Child Abuse

So PZ Myers writes a perfectly nice, reasonable, and eminently sensible "Yes Virginia" type post, publicly directed toward a young, brainwashed little girl who needs to revisit the smug all-purpose question that Jebus-Rode-A-Dinosaur Creation "Museum" huckster Ken Ham taught her to ask. Ham taught the little girl to ask "Were you there?" in response to any information presented to her that doesn't jibe with her programming (except, presumably, biblical narratives).

Naturally, no good deed goes uncalumniated:

I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken's Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy... sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn't see the message because I didn't want to...

And so another generation arises to drink the kool-aid, and perpetuate a stunted, shriveled intellect, and waste their most precious gift of all -- the capacity to learn.

Clown Car Contestants

Taibbi has some pretty good smackdown on the rising political star of Mary Tyler Moron. Aside from having a gerrymandered district consisting of rich white assholes, Bachmann's success up to this point is essentially summed up here:

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

Bachmann is the champion of those tens of millions of Americans who have read and enjoyed the Left Behind books, the apocalyptic works of Christian fiction that posit an elaborate fantasy in which all the true believers are whisked off to heaven with a puff of smoke at the outset of Armageddon. Here on Earth, meanwhile, the guilty are bent to the will of a marauding Satan who appears at first in the guise of a smooth-talking, handsome, educated, pro-government, superficially pacifist, internationalist politician named Nicolae Carpathia — basically, Barack Obama. Bachmann has ties to the Left Behind crowd and has even said that Beverly LaHaye, wife of LB co-author and fundamentalist godfather Tim LaHaye, was her inspiration for entering politics.

Ah, yes, the "those people hate you because you're smug and they know you're laughing at them" gambit. Well you know what? Fuck them. Fuck 'em all right in the goddamned neck. I'm not even going to bother with (justifiably) ridiculing the sort of oaf that feels compelled to profess divine intervention for every mundane activity and decision; there is nothing particularly wrong with belief per se, but those sorts of chuckleheads are either delusional or cynical in their faith.

But it is the implicit and explicit assumption that everyone else needs to get on their page, that they have the right to indoctrinate everyone's children with their special faith, that they are intrinsically more moral than us heathens Because They Believe. How is that not smug, how is that any better than the people who laugh at them because they are tethered to superstition and magical thinking (as opposed to religious belief being one mode of introspection and genuine reflection)?

Bachmann gets lumped in with Palin generally, but that is not an entirely honest comparison. Palin is clearly just out to soak the suckers with this ongoing cock-tease; she has yet to display an iota of aptitude or even basic desire for the job, much less for the rigors of campaigning for said job. I seriously would not be surprised if Palin's ultimate goal were to host an afternoon Oprah-type talk show (or perhaps an inverted View setup, with a bunch of like-minded troglodytes and one token librul to bash on in between circle-jerking whatever hapless celebrity is on to pimp their latest box-office load).

Not that Bachmann is the real deal, mind you; again, her incessant god-bothering jabber is either delusional (if real) or just pathetically empty (if put-on), and either way, her actual track record in the House appears to be one of grandstanding more than actually doing anything. Her chances for winning the nomination are slimmer some people seem to be thinking for now, because she is at least as intensely polarizing as Palin.

Personally, I would put money on Huntsman eventually getting the GOP nod. That he worked for Obama is a cardinal sin easily inverted -- once he figures out how to turn that into a "Hey, I tried to work with these guys" sound bite, he will start to pull disaffected independents, which is what any contender is going to need. If he can get half a rhythm going, there is simply no viable competition in that party.

The one clip of the recent "debate" I did catch spoke volumes -- Pawlenty trying to assert himself with his "Obamneycare" care guff on the Sunday circuit, but when confronted with it at the debate, with Romney just skull-fucking him the whole time, Pawlenty punts, taking care not to look aat Romney the entire time. That sort of gutlessness does not work well in a party of, to be generous, fanatical adherents. These guys have just spent the last three years doing everything they can to be an impediment to Obama, they are expecting "balls to the wall or not at all" at this point.

But for someone like Bachmann to be viable, as with Palin, there have to be enough moneyed donors to get her in the game. And that really is difficult to conceive -- they don't give that kind of money to people unless they know they can control them, and a culty midwesterner does not seem like a smart investment.

Either way, hell -- remember when we used to sit in amazement that a mouth-breather like George W. Bush could get in? Good times.

Get the Frack Out

Let's keep it simple: anybody who's fine with fracking needs to be fine with it in their own backyard. Funny how all these warnings about how we need to achieve "energy independence" simply revolve around fetishizing this or that tech, finding "new" and "clean" sources, or Drill Baby Drill (though again, not in the backyards of those squawking for it). But nobody ever talks about simply consuming less, about what the effects and opportunities might be if people drove smarter and less, if we enforced better fuel-efficiency standards, if people shut the fucking light off once in a while when they're not using it.

You can champion all the new tech you want, whether it's green and clean or kitchen faucets spewing fire. But at some point, at least a modest level of conservation has to enter the discussion. Or not.

Magical History Tour

Ahahahaha:

In Sarah’s version, Revere was

“He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.”

Jesus Christ, can anybody really add anything to that? It's beyond parody. If 'murka really wants to elevate a bubbleheaded snowbilly on her (if you're a middle-aged man who's not getting any) fuckability quotient, then as always, it deserves precisely what it will get in the bargain.

Palin has pushed this stupid bus tour as an opportunity to school ignint 'murkins on their Constooshunal ingnince. Maybe Roger Ailes can spring for a tutor to live on the bus with them for a few weeks, bring her up to speed on who's on Mount Rushmore and such like.

Cheesy Rider

Once again, if we accept the classic premise that markets act on demand, then our corporate media is a reflection of us as a nation, a bloated, rotted husk which, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, just doesn't know it's dead yet.

Also, too. Someone should maybe tell these halfwits the difference between a "scavenger hunt" and a "snipe hunt". Here are three major differences the mediatards can share with their window-licking friends:

1. Scavenger hunts have clues.
2. Scavenger hunts have a point.
3. Snipe hunts are, by definition, participated in by gullible morons.

Consider the most consistent line 'mongst media morons far 'n' wide, regardless of political bent -- they admit that they don't know what the subject of their "articles" is actually doing, ergo, they are literally following her around, unable to speak with her, for absolutely no reason at all.

If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the American media -- which again, like the country itself, is merely a series of obvious scams that people, in a tragic spate of collective Jungian subconsciousness, have agreed to dance to. Much like disco.

And we all know how that turned out.

A Beautiful Mind

One of Saint Sarah's less-than-gruntled former toadies has scrawled a "tell-all", adding to the publishing industry's largest segment, which is books no one in their right mind would read.

Naturally, the attention Frank Bailey has garnered so far, focuses around Sharia Plan's rather Leona Helmsley-like demeanor with people who can't directly help her political career, and her well-documented vindictive streak. But for me this little quote tells you everything you need to know about Palin's utter lack of even marginal intellect:

In his fervor, Bailey at first didn’t care that Palin lacked expertise — she had common sense. As she once e-mailed him, “Remember: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” But Bailey came to doubt his devotion, particularly after the presidential election defeat when Palin seemed to care little for governing Alaska and far more about cashing in on her celebrity.

[emphasis mine]
Set aside for moment that Frank Bailey is a fucking chucklehead who got taken for a ride, and now is trying to cash in on his time in the belly of the beast. Let's deconstruct Saint Sarah's attempt at profundity, not just for the complete lack of evidence and plausibility in the first part, not just because the Titanic sank not because it was poorly built, but because it hit a fucking iceberg.

Those nine words neatly encapsulate the mentality of Sarah Palin, and her addled flock. The smirking disdain -- delusional in its scope -- completely derides the notion of competence, of becoming better at what you do by learning as much as you can about it.

This was what I always despised about George W. Bush -- he exhibited the smugness of someone who seriously believes that he has long known everything he needs to know, that there is nothing more to learn. Palin is obviously cut from the same ragged cloth, no shock there. And no shock that she prefers the simple affirmations of fairy tales over empirical data.

But at some point, it needs to register with a critical mass of people -- voters and the skeevy corporate media monkeys they rely on for their daily dose of bullshit -- that beyond the breathless infotainment coverage of cock-teasing idiots like Palin or Trump, people who add to their fortunes by dangling months of guessing games to legions of dumbfounded dipshits, someone needs to be an adult.

A big reason America is in a period of epic fail right now, aside from its willingness to let Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon continue to skull-fuck the country with absolute impunity, is its inability to recognize unserious and marginal people for what they are. A serious, intellectually honest person does not let cartoon characters like Palin and Trump waste their time with this nonsense, and a nation serious about getting its shit together most certainly doesn't let these bozos jerk them off for months on end.

Their ability to stay in the conversation long past their sell-by dates feels to me like the sign of a nation that's given up on itself, has lost the capacity to identify entities that should never have been in the discussion in the first place, and are indeed simply using the process and its concomitant permanent campaign industry to enrich themselves. Maybe it's the natural by-product of a decade of hyper-cultural immersion in the mindless excesses of reality teevee, with it's deliberate vapidity and meanness. Maybe we were always mean and stupid, and are just not bothering to conceal it anymore. I don't know.

What I do know is that we are heading into a period that, for starters, will be characterized by more and more scarce energy supplies, and we are barely making token efforts to do anything about it, apparently assuming that some great Energy Fairy will providentially come along and fix it all. Shit, 'murkins cannot even be bothered to use environmentally friendly packaging for its snacking products, such is the affront to their dignity.

So it makes pathetic sense that a society that has lost its collective mind, preferring the comforts of magickal thinking, would put up with the notion of putting Sarah Palin or Donald Trump in charge of anything. Americans have had their heads lodged up their asses for so long, they have given up trying to extricate themselves.

Enjoy the view. It's only going to get worse.

News You Can Lose

Give us this day our daily cognitive dissonance: MSNBC host calls Laura Ingraham a "slut" and gets his fat ass suspended for a week, because MSNBC (unlike Fox) never stands behind their people when they say something "controversial".

To the extent that there's actually some controversy -- I mean, we are talking about the Laura Ingraham who has made a career out of using snark, insults, and calumny on her ideological opponents. All in the service of the 1% who already own pretty much everything worth owning, and won't be happy until they get the rest and take it all with them. Being their rented spokesperson -- basically the function of the entire damned punditocracy, a self-selecting crowd of poltroons, none of whom you would trust to clean your gutters, but are apparently supposed to trust in analyzing policies and events that affect your life -- seems to fit the basic definition for "slut", minus (praise Jeebus) the sex.

Say what you will about conservatards, but when one of theirs says or does something offensively stupid, they don't apologize, they bloody well double down on it. A lunatic goes on a spree at a supermarket, slaughtering old ladies and little girls and attempting to assassinate a US Representative who had already been on the receiving end of death threats, vandalism, and harassment, and Sarah Palin squeals "blood libel". Ofay teabaggers send each other photos portraying Obama as a monkey or a spearchucker, they don't apologize, they just shrug their shoulders and tell you to go fuck youself if you don't like it. Ted Nugent invites Obama and Hillary to suck on his AR-15 at his concerts, and not only will never apologize for it, but continues to be a Fox regular.

Ed Schulz trash-talking Laura Ingraham does not merit coverage or commentary, but what does is how quickly MSNBC pusses out with such predictability. Nobody at Fox looks over their shoulder at the lies and bluster that emanate from multiple pieholes on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

To the extent that "liberalism" can actually distinguish itself from "conservatism" in any meaningful, operational sense, as opposed to the usual ratchet-pawl two-sides-of-the-same-plug-nickel guff, it must at some point display a real willingness to take and throw punches. I mean, I'm just kind of embarrassed for them when they do shit like this. Fucking grow a pair already.

....And I Feel Fine

You know, I'm as glad as the next schmuck that the buffoonish radio dickhead predicting world apocamalypse was proven wrong yet again, as thus far they have always been. These jokers are a dime a score, always have been and always will be.

But what rings weird to me is how much press this particular joker got, both in the run-up to the magick date, and now the aftermath, everyone having a big grin that this old cheese-smelling cuss had a very public senior moment.

Don't get me wrong -- we've had our share of the billboards up this neck o' the woods, and the stupid doesn't just burn, it emanates. I guess I'm just glad that though my daughter is young enough to wonder about the provenance of this nonsense, she is at least astute enough to be skeptical about them. Not everyone, I'm wagering, is as lucky, and shame on Harold Camping for scaring the shit out of kids for no damned reason.

The adults, on the other hand, deserve precisely what they get. As we've always acknowledged, it really is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

But I'm curious as to what to ascribe this wave of coverage to, for a "story" that would in earlier times been relegated to the one-and-done bin of most marginal players. It seems that there is no such thing anymore as a marginal player -- a supreme assclown like Donald Trump can get slavish coverage for two full months to pimp his piece-of-shit teevee show in the guise of political aspiration, and pull out with the assurance that he could win this if he rilly wanted ta, and they just fucking stenograph it, like it ain't no thing. Sarah Palin has choked up the media cloaca for a full two years and counting now. Every network stentorously announced the withdrawal of Serious Player Mitch Daniels, without remembering to mention that he was Dubya's budget director for a few years, and thus had at least a thumb in how things ran for some time. And so forth.

So it goes with Harold Camping, and his happy if woefully misguided campers. The question is not "why is this a story" -- of course a nutjob radio preacher predicting global cataclysm is "a story" -- the question is "how did this story persist for a couple weeks". It's gone on and on like this for quite some time, seemingly more and more so as time goes on. Each news cycle seems more nonsensical, more relentlessly stupid than the last.

With this "story", one could play devil's advocate for a second, if one were so inclined. Consider not only the scope, scale, and frequency of natural disasters just his year so far, but the intractability of man-made catastrophes the world over. The destruction of the American economy and way of life continues apace, with no foreseeable respite. Your elected officials have been bought and paid for by the very people they need to prosecute, and who continue to drive the entire economy -- and thus, your way of life and that of your neighbors -- into the dirt. And the rest of the world, so much of it post-colonial, has suffered far worse for far longer, much of it at our hands.

Maybe the people who die in these natural disasters, or who take themselves and their families out as a response to creatively engineered desitution from afar, are actually being raptured. I hold it as no serious philosophical construct, nor do I want to disrespect the memories of those unfortunate souls. But if one believes in such outlandish ideas, one just never knows for sure.

Credentialism

So I finished my final MBA class this past Saturday. I still have to complete the directed internship, but the project is already mostly done, I just have to compile some survey results and make the pitch.

It's been an interesting two years, to say the least. I went in with two and only two goals for attaining the degree:

1. Open more professional doors. As I will turn 44 in a few days, it occurs to me that my career path needs to be more, shall we say, solidified, lest I meet the standard American working class dog's fate of working till the day I drop, leaving the cubicle farm feet first, a life by definition less than fulfilled. In other words, time to shit or get off the pot, professionally speaking. Until I start pulling down at least high-five/low-six figures, jury's still out on that one.
2. Gain more knowledge, of how and why things work, of specialized areas, of where to refer when in need. Really, to put it in somewhat Rumsfeldian terms, to learn more about the unknown unknowns, the things about which I didn't even know I didn't know. This goal was attained much more closely than the first one, because of the trade secret of the MBA -- you don't have to memorize everything from every class you take, every factoid that's pumped into your head, you just have to recall where to look it up for reference.

Of course, there were other valuable lessons, most of which I already knew but were reinforced with various degrees of vigor. The textbook industry is a goddamned racket, from author to printer; your instructors, while chock-full of the bien pensant sentiments one would expect sinecured academics to be flush with, are still susceptible to the same strains of peer pressure and business expectations as any of us in the real world are; you are handed rote ethical nostrums to dutifully recite, as if they were the bidnessman's Hippocratic Oath, without the rich context the ongoing shenanigans in the financial sector so abundantly provide; you need to memorize and regurgitate, and speak extemporaneously on the matter -- whatever it may be, balanced scorecards, Porter's five forces, why EVA is infinitely more important and useful than EBITDA -- as if your very life depends on it.

Most of all, what is reinforced is a rather unique arrangement, where you are both student and consumer, a role somehow both inherently subordinate yet festooned with Important Surveys on how well you enjoyed your extraordinarily high-priced product. It is a very strange business model, perhaps unique -- just as the insurance industry is the only major business model that is predicated on the company not providing the service for which it has already been paid, so the post-secondary edumacation system is the only model that caters to you even as it pushes you around.

It's been an enoyable experience, the way I assume a triathlon is for its participants -- it's an accomplishment just to complete it, really. But from the start, despite my goals and high-handed sentiments about the process and quest for knowledge and value -- something I still believe, for myself at least -- I have always thought about the subtext of the first goal enumerated above.

This is perhaps the biggest racket of all in the university system, this idea that a piece of paper is so incredibly valuable that it trumps all else, and thus is worth paying a couple years' wages (if it gets you the job it's supposed to, a tenuous proposition at best these days) for. And the truth is, it is and it isn't -- there is value attached to that piece of paper, so long as its holder realizes that there are people with nothing more than high school diplomas doing the same job just as well.

And really, now that I know where to look, and what to read, and with all the free resources on Teh Intartubez, I can tell you right now that the knowledge is available for free, or for less than $200 worth of books anyway, so you really are paying the big bucks for the credential.

I knew this from day one, to have it confirmed is alternately frustrating (because I still have to pay for the privilege) and comforting (because even with my worst assumptions about people and things, I love being proven right, which I always am).

All that said, it's been a fun ride. I love the library, I love the campus and the energy of it. I can see why some people never want to leave. But in the end, I do think that once the health-care battle has been more adequately addressed, it may occur to folks that granting more accessibility to higher education will lead to better macro outcomes in a rapidly crumbling society. You can't keep gouging kids at every turn, and expect them to just want to keep "getting ahead", especially when more and more that just means for them a decade or so of student loan repayments.

Your Awful Media, Part 15,864,573

Few things in this blessed life are more puling and obnoxious than the clubby back-patting of skeevy assholes:

This time, there was no "gotcha" moment, no kill-the-messenger pushback. Asked for comment about a child born out of wedlock, Arnold Schwarzenegger's camp simply gave up the goods.

It was quick, clean, surgical.

Schwarzenegger wasn't given a way out, the reporter who broke the story tells Howard Kurtz on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" on CNN. There was nothing to confirm or deny.

"It was true," says Los Angeles Times political reporter Mark Barabak. "They knew it was true, we knew it was true; they knew that we knew it was true. So it was pretty straightforward at that point."

Barabak does not say precisely how the paper got the story. He credits old-fashioned "shoe leather" for chasing the lead down.

Hmmm, yes, good ol' intrepid mediabots, with their shoe leather and Slap Maxwell hats and moxie and gumption and what-not. Praise be the shade of Edward Fucking Murrow, eh? I mean, the kid's only fourteen years old, ferchrissake. I guess they deserve some credit for getting to the bottom of this pressing mystery before the kid grew up, left home, started a family of his own. Nicely done, way to be on that proverbial ball.

I wonder what it would be like if more members of this particular "profession" devoted this degree of time and effort to, say, getting to the bottom of how Wall Street continues to rob this nation blind and stupid. Nah, it's much easier to sniff up Arnold Schwarzenegger's ass, harass the homely cow he porked and knocked up, as well as her hapless family. Let Matt Taibbi do all the Wall Street stuff himself. Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Usually I would just have the smug "we get the media we deserve" riposte to this sort of shit, but the easy jape fails me at this point. These are just bad, lazy human beings. It's bad enough that they peddle non-stories for a self-selecting audience of mouth-breathers; it's much worse that they're actually proud of it. Keep on livin' that dream.

Brand Newt Day

So Pravda's Dan Balz musta drew the short straw on reportage of the Republigoon clown car revving up for next fall. Instead of the tee-ball shots of crazymilfs Snowbilly Spice (Palin) or Mary Tyler Moron (Bachmann), Balz gets stuck with pimping eight-chinned pseudo-intemellectual Newt Gingrich. And pimp that shit he does, like it's a sixteen-going-on-thirty-year-old runaway:

Through intellect and ambition, Gingrich has kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on health care, education, energy and foreign affairs. “Newt’s been the Republican Party’s main idea man for close to a generation,” said Terry Holt, a Republican strategist who closely observed Gin­grich as speaker. “This is a guy who brings unlimited energy and creative thinking to a race that needs new ideas.”

Gosh, it's as if we could just take a Republican strategist's word (and the title of Balz' write-up) and just assume for the sake of argument that Newt Gingrich is a "man of ideas". So much is Balz convinced of this that aside from a quote of Gingrich's asserting a standard wish list and a token nod to the usual states' rights guff, nowhere in the several hundreds of words does Balz remember to include an actual, workable idea enumerated by Gingrich.

Fortunately he does link to the propitiously-named American Solutions site, which graciously includes links to several of Newt's stabs at profundity. Here's a magickal slice of the "ideas" and "intellect" being sold, like a case of spiked cough syrup out of the back of some greaseball's '92 Camaro in an alley:

Let me say that Louie Gohmert that he is a terrific national asset. He has a remarkable range of innovative ideas.

It goes on, lauding Gohmert's "brilliant insight" and "courage" in protesting something Obama wanted to do. Let me say that Louie Gohmert is the drawling hump who apologized to British Petroleum, after their fucked-up equipment had killed eleven workers and polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico, for having to endure Obama's shameless shakedown of their bullshit mud-drilling operation. Let me say that Louie Gohmert needs to be reincarnated at least a dozen times as one or another hapless creature encrusted by industrial pollution, and then reincarnated as a fisherman who has to make his suicide look like an accident so his insurance company will pay off his shrimp trawler and not leave his survivors completely destitute.

Seriously, if you had to make a "fuck 'em right in the neck" list of mouthbreathing assholes in Congress, Louie Gohmert is almost guaranteed to make your top three or five. Every public appearance of Gohmert convinces me more that he is a product of careful genetic engineering, of warped scientists valiantly attempting to find a sweet spot, that perfect cross of willfully ignorant and obnoxiously mean. Not in the childish "those guys are meeeeaan!" sense, but in the real "this guy barely gives a fuck about his family, and certainly not about anybody else" sense.

But in all seriousness, all intellectual honesty, can you read that entire speech and find a coherent workable idea, and even a sketch of how it can be implemented? There's plenty of rhetoric, sure, but it wears about as thin as the usual liberal "let's be the best America we can be/it takes a village" counterpart.

The big ideas seem to be, in no particular order: Gut the tax and regulatory systems, because our crumbling infrastructure can repair itself, and nobody gives a fuck about coal miners until 50 of them suffocate under a mountain of unsafe rock that the MSHA was too defunded or defanged to catch before it collapsed. Indoctrinate the populace with the heroic epic of American Exceptionalism, because you just don't see that at every fucking turn right now, seriously. Talk about God a lot, because if he hasn't struck Newt down by now, he must be pretty forgiving. And so forth.

(Even Gingrich's newfound god-bothering is off a touch; he claims that God has forgiven Gingrich's numerous transgressions, yet apparently does not hold out for the possibility that He might forgive the transgressions of Gingrich's political opponents as well. Of course, Gingrich is too busy effeminizing them and casting them as job-killers to notice this intellectual inconsistency. But then, that would presuppose that he has ever been intellectually honest in the first place. I'm not sure even Dan Balz really believes that.)

I get why Newt Gingrich thinks those things count as ideas; what I don't get is why Dan Balz thinks they count as ideas. See, an idea has to be more than "cut taxes" or "cut spending" -- you then have to explain the expected consequences and outcomes of these actions. If I say "cut spending", I should have to say what I want to cut, by how much, and how that will tangibly help the budget deficit. Every one of these goddamn "cut spending" clowns has the same schtick -- find some bullshit drop-in-the-bucket program that's politically unpopular but fiscally meaningless, and uphold it as the ne plus ultra of government irresponsibility and hedonism.

Crucial to this tactic is avoiding all mention of the Big Three spending programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Oh sure, once in a while one of the dumber and meaner ones will actually have the cojones to talk about privatizing Social Security, before catching themselves in a sudden rush of memory of how no one's really all that hot anymore to hand their paychecks over to the geniuses who monkeyfucked the world economy. And paid themselves nice fat bonuses for doing so, just because they could. Other than that, those things don't get brought up a whole lot.

It's like driving down a road that has three lane-wide, impossible-to-miss, car-swallowing potholes, and making a big show about the bug splattered on your windshield, acting like the potholes aren't there. Of course, this is constitutent-driven for the most part; the baby boomers are more than happy to ensure they get theirs and fuck over my generation completely and utterly, just like they always have.

And raging militarism is crucial to perpetuating important nationalist control myths, so the only cuts to the military will be in things that directly affect service personnel, such as post-trauma care, post-military job assistance, housing assistance for families while troops are deployed, etc. That's how that one works out. There'll always be enough money in the budget to bankroll another flying contraption the Air Force doesn't want, or to run formation exercises at the Raiders game. When your main concern is maintaining the budget for symbolism, the big cuts always come out of substantial stuff first. So guaranteed, any military cuts will come out of troops' backs.

Anyhoo, so again, Mr. Idea Man. I've reread the speech a couple times, just not seeing anything besides Mitch Albom-level stories and American Legion boilerplate. (And seriously, whoever transcribed this speech must have used cheap voice-recognition software. Fucking proofread once in a while, m'kay? Looks like a slow third-grader scooped this shit out. "Baton" Death March, seriously? Fugging chumps.)

Near as I can tell, Newt Gingrich has had exactly three big ideas in his entire political career -- mastering a precise vocabulary of loaded words guaranteed to antagonize and conceal rather than elucidate; cluttering up school boards and city councils with red-meat window-lickers who, while largely unelectable at higher levels, are useful for local rabble-rousing and policy shenanigans; and portraying himself as some sort of intellectual emeritus of the wingnut brigade. That last one is simple; when you're competing against marginal oafs like Palin and Bachmann, you pretty much win if you can get through a speech without drooling on yourself.

Ironically though, no matter how much he preaches his bullshit gospel about Christ's forgiveness, it's the issue of morality that will be Newt's undoing (assuming, in fact, that he's running because he genuinely wants to win and thinks he can win, as opposed to Fred Thompson's cute little take-the-money-and-run grift he pulled on the short-bus crowd a couple years back). The morality issue, in his case, is bad even for a politician.

Put it this way -- as a stereotypical godless, hedonistic sybarite, while I don't personally approve of fucking around on one's spouse or significant other, I don't make it a criterion for the people I elect to implement public policy. So, yeah, I found it distasteful and unsurprisingly tacky, even a minor source of irritation that Bill Clinton got his pole smoked by a chunky intern whilst discussing troop deployments in the Balkans. And I was weirded out by Clinton's bizarre compartmentalism, that he seriously felt that jerking off in a sink, instead of ejaculating in said intern's mouth, somehow absolved him of cheating on his wife, or having sex with a sub-sub-subordinate. And his smirking parsimony over the meanings of simple words was just obnoxious. But like most folks, I was far more irritated at the hypocrites who were all too happy to basically shut down the entire government to mess with him over it.

Chief among these scumbags was Gingrich. Maybe I am just a little bit square on the subject, because I simply cannot get my brain around a person who persecutes a colleague for doing the exact same thing he himself is doing at the same time. One expects at least some small measure of honor among thieves, but Gingrich time and again has shown himself to be a man utterly without honor, devoid of character. Expecting character and honor of one's openly purchased politicos is a fool's errand in the first place, but it's one Gingrich's party runs to every chance they get. Maybe for once we should take them up on that.

Update: Anonymous in comments reminds me that it was, in fact, Joe Barton who apologized to BP, not Louie Gohmert, proving conclusively that I cannot tell these inbred goobers apart. Amazingly, Gohmert is an even bigger shithead than Barton, so he'll probably serve at least another ten terms.

Tardocalypse Now

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this country desperately needs an enema. Take your pick at what's more morally repugnant -- the shameless racism, the mind-boggling illiteracy, or the complete inability to compose anything remotely resembling a coherent fucking thought. Truly, the best part of every single one of these halfwits ran down the cracks of their mommas' asses and ended up as a brown stain on a dirt road.

Some days you just figure that maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

[Via Gin and Tacos.]

Freedom of Screech

Looks like someone just got a lesson about speaking his mind during our week-long Two Minutes of Woofing.

"Nothing I said was meant to stir up controversy. It was my way to generate conversation. In looking at my timeline in its entirety, everything that I've said is with the intent of expressing a wide array of ideas and generating open and honest discussions, something I believe we as American citizens should be able to do. Most opinions will not be fully agreed upon and are not meant to be. However, I believe every opinion should be respected or at least given some thought. I apologize for the timing as such a sensitive matter, but it was not meant to do harm. I apologize to anyone I unintentionally harmed with anything that I said, or any hurtful interpretation that was made and put in my name."

Well, son, I'll see your reasoned attempt at civil discourse and intellectual honesty, and raise you a "USA! USA!" I mean, c'mon kid, whaddaya expe -- Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! -- expect here? You work for a professional sports league, one of the most die-hard bastions of mundane jingoism in American daily life. Every game starts off with the national anthem; NFL games frequently feature flag or color guard ceremonies, flying in formation over the stadium, etc. Nobody ever bothers to ask what any of these rituals has to do with watching extremely large and fast men beat the hell out of each other for an afternoon, it's just accepted as given. As a form of mass conditioning, it's about as unsubtle as it gets.

I'm actually impressed with how well Mendenhall expresses himself, and how sincere he comes off. But he shows a very profound misunderstanding of his station and his audience if he really thinks -- or even just hopes -- any of his fans want to engage in a debate (or even mild thought) about this stuff. These are people who will literally beat each other into a fucking coma for rooting for the wrong team, wearing the wrong jersey. Questioning the ritual is not within easy reach of most of 'em's intellectual toolbox. Not exactly a secret.

The questioning part for them only goes one way -- towards anyone not buying into what the angry mob is doing. It's like sitting down while the rest of the stadium does The Wave (remember that?) -- nobody appreciates your gesture to reason, they just give you the stinkeye for being a dick. Tribal signifiers, yo. This is pure lizard-brain stuff, and there's just no winning a debate with it. When Art Rooney has to step in on the CYA tip, you know you screwed the proverbial pooch. That's life in the gladiator class. Good luck with it.

A Star Is Bored

Howie Kurtz helpfully transcribes what may turn out to be the very truest thing ever said about oh-so-brief-but-transcendentally-brilliant phenomenumbskull, La Palin:

“Her real constituency is the media,” says former John McCain adviser Mike Murphy, who views Palin as a “niche candidate” incapable of winning the nomination. “The media have always overestimated her appeal. They’re drunk with interest in covering her. It’s a partnership—they’re in business together.”

Indeed. The downside of all this wondrous technology at our fingertips is that it's enabled this slovenly, grotesque infoporn market to crop up amidst us, influence the order of things inside-out and upside-down by sheer muscle and gall. The 24-hour news cycle, which is really the same half-hour of sound bites on a repeat loop, 48 times per day times a bazillion channels, has metastasized into the perpetual campaign industry machine. From the very second an election ends, discussion of the next one commences, two years or four down the road.

Remember a mere half-decade ago, when a preponderance of the country -- indeed, the world at large -- were certain that American hubris, id, and willful stupidity had reached its blessed apotheosis with the Bush/Cheney junta? You want to go back in time and warn those naive, beaten souls of the depths to come, made possible in very large part by people whose sole purpose is to sell pharmaceuticals and big trucks, with dressed-up factoids and famous nobodies paraded in between, a constant barrage of mediocrity at best, dangerous buffoonery most of the time.

But golly gosh, I sure do hope it all works out for Saint Sarah. She's just given so darn much in the service of pure fabulism, calumny, and chronic butthurt over the meekest response to her constant smartassery. It takes an empty industry to reward an empty personage, white noise for white noise, for the esteemed pundits to parse.

The clown car is crowded for the Republitards these dark days, made darker still by the fact that enough 'murkins are just stupid enough to vote 'em back in anyway. What would we do without Sarah's free-verse burbling, her snowbilly glossolalia, runway-circling syntax displaying a truly accomplished lack of knowledge on an impressive array of subjects? Friends 'n' neighbors, it really is hard goddamned work to go nearly fifty years in life without being able to converse competently on at least something, even trickier to gull millions of gomers into admiring you for it.

If this politics thing doesn't work out for her, there's still time for her to get into journamalism.

A Small Victory

A crackling portrait, the fondling of trophies
The null of losing, can you afford that luxury?
A sore winner, but I'll just keep my mouth shut
It shouldn't bother me....but it does
-- Faith No More

Heading into this past weekend, after two solid months of Charlie Sheen/Donald Trump/royal wedding guff from the rancid husk that passes for our corporate media, I had plotted out the usual pained jeremiad lamenting that which has at this point already been long lost. Sometimes it feels good to sing a familiar song, vent spleen into pixillated void, edit it into something passable.

Process, as they say, is important.

Needless to say, the events of the past 48 hours have cast my would-be picayune musings into rather sharp relief. Ever undeterred and still endlessly annoyed by the (seemingly paradoxical) abdication of a vacant institution, I have to lob at least a couple of scuds on the aforementioned inanities. The continued boosting of said inanities only feeds into the lame meme of the lamestream media, yet damned if it is not becoming more and more true.

Useta be that the meringue stories fell into a certain time of year when folks' attentions were presumed to be only incidentally tuned to the teevee. Moving summer-of-the-shark type crap into heavy rotation during March and April only makes one wonder what fresh hell awaits the unsuspecting person who might actually expect something, anything, newsworthy to float through their electronic transom during the summer.

Instead we get a vapid, overblown nobody with a crappy show traveling the country and making a complete jackass of himself; an inbred Hanoverian dynasty desperately trying to sling the tinsel of relevance on its archaic, completely useless offices and ceremonies -- and of course, Charlie Sheen.

Sheen's case is reprehensible for its simplicity, for starters -- a man is self-destructing, seemingly at a mile a minute, in front of America, and fucking with his bosses the entire time, while keeping up a level of whoring and drug intake that would have brought down most people. Everybody loves a train wreck, but not when it's drawn out so far past its shelf like, and not when it culminates in the likes of Matt Lauer pumping some weedy teevee therapist about What Charlie Should Do. Well, Matt, maybe Charlie should do his next bump off yer wife's ass, champ. How ya like them apples? It's just cheap, tawdry voyeurism at its worst.

Trump and the Windsors were just exhausting in the Jesus-Christ-who-in-their-right-mind-fucking-cares sense. The idea that anyone, besides shut-ins and morbidly obese people with broken remote controls, would watch royal wedding crap for three blessed weeks straight is utterly perplexing. It quite literally makes zero sense, except as the most abject, desperate attempt at marketing -- I dunno, tourism, wedding dresses, something along that line.

Considering that family of theirs, the princes seem like more or less normal decent people, who just happen to be able to get pretty much anyone and anything they want. One of 'em got married. Seriously, I mean, big fucking deal, are they going to follow the new couple to Mustique and film them having sex? It's difficult to escape the impression that this is not really a demand-driven market, but rather something that is pimped and pumped until certain segments just give in.

That's also the only sensible explanation for why anyone would watch more than five seconds of Trump's estimable contribution to the body cultural. Yes, F-list has-beens and never-weres threatening each other and pulling out each others' weaves. Why not just beat your own skull in with a large rock and have done with it?

Trump's bizarre attempts at political jabber make his weekly NBC abortion look like fine craft. Perhaps this is all performance art, just another distraction aimed at the already overly-distracted. Nevertheless, the fuck-China, take-their-fuckin-oil, whaddaya-gonna-do-bout-it-fuckface attitude capture perfectly a deeply ingrained, reflexively ignorant posture in the 'murkin body politic. He's the perfect preznit for people who confuse endlessly promoted scenes of Meat Loaf and Gary Busey screaming at each other with reality, much less with entertainment.

---

For a few years in the late '90s, I had a pirate rig on my satellite teevee system, basically an ancient PC with (iirc) a 386 processor, whose sole function was to simulate code for the satellite card reader. Periodically DirecTV would catch on, disable the code, and you'd wait a couple hours for a new code to pop up online and load (via floppy disk, mind you) over to the system. It was pretty sweet, since we got everything -- all the sports packages, all the movies, all the porn, yada yada.

There were also all the local network packages for something like two dozen markets around the country, New York, LA, Chicago, Jacksonville, what have you. It was cool to check out other local news teams, get some local weather, see what the weather bunny looked like, the usual. You could watch Live at Five at 2:00 Pacific time, Letterman at 8:30.

One thing that became a guilty pleasure -- perhaps because of its total spontaneity, perhaps simply because I'm originally from Los Angeles -- was when the 5:00 LA news would air a police chase, completely live, no delay, nothin'. Sometimes I'd recognize neighborhoods I had lived in or near, sometimes these things would go on for much longer than you thought they could. Some of these would-be getaway drivers (and they always get caught, of course) are pretty inventive, dumb as they are for thinking that they actually have a shot at getting away from the LAPD.

So one fine afternoon an epic chase comes on, goes on for at least fifteen minutes, not in the heart of the city, but the sprawling, interchangeable communities bordering it, your Norwalk, your Bellflower, your Cerritos, etc. Through alleys, around corners, backtracking around blocks, knocking garbage cans, sideswiping and cutting people short, narrow misses every few seconds. Crazy shit. This putz was endangering people, but you almost had to have a grudging respect for his sheer animal will, his utter belief that he would not be caught. The helicopter, the all-seeing eye, captures every move, every dodge, every squealing, frantic turn.

Finally he comes up on an overpass, hemmed in because, well, it's LA and it's fucking rush hour, and you ain't getting near any freeway in a hurry. Sits there parked on the overpass for a minute. Helicopter starts zooming in its focus, so's you could see the profile of the guy through the driver-side window, actually see his face fairly well. Naturally, there is periodic commentary throughout from the meat puppets at the anchor desk, peppered with the usual bons mots from the one in the copter, and by now, they're in the "well, what's he gonna do now?" mode.

Welp, here's what he does, friends 'n' neighbors -- while the copter has its nice tight shot on this gentleman sitting in his ancient, now-beaten Monte Carlo, no doubt pondering the sequences and patterns of decision-making and impulse control, both throughout his life and on that particular day, which led him to this particular fork in the proverbial road, he blows his fucking brains out. If anyone had any doubts about whether these chases were completely live, no delays, they were certainly dispelled that tragic instant. Suddenly it's no longer fun and games. Needless to say, the station was shocked at such an outcome, and made some changes.

There's yer reality teevee, folks. All these circle jerk shows, with their barely-vicarious nonsense, manipulative scripting and editing, and intensely manufactured and programmatic setups, taking weeks to "tell" a "story" that should really take a couple hours (and isn't interesting to begin with), featuring idiots that you wouldn't let clean your gutters, are nothing, just filler between endless ads for overpriced vodka and completely unnecessary pharmaceuticals.

Used to be that if you didn't like a show, you could avoid it by changing the channel. But with endless cross-promotion cluttering up blocks of time formerly devoted at least to somewhat newsworthy subjects, that is less and less the case. This has been amplified by the onslaught of Trump, posturing dickhead bloviating to anything and everything that looks like a microphone, blustery nonsense guaranteed to aggravate our creditors and give credence to the notion around the rest of the world that Americans will fall for damned near any ricockulous notion.

Even, as it turns out, the fuckwitted idea that a casino owner -- you know, the business model where people come in, drop off money, and leave -- who has managed to go bankrupt four times, might be a good or even competent businessman. But again, this seems much more media-driven than truly demand-driven (not to mention, for NBC, a pretty cheap and obvious conflict of interest, for which they really deserve a nice boycott). But it is also an inescapably ugly instance of the innate, lame voyeurism that pervades the popular culture at large. People feel compelled to gawk, even when there's nothing at all to see.

Maybe is the true palpable cultural residue of "reality" teevee -- people no longer have the urge -- perhaps not even the capacity -- to discern what has value and utility, and ignore or reject the toxic emissions of this ocean of dross. At some point, one would think, people might get sick of Trump's obnoxious preening and increasingly dismal choices for contestants. But then, the Survivor thing still seems to be on, weirdly, inexplicably. I still think dropping a crate of weapons on the next site would liven things up.

---

So. Bin Laden, eh? Good riddance and all that, but it's strange, this woofing, chest-thumping dynamic. The surprise Moe Greene-ing of bin Laden seems to have awakened our inner Homer Simpson, never too far below the surface in the first place.

9/11, you'll recall, itself brought out some baser, more opprtunistic impulses -- suddenly every inbred dipshit who had always trashed NYC as a multiculti librul enclave knew how best to avenge the city's honor, even though the majority of New Yorkers themselves, once the initial shock was over and cleanup had commenced, seemed determined to get up, brush off, and move on. The people with the least direct investment seemed the most bloodthirsty, especially in their eagerness to turn everything ending in -stan into a parking lot. The bloodlust was completely undiffused by important questions, such as who and how, and what the most rational course with the best outcome might be. People just wanted to go fuck up the first guy that looked cross-eyed at them. So we did.

This time, the bloodlust is undiffused by any rational thought about the results of killing bin Laden. It is not going to bring one (1) soldier home from a war zone a day earlier; it is not going to save a dollar or a dime from the military budget. It is still going to be standard procedure to molest travelers and confiscate toothpaste at airports; we will still detain people without charge or recourse, without defense or representation.

But one expects woofing from five-digit crowds at sporting events; that is, after all, the original, time-tested purpose of mobs gathered in stadia, drunk on $8 trash beer, deep-fried organ meats, and an unstoppable sense of self-regard. More offputting was an exchange I happened across yesterday on the public Nice Polite Republicans station, home of the soothing, dulcet-toned panderers of reasonable discourse. One of these indistinguishable gits was counseling a caller who had lost a loved one in the Towers, was still grieving of course, and had possibly achieved closure with this latest news. Good for him; after unspeakable tragedy, everyone needs to find whatever works for them to screw up the courage to soldier on and make the most of it.

But it struck me during the counseling session, not how routine these genuflections to public grief have become, but how invisible the grief of innocents who had our rage inflicted on them has always been. I recall stories of mothers literally digging through gardens of limbs, walled slaughterhouses of parts, looking for some sign of a lost child. I recall Fallujah getting white phosphorus, cheerfully referred to as "Willy Pete", which melts your skin off, being indiscriminately spewed into large cities under siege, to subdue them, force capitulation. I recall Abu Ghraib, prisoners humiliated and raped for the amusement of their pervert captors, and beaten and killed at times. There is never, and will never be, so much as a thought or a care for any of these lost souls, all of them preventable, none of them necessary, a great many of them genuinely innocent of any misdeed whatsoever, aside from being in the way.

Don't get me wrong -- the world is better off without the likes of bin Laden, and "moral equivalence" attempts to square the grief of 9/11 with the grief of the Iraq war will always ring false, as moral equivalence tends to. The SEAL team that went in and accomplished this mission did amazing precision work, truly a surgical strike. There will be foreign-policy implications, but there always are, no matter what we do, right or wrong. There is something here to celebrate and be proud of.

It's the public grief-plumbing that puts me off. It's just the stark, grotesque disparity of it all, one endlessly fetishized and the other long dropped down the memory hole. Most unbecoming of such a Christian nation, since perhaps the most durable tenet of that particular religion may be the principle of empathy.

Although I constantly claim to be "perplexed" by the manifest oddities of the world around us, and its cantankerous, misbegotten denizens, the reality is that the capacity for genuine surprise seems long gone.

Trump Card

Efuckingnough of this combforward tool on my fucking teevee, and these supposed "polls" touting his viability. Is there one (1) lamestream media entity who has the balls to step up and call bullshit on this assclown?

Look, let's break this down into simple empirical components, regarding Trump's supposed interest in running for president:

1. Either he is serious or he is not serious.
2. Either he is viable or he is not viable.

Okay then, let's take these one at a time, and lay out rational responses from a responsible media to each instance. Serious or not serious? If he is presumed to be serious, then he should immediately be prodded for specifics. It is not enough to lob cheap "no shit, Sherlock" rhetorical scuds like "increase revenue and cut spending" (which surely will leave generations of economists and politicians scratching their heads, wishing they had thought of such a brilliant proposal), a serious contender gives at least some indication as to how these goals can be accomplished.

If he is presumed to not be serious about running (and I am 99.999% convinced that this is the case), then the media entities in question need to stop giving him high-profile opportunities for his tedious ankle-biting, and call bullshit on him forthwith.

The question of viability is much simpler. Let me put it in a way that even the kids in the cheap seats can see clearly -- if Donald Trump is even remotely viable to become President of these here Yewnighted States, then this country really has well and truly lost its collective fucking mind.

There is absolutely no reason in the world this fucktard should be in any conversation of serious people. Trump is merely another warm body in big floppy shoes, helping to stuff the Republitard clown car. He is there to make Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich look good.

Am I actually concerned that Trump has a shot? Of course not. For one thing, Trump is not serious about running. Oh, he's probably serious enough when he claims he could do a better job. But that's the thing -- he's an egocentric asshole. He seriously and completely believes that he's above ever having to explain anything to anybody. Which is, I suppose, technically true when you own your own business, you get to be boss.

But obviously being a successful politician requires having at least some collaborative skills, of understanding that the way you get all the pigs on your side is to let them have access to the trough. Trump's idea of success is gold-plating the trough and eminent-domaining all the land around it for another tacky casino, declare bankruptcy and scuttle back onto the scene yet again with an armload of cooze and a belly full of gall.

This whole thing is just a stretched out promotional stunt for his stupid fucking show, because what the world really needs right now is maximum eyeballs glued 200 hours a week to Meat Loaf and Gary Busey tearing each other's throats out. I do hope Meredith Vieira, when she gets home from helping Trump whore this godawful mess, takes a good long look in the mirror and sobs a while; if she ever had a shred of journamalistic integrity left, it's just dander in Trump's forehead pelt at this point. Why not just abandon the pretense of "interviewing" this fucking toad, and just replace the Today show with an endless looping promo of Trump's piece-of-shit time-waster?

So. It's a big lie, and everyone knows it -- he's not serious, and he's not viable. The only way he runs is if there's money in it. But on the off chance that you, Tonstant Weader, have the grim misfortune to run into some truncheon-to-the-skull fuckwit of your acquaintance who voices their approval of this nonsense, and wants Trump to run so they can vote for him, there is only one sensible question to be asked of said fuckwit:

If the biggest crisis facing America right now is jobs, then why would you want to vote for some fifth-rate reality show hack whose sole talent is firing people?

Or, a Baby's Arm Holding an Apple

Since the only things this country produces reliably well anymore are perpetual war and perpetual campaigning, it is no surprise to find that Obama has officially tossed his hat in the ring for the election eighteen blessed months from now. It is of even less surprise that the most predictable by-product to emanate from these endless campaigns comes a-wafting from the cloaca of SF Comical columnist Mark Morford:

To the sneering disappointment of the puritanical left, Obama has turned out to be pretty much exactly what he said he'd be during his '08 campaign: flawed, exceedingly moderate, a resolute compromiser, overly pragmatic when he should've been a badass, temperate when he should've been white hot and furious, offering concessions when he should be bringing the hammer down.

In short, Obama has failed. He has not at all been the delicious chocolatey superjesus of radical sociopolitical transformation most on the hard left hoped, prayed and sacrificed precious Prius bumper ad space he would be.

Heh. Indeed. Yes, the peons, it seems, have been insufficiently grateful for all the wonderful things Obama has done for them. Shame on them. Bad peons!

Enough. Look, the man had plenty of opportunities early on to do at least some of the things he said he would do -- end a war of futility in Afghanistan, finish a troop drawdown from Iraq, rein in the rapacious bad-faith behavior of scumbag bankstas. See, I don't have a Prius, motherfucker. I have a house that's worth less than it was ten years ago, because Clinton and Rubin thought it'd be a super idea to gut the Glass-Stegall Act, and to monkeyfuck the securitization laws, leaving the door wide open for Lloyd and Jamie and their henchmen to totally ass-rape the economy, and make everyone else pay their eight-figure retention bonuses. Because they're soooo fucking skilled, you see.

We all get that politics is the art of the possible. The problem is that neither Obama, nor the Democrat supermajority, even tried to make their electoral mandate count. They shot their political capital on an industry-underwritten boondoggle for "health care reform", and came up for air only to find that not only did it not create any jobs, but that it didn't even really resolve the problem it purports to resolve. And then they had nothing else to work with, to get anything else accomplished.

So here we are. And yes, we all get that the Republicans seem to be content sifting through what charitably seems to be a carny freak show of unelectable poltroons -- and worse yet, Newt Gingrich. But really, isn't it part of the problem, that even up against a laughingstock ticket, Obama and the Democrats still always manage to find themselves instinctively punting on first down, or sucking up to the hand that inevitably slaps them?

How else does the fucking budget -- after Obama conceded more than the Republicans wanted in the first place -- get hung up on Planned Parenthood, how does noted sheepfucker Jon Kyl trot out a blatant lie about over 90% of PP's services being abortion-related, and the Dems don't have the stones even to denounce that? And we're supposed to vote for that shit, gratefully, unquestioningly, whatever 'n' ever, amen.

Get ready for another year and a half of this happy horseshit.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Obama's Libya campaign/non-war has reeked of Kosovo since day one, cynical and half-assed to its very core, and newer info only reinforces the similarities:

Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online.

Well, of course, it figures as much. The Saudis will do damn near literally anything to prevent anything resembling a true democratic uprising, including invading its neighbors. And not entirely without reason, from just about every standpoint -- the Saudi populace teems with young, unemployed, ultraconservative men, not exactly a cure for high gas prices.

And what of all that, anyway? Where in Obama's recent homilies to energy independence has the notion of conservation, of reducing not only consumption but waste, been seriously mentioned? The White House's own energy page pays scant lip service to the idea in its extensive back-patting laundry list, with a brief nod to "increase fuel efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution from medium- and heavy-duty trucks for Model Years 2014-2018". Oh, okay. Well, now that we've got the when (several years down the road, per usual, so whatever claque of gutless poseurs has the reins then can simply eviscerate the measures, however modest), from what to what? Doesn't say, just a brief mention about how "trucks consume more than two million barrels of oil every day, and average 6.1 miles per gallon."

So the path to "energy independence" includes finding new and better ways of deepwater offshore drilling (which has worked out spectacularly in the Gulf of Mexico), and investing heavily in such low-EROEI techniques as shale oil (basically melting chunks of a mountain, and dealing with the hazardous waste) and buying tar-sands oil (basically steaming the oil out of enormous volumes of sand and soil, and dealing with the hazardous waste) from Canada.

None of this takes into account that these are not long-term methods for retrieval, that even beyond the environmental issues, there is the matter of physics and math. The oil is getting more and more difficult to get to, while demand just keeps increasing. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the best way to stretch whatever supplies remain is to conserve. This used to not be a bad word, before marketers figured out that far too many 'murkins cannot help themselves when it comes to self-actualizing through their choice of vehicle.

I say this not as a hater of the internal combustion engine -- I have worked in the manufacturing and motorcycle industries in the past, and appreciate many makes of car for the works of functional art they truly are. There is a freedom and a vigor to the simple act of driving that is difficult to replicate in the workaday drudgery that comprises the majority of existence for the lower 90% of the Globalized Corporate Merchant Principalities of the Yew Ess Ayy.

But we are running out, and that pace will only continue to accelerate as supplies dwindle further and demand ramps up, and maybe someone in the decision-making class oughta stand up and murmur in the affirmative that it may not be the most intelligent idea to drive everywhere in a jacked-up Suburban like some strutting ofay asshole.

This doesn't automatically mean that the bombing of Libya is all about oil, unless of course it is. But even if it is not, one finds more often than not that blowback from foreign policy decisions (or lack of) frequently correlates with blowback from energy policies (or lack of). This is from a lack of coherence, of principle, of even a modicum of foresight and a minimum of discipline.

Shaw was, of course, devastatingly correct in opining that youth is wasted on the young,and that frivolous mentality is certainly writ large in this instance. It is not that living for today is necessarily bad, or that people should live quiet lives of deprivation any more than they already do. But when people live only for today, and collectively pretend that tomorrow will never come, and are shocked when it does show up and there are consequences to pay, it's kinda hard to feel sorry for them when they wonder why gas is going to be five bucks a gallon by Labor Day.


Update: Ahahaha. Of course, it figures. Even as we lob missiles at Qadafi, at $1M per, we're also bailing out his bank. I know I spent a great deal of the Cheney regime kvetching about their consistent incompetence, but sweet jeebus, these chumps give them a run for their stolen money at nearly every turn.

My Booky Wook

One certainly hopes "Pastor" Terry Jones is proud of himself. After all, it's not every day you can get innocent people killed with your idiot shenanigans; normally you have to be in a decision-making capacity in the federal government to accomplish that feat.

But Jones is no ordinary idiot -- in fact, perhaps inspired by his Yosemite Sam choice in facial hair, Jones has found a fairly innovative way to extend his sheer ridonkulosity:

Two weeks ago, with no advance notice, the burning was on again. The Quran was torched after a mock trial in which the book was found guilty of various transgressions.

Terry Jones howlds trile fer th' Caurt o' Jaybus.

Yes, a mock trial for a religious text. No word on whom "represented" the "defense", nor what, if any, transcript exists. This asshole's theatricality -- a clergyman who packs heat! -- knows no bounds. Straight outta the 12th century, y'all.

Of course, Jones figgers that the barbaric response simply proves his point. And he's not entirely wrong about the differences in response to fairly mundane events -- as corrupt and messed-up as Teh West and/or "Christendom" might be, there is simply no analog in the western world to the deadly riots that occur across Islamistan when someone draws a cartoon or burns some books.

But if we are results-oriented, this is not entirely relevant. The fact is that Jones is a cheap, sleazy provocateur, willing to put people's lives at risk for a stupid stunt. His intent was to antagonize, not to prove some epistemological point.

More interesting is that it hasn't seemed to occur to anyone that perhaps at least part of the reason behind the riots is the desire to let unwanted guests know that it is time to leave. In many ways Afghanistan is a debauched, sick culture, where a bunch of overcompensating child-rapists keep their society square in the dark ages by the systematic, violent repression of women.

Yes, America treats its women like second-class citizens, but Afghanistan treats them like hundredth-class citizens as a way of life. But the complicity of American companies in organized pedophilia -- not to mention American soldiers thrill-killing teenagers and old people, mutilating and desecrating corpses, acting like they're doing the world a goddamned favor by venting their frustrations on the weak and powerless -- brings us to that level. Whatever it is we think we're doing, it's not helping.

Now those are sensible reasons to riot -- except here, of course, where even the open gutting of the world's economy merely elicits more tweets on the comings and goings of assholes like Charlie Sheen or Donald Trump, rather than the immediate defenestration or guillotining of the perpetrators. But it's easier to oversimplify it as another instance of the wogs going batshit over a dumb book.

The decline of the empire continues apace, not only because of our institutional inability to know when to fold 'em, but our collective refusal to acknowledge plain facts right in front of us.

Land of Milk and Phony

This week's lame Palin analysis drops, in the context of a half-hearted disclaimer, a truth that says as much about the media as it does about Palin:

Who knows whether or not Palin will run for the nation's highest office. But if she does, comments like this one do little to make her sound presidential. For one, even if it was a joke, Palin was making light of something that has to do with the future of this country--the health and well-being of its children. And even if Palin spent most of the talk discussing deficits, health-care reform and foreign affairs, it's unnecessary side comments like these that will--whether she likes it or not--lead the news.

You know, I think we all got it a looong time ago that Palin is an empty-headed smartass. Running one smartass item after the next is, while entertaining, not terribly useful at this point. If in fact Palin did "spen[d] most of the talk discussing deficits, health-care reform and foreign affairs", even we accept the stupid fact that the media will always lead with the halfwitted jab at Obammy, it might be at least somewhat constructive if at least a paragraph or two were utilized to inform folks about Miss Thang's pronunciamentos on those subjects.

Palin has always been most revealing not when lobbing her cheesy punchlines, but when she tries to elucidate an actual opinion, tries to show she actually knows what she's talking about on any issue of importance. I think it's important to offer up to the public what her "solutions" to the Middle East, Iran, Libya, defecits driven by third-rail entitlements and bloated defense expenditures, health-care costs might be. It would, for one, force her increasingly ridiculous and self-marginalizing supporters to explain the inevitable gaffes and incoherencies, the dearth of ideas or solutions, or even the pretense of same.

It might be helpful if someone in our blessed corporate media thought these things important too, rather than spending their Palin time and space digesting and regurgitating one sub-borscht-belt line after another through its bloated cloaca. That would be too easy, and more importantly, counterproductive to the perpetual campaign industry.

Some $500 million or so was spent during the 2008 presidential campaign, and twice that is projected for next year's. It is in the vested interest of the vaunted fourth estate to keep a horse race going, to harvest clicks and eyes, sell ad space and commercials. The endless "will she/won't she" cock-tease keeps the game going, though everyone knows that she's not viable, incompetent, and probably doesn't want the job anyway. Beats workin'.