[watercolor, pen and ink on Imbroglio cold pressed paper]
click to enlarge
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Sunday, May 13, 2012
Painting: Bluehead, State 3
Painting by Jack Brummet
[watercolor, pen and ink on Imbroglio cold pressed paper]
[watercolor, pen and ink on Imbroglio cold pressed paper]
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Hermann Göering on selling war to the people
By Jack Brummet, World War II Editor
Hermann Goering was the highest ranking Nazi official to survive and be captured. During the Nuremberg trials, he had this exchange with Gustave Gilbert, an intelligence officer (who later recounted the conversation in a book):
Göering: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göering: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
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Coulrophobia: [Don't] Send In The Clowns (warning: includes clown painting)
By Jack Brummet, Pop Culture Editor
On their radio show yesterday, Dave Ross & Luke Burbank discussed clowns going extinct. From my generation forward, people now perceive of clowns as being frightening rather than amusing or distracting. This may have something to do with both John Wayne Gacy and Stephen King's novel, and movie, "It." There have been more than a few scary clowns in movies over the last few years (like The Joker and his band in The Dark Knight, for example). Our parents loved Emmett Kelly and Red Skelton, and clown cars at the circus, but somewhere along the line our generation and the following ones no longer much cotton to the clowns.
This is a painting I bought at a thrift store fifteen years ago. It may be Emmett Kelly. . .
This is a painting I bought at a thrift store fifteen years ago. It may be Emmett Kelly. . .
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Friday, May 11, 2012
1960 photograph of Ballard and the Olympic Mountains
This 1960 photo is a view of Ballard in Seattle. The Bardahl Manufacturing sign is still around...not sure about the WaMu sign (I suspect not) . In the background, beyond Bainbridge Island, are the Olympic Mountains. Photo courtesy of the Washington State Digital Archives.
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Photograph: 1935 - Battleships in Seattle's Elliott Bay
Photograph of the USS California (left) and the USS Tennessee (right) at anchor in Elliot Bay during summer maneuvers, ca. 1935. Courtesy of the Washington State Digital Archives
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Thursday, May 10, 2012
Dick Tuck, American Prankster Hero
By Jack Brummet, Presidents Editor
Dick Tuck is a legendary political strategist and hoaxer who made a life-long career out of making life miserable for Richard Nixon. He's been a hero of mine ever since I read Hunter S. Thompson (a friend of his) write about him during the 1972 Presidential campaign.
Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?" [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest, loan, or possibly a large cash gift, to Nixon's brother Donald. This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras. The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "
"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer."
As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:
This poster is from Tuck's 1966 Congressional campaign. He claimed his opponents added the Dick to form the F word, Tuck said he thought voters would think his opponent had done this and he'd "get the sympathy vote" with this tactic.
In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady." After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.
In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." Tuck agreed and launched his first prank against Nixon. He rented a big auditorium, invited only a small number of people, and gave a long-winded speech to introduce the candidate. When Nixon came on stage, Tuck asked him to speak about the International Monetary Fund. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."
One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese. As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald. Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.
After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."
Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes. But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol. Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."
At Dick Tuck and Dick Nixon's first meeting, Tuck had succeeded in getting hired by the Nixon team as an advance man. He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had. He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally. Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium. Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis. He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless.
In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".
Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or by telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."
In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note: There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].
By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (which he hadn't).
During the '68 campaign, Tuck would also often hire pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."
By 1972 Nixon decided he needed someone his own Dick Tuck. Nixon's effort to mimic Tuck's pranks lacked all humor and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.
Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.
Sources: Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.
 | "The real Nixon was always there, all I did was keep the spotlight on it." |
Tuck writes on dicktuck.com: "Exposing the real Nixon was always my goal. In the Chinatown Caper, a sign saying "Welcome Nixon" also asked – in Chinese – "What about the Hughes Loan?" [Ed's note: Howard Hughes had made a large, no-interest, loan, or possibly a large cash gift, to Nixon's brother Donald. This naturally erupted into a scandal...albeit, a containable one]. Once the phrase was translated for Nixon, he rushed over to the crowd, seized the sign and tore it up in front of the TV cameras. The message was simple: do you want a guy like this running your state or nation? "
"This kind of behavior, these ethical standards had been Nixon's since law school, when he broke into the Dean's office with some friends to see if his grades were good enough to keep his scholarship. It continued in his campaigns against Jerry Voorhis, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Pat Brown, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
"I didn't hide what I did. I never tried to be malicious. It's just the difference between altering fortune cookies to make a candidate look funny and altering State Department cables to make it look as if a former President were a murderer."
As Adlai Stevenson said during the 1956 Presidential campaign, “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
My favorite quote by Dick Tuck is from his concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election, in which he received about 10% of the vote:
"The people have spoken, the bastards."
In 1950, Tuck was working for Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. She was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against Richard Nixon. He watched first hand as Dick Nixon smeared her as "The Pink Lady." After that, he made it his mission to mess with Richard Nixon every chance he got.
In a 1973 Time magazine article, Tuck told a reporter, "There was an absent-minded professor who knew I was in politics and forgot the rest. He asked me to advance a Nixon visit." Tuck agreed and launched his first prank against Nixon. He rented a big auditorium, invited only a small number of people, and gave a long-winded speech to introduce the candidate. When Nixon came on stage, Tuck asked him to speak about the International Monetary Fund. When the speech was over, Nixon asked Tuck his name and told him, "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."
One of Tuck's best pranks was "the Chinatown Caper." During his campaign for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon visited Chinatown in Los Angeles where children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese. As Nixon spoke, an elder from the community whispered to him that one of the signs in Chinese said, "What about the Hughes loan?, " a reference to an unsecured/illegal $205,000 loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother, Donald. Nixon grabbed the sign on camera and ripped it up.
After the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who gave Nixon a hug and said in front of TV cameras, "Don't worry, son! He beat you last night, but you'll get him next time."
Tuck and many other people say that he was never malicious in his political pranks. Richard Nixon, however, became obsessed about Tuck, and even railed about him in some of the Watergate Tapes. But Nixon also admired Tuck, and often compared the dirty tricks committed by staffer Donald Segretti unfavorably to the elegance and humor of Tuck's political shenanigans. After the Watergate blew up in the newspapers, Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, saw Tuck in the Capitol. Haldeman reportedly turned to Tuck and said, "You started all of this." Tuck replied, "Yeah, Bob but you guys ran it into the ground."
At Dick Tuck and Dick Nixon's first meeting, Tuck had succeeded in getting hired by the Nixon team as an advance man. He organized a rally at UC Santa Barbara, and booked the largest auditorium they had. He booked it on a day when no students would be able to attend, and didn't do any publicity for the rally. Forty students showed up in the 4,000 seat auditorium. Tuck got up to introduce Nixon with a long, rambling monologue with many references to Nixon's cut-throat, red-bashing campaign tactics against Jerry Voorhis. He then announced that Nixon would now speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, of course, had not planned to speak about the IMF. Therefore, when he got up to the podium he was momentarily speechless.
In 1956, Nixon was running for reelection as Eisenhower's Vice President. The Republican Convention was held in San Francisco that summer, and Tuck learned that the route taken by garbage trucks going to the dump led past the convention center. Tuck paid to have all the garbage trucks bear signs that read "Dump Nixon".
Tuck also performed other pranks to undermine Nixon's campaign effort like posing as a fire marshall to provide low estimates of the turnout at Nixon's rallies, or by telling bandleaders at rallies that Nixon's favorite song was "Mack the Knife."
In one incident Tuck dressed up as a train conductor and signalled a train to leave the station while Nixon was delivering a speech from its rear platform. Reportedly, the train pulled out of the station with Nixon still speaking. [ed's note: There is some debate about whether this incident actually occurred].
By 1968, when Nixon ran for President, Tuck spooked Nixon's campaign managers so badly that they started imagining phantom pranks. A shipment of buttons printed in Greek, Chinese, and Italian arrived at Nixon's campaign headquarters for use at ethnic rallies in NYC. Nixon's campaign manager ordered that all the buttons be destroyed, just in case Tuck had tampered with them (which he hadn't).
During the '68 campaign, Tuck would also often hire pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies carrying signs with his campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One."
By 1972 Nixon decided he needed someone his own Dick Tuck. Nixon's effort to mimic Tuck's pranks lacked all humor and went badly awry. Donald Segretti's dirty tricks included forging letters to newspapers alleging sexual misconduct on Hubert Humphrey's part and forging letters on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie that included racist language.
Tuck was a key adviser in Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, he rode in Kennedy's ambulance as the mortally-wounded candidate was rushed to the hospital.
Sources: Dicktuck.com; Wikipedia.com/dick_tuck; jackbrummet.blogspot.com; Stephen J. Whitfield. "Nixon as a Comic Figure," American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring 1985, 114-132; Ron Kurtus, "Did Dick Tuck Cause Watergate?" revised August 28, 2000.
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Wednesday, May 09, 2012
BHO on gay marriage: It's not flip-flopping, weaseling, or pandering
By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor
As I have written many times, it's not weaseling, flip-flopping, or pandering as your thinking evolves and you change your position on an issue. I think BHO coming out in favor of gay marriage is a very brave thing to do. I'm not quite sure if it was the smartest thing to do politically, but it may be. This could be the nationally galvanizing moment for that issue. On the other hand, I don't believe that any of the "defense of marriage laws" that have come up for a vote of the people have been voted down (which now leads us to North Carolina, where it's OK to marry your cousin, as long as it's not a same sex cuz).
“I was reminded that it is my obligation not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society, but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in his his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
As I have written many times, it's not weaseling, flip-flopping, or pandering as your thinking evolves and you change your position on an issue. I think BHO coming out in favor of gay marriage is a very brave thing to do. I'm not quite sure if it was the smartest thing to do politically, but it may be. This could be the nationally galvanizing moment for that issue. On the other hand, I don't believe that any of the "defense of marriage laws" that have come up for a vote of the people have been voted down (which now leads us to North Carolina, where it's OK to marry your cousin, as long as it's not a same sex cuz).
“I was reminded that it is my obligation not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society, but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in his his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
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Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Octomom fronts her first porn video ('I'm Excited For It To Come Out')
[thanks for this news flash to our frequent tipster, D.E. We'd use his real name, but, alas, he is the CEO of a major technology consulting firm, and having his name linked forevermore with The Octomom's sex movie may be not an optimal business move. DE -- if you want full attribution on ATIT, drop us a line!]
Like many other micro-celebrities, Nadya Suleman recently decided to explore the fertile glens of skin mags and adult films. According to various reports, The Octomom was scared s***less when she arrived on the set of her first (of many?) film shoot last week. After some mentoring from a seasoned professional porn actress, she performed, they say, like a pro.
"My first shoot was amazing," Nadya said. "Such a learning experience for me in so many ways. I don't think I could have asked for a better crew to work with. They were so patient and willing to teach me. I owe a lot to Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake; she opened my eyes to a whole different world of self-pleasure that I could have never imagined. They made me look so glamorous, and for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful and sexy. I'm very excited for it to come out!"
The video, directed by Brad Armstrong, is scheduled to release in mid-June on an online porn site. At the shoot, Nadya also posed for a set of photographs in which she's seated at the head of a long table, her body covered with SpaghettiOs. “For the pictures, we had her topless with a thick sparkly red choker with a big red heart in front and red and white polka dot panties ... like 1950s style," an insider tells me. "SpaghettiOs were all over her body and she's even throwing the SpaghettiOs toward the camera. The label on the can was changed from SpaghettiOs to say 'Saucy Octos.'"
Octomom plans to buy her large family a new home with the proceeds from her randy new film career.
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Monday, May 07, 2012
Sunday, May 06, 2012
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Friday, May 04, 2012
Alien Lore No. 224 - UFO over British Columbia
By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore and Paranormal Editor
Thanks to Jeff Clinton for passing this along. This is one of the strangest UFO videos we've seen, and made all the more interesting by the commentary of the two apparently stoned people on a boat, shooting the video. ("Oh my f***ing god, it looks like Boba Fett's ship!")
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This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).
Thanks to Jeff Clinton for passing this along. This is one of the strangest UFO videos we've seen, and made all the more interesting by the commentary of the two apparently stoned people on a boat, shooting the video. ("Oh my f***ing god, it looks like Boba Fett's ship!")
---o0o---
This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).
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