Total Recall

So here in the Golden State we have a little karmic twist:

More Californians disapprove of the job performance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger than any governor in modern state history including Gray Davis, who was ousted by Schwarzenegger in a popular uprising, according to a Field Poll released today.

Seventy-one percent of California voters surveyed said they disapprove of Schwarzenegger's handling of the job, while 23 percent approve. The low ratings are shared across all demographics including party affiliation, region of the state, age and race or ethnicity.

....

The governor's numbers are nearly identical to those of Davis in the run-up to the recall. In August 2003, 70 percent of California disapproved of how Davis did the job while 22 percent approved.

Well, gee, maybe we should be like the whining, tantrum-throwing crybabies who chucked Davis and installed Schwarzenegger in the first damned place, and blow another $50 mil on some bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of freaks, right? I mean, who doesn't miss the glory days of '03, when Gary Coleman and Mary Carey and such like were "running" for the executive post of the planet's (then) seventh-largest economy?

No. Unlike those douche-nozzles, people with integrity and intellectual honesty are consistent in their realization that California has well and truly screwed itself in no small part by a serious over-reliance on its referendum process, which is nothing short of a joke. It has gummed up the works in this state, and needs to be overhauled.

Worse yet, look at who's running to take Ahnult's place -- a couple of asshole plutocrats trying to out-conservatard one another, one of them ready to spend $50 mil of her own money on the seat, and having already given her frat-boy jerkoff kid (with the villain snowboarder name) "consultant" loot. Oh, and Jerry Brown. Maybe Mary Carey's not such a bad option.

Schwarzenegger's low rating is driven by the severe economic downturn, DiCamillo said, while Davis touted his experience and competence when he ran for office only to be undermined by the energy crisis.

Oh, is that what "DiCamillo said", because while the first half of that sentence is undoubtedly true to a great extent, the second half ("undermined by the energy crisis") comes off as if it had been a natural event, the predictable consequence of one of Kepler's Laws of Motion of some such. And that's just not even true, podna:

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “solutions to California’s energy woes” reflect those of former Enron chief Ken Lay. On May 17, 2001, in the midst of California’s energy crisis, which was largely caused by Enron’s scandalous energy market manipulation, Schwarzenegger met with Lay to discuss “fixing” California’s energy crisis. Plans to “get deregulation right this time” called for more rate increases, an end to state and federal investigations, and less regulation. While California Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante were taking direct action to re-regulate Califonia’s energy and get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of California by Enron and other energy companies, Schwarzenegger was being groomed to overthrow Davis in the recall. Thus canceling plans to re-regulate and recoup the $9 billion.

After the California’s energy debacle of 2000, Davis and Bustamante filed suit under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act,” which would order all power companies, including Enron, to repay the nearly $9 billion they extorted from California citizens. The single biggest opponent of the suit, with the most to lose, was Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay.

Lay, a very close friend and long time associate of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, and one of their largest campaign contributors, hastily assembled a meeting with prominent Californians (confirmed by the release of 34 pages of internal Enron email) to strategize opposition to the Davis-Bustamante campaign and garner influential support for energy deregulation.

Included in the meeting were Michael Milken, “junk bond king” convicted of fraud in 1990 who currently runs a think tank in Santa Monica that focuses on global and regional economies; Ray Irani, Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum; former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Riordan and Schwarzenegger were at that time being courted as GOP gubernatorial candidates.)

Attendees of the meeting received a small four-page packet entitled “Comprehensive Solution for California.” The packet called for an end to the federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in California’s energy crisis and proposed saddling consumers with the $9 billion loss. Discussions further focused on preventing Davis’s proposed re-regulation of energy markets.

With Davis in office and Bustamante his natural successor, there would be little chance of dismissing rock-solid charges of fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, fake power delivery scheduling, and blatant conspiracy. The grooming of a governor amenable to a laissez-faire and corrupt energy market was essential. Recalling Davis and replacing him with Schwarzenegger was the solution. With Governor Schwarzenegger in office, Bustamante’s case is dead, as few judges will let a case go to trial to protect a state whose governor has allowed the matter to be “settled.”

It's too bad Kenny Boy Lay got off as scot-free as he did, avoiding jail and dying quietly just as his role in sending the nation's largest state into a tailspin (since turbocharged by the subprime scam) would have been elucidated more fully, just as his role in Cheney's Energy Task Farce (whatever happened to that, anyway?) might have been clarified even a little. It's too bad Lay wasn't staked to an anthill and torn apart by rabid dogs, frankly.

And it's too bad that a significant part of the driving force of this state in the past decade gets brushed under the rug with some cheap elision from a pollster. Gray Davis' biggest flaw as a politician was that he had zero charisma, but the fact of the matter is he got totally hosed, with total deliberation and extreme prejudice, by forces much larger than him, for a very large payday.

Wonder where Kenny Boy's $9 billion, poached out of the pockets of 35 million Califorians and never repaid, ended up. Maybe on a pallet in the sands of Iraq, maybe in Unca Dick's undisclosed location. We'll never know, of course, because we peons are on a need-to-know basis, but the least we can do is not be a bunch of chumps and pretend that it was all some kind of "shit happens" accident.

Crazy Trained

As brutally flawed as the fox-in-henhouse health-care clusterfuck is, the fact that it gets these troglodytes all riled up is proof that at least it's a step in the right direction. You know, back in the good ol' days when the Cheney regime was in charge and the land of milk and honey was populated by rainbows and unicorns, it was annoying and unhelpful enough to see the "Bushitler" placards. These clowns show with no argument or counter-proposals, just a brick in one hand and a fistful of "nigger" and "faggot" epithets in the other. Maybe someone can translate the Horst Wessel Song into Hicklish for them, so's they have something to chant while the effigies are burning.

And again, unlike both Chimpy McHitlerburton seizures of the throne, there is not and will never be any debate about the legitimacy of Obama's electoral blowout. It's his own damned fault that he's managed to piss all that away in less than 18 months, but the fact of the matter is that he won fair and square, and these goobers would prefer to govern by tantrum and slur. I've spent years noting what sore winners they always were, and am not at all surprised that they're even worse losers.

As always, they can go straight to hell; with any luck every one of these losers will have to contend with a serious, financially catastrophic health crisis befalling a loved one, and maybe they'll finally start to learn a thing or two about what they think they're protesting. Or, you know, not. If any of these bozos have learned anything more profound than which foods they can deep-fat fry, they have yet to demonstrate it with any reliability.

It's a very strange dynamic to contemplate -- an industry whose revenue model is explicitly predicated on not providing the service for which they've already been paid, can count their most vulnerable victims as their most vocal supporters, for free at that. Weirder still, some of these morons think it's actually a gun-control debate. They deserve what they get, good and hard and none too soon.

Meta-victory

Lot of interesting pro-con comments re Taibbi's question as to whether the "health-care" "reform" "effort" really does suck as badly as he, Taibbi, thinks it does. Well, if anything, it probably sucks even worse than we think it will, if the rest of the usual product out of the cracker factory is any indication.

And yet, it is probably just as critical as the Democrats think it is that this abusive sellout actually gets passed -- at least from their POV, which they have done every blessed thing they can think to render utterly irrelevant. Probably the truest comment is way down there, simply stating that whether or not this thing passes now, the Dems are going to take a hit in November.

And it's their own goddamned fault, per usual, since they let Rahmbo wheel-deal them into the back pockets of card-carrying assholes like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson. But only after Obama let the insurance and pharma lobbies write the thing in the first place. Yeah, that's visionary planning there, Chief. Could it be that Obama's vision is nearly as overrated as the Rahm's arm-twisting ability? Ya think?

They've shot their wad on this thing, and now cannot afford to walk it back, especially since they don't have the balls to fight for anything substantial in the first place. But the thought of the mouth-breathers on the other side becoming even more emboldened could only mean they'd find someone even dumber and more useless than Fredo to lead their next ticket, probably even more toxic and ridiculous than the sideshow carnies like Palin or Beck.

And yet "victory" will be meaningless in any real sense, merely a front-loading of tax dollars to a mandatory insurance policy, just another vast upward wealth transfer, a subsidized captive market with no mention of the driving issue, exorbitant costs. The costs will be the same and the profits will go to the same rentiers, it's just that the scheme will be socialized. Awesome.

As always, the system isn't broken -- it's fixed.

Incoherence

I'm not sure the English language contains words sufficient enough to convey the sheer contempt I have for these fools. Oh sure, there's always the reliable stream of inventive expletives, but sometimes circumstances call for something special. The too-clever-by-half sign held at half-mast by the addled crone in the photo exemplifies this need. Seriously, le mot juste, granny.

What freedom, one might hesitatingly ask this senile cow, has Barry O taken or threatened to take, that was not already at risk by the previous regime? Is he taking away your Murder She Wrote marathons or something? Precisely how and why is it that you people chose this particular moment to get riled up about creeping corporatism and state power? They're a bunch of Rip van Winkle types -- it's as if they fell asleep under a tree during the Eisenhower administration, and suddenly woke up, engaged with this befuddled yet passionate engagement. Maybe their nee-grow sensor is hooked up to their clapper, and the damned kids on their lawn set it off.

Whatever. They're a bunch of jerkoffs, completely detestable, not the least for their hypocrisy. Any time one of these human prunes is photographed "protesting", preening with some bullshit sign about their freedom to be a public jackass, the question needs to be asked, perhaps even by the journamalist giving them free coverage -- are you on Medicare, do you collect Social Security? Are you in any way, shape, or form receiving aid from the big ol' eeevil gubmint? If so, then kindly go fuck yourself. Hard.

I have yet to see, hear, or read about a single teabagger coherently defend or elucidate any of their "principles", and it's not for lack of trying to find an honest protester. The fact of the matter is that Obama, as a member of the center-right wing of the Corporate Party, has upheld almost all the policies of his universally-loathed predecessor, who hailed from the far-right wing of the Corporate Party. There is legitimate protest to be found and mined here, and somehow these obtuse individuals have failed, and continue to fail, to see it right in front of their gin-blossomed noses.

Worse yet, their name doesn't even make sense. They're not the pseudo-patriots they think they are. Here's the thing, you goddamned retards -- the Boston Tea Party was organized to protest taxation without representation. You, on the other hand, have elected representation. You may not like it, you may disagree with it, you may rant and rave about it even as you sell off your fungible assets in order to hoard gold because Glenn Beck told you to, but you do have duly elected representatives. There was an election, it was in all the papers and everything. They don't represent your interests, true enough, but mostly you just don't like how it turned out. Your name, dear morons, doesn't mean what you think it means. Epic fucking fail, assholes.

If it were up to me, I'd set these hypocritical codgers out on an ice floe, reminding them of their ultimate destiny as a steamy pile of polar bear shit. Failing that, I'd settle for the media asking them some questions and forcing them to elaborate on their oh-so-brilliant placards once in a great while. Collecting government largesse while simutaneously bitching about it should be an instant disqualifier from the debate, at the very least.

Sideshow

Taibbi is being rhetorical, of course, but I think we all know what Rick Santelli "means" by saying that you can't cheat an honest man. It's just that Rick Santelli is a loud and proud spokes-tool for profoundly dishonest people to begin with, a nasty symptom of a deeply compromised media system. Who the hell is Rick Santelli, and why does he have a teevee show, and what sort of person should take his spoutings at all seriously? Were those questions to be adequately answered, Santelli would probably be selling sacks of oranges at the corner of Woodruff and Rosecrans (I spent a few magical summers from ages 10-13, in the late '70s, nearby on the Faywood Street that runs off the Somerset/Woodruff intersection. Good fucking times, Bro Namath. I can show Little Ricky around the 'hood.)

Meanwhile, Frank Rich poses the heavier queries that pester the finer minds of the commentariat; namely, whither Obama the Fighter, sword inexplicably sheathed post-campaign?

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

No. The problem is not the absence of a message, it is the absence of a will to fight, more importantly to punch back. Fuck punching back, forget the Republican cheap shots and incoherent teabagger rants. He gets cock-blocked by Mary Landrieu, pushed around by Joe Lieberman, undermined by (ahem) something called Bart Stupak. The problem is a lack of party discipline, an understanding that sometimes it really is better, from a purely operational perspective, to be feared rather than merely respected.

Last week featured the bloodless pimping of Obama's sudden sense of urgency on this here health-care thingy, smash cuts of hortatory rhetoric, encouraging of the masses to alert their duly elected representatives to the crisis afoot.

Listen close, pally -- we did our fucking jobs already. We voted, and some of us even paid due attention after the election circus had left town. Now I'm supposed to harass my neighbors to pester their congresscritters over something they already know goddamned good and well they should do? Just to squeak through an industry-written abortion of a bill that won't change much for most people in the end? Are you fucking serious?

I resent the notion that, despite the unholy amounts of money these people make, we're supposed to continue to do their ground-work for them in our off-hours. Motherfucker, I have a job -- and so do they. What say we all do our damned jobs? You want me to help pass bullshit health-care legislation, pay me mid-six-figures and perks and lifetime free health care and I'll do your grunt work. Otherwise, kindly piss up a rope, Jack. We told you what we wanted a full eighteen months ago, fucking do it already with yer superdupermajority.

Back to Santelli and the media system, how it lets animals like that in. Yesterday and today -- and for all I know, the next week -- the Today show has had "exclusive" interviews with professional scumbag Karl Rove. Forgive my assumption that some vertical integration of ownership between NBC and Rove's publisher exists, but it's not exactly unheard of. But for some reason, I couldn't help but think of the recent death of the late great Howard Zinn, and how different our political culture might be if Zinn or Chomsky or practically any sentient being with opposable thumbs were allowed even 1% of the mass-media time accorded to a fucking piece of shit like Rove. Every time you flip on your teevee and get force-fed intellectual gruel, you can count on that being the very root of the problem.

Bean Ball

I suppose this week would be as good a time as any to reiterate that Jim Bunning is a bastard's bastard, the sort of vicious codger one would normally just write off as a senile coot, but who in fact was a card-carrying asshole even in his ball-playing days. Okay, there ya go, it's been said once again, many times many ways, Merry Christmas, fuck you.

No, Bunning's latest really just reminds me of a few rather important things that, were the media even to consider them, would immediately dismiss them as peripheral, though they are highly central to the system's dysfunctions:

1. Bunning is retiring at the end of the year, but has this episode alerted Democrats as to the urgency of making sure the homestretch of his term is as miserable as possible? Does anything motivate them to punch back, I mean like ever? Prove me wrong, ladies, prove me wrong and sideline this dickhead for the duration.


2. The median age in the Senate is 63 years now, with 26 senators in their seventies or older. Are the interests of an increasingly impoverished nation being well-served by an insular group of wealthy old farts -- such as, say, Jim Bunning? Term/age limits would have unintended consequences, but so does wheeling Strom Thurmond into chamber long after his brain had turned to oatmeal.


3. Parliamentary procedures need to be changed, pure and simple. It has somehow become a token assumption that a supermajority is the only true majority, and now Bunning is able to cock-block a $10 billion apportionment by himself. What the fuck is that, besides the cheap trick of a group of people who each think they could and should be in charge?

Like many of the institutions that determine the course of our lives, these people frequently seem more concerned with the pomp and ceremony of their station than with actual performance. It shows in the results.

Future Breed Machine

I don't know if the Duggars are living up to the true definition of "cult", since they don't seem to do much proselytizing. Of course, they have their reality show to do that for them, not to mention the circuit of mindless network morning shows every time the missus gets knocked up.

Regardless, the "religious" "discussion" about them bores the hell out of me, personally, and is a complete non-starter. Supposedly the kids are generally polite and well-adjusted, the family cares for one another, and unless there's some contravening evidence, it's hard to completely dump on that aspect of it, as creepy and obnoxious as the annual visits to the World's Busiest Womb have become.

But yes, in terms of religiosity, the Duggars merely represent the turgid, entirely predictable apotheosis of the dispensationalist belief in divine providence, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. As most such families can attest, it helps if you never leave the compound.

The idea that a small sliver of a country, one that is only 5% of the world's population to begin with, can eventually outbreed the other half of the world through dogged determination and annual pregnancies is almost charming in its mathematical hilarity. It doesn't help that the Duggars attribute beginning their long, strange trip as a result of, ahem, birth control (or more accurately, a miscarriage supposedly caused by birth control).

Anyway, here's the point (and I do have one): what's true in Bangladesh is true in Arkansas, or Nigeria, or New York City -- the key to alleviating poverty (material and intellectual) revolves more around empowering women, educating them and giving them real freedom in employment and reproductive rights, than any other single controllable factor.

The planet is exhausted and overcrowded, in the midst of a mass unprecedented extinction of mammalian species, methane pockets warming and jellyfish swarming the oceans, etc. It's entirely preventable, and it's just unconscionable that people resort to outdated mysticism of any stripe to justify adding to the problem.

Accidentally On Purpose

You know, I've stuck up for Niall Ferguson in the past because he's really not an idiot, but here I can only assume he's simply being willfully obtuse:

Whether the canopy of a rain forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." A vaccine, for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile, causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year's is roughly four or six or eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern -- known as a "power-law distribution" -- is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to full-scale world wars.

What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate -- and sometimes fatal -- disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

Well, certainly the financial regulatory regime did begin its long, inexorable rollback in the '80s, but Ferguson is correct in a backhanded way -- what really set the stage for the current problem has more to do with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the evisceration of any meaningful regulatory and oversight mechanisms. Remember during the 2000 campaign when folks made fun of Dubya's use of the little-known jargon word "securitization"? That's what he meant, friends 'n' neighbors, it's just that after all his other malaprops that magickal season, people just assumed it was another by-product of his hopeless syntax.

At any rate, yes, thanks to animals like Bob Rubin and Phil Gramm, the current economic failures owe much more to Clinton- and Fredo-era policies than to Reagan. Ferguson misses the forest for the trees here though, and I think it's because he's a true believer in the system, not only cannot believe in its capacity to fail, except in the most mystical and theoretical terms, but believes in its goodness, that it is right more than it is wrong.

This is a seductive belief, and it manages to roll in most of us at some point or other. I could probably read Chomsky and Zinn for the next fifty years, and not entirely overcome the socioeconomic conditioning provided by the public school system. I like the idea of anarcho-syndicalism, and a more even societal sharing of risk and reward, even as I accept the idea of hegemon, so long as it's an American hegemon. Why? Because societies are still at the stage where hegemony predominates, and a Chinese hegemon, for example, is even less likely to provide any ancillary benefit to my rational self-interest than a thoroughly corrupted American corporatocracy.

That's just one (rather extended) example, but here's the thing that gets me about Ferguson's baroque naïveté -- he's looking for birth-death civilizational cycles and perturbations for rational explanations. Here's the deal, bro-ham -- what we've gone through, what we're still going through, most of us, this is not a recession, it is not a depression. It is a correction, it is the natural outcome of deliberate actions buttressed by looting and constrained only by imagination.

Consider: a small but economically and politically powerful subset of people grants "loans" which are bullshit, backed by nothing, to a great mass of people, which the small subset knows with absolute certainty will never be able to pay back. They then place bets accordingly, again backed by imaginary assets. When inevitably the scam "fails", they use their financial and political power to force the government to repay their imaginary losses, keep their bonuses intact, and allow them to continue doing "business" as before.

In what way is any of that a "perturbation"? It was not anomalous; it was not unpredictable. It was not a behavioral outlier. It is perfectly in keeping with what is a clear pattern of sociopathic behavior, precisely because of the lack of disincentives to such behavior.

Look, I enjoy the armchair study of collapsonomics as much as the next guy, finding parallels between current events and ancient ruins, looking for causes of systemic failure. Natural disasters, internal corruption, barbarian onslaught, lack of moral fiber -- it's the ultimate in Monday morning quarterbacking. But there's nothing accidental about any of this. The Wall Street rentiers knew and know precisely the consequences of their actions -- there are none. Why wouldn't they continue to do so?

Immediately after the recent earthquake in Chile, we heard plenty of mortified plaints about looters and such, vile opportunists taking advantage of everyone else's misery. At least in Chile, the looters didn't actually cause the earthquake. There they get shot; here they get to keep their fucking retention bonuses through sheer chutzpah. It's a mistake to continue believing in the historical tendencies of goodness and rationality and utilitarian integrity of "the system" anymore -- these people have been given unbelievable control and leverage, and they're rotten to the goddamned core, utterly indifferent to anything but getting theirs.

Moron, Moron, Burning Bright

Deep thought: anyone who is "concerned" about Tiger Woods, or thinks he owes anyone other than his immediate family an explanation, much less an apology, is a flaming dipshit on wobbly wheels.

And hey, speaking of such critters, the big FudgeCPAC is going down, and it is never not entertaining at least. Noted sociopath and war criminal Richard Bruce Cheney, a man who has yet to be correct about much of anything of import, predicts Obama will be a one-term preznit. He is also predicting the Lions to win the next Super Bowl, so there's that.

What the two (Tiger and CPAC) have to do with one another is this: Fargo reject Pawlenty O'Toole took a break from neglecting the upkeep of his state's freeway bridges to burnish his moron credentials by comparing Tiger to Big Gubmint, deserving of a nine-iron to the temple by a distressed wife (that, um, would be the teabaggers, hot and impulsive like only a Swedish nanny can be).

Yet card-carrying loon Lonesome Rhodes -- who, if this is how he is in sobriety, must have been a fucking hoot as a drooling cokehead alky -- sez that Tiger is comparable to the Republicans, an addict who must first admit the problem in order to gain full benefit from appropriate treatment.

And of course Rhodes had all his props at hand, the chalkboard, the stilted socialist poetry slams, the "Clydie Clyde" (I was sure that was some sort of Manson reference, for some reason) muppet thing he apparently does. I had to reread the description to get the gist, it was literally incomprehensible to me. This toad is the fucking Carrot Top of political commentary, which is no doubt a grievous insult to Mr. Top, but prop comedy is a special burden to begin with.

But at least Carrot Top is not pretending to be some sort of arbiter of sociopolitical thought, yet apparently millions of maroons tune in to watch Beck play with sock puppets and draw conspiracy-guy diagrams on a fucking chalkboard, when he's not shilling for gold-hoarding scamboogery. Seriously, what a fucking asshole this clown is.

Anyway, the stupid Tiger analogies. It's one thing that none of them are capable of looking beyond the latest irrelevant "headlines" to compose completely inapt comparisons, but it's just gravy that they can't even be bothered to keep them straight amongst themselves. By the time they stagger out of their annual dipshit camp, the CPACkers will just decide that Tiger is Obama, and the walrus is (Ron) Paul. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

They Ask Questions

Question of the day comes from one H.R. PufnstufClinton, who splits residencies between Chappaqua, New York, and the sixth concentric ring of hell, which I believe was the one with all the ice:

"Iran has threatened other countries, including the kingdom," she said. "Iran has funded terrorists that have launched attacks within other countries, including the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia]. Iran is the largest supporter of terrorism in the world today. . . . You have to ask yourself: Why are they doing this?"

Indeed. You have to ask yourself. So let's do exactly that. Iran is surrounded by three huge nuclear powers -- Russia to the north, and India and Pakistan to the east. And Iraq, occupied by a couple hundred thousand Americans, to its west. And leading American politicians constantly threatening, sanctioning, or threatening to sanction. Not to mention the surge of Jebus rifles (and Jebus Predator drones) in Afghanistan.

So they are quite literally surrounded by much larger, historically aggressive entities. Does it even need to be said how completely unacceptable, how unthinkable such a situation would be here?

So Hillary Clinton, who hails from a country which has not exactly been shy about fostering terrorism abroad to suit its own interests, takes the podium at a, um, "women's college" in a medieval despotism that violently oppresses its women for amusement, a country which also happens to be Iran's bitterest enemy in the Arab world -- a country which has also managed to bankroll its share of suicide bombers and such like. And she asks exactly what the dealio is with these crazy Iranians, anyway. Grapefruit-sized cojones on this broad.

I mean, Jesus H. Christ, we shit our pants over every kleptocrat and banana republic who dared step out of line for the past seventy years, and we're wondering why Iran acts paranoid? It's just a shame Americans have no capacity for irony or self-reflection. Too bad for Ahmadinnerjacket that his country is now a handy pawn for leverage with China and Russia, but hegemon is really a shared (if unequally) burden.

At least the obnoxious polemic, no better than the crude red-meat rhetoric Sarah Palin tosses to her gibbering throng, should be countered. I'd remind Ms. Seckaterry o' State that it wasn't mostly (or any, for that matter) Iranians that knocked down the fuckin' World Trade Center, for starters, but there's a decent chance she already knows that. In which case, to borrow her own catch-phrase, you really have to ask yourself: Why is she doing this?

Spasibo, Vremya Stoli (or, Next of Kim)

So, it's your wacky neighbor's birthday, and what do you get for the megalomanical midget goofball who has everything already? Shoe lifts, bouffant dye, the latest granny shades, cases of Hennessy, he's already got all that. You could kidnap some Japanese actresses for his secret harem, but he's got that too. Madmen can be hard to shop for, even in the glorious revolutionary worker paradise of Juche 99.

Pyongyang, February 16 (KCNA) -- General Secretary Kim Jong Il received a congratulatory message from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Tuesday on the occasion of his birthday.

The message said:

Respected Your Excellency Chairman,

Please accept my heartfelt congratulations to you on your birthday.

Then Medvedev offered Kim a deal on some fake Rolexes and placebo boner pills. "Kak dyela, dude! I am having many great pills for your day! Make your cock like baseball bat, bro! All girls are liking!" It's probably more effective with the Cyrillic alphabet, at least from what I've heard.

Mayer of Simpleton

Although his claim to be the possessor of a "hood pass" and his gratuitous dropping of the n-word is ridiculous, and his music seems to be written with the sole mission of getting sorority girls wet (not that that's a bad thing, mind you, just not terribly interesting musically), I have to give grudging props to pr0n addict John Mayer's confession, even if I'm not sure if I really believe it. He's trying just a little too hard, maybe.

Is anyone still reading Playboy these days? They have always had very good interviews, but these days, the Onion AV Club has great interviews as well, even if they don't have airbrushed lap-dancers on the next page, dammit. It just seems like the sweet spot Playboy once had between upwardly mobile dickheads and pseudo-intellectual puds has been rendered extinct by the easy availability of good writing and high-quality spank material, and for free at that.

Mayer also took the opportunity to confess his love of porn, telling the publication, "Pornography? It's a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora's box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed. When I watch porn, if it's not hot enough, I'll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography."

Well, this adds a dimension to Your Body is a Wonderland, I suppose, but "new synaptic pathway"? Visual stimulation is one of the oldest synaptic pathways, obviously. It's just that technology has made it easier by an order of magnitude every few years for the past decade or so. And again, this has pushed all stroke mags -- but especially high-end ones like Playboy -- to the brink of irrelevance, not to mention bankruptcy. They're pushing buggy whips in an era of hover-cars, there's just no getting around it.

I feel for the new generation, I really do. If I were 18 years old right now, one of two things would happen -- either I'd take advantage of the amazing production and distribution capabilities and get some music going, or I'd hole up with a month's supply of beef jerky, Mountain Dew, and paper towels, and they'd have to send in a search party after a while. (TMI, I know, but we were all that age once.) It's strangely comforting to know that, despite all the high-profile tail he gets, Mayer still has to rub one out with surprising frequency. If he gets married, he could be the Tiger Woods of cheesy music.

Entrepreneurship

From the "Why Didn't I think of That?" files comes this little gem:

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as "the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World," the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. "If you love your pets, I can't understand how you could not consider this," he says.

Of course, if this is really the price-point equilibrium and market demand for this, then it's not exactly the gold standard of scams. But it is funny, and as always, some of the commenters are just gravy. I love this one:

tvlgds

Feb 15, 2010 10:05 PM GMT
I think this will be losing venture. I firmly believe that our pets will go with us. I do not believe God would leave these animals to fend for themselves.

Um, yeeaaahhhh, dude, 'cause He really looks out for animals as it is. I mean, this is just flat-out retarded, as in, this person has a severe cognitive deficiency that impairs them from normal perceptions and activities. They probably have to wear a helmet and life-vest when surfing the intarwebz.

Plunging to New Depths

Should we all chip in a nickel or something, and buy a card to let this dipshit know that his fifteen minutes were up a year ago, that he's the political version of Heidi Montag?

"John McCain is no public servant," Wurzelbacher told the gathering, Detrow reports.

He then reportedly went on to announce that his enmity towards the 2008 GOP presidential candidate is so high that he no longer backs Sarah Palin -- because she is supporting the Arizona Republican’s re-election bid.

Not sure who's dumber here -- Sam the Plunger, if he thinks McCain and Palin really give half a shit what he says about anything, or the people for whom this clown's presence was motivation to attend. It's like getting an endorsement from a cartoon character.

The Golden Drool

It's even odds that Frank Rich susses Bible Spice's Palm Pilot gambit correctly, that she intended to get "caught", knowing that she'd be lampooned by all the right people. From day one the rap on Miss Thang was that she made ol' Fredo look bright by comparison, but like Fredo, Palin has benefited from the "stupider like a fox" syndrome -- the bar gets set so low, it becomes almost impossible to fall below it.

Worse yet, Palin is uniquely unencumbered by the usual expectations of making at least a semi-coherent argument in at least a pretense of good faith. Not only do her fans not expect such basic graces from her, they would probably disdain her if she did suddenly start saying things that happened to be true and/or correct. Ordinarily you would say this is the garden-variety "red meat" crowd, but she doesn't even give them that. It's just low-grade rhetorical gruel, a sloppy word salad of cognitive dissonance and predictable buzzwords.

Like any demagogue worth the appellation, Palin is adept at wrapping her platitudes in the usual mindless, meaningless pieties, phrases that would probably be more troubling if she actually meant them.

Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.”

To listen to them, you'd assume that all these fucking people do in the first place is pray. So if it hasn't been working, why is it supposed to work in the future? Not that it would even occur to Palin or any of her drones to ask, much less answer such a question, but certainly serves as a prime example of the sheer mindlessness of mass-consumption pseudo-Christianity.

Another fine illustration of this is Michael Gerson, Fredo's former wordsmith and permanent conservatard catamite. Gerson may consider himself an evangelical Christian, but it's possible that his deity may not think that word means what Gerson thinks it means:

"Guantanamo" has become a synonym for "prison." Actually, it is a 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, complete with a McDonald's and a Subway. The Guantanamo Bay Children and Youth Program sounds like a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But there are families stationed here needing child care. The Navy conducts operations against drug running and human trafficking. The base is now a major transit point for supplies headed to Haiti.

Yes, and people have been tortured and force-fed and suicided there as well, without charge nor trial nor representation. Some of them were teenagers and illiterate shepherds sold for bounty. If some of them are in fact terrorists, let us prove it and dispense with legalistic niceties forthwith. Ending legitimate terrorists is not the problem; perpetually housing them in limbo is.

Gerson may enjoy conjuring up Nuremberg trial imagery, but he might want to consider that we executed enemy soldiers for some of the exact same tactics that we have been employing at Guantanamo and at black sites around the world. You would think that a devout Christian would be more well-versed in the nuances and pitfalls of symbology, but Palin, again bereft of ontological encumbrances such as consistency in religious principles, reflects the intellecual path for most of the publicly pious, including Gerson. Orwell's promise of the boot stamping on a human face forever would not be possible without enabling pigs such as Gerson, acting as if the presence of a sandwich franchise negates eight years of black ops and redacted autopsies.

Meanwhile, the cornpone fascists are well-entrenched in the indoctrination of the public textbook industry, a robust cash scheme if ever there was one. This is where the next generation of god- (and nation-)bothering poltroons gets (in)bred.

The other nonacademic expert, David Barton, is the nationally known leader of WallBuilders, which describes itself as dedicated to “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.” Barton has written and lectured on the First Amendment and against separation of church and state. He is a controversial figure who has argued that the U.S. income tax and the capital-gains tax should be abolished because they violate Scripture (for the Bible says, in Barton’s reading, “the more profit you make the more you are rewarded”) and who pushes a Christianity-first rhetoric. When the U.S. Senate invited a Hindu leader to open a 2007 session with a prayer, he objected, saying: “In Hindu [sic], you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods. And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration when they talked about Creator.”

Their interpretations are as pathological as their inane crusade to force everyone to kowtow to their tedious obsessions. As they do with the bible, these douche-nozzles selectively read and interpret Jefferson and Washington so that they somehow happen to tell them what they wanted to hear in the first place. I mean, who really gives a shit exactly how devout the founding fathers were anyway? They also believed that blacks were three-fifths of a person and women were property. This myth of absolute infallibility would have perplexed them, and is merely a too-clever-by-half rhetorical cover for lazy, disingenuous people with way too much fucking time on their hands.

These goofballs will not be happy until everyone is forced to kneel in the direction of Oral Roberts University five times a day for prayer. It would never even occur to them to just leave people the hell alone to figure out their own path for themselves. That would be too easy.

The Audacity of Dope

Political Zen question: Which is more ridiculous -- writing crib notes in the palm of your hand, or scribbling them out?

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ. Seriously? Our glorious librul media has plagued our poor eyes and ears for weeks over this joke of a "convention" that ended up with a grand total of about a thousand attendees? That's it? A thousand preening morons paying dearly to listen to Sasha Farce use her palm as a cheat sheet to recite the same schtick she's babbled for 18 months straight. And Palin, compared to opening acts Joseph Farah and Tom Tancredo, made the most sense.

So for a trumped-up event that ended up drawing fewer people than the average farmers' market out here in the sticks, we get to hear for the past month -- and probably several months to come -- what a sea change this is. Great job, media tards. Keep up the awesome work.

Tard and Feathered

There is something of a backlash going on lately, aimed squarely at the puling ingrates who have the nerve and/or gall to expect Saint Hopenchange to at least pretend to try to do what he said he was going to do, as opposed to doing what Goldman Fucking Sachs tells him to do. Stupid us, right? Just be grateful you didn't get saddled with a continuation of the inept and corrupt Cheney theocracy, and eat your damned gruel, chump. As always, you're welcome, America.

Look, believe it or not, we're all adults here, for the most part, anyway. We know this is a big boys' game, played by people whose sincerity is always in question. But Obama has been playing this game either as if he was utterly unprepared for it, or he was in on it all along. Letting Joe Lieberman push him around was bad enough, but handing his pet health-care project over to Max Baucus was the political equivalent of hiring Phillip Garrido as a babysitter. Bad enough Obama lets the Republicans cock-block his every word and deed, but he lets his own party screw him over at every opportunity. That's unacceptable, especially with a supermajority up until this week. Unacceptable hell, it's retarded. There, I said it.

And to the extent that Nacho Limpballs can "wade" into anything without radically affecting its displacement and level, he actually has a point, other than the one on his bulbous head. It's a backassward point, but par for the course for Limpballs.

The upshot here is that tough-guy bare-knuckle back-room arm-twister Rahm Emanuel, who has done exactly diddly-fucking-squat in maintaining any semblance of party discipline, calls his president's most fervid supporters "fucking retarded" -- and takes a jab at damage control by apologizing to Tim Shriver. Alrighty then, at least everyone knows exactly where they stand now.

To belabor the painfully obvious, every successful political organization is, at heart, an ongoing marketing campaign. As a campaigner, Obama successfully poached demographic niches and slivers by deft rhetorical positioning, demonstrating action, intent, passion. He commiserated with a nation that looked up from eight years of Bush's catastrophic monkey-fuckery, found itself in a major hole, and promised that he was the guy with the ladder.

So now citizens -- that is to say, customers, people who bought into the hype and still find themselves sucking wind -- are asking where that ladder is, because so far it just looks like another shovel with a slightly different handle. And for that, they are apparently ingrates and/or retards. Bottom line -- when your master economic plan is for people to lose their jobs and their vinyl-and-glue tract houses so that some thieving Wall Street cocksuckers can keep their vacation home and stock options, you need a better explanation than this ipse dixit bullshit we've been getting for a year now.

In our stupid, bought-and-paid-for Coke/Pepsi political dynamic, it might behoove New Coke to recall how that shakes out sometimes, that when half the customers you pulled over from Pepsi are already starting to go back, it might not be a great idea to call your best remaining customers retards. They just might take a moment to reflect and think, "You know, if I waste my vote on you again, maybe I am fucking retarded." And who could blame them? Rahm Emanuel shouldn't be fired for using a politically incorrect term -- he should be fired because he's fucking incompetent. Every one of these bozos in the Senate saw how Lieberman got away with every goddamned thing he pulled, so of course they're going to do the same. Rahm Emanuel is an enforcer like I'm LeBron James.

Rule number one for any business that intends to stay in business is that you at least make an honest attempt to do what you say you're going to do. Bush and Cheney did what they set out to do, like it or not, and they did it with less than 59 senators. These dipshits smack their faces on the doorframe, and blame everyone but their own klutziness. We'll see how that works out for them come November. I'm sure they'll come away from their inevitable ass-kicking more firmly resolved to flip the bird to the people who foolishly believed in them, and genuflect more resolutely to the animals who will never give them the time of day.

This, more than anything else, is why people just say "fuck it" and stop bothering to vote.

Fait Accompli

I agree it's a national tragedy in the making that the Supreme Court has removed the "constraints" of corporate political sponsorship.



We can only imagine the nightmare of corporate conformity and control that now awaits our innocent political system, not to mention our heretofore unmolested way of life.



I, for one, applaud our new insect overlords. At least they, unlike us, actually get what they pay for.

Super Bowl Shuffle

I think it's swell that Rod and Maud Flanders are exercising their free-speech rights and James Dobson's wallet. Good for them. Can't help but wonder, though, what the reaction would be from the Flanderses, and the folks they're dog-whistling to, if Planned Parenthood were to run a pro-choice ad. You might suddenly hear about how people just want to watch a damned football game. It's precious and obnoxious and completely uncalled for; other than that, I'd have a hell of a time figuring out how to care any less.

A small but niggling question: what exactly is the deal with a loudly-proclaimed evangelical (and proud virgin) spending his college career at the nation's top party school? Seriously. The kid lives by his principles, and I can respect that, even if the notion of a chaste college football player surrounded by horny coeds is incomprehensible to me.

But it points to the fact that all the top college programs are party schools, in which case it's either a moral compromise or a spiritual test for Tebow. But modern Christianity in all its stripes is mostly about getting your way while pretending that the mean ol' snakepit of a world is keeping you down. Yeah. Someday a person of faith will be allowed to rise to higher office, and talk about their sky-buddy on the public's dime, yada yada. Till then, they walk the iron path.

Whatever. The most interesting thing about Tebow will the rude awakening he's going to get when the Rams draft him and he finds out the hard way that you can't run the shotgun formation every single play.

Monotheism and Its Discontents

So let's see if we have this straight. Last week's upset victory by the new Senatorfold from Massachusetts marks the end of the brief era of wonderment that Hopenchange had brought unto our heretofore benighted land. A vitally needed health-care reform bill would now be brought to its bony, spavined knees because, according to the new-new math, 41 > 59, especially when you have no balls. Worse yet, the fearsome claque of jabbering teabaggers has now been empowered to reclaim what Obammy stole from them. And so forth.

I mean, hell, do these people ever listen to themselves? Not everything is a sea change, folks, nor do things necessarily possess the semiotic heft you ascribe to them in your political fever dreams. Maybe Martha Coakley was simply a phenomenally dreadful candidate, running on fumes and entitlement, a hack who couldn't even make sure the name of the state she was running for was spelled correctly on her own campaign ads, who thought a two-week vacation in the Caribbean during a close race was a good idea.

Regardless, now we are apparently on the verge of national catastrophe because this supposedly-better-than-nothing industry-written monkeyfuck might get filibustered to death, because the Democrats simply don't have the stones to actually force the minority party to make good on their threats. A party with some imagination and courage would make sure to heavily promote such proceedings; the spectacle of borderline retards like Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn expounding at length of the post-apocalyptic moonscape of Obamacare would be worth its weight in comedy gold. Only a party shit-scared of its own shadow, preoccupied with its incessant cat-herding, would fail to see this.

Not to mention that even had Coakley somehow figured out a way to retain a seat that a slow ten-year-old could have held for the Democrats, her role in the "reform" bill would simply have been that of caretaker -- that is, ensuring along with the rest of the people's delegates that nothing untoward would affect the health and pharma industries' revenue-gathering capabilities.

The hand-wringing is really pretty embarrassing, and I'm sure Scott Brown will turn out to be every bit the mediocrity he appears to be, but that was never going to redound to Coakley's advantage. If there is any lesson to be drawn from this, it is that sometimes people lose because they deserve to, because they fail to make a case for why they are even in the room, and are inept and tone-deaf to boot. The fear that it is also a party failure is justified, and on an even simpler basis -- it's not that they failed to do what they said they were going to do, it's that they didn't even try.

Decadence

It's a bit late to worry about it now, but as 2009 came to a close, I considered the idea of doing some sort of de rigueur end-of-year (or, and I really have no interest in the pedantic "when does it really begin?" dispute, end-of-decade) list. Since The Beast seems to have gone out of commission, I mostly thought about poaching their always-excellent "50 Most Loathsome People" idea, perhaps shortening it to 20 or 25.

But in the end it seemed like it would have been as much a tedious reiteration as a recapitulation. Does anyone need to be reminded that Richard Bruce Cheney is a loathsome tool who needs to be frog-marched off every cable-news podium onto which he skulks; that Nadya Suleman is a parasitic head case who needs to be forcibly sterilized; that Joe Lieberman is an unprincipled ratfucker who should be thrown from a bridge into a vat full of pig parts and droppings; that Barack Obama turned out be just another dime-store politician after all, even with all the populist political winds at his back? They're all loathsome in their own special way, but it's nothing new to readers of this or any other blog. It's just a matter of breaking out the thesaurus and finding innovative ways of saying "You really suck" to people we already disparage on a routine basis. Who needs it?

That said, it is somewhat useful for everyone to take stock of what the last year or ten years or whatever held for them, their families, communities, etc. I think most of us, unless we happen to be oil futures speculators or hedge-fund thieves, would like a do-over on many things. And yet, what would "we" do with it, Kemosabe?

Probably the most salient point to really be driven home over the past decade is how brute stupid so many people really are, and how technology has tended to empower them in that, rather than to allow or encourage them to unscrew their heads from their sphincters. It has enabled them, counterintuitively I think, to wallow in it and become even dumber and meaner, just when that seemed impossible.

Blogs and chat fora at least had a fairly equitable chance of raising or lowering discourse; for every virtual room of tubthumping dipshits, you had decent odds of finding people who could argue substantively, and even with some measure of intellectual honesty and good faith. Even a blog maintained by a halfwit troglodyte at least requires some small bit of discipline and persistence. All you need with a Twitter account is a lack of self-awareness, the assumption that someone, somewhere, actually gives half a shit what you had for breakfast. (Me, I had the usual Sunday Special of tequila and Pop-Tarts. Don't knock it till you try it, preferably with your taste buds pre-coated from last night's bender of hydrocodone washed down with RBVs and purple drank.)

Knowing that yahooism reigns and having it confirmed in ever more ways with ever more frequency are two different things. You can grok the dilemma of understanding just how dumb the average American is, and that by definition it means that half the people aren't even that smart, and still have be almost a surprise just how high it turns out you had that "average" bar set. The rise of Twitter and the prevalence of cable news networks attempting to keep pace with that nonsense only drives home the sad fact that all this technology democratized the people's ability to speak their mind, only to demonstrate that most of them had nothing useful to say, nor the means to even comprehend it.

What kind of moron watches CNN to listen to the news reader recite viewers' tweetstwits? Is it more or less the same kind of doofus that still contributes money to a moral cretin such as Marion Robertson, or the farm animal that watched Sarah Palin on Glenn Beck's Playground o' Decompensation, or do new times call for new taxonomies of dangerous retards?

In the end, maybe that's what the Naughts were all about -- confirmation, not revelation. They confirmed that there are vast swaths of people that really will fall for or put up with anything, and some of them are college-edumacated Democrats. There's a difference between them and the unrepentant yahoos of the Palin/Beck set, but only in degree. No one seems able to quite explain this compelling reason why the Democrats must retain Ted Kennedy's Senate seat or regain California's goobernatorship, seeing what they've done this past year.

So the Democrats are spineless and flaccid, even with a supermajority, and the Republicans are openly gleeful at any prospect to profiteer and make war on the backs of the poor. (Not that the Democrats aren't fine with those prospects as well, they just have the good grace to not be as open about it.)

The latest class I'm taking has begun with a rather protracted discussion of ethics in general, and the corporation's need to be socially responsible in particular. Snapshots of overworked South Asians and Caribbeans slaving for six cents an hour amongst piles of $120 logo shirts proliferate next to scenes from the ritual death of the factory farm. Woven throughout is the plaint that the eeeevil corporation squeezes its profits out of the hides -- sometimes literally -- of the weak and powerless, abusing them mercilessly to find that extra one-tenth of a cent per unit in profit.

What's ignored is how deeply symbiotic this ugly scenario is. Every successful business has gotten that way by giving people what they want. Anyone who is still in the dark about where their clothes or their meat or their kitchen cleansers come from is either too stupid to breathe, or knows exactly what the deal is, and is just fine with it.

It's not exactly a secret that people tell themselves little lies to get through the day all the time. So will they bravely put up with abused chickens and exploited Pakistanis and unbelievably polluted rivers in China, in order to save a buck on the next Costco run? Hell yes, even at the expense of the jobs and communities they used to have. It has always been thus, but the past ten years seem to have compacted and accelerated that nasty dynamic.

Oppression and malfeeance, lies and chicanery, in whatever nefarious forms, simply cannot continue without the complicity of some portion of the victims of those tactics. For example, violent pro-life activism would not exist without the involvement or tacit approval of at least some women. Fox News and its ordured heap of screeching daemons could not thrive without the viewership of the bamboozled, the very people who are being tricked into voting against their own rational self-interest over and over again. The Democratic Party would be thumped without the support of dead-ender bien pensant libruls who will back them at any and all costs -- as they are about to find out the hard way later this year.

Schmidt Happens

It's always great when a disgruntled operative airs dirty laundry.

Sarah Palin believed that Sen. John McCain chose her to be his running mate in 2008 because of "God's plan," according to a top political strategist in the Arizona Republican's campaign.

In an interview with the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes," Steve Schmidt described Palin as "very calm -- nonplussed" after McCain met with her at his Arizona ranch just before putting her on the Republican ticket. McCain had planned to name Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., as his vice presidential choice until word leaked, sparking what Schmidt called political blowback over picking the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Schmidt said he asked Palin about her serenity in the face of becoming "one of the most famous people in the world." He quoted her as saying, "It's God's plan."

It's too easy to point out that Palin is either a barking loon, a raving moron, or a cynical opportunist (or some combination thereof). The sick part is that some of the target audience for this article will read it unironically and nod their heads at Saint Sarah's affirmation. It doesn't occur to them that if that's "God's plan", then He's running this thing even worse than Al Davis runs the Raiders. The Big Guy needs a GM, and pronto.

Schmidt credited Palin with being a quick study and for giving a great speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., but he said it soon became clear that she often was not accurate in her remarks.

By "being a quick study", obviously Schmidt means "able to memorize and regurgitate standard talking points, albeit with great effort and syntactic awkwardness". By "not accurate", he means....aw, who are we kidding? She's an idiot, pure and simple. Schmidt knows better, and has to have a shit-eating grin just to utter such a preposterous phrase.

Even after a full year in the spotlight, with nothing but time to prepare, Sarah Palin is still catastrophically unqualified for any national office. That's not mean, it just is. Most people are, it's just that most people aren't telegenic enough to bamboozle millions of slack-jawed yokels into buying into this fucking nonsense.

Schmidt conceded that had Palin not been on the ticket, "our margin of defeat would've been greater than it would've been otherwise."

Well, yeah, they did better than they would have with Lieberputz, whom Republiclowns and conservatards put up with for his apostasy, but despise nearly as much as the other side does. But so what? They might have done even better with Carrie Prejean as a running mate, at least until the masturbation videos came out.

As bad as the Dummycrats are -- and christ, they are fucking awful -- the Republitards are an endless mine for comedy gold. I'm surprised Lincoln's shade hasn't risen to renounce any association or mention with these shameless reprobates.

Coocoocachoo

Apropos of nothing, this odd story manages to highlight something interesting:

Earlier on Sunday, a close friend of ex-DUP leader Ian Paisley repeated his view that Mr Robinson's position as Northern Ireland first minister was "untenable".

Free Presbyterian minister David McIlveen stressed that his opinion was not that of Mr Paisley.

His church has also said he was not speaking on their behalf.

"He has a problem with solving his family difficulties and I cannot take the view a person's private life does not affect their public life," he said.

Now, as politically incorrect as it may be, I actually agree with this philosophy. It's pretty simple -- it's hard to respect somebody enough to allow them to make big-boy decisions, when you know they've been cuckolded by a fucking barista and been unable to do anything about it. But then we're talking about a bunch of poncey fops who are still reminiscing about the thrashings they received in boarding school. It's just sad that a long-standing serious, violent political situation is affected by this nonsense.

Fuck the Patriots

In the neck. With a rusty fork. Nice win (their first over New England) by the Ravens; the only complaint is that they couldn't keep that 24-0 first quarter momentum going full throttle. Aside from the field position for their first touchdown, not even the refs could help the Patsies out of this one. If there's a team more sorely deserving of a 96-0 thrashing than the Tuck Rule Sillynannies, I'd be surprised. May they go 0-16 for the next decade.

On the other hand, the Packers. Epic shootout, tremendous game. The Cards actually have a decent chance against a fading Saints team, but assuming the Vikes beat the Cowpies, would probably not win in Minnesota. Fun stuff. The main thing is the Pats are out, maybe for some time.

The Golden Rule

Perhaps the most galling characteristic of the banksters -- aside from their utter lack of common sense or basic empathy -- is their sheer cluelessness. It was already obvious that they couldn't care less that their shenanigans have wrecked millions of lives so far, cost families their only homes and incomes, and all that. But they don't even seem to comprehend why those people might resent having to pay them for the privilege of having their lives wrecked. It's truly puzzling. You know, insult to injury.

(I've called them thieves all year, and I stand by that. The smoking gun in the linked article is in the beginning -- A.I.G. execs didn't even want their own stock as compensation, "worthless" in their own words even though it was trading at $40/share at the time. Does anyone still need a fucking diagram on this?)

Maybe let's illustrate the comprehension gap in Spoiled Douchebag Connecticut-ese to these bastards: Let's say the pool boy at your vacation home in the Hamptons is porking your trophy wife. You don't mind as a man so much, since you are a spineless, dickless dweeb who can't satisfy her anyway, and it keeps her off your back, so she can just go shopping and leave you to swapping made-up war stories with your trader buddies.

The thing is, the pool boy has been throwing his back into it as of late, and your trophy wife is clearly starting to think about how she can take your dumb trader ass to the cleaners, and collect six-figure alimony while she and Taylor fuck all day and drive your Cayenne around. Not cool, bro-ham!

So Taylor the cuckolding pool boy orchestrates a slip-and-fall on your pool deck, and your coke-whore trophy wife -- for whom you screwed over your first wife to cover up your insecurities at being a paunchy, balding closet case -- simultaneously hits your monkey ass with papers, requesting divorce and that mid-six-figure alimony you were dreading.

Both cases get to court. The kid that's tapping your wife gets everything he's asking for, grinning like a rube that poured cooking oil on the floor of a supermarket and pulled a sack of dog food on himself, and got fucking paid for it. And your cunt trophy wife gets twice the alimony she was asking for. And custody of the kids. And the vacay house.

Okay, Mister Banker Asshole -- how you feel about those judges, is how 99% of America feels about you. Hope that clears things up.

The Power of Prayer

Oh, hey, no doubt, Rush Limbaugh has certainly been in my prayers as well. Yet still he continues to draw breath. Same with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Horst Wessel gang. Might as well pray for a suitcase full of Franklins to land in your backyard.

Love the crybaby conservatard comments there, by the way, excoriating japing libruls. Hey, motherfuckers, where were the tears and outrage at the barrage of Chappaquiddick jokes at Ted Kennedy's demise, or Tom Coburn imploring his pagan goatwhore daemon to smite a colleague for him? I gots your incivility right here, son.

(And what sort of twee mezzofanuc wears "blue jeans, an argyle sweater and a tweed jacket with elbow patches", as Coburn apparently does? Sheesh. Nearly as retarded as Coburn, Brownback, and DeMint -- nary a hundred IQ points among the lot of them -- gathering to pray for the defeat of the neutered health-care bill. If prayer worked, those three certainly wouldn't be standing.)

Writes of Passage

What Ed said. This has been a huge pet peeve of mine for some time. I love the way technology has democratized and facilitated our ability to communicate freely and easily. But it's sad to realize that so many people who have absolutely nothing to say, nor the skills to competently say it, have been empowered and enabled by these toys.

It's not about the linguistic lepidopterist's cri de coeur to faithfully preserve any and all conventions of spelling and punctuation, it's about what a moron's failure to observe those simple conventions communicates. At risk of stating the obvious -- but I seriously doubt it would be obvious to a preening halfwit like Sarah Palin -- the way a person writes is not only a function of the way they speak, but of the way they think. And what Palin communicates in her climate change twittering -- aside from the fact that she apparently does not know the difference between "ions" and "eons" -- is that she does not actually read, much less think about, the things she writes.

What you end up with is a shitload of people who don't bother to inform themselves about much of anything in any real depth, pontificating on subjects they know very little about. And since they don't read in general, they don't understand the fundamentals of composing an argument with coherence and structure and narrative heft. You get these stupid little word-salad blips that mean whatever the hell Miss Thang wishes they meant. But that's not writing; hell, it's not even typewriting.

In terms of intellectual honesty and probity, Palin is the equivalent of an illiterate, drug-addled dipshit on a sidewalk with a crayon and some cardboard, scrawling half-formed trifles of thought for the bemusement of unfortunate passersby. CNN, true to form, stenographs her nonsense uncritically, in fact casting her yet again as a scrapper unafraid to take on The Man. I mean, for fuck's sake.

Let's cut to the chase about what the climate change dispute is really about: exactly how many people around this benighted planet can achieve the American way of life, of consumption and indulgence, before it exacts a permanent, catastrophic price on a substantial part of the earth's ecosystem. We have it, they want it, and now that they have all the manufacturing jobs we used to have, as well as the technology to attain that goal, it becomes a number-crunching exercise.

Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope calcs to illustrate. Figure that the most advanced industrialized economies -- North America, Europe, Japan -- total around 900 million people, out of roughly 7 billion total population. Figure also that the two most rapidly rising economies, China and India, have about 2.5 billion people just between the two of them. Each country has enormous seething underclasses and infrastructural gaps which will require attention in order to maintain their domestic stability.

The scale of just those two countries in comparison to Europe and the U.S. is amazing. Nothing Sarah Palin has ever tweeted or babbled about any subject indicates that she remotely comprehends any of this, that China and India each have lower classes far larger than the entire population of the United States. To bring them up to the same level that even the American underclass has would require efforts of a scope and scale that guarantees serious environmental consequences.

And yet we cannot continue to sit smugly at the top of the heap and deny to everyone else the creature comforts we take for granted. There is some sort of equilibrium that must be sought, or what we've seen just over the past decade -- the poles melting, mass mammalian extinctions continuing apace, clear-cutting everything in sight -- will be just a prelude. It can't be solved at some bien pensant circle jerk in Copenhagen, certainly, not with a bunch of douchebag private-jet limo libs smugly dictating terms for the peons, and overbreeding Third World shitholes refusing to take responsibility for their own demographics. But the dribbling buffoonery emanating from the denialists, who mindlessly chant "drill baby drill" without considering all the externalities of such endeavors, is far more destructive.

Perhaps this would be more readily apparent to a society that hasn't already done every conceivable thing it can to undermine its own capacity for reason and critical thinking. Dean Wormer was an optimist.

Vulgar Display of Pouter

For Peggy Noonan, this little jeremiad almost qualifies as a head-fake or a rope-a-dope. After some mild pseudo-populist clucking about how the economy's travails have deflated 'murkin's natural optimism and begun turning them against Obama (for, you know, essentially continuing Bush's economic and financial policies without missing a beat), she abruptly scoops up a couple armloads of hay from the barn floor and valiantly attempts to construct a nice strawman.

But something tells me this isn't all about money. It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.

Forget the hip waders, bring a hazmat suit. It's gonna get thick. So thick that Nooners has even given her hunch a name, the "Adam Lambert Problem", which is apparently like the Alan Parsons Project, but more flamboyant and destructive to Our Culture, which is what?

Seriously, if any of these harrumphing "culture" bozos can pin down exactly what that is, in the monolithic sense they imply, and without lamenting the demise of I Love Lucy, I've yet to see it. Indeed, Nooners never quite gets around to identifying any cultural benchmarks of which she approves. She just knows that people in flyover country are easily startled, yet apparently not quite enough to just change the fucking channel.

It goes on like this, and of course Nooners, per usual, misses the damned point.

America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.

Uh-huh. All these things we are protecting our children from that pollute the airwaves, the sexual references, the language, the obnoxious behavior, the ill-treatment of others. Raise your hands out there if you learned about all those things at school, rather than teevee.

The core problem with culture vultures is that their social concerns are somewhat at odds with their economic sensibilities. Is America more coarse and vulgar than fifty years ago? Of course. Could being marketed to relentlessly, endlessly, everywhere we go and everything we see, constantly being pushed to spend money we don't have on shit we don't need, encouraged to borrow at usury rates for impulse purchases, self-actualizing through fuckyoumobiles and electronic gadgets, commodifying all and filtering through only the prism of desire and pure id, could any of that have to do with that coarseness and vulgarity? How about being rendered powerless and cynical by ever-growing economic disparity, a culture that unironically insists that greed is good, maybe that plays a part in this?

I mean, all those things require a concerted effort to turn sentient beings into dullards, and thence easy marks for whatever bridge is sold to them by telemarketers, self-help hustlers, SUV manufacturers and such like. It makes sense that their entertainment and activity choices would reflect that; you can't actively encourage masses of people to be spoon-fed morons and then expect them to seek quality in their choices for visual and auditory stimulation.

There's actually a few points in Nooners' essay with which reasonable people can agree, but it's particularly offensive that she chooses to prioritize it above ordinary citizens' genuine concerns about their economic viability. You want vulgar and coarse, how about banksters turning the finance system into street-corner numbers racket, then expecting the peons to pay for it and insisting on fat bonuses for their trouble.

I suppose there might actually be a few addled 'tards out there who really are more het up about Adam Lambert than they are about getting their jobs shipped overseas, or their house foreclosed on, or being a medical problem from utter destitution. But as always, those folks get precisely what they deserve.

I don't like Adam Lambert either. That's why I don't watch brain-and-soul-sucking crap like American Idol or The American Music Awards, whatever the fuck that is. It really is a free country, Peggy, and as such, people are free to turn the goddamned teevee off and, hell, read a book or take a walk or play a board game with their family, instead of this constant "the food is terrible and the portions are too small" whinging, especially in contrast with the truly vulgar bastards that have wrecked this country's economy, its optimism, and very likely its future.

Deep Thought

Remember when Rahm Emanuel was like this hyper-bad-ass back-room enforcer who was, like, gonna make the most of that huge electoral majority and keep party discipline and make those Republitard biznitches cry uncle with that Krav Maga shit he learned in the Mossad? Yeah. Good times.

Stop, Democrats. Please, just stop. It takes real patience and practice to cultivate the level of mind-numbing ineptitude required to actually make the American health-care system worse than it already is.

Consider the Asshole

[apologies to David Foster Wallace]

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal, presumably between weekly Karl Rove 'rhoid-poppers, to delicately understate the unearned role of prominence Senator Lieberputz (I-Massengill) has taken in the putative health-care-reform process.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman's use of his swing vote to help quash a proposed expansion of Medicare marked the latest act in his deteriorating relationship with the Democratic Party.

Even a source, such as the WSJ, that would seem to have some inherent antagonism to Democrats and/or Holy Joe, fails to properly limn the obvious issue -- why Lieberman would continue to retain any sort of relationship at all with the Democratic Party. When he lost the '06 primary, he petulantly quit the party and ran against -- and beat -- the Democratic candidate, thanks in at least some part to campaigning by the current preznit. Since that time, he has shown his gratitude to both the party and Obama by ratfucking them at every possible opportunity, just for the sheer fum of it at times.

The fact that there is still a relationship to deteriorate is testament to the utter lack of sack in the Democratic Party. They're a bunch of cowards, hypocrites, and pussies, and they will continue to be so until they stop letting this hump push them around.

The liberal group MoveOn.org held rallies outside the White House and Mr. Lieberman's Hartford office Tuesday to protest his role. "It is absolutely absurd that after months of work, President Obama and the Democrats are letting one senator, Joe Lieberman, gut the health-care bill," said executive director Justin Ruben.

Yeah but, whaddaya gonna do about it, Ponyboy? You think these clowns haven't calculated a squawk factor into all this? Politically, it costs them less to play ball with Lieberdouche because they know the MoveOn crowd ain't goin' fuckin' anywhere. And until that factor gets changed, by action rather than merely the threat or mention of action, it'll stay exactly that way. There's just too much money on the table. You can't say that, senatorially, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies don't get what they pay for.

Many Democrats wanted to retaliate by stripping Mr. Lieberman of his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, but the senator made an emotional appeal to his colleagues, and Messrs. Obama and Reid argued that punishing him would only hurt the Democrats.

Bullshit, the relationship gets more and more symbiotic with each passing feint at a vote -- and all this drama for a meaningless, industry-written bill that does not address actual costs, but merely front-loads them. It will not improve the health-care system in this country one iota, it will merely grease the payment skids, because even though science, education, infrastructure, and all that are slipping away, one thing this country stands firm on is executive compensation and eight-figure bonuses taken out of the backs of the peons.

It should be clear by now that the Democrats need Lieberman just as much as he needs them. He provides them a convenient foil, always somehow managing to single-handedly prevent them from Doing The Right Thing. Funny how a dweeb with the voice and countenance of a cartoon character, who can't even ride in a car on Fridays, is thwarting this illustrious bulletproof majority we've been hearing so much about. Seriously, fuck you, Democrats. You lose because you deserve to.

I dunno, maybe it really is time to heighten those contradictions. The dime's worth of difference has gotten old, and life's too short to keep trudging to the booth to vote for Lucy with the football one more time.

Patriot Games

As bad as the Raiders have been this year (aside from last week's upset in Pittsburgh, which was easily the best game this team has played in at least five years), it is always gratifying to see another article on what a punk and a quitter Randy Moss is.

Randy Moss finished today with a single, 16-yard catch, which led to a fumble. Brady's interception was intended for Moss.

And if you asked the Panthers what their gameplan was, it's simple. They helped whoever was covering Moss early on in the game with a safety. Then, once he was frustrated, they no longer needed to. Because by then, it was Game Over for No. 81.

"We knew he was going to shut it down," Panthers corner Chris Gamble told me after the game. "That's what we wanted to do him. That's what we did. ... He'd just give up a lot ... Slow down, he's not going deep, not trying to run a route. You can tell, his body language."

Gamble continued ... "I know everyone who plays against him, they can sense that. Once you get into him in the beginning of the game, he shuts it down a little bit."

Yes. Yes. That's the Moss I remember, the guy who picked Al Davis' pocket for $15 mil and dogged it like a practice-squad scrub for two fucking miserable years. The guy who didn't give two shits about the team or the fans, but never gave back a paycheck. You deserve him, massholes. Choke on it. It's why he'll never get that ring, nor does he deserve it.

Requiem for a Wet Dream

Paul Samuelson sounds like he was a pretty decent egg. It's a damn shame that apparently he was unable to communicate to the motherless Wall Street fucks -- including his nephew Larry "You Gonna Finish That?" Summers -- that sense of Depression-era mores he informed his own work with. Then again, Samuelson seemed at least to understand the difference between "economist" and "bookie", a distinction that is far lost on the current gang of underwritten thieves. Keep up the awesome work, Preznit Hopenchange!

I consider it a privilege to pay for their manses and bonuses, and I will gladly take turns heaving the blade when it's their turn at the block, should a sufficient amount of 'murkins turn off their dancin' shows and decide to do something about their pockets being picked. I dunno, maybe if Tim Geithner was fucking Kate Gosselin or something, some attention might be paid.

News of the World

Soooo....anything new happen with Tiger Woods' cock that I need to be apprised of? Because it is apparently of the utmost necessity that I know where he's been sticking that thing. Jesus, and we thought the coverage of Michael Jackson's death was ridonkulously over the top.

Incidentally, should the need ever arise for the planet to know everywhere mine was during my twenties, I'm working on a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, the banksters' pillaging of the shell of the nation continues apace. We should all have been related to Bob Rubin, I guess, if we were expecting a fair shake.

The Song Remains the Same

Big thanks to The Vile Scribbler for steering me to this little gem. Basically an updated iteration of Steve Albini's classic screed on record-industry accounting. These people are vipers, always have been. No one will miss them.

Music industry weasels always liked to congratulate themselves that Zeppelin, for example, got treated well because Ahmet Ertegun loved them. Bullshit -- Zeppelin got paid because they had Peter Grant for a manager. Ertegun loved them because they made him lots of money. People can chicken-egg that shit however they like, it always comes down to money. But, you know, people will buy pretty much anything if you push it on them hard and often enough, as if the continued existence of Lady Gaga isn't proof enough of that.

So it's particularly telling that in the case of Too Much Joy, the major labels really haven't learned a damned thing from what's happened to them over the last decade. They took their shoddy promotional and accounting practices into the digital realm, that's all. They give crap bands like REM $80 mil, bully it out of the hides of all the other bands on the label, and wonder why no one thinks twice about fucking them over on LimeWire.

In another 5-10 years, the majors will either be gone or transformed. There's really not much use for them anymore, at least for production, distribution, marketing, or swag. Maybe fronting money and scheduling shit for some short-bus band that can't figure it out for themselves. But the payola stranglehold these assholes shared with radio is done, and good riddance. There's more bands than ever, and more good bands than ever, and the music's cheaper and more plentiful than ever.

A truly free market -- the predatory capitalist's worst nightmare.

Journography

Sully quite rightly gets it that the glee club at Politico specializes in verbal rub-and-tugs, yet there's something slightly off about the verb tense:

Increasingly, these journos see themselves as conduits for politicians, not as independent actors determined to get at the truth and hold the powerful accountable. There are no follow-ups any more; and when you see how Palin was insulated from real questioning in the campaign and book tour, you realize how corrupted the MSM has become....These people are not checks on power; they are increasingly its willing accomplices.

"Increasingly". "Has become". How about "are" and "have been for quite some fucking time"? Hell, I was referring to Allen as "Open Mike" several years ago, back when Politico was just a goopy stain in Pool Boy Vandehei's board shorts. This is the same breed of dipshit that was transcribing any and every paranoid Clinton invention throughout the '90s with halfhearted rebuttals at best (not that they would have had the presence of mind to avoid printing rumor and conjecture in the first place).

Seriously, what journalist in their right goddamned mind has to bother with slobbering Dick Cheney's knob? Yet Pool Boy and Open Mike do exactly that, not because of any dark conspiracy, but because they're housebroken by now. It doesn't even occur to them to call bullshit anymore. The best you can hope for is some pseudo-Gawker "as if" tone attesting to their postured skepticism.

Besides, one never knows when the next opportunity will come along for the yearbook society to fawn over the cheerleaders:

Palin spoke for 11 ½ minutes, poking gentle fun at the media.

“Sometimes you just gotta trust your instincts,” she said, “and when you don’t, you end up in places like this.”

But it had some value: “At least now I can put a face to the newspapers I do read.”

Kidding aside, sort of, “It's good to be here though, really, in front of this audience of leading journalists and intellectuals,” Palin said, “or as I like to call it, a death panel."

Hi-yooooo! Look, I get it -- the Gridiron dinner and the press corpse dinner in the spring, that's supposedly where these mutual antagonists get to set aside grievances and roast each other. Haw haw. Oh, it is to laugh.

And that's precisely my point -- these two sets of people are supposed to be mutually antagonistic. They're not supposed to get together for palsy-walsy no-camera strokefests. But these jerkoffs go the same parties all fucking year.

The media assholes pretend not to realize that for the politicians, they are the coveted "get".

Without constant, barely skeptical coverage and dutiful transcription, Sarah Palin would disappear from everyone's radar. Ya know? She's pimping a crap book for the sort of morons whose last book finished was The Secret, getting a fat little retirement fund off it, while the lies she told and the shenanigans she engaged in back in her politically inbred little state get forgotten.

Ditto Cheney; the guy left office as one of the most universally despised people in American government, and unless he's being brought to trial, there's not much reason to talk to him. As the saying goes, every word out of his piehole is a lie, including "and" and "the".

The press likes to strut around, pretending they're shining klieg lights on the dark recesses of governance, when in fact it's just a camera light with a gauzy soft-focus lens. It's not mutual antagonism, it's symbiosis.