Hammer Of The Blogs

The Bill Is Gone

2012-01-27T22:53:00.000-08:00

Gotta admit, it is tons o' fun watching Tons O' Fun circle the drain, hoist mostly on his own fat petard.

For someone who spent the '90s so obsessed with Clinton's pee-pee, Newt shore don't wanna talk about it now. Just take his word for it, his marital indiscretions were totally different from Clinton's. Even his own kool-aid chuggers can't be thumbing their tiny dicks to that tune; in a base best characterized by ridiculousness at every angle, that one's too preposterous even for them.

Although the lunar colony shit is pretty fuckin' hilarious as well. Tell ya what, Fatboy, we'll start building it tomorrow if you'll serve as its governor for life.

Strange Brew

2012-01-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

There is apparently no small amount of hoo-ha over Arizona "governor" Jan Brewer's finger-wagging guff in Obama's face, like he was the butler who dropped her favorite purse dog.

Let me suggest that, aside from the fact that teabagger politicians have long felt empowered to act like assholes to this president, to jam their finger in his face or heckle him at the State of the Union speech, there is no controversy, especially considering the source.

Jan Brewer is a clown, a schmuck, a puller of stunts, a shameless fabulist who squats out lies about her own father's history, who concocts lurid fables about deranged Meskins loppin' off heads in the Sonoran desert, leaving them for innocent Yuma children to stumble across on their way to Sunday school, no doubt. Anything and everything she says about any subject whatsoever should be viewed through the prism that she will say pretty much whatever is most expedient for her at the given moment.

Arizona has very deep-seated streak of stone yahooism in its politics, one that well predates our current conservatard lunacies. They've been barking at the moon since Evan Mecham was a pup. Brewer is exactly the sort of ass-grabbing fool Arizona wants -- and more importantly, deserves.

Maybe Brewer will use this as a stepping-stone to a run for Jon Kyl's Senate seat. One can only hope; with the demise of other clown-car devotees such as Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, the GOP needs to upgrade its batshit quotient.

Dixie Key Party

2012-01-21T22:23:00.000-08:00

So Fatboy and his big ideas, tiny cock, and swingin' heart won the day down in the original Treason in Defense of Slavery state. Awesome. That weird sound you just heard was every comedian, and every member of Obama's campaign team, simultaneously creaming their jeans. America's Wang should be even more hilarious; maybe they'll go for Santorumentum, or perhaps a stray dog wearing a sandwich board (or one of Rick's cool sweater vests).

No one in the corporate media has the balls to say it on the record, since this perpetual reality teevee show is their bread and butter in a dying market, but the Goopers' primary has long since degenerated into an ass-kicking contest consisting entirely of one-legged people. Only more hilarious. It's only a matter of time before they start using Yakety Sax for theme music at the remaining debates.

Cam-Pain

2012-01-20T23:36:00.000-08:00

So I just watched Bill Maher ask Bernie Sanders, after briefly describing the nature in which Mitt Romney has recklessly calumniated the record thus far of Barack Obama -- which, let's keep in mind, is practically indistinguishable from what Romney's record would be if he had the job -- a rather simple question: "Can you win running against a fictional candidate?"

As a laugh line, it's passable, but shit, George W. Bush did exactly that. Twice. And that's just this century. Obviously a substantial portion of politics involves, even requires, contorting the positions of one's opponent. Inventing positions has not been a bridge too far for quite some time.

There are many axioms that will take place during the year-long sideshow. But two stand out to me as particularly obnoxious. One is that, in this wondrous modern era of endless, self-devouring news cycles, most of which show no compunction about recklessly inflating trivial, inane stories, the perpetual campaign industry will continue full-tilt. The very second after the loser of the election concedes, the winner will delegate a team to strategize the next round. This will be true even -- perhaps especially -- if Obama wins. The Democratic Party will take the victory as a sign from the infinitely wise and well-informed 'murkin electorate that they won because they gave the people what they want, ergo, they want more of the same. So they start grooming, say, Heath Shuler for the '16 run, with a quickness.

This is the same brilliant marketing strategy that produced John Kerry as a candidate in '04. I'd say I've followed politics fairly closely for a very long time, and I'll be goddamned if I can tell you three things Kerry has done before or since his nomination, certainly nothing that would remind one of how he achieved such exalted status that magical year. But he does and did sum up quite nicely the Democrats' institutional diffidence and utter lack of feck in properly serving as an adequate countervailing force against the modern Republican party's ingrained habits of lying, verbal aggression, and outright fear of appearing rational or intellectual.

The second big obnoxious 21st-century campang thang we'll see, if you haven't already, is the groundhog-like return of the quadrennial N8r h8rz. "Never forget!", they plaint in unison, heavily bucked teeth quivering over where their chins would be if they had them. The operational premise of Nader's infinite perfidy single-handedly sending our fair nation into a tailspin is finely honed to a keen edge by a dozen years and counting of obsessing and fingering, like cheap plastic rosary beads or a hopelessly desiccated clitoris, wiggling furiously for purchase and the assurance that a payoff will be forthcoming.

Someday, someday, they quietly moan to themselves, waiting for the next liar to give them the illusion of bliss. Yes, no, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This is the one, so much better than the other one. Fuck you, h8rz, this corporate stooge will ass-rape us considerably less than that corporate stooge. How dare you complain about slightly more polite ass-rape!

Their favored stooge may even leave a tasty mint on the pillow afterward, for further delectation. So there's that.

No doubt you've heard the tired-ass joke about the Polack (and yes, I'm part Polish, so I can go there) walking up with a handful of shit, exclaiming, "Look what I almost stepped in!". This is a fairly accurate portrayal of your modern Democratic voter. (Forget your modern Republican voter; he's the one putting a dollop of whipped cream on his pile of shit and grabbing a spoon.)

So it will be a good six, eight months of yammering, nattering, tedious ankle-biting jabber, by self-styled hard-nosed realists who in their grim determination are simply Doing What Must Be Done, acknowledging the vicissitudes of a hopelessly corrupt system that produces and rewards thieves and vipers, yet doing fuck-all to actually change that system in any meaningful way. It is as elaborate a kabuki performance as any 30-hour filibuster to add a defense rider to a Broccoli Month proclamation.

To the empty notion that they might change the system as the opportunity presents itself, all I can say is, "When? How?". I mean, Obama was dealt a phenomenally dreaful hand by his predecessors, but he did come in with a supermajority, a clear electoral mandate, and favorable political winds. Those things were his to squander, and damned if he didn't do just that. We can't vote him a pair of balls.

Don't get me wrong; in spite of my misgivings about Obama, I'll probably vote for him, if in fact I vote at all this time around. (I'll almost certainly vote, for local and state pieces at least, if not for preznit. But it too becomes more and more an empty gesture, the act of casting a pebble into the void and pretending that it becomes part of some massive synergistic force.)

But it's not because I think Mitt Romney can't do the job, or would be substantially different in terms of practical policy initiatives from Barry O. It's because Romney's an asshole, and the people bankrolling him are bigger assholes, and the idjits currently driving the rhetoric of that party are fucking flaming assholes, and I like the idea of all those assholes thinking that they have a clue about anything about as much as I like the fucking Tuck Rule.

But I hate it all the same, I fucking despise a broken system that spends literally months mooning over an interminable parade of certifiable chuckleheads and buffoons as if they were marginally qualified for the job they already hold, much less the job they want to run for. It's a bad system, it reeks of filthy pelf, and neither candidate from either party will do a damned thing to improve the lives of the peons. There are only slightly lessening degrees of corporate toadying.

So let's keep all that in mind as N8r-b8ing season approaches, and the smugonauts go on their perennial snipe hunt. The most important takeaway from Nader's role in the 2000 election is not that Gore was such a dreadful candidate he couldn't even win his home state, or even that in Florida, 12 times as many registered Democratic voters "defected" directly to Bush as did for Nader.

The most important lesson, once again and we can all see that it still holds true, is that the Democrats learned absolutely nothing from it.

Priorities

2012-01-19T23:23:00.000-08:00

Cases of this sort are fascinating, primarily for the unusual gymnastics of reasoning undertaken in resolving them.

Whenever someone proposes to sterilize someone else, for whatever reason, obviously there should be some voice of skepticism raised, just to make sure the idea is being thought through, and either accepted or rejected for rational, hopefully at least somewhat utilitarian reasons. This does not seem to be the case here, the ruling does not appear to have a practical basis.

Consider the discordant rationales being deployed here. You have a 32-year-old woman whose mental illness is severe enough that her parents have to care for her. She is legally incompetent to take care of herself, to support herself, to make rational decisions for herself. This is not in dispute by any of the litigating parties, nor by the appellate court which overturned the first ruling.

So ostensibly this woman -- who, again, cannot care for herself, and therefore cannot support herself -- would suffer a tremendous civil wrong were she compelled to either abort the fetus she is currently carrying, or even to be temporarily or permanently sterilized afterward. Fair enough. This is not an unreasonable argument on its face.

But one still has to wonder at what expense comes avoiding this great wrong. Maybe the 'rents are independently wealthy, so they can just kick down for an daughter who can't take care of herself or any number of children she "chooses" -- to the extent that a person declared legally incompetent can be said to have made a rational choice in the first place.

But what if they aren't wealthy? What about the kid she already has, that the parents are taking care of? Or the fetus, that may be damaged from the drugs she has to take, or damaged by her if she has to go off those drugs during the pregnancy? Do any of the other people in this scenario have any rights, including the right not to be saddled with the poor decision-making capacity of a legally incompetent, mentally ill person? It's like their concerns don't matter at all, they are just there to accept responsibility.

I don't necessarily assume offhand that there is a political agenda underpinning any of this, though I do recall a privately-funded movement in Southern California in the '90s that set out to essentially pay crackheads with at least four kids to get their tubes tied. The movement got shouted down by self-styled women's rights groups, who bizarrely (imho) felt that a crackhead's "right" to reproduce infinitely trumped, say, the right of her children to not enter teh world addicted to hard drugs, or the right of society to not be compelled to infinitely underwrite this foolishness.

I suggest that this is one of those issues, like abortion, where the biological function of reproduction has been granted some mystical, exalted, practically untouchable status. It is a polite fiction people seem to have tacitly agreed on, this one inviolability of the right to irresponsibly reproduce with impunity.

Of course there are any number of reprehensible historical examples. Fortunately we live in a society whose very modernity enables judges to establish proper mechanisms to prevent such instances. We're not talking about sterilizing every retard and criminal here. (Although really, people, aren't there enough Juggalos in the world already, must we clutter up a dying planet with more, to accelerate the impending doom?)

You can propose legislation that allows for wiretapping, pulling suspects off the street and throwing them into Gitmo for torture, or just lobbing a missile at them halfway around the world, without trial or even charge, and no one will bat an eyelash. But Flying Spaghetti Monster forfend that anyone intervene in a legally incompetent person's "right" to compel everyone else in their life to bear the consequences of their decisions. It seems like the parents and the children should have some rights as well.

Still Alive

2012-01-19T21:45:00.000-08:00

I've probably mentioned this before, but I had sort of an assumption that finishing up grad school would somehow grant me more leisure time. And at least initially, I felt like I had my nights and weekends "back".

But it didn't take long at all to realize that not only was there not going to suddenly be this abundance of screw-off time, but that I didn't even want there to be. I'll watch the teevee, but I can't just sit and watch; I have to either have a book or a guitar or the laptop going as well. And the late nights continue apace, as the projects grow and expand far beyond their initial parameters.

The past six months or so have also seen me ingesting huge amounts of music, a little bit of everything -- thrash/power/prog metal, some pop, and even some classical (torrented all 104 Haydn symphonies, and while I'm familiar with the last 20 or so, it's been interesting getting acquainted with the earlier ones a few at time). After turning 40 a few years back, I was initially perplexed that my musical tastes seemed to be getting heavier in general, but as my daughter starts figuring out what she likes, I quit wondering about it and just going for whatever's there.

And there's a lot, and a lot of really cool stuff, in quite a few genres (more in an upcoming post). Anyone who whines about how today's music sucks just needs to turn the radio off, leave it off, and go on walkabout in the internets. There's tons of places to find great music that will never get on the radio. I hear people complain about radio pap, and I don't know what to tell them. There is no excuse for being stuck with mainstream crap, unless you're a 15-year-old mallrat and just don't know any better.

Some of these projects I'm working on will be put on the internets at some point, hopefully to turn at least a modest buck, but at least to get some decent chops at building a real thing, not just the creation of a product but building the requisite 21st-century marketing presence around it. Naturally, I will keep you all apprised as things develop. Right now we're balls-deep in a pure content-building phase, probably into March or April.

In the meantime, the blog, such as it is these days, tends to suffer quantitatively, and I suppose I'm becoming more okay with that. Seven years has kind of snuck up on me in some ways. Obviously the first five years were fairly prolific, and once school cut into that, I found myself missing the catharsis of these little 'sodes less and less.

Actually, the writing is still a great deal of fun, it is the subjects that are less so. How many ways can you call Mitt Romney an empty suit, Obama a feckless dupe who has betrayed his putative constituency and abdicated what at least plausibly appeared to be his deeper convictons? How many times can the industries underpinning our economic systems be portrayed as the money-grubbing rackets they most certainly are, and still sound relatively fresh? How many different ways are there to point out what a useless toad, what self-aggrandizing, leg-humping sack of shit Newt Gingrich really is, not to mention the hypocritical dipshits he represents?

And on and on. The names change here and there, but the bullshit remains mostly the same. They keep lying, too many of us keep buying. So it goes.

But politics and power are the things that capture my interest, and I suppose we'll have some things to mull and discuss this fine campaign season. So for now I certainly plan to keep the Hammer banging at least through the end of this year, while I continue working on the projects, get the products finalized and formatted and ready to roll, and get a website (possibly two or even three) up and running.

Like I said, I still enjoy writing, and while the hit counter doesn't trsvel fast here and there aren't many comments, I do strongly feel -- and there are practically infinite corroborating examples anywhere you look -- that the folks that do check in here are thoughtful and reasoned in the commentary they share. I'd much rather have five or six literate, intelligent comments than the six million lumps of monkey shit you see in, say, just about any YouTube comment section for starters, not to mention any given corporate media site, who really should be able to attract a better class of riff-raff.

It is a weird phenomenon that I'm still digesting much of the time, this compulsion to be constantly working on something. I've always liked to work, to learn, to keep busy, but we're talking about staying up to 3:00 or 4:00 AM three or four nights a week working on a project, or reading about ideas to make the project just a little bit better. And then going to work at 7:30. If I didn't enjoy it so much, I'd be burnt by now.

So thanks for checking in, thanks for still reading, please continue to do so (and leave some comments!), and we'll try to get the posts at least a little more regular, see how this year shakes out.

Only one thing is certain -- Newt will still suck. Just a beastly little man, on so many levels. In a truly civilized country, this is someone who would have been tarred and feathered already, not treated like a serious person.

Great Moments In Journamalism

2011-12-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

Since apparently that War On Christmas thing finally, blessedly petered out, the persecution ninnies need to create another quasi-Christian tempest in a teapot. Enter Bill Maher:

"Wow, Jesus just f**ked #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere....Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler "Hey, Buffalo’s killing them."

Tebow had thrown four interceptions in his team's Christmas Eve loss to the Bills, which prompted Maher's remark.

Okay, Maher is being deliberately obnoxious and confrontational, but that's what a political comedian is supposed to do. And the argument can -- and has -- been reasonably made that Tebow's squeaky-clean, overly-publicized evangelism has changed the outcome of Tebow's job profile, in that while Tebow has demonstrated his toughness and resilience, he still insufficiently displays competence in the basic mechanics of his job.

In other words, it's not unreasonable to ask out loud exactly how Tebow has managed to avoid being converted to a fullback or H-back, considering how poorly and inconsistently he throws a football. Which is ordinarily a deal-breaker for someone who plays the position of quarterback in the National Football League.

Part of it may be that, in a climate where some folks never get tired of braying the tedious "role model" trope, Tebow gives that particular crowd something to hang their hats on. He's not a grotesquely-overpaid doorstop who, in a hyper-competitive profession, somehow managed to be completely unmotivated by a $60 million contract. Nor is Tebow a jism-spraying fool who never got the memo on how babies are created. God-bothering aside, when you watch enough soulless jerkoffs dick around through their careers with an obscene sense of over-entitlement, Mister Clean is going to pull in a lot of people who are repelled by that sort of behavior.

But I digress, this is actually not about all that nonsense. What this is about is the ludicrous notion of what online Faux News considers worthy of reportage.

And while Tebow did not respond to Maher, some of his fans are calling for a boycott of HBO, urging customers who find Maher's tweet offensive to cancel their subscriptions to the pay cable channel, Yahoo! Sports reports.

Wow, that's fascinating, Faux News! How many "fans" is this mysterious "some" comprised of, six, ten, fifty, a kajillionty? Is there a link to the Yahoo Sports story? Is there any organizing entity behind these "some fans", say James Dobson, that sort of thing, some door-knocking claque with the word "Family" in their name? Or is this someone's random "ya know whut we shud do" Facebook page? You literally cannot any of those obvious questions by reading this "article", yet it the whole thing is presented as if it were actual news.

Tebow himself is less bothersome than the rabble roused by his schtick, people who would almost certainly come unglued if Tebow were Mooooslim, and felt compelled to preface every interview by thanking Allah and the One True Prophet (PBUH). And that's really what the people picking on Tebow are on about -- football fans want football; if we wanted a sermon, we'd go to church. Faith is supposed to be, and used to be, a personal thing for most people, rather than a tribal or political declaration.

[Update: Wonder why "some fans" didn't get all publicly butt-hurt over Big Daddy Drew's blasphemous takedown a couple months ago.]

The Walking Dead

2011-12-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Seems that the folks at The Atlantic have been analyzing Ron Paul's disingenuous responses to racist sentiments being disseminated in his own newsletter, much to the chagrin of the usual claque of exasperated Paultards, who are still agog that the rest of us can be so blind to the great man's innate brilliance.

Now, hilarious as this is, every bit as hilarious as the schtick of someone who's been in politics for 35 years still pretending to be an outsider, it is the audience of mouth-breathing, window-licking, arm-dragging troglodytes clamoring for this racist guff which really bears some scrutiny:

At the time I was Lefty Morris' campaign manager, who was the Democrat running against Ron Paul in the general election. Our campaign released the "Ron Paul Political Report" to reporters and later focus grouped some of his writings and affiliations at a restaurant in La Grange, Texas.

At the time, the "Ron Paul Political Report" was listed in an online Neo-Nazi Directory that also included publications by the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brothers (or something like that).

Of course, we thought we could use this to our advantage. So, in the focus group, we let participants look at the newsletters and told them that Ron Paul's Political Report was listed in the Neo Nazi directory with the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.

The focus group got really quiet. Then one man pops off, "There's nothing wrong with the Ku Klux Klan."

Another man in the group says, "The Ku Klux Klan has done a lot of good things. For example, if a man wasn't taking care of his family, the Ku Klux Klan would take him down to the town square and tar a feather him."

Next a woman says, "It's the media. They never report the good things that the Ku Klux Klan does."

We had a runaway focus group on our hands. About 10 of the 12 participants were chirping their enthusiasm for the KKK.

Wow. Just....Jesus H. Christ, keep in mind that this took place in 1996. Truly old times there are not forgotten. Then there's the excerpt in the Coates link about George Wallace being the forward-thinking liberal in his area -- until, of course, he got "outniggered" by an opponent and vowed never to fall for that again. Charming.

Maybe we should be reassured that the '96 focus group was "only" 12, that maybe these are isolated idiots. Some days it's hard to be sure of that, though. Regardless, as Coates notes, Paul's evasiveness pretty much tells you where he and his fans are at, not as racists per se, but intellectually dishonest nonetheless. It should be easy meat to repudiate this detestable shit right out of the gate, and yet for some reason it isn't.

I suppose people are charmed by Paul's irascible, insouciant insistence that the American garrison state pull out of its 700-plus bases around the world. Hey, that's a super idea, as long as we're all willing to conserve a bit. And since we're clearly not, not even a little bit, except as some boutique bien pensant notion, you need your hegemon, you need your octopus. They don't seem to have an answer for that one.

Paul at least is the most interesting and sincere of all of the people running for the office, and that includes Obama. However, that is exactly why he has no chance in hell.

Character

2011-12-11T22:47:00.000-08:00

A valiant attempt on the part of the NY Times to rehabilitate Gingrich's, um, character. Megalulz:

Mr. Gingrich has repeatedly said that he is not perfect and that there are episodes he regrets. “There are periods of my life I’ve had to seek forgiveness and reconcile with God for,” he said last month in an interview in New Hampshire. “But if you look at who I am today, I think I can withstand scrutiny as well as anyone else in the field.”

His candor seems to be working even with social conservatives, who seem more interested in choosing a hard-edged opponent to face President Obama. Recent polls of Iowa voters showed Mr. Gingrich with the largest share of support from Christian evangelicals.

Look, not to rehash yet again the long-dead Clinton impeachment saga, but it's relevant here. Count me among the folks who were repulsed and annoyed at the idea of the president not only getting his cock sucked by an intern while discussing Balkan troop deployments, but by his own admission ejaculating into a fucking bathroom sink. Because blowing a wad in this girl's mouth would have been wrong, you know? I don't expect pols to lead perfectly moral lives, but really, the whole thing was weird as all hell, in addition to being completely inappropriate. (Yeah, I'm a little square about bosses banging subordinates as a general principle, sorry.)

And just as a practical matter, you don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know that that sort of thing will completely derail your term in office, and that by nature of your immensely powerful position, there's a good chance that your good-time girl will get so excited, she'll have to tell somebody. So it's also an unforgivably irresponsible squandering of political capital. No doubt Clinton assumed that the usual gentleman's agreement was in place; shoulda known better that he wasn't dealing with gentlemen.

Aaaaanyhoo, despite the above-listed, far-too-often-discussed reasons to be pissed at Clinton for his exploits, I reserve far more contempt for someone who persecutes a man for such picayune things as if they were high crimes, while he himself is enjoying the exact same services. And, setting aside hoary sentiments about hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, it's particularly puzzling that a claque of doofuses who reflexively leap their high horses to lecture us godless heathens on their regard for high moral character, can align themselves with this slug.

And that's not even getting into the other various episodes of hypocrisy (taking $1.8 million from the much-maligned Freddie Mac) and revolting stances (such as using poor children as school janitors). Not that he has a chance to actually take the nomination; Newt is just the final "anyone but Romney" pig at the dance before the goobers buckle in and settle for either the real thing or Huntsman, who is apparently going all out to try to capture the NH primary and build momentum from there.

Jesus, the man is just awful, and the people supporting him are just as pathetic. Nice of them to demonstrate so convincingly for us that their sanctiomonious nonsense was just that after all. (As if their jumping from serial harasser Herman Cain to serial adulterer Newt Gingrich wasn't enough of a clue.) Turns out we really did know what they were all along, we were just haggling over the price.

A Thousand Cuts

2011-12-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

"If America goes, it will surely be an inside job." -- Mort Sahl

OK, so Alec Baldwin getting booted from a plane (and getting put on American Airlines' internal no-fly list) for being an asshole and not shutting down his iPad right when he was told to isn't really a sign, in and of itself, of an impending totalitarianism. But it's a symptom, an indicator of how much we're conditioned to put up with, what we've come to expect.

Isn't it interesting that, after ten full years since 9/11, of not getting attacked on US soil, either internally or from abroad, that now it becomes suddenly of vital national interest to declare the "homeland" (or, if you prefer, Heimat) a battlefield, necessitating the complete suspension of habeas corpus, of charging a suspect with a crime, of fair trial by jury. Yes, only now is it vital to officially decide and declare who is a vetted journamalist allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights, and who is but a mere blogger, not allowed to slander critical cogs such as foreclosure attorneys and pepper-spray-happy cops down at the be-in.

Maybe press passes should be required for people to discuss the daily news at the water cooler as well, lest the ruling class feel slandered by the scourge of unvetted public opinion. Officially approved discussion topics will consist of Tebows, Kardashians, and speculating as to whom will be the next set of neverweres on that dancing show.

Gin and Tacos commenter J. Dryden makes a brilliant point, summed up nicely in this sentence:

our country and culture is fertile ground for totalitarianism.

Flight of Dickarus

2011-12-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

Judging from the media coverage of the non-event, I guess I'm supposed to be outraged at Alec Baldwin's uppity behavior. I mean, really -- how dare not just shut his cakehole like a good German, and happily submit to what has long been nothing more than an abusive process, from the time you set foot in the departure terminal to whenever you eventually disembark.

Seriously, Baldwin should have thanked American Airlines for their "just shut the fuck up and sit quiet while we wait on the runway for a fucking week to take off" attitude that they stockpile in reserve for every airline passenger. Instead, he had the nerve, the absolute gall, to USE HIS I-PAD WHICH COULD TOTALLY BRING DOWN THE ENTIRE FRAGILE AIR TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE!!!elevenZOMG!!!

No. It's much easier for us to tell ourselves that some mouthy actor is being an asshole, than to wonder for a hot second just how we continue to let ourselves be treated like animals in a routine consumer transaction. Some folks will continue to do so right up to the moment the wage slave on the kill floor parks the metaphorical bolt gun between their eyes and pulls that trigger.

Just another little cut, a common indignity which most have been conditioned to placidly accept, one of a thousand. Go back to sleep.

Mother of Invention

2011-12-10T23:30:00.000-08:00

Historian-in-chief makes specious claim. Really, I'm surprised he didn't invoke the dog in a manger argument.

Also, too is the fact that -- again, brace yourself -- Newter's talking out of his capacious bunghole yet again: the name Palestine was derived from the Biblical "Philistine" by the Romans, fell into semi-official use by the Ottomans, and was revived by the British (along with other administrative designations) when they parceled out the area after WW1.

Gingrich's parsimonious averral that the usage only became common after 1977, after decalring the term an "invention", is too clever by half, but perfectly in keeping with the necessity of courting evangelical votes by waving the Israeli flag, as all Republican candidates are now required to do. Good luck with that, son -- either it's the economy, stupid, or it's not. Anyone with the luxury of obsessing over gay marriage or abortion or "holy" lands instantly reveals the true level of their concern for addressing the economic situation.

Projection

2011-12-10T12:01:00.000-08:00

Remember when one of the primary -- and most hilarious -- rationales given for invading Iraq was the idea that Saddam might have a squadron of nucular-tipped drones that would only take 45 minutes to get London or Washington? Somewhat ironic, considering how much we've depended on drones in the Afghan campaign (and the amount of diplomatic grief some of their more "erroneous" misfires have caused.

The commentary over Iran's pursuit for nuclear capability has been uniformly paranoid. Not that the mullahs are nice guys, and they very well could cause some trouble with the capacity for nuclear weapons, most notably by dissemination through surrogate independent terrorist cells.

But the simpler and more prevalent explanation is that Iran simply needs to keep up with its neighbors at this point. If you live in a really dangerous neighborhood to begin with, and all your neighbors have AR-15 assault rifles, and all you've got is a 12" Buck knife, are you gonna want a gun or what, just in case?

Anyway, this whole snafu plays right into China's hands, at least as much as Iran's. Between the Osama copter and now this, their reverse-engineering crews have just gotten a huge upsurge in projects to work on. And the tech monkeys can downplay this all they want, talk about how the Sentinel's tech is already been surpassed, but the fact is the plane has only been declassified for four years, and therefore is almost certainly less than ten. For a country that's still playing catchup on 70-year-old nuke tech, they'd settle for being just ten years (or less) behind on surveillance drone tech, since that is a huge future branch of warfare.

It might be useful if, just once in a while, our insect overlords considered their projected anxieties about certain weapons and tech, and see if that helps them empathize a bit more with other countries that are nervous over our capabilities with those weapons. Rational-actor theory aside, a scary weapon is still just that.

What a Friend We Have In Tebow

2011-12-08T02:05:00.001-08:00

Klosterman on Tebow. Worth a read.

I'm not sure of all the consternation surrounding the kid. As an atheist, I am non-plussed by his zealous professions of faith, it's how he was raised, it's how he's always going to be. Whatever works.

As a man, I have to wonder about someone who becomes a marquee Heisman-winning QB at a notorious SEC party school, and still manages to emerge as a virgin. This is a feat unbeknownst to modern science, friends 'n' neighbors. I mean, dude, you don't have to bang every cheerleader, but you can at least have a girlfriend, someone you actually care about and have fun with. People who store up sex for special occasions are inevitably disappointed.

But as a football fan, Tebow is simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating to observe. He runs like a deer and takes some serious hits. There's no denying his toughness. But he throws like old people fuck; every time he cocks back for more then fifteen yards, I get a visual of someone attempting to heave a frozen turkey over a ten-foot wall.

So as a lifelong Raiders fan, I find it immensely frustrating that Tebow continues to find ways to win, regardless of the inherent superiorities of the opposition. The Jets and Vikings, with their run-stopping front fours, should have shut his ass down; the Raiders, with a 17-point halftime lead last month, should have stood on his goddamned neck and pushed that lead to 30. But no, all the guy does is ride a storming D into single-possession fourth-quarter deficits to be overcome by moxie and/or gumption. To abuse the cliché, he just finds ways to win.

I still don't see the Donks making playoffs, it's statistically improbable at best. Then again, I still can't believe George W. Bush made it into the White House -- even by hook and/or crook -- not once, but twice. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Ho Ho Holy Crap

2011-12-04T01:33:00.000-08:00

This little number is far less interesting for the actual topic -- second-grade teacher drops a dime on "Santa"; parents get butt-hurt -- than for how quickly some of the commenters mount their librulnatsi hobby-horses:

Jeff Nickels · Top Commenter
"Teachers wont lie to them"? You cant be serious. Students get lied to by leftist "teachers" every single day in colleges and grade/middle schools around the country. It is not the job of a so-called educator to inform my child of anything other than the lessons at hand, and that includes whether or not there's a santa claus.

Jennifer Wagner
What are these lies that are being told "every single day in colleges and grade/middle schools..."?

Jeff Nickels · Top Commenter
Well on a local forum I frequent, an anonymous teacher bragged that she was "indoctrinating (my) kids with all of the liberal "information" she could so that kids wouldnt be "hateful conservatives". I guess we can live in fairy-tale land and pretend that mine was the only case of something like this happening, if you want to. We can also pretend that teacers are infallible arbiters of pure truth if you'd like; the national test scores and illiteracy rate would say otherwise,

Jeff Nickels · Top Commenter
(cont)..but we can also ignore that as well, if you'd like.

Jeff Nickels · Top Commenter
I'm willing to bet that if I teach my child a biblical view about homosexuality, you feel it would be alright for said teacher to "correct" my child, dont you? I can assure you that were that to happen, I would not only have the teacher's job. I would have the school board, school, principle, and anyone else involved in civil court post-haste. I am fed up to the gills with agents of government thinking they know best how to raise my own children.

And so forth. Look, it's bad enough that some offshoot of the War on Christmas guff will be ignited over the teacher's tragic revelation. (And not to break the hearts of some of the more addled codgers further down the comment board, claiming to be well into their fifties and sixties, yet "still believing", but I had the Santa thing dialed in when I was maybe six or seven. It seemed important to my mother, who grew up in a Jehovah Witness household and therefore got cheated out of childhood Christmases, so I went along with it until I was about ten. I have a feeling that many, maybe even most kids, are just going along with it at some point.)

Some folks are clinging on a bit too tight. You want to preserve the power of imagination for your precious rinpoche? Help them imagine what it's going to be like finding a fucking job in about ten years, one that doesn't make them want to self-medicate or ram their pedicab into a bridge abutment.

But it's the ones that immediately make the hyperintuitive leap to librul malfeeance that truly fascinate me. They're the ones for whom the very existence of, say, Glee is prima facie evidence that something untoward is being rammed directly down their throats, thus forcing them to confront the horrific notion that they might secretly like it. The axiom that anyone who obsesses that much -- or, you know, at all -- over gay people is very likely themselves gay holds true as always.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2011-11-27T23:03:00.000-08:00

So I assumed that in going to see the new Muppet movie over the holiday weekend, I would simply be fulfilling another parental duty, handing good money over to the Mouse Cult in exchange for two hours of cloying sentimentalism. And it is sentimental, and wears its sweetness and innocence on its sleeve.

But writer/star Jason Segel is clearly passionate about this project, and his joy in the story is infectious. Amy Adams is her usual perky, cute, engaging self. The Muppet characters feel like old friends, long time no see, and the movie makes an earnest but true point about the role for their style of entertaining in a steadily coarsened culture.

But what really makes it a very good movie are the songs, especially the ones written by Flight of the Conchords alum Bret McKenzie. The songs are fun and silly, play off the story's abundant meta jokes, and move things along (and the movie isn't two hours, more like a crisp 90 minutes or so). And there are a couple of extremely funny sight/music gags toward the end.

I know, I was surprised too. This may ruin my reputation as a foul-mouthed intartubez curmudgeon. Go see it anyway, you'll be glad you did.

Chunky Flunky

2011-11-27T19:37:00.000-08:00

Apparently this month's ~~GOP~~media flavor is a heady swirl of lard, failure, and what passes for intellectualism in an intellectual and moral vacuum.

The only thing more perplexing than ceding electoral imprimaturs to unpopulated states such as Iowa and New Hampshire is the notion that Gingrich is some sort of intemellectual thoroughbred, simply because he's written a bunch of books. So has Danielle Steel.

The actual ideas Gingrich promulgates are nothing more than retreaded American Exceptionalism boilerplate, tarted up for an audience of mouth-breathers that tells themselves and each other that reading Atlas Shrugged autmoatically confers smart-set credentials. Not entirely clear how or when mere affirmation became intellection, maybe it's always been thus and I missed it because I wasn't reading the highbrow assertions of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Talk about missing the boat. Of course, in this case it's the proverbial lifeboat where everyone's talking cannibalism.

At any rate, I suppose the Goopers have just about run out of losers and also-rans to audition for their little Anyone But Romney booty pageant. Unless they're going to change their minds about the Mittster, or give Paul or Santorum a go, or come to their senses and realize that Huntsman is about the only halfway reasonable person on the roster, they'll have to go back through the list of oafs and castoffs, and try to convince us that Perry or Cain or Bachmann are seriously electable. But let's face it, they can't even convince themselves.

Eliminationist Rhetoric

2011-11-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

Goddammit. Just. Goddammit. [Via Dohiyi Mir]

Look, we all get that Ann Coulter's role in this here game is that of agent provocateur. The factoid that Coulter and Bill Maher (both Cornell alumni) are supposedly close friends may be a tip of sorts that Coulter is cheekily aware that her obnoxious jabber is simply lucrative schtick.

But it's possible to point out that there is a line of sorts, fine or not, between schtick and open hostility, the sociopathic hostility of indifference to the murder of defenseless coeds by vicious thugs. Despite Coulter's implicit assertion, there is no debate whatsoever here -- the murdered college students were unarmed, period, end of sentence. The notion that someone would try to "humorously" walk that one back to Schtickville just says more about them than the subjects of their anemic jape.

I dunno. It's one thing to advocate physical violence against the authors of economic violence against the abject masses. Perhaps impolitic, but you get whence it originates.

But to advocate death for the people who have the temerity to agitate against the manifest economic injustices being perpetrated upon them, this is a different animal. This is the rhetorical arrogance of making a goof about kids being killed at school, about people who were dumb enough to believe that their national institutions would do the right thing when confronted -- despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary -- and were murdered in cold blood as a consequence.

Sooner or later something's gotta give, the question is on which side it falls initially. Do frustrated, beaten-down peons strike back against feckless, armored thugs, or do the latter just decide to stomp down the former? Sadly, you can always count on someone to inexplicably defend the latter, to trade their humanity for a couple of shekels and a sack of magic beans.

About the Other Night

2011-11-25T22:58:00.000-08:00

So uh, yeah, maybe I was channeling Burroughs a bit back there, not by intention but it kinda shook out that way. And of course there are plenty of things I actually am thankful for -- a healthy family, a job, a house, a reliable vehicle, a reasonably valuable skill set.

But even those things come with a set of caveats: since I work in the public sector, ~~finding~~funding is always precarious, I don't have much seniority, and I spend at least three nights a week looking for greener pastures in a moribund job market; the house is underwater, not as much as a lot of folks out there, but enough to make me a glorified renter; and even with pretty decent medical insurance, we still have to check EOBs and medical billing clerks and haggle with insurance companies whose provider lists may or may not be accurate at any given time. That's the thing in this country anymore -- even people who are doing "okay" are really just a paycheck or two from the sidewalk, still have to worry about job security in a flat economy, still have to waste hours on end haggling over routine doctor's office visits -- again, with medical insurance.

But all those things are a given, really. What's really burning my ass is the indifference or insouciance paid to the more blatant examples of official thuggery in our midst. We've been long accustomed to it, obviously. People were hunky and/or dory with police-state actions in the War on Some Drugs, no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture without trial nor even charge. And 9/11 just sealed that deal, and utilized technological advances to snoop and secure ever more.

So we're comfortable with masked DEA guys kicking in doors and shooting without provocation, just as we're inured to ordinary county mounties and town clowns tasering speeders for getting lippy. We're jake with whisking people to Gitmo, be they bountied Afghan shepherds or homegrown assholes, and stuffing them away for years on end, again without charge nor trial.

So what's the big deal about pepper-spraying college kids and elderly women for sitting on a sidewalk? After all, it might prevent potential consumers from getting that sweet-ass Black Friday deal, right?

Oh, and about that:

This year, reports of injuries, fights and at least one shooting have come in from across the country, with one California customer even fending off competing shoppers with pepper spray.

Words fail. Not to advocate vigilantism, but one hopes at the very least that when they check the surveilance tapes and figure out who this dunce is, her victims drop by with fresh pepper-spray canisters of their own.

But those stories, much like the thing itself are overblown; when the herd is heavily encouraged to converge, we shouldn't be too surprised when there's trampling here and there.

The part that's puzzling is that we continue to put up with all this shit, even though we know that we know better. I don't know if the prime instinct has simply become escapism at every turn, whether it's self-actualizing through shopping or endless schlock, or what. But again, it's really just going to come down to unplugging from the system, to stop feeding the beast.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-24T00:47:00.000-08:00

We thank you, o lord, for the banksters who have murdered the economy of the planet, who have turned the profit and productivity of others into a lint-ridden pocket for themselves to dip into.

Thanks for overpopulation, for idiots who seriously think they should have a dozen or so children, while entire species are driven to extinction at an unprecedented rate and resources deplete.

Thanks for punk bitch thug cops, wannabe tough guys who strut around in their Spaceballs stormtrooper suits (Taibbi's line) and spray blinding chemicals in the faces of their fellow citizens, which is the only reasonable response to peaceful protest, n'est-ce pas?

Thanks for a holiday that was once about reconnecting with family and community, but has long since devolved into a mindless orgy of pornographic consumerism, of people who actually look forward to the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night and do battle to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want.

Thanks for the gaping hole in this nation's soul, and its collective inability to see or do anything about it.

Thanks for an interminable series of breathless "reports" on subhuman scumbags who think a college football program is more important than -- well, pretty much anything, apparently. Because there are actually people who are violently angry at the unfair persecution of poor ol' Joe Paterno. Lord, may their children all get ass-raped in the shower by Jerry Sandusky. (Not really, but perhaps make them take a second to reflect "what if", and double-check as to whether they are actually human beings or not. Because it's pretty unclear right now.)

Thanks for the fucking fascist scumbags who run this country now, who cravenly use a terrorist attack by a bunch of Saudis a decade ago as cover for their paramilitarizing of urban police forces. We thank you, sweet lord, for these gutless, inhuman thugs who wipe their asses with our constitution every chance they get. Good to know that official press passes must be obtained to "report" officially-sanctioned "news". Wouldn't want reg'lar citizens to think they can just show up unannounced at ~~Tahrir Square~~Zuccotti Park and, you know, document what occurs, write about or even film the armored pussies who pepper-spray old ladies and coeds. Lord, please jam lightning bolts up their asses, and melt their dead hearts, in Tebow's name, whatever and ever amen.

Some simple truths (pezzo di merde):

Lloyd Blankfein, and every other bankster, for what they've done to literally billions of people at this point out of sheer greed and nothing more, are pieces of shit.
Mike Bloomberg, for his craven support of the banksters, and for unleashing his punk-ass thug cops on unarmed peaceful citizens who are simply tired of taking shit from well-heeled thieves, is a piece of shit.
Lt. John Pike, caught on video as a gutless, heartless bully, is a ten-pound growler, truly a king-sized piece of shit. Do your duty and flush twice on this motherfucker. It will truly be a fine day when this asshole finds himself in the unemployment line.
There are many more, too many to mention. This nation seems overrun with numberless pieces of shit, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of Wall Street to the frontlines of Occupied America to the chat rooms defending the pussy paramilitaries who push around the citizens they're fucking well sworn to protect.
What this nation needs is an enema, and a big one.

What the OWSers need to realize is that, however well-intended, what they are doing is not enough, might really never be enough. Rather than risk sacrificing their lives and well-being to an indifferent thugocracy and a complicit, compliant, complaisant corporate media who are already bored with their tubthumping antics, what the OWSers -- and everyone, including you 'n' me, friends 'n' neighbors -- need to do is avail themselves of any and every opportunity to divest from the matrix, to starve the beast.

Because it most certainly is a bloody beast, voracious, insatiable, red in tooth and claw, utterly indifferent to the misery spawned by its actions, indeed taking perverse glee in the pain it causes. It does not care about you, and by "it" I mean Wall Street, Congress, Obama, the urban paramilitary gangs masquerading as cops, the hump-your-leg-till-you-waste-more-money media, the whole wretched lot of them.

The decision we have to make is whether we continue to put up with it just for the opportunity for more flat-screens and iPads, or decide that having a lifestyle is a piss-poor substitute for having a life, and that maybe we won't miss our Dancing with the Has-Beens and Never-Weres and the hourly Kardashian updates as much as they think we will. The greatest fear these motherless fucks have is that we one day decide to stand on our hind legs and be men.

I can't think of a better day than today for us all to resolve to do exactly that. I think we would all be more thankful, and right now an attitude of gratitude might be just the thing.

Otherwise, I've had quite enough of this hollowed-out police state, and its revolting cheerleaders, and I'd rather make it a goal to get the fuck out of here once and for all, find a bungalow in Costa Rica and spend the rest of my life surfing and playing guitar, which is all I ever really wanted to do anyway. Bageant had the right idea.

The bullshit going on right now in multiple quarters on multiple levels, and the vocal support it engenders from some of the more insane quadrants of the mediasphere, make me positively ill. One can still believe in Hume's Paradox, the old "they got the guns but we got the numbers" maxim, but there's really no substitute for just pulling out whenever and wherever possible, divesting from the beast and re-investing locally.

Psycho Finance, Qu'est-ce Que C'est

2011-11-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

Ce que j'ai fait ce soir-là
Ce qu'elle a dit ce soir-là
Réalisant mon espoir
Je me lance vers la gloire... OK -- Talking Heads

George Monbiot is shrill:

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

Monbiot avers to the classic "all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles" chestnut, which is at least intellectually honest:

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

Here we're getting closer to the nut. Success in the high-stakes finance world is not predicated on raw skill; there is very little chance that Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein possesses skill sets that the average college graduate could not be trained for in, say, a year or two. Yes, they are highly specialized skill sets, but not uniquely so.

More and more, it becomes clear that their defining characteristic is willingness to push boundaries, to engage in what would previously have been considered transgressive behavior.

Finally the crux of the biscuit.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

Exactly. The persistent myth has been that taxes and regulations must be kept low in order to maintain robust growth and profits. Well, what of that, then? Both have been at historic lows for the entirety of this preceding decade, the paper profits of which have been wiped clean -- except, of course, for the engineers of that destruction. Securitization policies were upended to facilitate this mendacious scamboogery, and we can all see the results.

Yet again, the myth persists that if we just stay the proverbial course, the ship will right itself anon.

Taibbi, per usual, has been all up in this shiznit. Handing Social Security and Medicare over to these thieves was a dreadful idea before they monkeyfucked the world economy; it is incomprehensible that any remotely serious person would still be considering such a thing at this stage of the game.

As Taibbi points out, not only is their chicanery exhaustively documented and simple to trace (though hopelessly convoluted in scope, and hence beyond the attention span of the average 'murkin, which is precisely what they count on), but so is their incompetence. You have to give props to people who have the balls to demand to be thanked and rewarded not only for their malfeasance, but for their ineptitude as well.

Here's how I've explained the situation to people, to make it a bit less muddled, feel free to use or modify as you see fit:

Say you have an idiot brother-in-law. He fancies himself a pigskin prognosticator, and decides to take a loan out on the value of his house to bet on the Super Bowl. But wait -- not only is the bank allowing him a loan at full value, they're allowing him to "leverage" on a 30:1 margin. That is, his house is worth $200K, but Bank of Stupid is letting him borrow $6 million. Still with me? Okay, good.

You can guess what happens next -- he bets on the Steelers, who lose to the Packers, and he's on the hook for way more money than he's ever going to see in his life. The bank basically tells you and your neighbors that you get to pay for it, since your asshole b-i-l sure as hell ain't gonna cough up a thin dime for his stupidity.

Of course, there are additional layers of complexity to this admittedly feeble analogy, but the point still stands. It's public subsidy/private profit at its worst.

Now, to add insult to njury, the richies are bemoaning their lot, and pushing back against the tubthumping DFHs in the park, with their usual condescending sneer:

Mike Bloomberg wants you to believe the banks didn’t want anything to do with those unworthy borrowers. Yet in reality, the banks not only went to every conceivable length to take on the home loans of those subprime borrowers, they actually invented new technology to make clones of those Barney Frank debtors.

And there were thousands upon thousands of those synthetic deals, meaning each and every one of those deadbeat subprime borrowers have been Xeroxed by the banks fifty or a hundred times over, and are flying around the globe to this day as toxic assets.

Nomi Prins pointed out in her book It Takes a Pillage that we could have paid off every subprime loan in America at the start of the crisis for about $1.4 trillion dollars. But the bailouts ended up being four, five, perhaps as much as ten or twelve times that size.

Why? Because we weren’t paying off the underlying loans of those subprime, personal-responsibility-deficient homeowners. We were paying off the banks' bets on those loans. We were adopting all those clones they made.

Anyway, there's is a massive gap between making a bad decision with one’s personal finances and committing criminal fraud in billion-dollar amounts. Morally, the two acts are not even in the same universe.

Here is a perfect example of why I detest bien pensant limo libs nearly as much as I despise the usual mouth-breathing, window-licking, up-to-the-fourth-knuckle nose-picking conservatards. Animals like Mike Bloomberg, who presents a media-friendly image and aligns perfectly with their socially-liberal-but-fundamentally-authoritarian impulses, know perfectly well that there's more than enough blame to go around.

As long as Bloomberg appears "progressive" enough on vital issues such as abortion and gay marriage, these putatively librul tools could give less than two shits about whether he regards the peons as human beings. Not that abortion and gay marriage aren't relevant issues, but I'll go out on a limb and stipulate that everyone's right to live a decent life commensurate with the work they put out is a tad more critical.

But Bloomberg, his proxies, and complicitly his starstruck audiences, they're all happy to lay it all at the feet of the one group that has no media or political presence whatsoever -- the working stiffs who got juked into these bullshit mortgages.

Yes, they should have known better, yes they should have done the math and figured it out. But a lot of people made -- and are still making -- a shitload of money for all that, really for taking deliberate advantage of their lack of financial sophistication.

Even worse, in addition to the foreclosed millions you hear about, there are millions more -- I count myself among them -- who did everything right, spent wisely, lived frugally, locked in the mortgage rate opportunistically, didn't use the HELOC as an ATM, and still got fucking hosed by decimated property values, reduced credit limits, fewer decent job opportunities, etc. Trust me folks, there's no reward whatsoever for doing things "right", and indeed only the finest of lines between those folks and the folks who are being jeered at by smug billionaires for their supposed stupidity and recklessness.

Really, if there's one thing that Bloomberg and his scumbag friends have proven time and again, it's that stupidity and recklessness pays quite handsomely, provided one has taken care to rent the right people ahead of time.

As the slow burn of Europe continues apace, and eventually spreads here, and shit really starts raining down, keep all that in mind when it's time to choose a side. Wall Street has the moral compass of a Mexican drug cartel. These motherfuckers would skin you alive and feed you your own nutsack if they thought it'd gain them two cents on their portfolio.

Has nothing to do with the virtues of "capitalism", the magic of the "free market", or the vicissitudes of the peons. It's just the nature of the beasts. Perhaps a viewing of Grizzly Man might jog one's perception of how this thing really works.

News of the Weird

2011-11-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

This is not exactly burning front-page material, but it is passing strange at least that scientists would expend any real lengths of time, effort, and research dollars to limn the plight of chicken-fucking hillbillies. I mean, I don't quite get the "they deserve to burn in hell" vitriol of some of the commenters, but I would say that if you're the sort of person for whom buggering livestock is a habit, a way of life, the trajectory of your existence on this here earth is already pretty well charted.

This is just all kinds of charming:

The researchers found no association between penile cancer and the number of animals the men used over time, the species (which included mares, cows, pigs and chickens, among other animals) or the number of other men who also participated. However, the higher rate of reported sexually transmitted diseases in men who had sex with animals could be a result of group sex, said lead author Stênio de Cássio Zequi, a urologist inSão Paulo. More than 30 percent of subjects practiced SWA in groups.

Ahahahaha, there's a lovely visual, no, a bunch of inbred goobers gang-raping a cow. Well, there are 7,000,000,000 lost souls on our fair slab of rock, the law of averages dictates that at least some of them are going to be disgusting wastes of oxygen. Nothing new under the sun, but never a dull moment either.

Predators

2011-11-11T16:53:00.001-08:00

I don't know what sort of self-respecting man -- and a 6'5" athlete at that -- observes a ten-year-old boy getting buttfucked in the shower by a grown man, and not only doesn't intervene directly at the scene, but doesn't even call the fucking cops. I cannot imagine what went through that child's head at that moment, first probably thinking that Mike McQueary, seemingly a responsible adult, would jump in and rescue the kid. Instead, McQueary slunk away, went home, called his dad for advice, and then told Joe Paterno, who told Penn State's athletic director.

Again, keep in mind that McQueary was 28 years old at the time. Did he not get the memo about how sexually assaulting children is a bad thing? Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, one gets that Sandusky is a piece of shit pedophile, and Paterno and the PSU athletic department had the semi-plausible deniability of hearing everything second- or third-hand, but I have no clue what McQueary and the others who witnessed Sandusky's behavior were thinking. It is inconceivable to me that someone could witness the abuse of a child and not physically intervene immediately.

McQueary is likely to follow Paterno to the unemployment line; indeed, his coaching career is likely over. Good. Hopefully he lives to Paterno's ripe old age, and his gutless inaction haunts him every second.

It's amazing to consider the sorts of awful things humans will conceal just for the sake of reputation. Penn State's rationale is exactly that of the numberless Catholic dioceses worldwide that excused and covered up, perpetuated the exact same conduct systematically. Just as McQueary's inaction is unfathomable, so is the notion of anyone continuing to support organizations such as these with their (presumably) hard-earned dollars.

As always, you get what you pay for.

The "No Shit" Moment

2011-11-01T10:00:00.001-07:00

I like to give center-to-center-right people like Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson some leeway because they generally present smart, moderate arguments which just happen to land a bit to the right of where I normally would on most given subjects. This stands in stark contrast not only to the numberless goons the wingers have peddling numinous fictions for them, but to ham-fisted NYTimes "moderates" such as Bobo Brooks and Ross Douthat. People like Brooks and Douthat are not necessarily nasty players like their more wingy counterparts, but they do tend to be messy thinkers, whereas folks like Zakaria and Ferguson, who have actual educations and curricula vitae, and write actual books and know serious facts, generally impart their ideas with clarity and logic.

So I have no idea what got into Ferguson all of a sudden, but given his "killer app" metaphor, I'm tempted to assume he's been boning up on some Tommy Friedman and decided to up his book sales by giving that lazy tack a try. The earliest incarnation of "killer apps" seems apropos enough, anyway, in describing how the West surpassed the East after around 1500 (that is, around the time Vasco da Gama set the Portuguese navy in every seaport from Lisbon east to Macau, subjugated the natives and converted them at sword-point, and set up trading ports to put the locals out of business).

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

A knowledgeable historian without an agenda could easily pick apart most or all of these points, seeing as how Ferguson so easily elides over the era of colonialism, and the technological advantages provided by its immense labor-to-capital ratio. But to be fair, the era also brought us Scottish Enlightenment figures such as David Hume, James Watt, and Adam Smith -- the latter of whom is most important for pseudo-econs who have clearly never read Wealth of Nations as a totem to invoke every time they need to make a Serious Point about Capitalism.

Not only do they not understand capitalism nearly as much as they think they do (unless they seriously think that socialized debt and public subsidy of institutionalized, leveraged gambling has fuck-all to do with legitimate risk-reward scenarios), but they don't even understand that Smith himself very clearly came down dead against unproductive vorocracies masquerading as merchant princes, loyal to none but themselves and each other.

Anyhoo, where Ferguson really puts the rock on the ground is when he attempts to apply his "killer app" model to the current crises continuing apace:

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here.

....

The consumer society? Did you know that 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia? Only three are in the United States. And, boy, do they look forlorn these days, as maxed-out Americans struggle to pay down their debts.

Modern medicine? Well, we certainly outspend everyone else. As a share of gross domestic product, the United States spends twice what Japan spends on health care and more than three times what China spends.

....

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

What about science? It’s certainly true that U.S.-based scientists continue to walk off with plenty of Nobel Prizes each year. But Nobel winners are old men. The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers.

....

Finally, there’s competition, the original killer app that sent the fragmented West down a completely different path from monolithic imperial China. Well, the WEF has conducted a comprehensive Global Competitiveness survey every year since 1979. Since the current methodology was adopted in 2004, the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.

....

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe’s PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it’s America.

Kee-rist. It goes on like that, and worse yet, Ferguson even musters Charles Bell Curve Murray for his arguments at one point.

Look, the problem is much simpler than all that. Thirty years ago it was decided that while Americans were happy and productive actually making things they and their neighbors wanted to use and buy, it simply cost the bosses too much. Margins could be increased by outsourcing manufacturing, and 'murkins would be retrained to make far more money selling each other five-dollar cups of copy. Productivity increased massively over the last fifteen years, it's just that nearly every cent of gains went straight upstairs. There was not even the pretext of marginally spreading a bit of those gains around. Oh, and you're welcome, America. Enjoy your hi-def flat-screen, the better to see Chaz Bono's knee dimples.

Everything since then has been a futile attempt to paper the consequences of those decisions over, with cheerleading for the emerging economies and the rentier financiers running the shell game. They don't even bother to mask their contempt anymore, you all just get to bail out the TBTF banks that fucked you out of your job and are foreclosing your house. How you like them apples, Champ?

Ferguson gets close in his "reboot app" jabber, but what he misses is the most important thing -- health care is a racket. Ditto "higher education", credentialist mills that churn $200 textbooks and pull fat raises for academic sinecures on the backs of broke students and their strapped parents. Even the public education system, enough 'murkins have been bamboozled into believing that fat teachers' unions are bleeding them dry.

This absence of critical thinking, it should be pointed out, might just be the very consequence of a desiccated educational system that no one can afford anyway. Just a thought. But the fact is that all these "viruses" are not bugs, they're features built into the system.

The "updates" Ferguson refers to, in all these far-flung geographic locales, require government investment in infrastructure, massive revenue injections -- yes, tax increases, especially on the 1%, since they are the only ones who have anything anymore. Good luck selling that one.

The idea that only the plebes should suddenly have to learn the virtues of self-discipline is one that has probably underpinned the aristocratic philosophy since Sumeria. But hey, folks, just work harder and smarter, and this ol' ship'll turn right around.

Booty Call, Too

2011-11-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

Not sure how the publicity-stunt sexual exploits of a horsefaced Armenian chick with a fat ass, a sex tape, and an infamous dad, whose primary talent seems to be banging pro athaletes, merits so much attention. No doubt the Today show, most noted for having a chimp (other than Lauer) as a sidekick back in the day, will be milking this through Thanksgiving, no doubt thanks in no small part to esteemed relationship expert Star Jones.

Really, I'm repulsed that I know even this much about it, but it happens the same way I know that the most recent American Idol was won by some kid that looks like Alfred E. Neuman, without ever watching a blessed second of the show. You can only switch channels -- or turn the infernal thing off, or kill the browser link -- so quickly. Cultural osmosis, incurable even with antibiotics.

Do we even need to ask whether any corporate media outlets will turn away from Kim Kardashian's hypnotic cowcatcher ass long enough to talk about anything important to anyone's actual life -- say, the likelihood that Bank of America may have overextended itself (and, of course, all of us, since we're on the hook for their bullshit whether we like it or not) irretrievably [via Taibbi?]

5. Bank of America is officially rated the biggest, scariest bank. Its stock price also fared the worst of the group of banks (which also included Citigroup and Wells Fargo) when Moody's Investors Service downgraded it on September 21.

B of A's long-term holding company (parent bank) rating was chopped two notches to Baa1 from A2, and its retail bank rating was cut two notches from A2 to Aa3, placing B of A four notches below rival JP Morgan Chase and one below Citigroup, the third-largest US bank. Its bank holding company has the lowest rating among the top five banks with the largest derivatives positions.

This caused great fear for investors involved in derivatives trades with the Merrill Lynch division, prompting them to request trades be moved to the part of the bank with the better rating - the retail part with the insured (peoples') deposits. That way, B of A doesn't have to pony up as much collateral to back the trades, as it would in a subsidiary with a lower rating. The Fed was recklessly happy to approve, despite the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) misgiving about having to insure more risk, even if it can borrow from the US Treasury to do so. Meanwhile, Bank of America's stock price got so crushed that Warren Buffett scooped up a $5 billion preferred stock deal, effectively betting that the government won't let this big bank go bust.

6. B of A's derivatives position keeps rising. The total amount of derivatives in the FDIC-insured portion of B of A as of mid-year was $53.7 trillion, up 10 percent from $48.9 trillion the prior year, and up nearly 35 percent from its pre-fall crisis level of $40 trillion (the Merrill Lynch securities division holds $22 trillion in addition.) The bank has $5 trillion of credit derivatives, nearly double its $2.7 trillion pre-Merrill amount. In addition, because of its inherent zombie status and rating downgrades, the cost of insuring B of A against a possible default continues to rise in the credit derivatives market - a pattern that American International group (AIG) once followed.

Nice, huh? Read that again -- that's not $53 billion, but $53 trillion, roughly the equivalent of the entire on-the-books global GDP. The idea that we're forced to subsidize these ricockulously bad bets, while Ken Lewis gets nine figures of walking-away money, would merit the guillotine, in a society that didn't have the attention span and priorities of a seventh-grader.

Obviously it was ever thus. But anymore it seems the circuses-to-bread ratio is skewed in Paretian fashion. Herman Cain should not be disqualified because he played grab-ass with a couple of subordinates back in the '90s (though that is a reason, just not the most damning); he should be disqualified because he is a ludicrous person with stupid ideas, who is doing this just to bump up his book sales and speaking fees.

The more the corporate media (who of course have no vested interest in keeping you distracted with shiny baubles and plastic personalities, nosiree bob) indulge in this nonsense, as Neil Postman sagely pointed out a generation ago, the more we (in the collective) lose our capacity for meaningful engagement.

Instead of commiserating over the water cooler about the few picking the pockets of the masses, and getting away scot-free, we ponder the fairytale aspects of reality teevee wannabes and their contrived love lives. We debate the momentous occurrence of Chaz Bono being on a dancing show, without pondering for a second that Chaz Bono is way too fucking fat to be on a dancing show. (Or that, you know, the idea of sitting there and watching Chaz Bono or yet another of these Kardaashians dancing is a supreme waste of time and cable bill.)

I dunno. I am back as always to that poisoned well, the unleashing of easy "people are morons" snark, while realizing at the same time that there are a lot of intelligent people out there that are tired of this stuff, the debasement of "news" and "discussion" to its lowest common denominator, the sage review of idiot sexcapades, the common culture of collectively watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers. It's pathetic and unnecessary, and ultimately self-defeating.

When you're already in a deep, deep hole as a nation-state entity, these miserably inept cultural touchstones are not ladders, they're shovels, things deliberately placed to keep us from looking at the real problems. It's not just that the "stories" are stupid; they are, but the real issue is that, like the shows whence these creatures emanate, weeks and months are spent telling and rehashing what is really about five minutes' worth of one-view trivia. after that, really, who gives two shits about the Kardashian sisters or interchangeable reality twits? But they are marketed for months on end, until it's played out and the next meaningless thing comes along for another six months.

And I think there are a lot of folks who really just don't want to know. They understand just enough to realize that the game is fixed, the players bought, they are not in the club and are going to lose regardless, so they may as well distract themselves with comforting effluvia, cultural macaroni-and-cheese. The subject, its facts and its players are too complicated to keep track of, by design.

Actually getting on the same page to change the game would be too much like work, unless you're some DFH beating a plastic bucket in the park. Hopefully those folks keep all that in mind when their destitute grandkids are bailing out Ken Lewis' lucky-sperm-wealthy-from-cradle-to-grave grandkids.

And if you're a one-percenter, that is precisely the collective mentality you count on.

Booty Call

2011-10-31T23:36:00.001-07:00

Yeah, it's a real shock that ~~Long Dong Silver~~Herman Cain turns out to be a sexual serial harasser. (Right, alleged, falsely accused and unfairly maligned. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

The real curiosity here is that, while Cain has been surging -- throbbing, if you will (and you might) -- in the (ahem) polls for the last month, this just now comes out. Accusations and settlements from fifteen years ago taking a month to see light, in the age of 30-second Google hunts.

If you didn't know better, you might narrow it down to one of two rather unseemly assumptions: one, that our intrepid corporate media would take weeks to find its own collective ass in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight; or two, that whoever's been bankrolling this dog-and-pony show from behind the scenes finally decided to pull the blessed plug.

Either Rick Perry suddenly discovered oppo research, in between hits of ecstasy and paint thinner in New Hampshire, or the Koch Brothers finally decided to drop 185 pounds of dead weight. They're obscenely wealthy for a reason, and at least part of that reason is that they realize that there's not much percentage in bankrolling certifiably batshit candidates.

Expect Jon Huntsman to receive an anonymous manila envelope stuffed with photos of either Perry or Romney in a compromising position with: a dead girl, a live boy, a terrified farm animal, or each other. Such a moral dilemma!

Mystery Meat

2011-10-31T23:04:00.001-07:00

"I don't mind the taste!"

I am definitely not a food snob, and while I eat very little fast food in recent years (In-N-Out maybe once every couple of months), I certainly ate more than my fill of Carl's Jr. burgers back in the day.

But despite originally hailing from Los Angeles, McDonald's was always verboten growing up. It wasn't because it was fast food, or completely non-nutritious. It was because the food tasted like an unholy blend of cardboard and ass, flash-frozen and then thawed out under a heat lamp. The burgers are nasty, and the fries are pure grease and salt. It should not be mistaken for actual food, it is suicide by slower means. This is not exactly news, even to frequent customers.

So I have been to Mickey D's literally maybe a half-dozen times in my entire life. One of those times I tried a McRib, currently being overpimped on its 112th farewell tour.

I don't recall the exact circumstances which led me to try this bestial thing, probably peer pressure, possibly the occasionally profane amounts of drugs ingested in my twenties. Whatever the case, clearly there was impaired judgment involved.

As I recall, it tasted exactly what you would expect something concoted to offset the chicken shortage caused by McNugget sales to taste like -- a slab of pressed goo, slathered in sauce that must have had 10W40 as one of its main ingredients.

Now, it's not a secret that Americans, more than just about any other nationality, are accustomed to associating an utterly inane concept like "convenience" (as opposed to, say, nutrition, taste, quality, sustenance, or even actual hunger) with "food". And sentimentality may be one of the common touchstones of all cuisines, the ability to conjure up a rustic kitchen, whether grandmother's or anyone's, with well-placed manipulation of the olfactory senses.

But the marketing of this mystery slab ("Think smaller, and more legs.") is very perplexing. Maybe not as much as the grotesque glutton factories that continue to litter the landscape, but bizarre nonetheless.

I hold dear as a simple longstanding empirical axiom that Americans are enormously weird about, and have very dysfunctional relationships with, money, sex, and food. I think there are some people out there (and many of the comments in that first link seem to confirm the idea) that want to take the McRib out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Which, come to think of it, might help explain that nasty sauce.

Clownocracy

2011-10-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. -- Hunter S. Thompson

On the one hand, it may be a bit of an overreach for the FBI to classify Juggalos as a gang, in the same sense that violent street/prison/biker gangs comport themselves.

Most crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft, and vandalism. However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies, and drug sales. Social networking websites are a popular conveyance for Juggalo sub-culture to communicate and expand.

....

Juggalos’ disorganization and lack of structure within their groups, coupled with their transient nature, makes it difficult to classify them and identify their members and migration patterns. Many criminal Juggalo sub-sets are comprised of transient or homeless individuals, according to law enforcement reporting. Most Juggalo criminal groups are not motivated to migrate based upon traditional needs of a gang.

Coverage of the recent Gathering suggests that the majority of these goofballs would have trouble navigating their way out of their parents' basements, much less organize for anything more complicated than a pothead fuckfest in a remote holler:

As I walk through a tent area in the early evening, an excited Juggalo runs up to a group of guys in front of us. He has a can of beer in each hand, a cigarette on his lip, and some news: "We've got three Juggalettes giving free hand jobs in a tent up here!"

....

One Juggalo, an immense man with a red beard and a slightly lazy eye, parks himself on the side of the infamous Drug Bridge (more on that later) with a multipurpose cardboard sign: On one side, he offers "Got Neden?" stickers for sale; on the other, he's written, "Its my birthday show me your tits." In the corner, somebody has penned, "Baby mama Approved."

On the other hand, as collapse proceeds apace, gangs -- yes, even the hydrocephalic mouth-breathing Juggalo set -- constitute perhaps the purest and most original form of tribal loyalty. They know that the government has nothing for them. They know that what education they did get didn't prepare them for much, and to pursue it further would simply cost them far more money and time than they have, with no guarantees other than onerous debt.

The Dow is temporarily back "up", the Euros have bought themselves just a bit more time, like a doomed drowning victim trapped in a sinking car, instinctively sucking precious last gulps of air as the water rises inexorably, buying one more second, bargaining with inevitability.

Of course, nothing is truly inevitable, history does not have to be as deterministic as we make it out to be. It all comes down to what we decide to accept as our lot in life, if a system that quite literally depends upon and encourages eternal debt peonage for the masses, and a perverse socialized-risk gambling scheme for the very top, is mathematically sustainable.

It's human nature to confuse the ability to prolong with the ability to genuinely sustain, and that is where we are now. People still think things will right themselves, that something will come along and turn it all around, because something always does. As a planet of increasingly finite resources becomes more and more overpopulated, the futility of this sort of thinking still might not become apparent to its strongest adherents.

Providentiary thinking is magical in scope, and relieves its practitioners of the burden of empirical verification. A nation of Rick Perrys praying for rain does not a plan make. For now, the smart set of the commentariat is content to poke fun at the DFH protesting The Man, and to encourage us to self-actualize through the entertainment choices of following the exploits of celebritards and whores.

I think the effectiveness of that strategy is going to dwindle, as the economic corpses pile up in the parks and free speech zones worldwide. When even Friedman is coming around -- as if the globalization agenda he's been pimping for the last fifteen years had nothing to do with the philosophical underpinnings of the transnational merchant princes running our lives -- you know it's the real deal.

The Oakland OWS protest violence was just the beginning. Some catalyzing "black swan" event is on the near horizon, but really, unless the system itself is forced to tectonically change, it's all rearranging deck chairs on a sinking economy. For the masses, anyway; as ever, the wealthy will take it with them.

Mitt Happens

2011-10-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

When it comes to describing the Republican preznitential primary process so far, with its increasingly bizarre and inane "debates", and the string of three-week candidate crushes going back to Donald Fucking Trump's transparent publicity stunt, words begin more and more to fail. The usual metaphor of rubber-necking at the scene of a particularly grisly road accident doesn't cut it anymore.

It's more like trying to figure out the wave of torture-porn movies in the middle of the last decade, as sadistic schlock-meisters set out to limn the agonies of the human condition by trying to out-spatter the likes of Eli Roth. When your bar is already set low from the outset, you are absolutely guaranteed to GIGO your way through things.

So it is with this protracted sideshow, which ostensibly has the goal of presenting a viable replacement for Barack Hussein ~~Osama~~Obama who, some continue to insist, emerged fully realized from his mother's womb in a turban, waving a scimitar in one hand and clutching the Qu'ran and Das Kapital in the other, ululating "Death to Amreeka!" at the top of his tiny little lungs.

Of course, this negates the facts that Obama is actually the one who found and killed bin Laden after a decade on the run, turned a militant American-born cleric in Yemen -- whose stated goal was to radicalize American Muslims and create more Fort Hood massacres -- into a greasy spot on a donkey path, and assisted in bring down Moammar Qaddafi, a truly nasty character, without risking a single American life. When it comes to foreign policy, Barack Obama is as hawkish as they think they are.

Economic policy is even easier -- he's on retainer to the Wall Street thieves and grifters, to every bit the extent that one would expect from any of his Republican challengers (excepting, perhaps, Ron Paul). It is remotely possible that a McCain White House would have dropped the corporate tax rate to zero (which for many corporations it essentially is), but while Johnny Mac had to dance with them who brung him in '08, it's safe to wager that he is still rational and lucid enough to read a balance sheet.

So this summer has been merely a tedious exercise in trotting out an increasingly moronic series of candidates, in order to pander to what is apparently the most regressive, knuckle-dragging political base in a couple of generations. Seriously -- reasonable people from both sides can discuss at length the manifest failures of the Obama administration, but what sort of window-licking fuckwit actually thinks that Herman Cain would be anything but a disaster in any elected post higher than dog-catcher?

Oh sure, Cain would open the doors to the Koch brothers, let them and their subsidiaries pull favors and run riot over the regulatory agencies and labor unions (what remains of those entities, anyway). The magic of The Invisible Hand Making The Tide Rise For All Boats and such like. Because that's been working out so fucking well, hasn't it?

But Cain is interesting not in the sense of what he's revealed about himself -- a bumptious, ignorant tool who literally thinks that poor people should blame themselves first and foremost, and whose main actual idea is a 2000-mile fence to electrocute Mexicans -- but about the people who would actually vote for someone so comical and nonsensical.

And we won't even get into Cain's much-vaunted campaign video, which more than anything seems to allude to off-camera accessories such as a van with tinted portholes and a sex dungeon cluttered with missing hitchhikers.

Now, all of this has been an attempt by the Republitard base to avoid endorsing the Stormin' Mormon, Romney. Perhaps it's Romney's religion, or the way he keeps changing his positions day-to-day, or the fact that virtually nothing out of his cakehole is believable in the sense that you think he might actually believe what he's saying. But the bottom line is that the base hates him, but he has money and name recognition, so he's the perennial #2 in this dog show.

The fact of the matter is, when compared with the rest of the doofuses on the scorecard, Romney is not only the most competent and accomplished of the bunch, he is the only one of the front-runners that might be sufficiently competent to actually do the job. Romney's problem is the opposite of the rest of them -- he is actually an intelligent guy.

Romney, unlike Cain, understands why it's important for the president of the United States to know who the fucking dictator of Uzbekistan is, that there are important logistical capabilities for the US military about to be transferred there, and that Islam Karimov is a Saddam Hussein-grade brute who has literally boiled dissidents alive. He understands how economics and finance works. Romney, unlike Trump (who obviously was never an actual candidate, merely pimping his piece-of-shit teevee show), Bachmann, Perry, and Cain, is not an idiot.

He is, however, an unctuous, insincere turd who made his bones gutting manufacturing companies and sending American jobs overseas, instantly making him easy money for the Democrats to run against. And the Goopers know it. And the rest of their dance-card is a cluster of shit-scary goons and apocalyptos, people who, if they were really sincere in their belief in the dominionist claptrap about Christ coming back to scorch the earth and cleanse it of sinners week after next, should be spending their last days in style, having fun, not jockeying for the blue ribbon like a fattened pig at a county fair.

People have danced around Romney's (and to a lesser degree, because of the much lower name recognition, Huntsman's) religion, not wanting to appear bigoted, but treading dangerously close to ofay "some of my best friends are" territory. This is understandable; every religion is goofy to outsiders. Certainly in the years of running this blog, and before that on chat boards, I've never shied away from taking cheap shots at whatever religion crossed my sights, and Mormonism was definitely in there somewhere.

Perhaps counterintuitively, though, I would say this about Mormonism in general, and the many Mormons I have personally known, in particular: They're nice people. They place an emphasis on work ethic, and on individual self-sufficiency, but in the context of strengthening family and community. And not just the usual empty "fambly valyews" guff (though there was a video company in Utah whose specialty was bowdlerizing mainstream releases for "safer viewing"), but most of them seem to actually like their families, and make the effort to spend time with them.

Again, as an atheist, as far as I'm concerned every religion has wacky, far-fetched, completely fantastical belief systems and mythos underpinning them. Magic underwear is funny, there's just no getting around that. And certainly the Mormon church, just like the Catholic church, has many institutional wrongs to atone for. (Although, unlike the Catholic church, which took half a millennium just to acknowledge that it might have screwed the pooch on the whole Galileo thing, and that bit of nastiness with the Inquisition, the LDS church does update its dogma and amend its more racist undertones a bit more quickly.)

But institutional wrongs do not necessarily and always fully incriminate individual believers. Every Christian is not individually responsible for the Ku Klux Klan; every Muslim is not responsible for Osama bin Laden. And whether atheists like it or not, someone who professes to a mainstream religion is going to hold high office, at least for the near future. When enough people come around to the idea that you can be a very moral person without the burden of a particular established superstition, that will change. Till then, here's what you have to choose from. And Mormonism, as peculiar as its backstories are, as transparently scammy as its origins and its founder were, is merely the young child in a very old, far more established crowd of scams and fantasies; it is neither more nor less empirically valid than any of them.

I still think that in the end, Huntsman, if he can keep his powder dry, and just enough money coming in to keep breathing, gets this by attrition. The rest of them peaked too early and fell too hard; Perry, alone among them, has enough money and charisma and favors from his home state to rebound some, but it ain't gonna happen. The whole "if you like Dubya, you'll love Perry" schtick is exactly where it's at, and when was the last time you heard anyone admitting to missing George W. Bush?

And Huntsman, alone in the entire group of intellectual reprobates and buffoons, still has the ability to appeal to anyone outside that base. This will be a test for the far-right wing of the Corporate party, to decide if it still wants to be taken somewhat seriously by rational people, or it wants to continue its devolution into the "crazy aunt in the attic" wing of a hollowed-out corporatocracy.

Either way, metric fucktons of cash will be thrown around, and you, Tonstant Weader, won't see a red cent of it. Might be a good time to bone up on political consultancy.

Erin Go Blah

2011-10-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

OK, so it is duly noted that money bunny Erin Burnett should never be mistaken for a friend of the masses. I mean, at the risk of belaboring the blitheringly obvious, she has never been that person. If she were, she would not have the job she has.

Burnett's pedigree -- worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and is set to marry a Citigroup exec -- is exactly the curricula vitae one would expect for someone in her job. Same with Jim Cramer. It should not be a blindside surprise that Burnett comes across as a smug, overprivileged twit, functionally ignorant of how people outside of Manhattan get by in life. That is not an accident, that is a job requirement.

Look, the financial system itself is simply a polite fiction that people have agreed to agree on, to passively accept. Americans of all wealth quintiles, whether they have investments or not, have some awareness of how the DJIA works, insofar as it is "good" when it increases, "bad" when it decreases. But that's about the extent of it; even people who work in the financial services industry display little specific acumen as to why -- or more importantly, for whom -- those indicators necessarily mean those things. For the most part, it is about as scientific and empirical as astrology, or the reading of chicken entrails. Again, this is by design; the industry has a vested interest in protecting the arcana of their vested interests, and the mechanics therein.

This is where the cheerleading sector comes in, the CNBC money bunnies and balding galoots, the Burnetts and Cramers and Maria Bartiromos. The women present a veneer of knowledge and a frisson of sexuality, not-so-subtle reminders that money equates power and both will get you more ass than you can handle. The men present either the appearance of gravitas and expertise, or in the case of Cramer, the illusion of expertise coupled with a shameless buffoonery one normally associates with the local morning zoo radio drive-time show.

But they're all there for the same reason, in the end -- to make you believe that they know what they're talking about, that Wall Street's interests coincide and overlap with the interests of people outside of Wall Street. They are there to elide the increasingly obvious notion that Wall Street financiers simply regard the rest of the country and the rest of the planet as a dead-brain milch cow to be periodically cleaned out.

Don't ever tell yourself differently, folks. I am not exaggerating even a little bit when I tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Six-Pack, that nobody in that industry, from Erin Burnett on up to Jamie Dimon, gives a red-hot monkey-fuck whether you live or die, whether you can find a job, whether you live in a fucking cardboard box while they pick out $10K leather couches for their East Side penthouses.

They do not care, nor do they care about the banana-republic levels of income and wealth disparity, and the only emotion they feel when you resent this indifference and chicanery is antagonism and open hostility. There is not a moment in the lives of these people where they wonder why the peons don't have more, because that would interfere with them wondering why they themselves do not have more.

If the financial services system is a racket -- and Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, how can any sentient being at this point not understand that that is exactly what it is? -- then financial "journalists" are the procurers and whores of that racket, shamelessly exhorting and pimping anything and everything, whether they know better or not. They are the kids on the street corner in Goodfellas, running bets on the rigged numbers game to Tuddy and Paulie at the neighborhood pizzeria. They are Crazy Vince selling you the ShamWow and the pajama jeans on your midnight teevee, call within the next 20 minutes and get a 30% discount, tonight only.

Because one thing they do know is that the system is predicated on belief, like Tinkerbell. If people start understanding the flawed mechanics of that system, the shenanigans and outright thievery and graft that so much of it is built on, they might get wise and stop believing, and Tinkerbell dies.

Getting upset with a financial journo for doing what they've been conditioned and groomed for years to do is like getting upset with, say, Pat Robertson for saying something completely stupid and hypocritical. Like religion, modern de-leveraged and de-securitized finance is simply an ungainly belief system, but one that is necessary for its believers to maintain. They are balls-deep up in this biznitch, and if people stop buying what they're selling, they might no longer be able to have thousand-dollar meals at Cipriani's, or send their kids to $50K private kindergartens. Can't you feel the pain of the 1%ers, you heartless motherfuckers?

But there's nothing stopping anyone outside the bubble from taking a look at this shit, watching someone like Burnett waltzing down to the OWSers to fuck with people who are up to their eyeballs in debt and can't get a job because Burnett's cocksucker bosses might lose a quarter-point on their stock bonuses, and saying, "Wait a minute. How the fuck do credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and MERS benefit me in any way, directly or indirectly?" I mean, who you gonna believe -- Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer, or your own lyin' eyes?

The answer, of course, is that those alphabet-soup financial devices don't benefit you at all -- if anything, their only net effect on the average 'merkin is more debt and pain. That's where Erin Burnett comes in, to convince you that that pain you feel in your ass is not Lloyd Blankfein's tiny, barbed cock, but the invisible hand of the marketplace giving you a nice prostate massage.

American Spring

2011-10-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

It's a wonderful, terrible thing to watch the Occupy Wall Street protests. The belated but increasing corporate media coverage, as well as the prospects for the protests themselves, present some possible dilemmas.

First, the media. One could go back a couple years, and compare and contrast coverage of the teabaggers versus that of the OWSers. While some media observers surely did point out the incoherence and logical inconsistencies of the 'baggers and their proclaimed goals, just as many covered them almost reverently, as if they took the be-Rascalled tri-corner hats as a new wave of founding fathers, righteously battling an oppressive, indeed despotic, regime. Vituperative cranks hollering at hapless aldermen at local town hall meetings, and protest signs announcing that the bearers were unarmed "this time", were simply manifestations of this new breed of self-actualizing, totally-not-astroturfed codger.

The Occupiers, otoh, were portrayed (at least initially, and even still in many instances) as having no goals or leaders or stated political outcomes as such. And that's true, as far as it goes, but there's an actual reason for that, one which the media fails to comprehend so far.

The simplest way to put it is the old Upton Sinclair chestnut that it is impossible for someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on their not understanding it. But it is also ingrained, institutionalized in the corporate media DNA, to "properly" limn the narrative of a political story by long-established principles and benchmarks -- appointed spokespersons, bullet-point goals and negotiating tactics, etc.

It does not occur to your average corporate media bear that the OWS folks have quite clearly stated what they are pissed about -- a system that is rigged against the majority, that insists on practical impossibilities: that you can't get a decent job without going into hock for a degree, preferably a graduate degree; that the best time to look for a job is when you already have one, because apparently prospective employers smell rotting meat when an unemployed job-seeker walks in for an interview; that cutting taxes for corporations and financial insitutions is an imperative for job creation and growth, even though taxes have been at historic lows for a decade, and job creation has run at a net negative, while corporations outsource jobs and offshore revenues.

And that's not even touching on the too-big-too-fail banks sitting on reserves, refusing to lend or help jumpstart a moribund economy, continuing with the crooked derivatives that got them into trouble in the first place, pushing people out of their homes with retroactively falsified MERS and bullshit tranched promissory notes that no longer have identifiable holders because they've been sliced and diced and resold so often, etc.

It's a goddamn racket, folks, from A to Z. They don't even bother trying to conceal it anymore, one of the ancillary benefits of owning the political system outright, both the center-right and the far-right wings of the Corporate Party. That is what the OWSers are protesting, their complete economic and political disenfranchisement from a hollowed-out system. And they -- and by they, I mean the media and their owners -- know full fucking well what these people are fed up about, why they're risking being truncheoned and pepper-sprayed in their "free speech" cordons by chickenshit cops.

No doubt Lloyd and Jamie and the rest of the banksters are hoping for an early, frigid winter, the better to shut the rabble down forthwith, lest any substantial portion of the populace actually start believing this populist guff and daring to stand on their hind legs and be men. That simply would not stand, especially since the proles do have plenty of weaponry.

Wall Street is never willingly going to give in or even haggle with people -- literally everyone who is not on Wall Street -- they hold in such deep, unabiding contempt. Make no mistake, America -- Wall Street fucking hates you, considers you nothing more than sheep to be repeatedly fleeced, financial Soylent Green.

But it should be admitted and observed that, since in the conventional sense OWS does not have achievable, realistic outcomes to aim for -- the banksters are not going to voluntarily renegotiate their bloodsucking; unless OWS gets some measure of big, committed donors for candidates, they are not going to make a dent in what passes for a political system.

Certainly this doesn't mean their efforts aren't valid, worthy, even necessary -- they absolutely are, first as catharsis, then as curative, if possible. But "success", however one defines it for OWS, would seem to be automatically fraught with at least two noteworthy dangers: the inevitable attempt by someone from within the corrupt political system to co-opt them, or a (not necessarily inevitable, but not at all unlikely either) violently catalyzing event, a cop going full thug on a defenseless coed and provoking a riot, a lone nut in the crowd going after a bankster in person, that sort of black-swan game-changer that you just can't predict but resets the entire perception of the situation.

But those things are all different from a positive outcome, obviously a subjective, difficult-to-define thing to begin with. One dynamic is impossible to walk back from, though -- the spectacle of working-class people being told by millionaires that other working class people are the enemy, and worse yet, actually believing it, instead of their own lyin' eyes. I know Jay Gould wasn't bullshitting when he said he'd pay half the working class to kill the other half, but I still balk at the prospect of the first half actually falling for such a transparent ruse.

If the teabaggers actually believe their own stated precepts, and aren't simply a group of angry cranks that simply can't stand any government spending that doesn't benefit themselves, then they do have common cause with the OWS crowd. And for their own sake, they may want to find that common ground sooner rather than later, since the Koch brothers will sell their dumb asses down the river first chance.

Maybe the biggest takeaway of all is the quintessentially American notion of loudly supporting rebels and protesters in other countries, but denouncing the selfsame breed here as morons at best, traitors at worst.

Capital Games

2011-09-23T22:39:00.001-07:00

Some interesting developments and strange juxtapositions in the death penalty arena the last couple weeks (duh).

On the one hand, you have the case of Troy Davis, who may or may not have committed the crime for which he was executed in Georgia Wednesday night. Regardless, after reviewing the salient facts of the case (no DNA or physical evidence, 7 of 9 eyewitnesses recanting, an associate who was known to be at the scene openly bragging about actually pulling the trigger), even the most ardent death penatly advocate has to honestly acknowledge that such punishment should only be carried out under conditions of zero (or damn near zero) doubt. There was not only enough doubt raised in Davis' case to not warrant the ultimate penalty, but to question his guilt in the first place. And of course, it's now too late.

On the other hand, you have Lawrence Brewer, executed in Texas the same night as Davis. Brewer was one of the three white-power knuckle-draggers who beat James Byrd unconscious, then dragged him behind a pickup truck until his head hit a concrete culvert and popped off. There was never a second of doubt about the guilt of Brewer and his two accomplices, one of whom is also on death row pending appeal. Brewer had ceased his appeals, and in fact had said he preferred death to rotting away in a cell for another thirty or forty years. Even the staunchest anti-capital punishment person has to at least reasonably ask themselves if Brewer's crime does not warrant the ultimate punishment, does anything? If not, why not?

As a long-time (really lifelong) member of the decidedly "pro" side of the argument, I can only speak for myself. It is sort of a mantra for me (here and in daily life) that you cannot use rational responses with irrational people; almost by definition it will not work. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should try irrational methods for dealing with irrational people. It is simply an acknowledgement of the basic fact that it is nearly impossible to have a successful outcome by expecting the irrational person to respond rationally to your rationality. I mean, duh, that's why they're irrational.

Similarly, I would stipulate that there are crimes that are so transgressive in nature and scope, that the person who commits those actions is essentially irredeemable. It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate, say, Richard Ramirez, or John Wayne Gacy, to pick more extreme examples. I would say these fucking animals fall into that category as well.

There's just no walking them back from the things they did. Such a person is capable of just about anything. Warehousing them for the next several decades, in attempt to be "humane", simply gives them absolutely nothing to lose, in essence making them a danger to anyone and everyone they come into contact with, guards, prisoners. The world is simply better off without someone whose pastime is inflicting misery and torture on his fellow humans.

Now, usually you hear the sound bite from victims' families, talking about "closure" or some such. Or you see the garden-variety meathead "hangin's too good fer 'im" comments from the rabble, taking perverse joy in the opportunity to inflict the same punishment on the perpetrator; i.e., dragging Larry Brewer and his friends behind a truck until they disintegrate like putrefied hunks of meat in the broiling Texas sun.

For me it's simply a utilitarian argument, there is no joy or pleasure or revenge fantasy in it. Some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once pointed out, are simply no damned good, and warehousing them indefinitely to assuage your conscience (as if your tax dollars don't kill innocent people around the world every fucking day already) does nobody any true favors. But it should never be anything but a solemn undertaking, after exhaustive efforts to ensure truth.

Perhaps that's cold and dispassionate, but actually I think that's how such a process needs to be if it is to be done. You're simply deciding that the crime is transgressive in the extreme, and this person made a conscious decision to no longer act like a fucking human being. Deriving actual pleasure from executing even a John Wayne Gacy is a sure sign of yahooism.

Which takes us back a bit further, to the Republitard debate a couple weeks ago, when Gubnor Dubya Junior bragged about his kill rate -- which almost assuredly includes an innocent man -- and was received with cheers and applause. Even if all 234 notches on Perry's belt are clearly and irrefutably red-handed guilty, this is fucking disgusting, this chimp-like hooting at a death tally. (Christians all of them, no doubt.) This is no longer about the administration of justice, this is a lynch mob, the baying of hounds at a trapped, miserable fox, waiting to tear it to shreds, sating its bloodlust for a minute, before looking for the next kill.

So it seems with Davis' execution; despite the demonstrably flawed evidence of Davis' guilt, the family could not achieve "closure" until they knew Davis was dead. I do not think it will happen for them quite like that; if they could not move past their grief after 22 years, the demise of an abstract figure they presumably had never seen or met outside of the literal and figurative distance of courtroom proceedings is not likely to have the permanent effect they seek, more anodyne really.

I dunno. I do still seriously feel that some things, some people are simply too awful to let stand, that a serial killer or a child rapist is simply irredeemable, and in principle should be dispatched the second the burden of proof is sufficiently addressed. But it's not a conclusion easily arrived at; as with the abortion debate, I don't think this should be a conclusion easily reached on either side, both sides need to listen to one another, and quit shouting and rending garments.

All that said, between the tragically flawed mechanics of the system, the ruthless politicking of players who are all too willing to further their careers on the blood of poor people (notice that people who can afford decent representation never get executed), and the toxic yahooism undergirding that side of the issue, it makes me sick to my stomach to even be in the same philosophical house as those people, much less the same room.

I don't think that life without parole is necessarily as humane (and certainly not as cost-effective or safe) as opponents think it is. If the state of Connecticut decides it would rather shell out sixty grand or so a year to warehouse Joshua Komisarjevsky for the next several decades, while he takes metal shop classes and cyberstalks lonely women in between dodging sharpened toothbrushes and the threat of gang-rape, then okey-doke. Most rational people would rather die, you'd think. But then rational people don't do what Komisarjevsky and his scumbag sidekick did. And if they decide to ice their worthless asses after all, I can't imagine who'd fucking miss them.

But if leaving them to rot steals a cheap thrill from the vicarious switch-thrower, maybe it's for the better.

I Wish I Was Taller, I Wish I Was A Baller; Or, Drill Baby Drill

2011-09-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

Hilarious. Not damning -- if there's a less surprising thing in this world than a 23-year-old sports reporter hooking up with a college basketball star, I have no clue what it would be -- but from our Patron Saint of Abstinence, at least as hilarious as her first two progeny becoming parents before marriage.

Even the allegations of drug use -- our last three presidents, including the current one, have at least tacitly admitted to occasional use. (Which one might think would at least in principle undermine the validity of the massively failed War on Some Drugs, but that's another post.) This will only endear her further to her base, who must be growing tired of defending her manifold stupidities by now, but which is also their raisin-detree. Without a perfidious librul booga-booga to rail against, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

This, however, is just weird:

But for the Chicago Tribune and Newsday and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to drop
DOONESBURY for a full week because the strip contained quotes from THE ROGUE?

....

Has Sarah become the Blessed Virgin, and the USA a new Vatican City?

Major newspapers in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta refuse to run–for a full week or more–a comic strip that refers to excerpts from a book that dares to criticize a woman who once ran for vice president and then quit as governor of her state and has subsequently made millions of dollars by doing reality shows and appearing as a highly-paid political commentator on a right-wing TV channel?

Funny, Faux News has never worried for a hot second about Saint Sarah's slanderous calumniations, but these shit-scared media dinosaurs can't scramble fast enough to appease the threat of a slander suit. Over a comic strip.

Gutless, but like the story itself, not a bit surprising. For all its First Amendment pretensions, the vaunted fourth estate rarely misses opportunities to cave to corporate misgivings and apprehensions.

Decade of Decadence

2011-09-11T23:45:00.000-07:00

Xan had always known the importance of giving people a choice in matters where choice was unimportant. -- P.D. James, The Children of Men

All the commemorations, benedictions, genuflections, invocations, pronunciamentos, and various ceremonial prostrations are fine and/or dandy, and entirely in keeping with the usual expectations. No surprises there; really, there are very few surprises to be had anymore, when it comes to the political realm.

And this is nothing if not a chiefly political issue, tribal identifiers binding with solemn rituals. The key rule for any political issue is that it is infinitely more important to be seen and perceived as Doing Something, than it is to actually do something. It has always been thus, bizarrely symbols frequently become far more important and protected than the actual ideals and values they symbolize.

These sorts of things, candlelight vigils and solemn public liturgies, rote speechifying, have never done anything for me, regardless of the occasion. It's not that I don't think or care about what happened ten years ago -- I did and do care very deeply, and scarcely a week goes by that I don't think about it, the event, its repercussions, still unfolding, still metastasizing.

It's incomprehensible to me that anyone needs to be reminded of it, or feels the urge to display and share their grief. Unless it's completely spontaneous, an extemporaneous situation, frankly I don't trust people who grieve with complete strangers. And I sure as hell don't trust individuals who get weird and insistent about, say, the supposed divine meaning of intersecting I-beams, in the wreckage of a building that had countless such pairings. I don't discount the value of such anodyne objects in the wake of tragedy, it's just that people seem to think it absolves them from anything and everything else. It doesn't; after any tragedy, large or small, we move on, or we wallow and die a little more inside every day.

And there need to be concrete sentiments bolstering the sacred rites. Without actual commitment -- to finding a better way to do things and resolve problems, to planning for an increasingly dismal future for the seething majority of 'murkins -- and acknowledgement -- of using grief and rage to inadvertently carve a lost decade into history, blood for blood a hundred times over (and the wrong blood at that), of chucking every principle we once stood for right out the window because of some psychopathic asshole in a cave halfway around the world -- nothing will change, at least not for the better. The question is whether that has been a flaw or a feature in the first place.

So we should definitely take a moment and reflect on that awful day, and spare something for all the awful days since then, what we might have done or not done if we knew then what we know now. The resilience of a country lies in its ability to come away from catastrophes with ideas about things, lessons learned, ideals to strive for. There is more to be done, and more that we're capable of, than lighting candles, wearing ribbons, and chanting "USA! USA!" at the Jets game, until same time next year.

A Man, A Plan, A Canal; Or, Hope Floats

2011-09-09T00:40:00.000-07:00

The Post commentariat work on their next round of bons mots and fnords for the plebes to digest and regurgitate.

Maybe it's Hopey-Changey's increasing dithering, or the limitless antics of the 'publitools, but it's genuinely tough to say with absolute certainty whether Milhouse (channelling his inner MoDo) is in his Beltway polemicist/satirist mode, or if the slithering fucktards on the right-hand side of the proverbial aisle really did tweet and giggle and moon each other throughout The Big Speech.

Here's the thing, though -- nobody fucking watched it anyway. I seriously do not think the twitterati (said coinage had greater clarity of meaning before the inane-ovation of Biz Stone pervaded the mass of semi-literate self-marketing goobers) quite get it. For all their follies and fatuity, for all their deep-fried sticks of butter and craving for dancing has-beens and never-weres, the 'murkin people are canny in one key area -- they're too smart to waste one sweet second on this televised kabuki. Even without it being NFL opening day. If they wanted to watch these State of the Union-type circle-jerks, C-Span would have higher (or indeed, any) ratings.

If Obama cares about preserving his own job, not to mention producing some for millions of others, he had best stop with these half-hearted calculations, and find his inner Rick Perry already. People will vote emphatically for a swingin' pair over diffident posturing every day of the week.

Rule of Dumb

2011-09-04T22:19:00.000-07:00

Ed nails it. Once again, your intrepid corporate media manages to create and encourage a teabagger movement where there was none. Outside of fringe church book giveaways and conservatard book club specials, Christine O'Donnell will probably not sell, in the honest meaning of the term, more than a dozen books. Count on it.

There are a multitude of reasons for that, not the least of which are that O'Donnell has nothing whatsoever new or interesting to say about anything at all, nor is anyone who is actually enamored with her by definition a reader. I say this not just to be insulting (though that is an important part of it), but to point out an obvious and simple fact: people like O'Donnell, and Palin, Perry, Bachmann, etc., gain notoriety not for anything they've done, have the ability to do, or even intend to do. People like that are popular because they ventriloquize the antagonism, the endless butthurt of a claque of marginalized chumps.

In fact, even going back to the more successful movementarian jeremiads of yore (Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter), it would be surprising if most or even many of the people who obtained their books actually read them. And even if they did read them, it would not be to add to their arsenal of factual information, and certainly not to actually learn anything, or even to gain something resembling a meaningful intellectual perspective on the notions they routinely parrot. No, if they read the books, it would be to simply affirm what they already "knew".

So it is with fifteen journamalists hanging around a book signing with only five customers, and having nothing to say about the actual book in question. It is this sort of just-show-up coverage that has allowed the teabagger "movement" to metastasize far beyond where it would have landed normally, and to have a disproportionate effect on American politics. (And, it should be noted, to become a convenient scapegoat for the self-inflicted woes of the Democrats.)

I swear it's true -- when it comes to the media, there really used to be a time when both we and they understood the distinction between actual news and Jerry Springer reruns.

In Other News

2011-09-04T16:37:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of projects that I've been working on, that I may decide to do some self-publishing through Amazon's DIY Kindle program. So I have a few questions for all of you (okay, both of you) out there. Have any of you had experience with that program? If so, what was the outcome? Are there any issues with setup, publishing, etc. that I should consider going in?

Mind you, I am not looking at this as some life-changing career move, and no, I am not feverishly cranking out some basement rendition of the Twilight/Game of Thrones canon. But I do have some ideas that I think some might find useful and/or entertaining, and wouldn't mind pulling a modest supplemental income from, if possible.

Anyway, if you've tried the Kindle program, or something similar, and have some observations to share, please add in comments below, or email the Gmail. Thanks.

Graphic Violence

2011-09-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

The next time someone asks for a nice visual of the banana-republic wealth/income disparity this nation continues to endure, show 'em this:

[Via Decline of the Empire]

I'm not even sure what to say anymore, hence the almost non-existent posting level these days. For a long time I attributed my dwindling output to the rigors of school and work, and to a great extent those things did and do occupy a great deal of my time.

But it's also a lack of knowing what to say anymore. When I started this little thing back in 2005, I figured there was a niche for this sort of parodying and lampooning of public figures, especially politicians. And there still is, though The Daily Show handles much of the heavy lifting, in terms of knocking out the easy meat most reliably. (Maybe I should have become a writer for TDS, if I had any clue how; at least once a week I'll know what Stewart's going to say before he says it, or predict the comic headline.)

Everything about this nation has simply become impossible to parody at this point -- our political choices and sentiments; our pop-culture touchstones; our propensity to put up with the viciousness and abuse of a corporate media structure that runs interference for the robber barons who have burgled this country's future for themselves. The media is such an easy target, over and over again, because it is the correct one. They engage, in the aggregate, of polishing corporate turds, and presenting them to you, gentle viewer, as something worthy of attention.

Anything and everything, from the interchangeable chlamydia-ridden Joisey Shore mooks, to the daily "missing attractive white woman" updates on The Today Show, to the sculpting of whatever manufactured crisis crops up next on the nightly news radar, is presented as equally important, equally meaningful, equally impactful to our lives, when in fact very little of it is. Maybe our (and by "our", I mean the majority of 'murkins) critical faculties have just been irreparably dulled, worn down by attrition, from the daily -- hell, hourly pummeling of this contrived nonsense.

Next week, media-wise, will especially suck -- starting with the tenth anniversary 9/11 remembrances, that day where everything changed, but we all went right back to doing what we were doing, and changed nothing about ourselves, certainly not in the collective sense. Nevertheless there will be interminable, mawkish plaints to the sky, and any number of other modes of emotional manipulation.

Then on Thursday we get Obama trying to compete with the opening of football season with yet another proposal that will require fruitless negotiation with the Boehner gang. Assuming that Obama even has "good" (meaning those he campaigned on) intentions anymore, or if he's even permitted by the rentier class to retain them, it is all for naught if he does not learn to negotiate with even a modest amount of skill.

Again, giving Obama some small benefit of the doubt that he has not a completely owned tool of Wall Street at this point, let us sketch out a reasonable metaphor for his pattern of negotiating things. I've probably used this one before, but whatever.

Let's say you are dealing with somebody who insists that 2+2=6, and they will brook no disagreement, will not discuss the issue, will not listen to entreaties of empirical reason and cold rationality. You know that 2+2=4, and no amount of magickal thinking on the part of you or them or anyone else is going to change that. However, you also have to figure out a way to work something out with your idiot opponent. What do you do?

Well, whatever you decide to do, one thing you most definitely don't do is open with, "Well, what if we compromise and say 2+2=5, and work from there?". You may, after long and hard-fought debate, eventually be forced to concede something along this line to move things along and get something done, but only an asshole does this as an opening gambit.

Yet this is what Obama has done and continues to do with every major economic initiative. He doesn't just punt on first down, he routinely concedes before the ball has even been kicked and the clock has started ticking. I would not at all be surprised if he fucks over the entire next generation (or more) on Social Security and Medicare, and grants yet more bullshit "job creating" tax cuts (because the ones he's given up have created so many already) just to get some hopelessly-compromised "job bill" going.

This is how the man does every blessed thing. It does not seem to occur to him that granting upfront concessions to an irrational opponent does not defuse the antagonism of the negotiating scenario, it emboldens the opponent. If you give up that much without even so much as a fight, before the bell has even rung, how much more will you give up when you take a right cross to the nose. Over and over, again and again, Boehner and Cantor and their merry little friends delight in playing Lucy to Obama's Charlie Brown, getting that sadistic frisson every damned time he lands on his back, not knowing or caring why he can't ever seem to believe his own lyin' eyes.

And of course the Thankralphers are already scuttling out of the woodwork, reminding us all of the burn-at-the-stake heresy of even murmurs of dissent at how Mister Man has chosen to make good on any of his campaign promises. You're getting a shit sandwich either way; Rick Perry's will probably come with one slab of stale crust, but other than that, essentially identical.

It's not that that isn't true and correct, mind you, that as awful as Obama has been and continues to be, and his inability and unwillingness to fight has wrought his current stature, he's still preferable to an unrepentant knuckle-dragger like Perry. But it should beg the question of why this is our "choice", why this is always our choice, why it is we, every bit as much as Obama, who plays the Charlie Brown sucker role, whatever and ever, amen.

Friends 'n' neighbors, that helpful little graph at the top of your screen is the answer to all of those questions, why your politics, culture, news, economy, and so much more is just a big box o' turds. It is that, and absolutely nothing more, I promise you. And it is never, ever going to change until we do something about it.

The Power of Positive Thinking

2011-08-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

Bury your treasure, burn your crop
Black water risin' and it ain't gonna stop." -- Clutch, (In the Wake of) The Swollen Goat

Like most of y'all out there in Blogoland, I've spent the last few weeks more or less observing the increasingly choreographed Debt Ceiling Debate (which, like Health Care Reform and the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those things -- discuss!) out of the corner of my eye, a slo-mo train wreck in peripheral vision.

And of course, like everything The One touches, the end result was saturated in epic fail. Wait till Monday, when Moody and Fitch follow S&P's lead, to get the full flavor of how well and truly fucked we are now. Nice work, guys. Can't wait for the SuperCongress, or the League of StuporFriends, or whatever slipshod claque of corporate butt-boys and dogsbodies they throw together, to find newer and better ways to make it even worse. Except for their donors, of course.

Between the brazen, barely-concealed contempt both sides have for each other and for the peons, and Obama's carefully crafted, constantly refined MO of non-existent negotiation skills, punting on first down, and giving the other side concessions they didn't even ask for, somewhat heretofore unconsidered thoughts about What We Can Do kept twirling in the firmament.

Fortunately, Monsieur IOZ has returned, for however long, with a vengeance, and per usual crystallized what I'd been thinking better than I could:

Yea verily, I have returned unto you to put it straight to yinz: there is no tea party; there are no Democrats; there is no America. There is only global capital. There is no keeping American competitive for the future against the Chinese children of the math-science learning gap to win tomorrow today with the power of innovation. There is a single transnational elite whose allegiance is to itself. They would've fucked you on Saturday; they'll fuck you next Wednesday instead. There was no debt crisis. THERE IS NO DEBT CEILING. You are like prisoners in a concentration camp, tearing each other apart over crusts of bread. The guards check their rifles. The kommandant shtups his mistress. The carrion birds circle against the concrete sky.

You must destroy the rich.

Fuckin' A. On the one hand, no one's calling for violent insurrection as such, mind you, but on the other, that's all these motherfuckers understand, other than the threat of losing their money. The American motto is no longer "E Pluribus Unum", nor even "In God We Trust", but rather "The Fuck You Gonna Do About It?". It actually changed to that during the Cheney regime, but was mostly directed at the rest of the world. Now it more explicitly applies inward.

Blog Day Afternoon

2011-08-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

So Governor Goodhair (as the late great Molly Ivins generally referred to him), who now as ever looks and swaggers like an unholy cross between GeeDubya Bush and Josh Brolin, got his little stadium prayer circle jerk going today:

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness," said Perry, praying with hands clasped.

"Father, we pray for our president, that you would impart your wisdom upon him, that you would guard his family," the governor said. "You call us to repent, Lord, and this day is our response."

It should not take a map to get these chuckleheaded mutants to see that their problems are man-made, and thus need to be undone by the men who caused them in the first place. Assuming that their sky-buddy not only exists, but exists in their specific iteration (as opposed to the thousands of other iterations now and across history), why has he not helped them out before, what with their weekly benedictions and invocations? Why does he persist in refusing to pluck the beam of greed from the eyes of people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon? Why has he ignored Gov. Goodhair's earlier beseeching to smite the drought that's been killing Texas for the past several months, yea verily and forsooth?

'Course, Li'l Ricky's got his work cut out for him when it comes to ankle-biting god-bothering schtick, namely from the one and only Mary Tyler Moron, who has been peddling her snake oil across Iowa, patiently, diligently, Sunday after Sunday:

While Bachmann's stump speech and paid ads focus almost exclusively on her economic views, the social conservatism that launched her career is a strong undercurrent.

Isn't it, though? It takes some doing to take gubmint handouts and subsidies for your fambly farm, and for your closet-case gay-curing hubby to take gubmint dough to pay for his "treatments", and still get up there and decry the vicissitudes and intrusions of the nanny state, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

Obama really needs to step up his game if he wants another four years to coddle Wall Street and kill off what's left of the middle class, because as spineless and incompetent as he is, he at least knows when he's full of it, where these guys don't even pretend to care, and they care even less when they're called on it.

From time to time I do make small attempts to be more tolerant of the obsessively religious, to understand the important role that ritualized comfort mechanisms play in the lives of many people. But dammit, these things are right in front of them, and if they were to devote half the energy and time focusing on the actual people causing the strife in their lives as they do on their futile exercises in public piety, they might actually get somewhere.

And the reflexively pseudo-objective (in the sense that only politicojournohacks can muster with any real skill) notion that Perry's and Bachmann's respective ministrations are apolitical is ridonkulous. They are inherently, overtly political. This is early-stage dog-whistle scamboogery at its most obvious. Wait six, nine, twelve months, however long it takes for the presumptive front-runner or second-stringer by that point in time to schlep out to Saddleback and genuflect before Rick "Hey, You Gonna Finish That?" Warren, corral larger swathes of mainstream rubes.

Of the seemingly infinite ways that American politics and participants find ways to be buffoonish and annoying, this may be one of the more irritating offenses, this incessant god-bothering schtick, redolent with its tribalist assumptions that everyone is just supposed to pretend that this "approach" to problem-solving has every bit the validity of, say, a more empirically, logically based approach.

Not that empiricism and logic have all that much impact on politics in any phase anyway, of course, but at least you can more accurately keep track of who's responsible for lawn-darting the country.

Straight to Video

2011-07-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

Doop de doop, let's check in on Rupert Murdoch's American agitprop tabloid arm, and see how Precious' Triumph of the Shrill hagiography is doing:

"The Undefeated," a glowing look at failed vice-presidential candidate and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has already sold out a show in Grapevine, Texas (population 46,000), according to the distributor Cinedigm.

Grapevine isn't exactly a teeming metropolis but the film is set to roll out across Tea Party country in 10 AMC theaters.

In addition to Grapevine, the documentary by conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon will expand to Indianapolis, Ind.; Independence, Mo.; Kennesaw, Ga.; Houston, Texas; Orlando, Fla.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Highlands Ranch, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Orange, Calif.

Packed house, folks -- though oddly, no actual number provided. Funny, that. Usually phat numbers is the first thing a PR flack sets on, like flies on shit.

Unless, of course, "theater 8 at AMC Barrett Commons 24" has roughly the capacity of an airport Sbarro's. Naw, that couldn't be the case. There were millions, kajillions even. It's Palin Nation, people, you just live in it. Suck on that, faggy librul!

Oh, the hilarity, she ensues, in this blurb from the Houston screening, further down the page.

"The Undefeated", the new documentary that showcases Sarah Palin's rise in Alaska politics, has arrived in Houston.

The movie is only open in a handful of theaters across the country, including the AMC Gulf Pointe 30 off the South Sam Houston Parkway East.

The lines were for Harry Potter, but the costumes on Friday night are for Sarah Palin and the movie about her.

Faithful fans arrived early. Donna Galloway drove all the way from Beaumont for the debut.

"Undefeated is about having losses but coming back for victories," said Galloway.

[squinting eyes, pinching nose in pained expression]

Kee-rist. Let's take these in reverse order:

This word "undefeated" -- I don't think it means what you assholes think it means. She was defeated, along with her addled, dyspeptic running mate, not in small part because every time she opened her piehole, a team of political Superfund environmental hygiene experts had to hit the scene to quickly shovel shit. But regardless, they lost. Badly. Perhaps y'all heard, it was in the papers and everything. I'm pretty sure it was even on Faux News, to the benefit of their ratings since.
Gawrsh, all the way from Beaumont to Houston, Aunt Bea? Quite the feckin' pilgrimage to Mecca there. I mean, considering they're only showing this train-wreck in ten theaters in the entire country, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that many of the faithful would have to travel at least 100 miles if they're going to see this thing. Maybe there's tailgate parties out in the parking lots of the theaters, where these old bastards competition-guzzle cans of Ensure and char some round steak until it's really well-done, then sneak some Metamucil into the theater, thus thwarting The Man once again.
Finally: costumes? Seriously? It's bad enough when Star Wars/Harry Potter nerds pull this crap, but at least they have an excuse -- most of them are in seventh grade. Then again, at least intellectually, so are these bozos. You get to a point where you stop asking "what's wrong with these people", and decide it's simpler to just ask if anything at all is right with them. Driving two hours, or going in costume, to a two-hour informercial for a person who, despite being in her late forties, having a college degree and a family and some measure of political success, still cannot reliably complete a sentence that wasn't previously rehearsed to maximize borscht-belt timing for reckless calumniations.

And of course in the end it turns out to be somewhat selective bunkum, as most things Palin are in the end: in the conservatard enclave of Orange, CA the only person to attend the midnight premiere screening was the reviewer.

(A increasingly frequent defensive meme, which you'll see down in the comments in the Atlantic piece, is that at least Saint Sarah never said there were 57 states. Perhaps not, but the difference is, even people who hate him know that Obama simply misspoke. They know, whether they'll admit it or not, that Obama does not actually think there are 57 states. It is not generally that obvious with Palin, as she managed to irretrievably botch even the bowdlerized Paul Revere legend that most 'murkins learn by fourth grade, during her Magical History bus tour, which sought to highlight important places and events in American history by spending more time with Donald Trump than at Gettysburg.)

At this point, Palin-watching as a spectator sport is merely an extended exercise in schadenfreude, waiting for the next inevitable failure, both on her part and on the part of all the PMS (Palin Messiah Syndrome) followers. They are going to be disappointed, on many levels -- their hoped-for Passion of the Kee-rist turnout is never going to materialize, and their wampeter, content to earn pelf spinning ever more burbling foma, will not run, not in any genuine earnest anyway, perhaps only enough to give them another richly-deserved fleecing.

But what she serves as most of all is a barometer of this country's limbic urgency to follow failure with more failure, ridiculous stupidity with even more ridiculous and inarticulate stupidity. It is a doubling-down of id, the man who loses his car on a spin at the roulette wheel, then proposes to get it back by betting his house, then proposes to get it all back by stealing the deed to his neighbor's house and betting that.

I'm sure the next inevitable reality show to emanate from this cultural sphincter will be worth its weight in comedic gold.

The Unexamined Life

2011-07-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

Marcus Bachmann takes on clients of all ages.

Apparently there are rumors ahoof that Marcus Bachmann might be gay. Folks have taken to parsing audio and video of him, at it tends to ping the gaydar of most sentient beings who possess full (or even partial) visual and aural faculties. This is understandable, and more importantly, hilarious.

Set aside for the moment that, with Michele and her family benefiting from federal farm subsidies, and Marcus taking gubmint dollars to practice his "pray away the gay" quackery, they're hypocrites. The next time she yaps about making gubmint smaller and less intrusive, I heartily suggest that the feds take them up on that entreaty. That's the real crime with these people -- they can't even live consistently under their own fundamental precepts. But again, set that aside for now. This here is about Teh Ghey.

Friends 'n' neighbors, I have a much simpler method for ascertaining whether an individual might or might not be gay. (Again, not that I could possibly care less, of course, except insofar as the individual in question has aligned themselves with virulent -- and psychologically harmful to people who are still trying to sort themselves out -- activist nonsense.)

Anyone who spends their entire adult life on a literal divine mission to intrude and obsess over people's sex lives, and "cure" them of their "disease"? Yeah, that's someone who's projecting like your local Cineplex. Regular, well-adjusted people -- gay or straight -- simply do not have that kind of time to waste, nor that sort of niggling inclination to spend decades on that sort of thing. You can do anything you want to do in life, what is your motivation for choosing that?

No matter. Bachmann is simply the MSM's obsession du jour, now that Evita Palin's cargo cult is on its last legs (more on that in a few). Bachmann is photogenic and quick, and unlike Palin, not completely afraid to go on non-Fox media outlets. However, like Palin, she cannot stand up to even mild scrutiny, and will be considered by all but the most intractable of mossbacks to be a dithering husk by October.

I'm sticking with Huntsman to get the eventual Gooper nod, providing he can keep his powder dry and raise enough cashola when the time is right. The only other non-crazy contestant on that side of the ledger is Romney, who is a heretic to conservatives, and a job-killing bastard to everyone else.

In the meantime, I do hope Marcus Bachmann gets the help he so clearly needs, because even if he's 100% Chuck-Norris-banging-Miss-America straight, his vocation is as meddlesome, troublesome, and empirically problematic as, say, astrology or phrenology. I don't think that unhappy gay people are unhappy because they're gay, I would assume they're unhappy because ankle-biting god-botherers like Bachmann keep fucking with them because they're gay.

For people who proclaim their commitment to a philosophy of leaving everyone the hell alone to live their lives as they choose, they sure seem to not get it on this particular issue.

American Nightmare

2011-07-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

I would think that everyone who would enjoy Breaking Bad has already been watching it, but just in case....Go. Now. Get on your Netflix queue and put the first three seasons on. This, not Mad Men (and that's not to take anything away from the latter's mannered, lugubrious deconstructions of post-Ike, Bernaysian Amurka) is AMC's true flagship series. The writing is spectacular, the ensemble cast flawless, the production of the show finding dark humor (not unlike The Sopranos) in whatever corners it may lurk.

Of all things, in terms of the narrative unfolding as a cascading series of disastrous, unforeseen consequences of pivotal decisions, BB actually makes me think of A Simple Plan, which, as dismal as its subject and execution is, holds up rather well and I think is very underrated.

And there's a very real subtext, that as what remains of the middle class becomes increasingly squeezed, as the dream goes sideways for all but a very lucky few, options become less constrained, more volatile for a lot of people, who have been given nowhere else to turn. When even the golden opportunity of a lifetime of wage slavery and debt peonage starts drying up, where do you go?

Also, too, just in time to push the BB premiere.

Social Distortion

2011-07-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

With a mere sixteen months(!) before the next election, the tedious strategy circus on both "sides" will start picking up speed. The wingnuts on the right will start making goofier and looser assertions, secure in the knowledge that their crowd has no use for "facts" or "logic", much less intellectual honesty. Hell, Newt Gingrich is their idea of an intellectual, so clearly they have gone around a turn that even Hofstadter would have had trouble imagining. Their strategy will consist of continuing to obstruct any and all moves Obama might attempt toward righting an increasingly moribund economy -- one which is as likely as not to worsen than improve.

But that is the sort of guff we've been long accustomed to from that crowd. The real shenanigans will take place across the aisle, as "liberals" and "moderates" alike will outdo each other in informing why we should -- no, must -- grant Obama another term with which to play Lucy with their political football. Particularly galling about this strategy, such as it is, is that it invariably revolves around the prospect of losing on social issues which, sorry to say, are secondary at this point.

Polls consistently show a majority of the public being pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, etc. It is understandable that people would be distressed, concerned at the notion of losing (or being rendered unable to gain) fundamental rights because of the leverage of a small but politically motivated minority. It absolutely sucks rhino dong that terminally regressive, knuckle-dragging troglodytes can hamstring the political and social progress of a post-modern technocracy, just for the sheer glee of doing so (that, and the proprietary reading of a carefully selected, multiply translated Bronze Age transcripts of Levantine tribesmen).

But I submit that a darker corner lurks, deserves our additional attention. I submit that terminal fuckwits such as this guy, boundlessly greedy bastards and their awful dogsbodies, are the bigger threat. Day after day, year after year, these fuckers keep their boot across your neck, not because they create more actual value or wealth, or work hundreds of times harder than their minions, but because they can. Because it's a game, and they make the rules.

More importantly, they buy the refs ahead of time, and ensure their own success (not to mention the failure of everyone else not in the game). And the booga-booga currency to keep restive libs from realizing that the guy thye voted for is almost indistinguishable in economic terms from the last guy is the deathless specter of Roe v. Wade. Never mind that many states already have managed to circumvent or eviscerate RvW anyway, and where's yer fuckin' Supreme Court been for all of that?

This idea that we maintain or achieve success, fairness, justice, anything resembling economic parity or sanity, by remaining vigilant on one intellectually corrupt institution (a SCOTUS which has rendered its share of dismal decisions in the first place, from Kelo to Citizens United, and has done fuck-all in the arena of social justice anyway) and attempting to engage with righteous change an irredeemable instituion (a corporate-owned political party with center- and far-right wings, both of which have many, if not most, of the very same corporate sponsors) is perhaps the very definition of insanity. It's Stockholm Syndrome at its worst, the garbled cry of "go ahead and screw me out of every vestige of economic mobility, and trap me in the cage of debt and stratification, but fergodsake don't take my right to get an abortion away!".

By using this strategy against outliers on both "sides" (and make no mistake, Dubya was every bit as savvy about floating the phantom prospects of repealing Roe or amending the Constitution), they've managed to distract people with actual common ground -- the burgeoning underclass of economically disenfranchised.

I hate to sound like a revanchist Clintonista, but there is really only one issue worth voting on anymore. It really is the economy, stupid, specifically the widening gap of wealth and income disparity, a mathematical by-product of productivity gains accruing to owners only, rather than among the actual pool of producers. Nothing else matters, nothing else counts, if for no other reason than that an economically healthy society doesn't have those social issues to contend with in the first place.

Child Abuse

2011-06-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

So PZ Myers writes a perfectly nice, reasonable, and eminently sensible "Yes Virginia" type post, publicly directed toward a young, brainwashed little girl who needs to revisit the smug all-purpose question that Jebus-Rode-A-Dinosaur Creation "Museum" huckster Ken Ham taught her to ask. Ham taught the little girl to ask "Were you there?" in response to any information presented to her that doesn't jibe with her programming (except, presumably, biblical narratives).

Naturally, no good deed goes uncalumniated:

I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken's Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy... sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn't see the message because I didn't want to...

And so another generation arises to drink the kool-aid, and perpetuate a stunted, shriveled intellect, and waste their most precious gift of all -- the capacity to learn.

Clown Car Contestants

2011-06-25T23:50:00.000-07:00

Taibbi has some pretty good smackdown on the rising political star of Mary Tyler Moron. Aside from having a gerrymandered district consisting of rich white assholes, Bachmann's success up to this point is essentially summed up here:

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

Bachmann is the champion of those tens of millions of Americans who have read and enjoyed the Left Behind books, the apocalyptic works of Christian fiction that posit an elaborate fantasy in which all the true believers are whisked off to heaven with a puff of smoke at the outset of Armageddon. Here on Earth, meanwhile, the guilty are bent to the will of a marauding Satan who appears at first in the guise of a smooth-talking, handsome, educated, pro-government, superficially pacifist, internationalist politician named Nicolae Carpathia — basically, Barack Obama. Bachmann has ties to the Left Behind crowd and has even said that Beverly LaHaye, wife of LB co-author and fundamentalist godfather Tim LaHaye, was her inspiration for entering politics.

Ah, yes, the "those people hate you because you're smug and they know you're laughing at them" gambit. Well you know what? Fuck them. Fuck 'em all right in the goddamned neck. I'm not even going to bother with (justifiably) ridiculing the sort of oaf that feels compelled to profess divine intervention for every mundane activity and decision; there is nothing particularly wrong with belief per se, but those sorts of chuckleheads are either delusional or cynical in their faith.

But it is the implicit and explicit assumption that everyone else needs to get on their page, that they have the right to indoctrinate everyone's children with their special faith, that they are intrinsically more moral than us heathens Because They Believe. How is that not smug, how is that any better than the people who laugh at them because they are tethered to superstition and magical thinking (as opposed to religious belief being one mode of introspection and genuine reflection)?

Bachmann gets lumped in with Palin generally, but that is not an entirely honest comparison. Palin is clearly just out to soak the suckers with this ongoing cock-tease; she has yet to display an iota of aptitude or even basic desire for the job, much less for the rigors of campaigning for said job. I seriously would not be surprised if Palin's ultimate goal were to host an afternoon Oprah-type talk show (or perhaps an inverted View setup, with a bunch of like-minded troglodytes and one token librul to bash on in between circle-jerking whatever hapless celebrity is on to pimp their latest box-office load).

Not that Bachmann is the real deal, mind you; again, her incessant god-bothering jabber is either delusional (if real) or just pathetically empty (if put-on), and either way, her actual track record in the House appears to be one of grandstanding more than actually doing anything. Her chances for winning the nomination are slimmer some people seem to be thinking for now, because she is at least as intensely polarizing as Palin.

Personally, I would put money on Huntsman eventually getting the GOP nod. That he worked for Obama is a cardinal sin easily inverted -- once he figures out how to turn that into a "Hey, I tried to work with these guys" sound bite, he will start to pull disaffected independents, which is what any contender is going to need. If he can get half a rhythm going, there is simply no viable competition in that party.

The one clip of the recent "debate" I did catch spoke volumes -- Pawlenty trying to assert himself with his "Obamneycare" care guff on the Sunday circuit, but when confronted with it at the debate, with Romney just skull-fucking him the whole time, Pawlenty punts, taking care not to look aat Romney the entire time. That sort of gutlessness does not work well in a party of, to be generous, fanatical adherents. These guys have just spent the last three years doing everything they can to be an impediment to Obama, they are expecting "balls to the wall or not at all" at this point.

But for someone like Bachmann to be viable, as with Palin, there have to be enough moneyed donors to get her in the game. And that really is difficult to conceive -- they don't give that kind of money to people unless they know they can control them, and a culty midwesterner does not seem like a smart investment.

Either way, hell -- remember when we used to sit in amazement that a mouth-breather like George W. Bush could get in? Good times.

Get the Frack Out

2011-06-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

Let's keep it simple: anybody who's fine with fracking needs to be fine with it in their own backyard. Funny how all these warnings about how we need to achieve "energy independence" simply revolve around fetishizing this or that tech, finding "new" and "clean" sources, or Drill Baby Drill (though again, not in the backyards of those squawking for it). But nobody ever talks about simply consuming less, about what the effects and opportunities might be if people drove smarter and less, if we enforced better fuel-efficiency standards, if people shut the fucking light off once in a while when they're not using it.

You can champion all the new tech you want, whether it's green and clean or kitchen faucets spewing fire. But at some point, at least a modest level of conservation has to enter the discussion. Or not.

Magical History Tour

2011-06-04T10:34:00.001-07:00

Ahahahaha:

In Sarah’s version, Revere was

“He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.”

Jesus Christ, can anybody really add anything to that? It's beyond parody. If 'murka really wants to elevate a bubbleheaded snowbilly on her (if you're a middle-aged man who's not getting any) fuckability quotient, then as always, it deserves precisely what it will get in the bargain.

Palin has pushed this stupid bus tour as an opportunity to school ignint 'murkins on their Constooshunal ingnince. Maybe Roger Ailes can spring for a tutor to live on the bus with them for a few weeks, bring her up to speed on who's on Mount Rushmore and such like.

Cheesy Rider

2011-06-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

Once again, if we accept the classic premise that markets act on demand, then our corporate media is a reflection of us as a nation, a bloated, rotted husk which, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, just doesn't know it's dead yet.

Also, too. Someone should maybe tell these halfwits the difference between a "scavenger hunt" and a "snipe hunt". Here are three major differences the mediatards can share with their window-licking friends:

Scavenger hunts have clues.
Scavenger hunts have a point.
Snipe hunts are, by definition, participated in by gullible morons.

Consider the most consistent line 'mongst media morons far 'n' wide, regardless of political bent -- they admit that they don't know what the subject of their "articles" is actually doing, ergo, they are literally following her around, unable to speak with her, for absolutely no reason at all.

If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the American media -- which again, like the country itself, is merely a series of obvious scams that people, in a tragic spate of collective Jungian subconsciousness, have agreed to dance to. Much like disco.

And we all know how that turned out.

A Beautiful Mind

2011-05-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

One of Saint Sarah's less-than-gruntled former toadies has scrawled a "tell-all", adding to the publishing industry's largest segment, which is books no one in their right mind would read.

Naturally, the attention Frank Bailey has garnered so far, focuses around Sharia Plan's rather Leona Helmsley-like demeanor with people who can't directly help her political career, and her well-documented vindictive streak. But for me this little quote tells you everything you need to know about Palin's utter lack of even marginal intellect:

In his fervor, Bailey at first didn’t care that Palin lacked expertise — she had common sense. As she once e-mailed him, “Remember: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” But Bailey came to doubt his devotion, particularly after the presidential election defeat when Palin seemed to care little for governing Alaska and far more about cashing in on her celebrity.

[emphasis mine]
Set aside for moment that Frank Bailey is a fucking chucklehead who got taken for a ride, and now is trying to cash in on his time in the belly of the beast. Let's deconstruct Saint Sarah's attempt at profundity, not just for the complete lack of evidence and plausibility in the first part, not just because the Titanic sank not because it was poorly built, but because it hit a fucking iceberg.

Those nine words neatly encapsulate the mentality of Sarah Palin, and her addled flock. The smirking disdain -- delusional in its scope -- completely derides the notion of competence, of becoming better at what you do by learning as much as you can about it.

This was what I always despised about George W. Bush -- he exhibited the smugness of someone who seriously believes that he has long known everything he needs to know, that there is nothing more to learn. Palin is obviously cut from the same ragged cloth, no shock there. And no shock that she prefers the simple affirmations of fairy tales over empirical data.

But at some point, it needs to register with a critical mass of people -- voters and the skeevy corporate media monkeys they rely on for their daily dose of bullshit -- that beyond the breathless infotainment coverage of cock-teasing idiots like Palin or Trump, people who add to their fortunes by dangling months of guessing games to legions of dumbfounded dipshits, someone needs to be an adult.

A big reason America is in a period of epic fail right now, aside from its willingness to let Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon continue to skull-fuck the country with absolute impunity, is its inability to recognize unserious and marginal people for what they are. A serious, intellectually honest person does not let cartoon characters like Palin and Trump waste their time with this nonsense, and a nation serious about getting its shit together most certainly doesn't let these bozos jerk them off for months on end.

Their ability to stay in the conversation long past their sell-by dates feels to me like the sign of a nation that's given up on itself, has lost the capacity to identify entities that should never have been in the discussion in the first place, and are indeed simply using the process and its concomitant permanent campaign industry to enrich themselves. Maybe it's the natural by-product of a decade of hyper-cultural immersion in the mindless excesses of reality teevee, with it's deliberate vapidity and meanness. Maybe we were always mean and stupid, and are just not bothering to conceal it anymore. I don't know.

What I do know is that we are heading into a period that, for starters, will be characterized by more and more scarce energy supplies, and we are barely making token efforts to do anything about it, apparently assuming that some great Energy Fairy will providentially come along and fix it all. Shit, 'murkins cannot even be bothered to use environmentally friendly packaging for its snacking products, such is the affront to their dignity.

So it makes pathetic sense that a society that has lost its collective mind, preferring the comforts of magickal thinking, would put up with the notion of putting Sarah Palin or Donald Trump in charge of anything. Americans have had their heads lodged up their asses for so long, they have given up trying to extricate themselves.

Enjoy the view. It's only going to get worse.

News You Can Lose

2011-05-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

Give us this day our daily cognitive dissonance: MSNBC host calls Laura Ingraham a "slut" and gets his fat ass suspended for a week, because MSNBC (unlike Fox) never stands behind their people when they say something "controversial".

To the extent that there's actually some controversy -- I mean, we are talking about the Laura Ingraham who has made a career out of using snark, insults, and calumny on her ideological opponents. All in the service of the 1% who already own pretty much everything worth owning, and won't be happy until they get the rest and take it all with them. Being their rented spokesperson -- basically the function of the entire damned punditocracy, a self-selecting crowd of poltroons, none of whom you would trust to clean your gutters, but are apparently supposed to trust in analyzing policies and events that affect your life -- seems to fit the basic definition for "slut", minus (praise Jeebus) the sex.

Say what you will about conservatards, but when one of theirs says or does something offensively stupid, they don't apologize, they bloody well double down on it. A lunatic goes on a spree at a supermarket, slaughtering old ladies and little girls and attempting to assassinate a US Representative who had already been on the receiving end of death threats, vandalism, and harassment, and Sarah Palin squeals "blood libel". Ofay teabaggers send each other photos portraying Obama as a monkey or a spearchucker, they don't apologize, they just shrug their shoulders and tell you to go fuck youself if you don't like it. Ted Nugent invites Obama and Hillary to suck on his AR-15 at his concerts, and not only will never apologize for it, but continues to be a Fox regular.

Ed Schulz trash-talking Laura Ingraham does not merit coverage or commentary, but what does is how quickly MSNBC pusses out with such predictability. Nobody at Fox looks over their shoulder at the lies and bluster that emanate from multiple pieholes on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

To the extent that "liberalism" can actually distinguish itself from "conservatism" in any meaningful, operational sense, as opposed to the usual ratchet-pawl two-sides-of-the-same-plug-nickel guff, it must at some point display a real willingness to take and throw punches. I mean, I'm just kind of embarrassed for them when they do shit like this. Fucking grow a pair already.

....And I Feel Fine

2011-05-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

You know, I'm as glad as the next schmuck that the buffoonish radio dickhead predicting world apocamalypse was proven wrong yet again, as thus far they have always been. These jokers are a dime a score, always have been and always will be.

But what rings weird to me is how much press this particular joker got, both in the run-up to the magick date, and now the aftermath, everyone having a big grin that this old cheese-smelling cuss had a very public senior moment.

Don't get me wrong -- we've had our share of the billboards up this neck o' the woods, and the stupid doesn't just burn, it emanates. I guess I'm just glad that though my daughter is young enough to wonder about the provenance of this nonsense, she is at least astute enough to be skeptical about them. Not everyone, I'm wagering, is as lucky, and shame on Harold Camping for scaring the shit out of kids for no damned reason.

The adults, on the other hand, deserve precisely what they get. As we've always acknowledged, it really is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

But I'm curious as to what to ascribe this wave of coverage to, for a "story" that would in earlier times been relegated to the one-and-done bin of most marginal players. It seems that there is no such thing anymore as a marginal player -- a supreme assclown like Donald Trump can get slavish coverage for two full months to pimp his piece-of-shit teevee show in the guise of political aspiration, and pull out with the assurance that he could win this if he rilly wanted ta, and they just fucking stenograph it, like it ain't no thing. Sarah Palin has choked up the media cloaca for a full two years and counting now. Every network stentorously announced the withdrawal of Serious Player Mitch Daniels, without remembering to mention that he was Dubya's budget director for a few years, and thus had at least a thumb in how things ran for some time. And so forth.

So it goes with Harold Camping, and his happy if woefully misguided campers. The question is not "why is this a story" -- of course a nutjob radio preacher predicting global cataclysm is "a story" -- the question is "how did this story persist for a couple weeks". It's gone on and on like this for quite some time, seemingly more and more so as time goes on. Each news cycle seems more nonsensical, more relentlessly stupid than the last.

With this "story", one could play devil's advocate for a second, if one were so inclined. Consider not only the scope, scale, and frequency of natural disasters just his year so far, but the intractability of man-made catastrophes the world over. The destruction of the American economy and way of life continues apace, with no foreseeable respite. Your elected officials have been bought and paid for by the very people they need to prosecute, and who continue to drive the entire economy -- and thus, your way of life and that of your neighbors -- into the dirt. And the rest of the world, so much of it post-colonial, has suffered far worse for far longer, much of it at our hands.

Maybe the people who die in these natural disasters, or who take themselves and their families out as a response to creatively engineered desitution from afar, are actually being raptured. I hold it as no serious philosophical construct, nor do I want to disrespect the memories of those unfortunate souls. But if one believes in such outlandish ideas, one just never knows for sure.

Credentialism

2011-05-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

So I finished my final MBA class this past Saturday. I still have to complete the directed internship, but the project is already mostly done, I just have to compile some survey results and make the pitch.

It's been an interesting two years, to say the least. I went in with two and only two goals for attaining the degree:

Open more professional doors. As I will turn 44 in a few days, it occurs to me that my career path needs to be more, shall we say, solidified, lest I meet the standard American working class dog's fate of working till the day I drop, leaving the cubicle farm feet first, a life by definition less than fulfilled. In other words, time to shit or get off the pot, professionally speaking. Until I start pulling down at least high-five/low-six figures, jury's still out on that one.
Gain more knowledge, of how and why things work, of specialized areas, of where to refer when in need. Really, to put it in somewhat Rumsfeldian terms, to learn more about the unknown unknowns, the things about which I didn't even know I didn't know. This goal was attained much more closely than the first one, because of the trade secret of the MBA -- you don't have to memorize everything from every class you take, every factoid that's pumped into your head, you just have to recall where to look it up for reference.

Of course, there were other valuable lessons, most of which I already knew but were reinforced with various degrees of vigor. The textbook industry is a goddamned racket, from author to printer; your instructors, while chock-full of the bien pensant sentiments one would expect sinecured academics to be flush with, are still susceptible to the same strains of peer pressure and business expectations as any of us in the real world are; you are handed rote ethical nostrums to dutifully recite, as if they were the bidnessman's Hippocratic Oath, without the rich context the ongoing shenanigans in the financial sector so abundantly provide; you need to memorize and regurgitate, and speak extemporaneously on the matter -- whatever it may be, balanced scorecards, Porter's five forces, why EVA is infinitely more important and useful than EBITDA -- as if your very life depends on it.

Most of all, what is reinforced is a rather unique arrangement, where you are both student and consumer, a role somehow both inherently subordinate yet festooned with Important Surveys on how well you enjoyed your extraordinarily high-priced product. It is a very strange business model, perhaps unique -- just as the insurance industry is the only major business model that is predicated on the company not providing the service for which it has already been paid, so the post-secondary edumacation system is the only model that caters to you even as it pushes you around.

It's been an enoyable experience, the way I assume a triathlon is for its participants -- it's an accomplishment just to complete it, really. But from the start, despite my goals and high-handed sentiments about the process and quest for knowledge and value -- something I still believe, for myself at least -- I have always thought about the subtext of the first goal enumerated above.

This is perhaps the biggest racket of all in the university system, this idea that a piece of paper is so incredibly valuable that it trumps all else, and thus is worth paying a couple years' wages (if it gets you the job it's supposed to, a tenuous proposition at best these days) for. And the truth is, it is and it isn't -- there is value attached to that piece of paper, so long as its holder realizes that there are people with nothing more than high school diplomas doing the same job just as well.

And really, now that I know where to look, and what to read, and with all the free resources on Teh Intartubez, I can tell you right now that the knowledge is available for free, or for less than $200 worth of books anyway, so you really are paying the big bucks for the credential.

I knew this from day one, to have it confirmed is alternately frustrating (because I still have to pay for the privilege) and comforting (because even with my worst assumptions about people and things, I love being proven right, which I always am).

All that said, it's been a fun ride. I love the library, I love the campus and the energy of it. I can see why some people never want to leave. But in the end, I do think that once the health-care battle has been more adequately addressed, it may occur to folks that granting more accessibility to higher education will lead to better macro outcomes in a rapidly crumbling society. You can't keep gouging kids at every turn, and expect them to just want to keep "getting ahead", especially when more and more that just means for them a decade or so of student loan repayments.

Your Awful Media, Part 15,864,573

2011-05-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

Few things in this blessed life are more puling and obnoxious than the clubby back-patting of skeevy assholes:

This time, there was no "gotcha" moment, no kill-the-messenger pushback. Asked for comment about a child born out of wedlock, Arnold Schwarzenegger's camp simply gave up the goods.

It was quick, clean, surgical.

Schwarzenegger wasn't given a way out, the reporter who broke the story tells Howard Kurtz on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" on CNN. There was nothing to confirm or deny.

"It was true," says Los Angeles Times political reporter Mark Barabak. "They knew it was true, we knew it was true; they knew that we knew it was true. So it was pretty straightforward at that point."

Barabak does not say precisely how the paper got the story. He credits old-fashioned "shoe leather" for chasing the lead down.

Hmmm, yes, good ol' intrepid mediabots, with their shoe leather and Slap Maxwell hats and moxie and gumption and what-not. Praise be the shade of Edward Fucking Murrow, eh? I mean, the kid's only fourteen years old, ferchrissake. I guess they deserve some credit for getting to the bottom of this pressing mystery before the kid grew up, left home, started a family of his own. Nicely done, way to be on that proverbial ball.

I wonder what it would be like if more members of this particular "profession" devoted this degree of time and effort to, say, getting to the bottom of how Wall Street continues to rob this nation blind and stupid. Nah, it's much easier to sniff up Arnold Schwarzenegger's ass, harass the homely cow he porked and knocked up, as well as her hapless family. Let Matt Taibbi do all the Wall Street stuff himself. Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Usually I would just have the smug "we get the media we deserve" riposte to this sort of shit, but the easy jape fails me at this point. These are just bad, lazy human beings. It's bad enough that they peddle non-stories for a self-selecting audience of mouth-breathers; it's much worse that they're actually proud of it. Keep on livin' that dream.

Brand Newt Day

2011-05-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

So Pravda's Dan Balz musta drew the short straw on reportage of the Republigoon clown car revving up for next fall. Instead of the tee-ball shots of crazymilfs Snowbilly Spice (Palin) or Mary Tyler Moron (Bachmann), Balz gets stuck with pimping eight-chinned pseudo-intemellectual Newt Gingrich. And pimp that shit he does, like it's a sixteen-going-on-thirty-year-old runaway:

Through intellect and ambition, Gingrich has kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on health care, education, energy and foreign affairs. “Newt’s been the Republican Party’s main idea man for close to a generation,” said Terry Holt, a Republican strategist who closely observed Gingrich as speaker. “This is a guy who brings unlimited energy and creative thinking to a race that needs new ideas.”

Gosh, it's as if we could just take a Republican strategist's word (and the title of Balz' write-up) and just assume for the sake of argument that Newt Gingrich is a "man of ideas". So much is Balz convinced of this that aside from a quote of Gingrich's asserting a standard wish list and a token nod to the usual states' rights guff, nowhere in the several hundreds of words does Balz remember to include an actual, workable idea enumerated by Gingrich.

Fortunately he does link to the propitiously-named American Solutions site, which graciously includes links to several of Newt's stabs at profundity. Here's a magickal slice of the "ideas" and "intellect" being sold, like a case of spiked cough syrup out of the back of some greaseball's '92 Camaro in an alley:

Let me say that Louie Gohmert that he is a terrific national asset. He has a remarkable range of innovative ideas.

It goes on, lauding Gohmert's "brilliant insight" and "courage" in protesting something Obama wanted to do. Let me say that Louie Gohmert is the drawling hump who apologized to British Petroleum, after their fucked-up equipment had killed eleven workers and polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico, for having to endure Obama's shameless shakedown of their bullshit mud-drilling operation. Let me say that Louie Gohmert needs to be reincarnated at least a dozen times as one or another hapless creature encrusted by industrial pollution, and then reincarnated as a fisherman who has to make his suicide look like an accident so his insurance company will pay off his shrimp trawler and not leave his survivors completely destitute.

Seriously, if you had to make a "fuck 'em right in the neck" list of mouthbreathing assholes in Congress, Louie Gohmert is almost guaranteed to make your top three or five. Every public appearance of Gohmert convinces me more that he is a product of careful genetic engineering, of warped scientists valiantly attempting to find a sweet spot, that perfect cross of willfully ignorant and obnoxiously mean. Not in the childish "those guys are meeeeaan!" sense, but in the real "this guy barely gives a fuck about his family, and certainly not about anybody else" sense.

But in all seriousness, all intellectual honesty, can you read that entire speech and find a coherent workable idea, and even a sketch of how it can be implemented? There's plenty of rhetoric, sure, but it wears about as thin as the usual liberal "let's be the best America we can be/it takes a village" counterpart.

The big ideas seem to be, in no particular order: Gut the tax and regulatory systems, because our crumbling infrastructure can repair itself, and nobody gives a fuck about coal miners until 50 of them suffocate under a mountain of unsafe rock that the MSHA was too defunded or defanged to catch before it collapsed. Indoctrinate the populace with the heroic epic of American Exceptionalism, because you just don't see that at every fucking turn right now, seriously. Talk about God a lot, because if he hasn't struck Newt down by now, he must be pretty forgiving. And so forth.

(Even Gingrich's newfound god-bothering is off a touch; he claims that God has forgiven Gingrich's numerous transgressions, yet apparently does not hold out for the possibility that He might forgive the transgressions of Gingrich's political opponents as well. Of course, Gingrich is too busy effeminizing them and casting them as job-killers to notice this intellectual inconsistency. But then, that would presuppose that he has ever been intellectually honest in the first place. I'm not sure even Dan Balz really believes that.)

I get why Newt Gingrich thinks those things count as ideas; what I don't get is why Dan Balz thinks they count as ideas. See, an idea has to be more than "cut taxes" or "cut spending" -- you then have to explain the expected consequences and outcomes of these actions. If I say "cut spending", I should have to say what I want to cut, by how much, and how that will tangibly help the budget deficit. Every one of these goddamn "cut spending" clowns has the same schtick -- find some bullshit drop-in-the-bucket program that's politically unpopular but fiscally meaningless, and uphold it as the ne plus ultra of government irresponsibility and hedonism.

Crucial to this tactic is avoiding all mention of the Big Three spending programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Oh sure, once in a while one of the dumber and meaner ones will actually have the cojones to talk about privatizing Social Security, before catching themselves in a sudden rush of memory of how no one's really all that hot anymore to hand their paychecks over to the geniuses who monkeyfucked the world economy. And paid themselves nice fat bonuses for doing so, just because they could. Other than that, those things don't get brought up a whole lot.

It's like driving down a road that has three lane-wide, impossible-to-miss, car-swallowing potholes, and making a big show about the bug splattered on your windshield, acting like the potholes aren't there. Of course, this is constitutent-driven for the most part; the baby boomers are more than happy to ensure they get theirs and fuck over my generation completely and utterly, just like they always have.

And raging militarism is crucial to perpetuating important nationalist control myths, so the only cuts to the military will be in things that directly affect service personnel, such as post-trauma care, post-military job assistance, housing assistance for families while troops are deployed, etc. That's how that one works out. There'll always be enough money in the budget to bankroll another flying contraption the Air Force doesn't want, or to run formation exercises at the Raiders game. When your main concern is maintaining the budget for symbolism, the big cuts always come out of substantial stuff first. So guaranteed, any military cuts will come out of troops' backs.

Anyhoo, so again, Mr. Idea Man. I've reread the speech a couple times, just not seeing anything besides Mitch Albom-level stories and American Legion boilerplate. (And seriously, whoever transcribed this speech must have used cheap voice-recognition software. Fucking proofread once in a while, m'kay? Looks like a slow third-grader scooped this shit out. "Baton" Death March, seriously? Fugging chumps.)

Near as I can tell, Newt Gingrich has had exactly three big ideas in his entire political career -- mastering a precise vocabulary of loaded words guaranteed to antagonize and conceal rather than elucidate; cluttering up school boards and city councils with red-meat window-lickers who, while largely unelectable at higher levels, are useful for local rabble-rousing and policy shenanigans; and portraying himself as some sort of intellectual emeritus of the wingnut brigade. That last one is simple; when you're competing against marginal oafs like Palin and Bachmann, you pretty much win if you can get through a speech without drooling on yourself.

Ironically though, no matter how much he preaches his bullshit gospel about Christ's forgiveness, it's the issue of morality that will be Newt's undoing (assuming, in fact, that he's running because he genuinely wants to win and thinks he can win, as opposed to Fred Thompson's cute little take-the-money-and-run grift he pulled on the short-bus crowd a couple years back). The morality issue, in his case, is bad even for a politician.

Put it this way -- as a stereotypical godless, hedonistic sybarite, while I don't personally approve of fucking around on one's spouse or significant other, I don't make it a criterion for the people I elect to implement public policy. So, yeah, I found it distasteful and unsurprisingly tacky, even a minor source of irritation that Bill Clinton got his pole smoked by a chunky intern whilst discussing troop deployments in the Balkans. And I was weirded out by Clinton's bizarre compartmentalism, that he seriously felt that jerking off in a sink, instead of ejaculating in said intern's mouth, somehow absolved him of cheating on his wife, or having sex with a sub-sub-subordinate. And his smirking parsimony over the meanings of simple words was just obnoxious. But like most folks, I was far more irritated at the hypocrites who were all too happy to basically shut down the entire government to mess with him over it.

Chief among these scumbags was Gingrich. Maybe I am just a little bit square on the subject, because I simply cannot get my brain around a person who persecutes a colleague for doing the exact same thing he himself is doing at the same time. One expects at least some small measure of honor among thieves, but Gingrich time and again has shown himself to be a man utterly without honor, devoid of character. Expecting character and honor of one's openly purchased politicos is a fool's errand in the first place, but it's one Gingrich's party runs to every chance they get. Maybe for once we should take them up on that.

Update: Anonymous in comments reminds me that it was, in fact, Joe Barton who apologized to BP, not Louie Gohmert, proving conclusively that I cannot tell these inbred goobers apart. Amazingly, Gohmert is an even bigger shithead than Barton, so he'll probably serve at least another ten terms.

Tardocalypse Now

2011-05-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this country desperately needs an enema. Take your pick at what's more morally repugnant -- the shameless racism, the mind-boggling illiteracy, or the complete inability to compose anything remotely resembling a coherent fucking thought. Truly, the best part of every single one of these halfwits ran down the cracks of their mommas' asses and ended up as a brown stain on a dirt road.

Some days you just figure that maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

[Via Gin and Tacos.]

Freedom of Screech

2011-05-04T22:45:00.000-07:00

Looks like someone just got a lesson about speaking his mind during our week-long Two Minutes of Woofing.

"Nothing I said was meant to stir up controversy. It was my way to generate conversation. In looking at my timeline in its entirety, everything that I've said is with the intent of expressing a wide array of ideas and generating open and honest discussions, something I believe we as American citizens should be able to do. Most opinions will not be fully agreed upon and are not meant to be. However, I believe every opinion should be respected or at least given some thought. I apologize for the timing as such a sensitive matter, but it was not meant to do harm. I apologize to anyone I unintentionally harmed with anything that I said, or any hurtful interpretation that was made and put in my name."

Well, son, I'll see your reasoned attempt at civil discourse and intellectual honesty, and raise you a "USA! USA!" I mean, c'mon kid, whaddaya expe -- Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! -- expect here? You work for a professional sports league, one of the most die-hard bastions of mundane jingoism in American daily life. Every game starts off with the national anthem; NFL games frequently feature flag or color guard ceremonies, flying in formation over the stadium, etc. Nobody ever bothers to ask what any of these rituals has to do with watching extremely large and fast men beat the hell out of each other for an afternoon, it's just accepted as given. As a form of mass conditioning, it's about as unsubtle as it gets.

I'm actually impressed with how well Mendenhall expresses himself, and how sincere he comes off. But he shows a very profound misunderstanding of his station and his audience if he really thinks -- or even just hopes -- any of his fans want to engage in a debate (or even mild thought) about this stuff. These are people who will literally beat each other into a fucking coma for rooting for the wrong team, wearing the wrong jersey. Questioning the ritual is not within easy reach of most of 'em's intellectual toolbox. Not exactly a secret.

The questioning part for them only goes one way -- towards anyone not buying into what the angry mob is doing. It's like sitting down while the rest of the stadium does The Wave (remember that?) -- nobody appreciates your gesture to reason, they just give you the stinkeye for being a dick. Tribal signifiers, yo. This is pure lizard-brain stuff, and there's just no winning a debate with it. When Art Rooney has to step in on the CYA tip, you know you screwed the proverbial pooch. That's life in the gladiator class. Good luck with it.

A Star Is Bored

2011-05-04T22:23:00.001-07:00

Howie Kurtz helpfully transcribes what may turn out to be the very truest thing ever said about oh-so-brief-but-transcendentally-brilliant phenomenumbskull, La Palin:

“Her real constituency is the media,” says former John McCain adviser Mike Murphy, who views Palin as a “niche candidate” incapable of winning the nomination. “The media have always overestimated her appeal. They’re drunk with interest in covering her. It’s a partnership—they’re in business together.”

Indeed. The downside of all this wondrous technology at our fingertips is that it's enabled this slovenly, grotesque infoporn market to crop up amidst us, influence the order of things inside-out and upside-down by sheer muscle and gall. The 24-hour news cycle, which is really the same half-hour of sound bites on a repeat loop, 48 times per day times a bazillion channels, has metastasized into the perpetual campaign industry machine. From the very second an election ends, discussion of the next one commences, two years or four down the road.

Remember a mere half-decade ago, when a preponderance of the country -- indeed, the world at large -- were certain that American hubris, id, and willful stupidity had reached its blessed apotheosis with the Bush/Cheney junta? You want to go back in time and warn those naive, beaten souls of the depths to come, made possible in very large part by people whose sole purpose is to sell pharmaceuticals and big trucks, with dressed-up factoids and famous nobodies paraded in between, a constant barrage of mediocrity at best, dangerous buffoonery most of the time.

But golly gosh, I sure do hope it all works out for Saint Sarah. She's just given so darn much in the service of pure fabulism, calumny, and chronic butthurt over the meekest response to her constant smartassery. It takes an empty industry to reward an empty personage, white noise for white noise, for the esteemed pundits to parse.

The clown car is crowded for the Republitards these dark days, made darker still by the fact that enough 'murkins are just stupid enough to vote 'em back in anyway. What would we do without Sarah's free-verse burbling, her snowbilly glossolalia, runway-circling syntax displaying a truly accomplished lack of knowledge on an impressive array of subjects? Friends 'n' neighbors, it really is hard goddamned work to go nearly fifty years in life without being able to converse competently on at least something, even trickier to gull millions of gomers into admiring you for it.

If this politics thing doesn't work out for her, there's still time for her to get into journamalism.

A Small Victory

2011-05-03T20:29:00.000-07:00

A crackling portrait, the fondling of trophies
The null of losing, can you afford that luxury?
A sore winner, but I'll just keep my mouth shut
It shouldn't bother me....but it does
-- Faith No More

Heading into this past weekend, after two solid months of Charlie Sheen/Donald Trump/royal wedding guff from the rancid husk that passes for our corporate media, I had plotted out the usual pained jeremiad lamenting that which has at this point already been long lost. Sometimes it feels good to sing a familiar song, vent spleen into pixillated void, edit it into something passable.

Process, as they say, is important.

Needless to say, the events of the past 48 hours have cast my would-be picayune musings into rather sharp relief. Ever undeterred and still endlessly annoyed by the (seemingly paradoxical) abdication of a vacant institution, I have to lob at least a couple of scuds on the aforementioned inanities. The continued boosting of said inanities only feeds into the lame meme of the lamestream media, yet damned if it is not becoming more and more true.

Useta be that the meringue stories fell into a certain time of year when folks' attentions were presumed to be only incidentally tuned to the teevee. Moving summer-of-the-shark type crap into heavy rotation during March and April only makes one wonder what fresh hell awaits the unsuspecting person who might actually expect something, anything, newsworthy to float through their electronic transom during the summer.

Instead we get a vapid, overblown nobody with a crappy show traveling the country and making a complete jackass of himself; an inbred Hanoverian dynasty desperately trying to sling the tinsel of relevance on its archaic, completely useless offices and ceremonies -- and of course, Charlie Sheen.

Sheen's case is reprehensible for its simplicity, for starters -- a man is self-destructing, seemingly at a mile a minute, in front of America, and fucking with his bosses the entire time, while keeping up a level of whoring and drug intake that would have brought down most people. Everybody loves a train wreck, but not when it's drawn out so far past its shelf like, and not when it culminates in the likes of Matt Lauer pumping some weedy teevee therapist about What Charlie Should Do. Well, Matt, maybe Charlie should do his next bump off yer wife's ass, champ. How ya like them apples? It's just cheap, tawdry voyeurism at its worst.

Trump and the Windsors were just exhausting in the Jesus-Christ-who-in-their-right-mind-fucking-cares sense. The idea that anyone, besides shut-ins and morbidly obese people with broken remote controls, would watch royal wedding crap for three blessed weeks straight is utterly perplexing. It quite literally makes zero sense, except as the most abject, desperate attempt at marketing -- I dunno, tourism, wedding dresses, something along that line.

Considering that family of theirs, the princes seem like more or less normal decent people, who just happen to be able to get pretty much anyone and anything they want. One of 'em got married. Seriously, I mean, big fucking deal, are they going to follow the new couple to Mustique and film them having sex? It's difficult to escape the impression that this is not really a demand-driven market, but rather something that is pimped and pumped until certain segments just give in.

That's also the only sensible explanation for why anyone would watch more than five seconds of Trump's estimable contribution to the body cultural. Yes, F-list has-beens and never-weres threatening each other and pulling out each others' weaves. Why not just beat your own skull in with a large rock and have done with it?

Trump's bizarre attempts at political jabber make his weekly NBC abortion look like fine craft. Perhaps this is all performance art, just another distraction aimed at the already overly-distracted. Nevertheless, the fuck-China, take-their-fuckin-oil, whaddaya-gonna-do-bout-it-fuckface attitude capture perfectly a deeply ingrained, reflexively ignorant posture in the 'murkin body politic. He's the perfect preznit for people who confuse endlessly promoted scenes of Meat Loaf and Gary Busey screaming at each other with reality, much less with entertainment.

For a few years in the late '90s, I had a pirate rig on my satellite teevee system, basically an ancient PC with (iirc) a 386 processor, whose sole function was to simulate code for the satellite card reader. Periodically DirecTV would catch on, disable the code, and you'd wait a couple hours for a new code to pop up online and load (via floppy disk, mind you) over to the system. It was pretty sweet, since we got everything -- all the sports packages, all the movies, all the porn, yada yada.

There were also all the local network packages for something like two dozen markets around the country, New York, LA, Chicago, Jacksonville, what have you. It was cool to check out other local news teams, get some local weather, see what the weather bunny looked like, the usual. You could watch Live at Five at 2:00 Pacific time, Letterman at 8:30.

One thing that became a guilty pleasure -- perhaps because of its total spontaneity, perhaps simply because I'm originally from Los Angeles -- was when the 5:00 LA news would air a police chase, completely live, no delay, nothin'. Sometimes I'd recognize neighborhoods I had lived in or near, sometimes these things would go on for much longer than you thought they could. Some of these would-be getaway drivers (and they always get caught, of course) are pretty inventive, dumb as they are for thinking that they actually have a shot at getting away from the LAPD.

So one fine afternoon an epic chase comes on, goes on for at least fifteen minutes, not in the heart of the city, but the sprawling, interchangeable communities bordering it, your Norwalk, your Bellflower, your Cerritos, etc. Through alleys, around corners, backtracking around blocks, knocking garbage cans, sideswiping and cutting people short, narrow misses every few seconds. Crazy shit. This putz was endangering people, but you almost had to have a grudging respect for his sheer animal will, his utter belief that he would not be caught. The helicopter, the all-seeing eye, captures every move, every dodge, every squealing, frantic turn.

Finally he comes up on an overpass, hemmed in because, well, it's LA and it's fucking rush hour, and you ain't getting near any freeway in a hurry. Sits there parked on the overpass for a minute. Helicopter starts zooming in its focus, so's you could see the profile of the guy through the driver-side window, actually see his face fairly well. Naturally, there is periodic commentary throughout from the meat puppets at the anchor desk, peppered with the usual bons mots from the one in the copter, and by now, they're in the "well, what's he gonna do now?" mode.

Welp, here's what he does, friends 'n' neighbors -- while the copter has its nice tight shot on this gentleman sitting in his ancient, now-beaten Monte Carlo, no doubt pondering the sequences and patterns of decision-making and impulse control, both throughout his life and on that particular day, which led him to this particular fork in the proverbial road, he blows his fucking brains out. If anyone had any doubts about whether these chases were completely live, no delays, they were certainly dispelled that tragic instant. Suddenly it's no longer fun and games. Needless to say, the station was shocked at such an outcome, and made some changes.

There's yer reality teevee, folks. All these circle jerk shows, with their barely-vicarious nonsense, manipulative scripting and editing, and intensely manufactured and programmatic setups, taking weeks to "tell" a "story" that should really take a couple hours (and isn't interesting to begin with), featuring idiots that you wouldn't let clean your gutters, are nothing, just filler between endless ads for overpriced vodka and completely unnecessary pharmaceuticals.

Used to be that if you didn't like a show, you could avoid it by changing the channel. But with endless cross-promotion cluttering up blocks of time formerly devoted at least to somewhat newsworthy subjects, that is less and less the case. This has been amplified by the onslaught of Trump, posturing dickhead bloviating to anything and everything that looks like a microphone, blustery nonsense guaranteed to aggravate our creditors and give credence to the notion around the rest of the world that Americans will fall for damned near any ricockulous notion.

Even, as it turns out, the fuckwitted idea that a casino owner -- you know, the business model where people come in, drop off money, and leave -- who has managed to go bankrupt four times, might be a good or even competent businessman. But again, this seems much more media-driven than truly demand-driven (not to mention, for NBC, a pretty cheap and obvious conflict of interest, for which they really deserve a nice boycott). But it is also an inescapably ugly instance of the innate, lame voyeurism that pervades the popular culture at large. People feel compelled to gawk, even when there's nothing at all to see.

Maybe is the true palpable cultural residue of "reality" teevee -- people no longer have the urge -- perhaps not even the capacity -- to discern what has value and utility, and ignore or reject the toxic emissions of this ocean of dross. At some point, one would think, people might get sick of Trump's obnoxious preening and increasingly dismal choices for contestants. But then, the Survivor thing still seems to be on, weirdly, inexplicably. I still think dropping a crate of weapons on the next site would liven things up.

So. Bin Laden, eh? Good riddance and all that, but it's strange, this woofing, chest-thumping dynamic. The surprise Moe Greene-ing of bin Laden seems to have awakened our inner Homer Simpson, never too far below the surface in the first place.

9/11, you'll recall, itself brought out some baser, more opprtunistic impulses -- suddenly every inbred dipshit who had always trashed NYC as a multiculti librul enclave knew how best to avenge the city's honor, even though the majority of New Yorkers themselves, once the initial shock was over and cleanup had commenced, seemed determined to get up, brush off, and move on. The people with the least direct investment seemed the most bloodthirsty, especially in their eagerness to turn everything ending in -stan into a parking lot. The bloodlust was completely undiffused by important questions, such as who and how, and what the most rational course with the best outcome might be. People just wanted to go fuck up the first guy that looked cross-eyed at them. So we did.

This time, the bloodlust is undiffused by any rational thought about the results of killing bin Laden. It is not going to bring one (1) soldier home from a war zone a day earlier; it is not going to save a dollar or a dime from the military budget. It is still going to be standard procedure to molest travelers and confiscate toothpaste at airports; we will still detain people without charge or recourse, without defense or representation.

But one expects woofing from five-digit crowds at sporting events; that is, after all, the original, time-tested purpose of mobs gathered in stadia, drunk on $8 trash beer, deep-fried organ meats, and an unstoppable sense of self-regard. More offputting was an exchange I happened across yesterday on the public Nice Polite Republicans station, home of the soothing, dulcet-toned panderers of reasonable discourse. One of these indistinguishable gits was counseling a caller who had lost a loved one in the Towers, was still grieving of course, and had possibly achieved closure with this latest news. Good for him; after unspeakable tragedy, everyone needs to find whatever works for them to screw up the courage to soldier on and make the most of it.

But it struck me during the counseling session, not how routine these genuflections to public grief have become, but how invisible the grief of innocents who had our rage inflicted on them has always been. I recall stories of mothers literally digging through gardens of limbs, walled slaughterhouses of parts, looking for some sign of a lost child. I recall Fallujah getting white phosphorus, cheerfully referred to as "Willy Pete", which melts your skin off, being indiscriminately spewed into large cities under siege, to subdue them, force capitulation. I recall Abu Ghraib, prisoners humiliated and raped for the amusement of their pervert captors, and beaten and killed at times. There is never, and will never be, so much as a thought or a care for any of these lost souls, all of them preventable, none of them necessary, a great many of them genuinely innocent of any misdeed whatsoever, aside from being in the way.

Don't get me wrong -- the world is better off without the likes of bin Laden, and "moral equivalence" attempts to square the grief of 9/11 with the grief of the Iraq war will always ring false, as moral equivalence tends to. The SEAL team that went in and accomplished this mission did amazing precision work, truly a surgical strike. There will be foreign-policy implications, but there always are, no matter what we do, right or wrong. There is something here to celebrate and be proud of.

It's the public grief-plumbing that puts me off. It's just the stark, grotesque disparity of it all, one endlessly fetishized and the other long dropped down the memory hole. Most unbecoming of such a Christian nation, since perhaps the most durable tenet of that particular religion may be the principle of empathy.

Although I constantly claim to be "perplexed" by the manifest oddities of the world around us, and its cantankerous, misbegotten denizens, the reality is that the capacity for genuine surprise seems long gone.

Trump Card

2011-04-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Efuckingnough of this combforward tool on my fucking teevee, and these supposed "polls" touting his viability. Is there one (1) lamestream media entity who has the balls to step up and call bullshit on this assclown?

Look, let's break this down into simple empirical components, regarding Trump's supposed interest in running for president:

Either he is serious or he is not serious.
Either he is viable or he is not viable.

Okay then, let's take these one at a time, and lay out rational responses from a responsible media to each instance. Serious or not serious? If he is presumed to be serious, then he should immediately be prodded for specifics. It is not enough to lob cheap "no shit, Sherlock" rhetorical scuds like "increase revenue and cut spending" (which surely will leave generations of economists and politicians scratching their heads, wishing they had thought of such a brilliant proposal), a serious contender gives at least some indication as to how these goals can be accomplished.

If he is presumed to not be serious about running (and I am 99.999% convinced that this is the case), then the media entities in question need to stop giving him high-profile opportunities for his tedious ankle-biting, and call bullshit on him forthwith.

The question of viability is much simpler. Let me put it in a way that even the kids in the cheap seats can see clearly -- if Donald Trump is even remotely viable to become President of these here Yewnighted States, then this country really has well and truly lost its collective fucking mind.

There is absolutely no reason in the world this fucktard should be in any conversation of serious people. Trump is merely another warm body in big floppy shoes, helping to stuff the Republitard clown car. He is there to make Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich look good.

Am I actually concerned that Trump has a shot? Of course not. For one thing, Trump is not serious about running. Oh, he's probably serious enough when he claims he could do a better job. But that's the thing -- he's an egocentric asshole. He seriously and completely believes that he's above ever having to explain anything to anybody. Which is, I suppose, technically true when you own your own business, you get to be boss.

But obviously being a successful politician requires having at least some collaborative skills, of understanding that the way you get all the pigs on your side is to let them have access to the trough. Trump's idea of success is gold-plating the trough and eminent-domaining all the land around it for another tacky casino, declare bankruptcy and scuttle back onto the scene yet again with an armload of cooze and a belly full of gall.

This whole thing is just a stretched out promotional stunt for his stupid fucking show, because what the world really needs right now is maximum eyeballs glued 200 hours a week to Meat Loaf and Gary Busey tearing each other's throats out. I do hope Meredith Vieira, when she gets home from helping Trump whore this godawful mess, takes a good long look in the mirror and sobs a while; if she ever had a shred of journamalistic integrity left, it's just dander in Trump's forehead pelt at this point. Why not just abandon the pretense of "interviewing" this fucking toad, and just replace the Today show with an endless looping promo of Trump's piece-of-shit time-waster?

So. It's a big lie, and everyone knows it -- he's not serious, and he's not viable. The only way he runs is if there's money in it. But on the off chance that you, Tonstant Weader, have the grim misfortune to run into some truncheon-to-the-skull fuckwit of your acquaintance who voices their approval of this nonsense, and wants Trump to run so they can vote for him, there is only one sensible question to be asked of said fuckwit:

If the biggest crisis facing America right now is jobs, then why would you want to vote for some fifth-rate reality show hack whose sole talent is firing people?

Or, a Baby's Arm Holding an Apple

2011-04-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Since the only things this country produces reliably well anymore are perpetual war and perpetual campaigning, it is no surprise to find that Obama has officially tossed his hat in the ring for the election eighteen blessed months from now. It is of even less surprise that the most predictable by-product to emanate from these endless campaigns comes a-wafting from the cloaca of SF Comical columnist Mark Morford:

To the sneering disappointment of the puritanical left, Obama has turned out to be pretty much exactly what he said he'd be during his '08 campaign: flawed, exceedingly moderate, a resolute compromiser, overly pragmatic when he should've been a badass, temperate when he should've been white hot and furious, offering concessions when he should be bringing the hammer down.

In short, Obama has failed. He has not at all been the delicious chocolatey superjesus of radical sociopolitical transformation most on the hard left hoped, prayed and sacrificed precious Prius bumper ad space he would be.

Heh. Indeed. Yes, the peons, it seems, have been insufficiently grateful for all the wonderful things Obama has done for them. Shame on them. Bad peons!

Enough. Look, the man had plenty of opportunities early on to do at least some of the things he said he would do -- end a war of futility in Afghanistan, finish a troop drawdown from Iraq, rein in the rapacious bad-faith behavior of scumbag bankstas. See, I don't have a Prius, motherfucker. I have a house that's worth less than it was ten years ago, because Clinton and Rubin thought it'd be a super idea to gut the Glass-Stegall Act, and to monkeyfuck the securitization laws, leaving the door wide open for Lloyd and Jamie and their henchmen to totally ass-rape the economy, and make everyone else pay their eight-figure retention bonuses. Because they're soooo fucking skilled, you see.

We all get that politics is the art of the possible. The problem is that neither Obama, nor the Democrat supermajority, even tried to make their electoral mandate count. They shot their political capital on an industry-underwritten boondoggle for "health care reform", and came up for air only to find that not only did it not create any jobs, but that it didn't even really resolve the problem it purports to resolve. And then they had nothing else to work with, to get anything else accomplished.

So here we are. And yes, we all get that the Republicans seem to be content sifting through what charitably seems to be a carny freak show of unelectable poltroons -- and worse yet, Newt Gingrich. But really, isn't it part of the problem, that even up against a laughingstock ticket, Obama and the Democrats still always manage to find themselves instinctively punting on first down, or sucking up to the hand that inevitably slaps them?

How else does the fucking budget -- after Obama conceded more than the Republicans wanted in the first place -- get hung up on Planned Parenthood, how does noted sheepfucker Jon Kyl trot out a blatant lie about over 90% of PP's services being abortion-related, and the Dems don't have the stones even to denounce that? And we're supposed to vote for that shit, gratefully, unquestioningly, whatever 'n' ever, amen.

Get ready for another year and a half of this happy horseshit.

Low-Hanging Fruit

2011-04-03T22:27:00.000-07:00

Obama's Libya campaign/non-war has reeked of Kosovo since day one, cynical and half-assed to its very core, and newer info only reinforces the similarities:

Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online.

Well, of course, it figures as much. The Saudis will do damn near literally anything to prevent anything resembling a true democratic uprising, including invading its neighbors. And not entirely without reason, from just about every standpoint -- the Saudi populace teems with young, unemployed, ultraconservative men, not exactly a cure for high gas prices.

And what of all that, anyway? Where in Obama's recent homilies to energy independence has the notion of conservation, of reducing not only consumption but waste, been seriously mentioned? The White House's own energy page pays scant lip service to the idea in its extensive back-patting laundry list, with a brief nod to "increase fuel efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution from medium- and heavy-duty trucks for Model Years 2014-2018". Oh, okay. Well, now that we've got the when (several years down the road, per usual, so whatever claque of gutless poseurs has the reins then can simply eviscerate the measures, however modest), from what to what? Doesn't say, just a brief mention about how "trucks consume more than two million barrels of oil every day, and average 6.1 miles per gallon."

So the path to "energy independence" includes finding new and better ways of deepwater offshore drilling (which has worked out spectacularly in the Gulf of Mexico), and investing heavily in such low-EROEI techniques as shale oil (basically melting chunks of a mountain, and dealing with the hazardous waste) and buying tar-sands oil (basically steaming the oil out of enormous volumes of sand and soil, and dealing with the hazardous waste) from Canada.

None of this takes into account that these are not long-term methods for retrieval, that even beyond the environmental issues, there is the matter of physics and math. The oil is getting more and more difficult to get to, while demand just keeps increasing. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the best way to stretch whatever supplies remain is to conserve. This used to not be a bad word, before marketers figured out that far too many 'murkins cannot help themselves when it comes to self-actualizing through their choice of vehicle.

I say this not as a hater of the internal combustion engine -- I have worked in the manufacturing and motorcycle industries in the past, and appreciate many makes of car for the works of functional art they truly are. There is a freedom and a vigor to the simple act of driving that is difficult to replicate in the workaday drudgery that comprises the majority of existence for the lower 90% of the Globalized Corporate Merchant Principalities of the Yew Ess Ayy.

But we are running out, and that pace will only continue to accelerate as supplies dwindle further and demand ramps up, and maybe someone in the decision-making class oughta stand up and murmur in the affirmative that it may not be the most intelligent idea to drive everywhere in a jacked-up Suburban like some strutting ofay asshole.

This doesn't automatically mean that the bombing of Libya is all about oil, unless of course it is. But even if it is not, one finds more often than not that blowback from foreign policy decisions (or lack of) frequently correlates with blowback from energy policies (or lack of). This is from a lack of coherence, of principle, of even a modicum of foresight and a minimum of discipline.

Shaw was, of course, devastatingly correct in opining that youth is wasted on the young,and that frivolous mentality is certainly writ large in this instance. It is not that living for today is necessarily bad, or that people should live quiet lives of deprivation any more than they already do. But when people live only for today, and collectively pretend that tomorrow will never come, and are shocked when it does show up and there are consequences to pay, it's kinda hard to feel sorry for them when they wonder why gas is going to be five bucks a gallon by Labor Day.

Update: Ahahaha. Of course, it figures. Even as we lob missiles at Qadafi, at $1M per, we're also bailing out his bank. I know I spent a great deal of the Cheney regime kvetching about their consistent incompetence, but sweet jeebus, these chumps give them a run for their stolen money at nearly every turn.

My Booky Wook

2011-04-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

One certainly hopes "Pastor" Terry Jones is proud of himself. After all, it's not every day you can get innocent people killed with your idiot shenanigans; normally you have to be in a decision-making capacity in the federal government to accomplish that feat.

But Jones is no ordinary idiot -- in fact, perhaps inspired by his Yosemite Sam choice in facial hair, Jones has found a fairly innovative way to extend his sheer ridonkulosity:

Two weeks ago, with no advance notice, the burning was on again. The Quran was torched after a mock trial in which the book was found guilty of various transgressions.

Terry Jones howlds trile fer th' Caurt o' Jaybus.

Yes, a mock trial for a religious text. No word on whom "represented" the "defense", nor what, if any, transcript exists. This asshole's theatricality -- a clergyman who packs heat! -- knows no bounds. Straight outta the 12th century, y'all.

Of course, Jones figgers that the barbaric response simply proves his point. And he's not entirely wrong about the differences in response to fairly mundane events -- as corrupt and messed-up as Teh West and/or "Christendom" might be, there is simply no analog in the western world to the deadly riots that occur across Islamistan when someone draws a cartoon or burns some books.

But if we are results-oriented, this is not entirely relevant. The fact is that Jones is a cheap, sleazy provocateur, willing to put people's lives at risk for a stupid stunt. His intent was to antagonize, not to prove some epistemological point.

More interesting is that it hasn't seemed to occur to anyone that perhaps at least part of the reason behind the riots is the desire to let unwanted guests know that it is time to leave. In many ways Afghanistan is a debauched, sick culture, where a bunch of overcompensating child-rapists keep their society square in the dark ages by the systematic, violent repression of women.

Yes, America treats its women like second-class citizens, but Afghanistan treats them like hundredth-class citizens as a way of life. But the complicity of American companies in organized pedophilia -- not to mention American soldiers thrill-killing teenagers and old people, mutilating and desecrating corpses, acting like they're doing the world a goddamned favor by venting their frustrations on the weak and powerless -- brings us to that level. Whatever it is we think we're doing, it's not helping.

Now those are sensible reasons to riot -- except here, of course, where even the open gutting of the world's economy merely elicits more tweets on the comings and goings of assholes like Charlie Sheen or Donald Trump, rather than the immediate defenestration or guillotining of the perpetrators. But it's easier to oversimplify it as another instance of the wogs going batshit over a dumb book.

The decline of the empire continues apace, not only because of our institutional inability to know when to fold 'em, but our collective refusal to acknowledge plain facts right in front of us.

Land of Milk and Phony

2011-03-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

This week's lame Palin analysis drops, in the context of a half-hearted disclaimer, a truth that says as much about the media as it does about Palin:

Who knows whether or not Palin will run for the nation's highest office. But if she does, comments like this one do little to make her sound presidential. For one, even if it was a joke, Palin was making light of something that has to do with the future of this country--the health and well-being of its children. And even if Palin spent most of the talk discussing deficits, health-care reform and foreign affairs, it's unnecessary side comments like these that will--whether she likes it or not--lead the news.

You know, I think we all got it a looong time ago that Palin is an empty-headed smartass. Running one smartass item after the next is, while entertaining, not terribly useful at this point. If in fact Palin did "spen[d] most of the talk discussing deficits, health-care reform and foreign affairs", even we accept the stupid fact that the media will always lead with the halfwitted jab at Obammy, it might be at least somewhat constructive if at least a paragraph or two were utilized to inform folks about Miss Thang's pronunciamentos on those subjects.

Palin has always been most revealing not when lobbing her cheesy punchlines, but when she tries to elucidate an actual opinion, tries to show she actually knows what she's talking about on any issue of importance. I think it's important to offer up to the public what her "solutions" to the Middle East, Iran, Libya, defecits driven by third-rail entitlements and bloated defense expenditures, health-care costs might be. It would, for one, force her increasingly ridiculous and self-marginalizing supporters to explain the inevitable gaffes and incoherencies, the dearth of ideas or solutions, or even the pretense of same.

It might be helpful if someone in our blessed corporate media thought these things important too, rather than spending their Palin time and space digesting and regurgitating one sub-borscht-belt line after another through its bloated cloaca. That would be too easy, and more importantly, counterproductive to the perpetual campaign industry.

Some $500 million or so was spent during the 2008 presidential campaign, and twice that is projected for next year's. It is in the vested interest of the vaunted fourth estate to keep a horse race going, to harvest clicks and eyes, sell ad space and commercials. The endless "will she/won't she" cock-tease keeps the game going, though everyone knows that she's not viable, incompetent, and probably doesn't want the job anyway. Beats workin'.

Duh, Winning

2011-03-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

Onward to the Maghreb! As Hitchens once poetically put it, some people never learn, but then some people never intend to.

Les Mots Justes

2011-03-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

Of course M'sieur IOZ is absolutely correct in this week's unceremonious roasting of ~~Enrique~~Matt Yglesias. The current era of economics reeks more of careerism and credentialism for self-selecting opinion-mongers and audiences, and less of empirical data-crunching and pattern-theorizing. Consider this paragraph of Yglesias' which IOZ excerpted:

The fact that the economics profession can offer so little in the way of consensus guidance about dramatic, crucially important events like the panic of 2007-2008 is a huge problem and a very legitimate knock on the enterprise, but it doesn’t actually undermine the overall epistemic status of the discipline.

First is that the bumptious prose of this sickly little paragraph may as well be a sixth example for Orwell to present in Politics and the English Language. It is merely a hymn plucked in church to appease the faithful. It is difficult -- at least for me, because life is too short to spend too much time reading Teh Woodchuck with anything approaching regularity -- to really know whether these guys actually believe the guff they spread, or they've simply sunk too far into the sales pitch to divest credibly.

It doesn't matter. Just in that stray paragraph one sees much more fundamental errors, namely the classic Princess Bride issue of words not meaning what the user thinks they mean. Yglesias mentions "the panic of 2007-2008", as if those wascally Hunt brothers had tried to corner the dang silver market and caused a stampede. "Panic" is as inaccurate a term to describe what happened as the more tendentious debate over whether the real-estate collapse caused a "recession" or a "depression". An accurate term would be correction, or perhaps heist. "Panic" merely implies unknown causation producing unpredictable results via mass alarm and random collective action.

As opposed to, say, a bunch of boiler-room shysters pushing loans on people they knew full well wouldn't be able to afford them, just so they could slice and dice and tranche a bunch of derivative side bets, knowing full well that their investment in Barack Obama would be recouped when the mathematical reckoning inevitably came. Causation was known, results were predictable, and on the off chance that the engineering of this mess wasn't flat-out deliberate, it was at the very least sociopathically indifferent.

A lesser, but still substantial, semantic failure to follow through in an intellectually honest fashion is the "knock on the enterprise" line. Look, if economics is not an out-and-out religion, as IOZ calls it, with its impenetrable dogma, its cloistered priests, and laity suckaz like Yglesias, then at the very least one can ham-fistedly paraphrase Yogi Berra and point out that it's 90% psychology, and the other half is mathematical.

The problem is, the math side of it has been perverted beyond all honest recognition by the economists' brothers-in-arms, the rentier financiers, who every now and again pay some Indian kid from MIT to swing by the offices of Lloyd Blankfein's subordinates, dump some esoteric algorithm on a spreadsheet for them, and figure out how to plug in the numbers on whatever scheme they devise for the next round of rubes. The banksters neither know nor care how the formula works, or that it doesn't actually produce a tangible good, merely a new twist on the numbers game they run.

Now, I realize that the "enterprise" Matty refers to is economics, but seeing as how that discipline exists more or less symbiotically with finance, perhaps the current lack of, ahem, "consensus guidance" can be attributed to a poisoning of the epistemic well. Finance is not so much an "enterprise" these days -- a system that generates ever more money for ever fewer people, without producing any tangible goods or wealth, even secondarily (such as loaning that money or creating jobs with it) is not an enterprise, it's a racket.

The financiers are always going to maintain the pretense, especially since they have the government by the balls, and the assurance that when the new algorithm becomes mathematically unsustainable, they get bailed out and keep their goddamned bonuses. This is not about the creation of value or wealth, this is about recoupment by the very few from everyone else.

To the extent that intellectually honest economists realize all of this -- and how can they not? -- they are collegially and professionally constrained from stepping up and speaking their minds, fearing to be recognized as dupes to a street-corner hustle, or traitors to the common cause. Financiers move money around, economists track the results and develop arcane theories about yesterday's motions.

But neither group cares to mention the huge behavioral aspect to both, preferring to pretend that it's all mechanical, and therefore predictable and controllable to some degree. And the biggest behavioral factor is the return of a Gilded Age mentality, a smug, patrician assumption by a shrinking claque of well-heeled rulers that the rest of the population are merely sheep to be fleeced.

So no, the lack of "consensus guidance" is not undermining the "overall epistemic status of the discipline". But that status is being undermined all the same, by the failure of its prime movers to simply call things what they really are.

Orwell intrinsically understood the obfuscatory power -- and intent -- underlying cluttered language. It does not have to mean some firebreathing propagandist trying to conceal his true intent; it applies equally well to professional catechists.

Bringing Crazy Back

2011-03-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

With the advent of violent chaos across the Middle East, and chaotic violence in Japan, one might begin to fear that the End Times are near. Au contraire, mon frère! Raving assclown Sharron Angle, last fall's scary-silly entertainment, is preparing to throw her polyurethane foam helmet back into the proverbial ring, assuming she can wrest her arms free from the straitjacket.

It would seem that Sharron Angle is running for a House seat in Nevada. In a video on her Web site, Ms. Angle says she is “running for the United States Congress” but does not name the seat. Presumably it is the one in the Second District, which is being vacated by Representative Dean Heller, a Republican who narrowly defeated her in a 2006 primary run for the position. Mr. Heller is now running for the Senate seat left open by Senator John Ensign, the beleaguered senator who is not running again.

Not that anyone will miss fambly valyews champeen Ensign, who will now and forever be known as the guy who fucked his friend's wife, then tried to buy the cuckold off with some bullshit sinecure. But Heller appears to be cut from the same predictable cloth as the increasingly tedious teabaggers, attaining office during the vaunted Gingrich (that other fambly valyews champ) revolution, and reflexively voting against whatever Obammy's fer.

Not saying that anyone's going to miss a card-carrying asshole like John Ensign, but Heller and the recombinant ascension of Angle would be a statistical offset, and then some. Ultimately it's probably not a huge deal, just Nevada getting precisely what it deserves -- if it really wants it that badly then, to paraphrase Mencken, they should get it good and hard.

More an Art than a Science

2011-03-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

You have to hand it to the American media -- Japan gets hit with the twin power punches of massive quake and devastating tsunami, and in mere hours a good chunk of them find ways to make it all about us, and our deep-seated fears of everything except what we should actually worry about.

Your average 'murkin is many thousands of times more likely to die of stress, obesity, type 2 diabetes, substance abuse, depression, auto accident, and many other things, than from radiation from Fukushima, or Islamic terrists for that matter. This is not to say that I know that there is absolutely no danger in the US from radiation from Fukushima; I am saying that I don't know, which is what the mediots would say if they had an ounce of honesty in them. I will go out on a limb and say that a panic run on potassium iodide in Texas straddles that fine line between merely stupid and flat-out hysterical (and not funny hysterical, either).
Fortunately for opportunistic scumbag and all-around hump Glenn Beck (and unfortunately for the rest of the planet), the aphasic venom he soaks in is not fatal. Though one can always hope.

It is certainly bad enough when a fat, bloated, ignorant nation becomes entirely oblivious to its own bad karma, not only from initiating pointless, perpetual wars, but from trading its future for toys on credit to utterly shameless thieves and frauds. One has to ask, if one is so masochistically inclined as to engage with a subhuman prick such as Beck, precisely what it was that Japan did recently to earn this sort of divine reckoning. (One could also ask the Tokyo governor the same thing, since he sounds like the same breed of asshole, but maybe he gets voted out or forcibly removed from office.)

Putting natural disasters in moralistic contexts is never not going to be intellectually offensive. Most of us know this by the third grade. But wallowing around in this solipsistic narcissism of wondering how international catastrophes will affect us is very nearly as awful.

I'm embarrassed for them, really. I mean, somebody should be.

Re-gyptian Strut

2011-03-10T00:07:00.000-08:00

Everyone is expected to have formed an opinion on Egypt, on the asshole Mubarak, on the beneficence of him being our loyal asshole. The various potentates and kleptocracies that clutter the Middle East provide something of a tabula rasa for the spectrum of what passes for American foreign policy -- power to "the people" in Egypt, so long as they're the right people, and opportunism in Libya, to get rid of a loose-cannon bedouin colonel whose reach finally exceeded his grasp in a stuporous Castro-like tenure.

Notably absent from the conversation -- indeed, even modest official speculation -- is Saudi Arabia, which has an 86-year-old leader and an 82-year-old immediate heir, literally hundreds of inbred princelings after that, and a young, seething, jobless populace to placate. One would think that with that level of uncertainty, some of the more buffoonish tendencies of American vehicular self-actualization might give way to harsh oncoming realities.

One would, as always, be dismayingly wrong. There will be no shortages of single-occupant Excursions and jacked-up F350 king cabs with the requisite truck nuts, not until gas hits six bucks or so -- and then assholes such as those will be the first ones to siphon their neighbor's Honda, or knock over a liquor store to feed their insatiable addiction. One side preaches empiricism, physics and math, scientific prudence; the other pure id and gall and self-indulgence. There will be no respite from high bozoism, only a shift in its prevailing wind. Some halfwit knuckledragging House troglodyte, more likely than not from Texas, will sooner or later insist on opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to contain costs and enable the guzzlers just that much further, just one more hit, man, they'll suck yo dick!

So it goes, while the rest of the country continues its death march into uncharted realms of banana republic disparities, a dwindling cadre of inbred plutocrats manipulating swelling, foundering masses against their own rational self-interest.

Which, of course, brings us to Wisconsin, the latest guinea pig in said plutocrats' ongoing experiment in accumulating the last bits of rotted corpse. Per usual, Chomsky sees right through the Dems' feckless posturing, and refuses to play their dismal game:

The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join [against union-busting tactics] is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions.

The sooner we stop playing this game, enabling the charade of two distinct parties, the clearer the picture becomes. There are no parties; there is a ratchet and a pawl, a device manipulated entirely by vested interests, rentier thugs in $3000 suits who seriously think the peons should fellate them in public for all the wonderful good they do. The amount of contempt people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon have for Main Street, for you and me, is almost incalculable; in fact, it would best be calculated simply in direct proportion to their compensation -- the more they profit from their bookmaking ventures and failures, the more they feel you owe it to them. Make sure you send Lloyd and Jamie a thank you card, m'kay, show your appreciation. They're good guys, really, just ask them, they'll tell you.

Wisconsin is just the start; as states get more and more in the hole, and get rolled into short-run schemes like selling off parking meter rights for the next 70 years to raise cash to pay off this year's bills, the public-sector union-busting tactics will metastasize to other, larger states. California politics is pretty much run through the prison-guard union, but if some sort of deal were to be struck that would allow them to keep theirs whilst throwing other public unions under the bus, of course they'd take it.

The lesson should be pretty obvious to all but the most deluded Beckalo -- that we love the "power to the people" jabber, until it actually occurs, and especially when it occurs here. Nothing scares the political and financial classes -- who, after all, own the very modes of communication by which "information" is officially disseminated -- more than the thought of a sufficient number of peons getting wise to their shenanigans. They needn't fear -- in times like these, people can be counted on to revert to the usual devil-take-the-hindmost mean.

Rumors of Demise

2011-03-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

You know the drill, slammed to the gills -- working on two different case studies for a management control systems class (that finally ended on a high note, with a one-hour presentation/q&a session) and in the running for a promotion at work (that I didn't get, but turned out to be something of a pig in a poke anyway).

But I'm around, keep an eye out, there will be some non-Carlos Estevez material this week. Stay tuned.

Idiocracy

2011-02-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple weeks since this nugget dropped, but it is still hilarious. Apparently CNN has a different understanding of "political" than the rest of the English-speaking world. Asking Snooki Palin anything about anything is less likely to elicit sensible answers than shaking a Magic 8-Ball, but especially a political question.

I'm not entirely convinced Bristol Palin can even put her fingers together in the dark, so the idea of her even knowing about anything enough to care about it enough to run for office and do something about it is incomprehensible. Maybe if The Situation were her campaign manager it would make more sense.

On the one hand, it's hard to imagine someone who was unqualified even to be on a reality teevee show to have the ability or inclination to run for any office whatsoever; on the other hand, the brain surgeons in Arizona just installed Ben Quayle as their US rep, apparently for no other reason besides being the smartass offspring of a notoriously ridiculous (even for a veep) person. Anything is indeed possible here in Jebus' Chosen Land. There are just enough morons to keep literally anyone at least slightly viable.

Super Bowl Shovel

2011-02-06T23:55:00.000-08:00

So I suppose the game ended up the way I bet on it -- not that I bet more than a token amount, but I did take the Packers and the points. They tried to give the game back in the second half, but fortunately, Rapelessburger and the rest of them didn't quite take it back. Still, Dick LeBeau deserves some extra-special mention -- the guy runs what is clearly the most vicious, constantly innovative defense in the league. He's a Hall of Famer as a player and a coach, and is not only deserving of both, but is sorely underrated at both.

But sweet Jebus, what is the deal with the Black Guy Pees? It's like an entire nation somehow mutually decided not to hurt someone's feelings. I don't recall voting on this shit, do you? This group (I hesitate to call them a "band", since that would imply that they play and write actual music) of morons sucks so bad, the light from suck takes several years to reach them.

The use of lit crowd formations, to their credit, did evoke impressive formations from North Korean military drills, as did the incessant use of AutoTune to marginally disguise their utter lack of actual vocal talent. I suppose there must be some number of idiots out there who actually use their hard-earned money to purchase Black Guy Pees Music, since they got invited to the big show, but shit, are these people fucking deaf or what?

Anyhoo, the local kid won, that's all I cared about, to the extent I cared at all. But I think most people would rather see yet another washed-up rock band than this warmed-over halftime horseshit.

Parisienne Walkways

2011-02-06T23:27:00.000-08:00

Hats off to one of the true greats of rock guitar. Gary Moore was a beast, like Hendrix in that he was untouchable when he chose to flip the burners on. But Moore also had that Jeff Beck-like knack with impeccable tone and taste, knowing the right note to hit and how. I recall being influenced heavily at the start by some of the stuff he did on Corridors of Power, Victims of the Future, and Run For Cover, figures which are now stock metal runs, but which were pretty innovative for the time.

Even the earlier jerkoff stuff resonated with solid tone and passion, which is what it's all about. Anybody who doesn't admit that Gary Moore was one of the most underrated guitarists of all time is just flat-out lying. So while I'm certainly sad that he's gone, there are worse ways to go than on vacation in Spain. Here's to the hope that we all go in such circumstances, preferably in the saddle. RIP, brother.

Reaganomics

2011-02-06T23:01:00.000-08:00

Not sure why, with only 200 attendees, Miss Thang's latest bullshit venture into Ventura merits mention, But I guess it fits with the Lucy-with-the-football motif the lamestream media have going for them. With every little fart she poots across the mediasphere, they scramble to cover it uncritically, and she shits on them either way. Sounds like the original recipe for a Wasilla Steamer.

On the other hand, although my dad fucking loathed Reagan, primarily because of his union betrayals en route to political self-actualization (but later relented due to Reagan's Alzheimer-induced fall from grace and ultimate death), I can safely say that, having spent the day chopping firewood and barbecuing steaks for Super Bowl Sunday, I hewed closer to Reagan's ideal on his sainted centennial than did Mme. Palin.

Let's face it, friends 'n' neighbors -- whatever the tiresome jabber offered by Palin and her fuckwitted ilk, the fact is that Reagan, like Nixon, would have to run as a Democrat these sad little days. The sooner people remember that important tidbit, the sooner we might be rid of the tedious guff constantly lobbed by this shit-for-brains snowbilly.

The Big Game

2011-01-31T17:57:00.000-08:00

So everybody likes a local-kid-makes-it-big story, and Aaron Rodgers starting the Super Bowl is exactly that story for this area. Pretty much everyone around here -- excepting, of course, Steelers fans -- are rooting for the Pack this weekend, regardless of their regular affiliation. Everybody at least knows someone who knows Rodgers.

It happens that my wife is a lifelong Packers fan anyway, since her family hails from Wisconsin, but as an added bonus, as an oral-surgery assistant a decade or so ago, she removed Rodgers' wisdom teeth, as well as those of his younger brother Jordan, who is currently at Vanderbilt. So we'll be rooting extra hard.

Palinoscopy

2011-01-31T00:12:00.000-08:00

One assumes that 85% of the free world is with ~~Milhouse's~~Milbank's call to boycott the ongoing public martyrdom of Saint Sarah. I know I'm tired of talking about her, chronicling her misapprehensions, mischaracterizations, and calumniations. There's no denying that her fatuous nonsense has sucked the oxygen out of what passes for rational debate in this country. It's dragged what was already a bottom-feeder's game down to the level of a grub-eating reality-show fametard, which is Palin's true skill -- someone who will do anything for money and notoriety, and is able to get people to root for them, since just about everything in this country has devolved to a spectator sport.

But there is one great lie that can and should be clarified once and for all. That lie is that her detractors "hate" Palin, that they wish her literal, physical harm. Because political language is these days so polarized and polemicized, it's an easy lie to buy into.

I would be seriously surprised if, among all these blogonistas -- including myself -- that have beat up on Miss Thang lo these long 27 or so months, anybody truly hated her. I don't pretend to speak for others very often, but I'll bet money that the vast majority just wish she'd take her winnings and go the hell away. At this point, she's just a cartoon character, and an annoyingly popular one at that, like, say, Justin Bieber. But the difference is, Justin Bieber is not going around the country lying to gullible rubes and house-training them to vote even further against their own rational self-interest than they already do. Nor is Bieber writing books and starring in reality shows, both of which are not-so-carefully concealed platforms for which to spout the usual incoherent word salad of misguided political pronunciamentos. But the upshot is that it's hard to genuinely hate a cartoon character, you just want to not only change the channel, but know that you will see soemthing else when you do so. This broad is more over-saturated than our other favorite show, Dancing With People Who Useta Be Sorta Famous.

Palin has certainly mined a great deal of fandom with her thin-skinned persecution complex, but it's long past time someone called bullshit. The threats and acts of violence, the Nazi epithets and such like, are exclusively confined to the "right", to the extent that the anachronistic left-right construct still has any validity. There is no talk-show host or blogger on the "left" calling anyone a Nazi, or threatening Second Amendment remedies, or using crosshairs on a map/diagram as a checkdown visual. You know who else uses crosshairs? Anti-abortion fanatics, and they don't pussyfoot around with self-serving horseshit about "surveyor symbols". Say what you want about these fanatics, they fucking well mean precisely what they say, and don't try to dodge it.

But Saint Sarah needs to have both ways, all ways. And she is a saint, among her fans anyway, who have already bypassed the usual deliberative process of beatification and canonization, and anointed her outright, primarily for her ability to extend her middle finger to any and all who dare question or disagree with her. The complete lack of anything resembling substance is gravy to these window-licking fuckwits. And, as with Catholic saints, there is a verifiable miracle attributable to Our Lady of the Meth-Addled Welfare State -- she has never been wrong.

Think about it -- since we've gotten to know her, she has yet to say anything true or accurate or in remotely good faith, and despite all that, she has steadfastly refused, with the strength only a modern day Jeanne d'Arc could muster, to acknowledge -- hell, to even budge -- on any of it. Hell, the one thing she does seem to readily recognize is that the more obstinate she becomes, the more her legend grows in the hinterlands, where the unofficial coat-of-arms is a hunchbacked warrior (see what I did there, he's always got his back up! Hi-yo0o0oo!)

So I wish Dana success in convincing his fellow media humps to stop reporting on every twitterfart and undercooked opinion she floats. Usually these sorts of abusive, one-sided relationships are found with pimps and hos, the slapdown followed by the suckup. But it is really the corporate media that have kept her afloat, the bloggerati have merely commented pro or con on either her affability or aphasia.

The latter is definitely, as one might imagine, a full-time job. The fact that she has no clue wtf "Sputnik moment" might mean is just icing on the proverbial cake. Just when you think she's run out of stupid things to say, she goes and entertains you. Just like every other reality-teevee asshole.

Update: Sigh. She really does make it difficult not to loathe her, goes out of her way, in fact, to ensure it. But as usual, the jabbering throngs of dickless closet cases she speaks to are so much more loathsome. Not sure what these losers paid to listen to her shopworn bear-baiting and predictable schtick, but clearly they're not working nearly hard enough for their money. But it is a perfect place for her, evangelizing to a bunch of trophy-hunting freaks, warming up these inbred slobs for Larry the Cable Guy.

Maybe it is (as the anonymous commeter here notes below) time to give hate a real chance. A good place to start would be the Safari Club. I absolutely despise these skeevy fucks. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- hunting is fine, as long as you're filling your freezer. But people who just go out and kill things for the sheer joy of killing are fucking mental, and deserve every misery and tragedy that an entropic, uncaring void can visit upon them. I do sincerely hope that every one of them, the next time they go out to get their rocks off killing something, either the gun jams and blows up in their face, or just jams and allows the animal to step in, rip them limb from excruciating limb, eat their fill, and leave the rest for the vultures and beetles. Fuck these people right in the fucking neck.

Teachable Moment

2011-01-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

So now that another tedious, utterly useless Prom Night has come and gone, and we have judiciously observed the meaningless rituals of political comity and kumbafuckingyah, whatever and ever, amen, let us propose a simple observation: somehow this thrashing dinosaur of a nation managed to go three solid weeks of fulminating endlessly about the motivations and ramifications of a deranged idiot slaughtering a crowd at a supermarket.

But I'll be damned if I heard anyone discuss even the possibility of devising some sort of system that might prevent said idiots from just lurching down to the nearest sporting goods shop, and purchasing a Glock and an extended 30-round clip, no questions asked, no nothin'.

Look, I like guns, I believe in the Second Amendment. I own guns, I know how to use them, and pretty much everyone else here in Alabama, California does as well. And it would certainly be unfair to punish the vast majority of responsible gun owners for the actions of a few deranged individuals. But that is quite a different matter than the insistence that everyone, regardless of temperament, should have equal access to them. I like cars, too, but I get that not everyone is capable of operating them (indeed, there seem to be more willfully reckless, stupid drivers than ever). Even an easy-to-pass test is better than no test at all.

Let's go out on a fragile limb and state categorically that a reasonable competency test is a handy, if certainly not foolproof, device to weed at least some of the yobbos out, provide at least some obstacle to mental patients. Of course this would also require a registration system, or maybe just a "moving forward" registration system, which would still leave some quarter-billion weapons out there free and clear. Not much to worry the NRA's purty little mouths about, but might actually prevent the next ward-o'-the-state from shooting up your nine-year-old at a fucking Safeway.

Before we know it, another "national tragedy" will take place, as it inevitably does. Someone will hole up in his mother's living room and take out a few cops, or they'll go public and shoot up a college campus, a shopping mall, whatever. And we'll have our public rituals, then go right back to what we were doing. It seems to be tacitly accepted as the cost of doing business or something. As long as it isn't us, or someone we care about, served up as target practice for the next lunatic asshole with an incoherent axe to grind. It should be a national embarrassment that volatile goofballs are allowed such easy access to such dangerous firepower, and predictably take out groups of innocents with such appalling regularity.

But because we and our betters in the beltway media are much more concerned with ceremonial pretenses of commonality, it is not even suggested. Nor will it be, until one of their asses gets blown apart by the next desert Pupkin.

Moron Better Democrats

2011-01-18T22:55:00.000-08:00

Coupla points for the slow kidz out in Dummycratville:

When you've shot your legislative wad on, ahem, health care reform (which, like the Holy Roman Empire, may in fact be none of those things), and you lose your supermajority through dickless dithering, and the belligerent new House majority launches a scud across your bow with "Job-Killing" in the title of the bill, your first response should be to call bullshit on that assertion, not whinge about its intemperance. Fucking grow a pair already. This is why people vote for Nader, not to mention Republicans, you cock-gobblers. Talk about bringing a spork to a gunfight.

Sarah Palin, more likely than not by pure accident, did use "blood libel" more or less correctly, if you squint hard enough. The smart move in this case is not to spin your wheels parsing over the latent anti-Semitism of the phrase, but to send forth the appropriate media minions to muse aloud at the ~~ability~~ ~~knack~~ habit Palin has for turning even legitimate criticism into this twenty-four-seven persecution complex of hers. Just one (1) person needs to step up and say, "Look, honey, get off your fucking cross already -- the rest of us could use the wood."

Ah well. Maybe next election, or the one after, or the one after. The political system itself is Lucy with the football.

Trash Talk

2011-01-16T21:28:00.000-08:00

Now, the Jets have gotten a bit full of themselves, but since my general rule thumb in the playoffs is Anybody But Brady/Manning/Rapelessburger, and Baltimore gave the game back yesterday, the Jets it is. But Brady getting called an "asshole" by a certifiable turd like Antonio Cromartie, who has apparently made it his goal in life to fuck/impregnate everything that moves, I dunno. On the one hand, I got your tuck rule right here, Tommy Boy; on the other, it doesn't seem right to get clowned by a guy with 9 kids by 8 women in 6 states.

So we'll see, but chances are the Jets bandwagon will stall right where it did last year. Pittsburgh's D does not give up rushing yards, so either Dirty Sanchez gets that noodle arm of his dialed in, or Rex "You Gonna Finish That?" Ryan and the boys are done for the year.

But at least they've kept it interesting. Meantime, I'll root for local hero Aaron Rodgers and his Packers to get past an overachieving Bears squad next week.

Angry Lo(ugh)ners

2011-01-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

After all the usual hoo-ha over crosshair maps and Second Amendment remedies, and after all the Tucson victims have become useful totems for all sides concerned, perhaps the big takeaway from this weekend's events is how mundane it is anymore. Think about it -- the only thing that gives this story legs is its political context; without that it would be just another asshole shooting up another mall or whatever, and it would already have been forgotten.

The random-shooting-by-deranged-asshole seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon, not that most other countries don't have their incidents of lone nuts gaining notoriety the hard way. But we seem to generate them with alarming frequency, even for a large nation, but especially for a comparatively prosperous one. Violence in Third World countries and American metropolises predominates because people in those areas are frequently constrained in options.

But these suburban and rural commandos frequently have more options, yet choose to steep themselves in the toxicity of whatever's easiest, usually bad drugs and worse ideas. Arizona has always had a deep streak of yahooism, especially in its state politics but also in pretty much every square inch of real estate beyond the Phoenix city limits. It makes sense that something like this, should it turn out to be irrefutably political in nature after all, would happen in that state.

The desert landscape is beautiful, truly, but let's face it -- the people living out there have chosen to spend their lives in a wasteland of dust and scorpions and sweltering heat, while the urban areas live as if their water supply won't be gone in another 20 years, as the Colorado River continues to get siphoned off upstream. It takes a different breed of cat to live in Arizona, and there are some strange motherfuckers out in the boonies.

This useless prick that shot up the grocery store be-in, brave slaughterer of little girls and old women, is presumed to be mentally ill, though he damn sure well invoked the Fifth the second they started interrogating him about a possible Terry Nichols to his wannabe Tim McVeigh (which turned out to be the cab driver who dropped him off -- this fucking clown had a gun but no car.)

And of course on some level he must be, no rational person does this, yet the error is in presuming that his psychosis precludes any and all possibility of lucidity. After being told for several years by self-selected media clowns how Obama is about to institute a command economy and shuttle non-believers off to secret FEMA camps for RFID chip installation, somebody was bound to eventually do something about this imminent threat. Look, let's cut to the chase -- anyone who is sitting through Glenn Beck's teevee show, or buying Sarah Palin's "books", and attempting to glean some sort of coherent political analysis, is by definition mentally unbalanced. Law of averages, people, you get a couple million of these jokers, one of 'em's bound to snap.

In the end, it really doesn't matter what political ideology this jerkoff hewed to, because even reasonable speculation has revealed a great deal about some other folks. Here's the thing -- for the past two years we have watched a procession of increasingly crazy shit, the heightening of already volatile rhetoric, ever more disconnected from facts.

Declaring Obama a radical Moooslim Kenyan socialist, even after he faithfully catered to Wall Street thieves and continued almost all of Bush's most egregious policies. A former vice-presidential candidate schlepping around the country with a bunch of shopworn "don't retreat, reload!" slogans for the rubes, repeated ad nauseam, and endorsing House candidates via a map targeting opponents in crosshairs. A US Senatorial candidate threatening violent insurrection if the losers don't get their way.

Two dismal years of fist-shaking codgers disrupting town-hall meetings by incoherently screaming at their elected representatives. People strapping themselves with AR-15s to attend an event where the president is speaking, a previously (afaik) unheard-of notion. Faux News actively promoting the teabagger cause in a veil of fake populism, and hiring some of the loudest screamers. And so much more. Compared to what, the occasional antiwar protest, with the attendant burning of an effigy or two, and a guy with a Free Mumia tee-shirt.

So you gotta be kidding me that this all happened in a vacuum, that some disjointed and ineffective calls for self-admitted (and proud of it) war criminals Bush and Cheney to be indicted as such offset all this toxic guff these bozos have been leaking from every orifice. There has been an abundantly clear pattern of abusive, vituperative chunder and eliminationist rhetoric, not just at the usual soapbox levels but all the way up one side of this rotted edifice. These dopes try on their little tough-guy poses, getting all Travis Bickle on the full-length mirror before trying it out on unsuspecting passersby. They can't help themselves.

Something will come along, next week, two weeks, to fill this collective emptiness this society has carved between its ears, and out of its heart. And this will all be but a dim memory, another piece of meat for rabid dogs to fight over for our amusement and the Bickles to posture and preen, and pretend that this was a Second and/or First Amendment issue.

The main thing worth remembering is that the real victim here was Sarah Palin. Just ask her.

Hamsters on a Wheel

2011-01-11T22:40:00.001-08:00

Let's cut the proverbial shiznit, a'ight? The "downturn" does not affect everyone, only almost everyone. But not anyone who matters. Have you checked the Dow lately?

The rentiers and grifters and credit default swap scumbags who lawn-darted the economy in the first place are making just as much money as they ever were. And fuckin' A if they don't practically seethe with pure contempt at the peons who dare question their deeds, their judgment, the consequences of their noble actions.

They get all bent about how hard they slave for what they earn, as if 70-hour weeks in an air-conditioned skyscraper with a supply of The Macallan and Ketel One and on-demand blowjobs from the secretary is such a tough ride compared to some unlucky schmuck who has to work three menial, stultifying jobs just to make rent. It does not seem to even occur to them how fucking galling that is to people who are not quite lucky or clever enough to have mastered the black art of corporate bookmaking, and therefore must actually work for a living.

The, ahem, "philanthrocapitalism" is all well and good, but perhaps doing things that actually have impact on this nation's most persistent economic affliction -- its banana republic level of income disparity -- might alleviate the resentment that troubles them so. Failing that, they could always make good on their threats to go Galt on us. Really, I just don't know how the rest of us would manage without being forced to bankroll their collateralized debt obligations.

Second Amendment Remedies

2011-01-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

Nobody could have predicted....

Of course Mesdames Angle and Palin will rush to absolve themselves from any responsibility in this, and clearly this is a deranged individual (who of course must be allowed full access to firepower). No doubt one of their staunch defenders from the 82nd Chairborne will waddle forth with some sort of tendentious horseshit about how Ozzy Osbourne isn't responsible for every dipshit who kills himself with Suicide Solution playing.

But that is not this. This is precisely what Angle made a point of "rhetorically" warning about; this is the exact metaphor Palin chose to use for the entire campaign season. Well, someone locked and reloaded, honey; someone opted for that "Second Amendment [remedy]". How do you like it?

I do hope they're happy, Angle and Palin, if either of them even possess enough self-awareness to admit (if only to themselves) their role in this. More importantly, one or the both of them may slowly start to realize that they've got a tiger by the tail here, that the nasty guff they and their cohort have been peddling non-stop for two years has consequences when it reaches crazier ears.

But they won't, malignant narcissists never do. They just worry about how the blasting of Rep. Giffords -- and a judge, and a child, and others -- will affect them and their prospects.

Bastards of 2010

2010-12-31T23:37:00.000-08:00

[With apologies to the ~~late~~ great Beast.]

Update (1/3/11): Thanks to RD in comments. For months every time I'd tried to access The Beast, I would get an Error 404 message. I had heard that the site was going under at one point, so I just assumed that it had. But the real deal is that my sidebar link was just suffering from a severe case of linkrot, which is now fixed. Thanks, RD!

10. Mark Burnett
Largely responsible for "reality" teevee taking over network and cable airwaves during the past decade. Not that teevee was ever a grand cultural medium, nor have humans ever been quite as exalted as they think they are. But thanks in large part to Burnett's schlocky efforts, anonymous nincompoops consider it a star-making turn to be dumped out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of like-minded assholes, and eat bugs for the amusement of millions of emotionally-stunted couch potatoes.

With his latest entertainment abortion, however, Burnett crosses the line in allowing someone with a lamentable degree of political viability to get paid to pimp themselves -- essentially a two-month campaign commercial in which the candidate gets paid to shill their own happy horseshit.

Sentence: To be dropped on a remote island, forced to eat grubs and deer penises in exchange for life-sustaining basics, only to be shot by Sarah Palin from a helicopter.

9. Fox News
For these guys, the Big Lie is not just dogmatic consistency, it's a proven business model. This year's list alone underscores the fundamental fact that, for a substantial portion of people, "facts" are incidental to the overall narrative they need to remain "vigilant", in the sense that your neighbor is "vigilant" for building a giant cinderblock tower on the side of his house so that he can keep an eye out for unicorns. Has more Republican candidates on its payroll than the RNC, to which it now openly contributes, which at least removes the long-standing pretense of "fair and balanced". Simply calling Fox an irresponsible journalistic enterprise does a disservice to truly irresponsible, yet far less damaging, journalistic enterprises, such as, say, the National Enquirer.

Sentence: To live in the financially, morally, and intellectually bankrupt backwater which it strives to create.

8. The Supreme Court
Ideological handmaidens of corporate rapacity. Purveyors of the periodic charade that Roe v. Wade is the be-all/end-all of jurisprudential knowledge and advancement, whilst bumwipe such as Kelo and Citizens United (not to mention, say, Bush v. Gore) pass through unabated. Possibly an even more sclerotic instituion than Congress, which takes some doing. Home of intellectual reprobates such as Combover Tony Scalia and Long Dong Clarence Thomas, which should be warning enough.

Sentence: Tied to chairs and forced to watch LA Law reruns until they promise to retire.

7. The Democratic Party
The proverbial pawl to the Republican ratchet of awfulness. Considering the supermajority they had after the 2008 elections, pound-for-pound quite possibly the most gutless, ineffectual group of cheesedicks this country has ever seen. Time and again, they found themselves flummoxed by bare minority opposition, undercooked Faux News rhetoric that a sixth-grader could have eviscerated, and a complete lack of internal discipline. It's bad enough when the usual circular firing squad forms, but it seems to be an ineffably Democratic trait to accomplish this feat whilst holding all the cards.

Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the Wall Street rentier scumbags who paid good money to have these chumps look after your bad bets, in which case, they did exactly what they were paid to do.

Sentence: Permanent irrelevance.

6. The Republican Party
From career asshole Mitch McConnell to tanorexic crybaby John Boehner to teabagger godfather Jim DeMint, this is a collection of goofballs and whackjobs right out of a Dick Tracy or Batman lineup. A bunch of moral cretins, acting on borderline treasonous impulses, who would rather stall and further wound an economically reeling nation, just for the opportunity to fuck over Barack Obama. Would probably filibuster a resolution expressing support of Mom and apple pie until they were allowed to attach some district earmarks. Ran two candidates for the US Senate in the last election (Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell) who were so marginal in terms of qualifications and, well, sanity, they made even Sarah Palin look somewhat rational. As difficult as it is to overestimate just what scumbags the leaders of this party really are, it is even more difficult to fathom why supposedly reasonable people would remotely identify with these sociopaths.

Sentence: Unemployment, and benefits have been cancelled.

5. George W. Bush
A solipsistic, birdbrained amateur, who seriously does not appear to understand just how badly he monkeyfucked the country during his reign of error. Still and always a gladhanding butt-boy to the haves and have-mores, if only because he has no concept of anything else. Seriously believes that his biggest failure was his inability to turn Social Security over to ass-raping Wall Street fiends, even after they nuked the economy. A living, breathing, stammering insult to anyone and everyone who has actually busted their ass to earn an honest MBA, or even just worked their way through life. Does not realize or care that most of the shit that's gone down the last several years really is his fucking fault. Still butt-hurt about that Kanye West thing, as if anyone besides Kanye West gives half a goddamn about anything Kanye West has to say about anything. Should stand as a stark warning about putting unqualified morons into higher office, but will probably end up being some sort of totem for the burgeoning know-nothings barnacling their way onto the hull of the ship politic. Brags that he read fourteen biographies about Abraham Lincoln while in office, which may explain why he never got around to learning the nuances of his job.

Sentence: Home mistakenly foreclosed on by predatory slice-and-dice operation that "accidentally" robo-signed his mortgage and tanked his pension on credit default swaps.

4. Barack Obama
In the kingdom of the people without balls, the man with one testicle is king. Constantly treads the fine line between capitulation and collusion. Seems to think punting on first down is a strategy. Not only is unable to garner credit for the few decent things he has accomplished, but has continued many of his predecessor's policies, even after swearing on a stack of Qu'rans that he wouldn't. Has managed to squander a supermajority in less than two years, even with most of the country understanding the enormously bad hand he was dealt. Does not seem to realize just how badly his Wall Street buddies have rolled him, and like Clinton, will ultimately have to hock what remains of his hide to them if he hopes to get what will at any rate be an utterly meaningless second term. May eventually get a clue that the only way to approach a completely thankless job is to say "fuck it" and at least try to take some suckas down with you.

Sentence: Four more years! Four more years!

3. You
You've really let yourself go, yet you don't seem to mind. You've spent most of the last decade watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers and give each other herpes, and are mightily offended at the notion that someone else might think they're smarter than you. You let smug assholes in DC and New York skull-fuck you at every opportunity, and are enraged that they don't respect you. You think it's always someone else's fault, never your own. If you're a man, you think Sarah Palin wants you to jump her bones; if you're a woman, you think she wants to share her secret moose chili recipe with you. You've convinced yourself that it's your god-given right to have a vehicle roughly the size of a Winnebago to run mundane errands around town. You'll fight to the death to protect your right to guzzle and squander, you might even send a protest letter if Jersey Shore gets cancelled, but not much else seems worth the effort. You know your kids think you're a jerkoff, but you have no idea why.

Sentence: Reap the whirlwind.

2. Sarah Palin
The Oprah dream turned on its head -- a petulant, obnoxious smartass, empowered by pure spite and gall. Let's face it, folks -- a person who knows barely half of what they're talking about, and can't be bothered to learn the other half, is not fit for higher office, as if George W. Bush's rotten tenure weren't proof enough of that. Communicates primarily by crafting catchphrases via incessant twittersniping, then repeating ad nauseam in her fundraising road show, since her audience is generally of the sort that needs shit recited to them over and over and fucking over again. Insists on riding fambly valyews schtick until the wheels fall off, yet has a fairly poor slugging percentage with her older kids, and seems content to use the younger ones as props.

Seems to seriously think that Michelle Obama's initiative to discourage childhood obesity is some sort of conspiracy to forcibly keep Americans from choosing to swim in Cheez Doodles and sodium benzoate (and having the rest of society subsidize their excesses). In a decent society, people like Palin would be relegated to harmless bridge club and quilting activities; here, she's a political rock star for morons. Here is America 2010 in a nutshell -- on a recent episode of Palin's reality show, fellow professional pain-in-the-ass Kate Gosselin made an appearance with her in-vitro brood, and at one point, both women apparently complained about the intrusiveness of the media and the hassle of being famous for being well-known. At no point did it to occur to anyone, including the halfwits who actually sit through this dreck, to turn the cameras (or the teevee) off.

Sentence: After attempting to parlay her heretofore humorous political career into talk-show gravy, Palin is dragooned by her army of gibbering maroons into running for President -- and somehow wins, upon which she instantly nukes Pyongyang (on order from her prayer warriors), and sets off World War III.

1. Glenn Beck
Yet another "only in America" success story -- pudgy alcoholic cokehead finds Mormonism and becomes Fox News' most popular moralizer, surely cable's coals-to-Newcastle moment if ever there were one. Makes a tidy living affirming every John Bircher legend and outright lie to unbelievably credulous audience. Calling Beck a professional calumniator would be like saying Lindsay Lohan might have a little substance abuse problem. As the saying goes, every word is a lie, including "and" and "the". Between the simpering fugues and the messianic delusions, Beck's career arc will make a fascinating case study for some future scholar trying to figure out how millions of idiots bought into Beck's pet notion that Woodrow Wilson turned us all into communists. As with most professional jackasses, Beck's success says more about his followers than about himself. It is actually scary to contemplate so many foaming-at-the-mouth morons willing to pay money for the third-rate product this asshole generates; the only sensible explanation is that they are not working nearly hard enough for their money.

Sentence: Fired, preferably from a cannon.

Random Public Service Announcement

2010-12-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to give quick shout-outs to two of the many fine compadres lurking on the sidebar at yon right.

Our good friend The Vile Scribbler at The One True Blog always has an abundance of good stuff cooking, and is really swinging some lumber these days. Politics, philosophy, atheism, what have you, with nasty good humor and at a prolific pace.

Collapsitarian emeritus Dmitry Orlov, usually a fairly intermittent poster (like I can talk), has been throwing down some excellent jeremiads, and added some interesting guest posts into the mix as well.

Birth of a Notion

2010-12-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

On the one hand, one understands the administration's reluctance to directly engage the foaming retards demanding that the Kenyan Moooslim produce his papers. On the other hand, it's nice to see someone finally willing to stand up and call "bullshit" on these chumps.

Mr. Abercrombie, who represented Honolulu in Congress until leaving Washington to run for governor, said he has initiated conversations with his attorney general and his health secretary about how he can make public more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.

Good luck with that, but of course the real problem is that the actual document could be brought out at a press conference, and the birther goons would still find something hinky with it. Empirical evidence won't convince them, because they are never evidence-based about any issue, this particular one is just a convenient cover for their baser impulses.

Still, ignoring them hasn't made them go away or shut up, so maybe sunlight penetrating the edges might encourage them to scuttle back under the rocks whence they emerged. At the very least, to stand up and stop taking shit from these bozos on even one (1) issue might prove contagious. It is, after all, the season of hope, n'est-ce pas?

Big Balls

2010-12-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

No chance, sadly, that these dickholes would ever learn anything, no matter how long or how patiently you sat explained to them why this is inherently racist. Their Hamlet-without-the-prince reinventions of the causes of the Woah of Nawthun Aggression are so ingrained, it will take generations to weed out of them, if it ever really is. You'd think that they would, at least at some point, bother to read their own founding documents. As with any (by definition anti-empirical) religion, this is unfortunately S.O.P. with this particular sort of mouth-breathing boob.

I suppose we should just consider ourselves lucky that only three hundred of these dipshits bothered to attend; it's almost enough to make you forget that they also most likely drive cars, have kids, and vote. With the sesquicentennial and all, get ready for at least five straight years of this shit, starting with Il Bubba di Tutti Bubbi, Haley "Six Chins" Barbour.

Oprah, Mencken, Mencken, Oprah

2010-12-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

So, who wants to break it to Miss Thang that a nation of slack-jawed rubes, that has basically spent the last decade watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers on the teevee while their pockets were picked and their jobs sent to Shenzhen, is exactly dumb enough to put Sarah Palin in the White House?

Never put anything past the 'murkin public, dearie. Not only is there an abundance of assholes ready and willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, they also seem to think that noses grow back after you cut them off. Still not sure whether that is better or worse than people waiting for Oprah to tell them what to do or read, or for Barbara Walters to tell them who the "most fascinating" people are (an annual exercise in tedium that somehow manages to exclude even marginally interesting people as a general rule).

It never ceases to be a source of amazement/amusement to me, the people who we choose (or have chosen for us) to dictate the tastes and tempo of what passes for cultural discourse. Oprah's preening dismay at La Palin would have more credibility if, you know, she hadn't had Palin on to pimp Going ~~RougeRug~~Rogue last year, and again with her bohunk pincushion daughter just a few months later. If you aspire to be a tastemaker, start by learning to tell the difference between soup and wastewater.

Update: This guy, who bravely took a bullet for the rest of us and read Sarah's latest two-ply scrawl, hits the nail right on the head: "There is no historical analogue in the political history of the United States because Palin is not a politician. She is Oprah for another segment of the country."

He's right. And fortunately, Palin is just smart enough to realize this, and to realize that she can make Oprah money doing that, rather than Obama money dicking around in politics. Which is a good thing, because America is just dumb enough to vote for her, given half a chance. Let the wisdom of fools trump the spiteful foolishness of mobs. Or something.

Season's Beatings!

2010-12-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

You've probably already read this Ricky Gervais piece by now, but if not, you should.

Something to consider in the wake of the Don't Ask Don't Tell law finally being repealed, as people congratulate one another over the US finally joining every other industrialized nation in something, if not health care and education -- an openly gay politician has a much better chance of getting elected than an openly atheist politician (if there are any). Like Gervais, like most atheists, I choose not to pester people, religious or not, about my personal belief system. But I think most atheists could put their senses of morality and justice up against those of any devout person, and come up as good or better in comparison.

Generally we're just quiet about it, because we all have shit to do, and life is too short, and it's tough to talk people out of that particular tree; evidence obviously won't sway them on the subject, so rational discussion is usually not an option. But one could point out that there is only one openly atheist federal legislator (Pete Stark), and that's pretty much it at the federal level. Every time there's a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, the endless "diversity" trolls start counting gender and race as finely as they can, but when you get right down to it, it's six Catholics and three Jews.

It's easy to point the finger at American Christians -- sweet merciful Jebus, is it easy -- since most of them seriously seem to think that their religion was created in toto sometime between the landing of the Mayflower and the founding of the Republic. The idea that it could actually be a hodgepodge of cultures, histories, and traditions that co- or even pre-existed their usual touchstones does not seem to have even occurred to them. This does not, however, let the Euros off the hook, with their carefully sculpted hypocrisies -- state religions, symbols festooning public buildings, yet very little actual keeping of the practices. But very nice seasonal festivals, especially in the Germanic countries. So it goes.

Contrary to popular belief, atheists do have hope -- hope in the rational and empirical, hope that humans stop fine-tuning their traditional belief books to amplify their personal preferences, hope that they can eventually get over themselves and just leave other people the hell alone, instead of telling them what to believe or not believe.

Peace on Earth. Merry Christmas!

Useful Idiot

2010-12-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

This has to be one of the most willfully obtuse screeds to litter the NYT in quite some time, and considering the roster of chuckleheads who poop out filler for them on a reg'lar basis, that really is saying something. Certainly the Arab world, as a whole, needs to do a better job in weeding out the regressive nutballs in their backyards, but for one, Persians are not Arabs.

Cohen seems blessedly ignorant of any possibility why some inhabitants of that part of the world, after a couple straight centuries of varying levels of colonialism, might tend to assume the worst of the US and Israel. The question is not that it might sound preposterous that the Mossad would have remote-controlled sharks attacking people at Sharm el-Shaikh; it does sound preposterous. But only because sharks, insofar as we know, cannot be lowjacked and utilized as remote-kill devices, not because there's no way Israel -- who, let's recall, just a few months ago sent two dozen agents into a Gulf State hotel to whack someone, pissing off several countries' diplomatic corps with their counterfeiting of passports -- would ever do such a thing.

It's as if this guy, not even sixty years later, has never heard of, say, Kermit Roosevelt.

Make a Joyful Noise

2010-12-21T17:34:00.000-08:00

OK, it's basically an update of Dick in a Box, but that's not a bad thing. One of the more fun things to hit the teevee in recent memory.

Exception to the Drool

2010-12-05T16:52:00.000-08:00

Been meaning to touch on this gem for a while, but busy week, blah blah blah, you know the drill. Besides, if this is an article, you know it's a slow news week in Bullshit City.

Anyhoo, let us cut the proverbial crap -- for each and every one of the turd-bruglars mentioned trumpeting about "American exceptionalism", it is a vastly different concept than what most sentient beings assume. The phrase actually used to connote, get this, a certain level of exceptionalism, that even beyond the blood-soaked history of slavery and genocide, there was a common desire to achieve and excel. This, along with serendipitous geography and the sort of gregarious aggression that stupefies Europeans, translated into progress over the last century.

But the exceptionalists have something more sinister, less achievement-oriented in mind. What they really mean is the divinely-ordained right to push inconvenient others around, to dictate the tempo of regional and global activity, to drive the world's bus even as the country itself devolves into an obese corporate despotism with banana-republic levels of income disparity. To such people it makes infinitely more sense to spend $3 trillion to depose and kill Saddam Hussein, displace or kill 10% of the Iraqi population, and leave the country a violent Iranian satrapy, than to spend even one-tenth of that trying to make sure that the public education system actually produces thinking, reasoning people.

They'll throw out some pseudo-populist red meat about those darned bankers, but rest assured not a one of 'em would turn down a fat donation from Lloyd Blankfein or whichever Armani-coated homunculus. But they do get an inordinate amount of mileage from the one-o'-yew pose.

This cheap anti-intellectual posturing always gets traction when one of them (you know which one) misspeaks, then is apoplectic at the prospect of it getting reported. This is the downside of having the cowed corporate media report every blessed thing to fall out yer piehole, dearie -- they regurgitate the fuck-ups as well.

The takeaway from that particular non-story is not whether Palin knows the difference between North Korea and South Korea, anymore than anyone seriously believes that Obama thinks there are 57 states. People misspeak. It happens. (Of course, the responses of each when people make fun of them for it is telling; Obama never says shit, while Palin instantly gets defensive and has a holy hissy-fit that someone is not completely deferential to her.)

Palin probably understands which Korea is which in the context of American interests; that is, she knows which one is designated as "our friend". That's not necessarily an insult; for all his rhetorical furbelows and oratorical vamping, Obama has so far demonstrated precious little real acumen for foreign policy detail. Aside from his stance thus far on Iran, one would be hard-pressed to delineate substantial differences from what he's doing, and what his predecessors or opponents would have done.

If we accept for the sake of argument that Obama does not have over Palin -- aside from proprietary information granted the office -- any substantial advantage in profound knowledge regarding the Korean peninsula, we then have to keep in mind their respective approaches. That is, a leader who does not possess deep insight on a particular subject surrounds himself with people who do. And that is the big difference -- where Obama will at least in good faith try to find someone temperamentally inclined to defuse volatile situations with unstable despots, Palin would pick John Bolton.

This is of a piece with her "commentary" as such, on pretty much any given subject, the predisposition to escalate virtually any conversation with obnoxious guff and mendacious flapdoodle. People who are looking for a problem can invariably create one if need be, the better to rally her legion of angry, ignorant, gibbering morons to the most tendentious arguments.

In the past, I might have been self-righteously offended at yet another god-bothering dickhole overtly insinuating that the religious, despite at least two thousand years of bloody proof to the contrary, are inherently more moral than non-believers, whether or not they practice what they preach, whether or not they know what they're yapping about, simply by virtue of belief. But really, it would be like leaving my dog in the house, and getting angry when she shits on the rug. The dog is doing the only thing it knows how to do; the fault is mine for not kicking the stupid fucker out before I left.

So it is here. The only question is whether we (whoever "we" may be in this case, perhaps folks with IQs above 90) still have the energy to rub their noses in it when they soil the rug.

The Evil of Banality

2010-11-18T00:27:00.000-08:00

Is there no blessed end to this vapid cow?

"Of course, we all had to bite our tongues — more than once — as Tripp's father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spreading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric," Palin writes.

Jesus Christ, lady. Project much? Has she done anything over the past two years besides fatten her wallet by traipsing around the country talking shit, bearing false witness -- which, and I may be wrong, since I'm a godless heathen atheist (especially if someone like Palin is remotely a "Christian"), explicitly violates an actual commandment -- and jacking up the rhetoric to a height that even a sizable chunk of Republicans can't stomach in good conscience?

Of course, it's always a mistake to use the phrase "good conscience" in the same sentence as "Palin", since the latter truly has only a nodding acquaintance with the former, having sold whatever soul she may have had for the cheap and easy rewards of fake populism and reality teevee.

Bristol Palin has been featured on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," but Sarah Palin has a few words for Fox's "American Idol." She refers to "talent-deprived" contestants who suffer from "the cult of self-esteem."

"No one they have encountered in their lives — from their parents to their teachers to their president — wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth," she writes. "So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson."

Uh-huh, and apparently an entire nation has decided not to hurt her daughter's feelings, because it's not like she can, um, actually dance, nor is she actually a "star", even by the loosest definition of that term. She's famous for exactly two things -- getting knocked up by an oily bohunk, and being the offspring of an increasingly tedious political bobblehead. But it's nice that America's Sob Sister has the fucking balls to lecture the rest of us on how to set our kids straight, seeing the bang-up job she's done so far.

I think it would actually be edifying -- for Palin, for her supporters, for the people who are sick of her very name and presence at this point and wish she would just take her pelf and scuttle back into the underbrush -- if she ran for president. I still think it's doubtful, if only because she's just smart enough to realize that the real money is in the cock-tease.

But she is also an irrepressible narcissist, increasingly in love with the sound of her own grating voice and peanut-gallery aphorisms on Teh Twitter. The idea of her schlepping around the country for two years, weighed down with her rubber-glue shields and campaign-prop progeny, growing increasingly exasperated at the prospect of only being able to preach to the choir, exhausting herself for the pleasure of self-selecting jerkoffs, is interesting to contemplate.

Perhpas the most telling sign that she's topped out is that, while a bunch of her no-name House dimwits made the cut in the midterms, almost all of her high-profile picks lost. Alaska seems to have launched its own in-house write-in campaign to shit-can professional asshole Joe Miller, almost as a direct rebuke to her, to send lifer Lisa Murkowski (whom they had rejected in the primary) back instead.

After having this braying fool and her tedious jabber halfway up our collective asses for two endless years now, the main takeaway is really not that Palin is offensive, or even especially stupid, in a profession full of card-carrying morons. It's how predictable and tiresome she became quite some time ago, if you think about it. The last eighteen months, at least, have been the same Johnny One-Note schtick, unvarying -- and worse yet, uninteresting. One of my favorite bits is that she has yet to say anything that is either true or correct, but let's add one to the mix: when was the last time she even said anything interesting, as opposed to merely provocative or obnoxious?

Politics is at heart a clown college, and American politics is little different fromt he rest of the world in that regard. Dipshits and poltroons abound. But in America, where things are supposed to be bigger and better, one might expect a higher grade of buffoon. Palin has neither the pedigree of Fredo Arbusto, nor the avuncular charm of Fred Thompson. She is merely the personification of the garden-variety uppity dunce you can stumble across, double-parked in a Sam's Club aisle, any given day of the week.

Just another area in which we've fallen behind. The least we can do is demand a better class of jackass, not this prickly, grudge-nursing hausfrau who, despite attending five colleges to cobble together a fucking communications degree, cannot assemble a coherent sentence.

Bobocracy

2010-11-17T23:51:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, but this one is moronic even by Bobo standards:

The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.

Hanh? Lemme get this straight -- one of the most steadfast, indeed tediously consistent, preachers of the technocratic gospel is now protesting the supposedly topsy-turvy nature of What's Going On? Surely a heaping helping of doubleplusbullshit can't be far behind.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Fair enough. Whence the morality, the righteous indignation, against the thieves and scammers who shitcanned the economy, forced the taxpayers to bankroll their "mistakes", are now sitting on hoards of cash that they won't lend out to rejuvenate the economy, and have dragooned a like-minded bunch of abettors to fuck people out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork? No, of course not; Bobo merely hangs his balding pate, shaking his head sadly at the Spock-like bloodlessness with which machine-messiah liberals insist on running our proud, tradition-rich society. This is truly a feat of some estimable proportions, to completely look past and implicitly absolve the destructive, sociopathic greed of a niche of derivatives pirates, and lob dickless wads of disapproval at the management style of -- wait for it -- a bunch of dickless drones who don't have the balls to take on their benefactors.

Lloyd Blankfein could demand a sacrifice of a thousand barbecued live infants for next Walpurgisnacht, and the Democrats would cringe timorously and murmur tepid disapproval, and people like Bobo would berate said Dems for their lack of support for our fine capitalist insect overlords. This is a rotten fucking little system all the way around -- the people who run and rape the finance system, the people who are supposed to legislate and regulate it, and the people who are supposed to analyze and report factually with at least a trace of intellectual honesty -- and it won't change until we set up a guillotine on Wall Street and make an example of some of these humps.

I do not understand why this has not been done yet. Perhaps at some point enough of the folks who are getting ass-raped out of their houses will band together and do or demand something. Or they may choose to wonder instead if Snooki takes it up the poop-chute. (Answer: mos def, but only if the hot tub's hot and the Four Loko is room temperature. A lady has to have her standards, even if said lady is really a transvestite Oompa-Loompa.)

Yes, if only we could just run things with a bit o' common sense, as if wage stagnation, income disparity, and banana-republic-level wealth stratification have not been ramping up and destroying the middle class for three decades now. I have absolutely no clues where Serious Thinker Bobo proposes that the "low debt" and "high savings" are supposed to come from, perhaps that bottomless pit of moxie and/or gumption that well-heeled bootstrappers like himself assume exists somewhere out in the vaunted flyover country that media dipshits constantly champion, but never seem to actually reside in.

With any luck, he'll someday find out firsthand. Really, if the market for corporate butt-boy suddenly fell out and Bobo had to make something resembling an honest living, it's difficult to tell what actual skill he has. Anybody can peddle tendentious "opinion" guff on unsuspecting passersby -- it's called blogging, and there's an infinite variety of better content produced for free across these here intartubez. At some point his toadying may no longer be cost-effective, and his periwinkle-collar commiserating may be put to the test.

The Memory Hole

2010-11-17T22:01:00.000-08:00

The Great Revision continues apace, enabled not only by the usual complaisant chattering journos, but the éminence grise himself, a man literally without a pulse, but with a passion for gloss and invention that only a self-serving bastard can possess:

Addressing a crowd of 2,500 supporters and Bush administration veterans, Mr. Cheney said the response to Mr. Bush’s book showed that the country had begun to re-evaluate him.

“Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were,” Mr. Cheney said. “When times have been tough or the critics have been loud, you’ve always said you had faith in history’s judgment, and history is beginning to come around.”

....

His dry wit seemed intact as he took a poke at Mr. Obama’s recent admission that there were no such things as shovel-ready public works projects. Referring to the groundbreaking, he said, “This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

Yes, and we all know what they're shoveling. They never stopped, really, they just took a break for appearance's sake, and now the shoveling recommences.

Cheney may just very well be genetically predisposed, hardwired to the extreme, to act as hatchet man for whatever slimy boss he toadies for. He's been doing it since the Nixon administration, it's second nature, the way he steps in to let Fredo appear to be above the fray, above the mess that Obama may now officially own, but nonetheless did indisputably purchase on consignment from these two bozos, the continued existence and success of whom is proof enough that karma is a polite fiction.