Vote With a Bullet

Ho-hum. Another week, another massacre. Words fail at this point, you know, what else can you say on this miserable subject? Interesting debate over at Ed's nonetheless, with commenter Nick making some decent counter-arguments. Regardless, there are salient points and questions you just can't ignore in this context:

• Why it's easier to get firearms than to get over-the-counter decongestants.


• Why it's easier to get a gun than it is to legally drive a car.


• Is there anything at all, any scrap of token resistance built into the acquisition process, that gun absolutists can accept, in the reasonable common-good goal that deranged individuals not have a completely unobstructed pathway to being able to inflict catastrophic damage to crowds of innocents in a matter of seconds? Or is it just a shrug of the shoulders and a "gee, that sucks", until one of their own kids gets slaughtered by one of these goons?


• How does this inalienable right, this freedom, become more exalted and sanctified than any and all others? That is, we all concede absolute freedoms all the time every day, everywhere we go, because we have a utilitarian concept of what the "common good" entails. We acknowledge that the freedom to drive a car, and the freedom to drink alcohol, don't also confer an ability to do both at once. We get that you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, or make death threats, no matter how empty, against people. So where did we all decide that we can't erect any roadblocks, even modest ones, to lunatics acquiring AR-15s and cop-killer bullets, no questions asked? At what point did we all mutually agree that the collateral damage was just the cost of doing business?

None of this is said lightly; it's not fair to punish the vast majority of honest, responsible gun owners, for the actions of a deranged few. And as Nick points out repeatedly, pointing the finger at a deadly object does not remove all the underlying causes of the behavior that compels these individuals to commit these horrible crimes.

But we all put up with infringements to our absolute freedoms all the time; we put up with random police checkpoints for everything from seat belts to drunk driving, we allow ourselves to be felt up like strippers and herded like cattle, to ride on a goddamned plane. American life is filled with increasingly abusive and intrusive experiences, for the hollow promise of safety. There's even a new-millennium neologism constructed just for the phenomenon: security theater.

Would gun control (or bullet control -- or hell, just modest background checks and waiting periods) prevent all gun crimes? Of course not. But these acts, however meticulously planned, are on execution acts of immediacy, where everyone in that line of fire gets just enough time before the bullet hits to wonder whether a 72-hour waiting period or a background check might of thrown their wingnut on that day at that hour, just for a moment, just enough for a different quantum event.

Or is doing absolutely nothing infinitely preferable, because it might conceivably somehow infringe slightly on the god-given rights of people to buy a pallet of bullets to take out to the range? It's a tough question, and one that needs to be asked and examined by both sides of the debate, because simply chanting "Second Amendment" over and over again isn't cutting it.

Hungry Freaks, Daddy

What the world needs now.... is a nice e.coli epidemic for these humps. Every last one of them. Awful, awful excuses for humanity.

Sometimes you encounter an egregious, hopefully outlying example of someone who is clearly their own worst enemy in life, whose poor decision-making and impulse-control issues have led them to cadge assistance, and say something mean along the lines of, "This is the sort of thing that turns people Republican."

Well, this is the sort of thing that makes you root for the asteroid.

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.

When Harry Met Mitty

Gotta me-too the Boggster here. As "honey badgers" go, Harry Reid is more of the Casper W. Milquetoast strain, but as TBogg notes, he knows what he's doing here in going after Rmoney with (so far) unsubstantiated allegations. Reid is a fellow Mormon, a former boxer, and understands his place in the food chain.

Besides, as the song says, is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.

If Reid is proven correct -- and it stands to reason that he will be, if for no other reason than that this is simply too high-stakes a game to be lobbing these sorts of assertions with no basis in fact -- Reid may very well turn out to be a better poker player than a boxer. As Bush's own war marketeers once sagely opined, you don't drop a new product in August.

You do it right before/during/immediately after your opponent's convention. Look for the necessary "put up" (to appropriate Mittford's hilarious tough-guy bluster) right about then, when it will have the most impact. In fact, done well enough, it could very well demotivate an already disheartened base, and damage the down-ticket races.

Fuckin' strategy, how does it work?

Coupled with Mittington's terrible, awful, no-good-very-bad last couple of weeks, where he managed to piss off our closest allies, hold a $50k/plate fundraiser with the swindlers and chiselers who have literally been caught rigging the global economic system, and the biggest endorsement he picked up along the way, aside from Clint "I don't like paying taxes either" Eastwood, was from a past-her-prime cum dumpster. (Said endorsement could actually be a way of making Rmoney look bad, not that he needs any help, but who knows? More to the point, who cares?)

Porn to lose, indeed.

The Democrats are annoying as all hell, with their inability to counterjab even the most ham-fisted guff from baldfaced, smirking liars just daring you to call them out. They need to get their shit together, and big time, which is made all the more difficult by the simple fact that they are rented by the exact same folks who rent the Republicans. It's the ultimate hedge fund.

But the Republicans just need to go, period, end of sentence. This is a party that has outlived its usefulness, and while every nation needs at least two viable parties, this grotesque cabal of snake-handlers and grifters, pandering to the farm-animal intellectual level of a certain swath of 'murkins, has no practical use anymore, except as a cautionary tale.

Rmoney will still probably manage to pull 45% of the vote, because the perpetual campaign industry needs the illusion of a horse race. But he is clearly positioned to be the worst GOP nominee since at least Bob Dole, and at least Bob Dole actually put his skin on the line for the country, and has a solid record of accomplishment over the years.

Reid does need to back up his assertions, and I'd put my next paycheck on him doing just that, when the time is right. But with people distracted by the Olympics, or watching evangelist gastropods waddle to the chicken shack for another box of Freedom Sammiches®, congratulating themselves on their brave defense of the beleaguered First Amendment, it would be forgotten before Labor Day.

Stay thirsty, my friends. Hilarity is about to ensue.

Down on the Corner

Apparently The Corner protagonist De'Andre McCullough (hopefully I got the meaningless, decorative apostrophe placed correctly) has shuffled off this mortal coil. Surely someone will eventually lament the vicious socioeconomic circumstances that forced poor Andy into the life he led.

But I'll remember the strutting punk who, on page 43 in The Corner, bragged to his fellow punks about grabbing a stray tomcat who had been casing Andy's pigeon coops, breaking the animal's legs one by one, hanging it from a tree, dousing it with lighter fluid, and setting it on fire. I have no sympathy whatsoever for someone who does something like that, they're a half-step above a child rapist.

Karma takes some time to arrive, if she ever does, but when she does, she's a bitch.

The Comeback Kid

Football fans may recall when, after the Raiders, in a fit of uncharacteristic sanity, cut unproductive pork chop JaMarcus Russell, that Russell vowed to get on with another team, climb back up the ranks, and show those stupid Raiders what they missed out on. Click on the link to see how all that's working out.

Maybe I'm being petty about it. [Ed.: There's no "maybe" about it.] But as the link notes, Russell pocketed over $30 mil, for a 7-24 win-loss record, 18 TDs and 23 INTs, a record and work ethic that set back an already reeling team several additional years.

I still think the Raiders missed a good opportunity to bring Russell around when they had the chance, by not hanging on to Daunte Culpepper, who would have been a terrific mentor to a kid who really needed one at that particular point in his career. But at some point, we all have to step up and be grown-ass men, as it were, and maybe it's just a predictable by-product of throwing way too much cash at an unsophisticated kid who wasn't ready for it all, but I don't recall him turning any of it down.

On the one hand, it's only football, grown men permanently damaging themselves in the service of a kids' sandlot game. But as has been (I hope) demonstrated here time and again, the football in general and the NFL operations in particular serve as nice case studies for everything from management science to strategy. And Russell's story will serve as another kind of cautionary tale, not quite as bad as, say, that of Ryan Leaf, but pretty damned close.

The Big Tent

In which our favorite honorary Kardashian gets her party invite lost in the mail:

The Mitt Romney campaign hasn’t invited Sarah Palin to speak at — or even attend — next month’s Republican National Convention, in Tampa, Newsweek’s Peter Boyer reported. The convention schedule is still in flux, according to convention spokesman James Davis.

“While convention planning is well underway, we have not made any decisions on program schedule or speakers at this time,” Davis said. “We will announce those details closer to the event.

Ahahaha. Yes, with the convention hardly a month away, they're still trying to decide who's going to appear and speak. Hilarious. Well, Our Girl knows how to take a diss from The Man:

Palin surely knows that the official schedule isn’t set, but that didn’t prevent her from pouncing at Boyer’s inquiry, saying she suspects she’s “not the only one accepting consequences for calling out both sides of the aisle” and that “in accepting those consequences... you don’t invite yourself to the Big Dance.”

Especially if she or one of her offspring has a conflicting reality-show appearance. No, seriously, I think a good chunk of America, cognitively dissonant and downright schizophrenic on a lot of things, simultaneously wants Palin both to go away and to speak at the convention. She's the gift that keeps on giving, and when their lead horse has all the zip of a jar of Miracle Whip, anything to keep awake would be helpful.

It's going to be a desultory affair anyway -- Tampa in August, the summer swelter and the palmetto bugs, the refusal by their most recent successes to drop by and sit a spell, brag about their numinous achievements. Basically a four-day circle-jerk to keep Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the hangers-on believin' just one more time.

The Democrats may not have a whole hell of a lot to offer, but if the Mittster insists on leaving all the pepper at home, he's going to be outclassed by any random Dem back-bencher they throw up there.

Hacktivism

If you happen to see Bobo Brooks or Joke Line walking a little funny these days, it's probably thanks to Charles Pierce's ruthless ass-reaming of their hackery.

It is the elite political reporter's job, upon request, to sing to the real owners of the country a pleasant tune in a charming soprano voice. In return, they become very important players in the increasingly worthless puppet show that the real owners of the country are making out of the politics of the country.

Amen. Political commentators, as a rule of thumb, strive to live down to Upton Sinclair's old saw about a man not understanding something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it. So you have Brooks praising Romney as the finance version of a personal trainer, one of "rigor" and "productivity", as opposed to simply the equivalent of using other people's money to buy distressed property, borrow money against it to take out ginormous fire insurance policies, then torch the place.

Klein scarcely challenges the status quo any more than Brooks does; the stock in trade of both these men is to find the political center of any debate, on any subject, and attempt to circumscribe the perceived "centrist" path through the muddle.

But there is no muddle here. The stark reality is that, where at one time there may have been some intersection of interests for the peons and the oligarchs, there no longer is. This is by said oligarchs' explicit acknowledgement; if I have to sit through another round of braying by some pampered trophy cow that the people she rents don't understand the workings of the world quite as profoundly as she does, I'm going to punch a wall.

This is the way Romney and his claque want it, the system does precisely what they have engineered it to do. Brooks is right -- Romney is an efficiency expert, and his intent is to optimize. But the conditions he intends to optimize are those of the mafiosi who bankroll him, certainly not the conditions of the thankless rabble. Brooks knows this as well, he has to by now.

Brother From Another Mother

In the annals of unforced errors, this one is small but telling: death squad candidate Willard Mittington Rmoney III runs a tone-deaf hit ad contrasting (free signup required to read entire article at FT link) his smooth Pat Boone-isms with those of Soul Brutha #1:

Mr Romney’s senior moment came as he responded to a withering television commercial released by President Barack Obama’s campaign last weekend. That advertisement features Mr Romney delivering an off-key rendition of “America the Beautiful”, while the viewer is treated to scenes of empty offices and factories and headlines alleging that Mr Romney moved jobs from the US to other countries and kept money in offshore accounts.

Mr Romney counter-attacked with a commercial noting the country’s dismal economic condition and suggesting that Mr Obama only cares about helping his campaign donors. To drive that point home, it concluded with the president singing “I’m so in love with you”, a line from the old Al Green hit “Let’s Stay Together” to cheers from supporters at a fundraiser this year that was attended by Mr Green himself.

Viewed from a tactical standpoint, I was surprised that the Romney camp used Mr Obama’s performance. I could see why Mr Obama featured Mr Romney in his commercial; the Republican’s warbling suggested a lack of harmony between his rhetoric and his record in government and the private equity business. But unlike Mr Romney, Mr Obama sang quite well, raising the question of why the opposition would show him off to his advantage, even in this limited sense.

Fortunately, Rmoney's fambly-valyews advocates from the ownership class (seriously, are the Welches just really terrific human beings or what?) take a moment from lecturing their pool boys and nail ladies on the virtues of bootstrapping to explain just what Mr. Finger-On-The-Cultural-Pulse really meant:

In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”. I would imagine this is why Mr Romney’s campaign included the snippet of Mr Obama singing “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They hoped it would convey his otherness.

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

Indeed. The guillotines can't arrive fast enough.

Son of a Gun

Apparently everyone's expected to have or contrive some sort of received wisdom as to the motivations of the guy who shot up the movie theater the other night. He's a liberal, he's a conservative, he's a fanboy, blah blah blah. Bad enough that people need to declare What This Means, but to transparently utilize it as a template for their pre-existing pet peeves is, at the very least, indecent.

The most noteworthy thing about this tragedy, sadly, is how commonplace it is anymore, and not just mass shootings of random bystanders, but the routine occurrences of family murder-suicides, which seem to be frequently in the wake of economic devastation. The biggest factor in this particular instance is not radical political leanings, or even mental illness per se, it's how easy it is for deranged nutbags to acquire firearms and start spraying crowds.

The horror we all feel is by now tempered with ironic bemusement, because in the wake of this incident, and the next one, and the ones after that, nothing will be done to address the ease with which anyone can acquire deadly force with less hassle than it takes to legally drive a car. It's hard to say that further gun control might solve the problem anyway -- Switzerland has plenty of guns, and almost no gun crime. Whatever is proposed has to be done in a way that doesn't punish the vast majority of responsible gun owners, for the actions of a demented few.

And any proposal for even modest gun control would obviously be career suicide for any pol who put it forth. Where the ironic bemusement comes in is in recognizing that, if anything is done, it will be along the line of increasing surveillance and oversight. Americans will accept the intrusions of the state everywhere -- if someone were to propose putting metal detectors in movie theaters and supermarkets (were they not, you know, privately owned), you can count on a decent number of people endorsing it. They will allow any and every other freedom to be circumvented, rather than make Jared Lee Loughner or the Virginia Tech shooter jump through even one more modest hoop.

The One Who Knocks

One of the very few shows worth watching, easily in a league with all-time greats like The Sopranos and The Wire. It's hard to say enough good things about this show and its amazing ensemble cast. And the recapper in the link clearly loves the show, which is contagious. For some reason, the final season is being split into two eight-episode mini-seasons.

With the now-annual pissing contests between satellite providers and cable networks, over bundling and prices and such, great shows that require people of skill may become fewer and farther between. There's a lot of great stuff on, but as long as enough people are willing to watch retards wrestle gators and tow cars and open storage lockers, it's easy to understand the business decision that opts for the short margin of dreck, over the long-tail model of having to pay skilled people to make shows with expensive sets and costumes and, you know, writing.

If the profit margin of one offsets the prestige and craft of the other, we're all the poorer for it. Even if ingested ironically, it's sad that inbred duck-call manufacturers and handfishin' hillbillies have any cultural presence at all.

But whatever. Enjoy Breaking Bad while it's still around.

Beyond Parody

When Andy Griffith passed away last week, most Americans and media outlets probably thought of Mayberry. Some of us thought of A Face in the Crowd.

And then some others just couldn't help themselves, and thought only of Griffith as a "shill" for "Obamacare". That takes some doing, to reduce a 50-year career, featuring not one but several iconic name-the-character-and-you-instantly-know roles, and Teh Precious is the first and only thing that springs to their little minds.

Amazing. This is the sort of shit that puts comedians out of work, because you can't lampoon it. It just is, unabashed, unashamed, unable to help itself, like a drunken hillbilly screwing a farm animal in plain sight of the neighbors.

This is what a good chunk of America has devolved to, folks. How do you like it?

Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me (Slight Return)

[Graphic credit: Under the Mountain Bunker]

So the Mittster takes a detour from Hamptons fundraisers for douchey swells to have rap session with the NAACP, and, well, another day, another unforced error:

The audience initially welcomed the unofficial Republican nominee with a standing ovation and applauded when he promised to represent "all Americans of every race, creed and sexual orientation," and noted that "old inequities persist" even half a century after the civil rights movement.

But murmurs of disagreement rippled through the crowd early on when he argued that his policies would help "families of any color more than the policies and leadership of President Obama." When he added that he would reduce spending, in part, by eliminating "nonessential, expensive programs" like the president's healthcare plan, the audience booed for 15 seconds. And when Romney harshly criticized the president for failing to create jobs and "better educate tomorrow's workers," he appeared to have punctured much of the goodwill that was initially directed his way.

Romney stood quietly behind the lectern, smiling at the audience as it voiced disapproval. "I do not have a hidden agenda," he continued. "If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him." To a scattering of boos and catcalls, the candidate paused and nodded firmly before carrying on with his speech. "You take a look," he said.

While a few audience members credited Romney for his bluntness, a number of them suggested that he intended to be provocative.

"He wasn't speaking to us," NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond said after Romney's speech. "He was speaking to that slice of white America that hasn't made up its mind about him, and he's saying, 'Look at me; I'm OK. I can get along with the Negroes. I can say things to them that they don't like, so I'm not afraid to stand up to them.' … I think that's what this is all about, and that's the reason he came."

That sounds about right. Now he has options -- he can run off to Dick Cheney's for another fatcat hoedown, or go on tour with Dave Chappelle. Either way, hilarity ensues.

Bush League

Awful swell of The Atlantic to write ad copy for the next inevitable Bush to run for political office. He's pedigreed! He's pretty! He's half-Mexican! Awesome.

Because that's just what we need -- yet another Bush with their thumb on the public scale. ("P." is #3 on the linked list. My prediction about his political future was off by a few years, but will still probably happen.)

I'll give him this much -- at least he hasn't followed the paths of some of his uncles, and become a money launderer, or an S&L grifter, or the worst preznit this nation has ever endured. Kid's only 36, give him time.

Two Americas

Mitt's big fundraiser in The Hamptons proves once again that having an assload of money doesn't prevent one from being a complete turd of a human being. Hell, with this crowd, it's a qualification:

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

Indeed. Stoopid poorz, don't they know what's best for them? Well, no matter -- Mitt and his rich buddies know, and they're gonna give it to them good and hard. If only someone would make these uneducated lower-income morons buck up and bootstrap themselves, why, they wouldn't have so much time to complain. See, Miss Range Rover's got it all figured out.

Is it wrong of me to hope this fucking bitch gets herpes from her pool boy?

Remember, folks, the best way to hurt rich assholes is to turn them into poor assholes. There's a goal worth working overtime for.

Savages

Jesus Christ. Is there anything redeeming about what's left of this "culture"?

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A shot rings out, but the burqa-clad woman sitting on the rocky ground does not respond.

The man pointing a rifle at her from a few feet away lets loose another round, but still there is no reaction.

He fires a third shot, and finally the woman slumps backwards.

But the man fires another shot.

And another. And another.

Nine shots in all.

Around him, dozens of men on a hillside cheer: "God is great!"

Officials in Afghanistan, where the amateur video was filmed, believe the woman was executed because two Taliban commanders had a dispute over her, according to the governor of the province where the killing took place.

Both apparently had some kind of relationship with the woman, said Parwan province governor Abdul Basir Salangi.

"In order to save face," they accused her of adultery, Salangi said.

Then they "faked a court to decide about the fate of this woman and in one hour, they executed the woman," he added.

Both Taliban commanders were subsequently killed by a third Taliban commander, Salangi said.

Maybe, in our eventual departure from (sigh) that place, we can airlift the women and children -- and whatever adult males there are that haven't lapsed into abject barbarity -- the hell out of there. It's hard to say what else can be done; for every legit Taliban thug you kill, five or ten more crop up. Schools and roads get sabotaged and bombed. So perhaps removing their chattel and their sex toys will precipitate the final lapse into desuetude, the elimination of a foul mindset.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime, and behind every great civilization is a lot of shit to apologize for. But for all of our shortcomings, we don't do this....this horrific, scummy parody of a society, where a faceless vagina in a burlap sack is dumped into a soccer stadium to be shot like a piece of meat. It's like something out of a bad post-apocalyptic novel.

May the perpetrators this and so many other crimes -- against humanity, against decency -- be plagued by long and excruciating cases of ass herpes.

The Book of Moron

Conventional wisdom, such as it is, has slowly divested itself from the "debate" about Willard "Buzz Killington" Romney's Mormonism. While said religion does have some, ahem, rather unusual tenets, and has been responsible for considerable ugliness in the past (as opposed to, you know, any of the innumerable other belief systems which hinge on devotion to the improbable in order to navigate through life), counterintuitively it seems that, out of everything we know and are still learning about Romney, Mormonism seems to be the best thing about him.

I mean, really, what else can you hang your hat on with this guy -- that he's a rich asshole who was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple? That we the peons get the privilege of subsidizing his wife's "therapeutic" show ponies? That he has the people skills of an Asperger's sufferer? That, to listen to him speak, one's first impression boils down roughly to "Dubya with experience as financial weasel"?

These are fun times, friends 'n' neighbors -- for the next few months, you get to watch Romney's party vainly try to convince themselves that this guy's gonna take 'em to the promised land, deliver them from the clutches of that eeeevil islamocommiefascistneegrow. Hell, it might even work. Considering a substantial chunk of voting-age 'murkins are borderline retarded, anything's possible. Why not unemployed working-class people being bamboozled into voting for a hectomillionaire whose career was outsourcing their jobs? Yeah, that makes much more sense than giving Jon Huntsman and his smokin' hot daughters a shot.

Job Creators Are Go

Awful large of Scrooge McDuck to take a break from his Stepford vacation to grief the peons about the failed policies of failure imposed by their failed preznit, and totally not the fault of supersmart and helpful and wise Republicans who have bent over every which way to try to make this marriage work so neener-neener.

Should be a decent placeholder until the inevitable lecture about how his values infuse his decisions. Or until he whiffs on his veep pick and goes for Rob Portman, possibly the only guy on the planet with less charisma than Willard hisself. Looking forward to the non-stop hilarity of having a ticket with all the charm and excitement of a glass of warm milk.

Epic Flail

ur doin it rong

I defy anyone to watch this video, and be able to tell at the end if naughty librarian S.E. Cupp is actually an atheist, or even a garden-variety agnostic. For someone who supposedly has a degree in religious studies, this is a perplexing muddlement of thinking.

Good thing no one saw it.

Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me

Not sure what's more hilarious -- that the Moonie Times has increasingly toxic retard Ted Nugent uncorking a barrel of incoherent spittle on its already craptacular op-ed pages, or that Nugent apparently thinks he's an honorary black guy.

Epic win either way, though. The inevitable snark-lash from this should have poor Nuge weeping profusely about the death of free speech, and how persecuted he is, in no time. That's always been the conservatard M.O. -- clog up various broadcast media with vituperative rhetoric laced with overtly violent references and imagery, then get all butt-hurt when commenters on the intartubez tell him to go fuck himself. Worse yet, they might stop showing up to see him play Cat Scratch Fever for the millionth time, and shoot Hitlery Clinton targets like the flaming jackass he is.

When You're Strange

No doubt by now you've heard -- perhaps even formed an opinion -- on the great changing of the guard of our institutionalized morning fluff, the rotation of one moderately attractive, reasonably intelligent, and mostly ambitious middle-aged woman of little consequence, for another of the same. Yes, let's do spend a week or two wond'ring aloud who should be awarded seven or eight figures a year to warm up the bozos in the square for Gettin' Yer Lunchtime Swerve On With Hoda 'n' Kathie Lee, it's not like there's anything else going on.

But that's not the weird part. This is the weird part:

Ordinarily, you'd assume this was the usual spambot jabber, more or less randomly organized word-pixels roughly approximating a relevant sentence. But spambots are selling something, and neither of these idiots (who, by the repeated use of the phrase "downright creepy", appear to actually be the same idiot) have any active links or pitches. So, you know, what the hell?

Not necessarily another sign of the Decline O' Western Civ or anything, just really peculiar, that this guy felt the need to adopt two separate personae, to take two different (and frankly, rather stalker-y) poses on a completely meaningless subject.

And of course, I felt the need to weigh in on the meta-aspect of it, raising said meta by yet another order of magnitude. Who says America causes cancer?

Random Appreciation

Right now, and for quite some time, Louis C.K. is and has been the funniest bastard on the teevee, hands down. Catch the show before he figures it out.

Electile Dysfunction, Reverse Galt's Gulch Version

What if the 99% pulled up stakes, left for the emerging economies -- where the bloody jobs are at, mind you -- and left it for Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers and the rest of that lot? They're buying the election anyway, so maybe just getting the hell out, and letting them sell shit to each other, would just resolve the problem all the way around.

They already own everything anyway, and more is never enough, and they won't stop until they have it all, and all those icky poor people learn their damned place. So what's our place -- here, taking shit from these soulless humps for the rest of our lives, hoping for a scrap from the table from Obama and his sold-out friends, or escaping to Brazil, Costa Rica, Slovenia, somewhere with, ahem, a slightly lower disparity of income, affordable health care, a political system not completely in thrall to the Scrooge McDuck class of endless money-grubbing and people-collecting? Is that too much to ask? Why yes, yes it is.

No doubt most of us will still go and vote between Team Horseshit and Team Cowshit, if only to maintain the pretense that it still counts, that it won't get lost in the shuffle of pelf and stupidity, that it doesn't smell to high heaven.

But deep down we know the truth. We'll go back to the Sands and give Shelly Adelson more of our credit-card advances, and guzzle more ten-dollar Red-Bull-and-vodkas to try to forget that Lucy always, always yanks that football. When it comes to voting to pick our own pockets and cut our own throats, nobody does it better than us.

Random Appreciation

Back in the waning days of hair metal, the unfairly maligned Mr. Big had a #1 radio/MTV hit with the beans-and-weenies campfire love song To Be With You, and getting swept up in the commensurate "power ballad" publicity crapola. They had lesser success with a couple of similar type girlie songs, while the music industry, in its infinite wisdom, completely ignored the fact that they were a bona-fide rock band -- easily equivalent with the then-resurgent Aerosmith -- with world-class musicians.

Paul Gilbert has since put his quirky good humor to good use, re-doing TBWY with his touring band in a variety of heavy-rock stylings. This one here uses Van Halen's Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love as a template. Awesome.

Random Appreciation

Grilled Shrimp and Bacon Club Sandwich from The Cheesecake Factory. Very bad for you, but holy crap is it good. (Pro tip: split it into two meals over two days. This thing is huge. If I, at 6'2" and 225# can split it, chances are so can most of you.)

I swear, after a couple bites I wasn't sure if I should eat it....or fuck it. (That might have caused a bit of a scene, but it would have made a terrific YouTube upload.)

Droit de Seigneur

What do you suppose the total number of in-depth pieces is that Taibbi (since no one else at that level or above in the corporate mediasphere is going to bother) will have to write demonstrating that Wall Street is a pure grift, a scam, a racket wrapped in a scheme and smothered in deliberately obfuscatory jargon, before anyone will do anything meaningful about it? Forget guillotines on Wall Street; can't even get the SEC to do its job, nor enforce penalties with any real bite.

A drugged-out moron kid robbing a liquor store of $300 with a toy gun will do at least 10 in the state pen, easily. But the biggest banks collude to rob small towns all across America, looting their already depleted economies and leaving them destitute for the next generation or so, hell, they barely get a stern talking-to. In fact, it's just taken as a matter of faith that this financial alchemy is practiced by a divine claque of "job creators", even as they have destroyed the economy with the fury of a Dresden firebombing, and created nothing but pain and debt for the peons, and greater cashflow for themselves.

It's never puzzling why they do it, the mystery is why we continue to put up with it. What sort of ongoing desitution, or catastrophic catalyzing event, will it ultimately take for any reaction, much less and equal and opposite one?

Teachable Moment

Apparently we're all supposed to have learned something from the Sandusky verdict. (And hey, didn't that turn around with a quickness? Guess the jury went into their room, the foreman looked around and said, "Okay, we're done here. Any questions?")

There's nothing new here. What happened at Penn State is what happened at archdioceses around the world, what happens in the armed forces, the government, greedy corporations -- evil human beings protected from the consequences of their crimes by other evil human beings, people either too invested in the trappings of their institution, or cowed by authoritah, to simply do the obvious right thing.

So yeah, Sandusky's a bastard, and I wouldn't be surprised if he offs himself before heading off to the big house, unless he really just wants to be passed around the cell block like a chew toy. But Paterno was a bastard as well, and he got off easy, and every Penn State fan who was more concerned about the fucking program and Joe Pa's rep than the kids Sandusky systematically abused, they can go straight to hell.

The (in)actions of assistant Mike McQueary are perhaps the most perplexing of all. Maybe some of us are just cut from a different cloth, but if you walked in on an old man butt-fucking a fourth-grader in a college shower, would you break it up, maybe pound the old perv's face into the tile a few times for good measure, and call the cops, or would you slink away and call your dad for advice? Jesus Tapdancing Christ, McQueary (a 6'5" former college athlete who could easily have handled Sandusky) actually chose the latter option. He gets to live with that, but so does the poor kid Sandusky was abusing.

Sandusky's nauseating conduct is not remotely what's most interesting about this case; what should have been the captivating aspect is the absolute nature of power corrupting, of otherwise presumably decent people doing indecent things -- that is to say, nothing at all -- when confronted with vile deeds.

Stockholm syndrome ain't just for hostages, folks.

Crock of Ages

It's not generally in my nature to review things I haven't experienced firsthand; it seems kinda chickenshit. In the case of Rock of Ages, I'll make a small exception, given the non-stop promos and availability of reviews. It features actors I tend to like. The subject matter is something that I am intimately acquainted with, insofar as I occasionally would travel downstate back in that day and hit the infamous Sunset Strip clubs where hair metal got its start (and finish, for that matter).

I hate to disappoint the folks who just wanted to see something that sounds and smells like a hopelessly sanitized, Disneyfied version of the real thing. But it was really all about the coke and blowjobs. The notion that it was all just a bunch of nancy boys who poofed their hair, threw on some mascara, pouted their lips like Punky Meadows, listened to Don't Stop Believin' until their eardrums bled, and waited around for Metallica to come along and grow them all a set of denim balls, is just nuts. Don't take my word for it, go back and watch Decline of Western Civilization II (minus the Ozzy stuff). Some people took this shit seriously.

Believe me, I was an average-looking guy with average game growing up in a cow-town, and more often than not I wasn't even in a band, and every weekend was still like fucking Woodstock. (And no, none of us had to dress up like Poison or Motley Cure, or even Def Leppard.) The only way not to get laid and/or fucked up was to not leave the house. Anyone who actually lived through this period of time knows this; any film to make an honest attempt to communicate the reality would be borderline porn.

I get that it's a musical, looking at the "lighter" side of the scene. But I guess what I'm wondering is, who were they trying to go after with that approach? Maybe if they had figured that part of it out, it would have done better. This is the problem with nostalgia in general -- it's always attempting to reclaim a past that never actually occurred.

Pot Meets Kettle, Learns Nothing

From the latest issue of No Shit, Sherlock magazine, we find that serial monogamist and professional powdered-donut storage unit Newt Gingrich has stopped licking the mystery residue from his fingers just long enough to commiserate with a barnful of angry rubes:

Former U.S. House Speaker and one-time presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, spoke to a crowd of over 500 Republican supporters at a GOP Convention today in Missoula.

....

In his nearly 30 minute speech, Gingrich did not beat around the bush when it came to his feelings about our Commander in Chief. He bashed President Barack Obama calling him a “dreamer-in-chief,” in reference to Obama’s proposed Dream Act.

Awesome. This asshole spent six months jabbering about putting mining colonies on the fuckin' moon, and he's got the stones to beat on poor ol' Obammy for trying to resolve some immigration issues occuring down here on planet Earth.

We're long past the point of bothering to figure out whether these peckerwoods are stupid, insane, or just ornery (or all of the above). What they are is indifferent to facts, and to what they were just saying five minutes ago. What we should be trying to figure out is why so many of our fella 'murkins are so pig-fucking obtuse that they intend to vote for this cognitive dissonance. Pure spite and pants-pooping stupidity triumph over common sense yet again!

And hey, Newt turns (um) 69 today. Party on, Garth!

The Asshole Monologues

Good to see that America's homegrown Taliban are still rolling strong. When will these uppity broads learn that gubmint buildings are not acceptable venues for spouting anatomically correct terms? Sheesh. Next time, Rep. Brown will know better, and use "pooter" or "vajayjay". Penises, should the need, um, arise to refer to them, should be called "tallywackers" or "beaver cleavers".

This part was just priceless:

Democratic Rep. Barb Byrum was also blocked from addressing the Republican-controlled legislature Thursday.

The House forbid Byrum from introducing her amendment to the abortion bill, which would have banned men from getting a vasectomy unless they could provide proof that it was a medical emergency.

"If we truly want to make sure children are born, we would regulate vasectomies," Byrum said Thursday.

Brown and Byrum were both silenced from speaking on the legislature’s final day of session before its summer break.

That sounds about right. Of course these abortion bills are about nothing so much as controlling women's reproductive rights, while leaving men's untouched. Seems fair.

Not sure what these people are aiming for in the long run -- an almost comically oppressive Saudi-style Assbackwards-stan, where women aren't allowed to drive or vote, rape victims instead of their attackers are punished, and hamburgers eat people; or a Handmaid's Tale dystopia.

Considering that 99% of these stupid bills are proposed and passed by liver-spotted pervs who couldn't get laid at Mardi Gras with a truckload of beads and 55-gallon drums of Red Bull and Grey Goose, and their dried-up sob sister enablers, either scenario is manifestly possible.

Yes, folks, your modern Republican party -- taking you back to the 1870s, one bill at a time.

The Rules of the Game

Reiteration #2,543,678 of the operational differences between your nominal "liberals" and "conservatives": A card-carrying jackass like Ted Nugent can go on teevee and radio shows (and on tour with his little traveling music extravaganza) hither and yon and spout bumptious, potentially violent rhetoric about Obama, or mouth off about banging Hitlery Clinton with an AR-15 right before launching into Wang Dang Sweet Poontang, and if anyone has the nerve to get butt-hurt about it, well, you just don't like free speech, podna.

But a couple of putatively "liberal" writers mention the use of a prosthetic Dubya head in a split-second exterior shot in Game of Thrones, and boy howdy, they just cannot fall all over themselves enough to apologize and genuflect abjectly.

I mean, it's pathetic, and it just never stops with these people. This is why I(and many people, I believe) have never been fully comfortable with identifying with "liberals" and "liberalism". Conservatives are perfectly comfortable with mocking a decorated veteran at their national political convention, in support of a couple of draft dodgers, and liberals just go, "Gosh, that's mean."

By the same token, these are the folks who were all excited about thrice-bankrupted terminal asshole Donald Trump running for president -- even though it was a transparent publicity stunt for his worthless show, even though his sole talent is slapping his name on shit.
And now they're excited about Buzz Killington, because he's Not Obama. Even though he became a hectomillionaire by gutting American companies and sending American jobs overseas (or eliminating them outright), even though his foreign policy apparently boils down to "Ask Bibi", even though he lives the rolling-in-pelf, high-on-the-hog lifestyle that in another time and place brought guillotines into city squares.

It's not about Obama or Romney, nor even about any discernible practical difference in their "vision" or intent. It's about the vestiges of the political system being finally killed off by Citizens United, how a misbegotten ruling by a bunch of activist judges made it a fait accompli for rentier capitalists with far more money than conscience to just throw impossible amounts of money at whoever is more pliable, more complaisant.

It does matter who wins, in the sense that Obama and his party, on the rare occasions when they're on their game, manage to infrequently stand athwart some of the more rapacious maneuvers of their GOP counterparts. Though really, watching Corker, DeMint, Johanns, and Crapo take turns fellating Jamie Dimon for his latest massive fuck-up was nothing if not entertaining, and by "entertaining" I mean nauseating.

Not that I can't picture Chuck Schumer or DiFi doing the same thing. But nothing represents the fix we're in quite so concisely as watching U.S. Senators, even the mouth-breathing dipshits Republican voters routinely install, genuflect so shamelessly to a major factor in the ongoing economic crisis, who just "lost" somewhere between $2-7bn.

But it all begins -- and ends -- with the ability and desire to fight, and fight hard and dirty if necessary. Reasonable people can disagree over how "dirty" they're willing to get, but one thing's for sure -- you never get anywhere by constantly apologizing for every stupid little thing to people who routinely tell you to go fuck yourself.

Five-Minute Music Reviews

Van Halen - A Different Kind of Truth Van Halen has lived out the VH1 Behind the Music litany -- riding the proverbial gravy train with biscuit wheels into the mid-'90s, the band's increasingly polished output with Sammy Hagar derailed amidst a pool of bad blood and grunge takeover of the airwaves. The misbegotten follow-up with Gary Cherone, VHIII, is I think one of the most completely misunderstood albums of that era. It's not a question of it being "good" or "bad" -- it's actually better than it gets credit for. The problem is that it got so far afield from what fans expected from Van Halen, there was just no walking it back. It was basically their attempt at a Pink Floyd/post-Gabriel Genesis prog album.

Cut to the second decade of the 21st century, to find the inimitable David Lee Roth back in the fold 27 years later, and pedigreed scion Wolfgang Van Halen taking the place of Michael Anthony, who of course is backing Hagar and Joe Satriani in Chickenfoot. Got all that? Great, because despite the soap opera nonsense, despite the fact that almost half the songs on ADKT are comprised from demos from the first two albums back in '79, despite DLR's voice not being nearly what it useta be, it all somehow works. Wolfie throws some nifty bass lines throughout (not that Anthony was ever going to cause Billy Sheehan to lose any sleep), but has his work cut out for him in backing Uncle Dave (for what his bass lines might have lacked in virtuosity, Anthony was easily the best backing vocalist of any metal band of the '80s).

Tracks such as She's the Woman and Blood and Fire instantly evoke classic VH, and Stay Frosty is great fun, a total throwback to Ice Cream Man. Out of the collection, the oddly-titled and -arranged Honeybabysweetiedoll might be the most quintessentially old-school VH track here, a throbbing, menacing groove superimposed with feedback sound effects and nonsensical fuck-chatter from Roth. And Eddie sounds great on every track, weaving trademark lines and patterns all over the place, conjuring up the early '80 fire. There's at least enough here to warrant a follow-up, hopefully with fresher material and more input from the new kid.

---

Prong - Carved Into Stone Prong is one of those '80s metal bands that lost out hard in the Metallica craze of the time, and have still not gotten their due. Classic albums like Prove You Wrong and Beg to Differ stand toe-to-toe with Master of Puppets, and have held up at least as well as anything from that era. (Another overlooked gem from the time: Corrosion of Conformity's Blind.)

For fans of straight-up, in-your-face metal with a slight NYC punk edge, Carved Into Stone delivers right from the start. Eternal Heat punches and moshes from start to finish, as strong an opening statement as I've heard in the past several years. On the second track, Keep On Living in Pain, when Tommy Victor scowls, "For what I do this every day, without potential for success," you can't help but wonder about the whims of luck and chance, and remind yourself of the turds that other, bigger bands of the genre (please, no names!) have crapped out over the last 10-15 years.

But what's done is done, and I shit you not, people -- if you're a fan of this kind of music, this is the real deal. I have not had an album grab me by the balls like this in front-to-back, all-killer-no-filler style since Clutch's Blast Tyrant. Great, heavy, catchy songs, incisive lyrics, excellent vocals (no screaming or death growling), tons of energy and anger. It would be unfair to all three bands to compare this with the Ramones or Motorhead at the top of their respective games, but that's about as close as I can get for the uninitiated. Go. Get it now.

---

OSI - Fire Make Thunder While OSI is the brainchild of prog-rock alumni, Fates Warning's Jim Matheos and Dream Theater's Kevin Moore, they sound nothing like either of those bands. There must be some sort of boutique name for this kind of music; it's not "post-rock" like Russian Circles or Pelican, and it's not "djent" like Scale the Summit or Animals as Leaders (though all of those are excellent, prodigiously talented bands).

The best descriptor I can come up with for OSI is maybe "post-prog", or "anti-prog". Arrangements are frequently extended, but the sound is completely different. Drums are ridonkulously gated, vocals are filtered and "atmospheric" almost to the point of electronica, melodies are unconventional and certainly not sing-song. Choruses are practically unrecogniable as such.

But it all works, and works well. There are standout tracks throughout, but the closer, Invisible Men, merits particular notice, great melodies, nicely developed, almost poignant in parts. Check it out, and then go get OSI's previous album, Blood.

---

Anthrax - Worship Music Of the self-styled "Big Four" thrash bands (which, again, in a rational world, Prong would be a part of), Anthrax has had perhaps the roughest go of it, with their back-and-forthing on lead singers, finally coming back to the guy they got famous with in the '80s, Joey Belladonna.

While John Bush was a more technically accomplished vocalist, Belladonna had always been a fan favorite, and on Worship Music he actually sounds better than ever. From the Z-Rock single The Devil You Know to the Walking Dead homage (Scott Ian had a zombie role in the most recent season) Fight 'em ('til You Can't), Belladonna weaves his tales of modern angst with verve and urgency. Charlie Benante, always an elite metal drummer, pulls off some really nice flourishes on Fight 'em, and throughout. This album, which came out last fall, is a nice return to form for Ian and crew. There should have been at least four radio singles.

---

Rush - Clockwork Angels Rush is one of those bands people either love or hate (I happen to reside in the former category, though the fandom has been long diffused by a myriad of influences), and the long-anticipated Clockwork Angels, which dropped today, will change few minds. It is being billed as a "concept album", but forget that -- either the songs work, or they don't.

And for the most part, the songs work well. The first two tracks, Caravan and BU2B, were released late in 2010, while the rest of the album was being composed and produced, and the band played them on the Time Machine tour last year. Both are solid additions to the Rush canon, the latter with many pointed references to Neil Peart's, shall we say, questing atheism.

This has been the band's calling card and its curse, the cerebral nature of their lyrics and arrangements sometimes overshadowing the ability to just connect with a simple, visceral riff, a sonic punch to the gut. Not this time; Clockwork Angels abounds with terrific songwriting and old-school riffing. The most recent single, Headlong Flight, is a nice surprise, as a permuted, updated Bastille Day riff, with little stylized bits and pieces from the band's extensive catalog, yet a nice standalone piece all the same. Introspective pieces such as The Wreckers and Wish Them Well provide color and contrast, and make the entire album seem almost a valedictory, a summation of an imposing body of work.

Rush famously are one of the top-selling rock bands of all time, have the adulation of fans and musicians alike, and have influenced scores of bands, yet still have not been inducted into the increasingly humorous Rock and Roll Hall of Lame. (And at this point, I think I speak for most fans when I say that when the day does come, the boys should have the balls to tell them to go fuck themselves, they shoulda come knocking fifteen or twenty years ago.) And as all three band members are approaching 60 years of age, we're not likely to get many future studio recordings. Clockwork Angels stands up to repeated listenings, and overall is one of the band's strongest outings since the holy grail that was Moving Pictures.

---

Fair To Midland - Arrows & Anchors I must have listened to this at least fifty times since its release last July, and I'm not sick of it, not in the least. Melodically inventive, harmonically engaging, rhythmically pummeling, and lyrically weird, this thing hits on all cylinders.

They could have left out a couple of the "palate cleanser" instrumentals, but the actual songs are a lot of fun all the way through. Extra props to the Beatles-meets-Metallica corporate-bashing mashup Rikki Tikki Tavi. The epic closer, The Greener Grass, encapsulates the strengths of the band, capping the festivities with a practically triumphant chorus melody, juxtaposed with the oddness of the lyric, "Hey! Where did you go? I promise I will kill you right now!". Top that, Bieber-ella!

Raising Arizona

You can't help but appreciate when life imitates art. This is precisely whence comes the saying that stupid people shouldn't breed.

In Your Facebook

At some point in the near future, hopefully, I'll be gearing up my own little e-business on the side, since it appears to be the only way to do more than eke one's way through life in our postmodern paradise. And with such a venture will come the requisite social marketing presence, of which Facebook is still currently the primary mode of disseminating marketing piffle.

So it's not that I necessarily wanted the vaunted Facebook IPO to fail so epically, it's just that none of the numbers made any sense. No one seemed able to explain where the $100bn market cap came from (after being estimated at $45bn a little over a year ago), for a company with almost no discernible revenue model.

Someone should put Jamie Dimon on the case; he seems pretty adept at falling into buckets of shit and not splashing a drop.

Sperm Donor

Of course, extreme cases such as this jism-spraying retard should not be seen as being indicative of anything, except maybe to restate the time-honored maxim that stupid people really shouldn't breed -- or at least they should know when to fucking stop.

However, I think it's fair and reasonable to say that no court should strike any deal or cut any breaks whatsoever for this dipshit until he presents a receipt attesting to having gotten a vasectomy, maybe two just to be sure. But really, no deals or breaks should be had at all -- it's a surefire bet that every single one of Desmond Hatchett's thirty kids is receiving some form of government assistance, and that Hatchett's minimum-ass wages need to be garnished until every last cent is repaid. Fuck this gaping asshole.

Extra kudos, btw, to the commenters who use Hatchett's idiocy to complain about blacks, women, Democrats, Obama, and the "welfare state" in general. On that last count at least, there's a small amount of truth, in that more creative ways should be found to either incentivize good behavior, or disincentivize stupid behavior. Either pay this dipshit a couple hundred dollars to do the right thing and get clipped already, or just garnish every goddamned dime he makes until the taxpayers' investment in his progeny is recouped.

Providing a safety net for those genuinely in need should not mean enabling useless bastards like Desmond Hatchett to fuck everything that moves and force everyone else to pay for it.

SEO Tips and Tricks

So it seems that out there on these weird wild intartubez, there is a particularly auspicious asshole in Greenville, SC by name of George Tierney, whose Twitter MO seems to be harassing Sandra Fluke, calling her a "cunt" and asking her "when [she will] shut [her] god damn dick sucker". Fair enough; apparently Ms. Fluke's testimony a few months back pinched a nerve or several, and Tierney feels free to utilize his sacred First Amendment rights to, I dunno, challenge Ted Nugent to a contest to see who can be the biggest fucking jackass.

So. TBogg has duly noted Tierney's attempt to be this generation's Phil Donahue/Alan Alda male-feminist type, and of course Tierney promptly orders Mr. Bogg and his site managers not only to, um, cease and desist reprinting Tierney's own tweets verbatim, but, ah, to stop affecting Teh Google with these mischaracterizations. How someone can claim to be misrepresented by not only quotes, but screen shots, should be an interesting tale.

This is and always has been your garden-variety movementarian conservtard in a nutshell, folks -- smarmy, self-satisfied, quick to lob a nasty epithet, and even quicker to get all butt-hurt and chest-puffy when someone has the nerve to, you know, quote them.

Tierney should see a lawyer, that way someone can at long last explain to him how the fuckin' law works. Jesus, you can't make this crap up, parody has long been a thin substitute for reality.

Semantics

If one wishes to characterize Romney's prep-school hijinks as "bullying", hey, good luck with that. Last time I checked, a couple people holding someone down while another person shears the victim with a pair of scissors, like a trussed-up sheep, is not a "prank", it's called assault and battery.

From shearing queer kids to making a buck off of gutting American companies and putting American workers in the unemployment line, and pocketing the difference for himself. No, no behavioral pattern there at all.

State of Failure

Gosh, it's just too bad California isn't a Wall Street bank. Then we would be considered "too big to fail", and bailed out forthwith, and given a nice fat bonus for our troubles. Instead we're just a state that contains 1 in 8 Americans, and gets 77 cents backs for every federal tax dollar we pay in tribute to the high lords in DC. Ho hum.

Remember, friends 'n' neighbors, AIG alone got $180 billion in the bailouts. Even half of our $16 bn deficit would help out hugely. Apparently it's better to let us die on the vine.

Porn Again

Not only is it hi-larious that America's porniest city is in the shadow of Disney World, but that well over half of the top 20 cities are in deep red states, right through the bible belt.

As always, draw your own conclusions.

Qu'ils Mangent de la Brioche

Is there anyone following the ongoing economic debacle that would seriously contest Taibbi's contention here? Not only is it no secret that any austerity measures will come solely out of the hides of the peons, they scarcely bother to conceal it anymore.

And why should they? They barely bothered to hide the model that ruptured the economy in the first place, the "we fuck it up, you rebuild it and give us all fat bonuses" racket they dumped on us a few years back. As many folks (including, of course, yours truly) wrote at the time, the bailout completely disincentivized them from avoiding the same sort of bad behavior down the road.

It ain't rocket science. If you catch your kid poaching cookies from the jar and lying about it, you don't beat him, but you also don't just whistle a happy tune and bake another few dozen cookies to replace the ones he took. Except in this case, Junior was stealing cookies from every house in the neighborhood, and all you did was just replace the cookies to placate the neighbors, and not even talk to Junior about his bad behavior. So again, why wouldn't he continue to do what he was doing?

I dunno. It is weird and counterintuitive to watch how economic issues don't unfold here, how they seem largely inert, or maybe they're just being ignored, because no one wants to read about how someone gets their job sent to Shenzhen, then loses their house on the subprime ARM adjustment, then either murder-suicides his family or ends up in a tent city scavenging cans for cheap vodka. One would hope that if enough people were exposed to the magnitude of the human damage that a rapacious financial has instigated and perpetuated, they might rise up, get on their hind legs and be men when it counted most.

The main thing to keep in mind is that there is enough to go around, but in a plutonomy, the players at the table never know when -- or even how-- to say "when". It takes a certain type of person to take money that they didn't even earn -- that they inherited, or stole, or coerced, or simply got lucky on -- and presume a sense of entitlement, a mission to simply hoard and push the peasants around.

Keep taking their shit, until you realize you really don't have to.

Pray the Gay Away

I'd like to go on record and wholeheartedly thank the fine voters of Nawth Caraliney for their valiant stand against those awful hommaseckshuls and their pernicious ways. Clearly this whole "marriage" thing is just a sneaky attempt to gull us fine upstanding members of polite society into, I dunno, leaving our virgin butt-cheeks unprotected.

Seriously (and I said the same thing when my own fine progressive state voted the same way), what the fuck is wrong with these people? The nation and the planet are on the verge of truly catastrophic circumstances, on a lot of fronts. It is inexplicable that this is even on the top 100 of any serious person's concerns.

Extra kudos to the Obamanauts for scrambling on this one like Randall Cunningham. To use the standard Lucy with the football analogy does a disservice to poor Lucy; rather than simply yanking the football and cackling with glee, it's more like they substitute a lead-filled pumpkin, but continue to insist that, nope, that there's a god's-honest gin-yew-whine football, I tell yew whut.

You have to love the faithful defenders in the comments there -- if Obama proposed tomorrow that, say, payroll taxes be increased on workers by 20%, and Planned Parenthood be completely defunded of federal dollars, they would rise as one and stomp and huff that Romney would raise the tax by 50% and repeal Roe outright with a single swing of his mighty sword. Let the N8r b8ing begin in 5...4...3...2...

I dunno. Ask Dick Lugar about the value of centrism, of dickless incrementalism, of letting yourself be pushed around, time and again, by some fat, crazy slob, losing the respect of the rest of the playground, when all it would take to win that respect back would to fucking pimp-slap his stupid ass down already.

Then again, maybe not -- NC certainly proved today that dumb 'n' ign'int is alive and well, in generous portions, for no good reason at all. Perhaps this is really the way 'murkins want it, dumb and dysfunctional, drafting foolish and mean and useless initiatives to make closeted god-botherers feel better about who-knows-what, while the rest of it all goes up in smoke.

But this is no way to run a mature democracy, not one that hopes to survive. These are the actions of drowning souls, desperately pulling down whatever is within reach.

Money Talks

Another reminder, as if you needed one, heading into yet another interminable election season, that Saint Barry O is not your friend. The most charitable thing you can say about the man is that he seriously seems to think that punting on first down is a valid negotiation tactic.

Not to insinuate that maybe Obama's energies are better spent elsewhere than on griefing potheads, but sweet Jebus, time and again he insists on letting the animals who already nuked the economic system once prepare to do it all over again. This JOBS Act, with its stupid (even by gubmint standards) recursive acronym, is being billed as a boon to "startups"; what it will more likely do is create more Instagram IPOs. Because it's been a good long time since we had a Pets.com-led tech bubble, n'est-ce pas?

Come June, odds are that the administration's sole domestic "accomplishment", the fatally-flawed-from-inception Affordable Care Act, a pork-laden industry-written boondoggle that should never have gotten as far as it did in the first place, will be flipped by the Supreme Court, thanks to the self-serving antics of Swingin' Tony Kennedy, who apparently never met a fence he couldn't ride until splinters shoot out of his ass. So that leaves killing bin Laden, which is enough reason to give Obama the nod again, but only just.

Again, it is a fine thing to nobly take it upon oneself to "change the system from within", as it were, to accept and even embrace the inherent perfidies of our flawed system, and "vote" accordingly, invoking the usual pronunciamentos of serving as the final bulwark of reason against the barbarian asshole horde.

Of course, this is twaddle, and we all know it, even the folks who truck in such tendentious jabber. It is Chomsky's evil of two lessers, over and over and over again, an endless, perpetual Groundhog Day campaign cycle culminating in a same-as-it-ever-was denouement. Some will tell themselves and each other -- and ankle-bite any doubting Thomases with their bien pensant horseshit -- that once Barry gets his second term, why, that's when the real change will begin, just you watch, pally.

Friends 'n' neighbors, cash in your IRAs and 401(k)s and such like, and bet heavy on this here prognostication: Obama will win (suitably close for popular consumption and media horse-race profiteering), but nothing will change. Not a goddamn thing. The SEC will not suddenly grow teeth, Obama will not have a change of heart and bring Paul Volcker back into the fold. Not one Goldman Sachs swindler will ever be frog-marched off to a cell next to Bernie Madoff. Not one industry or CEO will so much as pay an extra percentage point in taxes for outsourcing hundreds of thousands of American jobs to Asian sweatshops, and pocketing the difference. Not one Democrat will be truly emboldened by an Obama victory. They'll make the requisite mouth noises, they always do. But they won't actually commit to anything. They are already bought and sold to the highest bidder, and they are always thinking of the next election.

That's not to say you shouldn't at least participate in the collective charade, cast your pebble into the entropic void, if for no other reason than that you have convinced yourself of the simple nobility of that act, that it is the price one must pay if one is to be permitted to complain. Go for it. Just keep in mind that so long as the benchmark remains so low as "just be less of a toxic asshole than Mitt Romney", then the Democrats will do the bare minimum to meet that benchmark and nothing more. They'll work just hard enough to keep from getting fired.

And then they'll turn right back around and do what they've been doing, because to try to force them to do anything even a bit different or better gets characterized as Savonarola-level apostasy. The popular notion in recent years was that the Republicans treated the Democrats the way Lucy treated Charlie Brown when she held (and inevitably pulled) the football. I submit that while the essence of the metaphor is entirely correct, the correct application of it is in how both parties treat any and all Americans who happen to not be lucky enough to reside within the donor class.

But I'm sure that this quadrennial tilt at gutless incrementalism will be much more effective than the last one, or the one before that.

Our Dumb Media

Whether or by accident or by design, because it's impossible to tell anymore, the cheap, disingenuous re-interpretation of Hilary Rosen's poorly-phrased remarks about Ann Romney gained traction where none should have been had, creating the typical unforced error for the usual circular Democrat firing squad. It is ever and always thus, a vested interest for The Party, its largely artifical divisions, and most importantly for the perpetual campaign industry, to keep "the race" "close".

To the extent that a former shill for the dinosaur music mafia ventriloquizes the sentiments of corporatist limo-libs, what Rosen meant should have been clear enough to anyone. But the game is to be drawn into the weeds by a contrived "debate", a hollow controversy to distract from that which is not controversial in the least.

Saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life is obviously not the point -- the point is that Ann Romney has never had to work a day in her life; that is, she (and of course her husband) has never not had the luxury of financial self-determination. She has never had to hold on for dear life to a job she detested, just to pay bills or retain something resembling health insurance. Never known the glory of getting a 5% annual bump at work, like it'll offset the 10-15% increases in food and fuel prices.

She has never had to put something back at the supermarket because she just couldn't afford it. She's never had to live paycheck to paycheck, to know the ineluctable frisson of understanding that you're just a paycheck or two, quite literally, from the street, from utter destitution. How many hard-workin' mommas had hard-workin' husbands who got their fuckin' jobs outsourced by Mittford and his Bain Capital buddies? Nothin' controversial 'bout that, right? Just bidness, son.

None of this makes Ann Romney a bad person, any more than her experience at being a parent and grandparent automatically fast-track her for sainthood. Rosen's point was and is, and will remain, exactly the same as the point used to be about George W. Bush -- that a person who has never had to worry about their financial future is manifestly unqualified even to speculate, much less authoritatively comment, on the realities that the average 'murkin faces every time they try to pay bills and remain solvent.

And no one should expect anything contrary to what they've heard this past week along this line, not from the Romneys and the GOP establishment, nor the Obamas and the Dem establishment, and certainly not from the refs. The first group has no shame nor scruples, the second no guts or backbone, about even the most uncontroversial points. Obama would rather make a career busting pot growers and drone-bombing villages than stand up even for a second against his professional calumniators. I'm not sure what's sadder, that simple fact, or as bad as he is, he's still light-years better than anything on the other "side".

Six more months of this bullshit. It's almost enough to make one miss the comedic stylings of the rest of the Republitards that have been tossed by the wayside. Where's Rick Perry when you could use a good laugh?

Just Asking

You think Santorum's foamy asshole ever gets sore from all the bullshit he pulls straight out of it? Of course, one would expect nothing less from a Joe Pa U alumnus (Go Fightin' ShowerFuckers!). But Jesus H. Christ, this guy doesn't even fucking try to conceal the fact that he invents things to suit his narrative. And he'll never retract or correct himself, because he's never wrong about anything. Which is a pretty neat trick.

On the one hand, it is gratifying to watch Santorum not only twist in the electoral wind, the math dangling ever provocatively just out of his reach, but willing to monkeyfuck his party's already dwindling chances in, ahem, Tampa (apparently Branson had an Andy Williams convention going when the GOP wanted to have its convention). On the other, it is enormously annoying to realize that, due to the limitless supply of butthurt stupidity in this nation, Santorum will no doubt land squarely on his cloven hooves smack dab in the middle of K Street.

In the meantime, if it encourages the louche, hypocritical "fruits 'n' nuts" reflexive California haters out in Real 'murka, I would like to humbly offer this demurral: Yes. You're sooo right. It sucks out here. That's why one in every eight Americans lives here. It's just awful. Whatever you do, don't fucking come out here. Just don't risk it. There's barbecuing in January. Barbecuing in November. Summers without 95% humidity. Winters without eight feet of snow and people frozen inside their homes. The largest, most diverse agricultural breadbasket on the planet, locally grown food of all types within an hour's drive. Stuff to do and see, and people who are actually conversant about books and movies and teevee shows that don't have Kardashians in them.

It's terrible. Run for your lives. Stay in Alabama and marry your cousin. Take Rick Santorum's every word as divinely ordained gospel.

Self-Awareness

You think there's ever a point where fucktards like this realize how much they actually undermine their own "arguments" with their sheer stupidity? I mean, the disingenuous denials of racism are bad enough, but that aside, what the fuck is this coinage "re-nig" supposed to be derived from? Is it a lame play on renege in which case it makes no sense at all, or could remotely be construed to mean the opposite of what this window-licking fool thinks it means?

I've said it before, and I'll say it yet again -- if the South ever tries to secede again, this time let's do the right thing and let them already. I'm goddamned tired of my blue-state tax dollars going down a drain to support cousin-fucking losers whose idea of clever involves coy plays on the N word.

Pain In The Gas

I realize that it's the Kenyan Moooslim's fault, since he refuses to initiate hostilities and bomb oil-futures speculators, that gas prices are the way they are. There is something hinky about the fact that Americans, in the aggregate, are actually driving less, yet the price increases apace.

And I'm sure I said something to the same effect last time prices were this high, but as long as there are Excursions, Suburbans, Expeditions, Tahoes, Denalis, jacked-up F250 King Cabs, and all other number of giant, boxy suburbatard short buses trolling around with one, maybe two people inside (which seems to be roughly 99% of the time in my experience, and frankly, I have never seen one that appeared to actually be at carrying capacity, not even once), I suggest that gas is not priced high enough.

Does it suck to spend 60 bucks to fill up a mid-size family sedan? Hell yeah it does. But how often, if at all, in any conversation about oil prices and the geopolitics thereof, does the notion of conservation, of perhaps driving even a little bit smaller and smarter, even come up? In that instance, in the psychological divination underpinning the dark arts of economics, one assumes that the true price-point equilibrium has not yet been reached.

Or it could just be that the den of thieves that comprises our financial system, and the refs who provide prefabricated commentary on all this, have a vested interest in keeping our ongoing electoral industry ritual "close", whilst one wing of The Party implodes in a spasm of collective insanity.

Dumb All Over

Has anyone else, over the last couple weeks, been having to remind themselves what year it is, that the notion of any debate over contraception seems as inconceivable (cue Inigo Montoya) at this point as any basic civil rights issue from the past six or seven decades? Seriously, a couple months ago most people would have rightly assumed that there was no argument to be had over birth control pills, and yet our Crusaders o' Infinite Regression went and found one.

Thank the Flyin' Spaghetti Monster that Fatboy Limbaugh just could not resist waddling into this, pendulous belly sloshing heedlessly against, you know, a pretty easy majority of the population. Limpballs' hasty apology/retraction indicates that he and his sponsors found out real quick what the pinkwashers at Komen found out last month -- women put up with a lot as it is, but when you start fucking with their ability to manage their own lives, you're just asking for it.

Maybe Darrell Issa could convene another claque of middle-aged men to dictate to the little ladies what's best for them, hilarity would be guaranteed to ensue.

But hey, while they're giving Limpballs et al what for, perhaps the boycotters might also consider going after the bigger institutions that persist in this medieval nonsense. I do not understand how or why a woman who disagrees with this guff could in good conscience continue to vote Republican, or stay Catholic. You want it to stop, take the money out of it, that is really the only way.

But more practically, this cafeteria philosophy only tends to empower the mossbacks in the long run, if said cafeterios won't actually take a stand on any of it. One question is why institutions continue with unconscionably outmoded doctrine, but an equally legitimate question is why members of those institutions who have individually passed them by continue to stay and put up with it.

It's like watching Tina Turner keep on trying to convince herself she can bring Ike around. But that never did happen, did it? So Republican and Catholic women can continue to contribute to organizations that, on a very fundamental level, treat them with contempt and disdain, or they can tell them once and for all to get bent already, that they ain't puttin' up with that shit anymore.

That is not an endorsement per se, tacit or otherwise, of another political party or religious denomination. Indeed, people (not just women in particular, but people in general) may find that extricating themselves from all of that -- from power structures who, in the age of instant contact and social agglomeration, are as outdated as their medieval positions -- could be an actual liberating movement.