Deep Thought

The lesson is not that The Saga of Shirley Sherrod is yet another tedious "teachable moment" about this country's race issues. There's really no lesson to be had at all, just a confirmation -- a quick round of creatively-edited, sub-performance-art tubthumping by a conservatard blogger and a few Faux News yard apes, and this administration reflexively punts on first down.

Were Breitbart or Fox, like the health-care and financial industries, to launch legions of barbed-tail lobbyist minions to extract humiliating concessions from Obama or famed tough guy Krav Maga Rahm, Breitbart would by now probably have his own Big Babywood basic-cable nutwork, and Rupert Murdoch would have the Lincoln Bedroom renamed after himself. And Obamanauts would proclaim it as a shrewd incremental advance.

I get what Al Sharpton said, that when you win the White House and both houses of Congress, you don't get into pissing matches with a bunch of poltroons dressed up like Paul Revere and carrying misspelled signs comparing Obama to Stalin. That's fine and/or dandy.

But you do, on occasion, have to remind the more obnoxious hecklers that you fucking won, and you have the stage and the mike. I got heckled once as a musician, and I made goddamned sure that motherfucker left the floor with his tail between his legs. These guys cringe before anyone even throws a real punch at them. Frankly, it's just ugly to watch.

You can get away with being wrong, you can get away with screwing up, you can get away with launching your copious monkey-butter across a zaftig Jewish princess' gob whilst discussing troop deployments in Bosnia. But you can almost never get away with being a total fucking pussy, especially when no jobs have been created.

There is a real pattern of this chickenshit behavior developing, and it is going to backfire if they don't deal with it. Carefully deliberated mediation impresses no one, all people see is someone with a knife at a gunfight.

Jack Tatum

Jack Tatum was the first football player I learned to recognize when I was a kid. He was the reason I became a football fan in general, and a Raiders fan in particular. I met him briefly at a Raider game in Oakland about ten years ago, and got to tell him that. He was quiet and polite, graciously accepting my compliment, talking briefly, moving on to the next fan in the stands as the game was about to start.

Tatum and George Atkinson were, during that sweet spot in the mid-'70s, the nastiest, hardest-hitting safety duo in the league. Fearless and ferocious, they literally terrorized opposing wide receivers forcing opposing offenses to alter their usual passing game plans.

Tatum never seemed quite the same after paralyzing Darryl Stingley, understandably so. That event tragically underscored just how dangerous the "game" really is, large men in peak physical condition deliberately hurtling at each other with force and impact comparable to an automobile accident, sixty times in three hours.

Certainly Tatum had hit other players harder, before and after Stingley, and to see many of the hits Tatum laid on people, it was actually surprising he hadn't hurt himself catastrophically. One step earlier or later, and Stingley just gets the wind knocked out of him. But the hit broke the way that it did, and Stingley and Tatum carried their respective burdens from that split-second for three decades after.

RIP, Assassin.

Pop Star

So Kathleen Parker, perhaps aspiring to be the WaPo MoDo, not realizing that the one is quite enough, vaingloriously and tediously attempts to cast performance artist Sarah Palin as some sort of postmodern feminist icon. Ahahahaha. Oh wait, she's (somewhat) serious.

This is, I believe, the selfsame Kathleen Parker who, not so long ago, ired thousands of knuckle-dragging cyber-troglodytes with her heretical analysis of Saint Sarah as being slightly out of her depth.

Apparently that was then, and this is now, and Parker's sage analysis has -- well, what's the opposite of deepened? Shallowed?

For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?

She and I apparently share a certain genetic predisposition to annoy all the right people. These would be the folks who take themselves and their ideologies a tad too seriously. Thus when I was promoting my book, "Save the Males," I wore an aggressively feminine suit -- pink with a bow in back -- just to irritate hard-line feminists, who, without bothering to read the book, would hate it on sight.

I happen to hate bows, but it was worth it.

Likewise, Sarah knows just what drives us all nuts and, instead of changing her tune, she turns up the volume -- and triples down. Don't like her little red shoes? She'll add a red leather jacket. Got gloss?

Oh, sisters really are doing it tofor themselves, aren't they? Here's the thing, and even Parker should be able to grok this simple observation -- there is a substantial difference between a columnist peddling a book under the guise of comfortably suburban pseudo-contrarian claptrap, and a former vice-presidential candidate hitting the rubber-chicken circuit and angering rubes with a St. Vitus' dance of choregraphed winks and glances at her scrawled palm, lying every step of the way. Parker and Palin are both trying to sell easily-replicated compendia of smartassery, true, but Palin is also catering -- no, deliberately antagonizing -- the addled assumptions of fairly large swaths of aggrieved morons, with the clear purpose of disrupting what's left of our political process.

This would be one thing if the country weren't on the verge of implosion, but this breathy sister-bonding with a noisome dingbat while serious people are trying to figure out serious solutions to serious problems, it's just bullshit. Palin appears to be not a whit more informed or astute about the world around her or the mechanics of US government than she was when Parker rightly called her out. Yet now Parker feels some lame kinship with Palin's increasingly tiresome narcissism.

This woman is not to be feared or loathed. She is to be taken with a grain of humor and a dash of admiration. A different version of Madonna, she's a public relations machine who manipulates public perception with well-timed and, recently, sophisticated messaging.

Again, Parker writes as if she should be talking about Lady Gaga or Lindsay Lohan, rather than someone who actively aspires to have an impact on the political process. Frankly, I'd rather have Madonna in high political office than Sarah Palin, and I can't fucking stand Madonna. The "grain of humor and a dash of admiration" was done with about 18 months ago; Palin is little more than a reality-teevee stunt-cast at this point.

So why the fuck are we hearing all goddamned week about her hypocrite daughter's impending crossbow wedding, like we should care that she put her legs behind her ears for a drunken hockey oaf and let him knock her up again? Happens every day around the world, the only difference here is that Levi is slightly smarter than we gave him credit for, insofar as he reads the papers enough to know that his future maw-in-law made $12 mil last year.

The genius of Sarah's message, whatever it is, is that it doesn't matter what it is. Of course Americans want their country back. We'd prefer that China not own us. Most don't like unfunded federal mandates, takeovers or bailouts. Except when it benefits us directly.

Reread that, because those five sentences are, inadvertenly one fears, the truest part of the entire column. The moment it doesn't matter what someone says, just so long as they say something, that person is just a parody of themselves with a brain-dead fan club -- in other words, Lady Gaga once again. So break the rest of it down -- "Americans want their country back" from whom? We had an election, you fucktards, it was in the papers and everything. And why does China own us, exactly, can our new pop goddess enlighten us? Does she know fuck-all about how the working class has been bled dry for 35 years, and now since the top 10% own 70% of the assets, they can pretty much trade with each other and write the rest of us off? Seriously, I've asked this many times, and I'll do it once again -- if anyone knows of any specific instance where Palin has proposed even one (1) actual serious policy, foreign or domestic, financial, job-creating, energy, whatever -- please do speak up. I think we'd all be very surprised.

In the meantime, Parker cuts to the heart of the teabaggers' deal, whether she knows it or not. Everyone gets bent over the idea of handouts, until some of the pelf lands in their hands. This is the core of the "get the gubmint out of my Medicare" morons' deal, which is why they need to die off all the sooner, since no one should expend energy trying to explain this shit to them.

Well, who's to argue with a lotta women comin' together? It's the sisterhood, baby. Wear pink and put a bow on it.

Sarah's long-term plans are anybody's guess. Anyone who thinks she won't run for president because she's making too much money on the celebrity circuit is missing a big point. You make money as a presidential candidate, too. If you win, you're president. If you lose, you're rich.

And don't tell her she can't. If you do, she's just gonna get feistier and cuter. Next thing you know she'll be a dadgum lioness givin' heck to those media hyenas, just the way they can't stand it.

Yes, she's showed us all, hasn't she? She really has, you know; where else can you lie through your fucking teeth, make millions, have thousands of morons adoring you at every stop, and even have formerly cogent media commentators fawning over your wardrobe and your bullshit attitude? But it's just good fun watching supposedly professional journamalists write these wretched screeds, like they're auditioning for a job at Entertainment Weekly.

It's not a coincidence that Bristol and Levi announced their immaculate engagement to some cheesy gossip rag, you know. Considering the "legitimate" media we've got, I'd guess we're about 10-20 years out from electing a Kardashian to national office, since neither the people nor the media can tell the difference any longer. Idiocracy will turn out to have been an eerily prescient documentary.

I'm so goddamned sick of all these people, the assholes yanking the world's chain with their prima-donna bullshit, and the highly-paid media monkeys writing brainless odes to them, instead of something useful. How do we get rid of them? They are ruining what's left of the country, but maybe we really want it that way.

Well, You Can't Have That....

Joe Bageant throws down only every so often these days, but that's understandable, and more importantly, every one has been a gem. I think he correctly susses the (probably) incurable malaise America is undergoing right now, and for at least the immediate future.

Along with the usual enviromental and classist issues, it's really a crisis of the spirit, to the extent that I can buy into that concept and remain a good atheist. Perhaps a secular version of "spirit" could be "passion", and when you see the things the majority of Americans appear to be passionate about, it makes sense.

One would like to believe it's just a media-created perception, but in even a notionally free-market milieu, there has to be some truth to it. Our pockets are being picked, our futures mortgaged, our lives and landscapes plundered by a precious few who already have too bloody much, yet never quite enough. Yet too many of us express our passions via modes that are undeserving of any passion at all.

We know things that were never worth knowing, about people not worth acknowledging, a comically dramatized echo chamber of interchangeable scripted "reality" shows. So many fat fucks pointlessly driving fat vehicles, carrying nothing to nowhere, back and forth, back and forth, spending money they don't really have on shit they don't really want.

Self-actualization, when it occurs at all, is done through the choice of vehicle, or hooting at hillbillies driving billboards in circles all afternoon, that sort of thing. There seems to be no sense of moderation in any of these pursuits; it's one thing to enjoy kitsch and trash and occasional indulgences, but it's important to find some balance to those things, especially since so many of them rely on dwindling shares of resources.

Bageant seems to have found that balance in simplicity, a genuine sense of community, the beauty of a moment. Speaking strictly for myself, I probably have an unhealthy attachment to my books, music, and guitars, but that's it. And even then, I recall being a teenager in Southern California, 25 years or so ago, spending the day surfing with friends and building a bonfire, meeting college girls and drinking beer and playing Beach Boys songs into the night. I remember thinking at the time, on one of those summer nights, that I could do that every day for the next hundred years.

It seems simplistic, counterintuitive, and may even be wrong, but sometimes you can observe the actions of others -- or even yourself -- and think that they can't possibly truly want to do what they're doing. But maybe we're all just too distracted anymore to think about what we really want to do, or it gets dismissed as too much trouble, or not enough time/money, even if some of the best things in life really are free (for now).

Deep World Cup Thought

Vuvuzelas are the African version of ThunderStix -- noisy, cheap, obnoxious toys that give supposedly grown adults an excuse to act like retards for a couple hours straight.

Unless, of course, a stadium that sounds like a ginormous nest of farting hornets somehow enhances your experience of viewing a sport that, while interesting at times, is viewed by most Americans on a par with, say, the metric system. The constant flopping and poor reffing is bad enough, but yeah, the fuckin' toy plastic horns don't help win converts.

Inside the Playbook

If you're a football fan who enjoys the mechanics of the game as much as the personalities, and you don't know about Matt Bowen's ongoing series of play and coverage breakdowns for the National Football Post, you're missing out. Really good, detailed analysis of what every player is doing on the field; great stuff for us fans in the off-season drought. I'm only slightly embarrassed to say that I've applied some of this to my very occasional Madden 2010 games, but if I can ride JaCarcass Russell to a 77-21 Super Bowl win, I must have learned something.

Return On Investment

Goldman Sachs executive/Obama economic policy advisor uses CDS payout to add to the indoor heated pool at his Hamptons spread.

I know The Krugster means well, and he is a Nobel laureate and all, but it's almost as if someone needs to break the news to him:

For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Uh-huh, and the bond vigilante and the confidence fairy usually convene at that off-ramp from the Suck It Expressway to Go Fuck Yourself Boulevard, near the tent city. (See what I did there?)

I don't think Krugman really needs to be told that this all falls under the general rubric of "it's not a flaw, it's a feature", but sometimes you wonder. Any investor, whether it's someone like Warren Buffett who generally invests in tangible assets, or some bookmaking hedge-fund scumbag, cares only about getting a return. If they thought more profit could be generated by encouraging and laundering more stimulus pelf, they'd gladly sign on to it, so the fact that they're not interested is more troubling than even Krugman characterizes it.

One aspect of this is that institutional investors really do seem to have allowed themselves to dumb down considerably. This may be attributed to a variety of reasons: the lack of accountability and proliferation of politically purchased moral hazard; the preponderance of automated spreadsheet algorithms doing most of the day-to-day trading, rather than people investing in ideas and things; the indifference to the inevitable consequences (see reason #1).

What you have here is a very small cadre of highly privileged -- yet not necessarily competent or qualified -- people controlling an increasing share of the nation's aggregate wealth. Worse yet, since they know that the peons will bailout their careless fuckups, they have almost zero incentive to maintain even modest standards of intellectual or moral rigor in their profession.

So you have what you have -- a fat, bloated carapace of a nation being hollowed out by financial parasitism. I don't think anyone envisions or desires perfect economic equality; it is impossible and unenforceable. However, when your level of income disparity is behind such workers' paradises as Vietnam and Yemen, and is actually closer to Zimbabwe than to those two, you have a real problem. Take a look down the whole list; the US is basically neck-and-neck with banana republics and sub-Saharan despotates.

It seems that, between their pension fund shell games, their shameless greed, and their credit-default-swap shenanigans, they may have reached that magical equilibrium where they don't need the masses to perpetuate their scam. Therefore any "stimulus" or "infrastructure" spending is a waste for them; they would make more money taking put options on Paraguay's World Cup chances. I think Krugman suffers from the same problem Obama does -- the belief that if you make rational appeals to people's better angels, truth and reason eventually will out.

This would be true if we had an economic elite that cared about creating things, instead of merely owning shit. But once you get past the public philanthropy of the likes of Buffett and Bill Gates, whaddaya got? A sub-class of people whose vocation is the acquisition -- and, more importantly, valuation -- of phantom wealth, paper profits. Keep in mind what the mechanics of the "financial reform" bill have been about -- the ability to peddle worthless securities to credulous institutional investors (a huge mode of control in leveraging pension funds, and thus the working-class chumps who depend on them to, you know, survive); the ability to leverage bad bets at asset ratios of over 30:1; the ability to basically force the next two generations of taxpayers to negotiate at gunpoint, to pay for someone else's deliberate mal-fee-ance.

These things are not "mistakes" nor "accidents". These are all very easily foreseen consequences of decisions made with indifference, if not outright malice, aforethought. And now that their bad bets have been paid off for them, and the ROI is in Asia rather than Oceania and Europe, they couldn't possibly give less of a shit what happens to displaced workers and the foreclosed homeless.

This is a very important, fundamental point that seems to escape many commentators, who dance around the issue and wonder that the Masters of the Universe don't get the ramifications of what they're doing or proposing. I assure you, they get it all too well, they know precisely what they are doing, and what the results will be. Every time I see the Dow average go up, I automatically assume that it happened on the backs of the peons, that unemployment or foreclosures or family murder/suicides are experiencing an uptick. More often than not, that appears to be the case. Wall Street seems to routinely profit, exult even, in the misery of the masses.

The sooner people start disabusing themselves of the weird, wild notion that the top 10%, which controls 70% of the nation's wealth, has any sort of moral or practical stake in the bottom half's 2.5% piece of the pie -- beyond how to use government leverage to forcibly extract that -- the more clear the picture will be for them. In the meantime, the middle class, the most consistent element of political stability, is decimated, paving the way for the corporate robber barons and their idiot demagogue apologists.

Unforced Errors

Per usual these days, I'm a tad late on the draw, but it bears even belated mention -- former heartbeat-away-from-the-preznitency-candidate Shitferbrains is not only tremendously, impassably dumb for a supposed Raygun acolyte, but irredeemably fucking lazy:

"This is Reagan country," the former Alaska governor told the cheering crowd, invoking the name of a fellow conservative icon, "and perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State."

Well, yes, if not for the fact Reagan, who Palin has frequently quoted and for whom she has repeatedly expressed admiration, actually attended Eureka College in Eureka, Ill., near Peoria, from 1928 to 1932. The 40th president didn't actually move to California, a state with which he'd become synonymous through both film and politics, until 1937.

Christ almighty, this would have taken what, fifteen seconds to check on Teh Googul? It's starting to make more sense, why Palin generally repeats the same tired schtick over and over again -- any of these pale attempts at an out-of-the-box homily inevitably plops on the podium, writhing, begging to be put out of its misery.

Not to mention the fact that Saint Reagan, no matter what these illiterate retards insist on yammering, would have to run as a Democrat these days. The teabaggers would have their three-cornered hats in full spin at Reagan's genial willingness to at least engage the opposition, even if he had no intention of actually listening to them.

I'm not sure what kind of asshole pays five hundred bucks to listen to Palin shrieking her bumptious schtick and made-up-as-she-goes-along factoids (portmenteau word of "facts" and "hemorrhoids"). As Johnny Carson once supposedly said, I've heard cats fuck with more harmony. The attendees would have been much better off just donating their damned money and taking in a bad movie.

Mediaocrities

What Dave Weigel really should apologize for is, well, apologizing. I don't think any rational person (which leaves out Drudge and his legion of butt-hurt readers) thinks that Weigel literally wishes for Drudge to set himself on fire. I don't think there's anything wrong with the shorthand term "Paultard" to refer to the internal inconsistencies of the acolytes of Paul pére and (even moreso) fils. This is especially true when the term was deployed to illustrate Faux News' hypocrisy in its newfound support of Paultardation across the nation.

There's actually a lesson to be learned from the likes of Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, not to mention the insane outer-world being of the R'lyeh of talk-radio -- don't apologize for saying what you actually think. At least Weigel has the advantage of being intellectually defensible in what he's saying; what he lacks is the courage of his convictions.

Every time somebody apologizes, they let themselves and everyone else who agrees with them get pushed around by people who couldn't give less of a shit whether or not they're remotely accurate or honest in what they say and do. Sack up or go home, ladies.

Intervention

I think there's a debate to be considered, and it's losers like this that make it a relevant discussion. The debate is not, contrary to the hooting commenters' lurid prison-rape fantasizing, how hard this idiot should be buttfucked by his cellmates.

A saner debate should focus on alternative, more productive modes of punishment, that lessen the burden on the taxpayers, endanger fewer children (and potential children), and don't irredeemably ruin this stupid sod's life, while still providing a punishment commensurate with the crime. It makes more sense to let these two morons out tomorrow with a couple years probation, taking them first to Planned Parenthood, for a vasectomy for him and at least a Norplant for her. In fact, it'd be cheaper in the long run to pay for tubal ligations, though that may be too invasive.

You could "on the one hand/on the other hand" this stuff for days, in addition to running the risk of bringing the would-be eugenicists out of the woodwork. But we're not talking about sterilizing retards or particular ethnic groups -- there's nothing irreversible suggested here, and frankly, with the public social safety network frayed almost irreparably at this point, it merits consideration.

The first rule of triage is to stop the patient's bleeding, even if it requires drastic measures. And when you have horrible people doing horrible things to their children, and having more and more children on the public dime because they neither know nor care enough to exercise a modicum of common sense or impulse control, maybe some "positive coercion" is called for. A mitigated sentence and maybe five hundred bucks to get high on seems a reasonable trade-off all the way around. It's worth it to halt their careless fecundity.

I realize I can be something of a hard-ass on this subject, and I don't apologize for it. I have no patience for these fucking people, and I sure as hell have only basic levels of compassion for them. I reserve that for the hapless kids they bring into the world and mistreat, passing on their bullshit to the next generation. I get the frustration that conservatives (and many liberals and moderates as well) feel about this sort of shit -- nobody likes feeling like they're doing all the right things, working hard, taking care of their families, only to also have to pay freight on these fuckers.

But I don't see the point in tossing them in prison, only to come out more incorrigible and less employable. Stop the bleeding, provide a limit to the cost they exact from society, without ever giving anything back. The system as it stands now fails everyone involved -- the people who work in it, seeing it become an exercise in futility; the taxpayers who pay into it, never getting results; the "parents" who know how to milk it; and most of all, the kids who have no control in their fate. This might be worth a try, if only because it would at least lessen the number of potential victims. Give me some feedback on this -- am I being an uncompassionate fascist asshole, or what?

Notes and Errata

A rarity, but I must quibble with Ed ever so slightly -- the right's martyr complex is hardly "latent". It's pretty much the only card they bother playing anymore, and it was a marked deck to begin with.

Check out the comments in this here article about Hugo Chàvez' latest brush with populist despotism. It's like reading a series of sidewalk sandwich boards, each one nuttier than the last. I'm half-surprised one of them didn't claim to have sucked Obama's Moooslim cock (under dire financial duress, of course, wrought by long years of communist oppression under Stalinbama's iron fist) in exchange for Victory Gin ration coupons and half a pack of generic smokes. Perhaps the encroaching moans from the hapless hitchhikers in these losers' basement sex dungeons prevented them from elaborating further. Maybe they took a break to molest the neighbor's collie, who knows?

Either way, we are apparently precious seconds from scavenging grass and bark in the nearest public park for our Dear Leader dinner soup, because Obammy is about to take a cue from Comrade Hugo and overtake Nabisco or Kraft or something, and cut off the all-you-can-eat buffets everywhere. Just ask 'em, they'll tell ya. Over and over again.

Night of the Living Debt

You can always tell the terrorist by his cologne and the watch on his wrist.

-- Clutch, Power Player

You know, as a responsible property owner -- that is, someone who followed the rate market, refinanced only as needed, and did not use the HELOC as a goddamned vacation/plasma-flatscreen fund, and kept things up on a single income at that -- I'm inclined to say screw the underwater crowd.

However, two things: one, moral superiority is no insurance against things like your own property value tanking because too many of your bozo neighbors lost their houses and flooded the market; two, bankers have no room to cry over the mess they helped create, perpetuate, and got bailed out at the top for.

The banking lobby says it could accept the bill as is, on one condition: that it apply only to new loans. In its current form, it applies to any existing loan.

“We really don’t want the legislature redoing contracts,” said Mr. Brown of the California Bankers Association. “That sends a bad signal to investors, to markets and to those whom we extended the credit.”

Whatever the fate of this particular bill, the issue of responsibility for debt is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. New government-mandated modification programs that for the first time will reduce borrowers’ debts will go into effect this fall, sparking another round of debate about who gets help and who does not.

“We’re a little in the Wild West here,” said Paul Leonard, California office director of the Center for Responsible Lending. “People are struggling with what it means to uphold the terms of your mortgage contract and what it means to walk away. There are no tried and true rules.”

This is no different than what goes on on Wall Street -- financial weasels generate a bunch of contract shenanigans to reel in the suckers, get the taxpayers to bail them out when the suckers live down to their names, and piss and moan about "responsible lending", aka legalized usury, permanent penury, etc. There's a moral hazard all the way around here; they fool no one.

The hell with it, bring back the mortgage sluts and start the fun machine all over again. Beats the hell out of this bullshit. We all might as well just open our wallets and dump them into a pile in the middle of the room.

On the Ball

I must be missing something here, because this seems impossibly dumb, even for the US government:

Four senators are seeking to force the Obama administration to blacklist the Pakistani Taliban, a day after the failed Times Square bomber pleaded guilty and admitted getting training from the group.

The senators, all from New York and New Jersey, said Tuesday they would introduce a bill requiring the State Department to designate the Pakistani Taliban a "foreign terrorist organization."

Wait, what? Wasn't the Taliban designated a terrorist organization, oh, I dunno, on 9/12/01? Or was it just the Afghan Taliban, while the Pakistan faction was left untouched, presumably because of deep-seated ideological and strategic differences over exactly how to bring "death to America"?

Or is this -- and I'll go out on a limb here -- a way for certain pols to posture and preen over some newfangled legalistic wrinkle, something that will inevitably (and inadvertently, of course) legitimize the eventual government overreach. Predictably, some dumb sod will find himself flown to a Syrian dungeon in the dead of night, because Chuck Schumer wanted to look tough for a few minutes. Stranger things have happened, yet always the choice in figuring out motivations seems to come down to "unforgivably stupid" vs. "stupidly malicious".

Sick Simper Tearanus

Christ, this Angle broad is worth her weight in comedy gold. Not that Harry Reid should get cocky, because people rarely go wrong in assuming that voters are reactionary mow-rons, but shit, she can't get out of her own way:

"Our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government," Angle told conservative talk show host Lars Larson in January. "In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

Sigh. "Lars Larson", is he from the same inbred Scandiwegian fjord-hole as Erick Erickson or what? Here is the original Jefferson quote, by the way:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Now, if you really think about what Jefferson is implying in the complete quote, it is at best opaque in some parts. The teabaggers certainly live up to Jefferson's phrase "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed"; rarely has there been such a spectacularly overheated yet befuddled "movement" in the spotlight, incoherent, self-contradictory, rudderless. Yet Jefferson acknowledges implicitly that because of their slack-jawed ignorance of the facts, they are the most likely to bray their long-simmered, cognitively dissonant grievances.

The quote is from 1787, from a Jefferson still flush with the success of a hard-won victory, and the establishment of a new and grand experiment in self-rule. It is not something Jefferson would have reiterated even a dozen years later, and indeed, none of his later writings (at least that I've ever read) burn with the same revolutionary fervor. I'm not saying that Jefferson got in on the top floor, liked the layout, and pulled the ladder up after him; I'm saying that he and the rest of the founders understood that ruling and keeping the ship of state on an even keel is a different game than revolution. Constant revolt -- especially when incited by the most ignorant, regressive, and temperamental elements of a society -- is as sure a recipe for disaster as sitting on your thumbs whilst a true tyrant is ahoof.

More importantly, no matter how hard they wish and squint, TJ's "blood of patriots and tyrants" money quote does not apply to them. This three-corner-hatted fever dream of theirs is a mirage, a sham, a cozy fantasy to tuck themselves into at night. Barack Obama is not a tyrant; Kim Jong-Il is a tyrant. Fat fucks who take their Medicare-subsidized Rascals on public roads to public parks are not patriots; they're lazy assholes who need a week in North Korea to set their stupid shit straight.

I think Mark Lilla has correctly sussed the heart of these preening goofballs' wafer-thin plaints:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

....

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

This is exactly right -- this is a group of people whose aim appears to be to cut off their collective nose to spite their face. They rant about self-sufficiency and the unwanted interference of government regulation, because their self-selected feedback loop tells them they are self-sufficient, even as they waddle to the Costco, instead of going Galt as they frequently threaten, and they have been too coddled all their lives to know what Third World shitholes without government regulations are like.

I've seen this phenomenon first-hand locally, and it perplexes and bothers me deeply -- people whom I know for an empirical fact are on the fucking dole, writing foaming screeds to the local news outlets about their wretched go of it under the iron fist of Barack Obama and his meddling government minions. Negro please.

It is of small comfort to recognize that if the best these dipshits can muster is the likes of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, then their bench is even thinner than one supposes. Yet the twin stupidities of a decade ago -- the selection of Fredo Arbusto and the usurpation in Gullyvornia of Enron-backed Rainier Wolfcastle -- have probably soured me for a lifetime on being even cautiously optimistic about my fellow votard.

One last indefensible quote from Sharron Angle, and woe betide the media flunky who brings it up and fails on the easy follow-through:

"The nation is arming," she told the newspaper. "What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"

[emphasis mine]

Um, the next step is that you field a better candidate for the next go-round, shit-for-brains. Someone needs to call this crazy bitch on this bullshit -- the logical, practical implication of what she is saying is that if a bunch of heavily-armed retards with delusions of being oppressed don't get their way, they will violently overthrow the majority.

They presume too much if they're assuming that they're the only ones with guns. Not that these goons would or could ever seriously organize to a meaningful extent in that regard, but inspiring angry loners is another matter, for which their thinly veiled threats of armed insurrection should be held accountable.

The Audacity of Dope

From the news you can lose file:

President Barack Obama's speech on the Gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin-Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Sooo....a professional language (read: advertising/marketing/trendmongering) consultant finds an opportunity to toot his own horn by nitpicking a preznitential speech. Count me in as shocked, but kudos to CNN for providing the free advertising, even if the implicit message is "Americans are morons who can't relate to oratory beyond that of a fifteen-year-old". Awesome.

Incidentally, the original piece has some more illuminating tidbits:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level – 9.8 Grade Level. This is the highest of any major Obama speech. Obama’s closest match among recent presidents is Ronald Reagan, whose speeches generally ranged from the 9th to 10th grade levels. (President George W. Bush usually spoke at a seventh grade level.)

Wow, that high, eh? Guess the flash-card practice and repeated readings of The Pet Goat really paid off.

You know, Obama deserves a certain level of abuse for his diffident response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, most notably the sheer amount of time he gave BP to dick around with a bunch of Rube Goldberg "solutions" to a problem that was caused by corporate negligence. And his tepid throat-clearing about finding an ass to kick, six or seven weeks down the line, fooled no one.

But the idea that Obama's not dumbing it down enough for us, that we need to be talked to like we're slow third-graders (i.e., Glenn Beck viewers) just confirms the notion that we usually get the government -- and the media -- we truly deserve.

Closet Cases

The most ridonkulous court case of the year finally winds down, and one side is getting a bit desperate in their closing argument:

Winding up a historic trial over same-sex marriage in California, the lawyer for Proposition 8's sponsors told a federal judge Wednesday that allowing only men and women to wed promotes responsible sex and child-rearing, and ultimately ensures the future of humanity.

During more than two hours of intense and sometimes skeptical questioning by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, attorney Charles Cooper maintained that society is entitled to reserve its approval of marriage for those who can naturally conceive children.

....

But Walker, who presided over the nation's first federal trial on the issue, sounded dubious. He note that the state allows couples unable or unwilling to have children to marry, suggesting that the institution has a broader purpose that same-sex partners might equally fulfill.

"Marriage is a right which extends fundamentally to all persons, whether they're capable of producing children, incarcerated or behind in their child-support payments," Walker said, citing Supreme Court rulings that allow people in all those situations to marry.

I'm sure Walker -- who, as Prop. 8 wingnuts will no doubt scream from the rooftops the second this case is decided, is gay -- feels somewhat silly having to tell these goofballs what they already know. All together now, friends 'n' neighbors -- marriage is designed to protect property. Preservation of fambly valyews, while valuable, is purely ancillary.

But to insist that marriage's primary function is to encourage procreation is functionally retarded, seriously. Moreover, even if that were its function, it would be very difficult to argue that it's been even a qualified success, considering the divorce rate, considering the steady lessening of whatever stigma out-of-wedlock parentage once had.

The disingenuous arguments these morons have wielded are nothing short of legalistic quackery, a deliberate conflation of the obvious notion that children develop best when raised in a stable environment, and the ludicrous notion that heterosexual couples have some sort of sacrosanct monopoly on said stability. Go tell it to Larry King, chump.

The only witnesses for Prop. 8's sponsors were political scientist Kenneth Miller, who said gays and lesbians can protect their political interests without judicial protection, and David Blankenhorn, an author and advocate who said allowing same-sex marriages could lead to more divorces and fewer weddings for men and women.

At Wednesday's hearing, Walker asked Cooper whether Blankenhorn, who heads the Institute for American Values but lacks academic credentials, qualified as an expert witness. Cooper said Blankenhorn was a recognized expert in his field and Olson hastened to endorse him, saying Blankenhorn's testimony helped to discredit Prop. 8.

Olson makes a great point -- much like with "intelligent design", it is the proponents of Prop. 8 who tend to inadvertently make the opposition's argument for them. It's sheer forensic ineptitude, really. What sort of bozo thinks the "marriage should be reserved for procreating couples" argument will fly in an actual court of law, as opposed to some church basement bake sale for the, ahem, "Institute for American Values"?

Well, the sort of bozo who is unused to having to make an argument out of the scope of the usual choir-preaching hortatory rhetoric. The sort of bozo who wants to make "majority rules" the other cornerstone of his argument, apparently unaware that just in the last five years, opposition to gay marriage has declined, and will continue to do so.

As always, I am just mystified by people who are willing to spend precious time, money, effort trying to "protect" an irretrievably debauched appellation. At least half of the heterosexual couples who get hitched find a way to screw it up -- and that's just the ones who actually get divorced, not the ones who stay together "for the kids" or whatever they have to tell themselves.

And many gay marriage opponents, understanding the reality of long-term same-sex relationships, retreat to the bizarre notion of insisting that they don't mind if gay couples call their relationships "civil unions", even though functionally it is a marriage. People are bound to each other, legally, morally, familially, but these folks get all butthurt if any of the participants use the "m" word.

This is a very strange obsession, no doubt bordering on projection for many of them. Seriously, any straight person who feels "threatened" by a couple of dudes or a couple of chicks formalizing their monogamous relationship needs to get a grip -- and a hobby.

Cock Teas

Media alert: retard gathering in rainy state. MUST CREDIT DRUDGE REPORT. Ho hum. So it appears another knuckle-dragging ex-football player has been pulled out of the mothballs for the entertainment of the rubes. Say hello to former Washington ForeskinRedskin Clint Didier:

"It's time we the people had the courage and fortitude to take our country back," U.S. Senate candidate Clint Didier told the gathering Saturday. "When I get to D.C., there's going to be hell to pay."

....

Didier, who wants to take on Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told delegates his game plan: "Secure our borders, unshackle our industries and get rid of the regulations."

It's time, he added, "to fight our way back to the light, to the truth, to the Lord God Almighty."

Holy shit, it sounds like a translation from some woman-hating asshole from the Jamaat-e-Islami party in Pakistan. The transcript doesn't note specifically that Didier ended his oratory with a "Yee-haw!", but no one would be surprised if he had.

There were a couple other mouthbreathers jockeying for position, but Didier was by far the most entertaining, and not just because of his Stamp of Approval™ from Miss Thang. If elected, he'll probably offer to cornhole a Phil Simms effigy on the Capitol steps, or something equally charming. In the meantime, someone -- anyone -- should ask this idiot to clarify: "take our country back" from whom? Someone needs to step up and inform these cockmonglers that there was an election, and the clear majority of this "we the people" these assholes routinely invoke voted for the representatives currently in office. Every call to "take the country back" logically ends with "from the majority of the voters".

So, you know, fuck you, Clint Didier.

Incidentally, another fun fact about Clint and his teabagger aesthetic:

Didier has refuted criticism of his receipt of federal agricultural subsidy money, arguing that farmers need to participate in the subsidy program to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. "If your neighbor has an advantage he is in the position to buy the next farm up for sale," Didier says.

One thing to keep in mind about the teabaggers, right down to the very last one of them -- they squeal endlessly about money being wasted, but only when it's not being wasted on them. Calling them a bunch of whiny hypocrites understates the case.

Mock the Vote

The curious case of Alvin Greene seems to be one of those "even weirder than you think" deals, doesn't it? After catching his mesmerizing performance on Olbermann the other night, it's impossible not to be intrigued by this mushmouthed, chuckleheaded cipher. Whatever the deal is with this guy and how he got here, you just know it's gotta be good.

But if you want to be pissed at somebody, be pissed at the Democratic party and its minions and mechanisms. What kind of half-assed organization lets an unemployed felon in as its representative in a senatorial campaign? Least they can do is find him a job. Greene looks like he could hold a door open on a windy day, if not much more than that.

No doubt this has more than a little to do with the state itself, and its, let's say, creative approach to political shenanigans. This is, after all, the state with a philandering governor who refused to resign gracefully, not to mention a slack-jawed livestock-molesting galoot of a state senator who called both Nikki Haley and Barack Obama "ragheads". Although the notion of Greene being a Republican plant seems a bit simplistic; even if they had any actual need for a plant in a campaign that should be a cakewalk for them, it wouldn't be this guy.

Perhaps Greene can take a hike up the Appalachian Trail, and find at least one (1) intelligible answer to any given question, such as, "How exactly does someone with no job and no campaign donations come up with $10,440 for a filing fee?"

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.

California Drinking

Deep thought: the exquisite irony of eMeg "Griff Harsh V's proud mom" Whitman spending $71 million of her own money to peddle herself as the voice of fiscal responsibility, has it registered itself in her Ben Franklin fivehead yet? Obviously not, since eMeg is really no doubt positioning herself as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney's next tilt at the electoral windmill. It takes some real doing to make Jerry Brown look like the best choice, but by gawd she's done it in spades.

As for iCarly Fiorina, the less said the better. The weekend chatter 'mongst the "news" dipshits centers around iCarly's snotty pot-meet-kettle live-mike sniping at Barbara Boxer's hair, because that is the media we have.

And while Boxer is as uninspiring as they come, at least she doesn't have the "I lawn-darted HP and all I got were these ludicrous campaign commercials" albatross. Poor iCarly probably does really think that Sarah Palin's imprimatur will help, but she would probably get more cred with the endorsement of the ghost of former gubernatorial candidate Gary Coleman. Tom Campbell would have been a much better opponent for the Republicans to run, and might have actually won with some financial support, but since the GOP org in this state could find a way to fuck up a baked potato, they declined to even pretend to help him out. So they get what they got, which is a big bowl of wrong.

Forty million people in this fucking state, and these are the choices we have. No wonder we're imploding. It's going to be a long campaign season; I may have to pull an Elvis and just shoot my teevee by the fourth of July.