Wasted Motion

Again, just an observation on who's throwing the election and whom to blame:  Jill Stein is polling at a statistically insignificant rate, even more so in swing states, whilst spoiled dingbats and butthurt crackers are apparently going for Rmoney en masse. I am willing to bet my next paycheck that, should Vulture/Voucher manage to squeeze this one out of their poopchutes, not one of the swing state losses will be able to be blamed on the DFHs, and all of them will be because of the party jumpers. Bet your last dollar on that, friends 'n' neighbors.

As I've pointed out too many times in the past with the N8r b8rs (now in their second decade!), the problem here is not so much who gets stuck with the blame, it's the inevitable practical ramifications of the scapegoating. American political parties these days move to the right when they lose the presidential election, that is the intent and design of the ratchet/pawl system we have. Scapegoating the DFHs simply gives automatic cover to ratcheting the Democrats, whether that takes the form of further capitulation to extreme-right jabber, or putting up "more electable" candidates in the snake-handler states.

Moreover, it absolves them from having to look at the real reason why they lost in the first place. With Gore in 2000, there were so many factors, only the most unself-aware partisan could have singled out Nader not just as the proximal cause, but as the only cause. With Obama, the cause for the supposed mass defection is said to be that Rmoney will be better on jobs, even though he has yet to say exactly how he'll create decent jobs here, even though he made his fortune creating jobs overseas.

So are DFHs also responsible for that much greater degree of mass cognitive dissonance, of collective stupidity? Of course not. But until we either make voting mandatory and on Saturday, like in Australia, and mandate a short, publicly-financed campaign to take all the pelf out of the perpetual-campaign system, they'll keep getting scapegoated. Failing that, we need to start finding ways, individually and collectively, to start divesting ourselves from this system that shackles us to lifetimes of wage slavery and debt peonage.

Ladies' Night

Not sure exactly how many of these insane pigfuckers have to fly the same party banner for some of the dingbats out there to realize that the Republican Party is not your friend. This has very little to do with whether individual women happen to be personally pro-life or pro-choice, and everything to do with how accepting they are of the idea that assholes like Mourdock or Akin should be making that choice for them regardless, and sticking them with the consequences. (And don't get me started on the pretzel logic Akin's angels deploy in the Guardian write-up; so pathetic it's not even worth parsing and clarifying, just the burbling of addled, self-hating morons.)

We are no longer postulating the shopworn conservatard bugaboo of the airhead trollop strutting down to the nearest strip mall for a quick D&C, followed by a trip to the food court and thence to a club for more meaningless slut sex. We are talking about people who are on record as saying that women's bodies are able to secrete mystical chemicals that prevent them from being impregnated by rape -- or worse, that if somehow they are impregnated by rape, it's God's will. Worse yet, these are people who are vying for the United States Senate, when they should be practicing safe sex by going out and tagging all the livestock that kick.

At this point, I'm really not sure which is more conclusive proof that God is a total dick -- that He would actually will that a woman be impregnated by a violent, awful, dehumanizing crime, or that He still hasn't dropped these bastards with bolts of lightning and flaming pools of carbolic acid. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people, not just Mourdock and Akin, but the women who would actually vote for them? How do you get to a point where you hate and devalue yourself to that extent?

Freudian Slip

Oh, this is charming. Yet another interchangeable Foxface shoots from the hip with some baldfaced nonsense pulled so freshly out of his ass he had to brush the peanut and corn chunks off it first. The difference here is that he actually admitted that he had no evidence for what he was about to drop, which makes him a perfect surrogate for the Republican Party and all of its candidates and voters. Hell, they're not even pretending to try anymore.

Maybe someone should remind them of that time when 241 Marines were blown up by a suicide bomber in Lebanon, and Saint Reagan's swift and mighty response was to get the fuck out of there. But hoo boy, four people die in mob violence under Obammy's watch in some country most of 'em couldn't find on a map if their lives depended on it, and their media provocateur surrogates come unglued.

These are the jerkoffs fabricating your news analysis, America. How do you like it?

Five-Minute Music Reviews

Muse - The 2nd Law  Muse's trajectory has been one that any band would envy, with sales and rep growing practically by an order of magnitude with each subsequent release. With the success has come a bit of mainstreaming; the Queen allusions more and more overt, the conspiracy theory lyrics moving on to more universal concerns of love and revolution. The kids are alright, even if they are a bit more comfortable.

That's not a slam at all, by the way -- every band that makes it big has to handle the twin challenges of massive commercial success and continued artistic development, and Muse has certainly handled it better than most. The 2nd Law picks up where The Resistance left off, in many respects, brimming with social consciousness, danceable hooks, and epic choruses, it tries to have it every which way, and does so with a pretty solid slugging percentage. Matt Bellamy's falsetto vocals are as plaintive as ever, as are his bristling, angry leads, though the latter are fewer and farther between.

 

The production, as on The Resistance, is spectacular, immaculate throughout, but here and there one wishes just for a moment for the tortured squall of Citizen Erased, or the Cure-tinged electro-funk of Map of the Problematique, or even the space opera of Knights of Cydonia. But songs such as Supremacy, Panic Station, and Big Freeze have bite, the closing two-part title suite is innovative, and bassist Chris Wolstenholme provides some nice vocal contrast with his two songs, particularly Liquid State.

 

You can't really say that Muse have "sold out"; they are so unabashedly commercial it would be practically impossible for them to do so. But they do what they do with great ambition and panache, and continue to till some fertile ground.

 

---

 

 

The Sword - Apocryphon  This one just dropped Monday, so I've only listened to it twice so far, not enough to break it down comprehensively. But it's enough to tell that the biggest little band from Austin is still kicking retro ass and taking names with their comic-book tales of doom, destruction, and adventure. If listening to classic Sabbath while reading old Robert Howard Conan books in a room with a giant Frank Frazetta poster and the whiff of stale bongwater sounds like your idea of good times, then The Sword are waaay up in your wheelhouse.

This is no mean feat, not at all, to take time-worn classic riffage, peg it to lyrics that are unapologetically cheesy, and make it really work. This is what playing it with conviction and passion are all about, kids -- these guys are clearly having fun with it, and it's infectious. Apocryphon is the band's fourth album, and as such, given the simplicity of the genre and the well-worn path it resides on, one might anticipate some cracks at some point, the need to change tack somehow. But aside from being apparently slightly less conceptually oriented than the last epic outing, Warp Riders, they are sticking to their guns, no doubt because they're pretty good guns.

 

The band was recently on an episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations farewell tour, which should up their hipness quotient even further, perhaps depending on how much of an insufferable prick you fell Bourdain is. (Personally I enjoy him, his show, and his books a great deal; Bourdain is much more self-aware and candid than just about anyone in the public eye right now. He is very much a WYSIWYG personality, which is generally a good thing, Donald Trump notwithstanding.) So far, I would pick The Veil of Isis, The Hidden Masters, and Seven Sisters as standout tracks, but in general, like The Sword's past efforts, Apocryphon is a solid stack of all-killer-no-filler riffs. These guys are poised to make the big jump, the way Mastodon finally did with The Hunter.

 

---

 

Devin Townsend Project - Epicloud  It is not an exaggeration to posit that former Strapping Young Lad mastermind Devin Townsend is this generation's Frank Zappa. A gifted, idiosyncratic guitarist who seems to live in the studio, Townsend is one of the most prolific, stylistically diverse producers out there right now. After putting out one of the best albums of the last decade with Synchestra in 2006, Townsend went into rehab -- and came out with 60 songs written and ready to record, which turned into the four-album Ki/Addicted!/Deconstruction/Ghost multi-opus, released over the next several years (the last two as a double set last year), each album completely different in musical style and focus.

So after all that, Townsend went back into the studio intending to record a sequel to his earlier Ziltoid the Omniscient space opera, and by his own reckoning, found himself writing more poppy, happy material. Not necessarily a bad thing, that -- that was the territory Addicted! traveled, and that one is a terrific, sorely underrated (if a bit short) collection. Epicloud is indeed very positive in outlook, obviously anomalous to most metal out there these days, which is at best nihilistic in most cases. But thanks to Townsend's rather angular sense of melody, peppered with his quirky humor (another similarity to FZ), and set in a lush choral wall-of-sound production, it works on a lot of levels. If the programming pinheads at Z-Rock could hear Townsend's stuff (or hell, The Sword, for that matter), maybe they wouldn't feel so compelled to dump the same fifteen-year-old Rob Zombie and Red Hot Chili Peppers tracks on their hapless listeners every fucking hour.

 

From the gospel-tinged choir bookending the album, to the ongoing collaboration with vocalist Anneke van Giersbergen on most of the songs, to the anthemic romp of Liberation and More!, to the sappy but heartfelt balladry of Where We Belong and Divine, there's a sweeping array of pop-metal stylings here, all of them more commercial than just about anything Townsend has done previously. But in a good way; again, between the glowing production and van Giersbergen's terrific vocals throughout, Townsend has earned the right to have a fat hit or two from this one.

 

---



Monuments - Gnosis  For better or worse, bands like Monuments probably represent the near future of technical metal. Combining Dream Theater-level chops with gutbusting Meshuggah-style vocals (frequently alternating with cleaner vocals in the choruses, similar to what bands like Scar Symmetry do), there's definitely a lot going on here. Great musicianship, good production, solid grooves -- musically it's all good. It's the vocals that throw me on stuff like this, and that's really just a matter of personal taste, but the pulsating neck-vein screaming is exhausting to listen to after a while.

Still, there are some really tight musical moments all throughout, particularly on Admit Defeat and Regenerate. If you like this type of music, with a lot of elements of bands such as Periphery and (again) Meshuggah, this is really well done. But you probably won't crank it up at your next party.

 

---

 

 

The Melvins - Freak Puke  I'm not as familiar with The Melvins' work as I should be, especially since there are plenty of bands I like who cite them as an influence. But it's never too late to get schooled, and as an album like Freak Puke is likely to get pegged as "experimental" or some such, it's not exactly a prime opportunity to bandwagon-jump a band that has never exactly been a household name in the first place.

 

From the opening cello(!) strains and brushed drums of Mr. Rip-Off, you know you're in for something odd and unpredictable. The lead track sounds like a sinister psychedelic '60s pastiche, between the arcane instrumentation and the atmospheric vocals.

 

And that's really the beauty of this album throughout -- no two songs sound alike (or, at times, even by the same band), and you just never know what's coming next. Stand-up bass and bowed chamber-music instruments figure in every song, right alongside fuzz-tone guitars and the spacey vocals. Unusual arrangements and interspersed sound effects just add to the chaotic proceedings. The closest thing to a conventional "song" is probably A Growing Disgust, or perhaps the cover of the Wings chestnut Let Me Roll It.

 

And again, it's precisely the unconventionality and weirdness of Baby Won't You Weird Me Out or Leon Versus the Revolution or the title track that make the whole thing so much fun to listen to. By the time you hit the meandering nine-and-a-half-minute capper Tommy Goes Berserk, you just want to hear what they're going to do next, which is about all you can of any album.

Trump: The Art of the Douche

Gosh, do you think Captain Combforward's big scoop is that his turd-in-a-punch-bowl teevee show is about to pull-start yet another wretched, interminable season? Experts' opinions vary! Some say that two plus two equals four, some say that it equals six. I say we can all get along, and agree to disagree that it's five, just for the sake of comity, if not reality.

Also, too, this toxic peckerhead's entertainment value has long outlived its shelf life, can we agree on that as well? Exactly how many times does The Greatest Country In The History Of Evah need to watch some variation on "Meat Loaf goes apeshit on Gary Busey"? Perhaps once we've lived the cycle of watching Honey Boo Boo auction her storage shed and spend her duck-call millions on a cee-ment pond, we'll achieve dipshit nirvana.

The ability of animals like Trump to not only survive but continue to thrive was certainly a factor in my deciding that there simply could not be a just and gracious god, when I was, like, ten years old. But really and come on, the fact that this gaping asshole still gets away with it, rubs your nose in it, sucka -- well, that proves not only that there is no god, but that there isn't even karma. I mean, sweet Jebus, can we not fire this jackass already?

Update [10/24/12 9:00 PDT]:  Ahahahahaha. These stupid publicity stunts of Drumpf's are like a nasty car wreck you pass by -- you really know you shouldn't slow down and look, but you just can't help it. And sure enough, it's always nastier than you thought, and lamer, and you end up walking away feeling worse about yourself and humanity. I actually hope Obama takes him up on it, just to watch Chump squirm and weasel out of his bluster.

Failing that, maybe we can all chip in a buck apiece, and bribe this dime-store asshole to go away already.

They Might Be Giants

Congrats to the local baseball heroes, the SF Giants, who became just the third team to come back from a 3-1 deficit in a league championship series to thump the Cardinals and pitcher Kyle Lohse, who grew up and went to high school up here near Chico. Should be a good matchup between the Giants and the well-rested Tigers, who dispatched noted assclown Donald Trump's pet Yankees.

So here's to what should be a good Series. The Giants have the upper hand on classic goofball personalities, with Posey, Panda, Pagan, Romo, and the rest of the weirdbeards. The Tigers are peaking at just the right time, and Verlander is the proverbial fireballer of the moment, with a 7-game playoff wininng streak going right now.

Either way, of the final four teams, this was the matchup that America wanted, whether they knew it or not. The last thing you needed was to watch the Steinbrenners bully, borrow, and derp their way to yet another store-bought champeenship. Buckle up and watch people actually have fun playing a kids' game, rather than some button-down pseudo-corporate dress-code bullshit.

Master Debaters Part 2: Binders Full of Women

So the Obama shows up last night to better expose Mittens for what he is --  a smug, pompous jackass who needs to kindly go away and hug his precious hectomillions already, leave us peons to what's left of our scraps for the next four years. Extra super bonus points for the faces of death Mrs. "You People" Rmoney and son Tagg "Tagg" projecting at the stage, apparently hoping for some effect on Obama. Not only that, Tagg was so darn angry, he was like totally gonna get up all in Obama's face and throw a punch at him, because he's a tough guychickenhawk just like dear ol' Dad.

Lest anyone out there on the intartubez might think this is schtick here, it isn't. If we talk about "character" mattering, then what sort of "character" does it take for someone to lead pro-Vietnam War counter-demonstrations at Stanford, while getting four deferments and then heading off for France? For a nation that refuses to forget the most marginal slight, it's something that this barely merits mention. It seems to me to be about the most chickenshit thing a man can do, to protest loudly and vociferously for poorer, less-connected kids to go fight and die, and turn tail yourself every bloody chance you get.

Anyhoo, the narrative is back on track, Obama will have just enough momentum to push him back over the top, but not enough to actually change anything, and in four years we'll be switching between the Andrew Cuomo-Todd Akin debates and Honey Boo Boo's Celebrity Rehab show, while holding on for dear life as Our Betters continue to skim 90% of what economic gains there are to be had.

Hair Today, Gall Tomorrow

Renaissance man and serial monogamist Donald Trump's twitter-twatting is the stuff of legend. Near as I can tell, this is not a parody. He coins amazing, memorable turns of phrase:

Boy howdy, if this century gets its own Algonquin Round Table going, the Trumpster's got a seat right next to Kanye West, ya heard? Jesus, I hope someone remembered to chronicle that timeless nugget o' wisdom.

But wait, there's more. He's not just the Samuel Johnson of the new millennium, you miserable peons. He's also a formidable baseball prognosticator:

Bang zoom, chumps! Forget that Verlander gave up three hits and one run (and that to start to ninth inning) in leading the Tigers to a 3-games-to-none leg up on the Yanks in the ALCS. The Donald has spoken.

It's Pronounced "Misery"

Considering a knuckle-dragging goon like Todd Akin actually has a decent shot at unseating Claire McCaskill, it seems a safe bet that there actually are voters in Missouri that will factor ludicrous quals such as a candidate's pronunciation into their choice. Guess that's simpler than, you know, reading up on the people and issues, and figuring out what is the most attuned with your own rational self-interest.

WYGIWYD

It's about time someone in the big leagues said it.

If you believe that Thursday night's vice-presidential debate was a "draw" because Joe Biden was "rude" and "disrespectful" while Paul Ryan was obviously being disingenuous and uninformed, or that you've decided to go with "disingenuous" and "uninformed" because its manners made it more "likable," then you deserve the inadequate health-care voucher that's coming your way in 2014, as well as the letter from the Social Security Administration that your benefits will be down to 85 cents a month because International Embezzlement LLC went belly-up and took your retirement with it. Tough luck, kids. Them's the risks of an Opportunity Society.

This is something I've harped on for months (probably years), but it really cannot be overstated. If you're a woman and you vote for Rmoney/Ryan, you bloody well deserve to have a conservative Mormon and a conservative Catholic tell you what your reproductive rights are (and more importantly, aren't). If you're gay and you vote for them, you deserve to have them and their knuckle-dragging surrogates tell you what a "real" family is, and treat you like a third-class citizen (or, you know, a chick).

If you care about scientific and technological advancement, and about America's primacy in the sci/tech fields, and you vote for self-styled teabagger morons, you deserve to have a school system that would rather teach your children that the earth was created in six days a few thousand years ago, than teach them to read and to be rigorous critical thinkers. If you're a working-class dog and you vote for a money-grubbing plutocrat who pulled his hectomillions out of the downsized hides of people who actually produced something worth buying, don't be surprised when your job gets sent to Shenzhen or Bangalore.

Conservative friends 'n' neighbors, all your high 'n' mighty valyews won't pay a day of your light bills, or make health care an iota more accessible, or put a dent in the upward siphoning of the economy to those who already have more than they could spend in five generations. If you like a landed aristocracy sucking your childrens' futures dryer than Phoenix will be in twenty years, keep on keepin' on.

Income for most workers has barely risen in the last 30 years, but the top 1 percent of earners have seen their income almost triple in the same amount of time.

Keep telling yourself that anything else is communism, and let us know how that works, how that's been working, for you.
 

Putting the "Mental" in Fundamentalism

At some point, we'll have to leave the Af-Pak area to these animals.

On Tuesday, masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack. All three survived, but late on Tuesday doctors said that Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital in Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain.

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”

      

“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”

Great. Yes, it would be twelve kinds of awesome sauce if someone could round up Ehsan and his buddies, and just end them once and for all. But by now, we should be able to see that it doesn't work that way, it'll never work that way, not with constant drone raids and collateral damage.

Just as there is no liberal counterpart to a twisted freak like Bill Tapley, so too is there no real western counterpart to the Taliban, to this scarily regressive, heavily bastardized perversion of Islam, that hates women and science, murders writers, threatens artists, molests boys, incites riots over comic drawings and fake films, wants nothing more than to bully and subjugate their societies back to the seventh century. Whatever idiots like Tapley, or "Pastor" Terry Jones, or even Fred Phelps are, they're not that, not by a longshot. Phelps is a king-size gaping asshole, but I'm pretty sure he never tried to assassinate an eighth-grade girl on a schoolbus.

But it's impossible at this point to imagine what we can actually do to alleviate the situation. I'm sure tough guy chickenhawk Sir Mitts-A-Lot wants to send other peoples' kids in to kick ass and take names, not only in Af-Pak, but Syria, Libya, and Iran to boot. No problem, right?

Again, let's just send as many planes in as we can to airlift out anyone who wants to leave, especially the women and children, leave the devout perverts to their own devices, see how well that goes for them. Hell, can't be much worse than it is now.

[Update 10/12/12:  Some glimmers of hope in this terrible story -- Malala Yousafzai has a fair chance of surviving the attack (to which, of course, the mighty warriors of the Taliban have vowed to go after her again, as well as her father), and there have been several days of public protests against these fiends. Again, it would be nice to believe that the Pakistani military could just go round these humps up, and plant them in a ditch forthwith. But of course it never works that way. The next best way is for the people themselves to rise up en masse against them, demonstrate that they've had enough of their violent medievalism.]

Shit For Brains, Part 2: The Poopening

I leave it to youse gentle readers out there to decide which is more appalling -- that a chuckleheaded clown like Paul Broun sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee (along with noted ladyparts enthusiast Todd Akin), or that he is running unopposed for re-election.

Since the Georgia 10th was created a few years back by gerrymandering, it has been a safe 2-1 seat for the Republicans, even with a college town (Athens) in the district. But that's no excuse; you should never concede territory, especially to a well-known buffoon who's only held the seat for two terms. Hell, even Nancy Pelosi doesn't get to run unopposed.

If they can't muster the nerve to at least pretend to try to contest Broun's seat, the least the Dems can do is stick him on a committee where he can't do any real damage. Maybe if the U.S. can drop another ten or twenty notches in science education and aptitude, we might get serious about it. In the meantime, thanks a bunch, Real America, for keeping these short-bus goofballs off the unemployment rolls.

Shit For Brains

Senatuh Leghawn makes a funneh 'bout blah foke

Well gawrsh, I jest cain't unnerstan how fokes kin call suthunuhs a buncha inbred ingnint crackers:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Republicans tried to distance themselves Saturday from a Republican state representative's assertion that slavery was a "blessing in disguise" and a Republican state House candidate who advocates deporting all Muslims.

....

Hubbard wrote in his 2009 self-published book, "Letters To The Editor: Confessions Of A Frustrated Conservative," that "the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise." He also wrote that African-Americans were better off than they would have been had they not been captured and shipped to the United States.

Fuqua, who served in the Arkansas House from 1996 to 1998, wrote there is "no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States," in his 2012 book, titled "God's Law."

Seriously, what can you say about mouth-breathing dipshits such as these, in the year 2012? On the one hand, it's not like anyone bought their self-published retardery, but it's the principle of the matter. At least the Arkansas GOP rushed to distance themselves from this nonsense, but shit, how does this still happen, how does the stereotype perpetuate?

I really don't know what else to say, besides, fuck these assholes right in the neck.

Mock the Vote

So, uh, it seems that Ozzy Osbourne/Brenda Vaccaro impersonator and noted thespian Scott Stapp is disappointed in Barry O, so, you know, let that sway you however it will. No word yet on who Chad Kroeger's endorsing, but then, he's Canadian isn't he?

It's hard not to enjoy the dynamic in play here -- did Faux News have to flip a coin to decide between Stapp and, I dunno, Janine Turner? What sliver of Faux' Maalox-chugging demo will even have any idea who Stapp is in the first place? Just weird -- or indicative of Mittens' level of pull among H-list has-beens and never-weres.

сердечные друзья

So in playing with all these new dashboard tools on The Blogger, I see that after America, in a distant second place for readership is Russia, a country which I have some (one-eighth) kinship with, and an abiding (and inexplicable) affection for. Since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by the Russian language (I can still read it fluently, but don't have sufficient vocabulary to converse), history, and culture. I knew a couple of expatriate Russians when I lived in Mendocino County in the '90s, and found them to be loyal friends and excellent drinking buddies.

So maybe it's spam, but I'd like to assume it's real. Spasibo, dobro pozhalobat, druzya!

Blast from the Past

Seems like we're getting a lot of new traffic in here as of late, and while I'm learning the widgets and gadgets and such like as quickly as I can, it wouldn't hurt to revisit some classic posts for teh n00bz (welcome, btw). So in the spirit of footbal season, here's what I think stands well as the first real foundational, classic post of this blog:  Riffs On Football As Cultural Metaphor.

As always, read it with someone you love. (Caution:  Some linkrot may occur. It's a seven-year-old post. I'll fix up links when I get the chance.)


 

Safe Bet

Ahahahaha. CNN commentator and noted handicapper Sportin' Life Bill Bennett takes a break from the slots to tell us all just why Teh Kneegrow is a bad bet:

Since Obama took office, median household income has declined more than $4,000. More people are on food stamps than ever before -- 46.7 million. The poverty rate is around 15%, the highest since 1993. The average retail price of gasoline has more than doubled under Obama, rising from $1.84 per gallon to more than $3.80 per gallon. In spite of this, he stopped the approval of the Keystone pipeline for further review.

First of all, the Keystone pipeline is explicitly designed to move oil to the Gulf for export. True story. It was in all the papers and everything. Building the Keystone tomorrow would not alter gasoline prices by a single red cent. Nor, for that matter, would another tax sop to the oil companies. You'd think a guy with a career firmly ensconced between the buttcheeks of predatory capitalism would understand intuitively how pricing works in a captive market.

Then again, I'm quite sure that he understands it perfectly well. He's just counting on you not to.

Obama inherited a bad economy, but his policies have made it even worse.

As we always say, any time a "news'" person attempts to provide quantitative economic analysis, to posit that something is doing "better" or "worse", the question is always:  for whom?  Cui bono? So in an economic climate where robber barons and banksters -- who are Sportin' Life's bread and butter, after all -- are doing just fine and/or dandy, what's with this sudden Hero of the Workin' Class, Joe the Columnist shit? Seriously, is there actually someone, an average schmuck of average means and circumstances, out there who reads this guff and concludes, "Yeah, Bill Bennett is on my side"? If so then perhaps, as always, such folks deserve exactly such as they end up getting, which is a swift kick in the balls.

This, though, is the (as they say in the 'hood) money shot:

Apart from the killing of Osama bin Laden, the death of Moammar Gaddafi and and [sic] the successful expansion of drone strikes, the foreign policy record of this administration has largely been one of capitulation, indecision and weakness.

Why, because he hasn't nuked Damascus and Tehran just yet? Pussy. Yeah, sure, other than getting the most-hunted terrorist on the entire planet for the past decade, what the hell has Hussein Obammy done for me lately? Really, after the colossal monkeyfuck of the Cheney regime, there should be a formal moratorium on any Republican saying anything about foreign policy matters for, I dunno, at least the next ten years. To very loosely paraphrase Jack Nicholson, you'd be better off just saying "thank you", and going on about your way, Fatboy.

As the say, read the whole thing, if for some reason you can't predict it word-for word ahead of time, and you need the entertainment value. It just goes on like that.

Ultimately, the takeaway from Bennett's tedious jabber is something he understands all too well.

Pot and Kettle

You know, just the mere facts that Turd Blossom not only still has gainful employment, but has the stones to call anyone else a liar, is all the proof you should ever need that the United States is not a meritocracy. If it were, an animal like Rove would be living under a freeway overpass praying nightly that some bath-salt junkie doesn't wander into camp and chew his fat face off, and George W. Bush would've topped out at being the best darn-diddly floor manager the Midland Best Buy ever did see. Yes, if only Obama could be as honest as poor ol' Scrooge McDuckMitt Romney. Good grief, Rove has the conscience and credibility of a pit viper.

A Simple Plan

Bibi prepares a trap for Ahmadinnerjacket.

I think we all get that Netanyahu apparently thinks US foreign policy is utterly at his disposal, and to some degree it is, with some justification. Israel is our friend and ally, beset and surrounded by mortal enemies (not, it should be pointed out, entirely without some mutual antagonism over the years), and it's not like any of the Arab League countries are rushing to help even a little bit with helping out the Palestinians, some of whom must undoubtedly prefer to move to, say, Jordan or Saudi than stay for another generation in a teeming Gaza refugee camp.

But whatever. Every president tries and fails to craft some sort of peace accord, it's part of the political dance. As far as Iran's lamentable attempts to manufacture a nuclear weapon, what never gets mentioned is that they may have practical reasons to do so that have nothing at all to do with Israel, despite Ahmadinejad's tedious bluster. Iran has three very large next-door neighbors (Russia, India, Pakistan) which have long been nuclear powers, seen the respect that gets accorded to them as a result, has a bitter enemy across the Strait of Hormuz that has also attempted to acquire nuclear tech in the past, and its neighbor to the west got shocked and awed precisely because it had not yet acquired nukes, and thus presented no deterrent.

Housekeeping

So by now you've noticed that the design here is completely different. Questions will naturally spring forth, like Paul Ryan from W. Mitt Romney's copious fivehead. For example, "Heywood," you might ask, "why the big change now, and not, say, six years ago?" Great question, imaginary person! Here are a few reasons why the blog design has remained static, and a few more as to why I'm making some changes now.


Why not before?

• I'm a lazy bastard.
• Only so many hours in the day.
• Concentrating too much on writing, not enough on design.

Why now?

• I've been in the process of building content with which to start up a new site, and I'd like to experiment a bit with some ideas before launching (new site will definitely be launching within the next month or so, and even though it will be a guitar site, I will post some sort of notice here at least once or twice).
• I've been meaning to do some redesign work for quite some time, but have had neither the time nor expertise. But Blogger has rolled out some seriously cool design tools, and I've been learning as I go along, and I'm taking a long weekend, so let's give it a spin.
• As I think I've indicated earlier in the year, I'm kind of in a minor dilemma with this blog. There are days when I'd like to keep it going, and days when I'm ready to walk away from it, just because there's only so many synonyms for "dumbass", and after nearly eight years, I think I've exhausted them all.
  
  But I don't think it'd be right to decide either way without giving things a fair shot, without using more of the tools and ideas at my disposal, trying some SEO tricks that I can tweak for the guitar blog, etc. I'd prefer to keep it going, if I can generate a reasonable amount of traffic. I don't need Atrios numbers, but I don't think a minimum of 100 hits a day after eight years is too much to expect.

Anyway, things are in flux right now, I have to go in and figure out a way to fix the blockquote formatting, rebuild the blogroll, play with the gadgets, experiment with design, yada yada, so expect more changes over the next few weeks at least.

In the meantime, please feel free to critique in the comments; I can't promise I'll respond to everything or give you what you want, but I will read and consider everything. Thanks in advance for your input, please be patient, and spread the word.

House of Cards

Check out this excellent interview over at Naked Capitalism, on the manifold reasons why and how this "economy" is nothing more than institutionalized racketeering. The question below [all emphases mine] should especially be read carefully by laypeople really wanting to get a handle on how this grift works, without having to spend six years and six figures on a finance degree:

In Other News....

I find the apparent mediot fascination with "the royals", well, fascinating. Can someone explain this to me? How is it that, assuming that the free market does indeed respond to proletarian interests, so many people care about the comings and goings of pedigreed inbreds? How does it become an international incident when fuzzy photos emerge of the B-cups of one of the inbreds' wives, or of one of the inbreds partying in Vegas? How does anyone find the energy to give half a shit?

Seriously. I get why people are fans of actors, musicians, teevee shows, even sports teams. These are all people with specialized skills, actual talents. They do things that most people cannot do, and at a high level. But how is it that so many people are so enraptured by people who do nothing at all?

Crass Warfare

I don't usually do the "read it all" or "what they said" thing, but uh, what Angry Black Lady said.

You know, we've all got that conservative loudmouth brother-in-law type, whether it's a co-worker or cousin or whatever, who basically internalizes and regurgitates on demand whatever lie they heard most recently from their "news" source, whether it's Fixed Noise or Rash Limpballs or just their own friends and acquaintances.

And you realize pretty quickly on when they try to engage you with the latest nonsense some joker chain-emailed them, it's unfortunately a waste of time to try to counter their arguments with rational debating points. They are not looking for a debate, they're looking for affirmation of their preconceived prejudices, nothing more, nothing less. Any response or point that takes any longer (or even as long) as a typical teevee sound bite (say, six seconds) is going to go in one ear and out the other. They last about ten seconds at a stretch before they shake their wittle heads and mutter, "Whatever."

Okay, then. So what do you counter these passionate bozos with, that they might actually listen and pay attention? That Rmoney thinks half of all Americans are freeloading losers because of their voting preference -- at least, according to the comments he made at a fundraiser thrown by a orgy-throwing vulture capitalist scumbag? That he quite literally made his fortune gutting American companies and sending American jobs to Chinese labor camps? That not just Rmoney himself, but the people he quite explicitly represents, are in fact the only people who are significantly better off than they were four years ago, and they still fucking complain, still seethe with contempt at the the peons who don't know their place? That this modern aristocracy persists in referring to themselves as "job creators", yet after twelve years of the tax cuts they insisted on, have somehow managed not to create any jobs, but have hoarded over a trillion dollars in aggregate private-sector cash reserves? At what point do these schmucks actually pay attention to what's right in front of them, and believe their lyin' eyes once and for all?

You can give it your best shot, and at least make it somewhat interesting. One obvious problem is the high degree of built-in hypocrisy, the mindset of people who deeply resent what they perceive as a class of freeloading untermenschen, always with their hands out, but who have for the most part never themselves said "no" to any free gubmint money coming their way. On the one hand, you don't want to argue too much with a moron, because people might not be able to tell the difference, but on the other hand, that's precisely why their toxic stupidity manages to hang in there every damned time.

Stepping In Mitt

For a campaign that appears to run on endless amounts of hot and cold running derp, Money Boo Boo continues to find new and better ways to fail:

Romney's response to the incidents of the last 24 hours -- the storming of the American embassy in Cairo and the killing of the American ambassador and three others in Libya -- is widely being regarded as hasty and ham-handed. From his initial statement late Tuesday, which accused the Obama Administration of "sympathiz[ing] with those who waged the attacks," to his Wednesday morning press conference reinforcing that criticism, Romney, critics say, appeared overly eager to turn the tragedy into a political wedge, and insufficiently respectful of the gravity of the situation.

Even for a team famously refusing to be constrained by the rigors of mere fact-checkers, this is a pretty bad whiff. As awful as the events yesterday in Benghazi are, and as tempting as it might be to "there they go again" at the crowds protesting what appears to be a seriously half-assed production of internets provocateurs trying to stir up violent responses, the fact is (to use the always handy Rumsfeldism) we don't know what we don't know. It is entirely possible (even likely, considering the apparent sophistication of the deadly event) that a small cell of actual terrorist types hung in for cover with the protesters. No one knows much of anything yet, certainly not the guy who fired his foreign policy advisor for being a lustful cockmonster.

Plus there's that whole "water's edge" thingduring events such as this. It would have been an easy and even graceful move to just hit the "thoughts and prayers are with the families" note and move back to the economy, which is really (ironically enough) the one card Rmoney has to play in his hand. And he couldn't even do that one right.

Of course, we are talking about the same guy that poked the Russian bear just for shits and giggles:

MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that Mitt Romney's characterization of Moscow as the United States' "number one geopolitical foe" has actually helped Russia.

The Russian leader said Romney's comments strengthened his resolve to oppose NATO's plan for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, a system Russia believes will degrade its nuclear deterrent. The U.S. insists the system is aimed at Iran, not Russia.

"I'm grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems," Putin told reporters, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

"The most important thing for us is that even if he doesn't win now, he or a person with similar views may come to power in four years. We must take that into consideration while dealing with security issues for a long perspective," he said, speaking after a meeting with Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic, according to Interfax news agency.

Mittford apparently thinks Boris and Natasha are still out to get Moose and Squirrel. Regardless, his recent comments on foreign policy, for a perpetually tumultuous part of the world, underscore the distinct impression one gets that he would just go ahead and appoint John Bolton and Elliot Abrams as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, or vice versa. Maybe run everything past Netanyahu beforehand, that sort of thing.

More and more -- though the media, in their interest to keep things close, will undoubtedly weight it just like they did for GeeDub -- it looks like Rmoney will get his clock unceremoniously cleaned by Obama in the debates. Whatever misgivings one may have about Obama, and they're there, and for good reasons, one strength the guy has is that he really does seem to be unflappable. Nothing ruffles his feathers. And yet he manages to convey humanity, even while tamping down emotion. Mitt, on the other hand, makes the simple act of, say, drinking a glass of water looked forced and robotic. You can almost see the smoke coming out of his ears as he attempts to figure out the algorithm to Barry O's rope-a-dope stylings.

As dismal as this chapter of the perpetual campaign industry has been, and as anti-climactic as an Obama win will be with the possibility of both houses of Congress being GOP, it will at least be appreciated to watch these jagoffs lose. Romney and Ryan present the most tedious, regressive, been-there-done-that-tried-it-what-else-ya-got ideas. Doesn't matter whether it's foreign or domestic policy, the economy, labor relations, health care, the environment, women's right to control their own reproductive decisions, they're Rip Van Winkle, two guys who fell asleep while Herbert Hoover was in office, and can't figure out why the rest of the world moved on.

No wonder the only people falling for this schtick are angry old white farts. The world stopped for them too, about the time Pat Boone was schlepping Little Richard tunes for the preppy uptight white kids.

What The Chuck

When the Islamocommiemoooslimkenyan usurps the Stormin' Mormon and re-ascends the Throne O' Doom, thereby heralding a thousand years of dorknessdarkness, don't say you weren't warned, America. Warned, I tells ya, by 72-year-old thespian and Whirled Nut Daily jokester Chuck Norris, his much younger wife, and way younger hair.

It's the next best thing to watching a fist-shaking codger tell an empty chair to get off his lawn.

Here Comes Money Boo Boo

Once again, Mittford "Buzz Killington" Rmoney is king of the unforced error, on this morning's Mitt the Press (see what I did there?):

In his interview airing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Romney praised the Wednesday night speech by the Democratic ex-president, which ridiculed Romney and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan on issues ranging from fiscal policy to Medicare.

"He did stand out in contrast with the other speakers; I think he really did elevate the Democrat convention in a lot of ways," Romney said. "And, frankly, the contrast may not have been as attractive as Barack Obama might have preferred if he were choosing who'd go before him and who'd go after."

Clinton's speech was regarded as one of the highlights of the Democratic convention; he formally nominated President Obama for a second term, and his folksy speech built up the current president while simultaneously taking Romney to task. But as Romney suggested, Clinton's speech drew as much interest as Obama's among political observers, and Romney seemed to suggest the former president even overshadowed the current one.

Think about that for a second. Rmoney just got showed up at his own coming-out party by an empty chair, gets barely a dead-cat bounce in the polls from it, and after a substantially more successful and well-received Democratic convention, the best he can do is try some passive-aggressive comparison between Cinton and Obama? It's a piss-poor, half-assed attempt to try to paint Obama as some hardcore lefty, and came off as such.

Especially considering the Republicans' own most recent White House occupants were nowhere to be found, it speaks volumes that the current ticket is left scrambling, preferring to find ways to tie themselves to Bill Clinton, somehow, some way, than to even bother mentioning He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, lest eight sordid years of monkeyfuckery be revisited.

Fun observations from the interview and panel discussion:

• The "Juntos Con Romney" strategically hovering over Mittford's shoulder reminds me of the old "Juntos Pedemos" signs from the Jorge Arbusto years. Good times.
• Good thing they got Sportin' Life Bill Bennett to explain values and shit. What's the over/under on him trying to pick the pulled pork out of his teeth with Julian Castro?
• Apparently Chuck Todd is cutting his own hair these days.

Also too.

Chris Kluwe Is Shrill

The NFL has been consistently portrayed as one of the last bastions of resolutely anti-gay sentiment. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe breaks that stereotype in a joyously profane barrage aimed squarely at some (as Kluwe correctly puts it) hypocritical old black Maryland pol, who implicitly threatened (or at least attempted to cow) the Baltimore Ravens organization after LB Brendon Ayanbadejo spoke out in favor of gay marriage. Got all that?

(As noted in Deadspin comments, Kluwe's tone and invective may render his message less effective, or even counterproductive, if his aim is to convince and persuade. That's entirely possible; however, as we know, it is a waste of time to deal with irrational people in a rational manner, by definition. So your next best tactic is to whip up enthusiasm on your own side, encourage the numbers to beat down Teh Stoopid. Sorry if that doesn't square with the personal beliefs of some, but that's really the way it is. The Bull Connors of the world are never swayed by quiet suasion and intellectual probity. Either you swing a bigger bat than they do, or you get smacked.)

If, as the saying goes, the only necessary for evil (or at least rank stupidity) to triumph is for good people to do nothing, then Ayanbadejo and Kluwe deserve a lot of credit for stepping up and using their public profiles for something good, as players are routinely expected and encouraged to do. Again, while people expect rednecks to spout these regressive attitudes, it is especially shameful for black politicians, and black churches, ministers, and congregations, to be so consistently and intensely against what is squarely a simple civil rights matter. More than the rest of us, they oughta know better.

Obama has certainly been more and more clear on his stance on this issue, culminating in his acceptance speech at the DNC the other night. Hopefully this forces some serious consideration among those folks who should have grown up on this a long, long time ago.

Mock the Vote

It's oddly reassuring to see that ignorance and bigotry is not the province of any particular race or creed, but can be found just about anywhere.

Many of the congregants in Wooden's Upper Room Church of God In Christ express conflicted feelings with the same phrase offered by Ieisha Hall: "I'm praying on it." The 37-year-old voted for Obama four years ago, in part because "as the mother of three sons, a big part of it for me was the history of" supporting the first black president.

"If God says so," Hall said she will leave her presidential ballot space blank rather than vote for Romney, even though he opposes same-sex marriage. "I know he does, but I just don't believe in Mormonism," Hall said, echoing a sentiment expressed by many congregants.

Do us all a big favor, lady, and stay home, then. A Vulture/Voucher victory will affect your life a hell of a lot more than, say, mine, or a lot of other folks. But you can congratulate yourself for your sanctimonious righteousness whilst your access to health becomes more expensive or non-existent, as your sons' ability to attend college gets curtailed, as your job, or your friends' or relatives' jobs, get outsourced or downsized so that Rmoney's stock port can go up an eighth of a tick.

There's nothing at all surprising about fools living down to their names, but still, like a train wreck, when you see it you have to look and wonder.

Somewhere deep in hell, Bull Connor is cackling his ass off. Is it really that much to ask that we have a nation where, if it doesn't break our arm or pick our pocket, we all agree to mind our goddamned business?

The Angel of Debt

[Post title shamelessly swiped from Gillian Flynn's mystery novel Dark Places. But it might be fun to repurpose the phrase just for the Mittster. Just sayin'.]

So maybe the next time you need to explain for the umpteenth time to your idiot brother-in-law why his vote for Rmoney is the proverbial equivalent of a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders, you can smack him upside his fool head with this, by way of clarifying what Mittford actually did to "earn" his ginormous pile of pelf:

Here's how Romney would go about "liberating" a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it's called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.

Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."

As always, there's more, read the whole thing, yada yada. But that's really the trick -- while Rmoney may have slightly more insight into the workings of the bidness world than the average schmoe, what he really has is what a good arsonist has -- a lack of conscience. Anyone can light a fire, most of us are simply prevented from doing so by a fundamental moral code.

But this is a guy who, with a bunch of his punk prep-school friends, gang-tackled and sheared a fellow student; who, at Stanford, attended counter-demonstrations in support of the Vietnam War -- a war which, it must be noted, Mittford received four deferments, and ultimately went to France to try to talk the frogs into giving up wine. There's no character there.

That's really the kind of human being Willard Romney is. There is a rather perverse, vindictive part of me that sincerely wishes that, were the rest of us insulated from the very real damage he and his equally soulless running mate, that he would win, so that his supporters, and every RNC attendee (especially Clint Eastwood) could feel the full effect of the policies they would put forward.

There would be no more fitting punishment for these jackasses, than to see how bad it could really get, if for no better reason than to appreciate how good they really have it right now. Few things are more annoying than watching a bunch of spoiled, fat, pasty-white assholes rant about how Da Bruvva is keepin' 'em down. May each and every one of them, and their families, get every single thing they so fervidly wish for.

Except for All the Others

Love this pithy observation from The Vile Scribbler:

It's especially amusing in an election year—Americans of all political persuasions are constantly complaining that our political system is irredeemably broken in some way or another, yet it's still widely accepted that it should be exported to everyone else, through persuasion or force.

Especially since our glorious system is no longer what we collectively pretend it is.

Fun Times at the 2012 Republican National Convention

For a hot second last weekend it seemed like an entertaining possibility to liveblog or drinkblog the inevitable nonsense of the Goopers' drunken Tampa trawl this week. But then I remembered, just in the nick of time, that I prefer to enjoy myself when I drink.

And sorry, there's just nothing enjoyable about this shitstorm of toxic buffoonery anymore, even by its inept, cringeworthy execution. Utter stupidity is only amusing when it has no real chance of succeeding, and while the smart money's still on Barry O, there are sadly enough dipshits in our fair land to make it close enough to wonder. It is only small, brief consolation that this weeklong sideshow was apparently eclipsed by the ongoing antics of some inbred fatbodies speaking some unknown patois in between what must be intravenous infusions of deep-fried Twinkies.

Even viewed through the kaleidoscope of Daily Show absurdity, these people make me sick to my stomach. Buncha pasty, doughy (and overwhelmingly white and old) middle-management assholes and exurban hausfraus who look like they'd be hard-pressed to fix anything, much less build it. Seriously, most of these people look like they'd fuck up a shit sandwich. But they're gonna fix our broke-dick gubmint that that Obammy wrecked all by hisself, with pure moxie and/or gumption. Riiiight.

[Also too, because hectomillionaire bidness geniuses always know something no one else does, right?]

So. The brilliant master plan here is to balance the budget on the backs of those least able to bear it, since ten full years of job-creating tax cuts have somehow failed to, um, create jobs. More of that, please, because it's worked spectacularly. Let's make sure that the "hard truths" that future Secretary of Cake Bobby BacalaChris Christie spoke of only apply to the peons, and not to the mighty engines of accumulation and pelf. Eventually 99% of Americans won't have a pot to piss in, or a window to through it out of, and these assholes can just sell shit to each other. It's the way John Galt would have wanted it.

As for golden boy Paul Ryan, they can fact-check his happy horseshit from now until November, and it won't matter. The tragic beauty of the current model of Gooper is that they are unconstrained, unimpressed by mere facts, or the refutation of false-fact agitprop. Just as the advent of Sarah Palin and her tribe of bumptious snowbillies made us damn near miss the subtle wit and vigor of George W. Bush, so does the trajectory of the party and its box of mismatched wingnuts promise to make us miss La Palin's Dorothy Parker-isms by, oh, 2014.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of their tedious jabber is this weird fixation -- this throbbing, constant, fucking obsession -- over abortion, and specifically over forcing rape victims to carry to term and bear the by-product of a horrific, life-altering crime. This is the sort of shit one has come to expect of, say, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, countries that, like these homegrown monsters, also obsess just a little too much over Teh Ghey.

The most vile and unacceptable thing about all these platform planks these chumps profess to believe in, as a matter of intellectual probity, no less, is that everyone -- including them -- knows the built-in hypocrisy to their deeply held prinicples. The teabaggers showed their true stripes long ago -- they believe plenty in gubmint money and interference, just so long as it benefits them. The minute someone else catches a break from it, it's the advent of Castro-style communism.

Ditto all the other issues -- everyone else must bootstrap whilst they cash their farm-subsidy checks and get SBA loans (and in Ryan's case, collect Social Security death benefits); everyone else must pay normal payroll tax rates so that Mittford and friends can get their capital gains rates lowered to 1%, to sock ever more money away in the Caymans and Switzerland; and you know there's no goddamned way that if any of their daughters/sisters/wives were raped and impregnated (despite Surgeon General OB/GYN Akin's imprecations to the contrary), that they would force them to carry and bear it. They're a bunch of goddamned liars and hypocrites, daring you to call them on it, and again, it's no longer funny, it's truly nauseating.

And hey, speaking of nauseating, didja check fambly-valyews poster boy and doddering jackass Clint Eastwood's attempt to mock-interview an empty chair? [Note to Clint: it was Dick Cheney who told Pat Leahy to "go fuck himself" on the floor of the US Senate. It's true! Ask your greatgranddaughter how Teh Google works sometime, when she's done changing your diapers.] Gawd, what a half-assed effort at whatever it was -- comedy, commentary, making a coherent logical case for one candidate over the other. Whatever the fuck that mess was supposed to be, it failed so badly, you couldn't really even get all that angry at it, just feel sad that an authentic American film icon, rather than pulling off a Reagan or a Schwarzenegger, was revealed as a rambling, shambling husk of what they thought he was.

Sure, the peanut-chucking boozehounds in the crowd drank it up, it's a pep rally. But the rest of the nation saw Grampa getting shithoused at Thanksgiving, rising to his feet in surly glory to lecture a hapless child, only to have his pants fall around his ankles, revealing only chicken legs and leaky Depends. Nice surprise guest, gang. Maybe you can pull in Jon Voight next time, if you try real hard. Pretty please.

Look, no one has any illusions about the feckless Dummycrats, people whose sole defining characteristic is consistently taking a knife (or a feather) to a gunfight. Even if he manages to win, Obama has to up his game if he is to get anything accomplished; these assholes have made it abundantly clear that they are more than happy to lawn-dart the country further just to improve their chances in the next election.

But at least the Democrats seem to feel at least a little guilty about fucking over the middle class. If this week of Two Minutes of Hate segments gives any indication, the Republicans take a weird sort of glee in it, the gleam an evil, shitty kid gets in his eye as he shoves an M80 in the rectum of a hapless bullfrog, and prepares to light the fuse. They get off on this shit.

If there were a way for every GOP supporter to bear the full brunt of every policy they're endorsing, without the rest of us having to, I'd be all for it. In fact, it'd be their karma. Unfortunately, in this case, the devil we know, the devil we currently have, is much more preferable than Vulture and Voucher and their weird hordes, not a single conscience in the entire lot of them.

Vulture/Voucher 2012

Inspired by Balloon Juice's coinage and commenter Ralph Baldwin's excellent slogan way down in comments for Charles Pierce's scathing takedown of Ryan, I slapped together a quick mock-up (using clip art found on the intartubez) of what a bumper sticker might look like.

Maybe someone should start a design/caption/slogan contest.

The Life of Ryan

So apparently noted tax-shelter enthusiast Rmoney is going to decide to eschew the vaunted swing-state wisdom, and bypass Portman and Rubio for conservatard hero Paul Ryan. Well, good luck with that, podna.

It's not as if Mittington had any good options anyway -- Rubio is not terribly well-known out of his state; Portman and Pawlenty aren't all that well-known in their states; Nikki Haley, Kelly Ayotte, and Susana Martinez, while possessing the requisite conservaquals, each have CVs roughly the thickness of La Palin's, and the Kochs and Adelsonsparty faithful don't want to relive that again.

So it makes sense, on the surface anyway, that Rmoney would fall for teabagger boner fuel like Ryan. The thing is, as Matt Taibbi (and anyone else actually paying attention to these dimbulbs) correctly sussed a couple years ago, while your average teabagger talks a great game about cutting spending and reducing government, blah blah blah, a great many of them were rather obvious recipients of that eeevil gubmint aid themselves. They're hypocrites -- they just don't like gubmint money that isn't thrown at them, pure and simple. How many of those Rascal-riding geezers down at the (tax-funded) public park didja see burning their Medicare or Social Security cards in protest? Yep, me neither.

So Ryan's past stances on those things -- especially considering Rmoney's average voter is going to be roughly in your Murder, She Wrote / Matlock demographic -- may come to haunt him and his new friend.

And if not, if the oldsters have a Maalox moment and decide to vote for the guy that'll have them eating cat food before they know it? Hey, what can you say? Bon appetit.

Freudian Slip

Is it just me, or does this shit read like this shit?

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.