Wondering Where the Lions Are

While the spontaneous outrage over the senseless murder of a magnificent, endangered animal is heartening, it's not enough to even scratch the surface. Some 600 lions (out of about 30,000 total, so 2%)are killed by hunters every year; some two-thirds of those hunters are American. Finally the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after declining the opportunity last year, is looking into reclassifying lions from "threatened" to "endangered" status. This would ban the importation of "trophies" and other such totems for over-compensating douchebags with too much money and not enough penis.

Fuck Walter Palmer, right in the fucking eye socket with a rusty corkscrew. I respect hunters who stock their freezers for the winter, and work with wildlife ecosystems. There is a legitimate role for deer and duck hunters. But I have no respect for rich cocksuckers who just enjoy killing shit. So I'm sincerely joyful that, at least for the time being, Palmer's practice and life appear to be ruined. He's a liar and a poacher and a piece of shit. He spends more money than most hard-working people earn in a goddamned year for the cheap thrill of killing an increasingly scarce animal. Seems like Viagra or enlargement surgery would be more cost-effective.

It's been impressive to see how quickly the popular tide was turned against the currently pre-eminent symbol of division and hate, the confederate flag. The only thing good about that flag is that it comes in two-ply. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd get a full-sized flag, make a video of myself taking a massive, steaming, soupy, vodka-and-beef-jerky dump on it, then wiping my ass with it, and driving to some "sacred" traitor loser monument and leaving it on Nathan Bedford Fucking Forrest Gump's bronzed fool head.

Fuck that flag and everything it stands for. But what it took for the tide to take a righteous turn was a tragic catalyzing event. Since that event and the righteous shitstorm, there has been some pushback, but mostly of the useless-white-noise ('scuse the pun) variety on Facebook. The only ones getting out there on the issue are the lunatic racist fringe, the knuckle-dragging shitbags that even hardcore teabaggers can't defend.

Maybe the same thing can happen here, with trophy hunting. The trophy hunters are bad enough, but they are at least technically legal, so they can be kept track of. Illegal hunters and poachers are worse, lurking in the shadows, waiting opportunistically, uncaring about the destruction they cause. Habitat encroachment is a huge problem as well, but one that could be managed, theoretically.

Most of us wonder from time to time what we might do if somehow awarded with what I would call "walking away" money, the kind of eight- or nine-figure windfall that would enable you to either be like some clichéd Powerball loser, or make a real difference. I shit you not that in such an event, I'd put some serious money toward rounding up a team of mercenaries, real Delta Force / Soldier of Fortune types, and just give them a hefty year's wages to go find every poaching gang or individual within 500 miles of a nature preserve, and skull-fuck the lot of them with Kalashnikovs.

I don't even care if they're poor villagers with families to feed; it is not the role of endangered animals to go extinct in order to support overpopulation of the human virus. That too is the fault of wealthier countries, though, since they pay dearly to either kill the animals or to harvest their parts for trophies or aphrodisiacs. Vicariously it'd be wonderful to hunt those fuckers down as well.

Realistically, I think we're at an impasse. Tigers are already nearly gone -- there are more tigers in Texas than in the rest of the world combined, and that has been the case for some time -- and elephants, lions, and rhinos are not that far behind. The fucking Chinese, who are almost solely responsible for the use of tiger parts, need to start cracking down on their gluttonous idiots, the way they control everything else in their citizens' lives.

I'd happily send my big-money Delta team to the tiger ranches as well, tune up those motherfuckers and their shitbird customers. These are people who add nothing to the world, they just take and kill and destroy. Fuck them. Let them find honest work. Seriously, is every dick broken over there or something, is there that much of a need to send everything into extinction because they can't get a fucking boner?

But China won't crack down on them, won't do anything about any of this. The tigers will be gone soon enough, followed by the other species mentioned, but there will be ever more humans, breeding, greeding, grasping, killing, fucking, sucking their way to oblivion. Most humans do not hate the earth and its wondrous creations, but those that do, that vile minority, do so with impunity, and have scaled their heedless destruction to the point of no return. We do not need an infinite supply of eaters in those already over-supplied areas, we need more of our precious wildlife resources and ecosystems. And we don't need any more assholes who self-actualize by destroying the rare and the beautiful.

The fucking meteor can't hit soon enough.

A Good Use for Drones

Kill all poachers. Fucking end them already. It would be nice to get the scumbags who buy the products as well. I have no sympathy for any of them. I hope they all die, the sooner the better. Find a commercial or ornamental use for their body parts.

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

Kristallnot

Here's an idea that is only part polemic:  the next whiny, thieving billionaire asshole to complain about Obama being Hitler, should get the literal result of his assertion -- that is, stripped of all valuable possessions, herded on to a boxcar, trundled out to an isolated work camp, starved, beaten, tortured and forced to fight to survive, until being loaded into a fucking oven. Hokay? Enough of this shit already.

It's just beyond disgusting, this incessant whinging from these slimeballs who have everything they could want, and it's still not enough. Apparently they need the admiration of the peons as well. Well, fuck you, Tom Perkins, Steve Schwartzman, et al. Do the world a huge favor and kindly fuck off and die already. We don't need you and the nothing you produce, but expect everything in return for.

I sincerely look forward to the day when enough people realize how badly these assholes have ripped them off, and have added insult to injury, and we finally get the guts and brains to bring the tumbrels and guillotines on to Wall Street, and we put an end to this self-serving bullshit once and for all. Better yet, an economic collapse that evaporates their paper profits, catapults them and their useless skill sets into a Mad Max hellscape, and forces them to do something worthwhile to survive, would just about be worth it. Many of the rest of us are already on our way there, thanks to their shenanigans, so might as well lean into it.

The Evil of Banality

Easily one of the most disturbing docs I've seen in a long time. A brutal reminder of the absurd, mindless cruelty that lives in people. If you can make it through this thing without at least wondering if a massive die-off might be such a terrible thing after all, you're a better person than I am.

Not one of these evil bastards has even a shred of remorse for the massacres they and their death squads committed in Indonesia in 1965-66. The attempts to show Anwar Congo as haunted by his deeds fall short; Congo is clearly just dismayed that he has nightmares and can't rid himself of them. Tough shit, asshole -- if there were any such thing as karma in this universe, Congo and the rest of his cohort would be withering away from a slow, agonizing death from eyeball cancer.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the movie is how, when you get right down to it, the Indonesian death squads were not really political. Sure, they wanted to kill commies. But only because the commies wanted to get rid of the Hollywood gangster flicks these criminals enjoyed. Aside from the death squads and genocidal ambitions, it's really like watching a street crew from a mob movie, shaking down merchants for protection money, running for office so as to legitimize their theft, throwing their weight around, siphoning parasitically from the honest labors of others. The commies would have shut down the protection racket, where Suharto recognized that these paramilitary gangs had a constructive use for his own genocidal ambitions.

Movies like The Act of Killing inadvertently provide an explanation for why mainstream dreck packs houses; by the time you're done with this thing, even Grown Ups 3 or Transformers 6 or Tyler Perry's Tyler Perry Puts on a Dress -- Again would be an acceptable palate cleanser.

Fun for the whole family. See it at your own peril.

Assassination Nation

As entertaining as it is, Public Shaming can only post so many twitards on any given issue, an infinitesimally small sample size in a nation of 320 million. But when I see unrepentant fucktardery such as this, it's hard not to at least briefly wish for a hot second that this was the dictatorship these idiots so feverishly believe that it is. Because in such circumstances, the internal security forces would already have knocked down their doors, dragged them to some secret location, pulled out their fingernails and raped their closest relatives in front of them, and then put a fucking bullet in their miserable heads. I'm only half-joking here, maybe not even that much.

In complete seriousness, one assumes that at the very least, the Secret Service has contacted these brain-dead shitbirds and explained to them that they have committed a crime, and could (and should) be prosecuted for it. Venting is one thing; these motherless fucks are openly begging for some random lunatic to step up and murder the President. So they need to be put on notice, no questions asked.

In the meantime, it continues to be a thoroughly nauseating prospect to know there are people like this, people who drive, work, vote, have children and/or parents, etc. They're a fucking embarrassment to humanity, and a complete waste of oxygen, and further proof that karma doesn't exist.

Rebel Rebel

Just a reminder that, as far as which side to take in the Syrian civil war, that we don't know what we're doing, and aren't going to know. It's assholes versus monsters, and if your only response is "whatever keeps gas prices lower" then you're merely an accomplice.

And of course Syria is not a big oil country, but their major benefactor, Iran, is. They'd love nothing more than to lure us into some bullshit proxy war in the Syrian desert, watch us chase our tails for another decade or so. If we want to do something about this, about petrocratic dictators and theocratic bastards, then support alternative energy. Stop bitching about Solyndra and support ten more Solyndras, and wind farms, and anything else (short of pumping chemicals into aquifers and undermining substrata) that minimizes the guzzling of oil.

The best way to defeat desert despots and Islamist thugs murdering children for no goddamned reason at all is to simply starve them, make it so you no longer need to buy the one thing of value they produce.

Killing In the Name of....

You know, if we're talking about areas where it might just be okey-doke to deploy us some killbots, these assholes might be an excellent place to check out. I mean, fuck them, like right in the neck. Seriously, let's drone us some poachers, shall we? I care less than a goddamn about the impoverishment of their situation; you know, it is actually possible these days to not have kids every time you have teh sexy timez, knaamsayin?

As for the demand side, don't want to be a cultural imperialist, but ah, what the fuckety-fuck is it with the Chinese? Are they just not going to be happy until they exterminate every elephant, tiger, rhino, shark, and whatever else they think will keep their tiny dicks hard? Jesus H. Christ, let's just donate a few pallets of Viagra already.

Certainly Americans have been criminally indifferent in the past to the plight and endangerment of many species, but this is insane. Yes, the idea of "charismatic megafauna" is subjective, but I think we all understand the ramifications of soups made of tiger penises or shark fins, or powdered rhino horns, or ivory trinkets for social-climbing assholes. Perhaps it's an economy of scale rather than culture, in that 1 in 3 humans are in China or India, so even a fraction of a percentage point translates into big kill numbers.

Whatever. Here's your internets curse, assholes -- if you've ever sought potency or luck from the by-product of a species that everyone knows is grievously endangered, may all forms of misfortune befall you, your family, your penis, anything and everything you hold dear. Rot in hell already.

Giving Thanks

We thank you, o lord, for the banksters who have murdered the economy of the planet, who have turned the profit and productivity of others into a lint-ridden pocket for themselves to dip into.

Thanks for overpopulation, for idiots who seriously think they should have a dozen or so children, while entire species are driven to extinction at an unprecedented rate and resources deplete.

Thanks for punk bitch thug cops, wannabe tough guys who strut around in their Spaceballs stormtrooper suits (Taibbi's line) and spray blinding chemicals in the faces of their fellow citizens, which is the only reasonable response to peaceful protest, n'est-ce pas?

Thanks for a holiday that was once about reconnecting with family and community, but has long since devolved into a mindless orgy of pornographic consumerism, of people who actually look forward to the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night and do battle to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want.

Thanks for the gaping hole in this nation's soul, and its collective inability to see or do anything about it.

Thanks for an interminable series of breathless "reports" on subhuman scumbags who think a college football program is more important than -- well, pretty much anything, apparently. Because there are actually people who are violently angry at the unfair persecution of poor ol' Joe Paterno. Lord, may their children all get ass-raped in the shower by Jerry Sandusky. (Not really, but perhaps make them take a second to reflect "what if", and double-check as to whether they are actually human beings or not. Because it's pretty unclear right now.)

Thanks for the fucking fascist scumbags who run this country now, who cravenly use a terrorist attack by a bunch of Saudis a decade ago as cover for their paramilitarizing of urban police forces. We thank you, sweet lord, for these gutless, inhuman thugs who wipe their asses with our constitution every chance they get. Good to know that official press passes must be obtained to "report" officially-sanctioned "news". Wouldn't want reg'lar citizens to think they can just show up unannounced at Tahrir SquareZuccotti Park and, you know, document what occurs, write about or even film the armored pussies who pepper-spray old ladies and coeds. Lord, please jam lightning bolts up their asses, and melt their dead hearts, in Tebow's name, whatever and ever amen.

Some simple truths (pezzo di merde):

• Lloyd Blankfein, and every other bankster, for what they've done to literally billions of people at this point out of sheer greed and nothing more, are pieces of shit.
• Mike Bloomberg, for his craven support of the banksters, and for unleashing his punk-ass thug cops on unarmed peaceful citizens who are simply tired of taking shit from well-heeled thieves, is a piece of shit.
• Lt. John Pike, caught on video as a gutless, heartless bully, is a ten-pound growler, truly a king-sized piece of shit. Do your duty and flush twice on this motherfucker. It will truly be a fine day when this asshole finds himself in the unemployment line.
• There are many more, too many to mention. This nation seems overrun with numberless pieces of shit, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of Wall Street to the frontlines of Occupied America to the chat rooms defending the pussy paramilitaries who push around the citizens they're fucking well sworn to protect.
• What this nation needs is an enema, and a big one.

What the OWSers need to realize is that, however well-intended, what they are doing is not enough, might really never be enough. Rather than risk sacrificing their lives and well-being to an indifferent thugocracy and a complicit, compliant, complaisant corporate media who are already bored with their tubthumping antics, what the OWSers -- and everyone, including you 'n' me, friends 'n' neighbors -- need to do is avail themselves of any and every opportunity to divest from the matrix, to starve the beast.

Because it most certainly is a bloody beast, voracious, insatiable, red in tooth and claw, utterly indifferent to the misery spawned by its actions, indeed taking perverse glee in the pain it causes. It does not care about you, and by "it" I mean Wall Street, Congress, Obama, the urban paramilitary gangs masquerading as cops, the hump-your-leg-till-you-waste-more-money media, the whole wretched lot of them.

The decision we have to make is whether we continue to put up with it just for the opportunity for more flat-screens and iPads, or decide that having a lifestyle is a piss-poor substitute for having a life, and that maybe we won't miss our Dancing with the Has-Beens and Never-Weres and the hourly Kardashian updates as much as they think we will. The greatest fear these motherless fucks have is that we one day decide to stand on our hind legs and be men.

I can't think of a better day than today for us all to resolve to do exactly that. I think we would all be more thankful, and right now an attitude of gratitude might be just the thing.

Otherwise, I've had quite enough of this hollowed-out police state, and its revolting cheerleaders, and I'd rather make it a goal to get the fuck out of here once and for all, find a bungalow in Costa Rica and spend the rest of my life surfing and playing guitar, which is all I ever really wanted to do anyway. Bageant had the right idea.

The bullshit going on right now in multiple quarters on multiple levels, and the vocal support it engenders from some of the more insane quadrants of the mediasphere, make me positively ill. One can still believe in Hume's Paradox, the old "they got the guns but we got the numbers" maxim, but there's really no substitute for just pulling out whenever and wherever possible, divesting from the beast and re-investing locally.

Bullies

Bullies, of course, are much in the "news" these days, as if they suddenly cropped up of a nonce, and had not always been there. Perhaps they are there in school to prepare you for the more institutional bullies you face through life, in the various guises of bureaucratic administrations -- teachers, friends, enemies, bosses, co-workers, politicians promising "change" every so often whilst they yank your dick and coddle the rentiers. We've all observed and/or dealt with them at one point or another, with varying levels of success. One thing is for sure -- asshole kids come from asshole parents. You can bank on it every time.

Every once in a while, though, an especially vicious subset crops up, so gleefully cruel, so overwhelmingly more powerful than their target, that you find yourself wishing for a murderous home invasion, or a one-home radius natural gas explosion, or a nice shoulder-launched Katyusha to dispense with the problem.

'I’m not proud of myself because this went from a neighbourhood dispute to a huge thing.'

Heh-indeedy. No, this motherless fuck isn't mortified because she suddenly realized that she was taunting and harassing a seven-year-old who is in the midst of a very nasty, grueling fate. She's bummed because the rest of the planet found out what a truly horrible person she is. I honestly cannot even imagine what sort of person does this shit. It's a scant step above child molestation or animal torture; it is the strong preying on the very weakest and most vulnerable, not for food, but for the sport of it.

Over a fucking bouncy-house. Seriously.

‘My husband is a good person and I hope he doesn’t lose his job. I hope our family doesn’t lose his job. I’m the bad person,’ said Mrs Petkov.

‘I feel horrible for what I’ve said and done. That little girl shouldn’t have had to lose her mum like that and she shouldn’t have to lose her life either. I just hope she didn’t see those pictures.’

Fuck that. Scott Petkov (or Petrov, the article really can't seem to decide which) refers to his wife's "brutal honesty" that the neighbors can't handle. Like she's Richard Pryor or something, man, and your phony bourgeois bullshit can't handle how real she is, with her Photoshopping and spray-camo-painting the Deathmobile. In your face, plastic exurbia!

I hope he gets his ass fired, just for having such a cunt wife and putting up with her bullshit. Grow a fucking pair, and put your psycho cow into her proper place, sporto. I hope she gets fired as well, if in fact she has a goddamned job. I can't imagine anyone hiring her for anything now. I hope they lose their house, their car, their dog, their Facebook page. I hope their kids realize what cocksuckers their parents really are.

Honestly, I am just flummoxed at how human beings can turn into whatever the fuck Jennifer and Scott Petkov are. It's just incomprehensible, how someone can get so butthurt over a perceived birthday-party snub that they devote themselves to tormenting the family of a dying child. What the hell is wrong with these people?

There is a point where you have to wonder how people can be so irredeemably vile and still live with themselves (or each other). This is well beyond that point.

A Modest Proposal

While most of the topics here are political, every once in a while we'll touch upon the nature of cruelty -- or more precisely, the deeds of cruel people, people who get their kicks preying on the weak and powerless. I make no bones about it, it's part of the reason why I am so pro-death-penalty (at least in principle, while acknowledging the huge flaws of the machinery). As far as I'm concerned, animal abusers are only a half-step above child molesters, a crime which I strongly feel should be a "two strikes and you're out" deal.

(Despite the title, I am not being even a little bit polemic here. Just fucking end these people already; they're no damned good (NSFW) to anybody, and no one will miss them. Even two strikes is too many.)

I don't care what the causes or backstories of these vicious assholes are. A person -- whether 15 or 50 -- who duct-tapes a puppy and bakes it in an oven is a waste of oxygen, and should be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Resources are tight, space is at a premium, the planet is overpopulated, and we're supposed to waste time, effort, and money figuring out what makes evil people do evil things?

No doubt there is some perpetuation of victimization at work here, but there is more cause to believe that the results will be worse as time goes on. The puppy-baker is not suddenly going to flip a switch and become a useful member of society; he's going to wake up and decide one day that his next-door neighbor's kid might be more fun and challenging game. These people enjoy inflicting pain on weaker sentient beings, pure and simple. Push comes to shove, it's "explained" by their inner misery or whatever, yet somehow, they never seem quite miserable enough to do the rest of the planet a favor and kill themselves.

It's good to see that at least law-enforcement agencies are taking this stuff more seriously. It may turn out to be a useful preventive tool in some cases, which, if they're not going to take my advice and just machine-gun these troglodytes into a hastily-dug ditch, would at least be a step in the right direction.

Allah Hates You

This is a great story, but it will have a terrible ending.

A Saudi woman whose male friend collapsed on being questioned by a member of the notorious morality police (the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) snapped, and laid a beating on the religious cop. The cop went to hospital with bruises, the woman faces prison and lashings.

Maybe the women could rise up en masse and stab them all in the goddamned neck. That would be a good start. Or a bikini sit-in, though these animals aren't messing around, so that would be needlessly dangerous.

Maybe it wasn't such a hot idea for the British and Americans to empower the most regressive, ass-backwards knuckle-draggers in the vicinity when they wanted a poke at Arabia's oil. Talk about buyer's remorse.

Tard and Feathered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cracker Barrel

This story gets me kinda stabby, and not in a good way. Haven't these scumbags died off yet?

A white Justice of the Peace in Louisiana who refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple says he has no plans to resign, the Associated Press reports.

Keith Bardwell's comments to reporters follows calls for his ouster by Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

"Everybody hates me," he tells reporters. "Really. I don't know why. I treat people, I figure, equal. I have one problem with mixed marriages and that is the offspring."

[emphasis mine]

Hey, cocksmoker -- this word "equal"? I don't think it means what you think it means. But the takeaway is how he refers to the, y'know, children of interracial couples. "Offspring". They're another species, as far as this clown's concerned.

The article doesn't really say, but "justice of the peace" usually is one of those pick-up-fifty-bucks-on-the-weekend type of gigs, like being a notary public. Since it doesn't sound like Bardwell is an actual employee of the state or a parish, probably the worst they can do is revoke his license. So fucking revoke it already; there is almost certainly an ethical standard he's supposed to abide by, even in Louisiana, and he freely admits that it's his call.

Even better is the cousin-fucking galoot, some piece of shit with a confederate flag avatar, natch, in the comments what calls itself "AngryRepublican2". Here's what it had to say:

Good for JP Bardwell! It's refreshing to see someone stick up for their beliefs and not cower under the threat of the PC police. If only we as a people had resisted all the "civil rights" nonsense in the 1960s we'd not even be discussing this topic -- the states and local governments would have been left to decide these matters on their own, without socialist federal government intervening. I pray this is the start of a trend back to more common sense government.

Also, shame on Jindal. He used to be a true conservative but apparently has now fallen under the Obama trance. Landrieu wandered off into the Marxist swamp years ago.

Constitutional retardation aside, I sincerely hope this asshole's 18-year-old granddaughter gets deflowered and knocked up by Flo Rida for a BangBus video.

Free Speech for the Dumb

Is there anything quite as tedious and tendentious as these ludicrous, intellectually louche "arguments" that defend the indefensible under the guise of protecting free speech?

This is not the only deeply offensive speech protected by the Constitution. Nazis are allowed to march, and racists are allowed to spew racism. If legislatures have the power to disapprove certain categories of unpopular speech, a lot of expression could become illegal.

Christ. Not the old "first they came for the dogfighters and the chick-squishers, and I was not a dogfighter or chick-squisher" cliché. Look, first of all, Nazis are allowed to march and racists are allowed to spew as long as no one gets hurt. It's not that complicated.

These idiots keep looking around for a line to draw, and it's right fucking there. Dogfighting is illegal, animal abuse is illegal. This is not a "free speech" issue, it's a "causing harm to others in clear violation of the law" issue. The laws are pretty clear about those things, just as they are about kiddie porn. No court is going to confuse a PETA jeremiad with a crush video. Obscenity guidelines typically revolve around prohibiting content that is overtly salacious or prurient. And as obnoxious as PETA's exhibitionism can be, there's a huge and obvious gap between their tactics and those of these twisted assholes.

(And seriously, the bastards who get their jollies from watching the unwilling and helpless be raped and abused, tortured and killed, they need to have their fevered brains splattered across the nearest wall, right along with the actual perpetrators. Just be done with it. Trust me, no one will ever miss them.)

I'm not sure what the self-styled First Amendment absolutists see in tilting at this particular windmill, that our civic lives and freedoms will be unnecessarily circumscribed by preventing these vile people from doing these vile things. Sometimes the theorists need to get out of their ivory towers and take a stretch in the real world, and think about the unnecessary damage that gets committed under their rhetorical umbrellas. I'm betting most of them were upset about Michael Vick, and Robert Stevens and these crush creeps should be no different.

....And the Horse You Rode In On

Oh, this is fuckin' rich. Mere hours pass after America's favorite crazy-ass ex-governor starts yammering some fever dream about "death panels" and shit, and she has the balls to call for moderation. That particular farm animal is long down the road, honey. You and your goober-rousing friends have taken what should have merely been a tedious dog-and-pony show to legitimize the Democrats' latest exercise in circular-firing-squad futility, and turned it into an ongoing series of town-hall putsches, punctuated by the addled bleats of ignorant goat-fuckers, mindlessly goaded into action by the most transparent scam this side of Nigerian royalty.

The more I see this crap, the more I resent it, but not because of its obvious lack of legitimacy as genuine grassroots activism, not because they resort to ever more vile tactics and rhetoric, not even because its participants are uniformly unencumbered by even basic facts. It's because if they had half a clue and a sense of proportion, they could be channeling that weird energy into at least a slightly more productive direction -- for example, menacing Goldman Sachs employees until they either give back the money they've stolen or jump out their office windows.

The world is crumbling around them, and they've allowed a scumbag HMO meat-puppet like Dick Armey to deploy a cyber-army of flying lobbyist monkeys, and bamboozle them into thinking that the most constructive thing they can do while they're indefinitely between jobs is to show up half-cocked to harass Arlen Specter with a misspelled swastika placard and a bunch of poorly remembered slogans and catchphrases. Chickens voting for Colonel Sanders indeed.

The health-care "plan" is surely an industry-written crock of shit, but not for the reasons these bozos think it is; indeed, if they were even close to being right, from the looks of most of them they would have been converted into soylent green for the FEMA concentration camps already. It's certainly their right as 'murkins to be losers and morons, and proud of same, but they've abandoned their last semblance of dignity in the process as they shamble toward their inevitable dream ticket of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

My Daily Misanthropy

I've said it before and I'll say it yet again -- there are days when I actually wish their paranoid fantasies were true, if only because it would definitionally mean less of their whinging, cringing, tedious bullshit. They string words together without bothering to learn the meaning, and they rail against imaginary nazis while studiously ignoring the real ones among and around them. If this isn't a group that needs to be curbed from further inbreeding, I don't know what would qualify.

But more to the point -- they quite deserve the miserable health-care/employment/education/infrastructure they so avidly desire, which is the one we all currently have. I am tired of reading anecdotes about so-and-so's sister/aunt/senile grampa who collects SSI and Medicare, hasn't held (or even looked for) a job in fifteen years, and goes to teabagger parties to rail against The Man. Do us all a favor and fucking pull the plug on yourselves already. Or whatever. Go John Galt, get off the grid, do what y'all keep threatening to do. It'll work out better for everyone.

But the day someone, say, uses their infant's stroller to hold up some offensively ignorant "protest" sign that doesn't remotely mean what they think it means, they definitely deserve to have their goofball dreams come to pass. See you in the concentration camp!