Beg to Differ

There's no need to statsplain the obvious confirmation-bias arguments, that people tend to believe what they want or need to believe, despite the facts. I honestly hope no one bothers with the hardcore maroons. There's just no percentage in it, and in fact, sometimes it has to be acknowledged that there are simply some people who do not learn the obvious and see what's in front of them until you break one off in their ass.

Look, when you say, essentially in the same argument, that people won't respond to facts, and that you can't convince them, you're admitting upfront that it's a waste of time to try to reach out to them. You might be able to sway them if they meet you halfway, engage with some semblance of intellectual honesty. Let the rest of us know if that ever happens to you.

The Right, Stuffed

Of course "right people" can (and for the most part should) be interpreted to mean whites, but the teabaggers' disdain runs deeper and broader than that, and who comprises the "right people" is even simpler than that. They really just don't want any gubmint dollars going to anyone besides themselves, or some rich asshole who might "create" a "job" for them, even if they're beyond working age, or don't have any marketable skills, or are too addled on meth and/or oxy to do much in the first place.

Working in social services for several years now, I've seen and heard many people and stories in this area, both pro and con. One of the most common sentiments is that people shouldn't have children they can't afford, which is reasonable enough in principle. Nobody wants to feel like they're being forced to subsidize the bad habits and poor impulse control of others.

But many of the people saying that have nothing at all to say about the billionaires and corporations that they're also forced to subsidize. They have an iPhone, but no reservations about the conditions under which their devices are constructed, and no thoughts about Apple offshoring billions of dollars in order to avoid paying taxes. They shop at Wal-Mart, but can't be bothered to care about the fact that if the employees can't get by on their shit jobs (and can't get a second job because of unpredictable scheduling constraints), they have to seek gubmint services to supplement the shortfall. Great racket for the multi-billionaire Walton family, to soak up the profits and force taxpayers to pick up the tab for food stamps and medical care.

The teabagger "movement" itself, regardless of what its addled adherents think, is bought and paid for by Koch Brothers types who hire shithead consultants who know how to sell shit to these rubes, over and over again. These are the people who lose to tic-tac-toe-playing chickens at county fairs. That people like Reihan Salam and Frank Luntz and all the others continue to have lucrative careers either selling the scam or writing about it proves that maybe the rest of us should just get in on the racket, since it never seems to run dry.

Ipse Dixie

It's somewhat heartening to see how quickly The Market Has Spoken on retailing items emblazoned with the 'murkin swastika. If I were of more cynical mind and heart (I know, I know), I'd probably come up with some catchy bullshit slogan about the noble resistance to political correctness and move some "collectible" swag on CafePress or such like. Git 'em now before they take yer guns!

Do rednecks really think anyone buys their bullshit rationalizations about what that flag "means" to them, that it somehow no longer means what it has always meant? Since when do symbols of genocide and brutality and institutionalized cruelty get to magically shuck off their history and start over again? More importantly, why would you want to do that?

The idea that the Traitor Loser flag now just stands for "courage, family, and good times" is just ludicrous. It cannot escape its history so easily, or indeed at all. It is the emblem of the eternally butthurt, of people who take some perverse pride in being descended from people who fought against their own country for the right to own and brutalize other human beings. It is not a point of pride, it is a point of shame.

Slavery and its vile structure is a stain on this nation's soul, one that the Founding Fathers saw and understood, and regrettably did not move to correct quickly enough. But once they finally did move to correct it, the southern states felt more obligated to their disgusting institution than to their country.
They lost, and paid a more than fair price; if anything, in retrospect, the Union clearly didn't finish the job and beat the stupid out of 'em.

Now, while it can no longer stand that public places show open support for this, I really couldn't care less if people choose to fly the rag as individuals. Freedom of speech and all; if people want to tell the world that they're assholes, I encourage them to speak loud and remove all doubt. But by the same token, they should expect their self-serving nonsense to be repudiated by people who have actually watched Selma and 12 Years a Slave, and read the Corner Stone speech, and understand exactly what "states rights" and "heritage" they are referring to.

Ordinarily I root for losers and underdogs, I like rebels and people who tell The Man "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". But this is just plain pig-headed obstinacy for its own sake. The default excuse for the rapists and killers and vicious oppressors of the good ol' days is that they were people of a different time. They certainly were, and it certainly was a different time, and the best way to ensure that the mores and rationales of that misbegotten era stay in the past is to stop memorializing the schtick and totems of that era. They need to either let go and get rid of the damned rag, or get used to the rest of the world calling them on their bullshit.

Endless Kabuki

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -- Frank Zappa
Hollywood is like high school, but with money. -- Martin Mull

Traditionally the "silly season" for "news" has been in the summer, since people (somebody, anyway) are on vacation and paying even less attention than usual. But it seems like this week -- heading straight into what is an unseasonably nice weekend here in the NorCal (I'm barbecuing steaks in about an hour, fool, so suck on it, snow country! Global warming, amirite?) -- has had more than its rightful share of sheer nonsense.

Starting with the State of the Union, a completely useless pseudo-political appendage, nothing more than an extended plug for the now-perpetual campaign that undergirds this nation's version of political engagement. Yes, Obama managed a few bons mots at the stone-faced dipshits on the other side of the proverbial aisle. He's always talked a good game, that's how he got in. Walking said talk has always been another matter, the tedious, mindless intransigence of the opposition notwithstanding.

Somewhere along the line, the SOTU has morphed from a routine of the president giving the speech, and an individual from the opposition party being appointed to giving a single rebuttal, to multiple responses in the same key, all of them stupid. It would be one thing if the respondents each had a fresh take or perspective on what, let's face it, is simply a barrage of self-serving hortatory rhetorical boilerplate. But they don't; instead of orchestrating their views, the teatards all play a triangle, and ting it at random intervals, or perhaps to some indiscernible inner rhythm.

I think we all had the most fun with soup-brained cornhole Senator Bread Bags, who apparently grew up in Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the mid 1930s. Listen close, you dingbat -- I grew up poor, with farmers and dairymen in my family (though we didn't get the gubmint subsidies Senator Hawg Ballz' kinfolk got, apparently not enough to buy her actual shoes). I know what it's like to wear the same clothes and shoes two years at a time, to stretch the same dinner three or four nights.

But I never wore bread bags over my shoes, not the least reason for which is that bread bags are not particularly known for their exceptional durability; they are, after all, made specifically to encase a food item which typically lasts less than a week. I mean, we all know these "stories" are 100% grade-A bullshit, but usually there's at least some believability to some of them. Hawg Ballz didn't even bother to brush the peanuts off this one when she pulled it directly out of her ass.

Hey, whatever. If you're the sort that takes some sort of weird "pride" in stuffing plastic bags and cardboard into shoes that really should be replaced, more power to you. Hell, you might be up for the one-two jib-jab of the King and Queen of Holy Derp pretending one more blessed time to throw their pointy hats in the ring. Will anyone fall for it this time?

Do we really need to ask? No matter what the question is, regardless of the ninth-circle example of sheer stupidity, whenever you read it and ask if anyone is really that fucking dumb, invariably someone shuffles forward, finger jammed into nostril up to the third knuckle, as if to say, "Uh, yup."

Trump and Palin are just two of the speakers -- and you know I use the term loosely -- gathered at something called the Iowa Freedom Summit (because "Fuckfest 2016" would have been too obvious). A larger collection of card-carrying shitbirds you will not find outside of a state penitentiary. These are people who literally cannot wait to destroy what's left of their country, spread the profits among themselves, and then find newer and better ways to export said destruction as far and wide as possible.

The icing on this shit sandwich of a news week is the manufactured outrage over Michael Moore and Seth Rogen tweeting smartass remarks of mild dissent regarding Duh Most Patriotic Movie Evar. You see, when it's some frog rag getting lit up over its disparaging remarks about Islam, every conservadouche is suddenly a fucking free-speech champeen, never mind that Charlie Hebdo had said nasty things about the Catholic Church as well. But it's all good because booga-booga-moooslim.

But a couple people say that the movie felt a little propagandistic (gee, ya think?) and even Dean Fucking Cain (hey, I kinda remember him, I think) comes unglued. You would think that Moore had directly referred to Chris Kyle (PBUH) as a "coward," rather than mentioning that because Moore's uncle was killed by a sniper in WW2, Moore's family had routinely referred to that mode of killing as cowardly in general. (For the record, I happen to disagree; for the most part, killing is killing. I'd say a drone bombing of a wedding party is pretty fucking cowardly, though.)

And you'd think that Rogen had called Kyle a Nazi or something, instead of merely alluding to the reputedly (I haven't seen it yet, not in any rush, will probably Netflix it eventually) propagandistic nature of the film. And so now Dean Cain and, um, Kid Rock want to kick Rogen's ass or something.

There's a thread in the tenor of these hirsute defenders of Chris Kyle's sacred honor, as if they themselves had a vested interest. More to the point, the "he did this in order to give you your rights" tack is just nuts. I don't have an issue with Kyle's feelings about the people he shot, or Iraqis and Muslims in general. No doubt most of the individuals Kyle encountered or dispatched were, in fact, what most of us would regard as "savages"; I sure as hell can't think of many better words to describe the sort of motherless fucks who torture people with power drills.

But that is orthogonal to whether Iraq or any of its demonic hordes presented anything resembling an actual threat to the Homeland, or that we even had a clue as to what sort of people we were supporting or aligning ourselves with. "Destabilizing unfriendly regimes" has a nice ring to it, for the ear of the hegemon; the reality of it is much different, now more than ever. But it's not like any of the people Chris Kyle killed from afar were on the verge of hopping a plane the next day so they could strap themselves with Semtex and ball bearing and hit the nearest mall food court. Yet that seems to be the thrust of the arguments, the japing at Moore and Rogen (who, if you haven't heard, are fat).

Maybe when Martin Mull famously opined that showbiz (and that's all any of this is, folks; you might as well have TMZ doing political coverage anymore) was like high school with money, he was being too generous. Because these days it seems more like preschool.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any honorable Gentleman will question it. -- John Stuart Mill

Hope this is what you wanted,
hope this is what you had in mind,
'cause this is what you're getting.
I hope you choke on it. -- Tool, Ticks and Leeches

For all you election junkies, this article is as exhaustive a breakdown of your proverbial "swing" states as one could hope to find. Ultimately, though, it is also as disheartening a read as one might suppose. Putatively Democratic candidates who can't run fast enough from -- or hell, directly against -- their duly elected president, because they're deathly afraid of pissing off their rube constituency.

Of course, it doesn't help to have the usual compliant and complaisant corporate media, who in the course of chasing their precious narrative would much rather talk about how Bruce Braley and his wife are kinda jerky about their neighbor's chickens, rather than how Joni Ernst is just another clown-car teahadi in a folksy drawl and a Tupperware saleswoman smile.

The real narrative to be understood here is how the teabaggers overstepped in 2010 and especially 2012, and that they're learned their lesson this time around. There are no clear loons like Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, just pleasant jest-lahk-us types like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner. The goofballs have cleaned up their act, while the supposed adult political party stands around holding their collective dicks and running from their erstwhile principles (which most of them would sell down the road in a heartbeat anyway).

It's long been a cliché that the massive sums of money dumped into the political process has been a corrosive influence on the process. But it's also altered the types of people who are willing to run for office, not only to subject themselves to cartoonish levels of scrutiny, but to sell themselves constantly to anyone and anything, because of the sheer amount of money it takes just to stay in office, even for an incumbent. An average of thousands of dollars per day need to be raised to retain a US Senate seat, and most House seats aren't cheap either.

An estimated $4 billion total was spent in the 2012 election. When we start thinking more closely about which industry specifically received most of that money, and proceed and engage accordingly, we might finally start getting better candidates, instead of the candidates we deserve.

Outrage Du Jour

So let's see if we have this straight -- this weekend commenced a massive bombing run in yet another fragmented, despotic Middle Eastern nation that we know nothing about, to kill people we know nothing about, to render consequences we (via the transitive properties of the first two points) cannot foresee. Again.

And yet what's got people's panties in a huge fucking wad is whether a meaningless public gesture was properly made. Friends 'n' neighbors, I'll tell you something -- there are a lot of reasons to be unhappy with Obama. An off-handed, half-assed salute is about #50 on the list.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it to my final day:  a country so chock-full of whinging boobs and ninnies deserves exactly the corrupt, inept, grasping, scheming gubmint it gets, from the Moooslim in Chief on down to goat-fucking reprobates like Louie Gohmert.

Let me be more specific on this subject. Since for some inexplicable reason I like to keep "informed," and don't have enough disposable income to, you know, take a vacation and have a life, I am all too aware of dopey "cultural barometer" non-issues such as this. I prefer to look at current events, and their concomitant media coverage and reactions from the rabble, in terms of nutritional content, on a pound-for-pound basis.

In other words, while I might disagree with someone's opinion on, say, the war in Afghanistan or what to do about Wall Street, at least those issues have some real heft and effect. Even if I radically disagree -- even if I am diametrically opposed, like Chaotic Good to Lawful Evil, yo -- at least the worthy opponents have registered their jabber on an issue that actually means something. At least it's an issue that can be chewed over. There's some steak there, some protein in the mix.

What I have come to think of as "Facebook" issues, such as the (socialist, atheist) pledge of allegiance, this "latte salute" arglebargle, or just how awesome the movie God Isn't DeadGod's Not Dead is, where people will work themselves into a nice frothy lather (much like that in Obammy's coffee cup, oh snap!), it's nothing. It's marshmallow crème. It's a 50 lb. gunny sack of Cheetos. It's a steaming bucket of shit. It's a fucking bowl of Cool Hwhip. It is not only completely devoid of any nutrition whatsoever, it is bad for you.

And I'm sorry, but even children can tell the difference; adults certainly should be able to as well. Cheap symbolism is just that, nothing more. On the one hand, there are and have been symbols that bind peoples, nations, groups of like-minded people. But, uh, guess what? We now communicate instantaneously, we are not constrained by temporal boundaries of distant, unreliable service of mail and news.

The idea that the empty comfort of a crisp salute, from a man who otherwise is preoccupied with starting more wars to slow the decline of his political party, and stroking the pelf-grubbing thieves who own everything, means anything, beyond what gaggles of choice idiots think they need it to mean, is preposterous. If he salutes to their approval -- and you can be sure that, for the most part in six years so far, he has, or the quaking dipshits at Faux News would have hit you upside the head long ago -- those other things are still taking place.

All these staunch defenders of "our troops" and the utterly meaningless rituals that surround their activities. Here's a thought -- if you're so gung-ho about supporting military personnel, howzabout you devote your energy and cheap, empty rage to getting them a decent pay scale?

On Golden Pawn

Ahahahaha. I bet you're all shocked that tealoading welfare rancher Cliven (not to be confused with Al or Ted) Bundy turns out to be just what you could easily assume -- an old racist cracker. The militia movement is not known, shall we say, for its holistic outlook toward non-whites. This was entirely predictable.

The stupid-ade to made from this particular bushel of stupid is the fun of watching all of Bundy's erstwhile conservalibertarian buddies at Faux News and in Congress running away from him even more quickly than they tried to hitch their rhetorical wagons to his "cause". Even better is Bundy's apparent confusion -- not only has he no clue what he said that might be objectionable, but he doesn't yet understand what his role in this really is.

As barmy and self-serving as I found the video of Bundy ridin' the range wavin' a giant US flag -- again, you know, the banner that represents a gubmint that Bundy has pronounced to every microphone and knothole that he don't believe in, consarn it -- it provides the most important clue to what makes this clown tick.

Bundy seriously believes that he is the hero of his personal saga, his kampf, his jihad (settle down now; both those words mean the same thing: struggle), and so when people like Sean Hannity and Rand Paul flock to his side in a show of support, it validates Bundy's narcissism. It confirms his thesis, that he (Bundy) is an avatar of absolute good and right, while the gubmint and its nefarious agents are soulless minions serving an ineffable evil.

It will sink in through the five gallons of shit in the ten-gallon hat at some point, that Bundy is simply a totem of convenience, a game piece to be used for teevee ratings, to help burnish the libertarian small-gov street cred of a probable presidential contender. It served their respective purposes to attach themselves to Bundy's grievances, for their own perpetually aggrieved audiences.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro.” Yeah, there's no way for anyone to start an idea with such a sentence, and have it end well. Some people just insist on being damned fools, determined to make asses of themselves at any given opportunity. But Bundy, unfortunately, vocalizes a sentiment and assumption that of course has much traction in certain circles.

For people constantly on the hunt for welfare cheats and grifters, lounging in their skivvies and cranking out litters of dependents, these sorts of passive-aggressive, more-in-sorrow-than-anger claims provide small cover for their incipient racism. Now, to be sure, there certainly do exist some folks who, across multiple generations, indeed have been enabled by Great Society programs into a cycle of dependency. I work in social services, and I've seen such people, talked to them, seen their files. I've seen entire families who have been almost completely on the dole for four generations.

But here's the thing -- in the county where I live and run across these folks, they're mostly white. In fact, on the national level, recipients of services are almost equally split between white, black, and Hispanic. So Bundy's comment and assumption is disgusting not just on the obvious face value, but on multiple levels.

What would Bundy's advice to a white family who lives in the squalorous, idle conditions he decries? He can't "wonder" aloud whether they'd be happier, freer, more productive under a system of legal torture, rape, and murder. Probably tell 'em they just need them more Jee-zus, the sure cure for everything from layoffs, to working three jobs to keep your rat-infested apartment, to the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Hopefully this episode helps take the piss out of these would-be secessionist assholes, as well as the demagogues who try to utilize them for their own opportunistic schemes. You know it won't, it never quite does, but the next one of these jerkoffs that pops up will get more well-deserved scrutiny of their underpinning sentiments. Let's not kid ourselves -- a good chunk of these groups, whether they'll ever admit it or not, really just want to break away into their own all-white enclaves.

[Update 4/24/14 10:45 PDT:  Credit where credit is due. Krauthammer makes it absolutely clear why Cliven Bundy's (repeated) statements are so execrable, front to back. The guy is finally (and rightly) getting hung up on his racist sentiments, but the fact is that his traitorous jabber should been identified as such well before that point, by people who should have known better. In a just world, this would at least put a fat dent in Hannity's ratings and career as well, but you know it won't. He'll just burble some half-assed "I didn't know, and besides, the BLM are still dicks and thugs" non-apology. Anyway, good for Charles K on this one. Hell, even Glenn Beck (no small thing, as Bundy is a fellow Mormon) seems to have gotten out in front of this one.]

Mad Cow Disease, Political Version

From the "who the hell asked you anyway" file:

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin sent out an apology for her criticism of Pope Francis, who she called “liberal” earlier this week.

“It was not my intention to be critical of Pope Francis,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page.  The former vice-presidential candidate said her comments were meant to remind “viewers that we need to do our own homework, and I hadn’t done mine yet on the Pope’s recent comments as reported by the media.”

She wrote that the media often mischaracterizes the comments of public figures and that she’d rather trust her “many Catholic friends and family” than reporters.

Again, who cares what she thinks about anything? Why is Jake Tapper, in letting her plug yet another unreadable book that she didn't really write, soliciting her opinion on the Pope if she's not Catholic (or hell, even if she was)?

I get the meta-implications of asking aloud why people keep asking about Palin, but really, why? To cater to the dwindling claque of teabag screamers? Because one of the multinational conglomerates that owns one of the broadcast networks also owns the company publishing Palin's tedious jabber, and they all have a handshake agreement to logroll each others' "books"?

Palin's comments, referencing herself and "viewers," regarding their need to do their own homework, are just too precious. Palin has yet to be true or correct about much of anything that she's ever said on any subject at all; worse yet, she and her followers have made a point of being completely unconcerned about that the entire time. Facts are and have always been orthogonal to their shamelessly emotional, rage-driven plaints. The idea that any of them are suddenly encumbered to actually know what the fuck they're talking about is just precious.

Plus Ça Change

Just what you needed -- yet another paean to small-town foke givin' Teh Man the ol' whut-fer. Christ on a stale cracker, like anyone should fucking care that some backwater latrine whose population dropped from 668 in 2010 to 654 in 2012 (presumably from some combination of old age and common sense) seriously thinks that pointlessly erecting a Ten Commandments "monument" (pictured below) is some sort of heroic act of defiance to a brutal dictator.



I wrote extensively about this particular phenomenon several years ago, in the context of a book review, and near as I can tell, only the specific locations have changed, the predictable useless yahooisms have remained intact. Yes, Obama has only visited the state twice, once to speak at a memorial for a mining disaster (but fuck the MSHA and EPA, amirite peoples?), and later that same year (2010) for Senator Pork Robert Byrd's funeral. So there is, as they say, some resentment building in West Virginia, as they perceive a lack of sufficient response to their plaints.

It doesn't seem like anyone wants to break the cold, hard truth to the ruggedly independent Mountaineer State, so let me take a humble stab at it -- you people need to pull your heads out of your fucking asses, m'kay? There's no way to put a cherry on this turd cupcake, folks. When you have a state full of goddamned moochers, who sponge from the system far more than they contribute, who produce a single commodity whose vocational utility is rapidly diminishing (for a variety of reasons -- diversification of energy sources; mechanization of coal extraction; diminishment of "easy" extraction sites), who have disproportionately large populations of medical and welfare benefit recipients, there's not much point in doing meet-and-greets in Cooter's Gulch.

Not to mention the fact that barely one-half of one percent of Americans live in West Virginia, and it becomes quite easy to see why no one wants to bother with it. Great, you produce coal. Awesome. But since many of us can simply run down to Harbor Freight and get of the grid for under a couple grand, and there are other exploitable energy sources as well, it is incumbent upon the self-styled individualists to explain -- in greater detail than some weird fuck-you Ten Commandments monument, mind you -- why precisely the other 99.5% of the world's largest economy is supposed to give more than three-quarters of a fuck about your failure to prepare, anticipate, or adapt to the tectonic change that the entire planet saw coming two decades ago.

It's not my intent to indulge in gratuitous hillbilly-bashing, I swear. I do have compassion for people who have spent their entire working lives performing difficult, extremely dangerous labor, and are either spent from decades underground breathing toxic dust, or have enough to get by but have watched their towns and communities collapse around them. West Virginia has probably had more news stories about its pervasive drug problems than anything else, which is a shame, since anyone who has read up on the state and its abundant natural resources knows that it's a lovely place full of beauty and wonder, comparable to just about any other place in the country. (Yes, even my beloved California.)

But caves and geographic quirks are not enough, unfortunately, to turn a generational economic tide. The state's geographic and cultural insularity, as with many southern (and WV does pride itself on being the "most southern of the northern states, and the most northern of the southern states," among other directional superlatives), has finally caught up with it in that regard.

One branch of my family is a boisterous, insanely fun group of Irish Catholic Texans, so I know firsthand a little somethin'-somethin' about the suhthuhn culcha I routinely deride. Anyhoo, one defining redneck characteristic is the display of the confederate flag in some form, whether an actual flag or merely a bumper sticker. The redneck proudly informs dismayed passersby that his is a symbol of "pride" and "independence," as if it were up to one random simpleton to repurpose a highly objectionable emblem of rape, terror, murder, systematic subjugation. In our family, this fucking thing was regarded as nothing short of an American swastika.

But the reality of such a symbol, when one comes across it --and I did, this very afternoon, here in sunny NorCal -- is that its bearer is someone whom, as my East Texan great-grandmother would have put it, "cain't tell 'em nuthin'." No, indeed -- and that, ladies, fish, and gentlemen, is what you are seeing with your southern states, most of them (Texas and Florida notwithstanding, but even then only by economy of scale) unproductive moochers, culturally regressive, uncomfortable with the fairly major societal changes taking place, and not knowing what to do about any of it.

I wish I knew what to tell them, I wish there were easy answers for them. It would be nice to just be able to tell them to suck it up, take a few Khan Academy classes to get their shit together, and grow superhot peppers. [Ed. Someone has to give those hot-pepper guys a reality show. If people can watch other people open a goddamned storage shed, they can watch heat-seeking trenchermen grow two million Scoville unit peppers.]  But just as one cannot serve two masters, one also cannot be utterly dependent on gubmint largesse, and simultaneously expend precious scarce energy and resources railing against said gubmint. That's not politics, it's math.

Deadeye Dick

Just for a hot second, let's set aside the serious impracticality of grotesquely disparate levels of governance; that is, the notion that an almost literally uninhabited state has equal representation in the nation's highest governing body as a state with forty times as many people (and at least four cities with larger populations -- hell, LA's metro area has close to 20 million people, versus the less than 600K in the entire state of Wyoming). The Constitution might be in need of an overhaul, or at least a review, if enough high-profilers with IQs above 80 can be located and dragooned into such a noble project. But that's a subject for another post, perhaps by a different observer.

Consider instead the reasons and ramifications for Shooter Cheney's carpetbagging (perhaps teabagging as well, jury's out so far) daughter trying to muscle Mike Enzi out of his Senate seat. Whatever your political bent, 2014 is shaping up to be fun times already, n'est-ce pas? As Shooter hails from reliably traditional neocon stock, it's difficult at first blush to presume that Liz Cheney would fall too far from that particular tree.

And yet, if one attempts to read the, erm, tea leaves (see what I did there?), the signs are unmistakable. The Cheneys are, and have always been, political opportunists, first and foremost. (That's not a disparagement, by the way; anyone wanting to be successful in such a high-stakes money game had best be an opportunist above all else. There is simply too much money, power, and influence abounding to be left to the merely principled.)

So the fact that Rand Paul has so far endorsed Enzi means little, perhaps nothing at all. Paul is almost certainly positioning himself for a presidential run in 2016 or 2020, and so he is in the early alliance-building phase. Enzi will probably win, and if so, as the senator from the least-inhabited state, he'll no doubt appreciate Paul's early backing. If Liz Cheney should win, Paul will simply reach out (in the spirit of collegiality and party comity, of course) and patch things up accordingly. No sweat either way.

The more interesting possibility here -- as well as in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, where amazingly, those states' senators are all being primaried by insurgent teabilly candidates -- is that either the vote gets split and redounds to the Democratic candidates in some or all of those states. The chances of that happening in all five of the above mentioned states is not a betting man's parlay, but it's not too much to hope that perhaps three or even four of those states could roll D and expose the soft white underbelly of teabilly moocher flesh.

We'll find out in one year. Much money will be spent, and regardless of the outcome, very little will be accomplished as a result.

American Grandstand

It's never been news that there is a practically infinite supply of people who are not only willing to cut their own throats, but to vote for other, far wealthier people to do it to them. So it's no surprise that, while a polled majority seems to understand that the shutdown sideshow was entirely engineered by the short-bus teabilly contingent in the Outhouse of Representatives, a substantial (and of course disproportionately vocal) minority blames Obama 100% for this mess.

Certainly Obama deserves some blame -- for persisting in the delusion that these maroons could be dealt with as if they were normal human beings, and not delusional would-be revolutionaries. There is no negotiating with fanatics, and that is all these people are. They are not seeking any sort of "grand bargain," they are seeking only capitulation. There is no compromising with them.

Obama has failed to understand this, over and over again. If he is not urging the DCCC and DNC and anyone else who will listen to pour as much filthy money into unseating these psychopaths, then he is just continuing to fail, simple as that.

At the very least, this should be one of those episodes that highlights the remaining actual differences between the parties, that while -- since they both represent the "donor" class -- both are red in tooth and claw, the Democrats at least usually make a token effort to clean up some of the blood, pick out some of the chewed meat, before uttering whatever feckless burble they think the proles need to hear this week, before muttering "whatever" and turning on the teevee to watch nincompoops sort their sock drawers.

So when you have apologists for bullshit and psychobabble gleefully willing to wreck the world economy just to stand on their imaginary principles, you then have to focus on the fools who keep supporting them -- even though statistically, it's those very same fools who will bear the brunt of the proposals and policies of their fearless leaders.

The only reason we don't let them get exactly what they think they want, and good and hard, is that they'll drag most of the rest of us down with them. At this rate, they might anyway.

Careful With That Microphone

You know, if Michelle Bachmann didn't exist, you'd have to invent her. I just assumed that God's punishment on us was allowing her to stay in office.

Fight Fire With Fire

If this little stunt doesn't clarify what the NRA is and does at this point, I don't know what will. They subsist on imaginary grievances and fantastic scenarios, from jackbooted thugs coming to forcibly seize their weapons and bullets, to successfully waging an armed insurrection against a corrupt government.

(Not that being able to counter the excesses of corruption isn't a great thing, but they've got urban assault vehicles and drones and chemicals and nukes. You think some next wave David Koresh is going to hold off a siege of RPGs and Abrams tanks and Predators? Come on. First round of Willy Pete over the wall, and it's over. Your collection of Kalashnikovs and Chinese SKSs won't help you.)

Reasonable people (to the extent that there are any left) can agree to disagree over the specifics of where exactly the line is on the Second Amendment, whether it is presumed that people in the 18th century could conceive of semi-automatic handguns with 30-round clips, or that maybe mild background checks to possibly prevent even one of our weekly spree killings won't infringe on anyone. But the NRA exists merely to leverage antagonism and stoke paranoia.

And collect money. Sweet, sweet money.

So if you're sick of their bullshit, maybe it's time we all chipped in five or ten bucks, and got some lobbyists in there to counter said bullshit. Put together a reel of their greatest hits, go around the country, reach out to responsible gun owners with other responsible gun owners and reiterate that no one wants to take anyone's hunting rifles away, unless you're a violent felon or a raving nutbag.

Or you could continue to suffer, in quiet resentment, the seditious nonsense of a lobbying group whose membership numbers a little over one percent of Americans. Talk about a tyranny of the minority. Law, policy, and cultural rhetoric are apparently being determined by people who watched Red Dawn one too many times.

Frankly, the NRA and its members and political supporters need to decide whether they are merely an ankle-biting special interest group, or a wannabe separatist movement.

Labor Daze

So, uh, lessee here what people's poet Sarah Palin, aka "The Quitter from Twitter" is down to these days:

Oh no she di'unt! That is some grade-A Fuckface von Clownstick smackdown, yo. I especially like how she says "working our asses" off, like she's just a down sista like you, with a second job cleaning motel rooms just to make ends meet.

And totally not a past-their-sell-by-date ankle-biter cashing checks for ghost-written doorstops that no one in their right mind would read, much less write, so stop it you guys! It's quite a formidable work ethic in that family, truly. But there's only so many Big Gulp "punchlines" you can pull out of your ass before you have to move on to the next schtick.

Now, the WHCD nerdprom is a tiresome, unseemly, self-satisfied party thrown by people who do little but party most of the year. Has been for some time. So I guess she gets credit for concern-trolling that rare acorn, before she goes back to doing whatever it is she does.

TMI

One thing the Boston terrorist attack has really driven home this week is the prevalence of "too much information" -- in both senses of the phrase. Maybe some people still watch the corporate evening news, when they're not fixing typewriters and fax machines. But I wager most of us, in this interactive world, get our information from news aggregators.

More often than not, that means subjecting ourselves to a toxic barrage of nonsense, a dynamic in which we're encouraged to commit and contribute our two cents, even if the actual opinion offered isn't worth that amount. Notions of intellectual honesty, or logical consistency and integrity, are completely disregarded, not even acknowledged.

This doesn't just apply to the usual retarded political sentiments, by the way -- the profusion of social media inanities is something that just a generation ago would not have been just technologically impossible, but conceptually impossible. The technologies, and the social mores that have cropped around them, have literally changed the way we think and perceive these interactions, in a way that, to someone born before, say, the mid-1980s, would have been truly inconceivable. The advancements in technology were foreseeable enough, it's the regression to the mean of basic interaction that would have been more difficult to prognosticate.

Or not. That other great '90s cultural phenomenon, The Jerry Springer Show and its innumerable bark-show brethren, presaged the now commonplace norm of televised human cockfighting. Anyone who might have not gotten the memo about some people being truly mean bastards, should have a clearer understanding now.

Death and Texas

Texas Gooper mouthbreather (pardon the multiple redundancies) Steve, I say, Steve Stockman has a fresh, bold new slogan/bumper sticker for his perennial House campaign. Either that or he has some sort of weird bet with Louie Gohmert to see whose knuckles can make the most noise dragging on the Capitol Hill concrete.

It's not even worth deconstructing the sheer nonsense populating the entirety of Stockman's buffoonish slogan, except to point out that, again, I wish I had thought of it first, I'd have had a CafePress swag account going full-tilt to skim the rubes out of their disability checks. I would also say that Stockman forgot to shoehorn a gay marriage reference in there somewhere, so I assume the baby Jebus is crying now.

It is worth pointing out the primary logical flaw in this ham-fisted jabber (which of course would then be conflated by your usual conservaturd as further evidence of the "humorless" librul -- because har har, gun carryin' fetuses killin' their murderous mothers and the abortonazis that tricked 'em into it, amirite?). Both the Second Amendment and Roe v. Wade are matters of settled law, and interests from either side try to nibble at the margins of each.

But here's the thing -- virtually nobody (and I defy anyone to find a decent example proving otherwise) from the pro-choice side is a strict absolutist on the subject. It is very difficult to find anyone who seriously thinks that abortions should be allowed for any reason aside from the health of the mother beyond 20-24 weeks. Yet pro-life obsessives such as Stockman enjoy propagating the awful notion that "liberals" or "pro-choicers" believe as a bloc that live babies can be killed under the Roe rubric. I sure as fuck don't believe such a thing, and I don't know (or know of) any other pro-choice person who does, either.

This assumption is proven by the #gosnell hashtag on Stockman's Twitter comment introducing the bumper sticker. For those of you who don't spend every waking moment donating money to Pat Robertson, reading Chuck Norris columns, and self-flagellating over the American Holocaust, Kermit Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortion provider facing seven murder charges under a grand jury indictment. By all accounts, Gosnell is a butcher and a fiend and a fraud, and at 72 years of age, it is entirely likely that he will spend the rest of his rotten life pushing ass out of Club Fed. And good riddance to him. No reasonable person could read the report on Gosnell's gruesome operation and not be utterly repulsed.

But here's where Stockman's clumsy abortion-guns analogy, um, backfires (see what I did there?) on him. Second Amendment absolutists hasten to point at the near-constant spate of spree killings and firearm incidents involving children as mere outliers. It's a big, big country, and shit happens, y'know? Yet Gosnell's singular butchery is presented as prima facie evidence for both the supposedly routine nature of beheading live babies at Planned Parenthood, and the mendacious negligence of the lamestream media in failing to report every lurid detail of Gosnell's baby abattoir.

As far as the argument that the media sucks, well, it's hard to argue with that one. Is there a conspiracy to deny the 'murkin public their well-earned details of a scumbag abortion doctor's attempt to keep up with Jeffrey Dahmer? Sure, in the sense that the corporate media understand deeply that what their audience wants is meaningless fluff about royal babies and poop cruises. In other words, the conspiracy is driven by market considerations, not ideology.

The mission of the nightly news is not to give you news per se, it's to get you to buy automobiles and snacks and pharmaceuticals. Its goal is to get you to spend money you don't really have on stuff you don't really need or want. This is not exactly a secret. When they lose viewers, they lose sales. And nothing will lose viewers more quickly than some trumped-up bullshit about one whackjob abortionist in urban Philly operating a slaughterhouse filled with cat shit and baby parts. Hokay?

So the apparent lack of sufficient national coverage of the Gosnell case is indefensible, but hardly proof of an overarching conspiracy to protect the constantly beleaguered Planned Parenthood, especially since Gosnell was never a PP provider, as far as I've read. Certainly there's laziness involved there, but if it's a conspiracy, so far its accusers have yet to attribute whence said conspiracy originated. Reporters may tend to be liberal, but their bosses do not. Are we to assume that the conspiracy of silence is political? Then provide some proof, or even some evidence of this.

Obviously none of that will happen, this is merely a shithead southern congresscracker doing what they do, grandstanding on an issue that allows him to not have to explain to his poor cracker constituency why they're still broke and jobless, pretending that a tremendous outlier is standard operating procedure. And again, that is exactly what Gosnell's operation was -- an outlier, an aberration, a serial killer posing as a doctor. Gosnell is no more a typical example of reproductive health care than Jared Loughner or James Holmes or [fill in several dozen other spree killers off the top of your head] are examples of typical gun owners.

Yet that will be how it is presented. Just you watch. Pro-lifers and Second Amendment absolutists are birds of the same wretched feather; the verities of a single sentence written in the eighteenth century are as sure and unchanging (despite massive, unprecedented technological advancements since then) as the certainty that a fertilized egg is a fully-realized life whose minutes of existence trump any and all rights its host might have. The notion that maybe getting a deadly weapon and cop-killing ammunition ought to present as least as many challenges as, say, driving a car or obtaining allergy medication, are utterly foreign to them. Yet the idea of telling women what they can and can't do, even if they're only five or six weeks along, is as natural to them as masturbating to an Oral Roberts scrapbook.

And while we're at it, let's dispense with the implicit notion that a rabid pro-life stance means that they care more -- about anything. They don't care about the women they wish to force to have kids they don't want, and they don't care about the kids themselves once they're out of the womb. They don't care about the families who can't afford more mouths to feed, since they always support gutting social services, and will never lift a goddamned finger to help them improve their economic lives. They don't care about whether those kids are born to abusive parents, or have to attend shitty, underfunded school, or end up in soul-deadening jobs that don't pay enough to live on, or if they end up in prison.

Just as the universe is so much more than the Big Bang, the singularity that precipitated its existence, so is a human's life so much more than the instant of birth. But a pro-lifer couldn't care less about any of that shit -- their obsession is with the blessed event of the singularity. And all the other fully formed, fully realized lives are secondary -- or hell, of no consequence at all --- in their estimation.

As Barry O begins his typical punt-on-first-down tiptoe toward compromise on modest gun-control measures, such background checks, clip capacity limits, and mandatory liability insurance, look for Stockman's half-witted jabber to become the rallying cry of hundreds of teabaggers seeking re-election next year.

[Update 4/13/13 4:10 PDT:  What Mistermix (and the commenters) said. The anti-abortion crowd would like to believe and perpetuate the notion that the Gosnell case is evidence for overturning Roe, but as the Juicers say, Gosnell is actually a case for why Roe exists in the first place.

Pro-choice is really pro-life; pro-life is really just pro-fetus. Again, the anti-choice folks do not care about the rest of the family, or even about the child itself once it exits the womb. Once you're born, you're on your own.]

Fire in the Hole

Clearly it does no good to assess the gun-control "debate" in a logical even-handed fashion. The discussion, such as it is, has nothing to do with anything sensible or reasonable. There are, in fact, sensible responses to the plaints of gun-control advocates that this or that measure worked in Britain or Japan or Australia or wherever. Near as I can tell, such responses have not been proffered much; by and large, the ante has been upped way past that.

It is a crystal-clear fact this is not an argument that will be won or advanced with mere reason. Any reasonable gun advocacy that might exist has been drowned in a steaming vat of hurr. And while it is somewhat heartening that a few of these mouth-breathing, window-licking, soul-deadened, nose-picking, dick-grabbing, ass-spelunking, knuckle-dragging irate goobers managed to shoot themselves at their own Mow-ron Super Bowl yesterday, the problem is that they thought it would be good sport to hold said event in the first place on the holiday for the victim of an assassin, the target of a chickenshit cracker with a gun and a grudge.

Coupled with their incredibly brave response to the tragedy of a lunatic slaughtering a classroom full of first-graders -- armed guards at schools, which has graced some hapless students with dipshits and child molesters (and if there is a god or even basic karma, explain the continued existence of Joe Arpaio) -- it seems that we are no longer dealing with two legitimately opposing viewpoints. We have one group of folks who, morally exhausted at the weekly massacres and spree-kills at schools, malls, wherever a deranged asshole with more firepower than sense decides to tune up his shit, timidly propose rather modest regulations and safeguards in the hope that said deranged assholes find even minimal resistance when they decide it's time to listen to the voices in their heads.

On the other side, you have the usual claque of industry lobbyists bolstering the usual clatter of misfits sporting laundry lists of imaginary grievances and paranoid fantasies, refusing to budge even a goddamned inch. Their "right" to immense quantities of firepower trumps everyone else's right to wonder if some shitbird will buy a Glock with a 30-round clip of some fucker's trunk at a gunshow, and give it a workout at the nearest place populated by people who can't fight back.

Electile Dysfunction: After the Laughter

So many cool things to take away from the big day yesterday, not the least of which was how Nate Silver (pictured at right) totally pwned the conservatard punditocracy -- who, if they really believed in the accountability and personal responsibility they espouse for the peons, would scrape up some dignity, resign their positions due to gross incompetence, and go out and get real goddamned jobs.

Also heartening is the fact that the Koch Brothers wasted their money on a guy they probably didn't even want in the first place; that wrasslin' wife Linda McMahon has now wasted around $100 million losing two runs for the Senate; that Sheldon Adelson blew a metric fuckton on not one but two guys he didn't want in the first place (unless, you know, he wants to admit that he wanted Newt Gingrich as preznit, which even the current future former Mrs. Gingrich isn't guaranteed to do).

Until actual conservatives rip off the blinders and relearn the basics of intellectual honesty, they're going to be stuck with these jackasses that just tell them what they want to hear:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

Uh, yeah, and the careful observer -- oh hell, who are we kidding here? a casual observer -- can see that the lack of accountability alone proves that the entire political commentary industry is just a carny sideshow designed to reel in the goobers. As always, they deserve such treatment for as long as they're willing to put up with it. If they demanded one-tenth of the integrity and accountability from their news readers as they do from their caricatured preznit, they might notspend most of their waking hours in a haze of smoke and bullshit.

It'll be a matter of hours, if it hasn't happened already, before the conservabot failures will start gravely intoning that Rmoney lost because he wasn't conservative enough, and by implication, other folks in the clown-car primary would have won. Obviously, this is true only in the fantasyland they inhabit, with one important exception -- Jon Huntsman, who I still believe firmly would have pulled more than enough Democrats and independents to beat Obama.

Whoever's really running the GOP these days -- one assumes it's still well-heeled, cynical business douches using hypocritical fambly-valyews sociopaths and say-anything-for-a-buck media monkeys to do their bidding -- needs to sit down and really decide where they want to go from here. For reasons I've stated here ad nauseam, as well it just being human nature that some people just don't learn, I still think they will double down on their bullshit, find someone even more craven, but more provocative, stir up the rube vote.

But maybe not; the rubes are a fading, dying demographic, and what the blue-island-in-a-sea-of-red electoral maps don't readily point out is that it's those blue islands where all the people are, that vast swathes of broke, undereducated goons outnumbered by livestock and inoperable vehicles are not going to effectively serve their corporate interest going forward.

And shit, maybe if these tightwad motherfuckers -- who seriously must have to spray WD40 on their ankles in the morning so they can screw their socks on, they're so goddamned tight -- decided that, instead of spending their pelf to paint the 99% as greedy, grasping moochers, simply granted the peons even one-tenth the median wage gains that they've given themselves for thirty years running now, might convince more people, more cheaply, and with no animosity.

Of course, that won't happen -- these are people for whom money is no longer a means of subsistence or support, but merely a game, a way of keeping score. They think they'll take it with them, and proceed accordingly. But eventually you hit that point of equilibrium where there's just not enough lucky-spermers or hyper-successful bidness innovators to keep that machine going. But Flying Spaghetti Monster bless 'em, they'll always try.

Really, it'd just be better if they'd make good on that longstanding threat to go Galt on us already, makers thwarting takers, producers combating the teeming class of parasites seeking to rob and expropriate them of their precious pelf. They'll never do it, of course -- it would be like a fattened tick leaving his dog. But it's always interesting to ponder the shared dreams of diametrically opposed groups of people.

Me Too, Part 2: This Time It's Hilarious

Guess I'm just in a me-too mood ths afternoon, or maybe I'm just trying to avoid working on the e-book projects I've committed to. Whatever. This "fuck you" response to the high-horse teabillies is one of the most eloquent ass-poundings I've come across lately. Enjoy.

Mitt Happens

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 OsamaObama 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.