing of the 'bourgeois' camp - it's a Catholic led religious right, not a fundy protestant one). Abortion is technically illegal though de facto permitted through a series of loopholes. There was a huge right wing freakout over a weak civil partnership law a decade ago. And there is plenty of xenophobia, though it's not a major electoral issue the way it was through the nineties and the early years of this decade with the grudging acceptance of citizenship for the children of permanent residents born in Germany, a reform forced through by the Schroeder government at the insistence of its Green partners. On global warming - everyone accepts its reality, but a lot on the right don't want to do anything about it unless the US and China get on board.
In general it is a lot easier to prevent major broad based social programs than it is to kill existing ones. All in all it's to the left of America, but once you factor out status quo inertia not as much as it might seem at first glance.
NB On the weakness of the religious faction, but its existence, note the protests over Merkel's leadership bid - she was unmarried but living with her longtime (male) partner. They got married, the religious wing still grumbled, the rest of the party told them to pipe down.
23: If somehow universal health care had managed to pass here, it would be unkillable. (The fact that Germans accept the reality of global warming is genuinely because they are better people.)
also recent experience with fascism (bad!) and actual communism (its more than just an estate tax) probably shades some reality into people's thinking
25: if we did the mid-90s or aughts over again, you don't think theres a good chance clinton or bush manages to privatise social security?
speaking of which, talking about 'probability' to historical counterfactuals doesn't really seem to make sense. but it seems like a 'could have happened'
Yeah, I'm with you on this 'Once you start a nice big universal social program, people love it and it is invincible' thing. I like the way Rick Perlstein put it back in 2005.
Tomorrow I'll probably be having lunch with my German colleague. I should ask him what he thinks of this stuff.
also, the pirate party got 2%
Of the party vote?
(Remember that the the 5% threshold distorts, because voters know that a vote going to a 3% party is wasted. But I'm not sure which way this distorts the Pirate Party's result.)
If your metal dildo is in a birdcage, you aren't doing that bad a job of repressing your libido.
KISS MY ASS, HELPY-CHALK