Smite the Hand That Feeds You

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it -- Voltaire

Continuing his uphill struggle against sanity and encroaching irrelevance, legacy evangetollah Franklin Graham has a message for all you disobedient kids out there:

Graham equated the Obama years with a national rejection of God. "In the last four years, we have begun to turn our backs on God," he said. "We have taken God out of our education system. We have taken him out of government. You have lawyers that sue you every time you mention the name of Jesus Christ in any kind of a public forum." Oddly, Graham ignored the fact that he and other shepherds of the Christian right have griped about such matters for much longer than four years. It didn't start with Obama.

As Graham denounced the Obama years, Newsmax's Kathleen Walter asked, "So we've become too secular a nation? How do we bring God back into government?" Graham replied:

Maybe God will have to bring our nation down to our knees—to where you just have a complete economic collapse. And maybe at that point, maybe people will again begin to call upon the name of almighty God.

Economic calamity was the one option Graham mentioned—as if only such a disaster could move the United States in the right direction.

It's almost sad to watch; first Graham's old man removed Mormonism from his website's list of cults just a couple weeks before the election -- at best a cynical, opportunistic, nakedly political move by an organization undoubtedly taking advantage of its non-profit status to advocate politically; at worst a revealing look at the transparent intellectual dishonesty of these people.

So it goes. As the mossbacks continue to die off, and more and more sentient beings grow up to realize that they don't need hucksters like the Grahams for much of anything, the televangelist breed will continue to fade into irrelevance. Which is great for the ideal of intellectual probity, but the world of comedy and satire will sorely miss that breed, until the next incarnation of P.T. Barnums come along.

Raiders Fading

After a decade of utter futility, the Raiders seem to be determined to continue down that hole. Despite having a top-10 offense last season, even with Darren McFadden out the last ten games, the new management/coaching regime decide to overhaul the offense by installing a zone-blocking scheme (ZBS), even though key players on the o-line are better suited for power blocking. The defense, especially the secondary, was completely blown up, thanks to outgoing DC Chuck Bresnahan's inability to finish a game.

To say the least, this has made watching this team a frustrating opportunity at best. The defensive secondary is woeful, the running game non-existent, and even special teams are largely inept; the season-ending injury to kickoff returner Jacoby Ford, at the beginning of the season, has left them unable even to get decent field position, in the instances when the defense is actually able to force opponents to punt.

The Raiders have been beset by a multitude of woes for quite some time, as any football fan knows, and one of the biggest problems has been a lack of continuity. Since their Super Bowl fiasco after the 2002 season, they have gone through 6 head coaches and 9 starting quarterbacks (including Dennis Allen and Carson Palmer, respectively). By way of comparison, in the 32 seasons (1963-94) between the tenures of Al Davis and Art Shell, the team had six head coaches and eight starting QBs, including short-timers such as Mike Shanahan and Cotton Davidson.

Twinkie Defense

Here's another fine example of media misfocus (in the aggregate; as we'll see, some of 'em got it right), in the coverage of Hostess shutting its doors. From the morning chat shows to the local "news" tonight, all the coverage I've seen has focused with a childlike obsessiveness on how not having Twinkies and Wonder "Bread" will leave a gaping hole in America's fat-encased heart. (In fact, the local news here actually went down to the nearest Hostess outlet and interviewed several customers -- not a one of 'em under three bills, and most looking like they might have a side job as Hoarders extras -- waddling around and grabbing whatever they could from the shelf. Because the impending scarcity of Ding Dongs is apparently a harbinger of Zombie Apocalypse or something.)

Sure enough, our vaunted entrepreneurial class have already taken it upon themselves to try to wrangle bizarrely, hysterically extortionate prices out of morons. Folks, I don't think I've had a Twinkie or Ding Dong since I was, like, 17 or so, and I'm not exactly a health-food fanatic. But I don't remember them being anything special, and if I'm paying ten grand for something, I better be able to either drive it, stick my cock in it, or go on a nice vacation.

Anyhoo, obviously what really truly sucks here is that 18,500 people are going to lose their jobs. And as the NY Times mentions, after the brief obligatory intro on the wonders of sponge cake filled with sugared lard, there were multiple factors in play here:

As the national appetite for junk food waned, the company fell on hard times, struggling against rising labor and commodity costs. In 2004, it filed for bankruptcy for the first time.

Five years later, the company emerged from Chapter 11 as Hostess Brands, so named after its most prominent division. With America’s new health-conscious attitude, it sought to reshape the business to changing times, introducing new products like 100-calorie Twinkie Bites.

But the new private equity backers loaded the company with debt, making it difficult to invest in new equipment. Earlier this year, Hostess had more than $860 million of debt.

The labor costs, too, proved insurmountable, a situation that has been complicated by years of deal-making. The bulk of the work force belongs to 12 unions, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.
The combination of debt and labor costs has hurt profits. The company posted revenue of $2.5 billion in the fiscal year 2011, the last available data. But it reported a net loss of $341 million.

With profits eroding, the company filed for Chapter 11 in January. It originally hoped to reorganize its finances, seeking lower labor costs, including an immediate 8 percent pay cut.

....

While highly critical of management missteps, the Teamsters agreed in September to major concessions, including cuts in wages and company contributions to health care. As part of the deal, the union was to receive a 25 percent share of the company’s stock and a $100 million claim in bankruptcy.

Hunh. So private equity weasels and health-care costs (and yes, unions factor into this as well; while I'm pro-union, anyone should be able to see that negotiating with 12 unions is going to be an extremely cumbersome process at best, but more likely to be hopeless in most circumstances) are major factors here. Imagine that. Well, maybe we'll just have our Twinkies made in Mexico or Canada, like our American automobiles.

The plaintive paeans to lost childhood "icons" aren't annoying, just meaningless. It's a fuckin' snack cake ai'aight? People should be up in arms at the way the facacta health-care racket doesn't just screw them out of money and sanity, but jobs as well. They should be wondering why and how a company with $2.5bn in revenue still finds iself face-down and ass-up, while you know goddamned well that the private equity boyz that stuck them with all that debt made out just fine.

Just something to keep in mind next time this story crosses your radar -- are they talking about the jobs, and how they were lost in all this scavenging and negotiating, or are they fixating on Ding Dongs?

Legacy Pledge

It's easy (and fun) to pick on budding media legacy Luke Russert and his frequently inelegant ways of approaching the important issues of the day, or even getting the wrong end of the stick on some things. But he did try his artless "when you gonna retire already, Grandma?" schtick on Hoyer and Clybourn as well, so not completely sexist.

A better tack to take, perhaps, might have been to find a way to point out the more generally obvious -- that Congress, especially the Senate but certainly many House reps as well, has more than its share of fogies, that with virtually guaranteed incumbency in most districts and states, one can very easily grow old and die in office, and get used to the prospect of doing so as time goes on.

But that's what the media does best -- fixating on the superficial, ignoring the deeper and more important story right in front of them. Instead of correctly noting that the average age in the House is 58, and in the Senate is 63, that there are legitimate questions about what in many cases turns into a more-or-less lifetime incumbency, and a working age decades beyond that of average 'murkins, they turn it into a sexist, ageist blurt. Instead of pointing out that everyone in the Petraeus "scandal" is a Republican, and thus has no interest in covering anything up for the Obama administration, it's allowed to linger and become an insinuated factoid in cahoots with the Great Benghazi/Reichstag Coverup.

Incidentally, how many folks who are outraged, just apoplectic over this manifest American tragedy, how many of them are bent that Condi Rice, the National Security Advisor on the day that 3,000 Americans were murdered on their home soil, not only was promoted to Secretary of State, but still appears regularly to shill for her party, is considered a "serious" Republican, and was even considered a possible veep contender for Money Boo Boo's ticket? None, that's how many, because these sorts of "serious" questions always and only apply in one direction.

And it starts, of course, with a media that is complaisant to power, which of course is what Tim Russert specialized in. Just the nature of the niche he was in; the Sunday chat shows are meant to smooth the rough edges of actual discourse, to give shithouse-rat goofy people a seat at the adults' table and confer the sheen of legitimacy.

Moocher Petitions

So the red-state butthurt parade is flaring up in the fine art of petitions for secession. I completely agree with Digby on this:  let them go. The chart at the link says it all -- Texas is the only "red" state that pulls its own weight; 17 of the 18 states that contribute more than they receive are "blue"; 21 of the other 32 states -- including 9 of the bottom 11 -- take more than they make.

So go already, you goddamned crybabies, please. The rest of us would like to keep our money, the way Jesus and Ayn Rand intended it. I'm sure Texas won't mind supporting you. Buh-bye.

Insanity Workout

Ed ably defenestrates yet another deserving moron, but to really appreciate the full measure of crazy, read the original post, and then, for an extra side order of crazy with extra crazy sauce and crazy bread, read the comments, as well as this profile, bearing in mind that this guy used to work for Ron Paul.

Of course, even the most Paultarded things I've seen since Gandalf the Cracker cast his weird isolationist spell over our nation's befuddled masses never quite approached this intellectual loogie:

Seccession of [sic; obviously he means "Secession or"] leave. I say we've got two to three years left before they start rounding up dissenters and sending us off to Nazi-style concentration camps. I've got a little more time, cause I live in Texas.

Arizona is a good place to be for now. But New York, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, PA beware. You're vastly on the road to complete authoritarianism and statism. Grab your guns, protect what few things you have left. You're living in Nazi Germany circa 1933-34.

It goes on like that; Dondero later talks about "disowning" his brother and one of his sisters, "....the fucked up brother in Delaware, piece of shit, scumbag mother fucker who is a Democrat, and another sister in Philly who won't tell me, but I'm almost certain voted for Obama....They are dead to me now. And I will not under any circumstances attend their funerals in 30 or 40 years."

One can only assume that those hapless siblings are well relieved to be rid of this thing, instead of having to help change his poopy diaper every time an election doesn't go his way. Seriously, I think we can all recall the vicious, hyperbolic nature of the 2004 "election", culminating in election fraud normally observed by Jimmy Carter in, say, Guatemala.

Plenty of butthurt liberals were threatening to move to Canada (perhaps until they realized that it's harder than you think; there's more to it than packing a U-Haul and professing loyalty to William Shatner and Geddy Lee when you hit the border). Maybe a few got weird with their friends and family, exploiting rifts along pre-existing fault lines that all families have. Hell, maybe even a few of the more vituperative may have seriously prophesied that the Cheney regime would round them up and stick them in "Nazi-style concentration camps".

But I don't think any of those extreme butthurters were former staffers for a presidential primary candidate. Nor did they go into the extensive laundry list of "activist" ideas that Dondero claims, such as loudly berating EBT card users at the Wal-Mart check stand, just in case any are within earshot and are suitably shamed by his dissatisfaction.

There's No "U" In "Team", Either

You know, the extended scholarship Tim Tebow has gotten in the NFL rankles me as a football fan, rather than as a non-believer. But this sort of grousing to the media by his "teammates" is pretty cheap shit. Sure, every time the guy cocks back to throw for more than fifteen yards, he looks like he's heaving a canned ham over a brick wall. And his occasionally impressive rushing stats fail to account for the ten times as many east-west yards he scrambled like a doomed chicken.

But the Jets, true to their East Coast Raiders M.O., are in full free-fall at this point. And it's actually not Tebow's fault, at least not on the field, since he's hardly played, and the team in the largest media market should know how to handle distractions -- we are, after all, referring to the same team who, when signing jism-spraying asshole Antonio Cromartie, had to front him his signing bonus so he could catch up on child support payments. (To give you a clearer idea of what a turd Cromartie is, all twelve of his kids are seven-years-old or younger. Four of them, by four different women, are five-years-old. And that's not even taking into account that at least one other was "taken care of".)

Even in NYC, when a team airs its dirty laundry this much, it's imploding. Forget Tebow, either Sanchez or Ryan will be gone next season, probably Mike Tannenbaum as well. Just like with the Raiders, too many injuries, not enough playmakers, half-assed coaching. All those things add up, long before the Wildcat package guy sets foot on the field.

Not that I feel sorry for any of the characters in this play, really; as shitty as it is of Tebow's fellow Jets to hang him out like this, at least he knows where he stands with them. And when he washes out of the league in another year or two, maybe after a stint with the hapless Jaguars (so long as they remain in Jacksonville and Shahid Khan doesn't move them to LA), there'll be a nice House seat somewhere in the Florida panhandle waiting for him, just like there would have been in Colorado Springs if he'd remained with the Donkeys.

The Groupie Routine

I guess since there aren't any princess boobies or self-immolating celebritards this week to gawk, we have to contrive an opinion on the sudden surge (in my pants) of milfhunting generals and their power groupies. Obviously it's all about someone at State or CIA fucking the dog on that Benghazi thing, and the ensuing coverup, or something. The beauty of a really good conspiracy theory is that you can make things up as you go along.

Of course, it doesn't help things that apparently classified information has been found on Paula Broadwell's computer. D'oh! Or, as another theory has it, this is a way (however inelegant) of pushing off one of the last remaining neocon foreign policy holdovers.

Either way, when Kissinger stated the obvious by identifying power as the ultimate aphrodisiac, he was wildly understating the case.

Five-Minute Music Reviews

Couple of newer releases, and a few from earlier in the year:

Aerosmith - Music From Another Dimension!  Aerosmith is one of the truly great American hard rock bands. Whatever else they've done over their extensive history, the early trifecta of Get Your Wings / Toys in the Attic / Rocks took the Stones' energy and angst and brought it home in spades. Of course, since that time, their track record has varied some. Most notably, since their resurgence in the late '80s with Permanent Vacation and Pump, the band has shamelessly incorporated a level of song-doctoring and outside songwriting that would put a slew of hacky pop bands to shame. The saving grace is that they still have Joe Perry, and really the entire band is effective at putting their own stamp on pretty much anything (as anyone who's ever heard the old Live Bootleg version of James Brown's Mother Popcorn can attest).

The problem here is twofold:   one is that rock has been pretty much pushed out of the mainstream of what passes for pop culture these days, making any album an uphill struggle even for well-established acts; and two, while Steven Tyler may have parlayed his American Idol stint into a prime pop presence, with that comes the burden of maintaining that profile for that particular audience, most of whom probably had to consult Wikipedia to figure out who Tyler was in the first place.

It's not that Dimension! is terrible; it does serve as a document of the band's evolution, and there are plenty of catchy tunes in a variety of styles. But aside from Perry's reliably raunchy lead work, it's mostly polished, pretty, and predictable. There are some nice old-school moments in Out Go the Lights, Freedom Fighter, and Street Jesus,. And hell, it's Aerosmith. But by the time you get to the obligatory duet with, um, Carrie Underwood (she's 29, Tyler is 64, just sayin'), you almost expect a cameo from J-Lo.

Like their heroes the Stones, Aerosmith have by and large joined up with the establishment they avoided in their misspent youth. That's okay; probably the only person on the planet in their mid-sixties who can convincingly flip off The Man without looking like a schmuck is Lemmy. But one is reminded of Wayne Campbell's poetic admonition to Garth Elgar:  "Led Zeppelin didn't write songs that everyone liked. They left that to the Bee Gees."

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Black Country Communion - Afterglow  For those not familiar, Black Country Communion (BCC) are one o' them dreaded "supergroups", the term generally associated with those plodding entities from the '70s, that seemed to begin with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and end with, well, Asia, which boasted Palmer as a member.

But BCC, comprised of Deep Purple Mark 3 bassist/singer Glenn Hughes, hard-blues shredder Joe Bonamassa, keyboard virtuoso Derek Sherinian, and drum legacy Jason Bonham, won't be mistaken for ELP or Asia anytime soon. Sixties and Seventies style "retro rock" is bouncing back big, mostly with bands like the Black Keys, but also with lesser-known bands such as Rival Sons and The Answer, both of whom feature classic Robert Plant/Stevie Marriott-type blues belters.

BCC are very much in that mold, pushing their Purple/Zeppelin roots for all they're worth, cranking out riffs by the truckload. Hughes, at age 61, sings balls-out like someone half his age, as if still doing tracks for Burn. Sherinian is in full Jon Lord mode, in the best sense of the word -- he combines the late great Lord's impeccable Hammond B3 chops with a sense of restraint, as much or more of an accompanist than a pure soloist. Bonham lives up to the family name and does his old man proud.

Bonamassa may have the toughest line to tread here, to not come off sounding too much like either Jimmy Page or Ritchie Blackmore, and in this he succeeds admirably, by finding the English guitar icon that fits both sensibilities perfectly -- Jeff Beck. The mercurial Beck was always far and away the most imaginative and technically accomplished of any of the British guitarists of that era, and even his more recent work sounds fresh and current. Bonamassa shows that kind of fire and spirit in his playing, with some sweet cascading runs in the romping Confessor, some great Beck-type whammy-bar fluttering in the title track, and ripping blues bursts throughout. The Zeppelin-esque stomp Crawl is nice closer to a solid, tight, old-school effort.

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22 - Flux/The Pool Sessions  This one came out during the summer, and it's too bad it didn't get more attention. The easy genre description would be something along the lines of "pop-mathcore", but those sorts of hybrid generalizations tend to shortchange the parts they attempt to cobble together. 22, hailing from Norway, have recognizable elements, but combine them well in their own way. Certainly the busy mathcore/djent components are there throughout, especially on tracks such as Gotodo and Disconnected from the Grid, and there's even some (almost) metallic atonal rhythmic chugging kicking off Oxygen.

But what separates these guys from the trap of easy categorization is how melodic and catchy the choruses are, no matter how busy the verses tend to be. It's as if Animals as Leaders or Scale the Summit borrowed Matthew Bellamy for vocal work, with Muse's more Queen-style melodies anchoring the songs, with a little Mars Volta thrown in for good measure. Indeed, songs such as Kneel Estate and Susurrus sound straight out of the Muse hymnal, more Absolution or Black Holes and Revelations than their last two more orchestrated efforts.

This is one of the coolest things I've heard all year -- weird, catchy, dense, virtuosic, interesting, unabashedly both poppy and nerdy. One of those albums that gets better with each listen.

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Internet Business Questions

Couple questions for any of you kids out there who may have an interest or experience in these things:  the site I'm working on is going to be about guitar and guitar technique, theory, that sort of thing. Lot of "shred"-type stuff, but not exclusively; in fact it will probably cover more technique and theory.
So basically what I'm wondering is if any of you folks have any particular knowledge or experience to share in building and promoting an internet business of any sort, or in writing and promoting e-books (site-based PDF, Amazon, Smashwords, etc.). I've spent a great deal of time over the past year, familiarizing myself with the usual internet marketing ideas, Warrior Forum, etc., and found that while there are definitely some things in that area to try, I'm more interested in a content-based business model than in relentlessly marketing, trying to cast an insanely wide net on a fairly modest niche. But I'm interested in any experiences any of you may have had in those areas as well, good, bad, or indifferent.
Again, any observations or thoughts, however large or small, are most welcome. If you'd rather not post in the comments thread, feel free to drop me a line at heywoodj.dan@gmail.com, I actually do check it pretty frequently these days. Thanks.

Sore Loserman

Speaking of pedophiles, noted draft-dodging scumbag and all-around gaping asshole Ted Nugent has a love poem fer all you Obamatons out there:

"Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav a president to destroy America," Nugent wrote in the first of a storm tweets. "So Obama still demands the hardest workers provide for the nonwotkers. Shared opportunities my ass," he followed, before tweeting, "What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cellphones birthcontrol abortions & lives."

Indeed. If Tom Paine were alive in our age of modern wonders, I'm sure he would have tweeted much the same missive, and then banged a 17-year-old groupie. Hey, the heart wants what it wants, amirite? Christ, it's like Nugent has some kind of weird bet going with Donald Trump, to see who can be the biggest fucking bozo on the planet.

Then there's this guy, who expends several thousand more words, couched in apocrypha, class-envy tropes, and allusions to classical Greek philosophers so's you know he reads something besides Fifty Shades of Grey, saying much the same thing. The takers voted to hold down the poor misbegotten makers and cornhole 'em, as portrayed in Atlas Smugged. Why, it's a miracle the producers haven't gone ahead and gone Galt on us thieving parasites already. And sweet jebus, but the comments make you long for the poetry of the article itself. Every commenter a bigger producer than the one before him, one must assume, none of them ever having taken so much as a sweet dime from the eeevil gubmint, even when hard times came a-knockin'.

Really, it's a right fuckin' miracle they've suffered those indignities for so long. It's as if Wall Street never lawn-darted the economy, and forced us not only to pay for the rebuild, but to give them bonuses for all their hard work. It's as if a wave of foreclosures and concomitant family murder-suicides all across the land never occurred. It's like the "job creators" didn't take their tax cuts and either sit on them in the Caymans, or invest them in Asia, and not create a damned thing in the good ol' U.S.A.

Penn State Wants You

You know, as creepy as it is that this jerkoff was messing with a teenager (whether or not the kid was actually underage), I really just want to take the opportunity to point out that, as the father of an 11-year-old, and as someone who has seen a great deal of children's teevee over those eleven years, and not minded most of it, Elmo was the one who far and away drove me up the fucking wall every goddamned time. And I like the Muppets, but could not stand to be in the same room as that minion-of-Satan, rusty-nail-on-a chalkboard, roomful-of-screeching-babies-and-yammering-Palins voice. And yes, Elmo fans should feel free to wonder if Clash used that voice in more, um, private moments. At least he's not Jerry Sandusky, but jeez, not by much.

Everybody Hurts

This is awesome. This is my favorite thing for the weekend so far (especially since the Raiders failed to show up yet again today). I could watch 20 minutes of this with nothing but a wah-wahhh muted trumpet noise every few seconds. Extra props to the glassy-eyed blonde dingbat at 1:27, "ROMNEY" written across her forehead. She looks like her cult just told her to start crushing pills in the applesauce, so they can catch the comet coming around the dark side of the moon, mind processing the command as pure gabble, but still not bridging the synaptic divide caused by weeks of barinwashing and protein-free porridge.

Seriously, you wonder about folks like that. Did she scrawl across her forehead bu herself, getting in front of a mirror to get the lettering just so, or does the poor thing actually know someone who's enough of a friend to do the writing for her, yet not enough of a friend to talk her out of it in the first place? (And yes, anyone who wrote "OBAMA", or "PELOSI", or "SPRINGSTEEN" across their forehead like that deserves an equal measure of ridicule. People who pretend to hold deeply-conceived political philosophies, and then dress up like they're going to a Florida State-LSU matchup need to get a damned grip.)

Anyway, so long as we're clear -- the core of the schadenfreude (or as TBogg is calling it, Mittenfreude, nicely done there) is not that these poor souls dared to disagree with "us", as if Obama voters were and are monolithic. It's that they failed to explain their discontent sufficiently, it's that both they and their candidates failed utterly to clarify their positions, what they'd change, what effects those changes would entail, how those changes might help the economy.

It's pretty simple, folks -- when plutocrats wreck the economy to their own advantage, and your party then has the balls to put one of 'em up as a nominee before the wreckage has even been cleared from the playing field, you need to explain yourself. And if you can't, it's your own damned fault.

Mantra

Let's keep it short and sweet -- if you are not a member of the investor/donor/owner class,  Wall Street hates you; best-case scenario is that they view you in roughly the same manner as a corporate factory farm views its hogs or chickens, merely a commodity to be exploited, basic humanity and decency be damned. Barry O keeps saying to remain engaged and active beyond the quadrennial ritual, I say take him up on that, as far down the food chain as you can go. Unless you enjoy living in a refrigerator box in an overcrowded favela, that is. But these animals and their media minions will gut you and rob you blind as surely as any random crackhead, the fact that they wear a suit and tie while doing it makes you not a bit safer.

Electile Dysfunction: After the Laughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lyin' King

It's rare that I'll link to (or even read) MoDo, but she is absolutely on the money (Boo Boo) with this:

Even some of Romney’s own campaign advisers confess they don’t really know who he is. Is he the pragmatist who would curb Grover Norquist, John Bolton and Dan Senor, or the severe conservative who would let them run wild? It’s sad when you are hoping someone is an opportunist and a liar.

Exactly. With Obama, the disappointment has a far different quality, because Obama seemed in 2008 to have the talent and desire to be a genuinely transformative figure. (Although he did say, over and over again, that "we are the change we've been waiting for"; implicit in that statement/slogan is that he couldn't and wouldn't do it himself, that an engaged (and given the circumstances, enraged) electorate would do some share of the heavy lifting, instead of losing interest and waddling off to watch the 200th season of Survivor.)

But Rmoney is, in many respects, a WYSIWYG candidate; if he appears to be a political lycanthrope, a smarmy shape-shifter ready and willing to be everything to everyone, it's because that's exactly what he is. The only rule in effect for him and his team, to determine how he would govern, is simply to follow the money, look at what Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Bros. want and plan accordingly.

To the extent that, per the N8r b8rs' masturbatory fantasies, there is actually a statistically significant number of third-party defectors throwing it to Rmoney (highly unlikely that he'll win, or that there's enough third-partiers to make a difference), those folks certainly need to keep in mind that, whatever their misgivings about Obama, Rmoney would be an order of magnitude worse on every single one of them.

But where this is really decided at, as we'll see in a couple of days, is if the horse-race coverage is true, if there really are a sufficient number of low-info women voters anxious to vote so directly against their own rational self-interest. Every time I hear or read a woman complaining about the oppression of the male hierarchy, I instantly respond that we can't do it without your help, ladies. I assume they'll keep that in mind when Preznit Money Boo Boo finds another Combover Tony or Strip-Search Sammy or Long Dong Thomas to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg to get a SCOTUS that will not only overturn Roe v. Wade and Obamacare, but find new and creative ways to damage families and children.

Just Say Mo' to Drugs

Whatever Bobo's smokin' these days, maybe we could all use a hit. Vote for the Republican, because he'll actually have to compromise. Hilarious. Any more prescriptions, Doctor?

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

If there were ever any merit or upside for vindication, I might actually bother to dig through the archive and see if this was also Bobo's guiding "logic" for Jorge Arbusto back in the glory days of 2000 and/or 2004. But there are rarely any surprises to be found in reading Bobo's gnomic droppings, and so I punt. We are where we are, Tonstant Weader, knowing what we know about the players in this here game.

Really, if there's any greater argument against the welfare state than the continued sinecures of overpaid token media contrarians, I'll be goddamned if I have any clue as to what it might be. One of these days, someone should have Bobo and his ilk blind-taste-test competing policy initiatives from each candidate, see if they can actually differentiate. Ten bucks ('cause that's all I gots after The Man has taken his 93% cut) says they cannot.