Groucho Marx was a pen pal of T.S. Elliot

..Enter Groucho, whose wit was as uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic. Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilised taste, the crux of Groucho’s humour was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste. “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,” he once said to a host, “but this wasn’t it.” And: “I remember the first time I had sex—I kept the receipt.” And: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” As for Groucho’s attitude toward Eliot’s exaltation of art and knowledge, he had this to say: “Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.” What Eliot considered “the waste land” of modern life—the deracination, impudence and profane materialism—was mother’s milk to Groucho.

And a fan/friend of rock performer, Alice Cooper.

They met while dueting on “Lidia the Tattooed Lady” at a Frank Sinatra birthday party.

They became friends while living in Beverly Hills. Groucho had insomnia and would call Coop at 1 a.m. to hang out.

“He had a chair next to his bed with a six pack of Budweiser, and we would sit and watch old movies. And then pretty soon, after about two movies were over, I’d look over and he’d be in his beret and his cigar and he’d finally go to sleep. I’d put out his cigar, turn out the lights and go home. And the next night, one o’clock in the morning: ‘Hey coop, can’t sleep, come on over.’”

Groucho took his friends to Coop’s concert, from George Burns to Jack Benny and Mae West. Ballet dancers in Coop’s show, performing as skeletons, would look over and see Fred Astaire on the side of the stage.

None of them needed earplugs.

“In fact,” Cooper says, “George Burns would say, ‘Guillotine – I remember 1923, Gracie and I were working in Toledo. The great Mahagony did an act like that, except pigeons would come out.’

“There was nothing I was doing on stage they hadn’t seen before, except it was in rock and roll form.”

Those Hollywood comedians got Alice made into a Friar. He’d go to their roasts.

“It was a bizarre time in my life,” he says. “Here I was the weirdest freak in Hollywood. I was this Alice Cooper monster. Every parent hated me. And all the comedians said, ‘He’s a friar, he’s one of us.’”

…the situation being whether you’re a Democrat or Republican.

Don Surber:

I am going to keep this simple. What was said by National Organization President Patricia Ireland about Paul Jones on April 2, 1998, and what NOW is saying now about Herman Cain.

From April 2, 1998:

Judge Susan Webber Wright’s ruling dismissing Paula Jones’ complaint against Bill Clinton certainly gives lie to the right-wing charge that anti-discrimination laws have gone too far. And it shoots down the tired complaint that a man can’t even compliment a woman at work anymore.

Jones alleges that Clinton ran his hand up her thigh, exposed himself to her, asked for oral sex and pointedly reminded her of his friendship with her immediate boss. No woman should have to put up with such behavior at work. But according to the judge, even if then-Governor Bill Clinton propositioned and pawed then-state employee Paula Jones — certainly misconduct for any employer or supervisor, Jones does not have a valid harassment claim because she could not prove that the overall result was a hostile work environment.

This ruling does not mean it’s open season on women in the workforce.

Women who face unwelcome sexual behavior at work can still win in court if the harassment is so pervasive or so severe that it interferes with their jobs. When it does, lewd bosses and crude co-workers can and will be held accountable.

From Erin Matson, NOW Action Vice President on Monday:

Revelations that presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexual harassment while heading the National Restaurant Association, as well as suggestions that financial settlements bought silence, are deeply troubling.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace. Unfortunately that has not stopped the widespread practice of unwelcome sexual advances, innuendos and jokes in the workplace being leveraged by men against women.

Last night, Mr. Cain’s campaign responded to news reports of the allegations with a statement that the press were “Spreading rumors that never stood up to the facts.” And yet this morning, Mr. Cain acknowledged that he was accused of sexual harassment while he was at the National Restaurant Association.

Setting the Cain campaign’s utter disregard for the facts aside, it’s outrageous for anyone to suggest that sexual harassment allegations represent political smears to be dismissed rather than the bravery and dignity of women simply trying to go to work.

This morning, Mr. Cain made a statement saying: “Yes, I do have a sense of humor. Some people have a problem with that. Herman is going to stay Herman. Thank you very much.” Feminists will continue to closely follow this story with the seriousness it deserves.

From Wikipedia: “On November 13, 1998, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop the appeal.”

This case that NOW kissed off as dismissed was settled for every dime she demanded 6 months later.

According to press accounts, Herman Cain’s accuser received $35,000 – 4 cents for every $1 Miss Jones received.

Tina Korbe at Hot Air

If only we could all budget our money the way Uncle Sam does. We could justify routine purchases as “emergency” spending. (Five dollars for a caffeine fix at Starbucks? But it’s an emergency!) We could pretend we saved money by not buying something we never planned to buy in the first place — and then spend that money elsewhere. (You always planned to pay college tuition for your kids even after they graduated university, right? Well, don’t — save the money and buy a new car instead!). We could delay payment by ten years for major purchases and pretend we’ll never have to pay for them. (What washer and dryer? You don’t owe money for either in this 10-year enforceable window — so don’t budget for ‘em at all.)

But, for some strange reason, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think it should be the other way around: They think Uncle Sam should start budgeting a little more like we do. That’s why, today, they introduced the Honest Budget Act, a bill to eliminate the most outrageous gimmicks Congress uses to justify increased spending.

“The American people are very unhappy with Washington and they have a right to be,” Sessions said this morning on a conference call. “They believe that we’re not honest about our numbers, that we’re manipulating spending and that we’re driving up the debt to further our own agendas. [So,] we’ve examined the budget process over the last decade or more [and] we’ve identified nine distinct problems that tend to recur that represent manipulation of the truth when we deal with the public about the budget.”

Sessions and Snowe identified them — and then sought to eliminate them. Among other things, the Honest Budget Act does the following:

• Requires both houses of Congress to adopt a binding budget resolution or face a 60-vote threshold to move any spending bills through Congress (in other words, under the HBA, no budget — in all probability — equals no appropriations);
• Makes it more difficult to label routine expenditures “emergency spending”;
• Eliminates phony rescissions (Congress can no longer use savings from falsely projected spending to justify actual increases in spending);
• Makes real the fake federal pay freeze; and
• Disallows timing shifts, which bill drafters use to make a bill appear deficit-neutral within a certain time frame.

“This is a good step,” Sessions said. “We can accomplish two things: We can restore more public confidence in the numbers that come out of the budget process and we can save money at the same time.”

Actually save money. Consider: Since 2005, budget gimmicks have enabled more than $350 billion worth of additional deficit spending.

Sessions said he and Snowe expect to receive broad and bipartisan support for their bill.

“I’ve had Democrats tell me they want budget reform,” Sessions said. “I find it more clearly advocated by new members on both sides of the aisle.”

Seriously: Who won’t support this bill? Are some senators actually willing to stand up and say, “We’re all for tricking the American people as long as we’re not caught”? Who am I kidding? Of course some are. Look for this bill to be buried by Harry Reid — but to nevertheless drive a meaningful discussion of budget reform. And if it does come up for a vote, it’ll be nice to have it blatantly on record that some senators actually stand for disingenuous practices.

Ed O’Keefe in the Washington Post exposes just how incompetent the Obama administration has been.

The government watchdog who first raised concerns about the federal loan program used to finance the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra said Wednesday that the Energy Department was ill-equipped to quickly distribute billions of dollars in economic stimulus funding.

Making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the Solyndra scandal broke, the Energy Department’s inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, told a House subcommittee that Energy’s $35.2 billion in stimulus funding eclipsed its annual budget by $8 billion and placed strains on the federal, state and local officials responsible for distributing the funds.

In some cases, state government personnel tasked with distributing the federal dollars had been furloughed because of state budget crunches, Friedman said.

Friedman’s testimony was meant to summarize more than 100 investigations conducted by his office into Energy’s stimulus spending. The probes have recovered $2.3 million in fraudulently obtained stimulus money and sparked five criminal prosecutions.

Several of Friedman’s probes have concluded that the political push to quickly create jobs and spur economic development didn’t match economic realities on the ground. And although he credits the department with making significant progress in distributing the federal aid, he said 45 percent of stimulus dollars distributed by Energy had not been allocated by state and local government as of Oct. 22.

Hurry, hurry — gotta get busy stimulatin’!

Obama administration officials have defended the department’s management of stimulus dollars, noting that 55 percent of the money had been distributed to recipients as of late last month. But the $535 million government-backed loan given to Solyndra, the now-shuttered solar company, has raised questions about the rush to distribute stimulus dollars and the leadership of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his top aides.

In his testimony, Friedman said the department failed to properly document and could not always demonstrate how it resolved or mitigated risks before granting loan guarantees. Critics have said such steps might have prevented the Solyndra scandal.

Friedman also criticized the administration for touting the existence of “shovel-ready” projects that needed federal funding to be completed quickly. From the start, administration critics were skeptical that such projects existed.