Last Chance for Democracy?

With about seventy-five days and counting until midterms, it's important that voters -- well, let's be honest, Democratic voters -- need to not only be sure that they show up to vote, they need to take a few minutes beforehand and make sure they're still allowed to vote. These motherless fucks are perfectly willing to cheat and steal what they cannot win fairly. That fact should not be surprising.

So it's a good time to repost Ed Burmila's article about that very thing. Check in with your local county elections office, make sure you're still registered, that some teenager in a Macedonian troll farm owned by a Russian oligarch hasn't hacked the rolls and purged you and your neighbors off.

They are scum. They have no principles, no scruples, no reservations at all about stealing this thing. Take a few minutes while you still have time and make sure that they can't. Because if you think the last couple years have been hell, just imagine what it's going to be like if these bastards hang on to power, and assert an electoral mandate to do their worst.

Another Bloody Election

On the one hand, it's easy to agree (however reluctantly) with The Pantload that the electoral process should and could be more than self-affirmation for celebrity airheads. On the other, one can be quite certain that Pantload is just fine with the usual salt-of-the-earth maroons cutting their own throats once again, because the Kenyan Moooslim is letting illegals with Ebola sneak across the Meskin border in order to distract from Benghazi.

But it was funny watching a bunch of chickenshit DINOs run like hell from their own party, and still lose. I'll give the teahadis their due -- at least they know what they fucking stand for, and by jebus stand for it. I'm still amazed that working people are dumb enough to vote for it, but it's not like halfwits such as Mark Pryor gave them much of an alternative. So this is what they wanted, and it's what they will get. Although I live in a blood-red county of the People's Republic of Cali, at least I don't live in some flyover dump that really takes the hit from the policies they just voted for.

Reap the whirlwind, assholes. You deserve nothing less.

[Update 11/7/14 6:30 PST:  This is one of the better analyses of the whole sordid thing that's I've seen.]

Primary Colors (Slight Return)

It's interesting how the two most prominent political outcomes this year so far have been so willfully misconstrued by the media dupes.

First you had Eric Cantor, whose district had been redrawn more rural and red than it had been. This turned out to be a disaster for Cantor, whose applecart got overturned by some Randian yabbo from a small private college. Could this be the resurgence of the teabaggers, or simply a case of a low-foreheadvote turnout, a challenger who had a decent ground game, and an incumbent who so took his victory for granted, he spent over $160k schmoozing in steakhouses instead of glad-handing the rubes in his district? Much discussion was had over the various possible causes, thus ensuring that many boner pills and insurance policies got sold.

More recently you had the primary runoff in America's most useless state, Mississippi, between ancient pork-chaser Thad Cochran and another in the endless procession of teahadis, Chris McDaniel. It's actually a damned shame McDaniel didn't win, because it would have been hilarious to watch him try to turn the pork off. No fuckin' way, champ, yours is a state that produces only two things:  jack and shit. If it weren't for the rest of the country supporting your welfare state, Mississippi would be nothing but a couple of football colleges and a Faulkner museum, surrounded by subsistence farmers.

So both these electoral outcomes were framed, as these things tend to be nowadays, as responses specifically to the teabaggers. (And yes, I refuse to call them by their preferred name, because it's stupid, because it doesn't mean what they think it means, and mostly because they won't stop acting like petulant assholes.) Cantor's defeat was a jumbled mess of analysis, but the upshot was that the insurgent won, which could only mean a repudiation of "establishment" mores. Cochran's squeaker victory, on the other hand, proved how establishment Republicans -- with a little help from Democratic "friends" -- could beat back this insurgent tide.

As you might imagine, I have a different interpretation than the people whose paychecks depend on peddling the conventional interpretation of things. Politics is an industry, pure and simple, from the pols themselves to the donors, the lobbyists, the cable news networks, the dipshit analysts who never get anything right but still keep their jobs, the massive amounts of commercial time sold, etc., etc. There's a lot of money involved here; there's a tremendous amount of energy and effort and pelf that goes into manufacturing all that consent.

This is really about incumbency. Industries rely on stability and predictability, being able to make solid projections and plan strategy accordingly, so as to optimize profit. So when politicians with incumbency ratings normally associated with third-world despots suddenly find themselves challenged or even defeated, the point-one-percenters who put them there get fidgety.

They don't care about chumps like David Brat or Chris McDaniel particularly -- they can either pay those guys to go along with the program, or make sure they get nothing done and then bankroll the next primary challenger. Everyone's a revolutionary until they start getting paid.

What the owners care about is the idea that the peons might start thinking that they actually have a choice in these things. Everything about the system is designed specifically to keep the peons out of the process, the obvious barriers to entry being cash in hand and net worth. So when some rabble-rouser comes along and disrupts the industry's stability and predictability, they don't like it. It makes them nervous.

And I'm really not sure why it does, or should, make anyone nervous. The incumbents aren't going anywhere, the percentage will still remain comically high. Business will proceed as usual. Rick Perry will have a few more unforced errors, which will embolden the faithful and enrage the unbelievers, but will only sway the backers insofar as it affects Perry's actual poll ratings, his ability to get elected and carry out their agenda.

Some other clown-shoes psychopath will step of the primordial ooze of the primary system and get the support of Perry and the rest of the moron claque, and the operational plan will continue apace. The Republican voters will continue to fabricate and exaggerate, and the Democratic voters will nag their doubters with threats of another 15 years of Nader-baiting, since we can all see what a slam-bang job they've done keeping abortion legal and the median wage stagnant for forty years now.

Primary Colors

It's difficult to decide exactly what is the most tedious aspect of Blind Lemon Clinton's will-she-or-won't-she pas de dunce:

• the sheer inevitability of her candidacy (and really, the "my turn" campaign is usually a Republican thing);
• the shameless crying of poor mouth, at a country still reeling from an economic setback caused in great part by, um, the repeal of Glass-Steagall;
• the promise that Preznit Hillary will sell out the working class almost as quickly as your garden-variety Koch-sucker;
• the predictable scramble by the overpaid talking heads to provide their breathless analyses of loose cocktail party chatter;
• the continued use of "commentary" from proven shitbirds like Newt Gingrich, whose peanut-gallery bullshit will be exactly the sort of thing that nudges nauseated fence-sitters -- who will by then be exploring real estate in Croatia at the prospect of being "given" a "choice" between Clinton and yet another Bush -- over to Clinton, so we can get pretty much what we were going to get in the first place.

Oh, just run already, dear, it'll be a historic moment and all that. Not because of the woman thing -- hell, even a woman-hating country like Pakistan has had a female president already -- but because the bottom is falling out of this country, the foundation is giving way. The transnational merchant princes won, in no small part thanks to Hillary's husband Rubinizing the economy and leaving it the exclusive province of the sociopathic spreadsheet diddlers.

Perhaps the Clintons genuinely thought that the rising tide would lift all boats, that massive productivity gains and ease of financial regulations and securitization would create enough wealth for all. And it did, to a point. But left in the hands of a greedy few, for whom the word "enough" has no definition, even crumbs stopped falling from the table. Obama hasn't had the testicular fortitude or the juice to do anything about any of this, and will most likely be rendered as lame a duck after the midterms as Saint Billy Jeff was.

Say what you will about the teahadis -- FSM knows I've said my share -- but one important part of their argument that actually resonates is that their country has been taken away from them, and no one in Warshington gives a shit about them. Of course, their country has been taken away from them by the bottomless rackets that run this country, and own the media, so as to convince them that it was gays and illegals that did it, but whatever. The core is true enough.

So it will be a(n) historic moment, no doubt. The next president will get to preside over the continuing implosion of a once-vibrant republic, a society that actually gave a shit whether its children could read or count, communities that understood the nature of community and mutual good, businesses that actually paid their employees enough to survive on, to purchase the things they made or sold.

For a time I thought there might be some catalyzing domestic incident that expressed this discontent on a large scale, not necessarily violent, but something that would be apparent to all. It seemed like the Occupy Wall Street movement might be just the thing, but sure as shit, the corporate toadies rushed to their battlements to marginalize and defame these people, while the NYPD let every scumbag they could out of jail and set them loose in the park.

People are simply too atomized anymore, connected electronically, but not socially enough to translate into any meaningful action. The cops are paramilitarized to the teeth, and get away with pretty much anything anymore, so there's no percentage there either. There's not really anywhere to turn -- either you get lucky and generate enough multiple revenue streams to eke your way through what passes for a life, addled by pills and distracted by sports and reality shows, or get pulled under, quickly or slowly, the result is the same.

So here you go, Hillary, congratulations. How do you like it?

Preaching to the Choir in the Briar Patch

Elaborating a little further on "Benghazigategate", which is to Fux News what the missing Malaysian jet is to CNN, a steaming fnord in the punch bowl, meant explicitly to distract folks from anything of actual import. Again, Congressman Car Alarm and his merry band of idiots know full well that there is no there there, that compared to US Embassy deaths in the past, the most damning thing about Benghazi is that it was a PR fuck-up.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I do anyway -- that is not to minimize the tragic, violent death of foreign service personnel, but simply to point out that dozens of people were killed in multiple incidents around the world during Fredo's tenure, and no one said jack shit. In Beirut in the early '80s, between the US Embassy and Marine barracks attacks, over 300 people were lost, and there were glaring security issues in the latter attack that should have gotten someone's ass whipped.

And that's not even to mention the weird fact that some of the most strident criers of this particular "wolf!" are the same folks who voted to defund embassy security. So, you know, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, fellas.

Now, all that said, I think it's a splendid thing for these folks to continue with their obsession, and I think the Democrats should (and probably do, but won't say so) embrace it as well. For one, it is only going to get the base to vote in the midterms, it will not sway or convince a single person truly on the proverbial fence. It is of no strategic use.

Second, and maybe this is just my personal preference, the only possible long-term outcome of obsessing over this nothingburger is that it sticks to Hillary Clinton's "my turn" presidential campaign, and that would be just fine. It is a sad state of affairs when, in a fairly sophisticated nation of 320 million people, and a hyperactive electoral industry with dollars flowing through it like water through Niagara Falls, the best our "two" parties can come up with are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Let me be even more clear:  if the "choice" in 2016 comes down to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, then we might as well just dispense with the endless campaign, the tedious analysis, the useless debates, and just have a fucking coin toss at the Super Bowl, and not bother to look at the result. It would be as explicit an indicator of the truth about the political system as one could imagine, the open acknowledgement that your vote is worthless, outcomes are inevitable, and the best you can hope for is for some rich tool to toss you a better piece of flotsam on which to weather an endless storm.

Don't get me wrong. If it comes down to Clinton versus whatever clown-shoes psychopath the Republicans roll out, you hold your nose and vote for her, and hope next time there'll be a better choice, just like you've done since day one. This is based on the presumption that at least the Democratic candidate has at least a slight chance of being marginally less catastrophic to the interests of what remains of the American working class.

It's just that it is always going to be this way, and it is not an accident but by design, and the only way to make it stop is to, well, make it stop.

Cabin Fever

The Benghazi fever can probably be cured with more cowbell, but honestly, why bother or worry? This is one of those pointless things that will convert or motivate absolutely no one; statistically, there is virtually no living human who is going to look at this ongoing handjob and say to themselves, "Self, I was going to vote for the Democratic candidate in these here midterms, but because of the vague, unfounded speculations surrounding the Benghazi attack, I'm going to go right ahead and vote against my rational self-interest, and endorse the red-assed baboon that the Republicans are running. While I'm at it, I'll just hit myself in the head with a hammer or a large rock for a while."

But hey, whatever. Look, instead of griping about the ludicrous idiocy of the House Republicans, maybe start running some viable candidates and putting some real money behind them. I mean, Darrell Issa is not really Jesus H. Christ, he just thinks he is.

Shorter Charles Koch

Who you gonna believe -- me, or that fucking commie your hippie neighbor voted for? I'll buy your soul and feed it to you, drop by drop, and you'll thank me for it.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

You know, I get what Steve is saying here, and to some extent I actually agree. But goddamn, at some point the truly librul animals have to by god rear up on their hind legs and demand a genuinely transformative figure, rather than one that merely put on a good show of it on the campaign trail (such as Obama), not to mention a neocon warmonger whose only redeeming trait is that she's not quite part of whatever wretched clown car the Adelson wing of the Privilege party will put together in about 18 months.

In other words, if you want something better, you are going to have to insist on it and fight for it. The self-congratulatory rear-guard rhetorical volleys against the (barely existent) micro-claque of bien pensant pwoggies and Naderista holdouts will do fuck-all in the creeping face of corporate fascism. Citizens United opened the floodgates, and McCutcheon will prop them open -- by 2020, probably well before then, "Democrats" and "Republicans" will be replaced in all but name with more accurate Game of Thrones-sounding terms such as "Sorosians" and "Adelsonians."

This is not schtick, folks, this is fact. Winter has been coming for quite some time, and now it is here with a vengeance. The notion that Obama might give more of a shit than John Boehner or Ted Cruz is useless if nothing gets done in that regard, beyond the usual hand-wringing and cheap DFH-punching.

I mean, what does Hillary being "our best shot" entail, really, a face that's slightly less red in tooth and maw for the remainder of the working class? "Our best shot" at what, and who is the implied we in the word our, anyway? Only the very rich and the very poor have any real representation at this point; everyone else is simply a milch cow for the partaking thereof. People vote Democrat at this point because they think the ongoing predation will be held in at least slight abeyance. The chickens are still voting for Colonel Sanders, mind you; they're just getting a day or so reprieve from their inevitable fate.

These fuckers want your soul, and it's really up to you whether you deed it over to them or not. At least in the past, politics was somewhat transactional; you give me your loyalty and I'll make sure your job stays intact. Now it's more along the line of "give me your first-born and maybe I won't donkey-punch what's left of your job, your town, and your pension fund, because the other guy is even more of a sociopath." So what do we (to the extent that there is a "we" anymore, kemosabe) proles propose to do about any (much less all) of this?

Pissing away precious time and energy rallying against this or that random idiot who says something impolitic about gay people seems a poor substitute for taking back what's left of one's country. On the other hand, as I've been saying, Costa Rica seems quite nice.

Purity Bawl

Since it's an election year, it's time for the regularly scheduled plaint of the Thanksralphers, that migratory flock of folks whose bleats and peregrinations have somehow never quite clued them to a small but vital fact -- that Democrats don't lose because of third-party perfidy, but because too many of "their" voters end up voting Republican.

It's been repeated countless times in this here blog, but if the stupid "Mumia sweatshirt" schtick still merits play, then this does too:  in the 2000 electoral debacle, twelve times as many registered Democrats in Florida voted for George W. Bush as voted for Ralph Nader. Hokay? The Thanksralphers and DFH-punchers can ignore that all they want -- and they clearly want, since it's been twelve years and I'll be damned if I've ever seen any Dem animosity toward those party-jumpers -- but like gravity and evolution, this is a true fact whether or not people believe it or act on it.

I've come to believe that the folks who continue to indulge in meaningless Nader-baiting have simply made an easier strategic decision for themselves. It's easier to titty-twist the minuscule number of "purists" who supposedly insist on absolute ideological rigidity, than to take a serious look at the much greater number of people who, for whatever reasons, jump over to the other major party.

Or the even larger number of people who look at a corrupt system run by and for the wealthy and connected, understand intuitively that neither party gives a red-hot monkey-fuck about them, and stays home. It's all well and good to insist that even if one is getting by and not in need of assistance, they should at least vote with compassion for those less fortunate, who are in need of this or that government assistance. But uh, if one is looking at, say, literally spending the rest of their natural life paying interest on $200 textbooks because the higher education system is a fucking racket, that person may have different priorities in the voting booth besides ensuring that the alcoholic vagrant shitting on the downtown sidewalk has adequate health care.

There is certainly a difference between the two parties, operationally and policy-wise. These differences have become larger and more apparent due to the polarizing nature of the teabaggers, and their effect on the Republican party. As much of a disappointment as Obama has been to lefties and progressives, I don't think anyone would argue the point that his strategies and outcomes would have been vastly different with a better Congress and Supreme Court. Still probably would have been dickless incrementalism, because that is all our owners will permit, but the intransigence and idiotic obstructionism of the 'baggers has certainly worsened an already bad situation.

But the real problem here is the idea that anyone's vote is "owed" to a political party, as opposed to the party having to make its case for earning your vote. It's dangerous and undemocratic, it has led to the current situation, where the parties are owned and operated by corporate interests, and simply take your vote for granted, promising everything and delivering jack shit.

Hey, whatever floats people's boats, I guess. I could just live without the smug, sneering, condescending attitude that permeates these sorts things, expending far more energy and effort lecturing a tiny portion of voters on their sincere (if perhaps somewhat misguided or impractical) principles, than on the vastly greater numbers who jump over to the other side without a care in the world.

It's important for everyone to keep in mind that politicians, good or bad, are reflective of their constituencies. Somebody keeps voting -- on purpose, even -- for dipshits like Louie Gohmert and Jim Inhofe. Those people are the goddamned problem, not the handful of supposed purity trolls.

Joe Dirt

You know, the interviewer doesn't do himself any favors by baiting with the same question over and over again, but Palin-with-a-penis Joe Miller seems like a bundle of fun, right?

Here's the thing (puts cranky contrarian hat on, adjusting the brim) -- Miller is actually correct about a few important things (setting aside his tedious "states' rights" guff). What passes for the federal government these days does a piss-poor job of providing adequate representation to, well, the average Joe.

Merchant princes and soulless corporations own and operate "both" parties, which ought to provide some clue as to the extent they are genuinely different from an operational standpoint. The truth is that, while each side makes lots of noise for its respective base, little or no action actually takes place, but the bases are distracted sufficiently from the ongoing pocket-picking of their futures. To loosely paraphrase a noted political philosopher, the best way for rich people to keep the poor people they bully and cheat off their backs is to pit them against each other, which they do quite well.

It's a common trope that this nation doesn't make or manufacture anything anymore, but that's not quite true -- America invented the concept of public relations, and the operational aspects of the nation are handled accordingly. PR, opinion, and consent are manufactured routinely, and in mass quantities.

This is what enables "us" to send warships to the Black Sea to flex nuts at Putin's own nut-flexing in Crimea, and not even consider how deeply we would consider it a provocation if, say, we decided to send in the National Guard or even a few army units to eliminate the Mexican drug cartels once and for all, and the Russians or Chinese took it upon themselves to masturbate out in the middle of the Sea of Cortez. This is what enables professional opinion-mongers and analysts of dubious skill and repute to talk about Ukraine like it's important to them on a personal level, without mentioning the geopolitical issues of how Russia perceives our continuous overtures to get Ukraine into NATO, or how much money Ukraine gets in hock to the World Bank and the IMF (i.e., the western centralized banking usury system).

This is how chickenhawks like Huckleberry Closetcase get to go on the Sunday morning follies and pull assertions out of their asses, brush the peanuts and disappointment off them, and present them as facts, apparently based on the premise that, sooner or later, they might actually right about something. (And of course, we wouldn't want to mention that maybe Huck's tough-guy 'tude is driven mostly by the fact that he's being primaried, because the Koch Brothers simply won't be happy until they own every fucking thing and all citizens are merely serfs to their lordship.)

It is all of a piece -- the corporate-owned political and media systems have vested interests in keeping people ignorant and belligerent, outraged over all the wrong things, and ignoring the issues that actually affect their lives. Miller may not think he's part of that, since he likely has no direct stake in such things, but he is a part of it, whether he realizes it or not. Because he, like the corporate insect overlords, make bank on stoking jabber and nonsense, on getting folks liquored up on stale -- and logically impossible; Obama simply cannot be both a tyrant and a pussy, so maybe pick one and stick with it already -- bullshit.

Not only do election season get longer and more polarizing, but midterm election seasons get angrier and weirder with each iteration. Again, it's easy to see where the perpetual horse-race industry has a vested interest in all that. But maybe -- and here's where I suspect someone like Miller and someone like myself might be more aligned in opinion -- it may be time to consider the benefits and strengths of a more decentralized political system, a Hanseatic League type of setup if you will (and you might) that forces welfare states such as, um, Alaska to actually be self-sufficient, instead of just talking about it, and taking blue-state tax dollars and talking shit the whole time.

To paraphrase yet another cinematic thinker, I would prefer if they just said "thank you" and went on about their way; failing that perhaps it's time to cut them loose and make them fend for themselves. We'll see how that rugged individualist shit works out when the deep southern states aren't propped up by our decadent, filthy money.

The Party of Ideas

Shorter Republican Party:  We got nuthin'.
Look, I don't think that a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynastic dynamic is particularly useful or beneficial for anyone, except the two families and their associated claques and hangers-on. It's a reminder that the political process is hopelessly debauched, that you have to be something of a skeevy bastard to raise the unholy amounts of money it takes just to run. To the extent that there are substantial operational differences between the parties, they both need to develop deeper benches, rather than running back to the same people every election cycle.
And yes, the idea of a president getting his cock sucked by a subordinate at his business desk (not to mention finishing off in a sink -- because blowing a load in her mouth would have been wrong) is, to say the least, off-putting, regardless of which party. That Billy Jeff was impeached by hypocrites was certainly no surprise; in retrospect, he should have been impeached for repealing Glass-Steagall.
But what's done is done, and been done for quite some time. Anyone who is still actually upset over the Lewinsky thing is a lot like the goofballs that show up en masse every Roe v. Wade anniversary. It's done, it's settled. The idea that this is a battle ever worth revisiting, much less when there are a multitude of real issues affecting our lives that need attention, is bizarre.
Of course, these are just midterm talking points anyway, only the most fervid and bereft polimonkeys will be jabbering about Monica by 2016. But midterms rely on low turnout, primarily by old people who have nothing better to do, and who would have been shoved out onto an ice floe in earlier, simpler days. So they'll rant amongst themselves about that awful thing Billy Jeff did, nearly a full generation ago now, and connect it to his grasping lesbo wife, and then go pull the lever for Scott DesJarlais and Mark Sanford, without a trace of irony or self-awareness.

Order Distorters

This week's bucket o' bullshit, in the wake of a predictably vanilla ('scuse the pun) State of the Onion speech, comes to you courtesy of failed veep tool and P90X spokes-prick Paul Ryan:

"We have an increasingly lawless presidency where he is actually doing the job of Congress, writing new policies and new laws without going through Congress. Presidents don't write new laws, Congress does," Ryan said.

Ryan backpedals against the other exec order bullshit that your senile fascist aunt probably forwarded to you when she was in her cups, that The Blah Guy has issued a flurry of orders, to grease the skids to herding the freedom-oriented folks into those FEMA camps out in the boonies. (Never mind that they are still flapping their yaps, which would seem to, erm, logically undermine their "point," but whatever.)
If only there were some way to verify those assertions, right? Not that it matters, since as always, facts are completely orthogonal to whatever argument it is that they think they're making. So the new talking point, according to Ryan, is the "scope" rather than the number of executive orders (since again it turns out that Obama has issued the fewest exec orders for a two-term president since Grover Cleveland, and in fact is barely ahead of Poppy Bush, and only two ahead of Gerald Ford, who only served two years as the fill-in between the disgraced Nixon and the single-term Carter).
No matter how easily and often these lies can be refuted, this "lawless imperial dictator" guff will no doubt be the midterm mantra, as gerrymandered incumbents run -- unopposed, in many cases -- to screw their constituents ever more.

Tea and Simpering

No doubt the latest set of polls 'n' graphs on dwindling teabaggery will push all the usual buttons and pinch all the usual nerves. It will be discounted in the expected circles with disdain as lamestream mediot bullshit.

And in some concentrated areas, that may actually work, in the gnarly pockets of doofery and befuddlement that pepper the land like so much randomly blasted buckshot. There's no shortage of people who, if Obama declared that the sun would rise in the east tomorrow, would denounce the flashing neon commie conspiracy such a statement stood for. And they've made goddamn sure that their elected representatives act accordingly.

But they're now about to find out the hard way what sort of game this really is. When Frank Zappa famously said, "Politics is the entertainment branch of industry," he understated the case, if anything. At the very least, at risk of stating the painfully obvious, it is first and last a money game, run by people with lots of it, and they've run out of patience for these bumptious rubes who were easy enough to gull into slitting their own throats, but damned if they'd shut the fuck up and stop yammering for two seconds.

Really, the only time your average teabagger stops to take a breath, it seems to be just long enough to cash whatever check he gets from the eeeevil gubmint. Then off he goes again, denouncing anyone else who got a check.

When this aforementioned fiscal hypocrisy is the defining characteristic of your "movement," you can be sure that its fuel is of the fossil variety -- polluting its environment and rapidly depleting. And so now the adults in the Republican establishment, perhaps calling the 'baggers' bluff to go rogue and set up a third party, have forced poor ol' John BonerBoehner to sack up and shut this nonsense down.

Because it's starting to cost them money. The Koch Brothers didn't get obscenely wealthy with hopeless, unproductive charity contributions. And while their little foray into astroturf politics may have gleaned them some short-run benefit, even they have to see how it's starting to backfire.

Not that it will matter too much in the end. For one, the districts are so heavily gerrymandered that very few are actually contestable in any real sense, so for the most part there's not much effort; for another, even if, say, Democrats take half  -- or all -- of the 'bagger seats in the House next year, what are they gonna do? You think they'll take some populist tilt at Wall Street, make the banksters give back the stolen pelf? If so, I have a nice bridge on some pristine swampland for you.

Deadeye Dick

Just for a hot second, let's set aside the serious impracticality of grotesquely disparate levels of governance; that is, the notion that an almost literally uninhabited state has equal representation in the nation's highest governing body as a state with forty times as many people (and at least four cities with larger populations -- hell, LA's metro area has close to 20 million people, versus the less than 600K in the entire state of Wyoming). The Constitution might be in need of an overhaul, or at least a review, if enough high-profilers with IQs above 80 can be located and dragooned into such a noble project. But that's a subject for another post, perhaps by a different observer.

Consider instead the reasons and ramifications for Shooter Cheney's carpetbagging (perhaps teabagging as well, jury's out so far) daughter trying to muscle Mike Enzi out of his Senate seat. Whatever your political bent, 2014 is shaping up to be fun times already, n'est-ce pas? As Shooter hails from reliably traditional neocon stock, it's difficult at first blush to presume that Liz Cheney would fall too far from that particular tree.

And yet, if one attempts to read the, erm, tea leaves (see what I did there?), the signs are unmistakable. The Cheneys are, and have always been, political opportunists, first and foremost. (That's not a disparagement, by the way; anyone wanting to be successful in such a high-stakes money game had best be an opportunist above all else. There is simply too much money, power, and influence abounding to be left to the merely principled.)

So the fact that Rand Paul has so far endorsed Enzi means little, perhaps nothing at all. Paul is almost certainly positioning himself for a presidential run in 2016 or 2020, and so he is in the early alliance-building phase. Enzi will probably win, and if so, as the senator from the least-inhabited state, he'll no doubt appreciate Paul's early backing. If Liz Cheney should win, Paul will simply reach out (in the spirit of collegiality and party comity, of course) and patch things up accordingly. No sweat either way.

The more interesting possibility here -- as well as in Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, where amazingly, those states' senators are all being primaried by insurgent teabilly candidates -- is that either the vote gets split and redounds to the Democratic candidates in some or all of those states. The chances of that happening in all five of the above mentioned states is not a betting man's parlay, but it's not too much to hope that perhaps three or even four of those states could roll D and expose the soft white underbelly of teabilly moocher flesh.

We'll find out in one year. Much money will be spent, and regardless of the outcome, very little will be accomplished as a result.

Bachmann Quitter Overdrive

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. -- Frank Zappa

Barely six months into her latest term from the state of Gerrymander, teabagger cupcake Mickey Bachmann has decided to shift gears on her career in shit shoveling, just as a cloud of finance investigations regarding her doomed (but hilarious) presidential campaign starts closing in. Would it be irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.

Unfortunately for women-in-prison movie aficionados, Mickey is unlikely to end up the big house. Chances are, she'll do just fine on the wingnut rubber-chicken circuit, peddling tales of woe and persecution. That and lobbying, the pestilential carbuncle on the prolapsed rectum of American politics. Plus her husband can keep grifting the health-care racket for curing gays. You can't parody these people anymore, seriously.

Not that it matters hugely; even if Bachmann is replaced by a librul Democrat, what then? More gutless incrementalism, spineless compromise, punting on first down, yada yada. There's no "mission accomplished" here, just a change in marching orders, at best a slightly less malevolent, cartoonish presence in an endless field of competing fnords.

Death and Texas

Texas Gooper mouthbreather (pardon the multiple redundancies) Steve, I say, Steve Stockman has a fresh, bold new slogan/bumper sticker for his perennial House campaign. Either that or he has some sort of weird bet with Louie Gohmert to see whose knuckles can make the most noise dragging on the Capitol Hill concrete.

It's not even worth deconstructing the sheer nonsense populating the entirety of Stockman's buffoonish slogan, except to point out that, again, I wish I had thought of it first, I'd have had a CafePress swag account going full-tilt to skim the rubes out of their disability checks. I would also say that Stockman forgot to shoehorn a gay marriage reference in there somewhere, so I assume the baby Jebus is crying now.

It is worth pointing out the primary logical flaw in this ham-fisted jabber (which of course would then be conflated by your usual conservaturd as further evidence of the "humorless" librul -- because har har, gun carryin' fetuses killin' their murderous mothers and the abortonazis that tricked 'em into it, amirite?). Both the Second Amendment and Roe v. Wade are matters of settled law, and interests from either side try to nibble at the margins of each.

But here's the thing -- virtually nobody (and I defy anyone to find a decent example proving otherwise) from the pro-choice side is a strict absolutist on the subject. It is very difficult to find anyone who seriously thinks that abortions should be allowed for any reason aside from the health of the mother beyond 20-24 weeks. Yet pro-life obsessives such as Stockman enjoy propagating the awful notion that "liberals" or "pro-choicers" believe as a bloc that live babies can be killed under the Roe rubric. I sure as fuck don't believe such a thing, and I don't know (or know of) any other pro-choice person who does, either.

This assumption is proven by the #gosnell hashtag on Stockman's Twitter comment introducing the bumper sticker. For those of you who don't spend every waking moment donating money to Pat Robertson, reading Chuck Norris columns, and self-flagellating over the American Holocaust, Kermit Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortion provider facing seven murder charges under a grand jury indictment. By all accounts, Gosnell is a butcher and a fiend and a fraud, and at 72 years of age, it is entirely likely that he will spend the rest of his rotten life pushing ass out of Club Fed. And good riddance to him. No reasonable person could read the report on Gosnell's gruesome operation and not be utterly repulsed.

But here's where Stockman's clumsy abortion-guns analogy, um, backfires (see what I did there?) on him. Second Amendment absolutists hasten to point at the near-constant spate of spree killings and firearm incidents involving children as mere outliers. It's a big, big country, and shit happens, y'know? Yet Gosnell's singular butchery is presented as prima facie evidence for both the supposedly routine nature of beheading live babies at Planned Parenthood, and the mendacious negligence of the lamestream media in failing to report every lurid detail of Gosnell's baby abattoir.

As far as the argument that the media sucks, well, it's hard to argue with that one. Is there a conspiracy to deny the 'murkin public their well-earned details of a scumbag abortion doctor's attempt to keep up with Jeffrey Dahmer? Sure, in the sense that the corporate media understand deeply that what their audience wants is meaningless fluff about royal babies and poop cruises. In other words, the conspiracy is driven by market considerations, not ideology.

The mission of the nightly news is not to give you news per se, it's to get you to buy automobiles and snacks and pharmaceuticals. Its goal is to get you to spend money you don't really have on stuff you don't really need or want. This is not exactly a secret. When they lose viewers, they lose sales. And nothing will lose viewers more quickly than some trumped-up bullshit about one whackjob abortionist in urban Philly operating a slaughterhouse filled with cat shit and baby parts. Hokay?

So the apparent lack of sufficient national coverage of the Gosnell case is indefensible, but hardly proof of an overarching conspiracy to protect the constantly beleaguered Planned Parenthood, especially since Gosnell was never a PP provider, as far as I've read. Certainly there's laziness involved there, but if it's a conspiracy, so far its accusers have yet to attribute whence said conspiracy originated. Reporters may tend to be liberal, but their bosses do not. Are we to assume that the conspiracy of silence is political? Then provide some proof, or even some evidence of this.

Obviously none of that will happen, this is merely a shithead southern congresscracker doing what they do, grandstanding on an issue that allows him to not have to explain to his poor cracker constituency why they're still broke and jobless, pretending that a tremendous outlier is standard operating procedure. And again, that is exactly what Gosnell's operation was -- an outlier, an aberration, a serial killer posing as a doctor. Gosnell is no more a typical example of reproductive health care than Jared Loughner or James Holmes or [fill in several dozen other spree killers off the top of your head] are examples of typical gun owners.

Yet that will be how it is presented. Just you watch. Pro-lifers and Second Amendment absolutists are birds of the same wretched feather; the verities of a single sentence written in the eighteenth century are as sure and unchanging (despite massive, unprecedented technological advancements since then) as the certainty that a fertilized egg is a fully-realized life whose minutes of existence trump any and all rights its host might have. The notion that maybe getting a deadly weapon and cop-killing ammunition ought to present as least as many challenges as, say, driving a car or obtaining allergy medication, are utterly foreign to them. Yet the idea of telling women what they can and can't do, even if they're only five or six weeks along, is as natural to them as masturbating to an Oral Roberts scrapbook.

And while we're at it, let's dispense with the implicit notion that a rabid pro-life stance means that they care more -- about anything. They don't care about the women they wish to force to have kids they don't want, and they don't care about the kids themselves once they're out of the womb. They don't care about the families who can't afford more mouths to feed, since they always support gutting social services, and will never lift a goddamned finger to help them improve their economic lives. They don't care about whether those kids are born to abusive parents, or have to attend shitty, underfunded school, or end up in soul-deadening jobs that don't pay enough to live on, or if they end up in prison.

Just as the universe is so much more than the Big Bang, the singularity that precipitated its existence, so is a human's life so much more than the instant of birth. But a pro-lifer couldn't care less about any of that shit -- their obsession is with the blessed event of the singularity. And all the other fully formed, fully realized lives are secondary -- or hell, of no consequence at all --- in their estimation.

As Barry O begins his typical punt-on-first-down tiptoe toward compromise on modest gun-control measures, such background checks, clip capacity limits, and mandatory liability insurance, look for Stockman's half-witted jabber to become the rallying cry of hundreds of teabaggers seeking re-election next year.

[Update 4/13/13 4:10 PDT:  What Mistermix (and the commenters) said. The anti-abortion crowd would like to believe and perpetuate the notion that the Gosnell case is evidence for overturning Roe, but as the Juicers say, Gosnell is actually a case for why Roe exists in the first place.

Pro-choice is really pro-life; pro-life is really just pro-fetus. Again, the anti-choice folks do not care about the rest of the family, or even about the child itself once it exits the womb. Once you're born, you're on your own.]

Sex Type Thing

Looks like that skeevy fuck Scott DesJarlais is going to get his fat ass primaried out next year, but still -- if that can be in politics, then Anthony Weiner deserves another shot. After all, going through DesJarlais' laundry list of scumbaggery, his behavior is borderline criminal, and should at least have been unethical enough to cost him his license several times over. Maybe it's okey-doke with the Tennessee medical board (assuming they have one, other than the 2" x 4" type) to fuck your patients and pressure your paramours to get abortions.

On the other hand, Weiner was just an unbelievable dumbass. So he's a narcissist -- show me a politician who isn't. But during his House tenure, Weiner stood out as a guy with balls and principles, who might actually still do something useful.

Hell, even Diaper Dave Vitter is trying to redeem himself somewhat, and hopefully his and Sherrod Brown's TBTF bill succeeds in starting to rein in the thieving banksters. Weiner would be part of that effort as well, one hopes, and right now, that's an effort that needs every bit of help it can get.

Autopilot

Ahahahaha. Even for bullshit debates, the true believers just can't help themselves. Cupcake O'Donnell wastes no time in going for the meat-and-taters talkin' points, since most everything else is past her grasp:

"My opponent wants to go to Washington and rubber-stamp failed spending bills," she said. "This is wrong. Uncle Sam needs to be cut off."

She also wondered about Coons' patriotism. "If you've ever questioned whether America is a beacon of freedom and justice, then he's your guy."

OK, the first part, while hackneyed (as if Republitards don't spend other people's money like water), still has a debatable point in it -- either spending is rampant and wasteful, and needs to be cut across the board, or people just don't want their spending ox getting gored, and before you know it, nothing gets cut. That is a point that can be debated.

But there is no sensible, logical jump that takes you from that to impugning Coons' belief in American virtue, presumably over his sarcastically-titled "Bearded Marxist" thesis. It's just weak, even for someone who's spent most of their adult life campaigning against the perils of masturbation and homosexuality.

Asked about evolution, which O'Donnell has said she believes is a myth, she said the question was "irrelevant." When pushed by Wolf Blitzer, a CNN anchor who was one of the moderators, she said: "Local schools should make that decision."

Friends 'n' neighbors, if you need to ask why China and India are drinking our collective milkshake, there's your answer.

99 Problems: Dunce Dunce Revolution

Oy. What hath Palin wrought, you know? It was bad enough we had this belligerent nitwit dumped on us, but now her ideological gender-mates are cropping up hither and sometimes yon. And they are bad enough in the sense that you don't even need to go into their politics or positions (since none of them are willing to discuss their actual ideas anyway). They're just ridiculous people to begin with.

I don't care that Christine O'Donnell may or may not have "dabbled" in "witchcraft" (which was probably a bullshit embellishment of her being a hanger-on to either Dungeons and Dragons nerds or headbanger poseurs in the first place). The concern is that she has yet to articulate a position on anything; she apparently seriously believes she'll just waltz into Capitol Hill with a Ginsu pen and cut spending as far as the eye can see.

Of course, she's never held a real job either, not one that requires reporting to a boss and justifying your continued existence. So much for this simplistic "I'm you" crap. An even bigger concern is that she has spent her entire adult life campaigning against fairly routine things like masturbation. I don't know what to make of a person who fails to recognize biology for what it is.

Then there's Sharron Angle, Nevada's crazy cat lady, minus the cats. As with O'Donnell, it's not the actual politics (because again, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid that they actually talk about what they do and how they plan to do it), so much as the basic notion that a person who campaigns against black football jerseys on religious grounds is simply mentally unstable, and probably shouldn't be trusted with more than a three-figure budget.

So beyond politics, there's just sheer intellectual quackery, not to mention dishonesty. And then there's eMeg Whitman, supposedly more reputable and legitimate, by virtue of her awesome bidness experience. But this is someone who has built a personal fortune on insider trading and opportunities, situations that, legal or not, are denied to 99.9% of all other human beings on the planet, period.

And really, how great of a businessperson are you when you blow an eighth of a billion dollars of your own money to be governor of California, a job sure to be as thankless and winless as head coach of the Oakland Raiders? Especially since, for all the high-dollar media blitzes she bought, Whitman is running maybe neck-and-neck with Jerry Brown, who has spent dick on his campaign, and waited until after Labor Day to even bother advertising (as it should be).

But the first rule of politics is, don't spend your own money. Yes, yes, throwing your own cash in presents the veneer of incorruptibility, but as Jesse Unruh famously said, if you can't take thier money, drink their whiskey, fuck their women, and still vote against them the next day, you don't belong there.

This is the level of incompetence I'm supposed to elect as governor? Why not just re-elect Schwarzenegger as goobernator for life and have done with it? At least Ahnult is occasionally entertaining; the best we'll get from eMeg -- before she inevitably jumps to be running mate to Mitt Romney's '12 Magic Underwear campaign -- is an occasional update on her evil snowboarder son. Frankly, just naming a kid "Griff Harsh V" -- yes, the fucking fifth, goddammit -- is a sign of epically poor judgment.

People, I'm tellin' ya, we gotta start judging people on intangibles, if they refuse to give us tangibles. As tempted as I am to let them choke on their own fumes o' stupid, this teabagger shit, it does no one any good -- except, of course, their corporate benefactors.

Not to implicitly support the hoary notion of smoke-filled backroom deals, but the idea that politics is best served by installing complete neophytes is dangerously stupid. Sure, we've railed against stupid, gutless compromises in the past, because such creatures deserve to be called what they are. But politics is, in the end, the art of reasonable compromise, and adding bozos like these to the mix just makes a toxic pot more so.

Part of me hopes the retards get what they think they want, just to watch them twist in the wind. After all, their moron bullshit won't affect me, not for a long time, by which point I'm sure (wishful thinking) I'll be just another flatulent gazillionaire. Let these Scrooge McDuck wannabes hoist themselves on their dull fantasies of striking it rich with whatever nose gold they can dig out, and devil take the hindmost. It'd be worth it just to watch their state-subsidized Rascals re-appropriated. Fuck 'em.

The problem is, no matter how iconoclastic I am temperamentally, I still trust and believe in the Scottish Enlightenment ideals of what this nation was supposed to be, what it still should and could be if even fifteen percent got their fucking shit together and brought the wood to the dipshits currently poisoning the discourse.

Teabaggers are certainly not a "populist" movement, not in the conventional sense, and its backers do not represent the best interests of its participants, pure and simple. Only in America could a cokehead morning zoo deejay -- who was so spiritually empty that he and his wife converted to Mormonism after shopping around (if only they had found magic applesauce before the magic underwear) -- print money selling easily disproved lies to addled dipshits.

Not all of these assholes will win, but the fact that any of them are even in the running, as if "throw the bums out" suddenly translated into "find the dumbest motherfucker you can", should be warning enough.