Autumn Atum Egypt Watch

Someone arrogating all power to himself in Egypt.
It's not as if there's no track record of this sort of thing when the post lies vacant. Unsuccessful attempts at arrogating all power to oneself, for whatever good it's going to do, are followed all down the ages in Egypt by endless further attempts to do the same on the part of others. There's never been a recorded time when someone wasn't after the job.
So this round it's Egypt president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Mursi making a grab for it in the aftermath of the suspended massacre in Gaza.
It is said that Patriarchy cannot fail Egypt, but that Egypt shall always fail Patriarchy given time.

Thanksgiving

All that moment come together
in shared wonder
at the sight of such delightful
parade

The Untraceable Lightness of Citizens United

It can't be the case that only Stephen Colbert's lawyer has figured out a way to channel money donated to a political SuperPac in the heat of the recently concluded presidential election campaign into a separate secret stash of untaxable cash by passing it to yet another non-profit controlled by Colbert, formed under a different part of the tax code not covered by the same Federal Election Commission filing requirements, which then passes it along to yet a third non-profit, still controlled by Colbert, the identity of which the intermediary non-profit is, as it stands, not required to divulge. The intermediary SuperPac is not required to divulge that the money it recieves comes from the original SuperPac to which it was donated, and the third non-profit is not required to divulge that its money comes from the intermediary. It doesn't have to say nothing to nobody about that money in fact. It's free.

Reading comprehension is why we have tax lawyers in the first place, after all, and it will be illuminating to see what percentage of money given to the bigtime SuperPacs leaks out in this direction when the Federal Election Commission lays down the count and the amount in its official report on the 2012 presidential race.

The Colbert Report
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Man's Man and Attractive Woman Have A Bunch of Sex!

I'm wondering how this story failed to break before the election. Sure, Petraeus represented the Republican's best presidential hope going forward, but, for the off chance that the froth from the revelation of his affair with his biographer might shake up Obama's campaign just enough to ensure what Romney's team thought was going to be a very close win, shouting Benghazi! Petraeus! Benghazi! over and over in the last week before the election seems like it would have been the politic thing to do. It's a no-brainer, at least in terms of American politics, where we cusomarily destroy the future in order to ensure the present. But not a peep until after the vote. Hmm.

Here's Paula Broadwell on the Charlie Rose Show, talking to Charlie about All In, her book about David Petraeus, with a measure of circumspection suitable to the civilized tenor of conversation expected at Rose's table, given what we now learn.

You're Welcome

I congratulate myself on the acuity of the previous post, which not only called an Obama win at least an hour before the networks noticed it, but also reported an even earlier case of the call, made in person by me out loud in public. I submit that the outcome was any surprise at all only because the major news sources willingly duped themselves into the breathless narrative excitement of a close race pandered by the Republicans, just in case in might become one, but on election night, swiftly, as election nights go, states one by one brushed Romney aside, and from the moment Ohio fell to Obama the hot air it took in the newsroom to misremember what had just happened lasted far into the weekend [it is predicted here. p.r.] 

Early on the West Coast

I called it for Obama some months ago, saying, "Obama's going to win" out loud and within hearing distance with the sort of conviction that passes for prescience if the deed foretold is done. I made no prediction regarding Elizabeth Warren, who is just now projected by NBC to be the winner of the Senate race in Massachusetts over Scott Brown, the incumbent, who to my knowledge avoided the pitfall of the explanatory word about rape which a number of fellow Republican males running for Federal office found it necessary to indulge in during the course of their soon-foundering campaigns, and yet, still lost to Warren, who was denied the chair of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  she'd helped bring about in the wake of the financial meltdown that ushered out the Bush Era, and ushered in our first African-American president four years ago. Financial interests strirred up the Republicans to block her appointment to the post, which went to another, but left her free to challenge Brown, a one-term Republican in his first re-election bid. So now the financiers and Republicans have a Senator instead of a Bureau chief to contend with.

Hunter Moon Man

In Game 2 of the 2012 World Series, Hunter Pence scored one run and drove in the other in a 2-0 San Francisco Giants victory. In total, he scored three of the 16 runs scored by the whole team in their four-game Series sweep over the Detroit Tigers. So there is that about him.

Offensively, he gets almost all the credit there is for winning game 2, as much as Pablo gets for lighting things up in game 1. In game 3, after stealing second base in the top of the second following a leadoff walk to open the inning, Pence scored on Gregor Blanco's triple. Blanco soon followed with the only other score of the game, another 2-0 Giants victory.

In the fourth game Pence took second on a double and scored on a triple by Brandon Belt. Hitting a triple after Pence takes second is in all the playbooks. It worked again here, giving the Giants their first run of a game which surely will be remembered more for the astonishing strikeout of Melky Cabrera by Sergio Romo that sealed the win and the Series for the Giants than for what Hunter Pence accomplished. Still, he showed up. He did good.

He appeared cleanshaven at the Giants Victory Parade in San Francisco yesterday, perhaps making good on some promise about ever winning the World Series.

Powell and Market Streets, San Francisco, October 31,  2012