Tough day for the Dems, with at least four major candidates choosing to retire rather than face uncertain election chances next year: Sens. Chris Dodd (CT) and Byron Dorgan (ND), along with Gov. Bill Ritter (CO) and some poor schmo who wanted to be governor of Michigan for some reason, have all dropped out. Politico notes that “Democrats are now facing their bleakest election outlook in years-and the very real possibility the party will lose its 60–40 Senate supermajority after the November elections,” although the fact is that Dodd was almost sure to lose and this will actually help the party keep the seat. Also, “bleakest election outlook in years” actually means “in four years,” since winning supermajority status in 2008 was actually a high-water mark for either party in the modern era (the last time it happened was 1976). Still, that’s your narrative, and you’re stuck with it.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died on January 4th in Tokyo at the age of 93. Yamaguchi had the distinction of being the only survivor of both atomic bomb strikes on Japan.

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima….

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.

Yamaguchi was ultimately felled by stomach cancer, but we have to imagine that even the Grim Reaper decided in late 1945 that he’d give the guy a pass for as long as he needed.

“It’s been a momentous couple of days in this new year for members of the American Third Position Party, the Westminster [California]-based group that’s seeking to give the poor, oppressed White race a voice in this country. They’ve secured the philosophical leadership of famous white supremacists, launched a new website, and have four fans on Facebook!”
-This account of Long Beach State psychology professor Kevin MacDonald’s political life with the Third Position party is pretty entertaining. Also, he hates Jews!

Willie Mitchell, 1928–2010

A cornerstone of Memphis, pianist, producer and bandleader Willie Mitchell died yesterday at age 81. Aside from making his own music, Mitchell owned and operated the Hi Records label after 1970, home of Ann Peebles, Syl Johnson, and most notably, Al Green. It’s not a stretch to say that Mitchell is responsible for some of the very greatest soul music ever recorded.

Woman-interested site Wears the Trousers mag has been counting down their top 100 albums of the decade; they have now published from numbers 100 on down through 26. Tomorrow comes their top 25 and I actually cannot imagine what is going to be on it. Checking in at #99? Yo Majesty! (OMG, remember them from like 2008?) Yes: the “now-defunct lesbian Christian rap duo” that “didn’t quite make the transition from internet phenomenon to unit-shifting hip-hop megaliths.” Indeed. In other news, it’s truly irking to see Hope Sandoval rank just above Gillian Welch (don’t get me started!) but mostly otherwise this is a fascinating list that is an excellent guide for some lazy online shopping, basically.

Dear riders of the Powell-Mason cable car line in San Francisco, late summer 1991,

Sorry for flashing you.

I was living at 1612 Mason Street that summer, in an apartment on the bottom floor of a grey-and-purple building by the corner of Green Street in North Beach. A particularly picturesque San Francisco spot. View from the roof out over Fisherman’s Wharf to Alcatraz in the Bay. The trolley tracks ran right past.

The only way I was able to afford such a nice place was to share its two bedrooms with four friends from college. I’d been asked to take what a kindly dean referred to as an “academic hiatus” after my sophomore year. I thought I’d get a job and start a new life. But that was a recession summer. Jobs were not to be found, even for someone with my credentials. I ate tuna fish sandwiches and potato salad every day, saving every spare bit of cash for rent and the amazing pot a friend of a friend brought us down from Humboldt County. The only furniture in the apartment was a kitchen table and chairs. We slept on futon cushions and didn’t much decorate.

Or hang curtains on the windows in my bedroom. Those that looked out onto the sidewalk, and the street, down the middle of which, every half-hour or so, a red-and-yellow cable car full of tourists would slowly clatter and chug its way towards the intersection. My roommates and I joked about living in a fish bowl and carried our clothes into the bathroom to change after showering. But as the months passed and I got more comfortable in the apartment, I started walking back into the room in a towel and changing there. You could hear the trolley approaching from a block away, so there was always time to cover up. Eventually, though, probably due in part to the listlessness of unemployment, I stopped making the effort.

What did I care if a couple tourists saw me naked? Consider it a free perk or a hidden tax that accompanies the price of a ticket. A new kind of San Francisco treat.

This was early in the handheld video camera era. I remember being struck by the number of people who rode the cable cars with the things fixed to one eye, held steady, filming the façade of every building on the route. I always thought they were missing a lot that way, sacrificing 360 degree scenery for dull documentation. Didn’t they want to look around? It didn’t seem like a fun way to spend a vacation day. Perhaps for this reason, and perhaps also because of the potency of the Humboldt pot, I got a real kick out of it the first time I saw a guy’s face pop out from behind his camera, eyes and mouth open wide, having spotted the whole of me through his lens. It’d give him a story to tell. Spice things up a bit.

Soon I took to air-drying after a shower, staying naked on purpose, waiting to hear the trolley come and standing right up in the window, hands on my hips, stoned and giggling to myself as it passed. It was rare that anyone noticed-only two or three gawkers and pointers over a month or so of this-but I very much enjoyed the thought of the people who might have caught me on camera without noticing in real time. That would be a fun home movie screening. Greetings from San Francisco!

But if you didn’t find it fun, well, sorry. Also, please keep in mind what Mark Twain said about how cold it is in San Francisco during the summer.

Dave

“President Obama’s meeting with his top national security advisers does nothing to change the fact that his fundamental approach to terrorism is fatally flawed. We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation’s security. That’s what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001.”
–Sarah Palin, ladies and gentleman. I don’t even know where to start.

Well if she is not, then why does she know so much about fashion, hmm? Simon Doonan (window dresser; homosexual; short) meets the First Lady for White House holiday decorating: “Her long-standing interest in style makes the process easy: She likes the ‘softer, more Romeo Gigli colors.’ She agrees with my suggestion that we should use ‘a Lanvin-ish antique-looking glitter’ instead of anything too sparkly. While Mrs. Obama loves the idea of ‘the Wish Tree,’ an interactive piece created by a Hoboken-based company named Cardboard Design, her most enthusiastic response is reserved for the 800 recycled silver balls that are proposed for the monumental Blue Room Tree. Together we decide that decoupage, rather than painting, is the way to go.” Then Doonan lays into that nice man, Andrew Breitbart, who runs that nice website for conservatives. Related: enjoy all this further fodder, teabaggers!

This local news piece about a service you call when you’re too tanked up to drive yourself home that sends a man on a tiny scooter to escort you back in your own automobile is, I guess, interesting enough as it goes, but you’ll want to pay special attention at about the 1:55 mark where there is an important aside that is delivered in the most bizarrely cheerful fashion. I guess we all make amends in our own ways.

The late Michael O’Donoghue, who among other things was the first head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” would have turned 70 today. I am going to use that occasion as an excuse to quote from what still remains one of the funniest pieces I have ever read. It comes from his brief run as a Spin columnist. The subject is Liza Minelli.

Liza. Freaky, mawkish Liza with those waif-found-stuffed-in-a-drainpipe looks and that paperback version of Judy’s voice. Liza, not so much a human being as a walking collection of show business tics. Liza, whose career is based on the belief that you can’t overuse the words “special” and “magic.” Liza with an “F.”

Obviously, on a sane planet, she would be kept in a cage and people would pay a small amount-no more than a quarter-to poke her with a stick. Yet here on Earth, she’s a big star. Why, you ask, and rightly so? I’ll tell you why. Because her mother, who always looked like she was two seconds from jumping off a high ledge, knew an incredible secret — a secret so dark and twisted that it has never been spoken aloud-a secret any Rosicrucian would give his left nut to possess-forbidden knowledge older than the pyramids unveiled here for the first time-a secret guarded by the rich and powerful for centuries yet I reveal it to you for the price of a rock’n’roll magazine-a dreadful secret that Judy, lying on her death bed, with seconds to live, leaned over and whispered into her daughter’s ear:

“The person in the most pain wins.”

The whole thing is here.