Bitter Suite

Some questions for Rosen:

• Will there be any haphazard sandbagging of the other two candidates, just to level the playing field? If so, when? If not, why not?


• Do you feel any share in the responsibility for generating this nonsense, besides invoking the law of unintended consequences and laying it at Russert's gouty feet?


• Implicit in the mission of the online mediapreneur is the sense that they are able to drive their own narrative without the help or hindrance of the corporate media. How does that square with this occurrence, in which Press the Meat was able to seize and skew that narrative on the basis of some poached quotes? What, if anything, do you or Fowler intend to do to either reclaim your own narrative, or generate a capable counter-narrative? Simply shrugging this off as one that got away from you is unacceptable beyond, say, the high-school newspaper level. You own this one, at least for needlessly enabling the Clinton campaign to start one more round of backstabbing before the PA primary.

Hell, it would be helpful for Rosen and/or Fowler to try to back their own inept exegesis on the "bitter" comment. Fowler herself manages some cheap, surface limo-lib-baiting, trying to waffle on divining what Obama "really meant".

I'm not sure this is what at least this lot of Californians needed to hear about Pennsylvanians. Such phrases can reinforce negative stereotypes among Californians, who are a people in a state already surfeited with a smug sense of superiority and, as an ironic consequence, a parochialism and insularity at odds with the innovation, prosperity and openness for which California is rightly known. (Of course, this is a generalization, and as such does not fit everyone; but as a state characteristic I stand by it.) Californians might be better served by hearing that Pennsylvanians have a strong sense of their place in American history, for here California is wanting. California needs to hear that other Americans have gone through hard times and survived, humor intact. Since Barack Obama sees himself as the candidate best able to unify the country, these are the messages he needs to carry and his frank words about Pennsylvania may not have translated very clearly.

Funny how coastal stereotypes are perfectly acceptable, but heaven forfend anybody look askance at flyover states, most of which take more federal tax dollars than they contribute. Unlike those smug Californians, with the 77¢ they get back for every dollar. You know, that state of douchebags where one in every nine Americans resides.

Why the hell are these dwindling road-to-nowhere states where everyone leaves so they can make more than $20k/year so inviolable and immune from even deserved criticism, but "San Francisco" is some sort of wink-and-a-nod code for, I dunno, "Barack Obama plans to let faggot schoolteachers buttfuck your chilluns in the hallway with impunity"? Perhaps most amazingly (or, you know, not) is the ease with which Clinton herself jumped on that "elitist San Francisco" bullshit. Whatever sympathy the Clintons may have generated in the course of two terms of smears and lies and calumniations must by now be completely gone. Indeed, they seem to have become precisely what they despise, which is the creeps and liars who made careers out of despising them.

How did we come to this, and why does the coastal elite media enable it so? I've said it a million times, but it bears repeating -- if Bobo Brooks and Tweety Matthews and the rest of these bozos like the heartland so much, then fucking move there. Don't hide your lights under the DC/Hamptons bushels, ladies, grab your overalls and get your farm on. Let us know how that works for y'all.

Another paragraph of Fowler's assessments of Obama's situation struck me as odd:

It's curious, then, that he often has such a hard time making a connection with many working class Americans. With plenty of time for people to get to know him, like in southern Illinois before his first state legislature race and in Iowa before the caucuses, Obama has forged that connection. People get comfortable with the way his mind works. Obama is the man with the big picture; he jumps quickly from the particular to the general and back again, for he makes sense of the world in a synchronic rather than a linear way. For all his soaring rhetoric, there is a dispassion about him. And yet he blends rationcinative intelligence with empathetic understanding. This is a rare combination, and for many people, this aspect of Obama takes some getting used to. His Puritanical streak, moreover, while amusing to the press can be off-putting to everybody else.

Let's get back to Ockham's Razor, folks; the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So let's take "small-town white working class antipathy to Obama" as a given, though I think it's a dubious assertion at best. But let's say it's true -- what are the most likely causes of that? The reflex assumption seems to be racism, but I don't buy that. More likely, it's simply a lack of familiarity with him, and an instinctive mistrust of someone who has risen so far so fast. Those are things that can be alleviated over the summer.

But if the problem really is racism, or suspicion of intellect, or any of the usual infantilizing tropes used to veil off these areas and social classes, then Clinton's efforts to capitalize on Obama's contrived misstep are for naught, because such people also would have issues with uppity wimmins, and certainly have issues with Clintons. She can poach a few slivers of percentage points here and there and raise doubt among the superdelegates over his electability all she wants, because those are things that will mostly redound to McCain in the fall.

And if people are having some sort of trouble acquainting themselves with Obama's supposedly complicated thought processes, well, isn't that their problem? They can't even seem to settle on whether he's too condescending or not condescending enough. Apparently he has to spell it out in see-Dick-run terms while downing a shot, eating a greasy slab of mystery meat and bowling a 300 game.

It's as if the notion of running the country doesn't even come up, which it might not for the sort of idiot who festers in the boonies, their biggest worry in life that someone out there thinks they're better'n you. Well, you show 'em, motherfucker. Go ahead and vote for Po' Boy McCain, and get exactly what's comin' to ya. Otherwise, get off your cross already -- as always, the rest of us could use the wood.

Friends Like These

Speaking of ratfucking, how 'bout that Lieberman? He's supposedly the closest thing Obama has had to a mentor in the Senate, and was at least nominally a Democrat until less than two years ago. And now he's openly campaigning with a Republican nominee who promises more of the same, and thinks it's a "good question" to wonder whether Obama -- Lieberman's supposed friend -- is a Marxist or an "elitist", as if the Senate itself is not an elite body by design.

At least scumbags like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove never tried to fool anyone about what they were, and what they were up to. Put it this way -- if Obama wins and doesn't immediately exile Holy Joe to the Senate version of Siberia (say, the Committee to Tickle Huckleberry Graham's Prostate), then he doesn't belong in the game. Lieberman's the sort of treacherous, slimy shit for whom tarring and feathering was invented.

Niche Empires

Not to unfairly disparage the feel-good aspect of your typical Bart's People stories, but it's hard to escape the notion that maybe having to live daily with the unspeakable burden of having had Rush Limbaugh's drug-withered nub in one or more of her orifices compels a girl to rebuild her karma. And hey, vaya con dios with all that, really. Everybody could use a little good news sometimes.

But continuing with today's little theme of words and phrases not quite jibing with useful real-world definitions, this jumped out as passing strange:

"In the news business, you have to get picked," said Kagan, ex-girlfriend of another media emperor, Rush Limbaugh.

Another "media emperor"? Look, I hate to get all nitpicky yet again on semantics, but shit, none of those three words has any actual meaning. Starting a website is just that, a nice thing but still not terribly significant. The book and the TV docs add to the portfolio, yet this does not quite an empire make. Although considering how shabbily CNN disposed of her (which seems to be a habit of theirs), her ambition is at least respectable.

And Limbaugh is a drug-addled creep who makes a lot of money calumniating his political opponents and disinforming the rubes that still listen to him, but outside his radio show he's nothing. He's only done a few books, and not for a while at that, and as far as I've ever heard, he owns no other media properties, aside from the website for his own radio show. He's a pernicious stain on the American media landscape, and the hell with him and his empire of dirt. Empires expand and conquer; Limbaugh is merely King Shit of Turd Hill.

These people barely qualify as media entities, in an already hopelessly supersaturated multimedia tableau. And maybe that's for the best; maybe in our new and improved digital age, we can all be emperors of our own little fractal empires, selling this or that trendy pig in a poke to one another. It's good to be king.

Metatardia

Full disclosure: even though Heidi Klum gives me a boner that's, as Richard Pryor used to say, harder than Chinese arithmetic, it would never occur to me to watch something called Project Runway, which I assume is exactly what it sounds like, which proves that my instincts are correct.

But though the article is at its blank corporate heart a decent thumbnail sketch of content infighting between vertically integrated media entities (on, let's keep in mind, the people's airwaves, which are currently clogged with all manner of eighth-rate pseudo-celebs sorting their sock drawers), its premise is lame from the gate.

Not even a catwalk catfight could prove as riveting as the behind-the-scenes sideshow that enveloped "Project Runway" last week.

With NBC Universal contesting in court the move of the unscripted series from its Bravo home to rival Lifetime, the TV industry has a war on its hands worthy of its own reality show.

Oh, snap! And why not? Celebrity Sock Drawer is just the beginning, assuming someone can track down Corey Feldman and Erik Estrada in the first place. You have to have the "making of" CSD; the "behind the scenes" profiles of the once-slightly-recognizable CSD participants, their various substance abuse issues since their long-ago Love Boat appearance, and the inevitable redemption sequence; and of course the "results" show, where roughly forty-three seconds of declaring a "winner" or "loser" is stretched to an hour of stagey glares and farting house music.

Celebrity Sock Drawer. Only on....eh, let's say Bravo, or one of the Home Trinket nutworks. I think we could all use a nice capodimonte figurine of Corey Feldman trying to remember which sock he had his stash stuffed into.

Failing that, there's always MILF Island.

Oh, the Places You'll Go

Apropos of nothing, I find it a bit peculiar to stumble across the factoid that torture apologist John Yoo is a couple of weeks younger than I am. It's probably just me, but the process of relative aging can be condensed thusly: realizing you're older than the women you use for sexual objectification (Penthouse Pets; porn stars; etc.); realizing you're older than most of the sports figures (actors; musicians) you enjoy; realizing you're older than the people who get paid lots of money to tell you and everyone else how to live their lives.

That last has always seemed somehow to be an ever-distant stage, something our parents might have to contend with but we never would. Yet Barack Obama is only five or six years older than me, and I suppose that's disconcerting enough for whatever reason. Still, there is something about being so close in age (if, to tremendously understate the case, not life experience) to the primary formulator of excuses for official barbarity.

Think of it -- it took a thirty-something Korean immigrant to come up with the novel idea that if you simply called your captives "detainees", and coupled it with the heinous notion that anything the unitary executive chooses to do is by definition legal (but, of course, for him only), you could treat them like fucking farm animals and no one could ever say shit. People were executed during and after World War 2 for exactly the sort of deeds Yoo has found suitable to institutionally underwrite for this gang of thugs and creeps. Even better, we all get to pay his (and their) salary.

What a country!

Prose and Cons

One of the things I've always loved about the internets is how the varied content serves as such a great complement to more conventional sources of reading material. Of course, plenty of the old-school tribe look at the online breed as the unwashed scribbling for the even more unwashed, as if their own professions weren't driven in no small part by trendy, unreadable wankery and tedious fabulism, hardbound so as to grant it some unearned, defiant veneer of respectability.

But there are plenty of "non-professionals" who do damn fine bits of writing, contrasting with paid professionals who peddle junk under this or that corporate banner. An example of the former is Kissing Suzy Kolber's Big Daddy Drew, whose epistle on how sportswriters undermine themselves and shortchange their fans by getting too close to their subjects is both hilarious and spot-on.

Even better, it serves as a fine metaphor for how political journalists routinely betray their own mission with sloppy, lazy thinking and cheap hypocrisy. I mean, I don't how much a waterboy like David Shuster makes, but I know Tweety gets paid north of $4 mil a year, and for them to lob this fucking ofay bullshit back and forth like it means anything is unacceptable, yet par for the course.

That this sort of nonsense is SOP is incomprehensible, until you realize that they're not really talking to us, but to each other. All of them, the "experts", the "consultants", the sinecured douchebags for whom this sort of thing has become a family industry, the morons peddling unreadable books to illiterate ninnies. It's a cottage industry for their little clique, no more, no less. It's a distraction from the fact their defense-contractor employers have a vested interest in keeping us focused on stupid shit like whether or not Barack Obama can bowl a fuckin' strike.

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Here's another excellent compare-and-contrast example, where the "amateur" is leagues ahead of his "professional" counterpart. Edward Champion delivers what I think is a devastating kill-shot to sprezzaturda's happy horseshit.

Only a person thoroughly removed from linguistic pleasures would quibble with the semantics of “assclown.” It was a surprise to me to see Siegel taking umbrage with the term. “Assclown is a really funny word, though,” grinned Nicholson Baker, who did his best to try and get through to the pigheaded Siegel. But it quickly became apparent that Siegel would not be moved and I watched with some sadness as the cheery, ruddy-faced Baker shifted to profound and silent empathy for this lost soul.

Exactly. "Assclown" is just one of those cool words, so intrinsically funny I would laugh at it being used directly at me (before, of course, instantly wracking my brain for a comeback). Siegel seems not only joyless but, if what I've read of his and seen of him in his preposterous Daily Show appearance, passionless as well.

Everyone should have something that motivates them to get out of bed and do whatever they do, something that instills them with passion. Music, beer, sex, volubly extemporized misanthropy (in my case, all of those things and much more) -- so many wondrous things to inspire one to punch a metaphorical hole in the wall. But Siegel comes off as so listless in his cynicism, you wonder if he's doing some elaborate Tony Clifton schtick. If so, bravissimo, sprezzatoola. But more likely than not, he's really (as I've called him before) just a preening butthole.

Who makes a lot of money writing, which is a task only marginally more difficult than fucking or taking a dump. Again, we have a sloppy thinker given to petulance and poor argumentation, who is published with presumably a straight face on the part of the people who pay him. Yet the unwashed intartubez heathens who chronicle his jerky words and deeds write circles around him. For free. Strange, that.

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One last example of sloppy writing (or perhaps editing), and this only because it pokes one of (numerous, I admit) pet peeves. This article, one of many solemnly chronicling how economic hard times have hit reg'lar folks in the shorts, contained this little nugget o' wisdom:

"I think we're almost in a depression," said Rohnert Park resident Donna Shore, 72. "Like the man in the movie said, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not taking it anymore.' "

Hunh? Even decontextualizing the over(mis)used, hackneyed Network line, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously. You're pessimistic about the economy, and you're angry about it. Fair enough. But in what way are you not gonna take it anymore? Buying less and driving less are not moral stands or expressions of righteous anger, they are necessary adaptations to economic contingencies. This is a difference with a very substantial distinction, which apparently escaped everyone involved.

But get this: this meaningless utterance, which tells you really nothing about the actual subject of the article, was used as the pull quote for the print article. It's ridiculous; it would have made more sense for her to say, "This economy sucks, and I'm going under, and I think that most people are worse off now than they were four or eight years ago." At that point, miraculously, she would almost -- not quite, but almost -- recontextualized the shopworn movie quote.

And this is not the problem of Ms. Shore, who as a regular person being interviewed for a newspaper article should not be expected to be a professional orator. It's not even the problem of the writer, not entirely; the rest of the article actually makes a decent case and stays relatively coherent. But someone at the editorial level apparently thought, "Hey! A movie quote! Let's highlight that and use it as an attention-grabber!" Well, it worked, but in the wrong way. No attention was paid to whether the quote had relevance; it was just something they knew people would recognize.

I think a major factor in the devolution of corporate news media, and how people tend to regard these various media, is a growing incompetence with language, on all sides. At many institutional levels there is deliberation behind this; for example, it is Bush's striking, nearly autistic opacity with his use of language to describe his own reasoning which gives him leeway. By the time one manages to hack through the thicket of stubbed-toe oratory and fractured logic, he's moved on to the next one. It's difficult to keep up, and when the media are already accustomed and conditioned to draw their own boundaries with regard to challenging him on his premises, they end up doing much of his work for him just by sticking to their usual horserace tropes.

This incompetence filters down, inexorably, to a point where important stories get de-prioritized behind celebritard ass-sniffing, or fearful reverence of flawed and perfidious rationales, or an incapability to discern a meaningless quote from one that actually means something. Maybe all reporters -- and all readers, for that matter -- should be compelled to read Politics and the English Language at regular intervals, until those truths are internalized, at least to the point that they sufficiently displace the untruths and the empty assumptions that drive so much of our public narrative.

Going Postal

I know it's the silly season and all, as the paid poli-monkeys wait for the homestretch before the Pennsylvania primary so's they can dust off their crystal balls and make their foolish guesses, but check the coverage of Obama's "gaffe":

As his political opponents heap on scorn, Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged that he chose his words poorly when describing small-town Pennsylvanians at a fundraiser on Sunday. But he didn't back off the message he had sought to convey.

"I didn't say it as well as I should have," Obama conceded before a crowd in Muncie, Ind., this morning, as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republicans prepared to hammer him for a second day.

Since even the Post itself admits that Obama's corrective was only about the fineries of phrasing and not actual meaning, the headline ("Obama Concedes He Misspoke") is overstating the extent of things. Obama said what he meant, and reiterated as such. He did not "misspeak", nor did he "concede" anything, other than perhaps the obvious -- that both his opponents are craven hypocritical opportunists, and the people who are supposed to be professional enough to know better appear to be borderline retarded. (Then again, check out the commenters in Murray's column, many of whom appear to be actually retarded.)

Here's what Obama actually said in the first place:

"In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long," he told the donors. "The jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

If anything, Obama is being too kind, too conciliatory on this point. There are a lot of great things about small-town life, to be sure, but there's no getting around the fact that they can also be seething reservoirs of ignorance and futility, of people who will enthusiastically vote against their own self-interest time after time because of some idea they have in their head about how things are supposed to be.

For example, in the county I live in, there was a referendum last summer on whether to allow the local tribe to build a casino. Personally, I don't gamble, nor do I have a burning need to see the latest incarnation of Bad Company between a couple hands of blackjack. But that's me; the fact is that these places also have hotels and golf courses and restaurant buffets and other things to do. And in a sparsely populated county with chronically high unemployment, where a substantial number of people (including myself) have to commute into the neighboring county (80 minutes a day round trip for me) just to get a living wage, the 400-500 jobs created in the county would have been significant.

So what happened? Well, one of the local strains of god-botherers got together and weighed in against the pervasive immorality, and the initiative lost by a handful of votes. So people still go to the nearby casino, which is literally a couple hundred yards across the county line, thus enhancing their tax base. And amazingly, people still gamble and drink and do enough crank to choke a horse, because there's nothing else to do, and now that gas is four bucks a gallon it costs too much to go anywhere else. Result: frustrated, broke, bored goobers left to their own devices. Way to preserve those small-town values, fuckheads.

And this is California we're talking about here. Imagine what life is like in rural Kansas or Oklahoma if you happen not to come from a land-owning family, in a town dominated by little more than a looming Wal-Mart and a sense of resentment, alleviated only by the occasional parade or football game. So really, if anything I think Obama understated his case. The fact is that the god/guns/guts crowd is always going to hump the same leg, it's just that when times get tougher and the frustration builds, the urge to use their imaginary friend as a comfort mechanism becomes even more pronounced.

And then they turn around and vote for a drooling moron simply because he told them that everything they think -- even on issues they know nothing about -- is absolutely correct.

Now, compare and contrast with the tender caresses of Poor Ol' Straight Talk's ridiculous efforts to differentiate himself from the current boobocracy:

Speaking before a global investment firm this afternoon, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took pains to distance himself from President Bush even as he reiterated his support for Gen. David Petraeus's handling of the war in Iraq.

During a town hall meeting at Bridgewater Associates, McCain vowed to confer more with congressional leaders on matters of war and "be humble" in his dealings with foreign leaders. Asked whether he would reject Bush's "preemptive war" strategy, he declined to rule it out but said he would take a sharply different tack when weighing military action overseas.

Wow. So he's going to be, like, totally different, except where he's not. That clears things up. Aside from voicing his principled opposition to torture (except, you know, when push actually comes to shove and he votes with the fuckers anyway), everything else is a wafer-thin parsing of current policy, both foreign and domestic.

And it's on economic issues where McCain seems most out of his depth (which, considering his indistinguishable foreign policy notions, is considerable). Bush also talked a good game about cutting spending when he was out on the stump, when it's easy. But then you get there, and you need the vote of a raging fucktard like, say, Don Young, and he wants a bridge. And there are 534 more Don Youngs, each with an endless list of bridges they'd like to build with your money. Everybody swears they'll cut spending until they get there and realize that it's all sops to their corporate sponsors or make-work boondoggles for aggrieved constituencies who had their old jobs outsourced to Bangalore and Shanghai, so some asshole's stock could go up half a point.

"I think you need to consult more closely and carefully, not with every member of Congress, but with the leadership of Congress," he told the crowd of several hundred Bridgewater employees. "If they're not in on the takeoff, they're not going to be in on the landing.... In other words, consult with them a whole lot."

Fuck. Fuuuuuuuuck-argh. I don't know about you, but if I have to listen to another four years of mindless Chance the Gardener "in other words" locutions, my teeth will break from gritting them too much and too hard. There oughta be a law against this monkey-fuck of a rhetorical trope, simplistic and shallow and implicitly condescending. I have never once heard an "in other words" that added any value to the original point or explained it any further, and that is true a hundredfold of everything Bush has ever saddled with this lazy phrase.

And all the while, the grand designs and master plans of these clowns continue to disintegrate right out from under their bullshit. In other words, their own arguments are undermined by actual events with a rather disturbing consistency.

Fuck "in other words", assholes, just say what you came to say. Most of us can keep up, really, and the ones who can't were just festering in their ratholes anyway, waiting only for someone to stroke their prejudices just enough to motivate them to vote against themselves one more time. This is Obama's true failing, that he misplaces some of his trust in the sort of folks whose political decisions are permeated by Stockholm syndrome.

Sox Type Thing

When it comes to being superstititous, baseball fans are practically in a league of their own, compared to other sports:

A construction worker with a rooting interest in the Red Sox buried a Red Sox shirt in with the concrete foundation under what will become the visitors' clubhouse in the new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, two construction workers told the New York Post Wednesday.

And then he went home and once again violated the crusted orifices of his collection of George Steinbrenner and Alex Rodriguez blow-up dolls.

Sadly, this is only the second-dumbest sports story of the week, the first being the ongoing harassment of the Olympic torch. That's what passes for political protest these days -- pointless symbolic gestures against pointless symbolic gestures. It's a second-order wank, a meta circle jerk. You want to make the Chinese care what you think, then go through your house and throw out everything you own that says "Made in China", and replace accordingly. Otherwise, it means even less than the carrying of the torch itself, a tedious ritual in which the thing is paraded around the world as if it were royalty and not, you know, a fuckin' torch.

These are the kinds of stories that make soccer hooligans appear rational.

[Update: Saints be praised, a construction crew found and removed the offending garment, after spending five hours Saturday drilling and jackhammering through new construction. They're even considering pressing charges, though for what is, as you might guess, a bit unclear.

These people, as evidenced by their effort and indignation over an impossibly trivial prank, are too fucking stupid to competently draw breath, much less build a stadium. It would be a waste of time to tell them to grow the hell up.]

Clintonism and Its Discontents

The revelation that the Clintons have finally gotten their cut from the public-service trough is less distressing than it should be, I suppose. Certainly it's not surprising; we are, after all, talking about a couple whose first home purchase was in Chappaqua at the end of Bill's time in office. It seems that everyone at that level uses their status to elevate themselves in some fashion -- toys, trinkets, junkets, trophy wives, sweet-ass real-estate deals, cash money in pocket.

So it's impossible to be shocked and difficult to actually be offended that they raked in $109 million, in a period of time where a gelatinous cube like Rush Limbaugh made twice as much to scarf down oxy and boner pills and head to the Dominican Republic for some young brown ass, or Alex Rodriguez making a quarter-billion to swat a ball and miss the playoffs every year.

And yet, in the midst of Hillary's hard-times pulpit-thumpers she belts to hapless crowds hither and yon, there are things like this:

Former President Bill Clinton has earned $15.4 million from billionaire Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. investment firm since 2003, according to tax documents released by his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The earnings represent 20 percent of the approximately $75 million Bill Clinton earned during the same period, according to the documents. That may raise new questions about what services he performed for Los Angeles-based Yucaipa, whose investors include the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al- Maktoum.

....

The tax returns indicate the couple paid all the U.S. federal taxes owed on the income from Yucaipa, which controls three funds located in the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands doesn't charge any individual or corporate income tax and has strict bank secrecy laws.

Bill Clinton's ties to Yucaipa have sparked controversy over the past year, including a September report in the Wall Street Journal that detailed how one of the former president's aides had helped arrange a partnership with Burkle that dissolved amid litigation over allegations of misused funds.

It's not exactly Chinese bagmen bringing sacks of laundered money, but it's probably not much better than what it sounds like.

Even better is this:

In all, the Clintons earned $109 million from 2000 through 2007 and paid $33.8 million in federal taxes, the returns and campaign documents show. They donated $10.3 million of their income over that time to charities.

The bulk of those charitable donations went to the family foundation. From 2002 through 2006, $5.9 million of the $6.4 million, or 93 percent, of the Clinton's charitable giving went directly to the Clinton Family Foundation, according to the tax returns and foundation records.

Because The Human Fund would have been too obvious.

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The other entertaining Clinton nugget during the past week was this gem, which should have been seen coming up the road:

An angry Colombia said on Saturday it ended a contract with a lobbying firm headed by a top campaign aide to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after he apologized for meeting with Colombian officials to advocate a trade deal that she opposes.

Mark Penn, who in addition to working as Clinton's chief campaign strategist is a lobbyist in his capacity as chief executive officer of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, said his meeting with Ambassador Carolina Barco Isakson "was an error in judgment that will not be repeated."

"The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable," the Colombian Embassy in Washington said in a statement.

Hammer of the Blogs is pleased to present an exclusive photo of Penn's negotiations with the angry Colombians:



Note the look of consternation in the Colombian's eyes, as well as the sweat pouring off his beak. I think we all learned what pissed-off Colombians are capable of from Scarface; if Penn actually possessed elbows and knees, and any of the Colombians happened to have a chainsaw handy, Penn would have been in really deep shit.

More seriously, I think this is an area where the Clintons (and let's not beat around the, erm, Bush here -- as with a decade and a half ago, we are again being offered two for the price of one, as if we were at the political Dollar Tree looking for a deal on toiletries) are vulnerable. Penn is an operative's operative, and one of his subordinates at Burston-Marsteller is John McCain's henchman, Charlie Black. So either way, B-M wins, which really means a lot to Mister and Missus Joe Six-Tooth.

Even diehard Clintonistas will have to acknowledge that Bill got a certain amount of mileage out of rhetorically feeling our pain, and it rang true, since he couldn't afford his own house either. He was one of us, skeevy big-hair glad-handing priapism and all.

But the schtick plays a bit more hollow nine figures later, well-entrenched in the same machine which spent eight years attacking both Clintons, hanging with the exact same people whose pastime was calumniating them, making money hand over fist, her supporters paying him six figures to "consult" and speak at their events. Lotta inbreeding going on there, which does not make them special, but rather mundane. It's a racket, and they've learned to play.

Maybe we can all play, and feel each other's pain, or something. But if we all could afford to live in the Hamptons, where would the swells go to feel superior, and whom would they have to look down upon?

The Jokes Write Themselves

Okay, I've resisted the temptation all week to make jokes on variations of fucking oneself, but in all seriousness, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should:

A transgender man who is six months pregnant said in an interview aired by Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he always wanted to have a child and considers it a miracle.

"It's not a male or female desire to have a child. It's a human desire," a thinly bearded Thomas Beatie said. "I have a very stable male identity," he added, saying that pregnancy neither defines him nor makes him feel feminine.

Beatie, 34, who lives in Oregon, was born a woman but decided to become a man 10 years ago. He began taking testosterone treatments and had breast surgery to remove glands and flatten his chest.

"I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day," he told the talk show host. Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.

Of course, the term "man" here is used verrry loosely, not the least reason which is that no man in his right mind would ever want to endure pregnancy, much less childbirth. I thought it was Rachel Maddow at first; I'm absolutely not convinced that this is a "man".

Perhaps my understanding of sex-change operations is outdated. Isn't psych testing part of the requirement just to undergo treatment? Aren't the hormone treatments administered and tracked by a physician? Isn't it supposed to be a little more complicated than just grabbing an applicator that looks like Jodie Foster's knuckle?

Yes, I'm sure all these testosterone treatments are good for the fetus. And I'm sure a presumably reputable doctor has a perfectly good rationale for letting a sex-change patient keep the original equipment with the express purpose of getting pregnant.

Well, as long as the kid doesn't come out looking like Manbearpig, vaya con dios, I suppose. But in an already overpopulated world, is it really necessary to craft new and innovative ways to have children? Do these Dr. Moreaus have nothing better to do? I had slightly more respect for them when they were turning a buck off of boner pills. Maybe this will turn out to be a hoax.

A Man for All Squeezins

Just when you assume it's some standard-issue April Fool's Day column, you realize, "oh hell, it's Goldberg again", which suffices as explanation enough. It's hard even to find a salient excerpt, since it meanders in its lameness. But Goldberg starts off with the usual plaint that European politicians are too craven in the face of the rhetorical aggression as practiced by Islamic governments and fundamentalist clergy, here in the context of the outcry provoked by the short documentary Fitna, by Dutch director Geert Wilders.

Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt's grand imam threatened "severe" consequences if the Dutch government didn't ban the film.

This has been a particularly rich vein for the usual neoclown pundits to ply their trade and preach to their choir. It's easy pickins, and in their habitual sophistry they can double-dip with Muslim-baiting and lib-baiting. Apparently we are now required to issue pro forma declarations in every instance of official and semi-official Muslim radicalism, as if "liberals" (which, recalling Goldberg's creative redefinition of the term, are down with the fascism) have more patience with riots over cartoons than they do with the gibbering retards of Jesus Camp.

I do think that Islam is in danger of allowing itself to be defined by its most vocal and radical spokesmen, if moderate Muslims do not step up. But where are they supposed to step? Islam is too diffuse and too decentralized, and in its home countries it is too inextricably entwined with social culture and canonical law. Islam needs its own Reformation and Enlightenment, but that is much harder to accomplish without a centralized hierarchy. Even if an Islamic Martin Luther is waiting to be heard, where exactly does he nail his theses?

So I'm not sure exactly what Goldberg and his intemellectual peers wish to do about all that, but then neither are they. The European governments are treading lightly because they want the immigrants to assimilate, which is hard to do if an inflammatory issue is stoked. The Islamic governments are taking the opposite tack and making an issue out of the movie's propriety because religion is a mode of social control. This is not exactly a secret, but people like Goldberg make entire careers, secure contracts to write unreadable books with untenable premises, by regurgitating exactly such canards. People believe what they want to believe.

Which brings us to Goldberg's main point, after a useless diversion into a anecdote about drinking in Turkey that amazingly doesn't end in some lurid Midnight Express scenario.

Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.

....

In America, the easiest place to find this ancient symbol is on the back of cars. Recently, however, it seems as if Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you've seen these too. The fish symbol is "updated" with little feet coming off the bottom, and "IXOYE" or "Jesus" is replaced with either "Darwin" or "Evolve."

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

Here's Goldberg's entire basis for taking offense -- it seems as if Jesus fish are outnumbered by Darwin fish. This is at least as rigorous an intellectual standard as can be found in anything else he's ever written, I suppose. It's practically a tic with him at this point, he's been doing it long enough.

But it takes a complete and utter moron to baldly assert that, in this particular dilemma, it's the people who profess not to guide their thoughts, actions, and emotions by superstition, who do not proselytize to hapless strangers, who are "smug", smug to the point where our boy actually takes offense.

Listen up, Lunchbox -- nearly all of human history has been written in blood drawn by smug motherfuckers who each thought they had a direct pipeline to the omniscient superdude in the sky. It is only in the past 150 years that the semblance of rational thought and reason-based deduction has begun to crawl out from under the holy thumb various breeds of god-botherers have kept everyone under for the previous millennia. Isn't that offensive?

I couldn't care less about the Jesus fish or the Darwin fish; I am indifferent to what people choose to broadcast on the bumpers, tailgates and windows of their rolling shitboxes. The Calvin praying window sticker means about as much to me as the Calvin-pissing-on-a-football-team-logo window sticker. Both are just cheap, pirated expressions of id and poor impulse control. But all that is another matter from the constant smug assertions from the religious that they are inherently more moral, that they would rather vote for a crook who talks a good Jesus game than an upstanding atheist. There are plenty more openly gay politicians than there are atheist ones, if one wishes to make thumbnail comparisons of stereotypically reviled minorities.

But he's all butt-hurt that a few people tweak these sacred cultural signifiers, cheap adhesive totems slapped on hickmobiles far and (especially) wide. Awwwww. Yeah, that's far more offensive than squads of goobers infesting the government at every level from the DoJ to red-state school boards with their anti-intellectual inbreeding, fools poisoning the well of science to tell people with a straight face that the Grand Canyon was created 6,000 years ago by the Noah's Ark flood. With priorities like that, it's no wonder we're falling behind.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. "Namely: It's acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with 'Shalom' written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with 'Usury' written inside the same symbol would be an outrage."

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It's a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

Again with the false equivalencies, especially since Jews don't actively proselytize like that (not to mention the revolting idea that lobbing a "usurer" slur at a Jewish person is comparable to having the nerve to separate science from religious dogma). Goldberg presumes that the Jesus fish is nothing but a cultural signifier, a secret handshake to be experienced on the highways, or something. Fine, but spare us this incessant whinging every time the bubble gets poked just a little. It's expected that religion can intrude on a great many aspects of public life, but a cheap plastic sentiment making fun of another cheap plastic sentiment sends the squeamish into perpetually high dudgeon.

Religious people like to tell themselves, each other, anyone who'll listen that the godless secular heathens are picking on them, persecuting them for their belief. I hate to spoil the fun for them, but here's the secret -- we don't care enough to persecute you. Really, we don't give a shit. Go to your megachurch and clap to white-guy rhythm; festoon your car in Jesus fish and praying Calvins and Virgin Mary tire carrier covers. Knock yourselves out. Just leave the rest of us alone, and quit acting like the future of the universe depends on the Pledge of Allegiance having "under God" in it, or political speeches ending with "God bless America".

The same is true for Islamic fundamentalists -- when movies and cartoons get significant subsets of your culture violently upset, their conduct should be repudiatd. They need to grow the hell up. All the Abrahamic religions point to God as being the judge of these matters; it would be nice if they'd just leave it to Him, and get on about their lives.

Peasant Revolt

Wherever you stand on Kunstler's dire predictions, ya gotta admit he paints a pretty picture:

Wait until summer gets underway and The New York Post gossip page resumes its coverage of hijinks in the Hamptons. The executives of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan / Chase, and other dealers in fraudulent securities, plus the art world and show biz glitteratti who party together out there, might all find themselves the object of considerable grievance and resentment as the beaching season ramps up, and the limos roll around the charity lobster roasts, and the guests stray down the lawns, chardonays in hand, to plot divorce from their over-leveraged husbands.... God knows what seekers-of-vengence will be creepy-crawling the privet plantings along Gin Lane in the crepuscular gloom, searching for trophy wives to garrote.

Perhaps a bankrupt landscaping contractor from Lake Ronkonkoma, recently stiffed by a hedge fund manager over the installation of a half acre of pachysandra, will be arrested on the Wantagh Highway with blood on his sleeves and a high-C piano wire in his pocket.

Well, one can only hope, but the surveillance state and enhanced police powers, coupled with an utterly complaisant media that will swallow anything a mall-cop with a taser tells them, does not bode well for the rebellion. Besides, reg'lar folks may be too preoccupied with trying to hang on for dear life to worry about crashing the swells.

Here lies my third dissent from what I heard at the conference: since America is bankrupting itself so comprehensively at every level, the wished-for "funding" for the green rescue program will not be there in any case. Capital itself, as represented by Wall Street, is flying to pieces this year as its stock-in-trade of paper certificates loses legitimacy in the face of the overwhelming fact that the society behind that paper will be decreasingly capable of producing surplus wealth -- which is what capital is. The unwind of "positions" now underway among the big bankz is the process of previously anticipated capital accumulation vanishing down a black hole. It will be gone forever.

The first part of the paragraph should perhaps be untethered from the second. Any "green" economy that springs up in the wake of peak oil will most assuredly do it on the public teat. There may be the usual appearances of private-sector capitalization, but only gubmint largesse greases the sufficient wheels. Oil companies are content to cash their record profit checks, let refining and extraction infrastructure either dwindle away or lose EROEI, and bide their time until federal money in some form appears to motivate them to action.

So we'll pay for it, one way or the other, as we do right now. Even before the enhanced risk premiums that have led to wartime profiteering, there were always externalities subsumed by the public, in order to keep gas "cheap" as compared to the Euros with their public transportation and such.

The decoupling of global financial capital markets, while associated in some respects, seems to be an altogether different matter. That is simply a natural result of using imaginary money to bet on imaginary products; it's second- and third-order bookmaking. Nothing is actually produced but collections of guesses and percentage points. And it is only going to last so long as European and Chinese central banks continue to fund it out of rational self-interest.

But now they're pulling to cover their own side bets. The fat stock bumps here and there are erupting out of valleys; it's a buyer's market for federally bailed-out bags of crap like Bear Stearns. Hell, who wouldn't want to buy federally-secured stock at two bucks that was trading in the $70's just weeks ago? But obviously that won't hold, that's short-term speculators cashing in on a quick mark.

If the Chinese get sick of propping us up and lending us money to buy shit from them, or the major countries decide to ditch dollars for euros as reserve currency or oil trading, we are screwed royally. Or perhaps not; what such a situation would do is essentially force us into a position the British Empire found itself in nearly a century ago -- making a choice between guns and butter, having to live smarter and more modestly, realizing that everything comes from somewhere, that the only things generated out of thin air and happy thoughts are prayers and financial derivatives.

It might mean no more ginormous sorry-about-your-penis-mobiles, jacked-up guzzler toys carrying nothing to nowhere, which would be a real tragedy. And it might mean that an entire class of people who made a great deal of paper wealth by grifting each other and betting on it, would suddenly have to justify themselves. But we'll cope somehow, I'm sure.

Back Door Man

The bozos are up to their usual tricks:

As if to offer denial in the face of disaster -- and commit the U.S. to losing many more soldiers and Marines -- the Bush administration has begun negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades, after President George W. Bush leaves office.

The negotiation, set to conclude this summer, will establish the basis for a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to the Bush administration, the Iraqi government requested a bilateral agreement to replace the expiring U.N. mandate for the occupation, which offended Iraqi sovereignty. Asked if there was any irony in preparing a plan to keep thousands of foreign soldiers in Iraq in the name of Iraqi sovereignty, a National Security Council official, who requested anonymity, replied, "Sure, but we plan to negotiate that aspect" of the agreement.

....

The Bush administration has less than a year in office, yet it is now negotiating a deal that will commit the U.S. to an open-ended continuation of its most momentous, and controversial, foreign-policy decision. At the very least, the accord will prove a thorny issue for any successor Democratic administration that wins election on a promise to end the war.

Which was probably the point -- if McCain wins, the country has lost its mind anyway, and endorsed Cheneyism after supposedly repudiating it for several years; if Clinton or Obama wins, they will be hemmed in from day one by an eleventh-hour agreement. Of course, that can be augmented or even circumvented with more mercenary units, and rotating regular troops home.

But the most glaring aspect of all this is that after five years, they're still making this up as they go along. There's scarcely a semblance of a plan, certainly not a proactive one, and not even a reactive or much of an adaptive one. It's just stick people in as needed, take credit and deflect or ignore blame. When Clausewitz declared that war was politics by other means, I guess the Bushies took him as literally as they possibly could.

Life's a Pitch and Then You Cry

Life outside the bubble.

Walmartyrs

The current non-political outrage of the week involves this poor family whose story sounds like a country song:

Debbie Shank breaks down in tears every time she's told that her 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in Iraq.

The 52-year-old mother of three attended her son's funeral, but she continues to ask how he's doing. When her family reminds her that he's dead, she weeps as if hearing the news for the first time.

....

The family's situation is so dire that last year Jim Shank divorced Debbie, so she could receive more money from Medicaid.

Jim Shank, 54, is recovering from prostate cancer, works two jobs and struggles to pay the bills. He's afraid he won't be able to send their youngest son to college and pay for his and Debbie's care.

And, as you've probably already heard, Wal-Mart is seeking reimbursement for medical expenses incurred on the employee health plan.

Two years after the accident, Shank and her husband, Jim, were awarded about $1 million in a lawsuit against the trucking company involved in the crash. After legal fees were paid, $417,000 was placed in a trust to pay for Debbie Shank's long-term care.

Wal-Mart had paid out about $470,000 for Shank's medical expenses and later sued for the same amount. However, the court ruled it can only recoup what is left in the family's trust.

The Shanks didn't notice in the fine print of Wal-Mart's health plan policy that the company has the right to recoup medical expenses if an employee collects damages in a lawsuit.

....

The family's attorney, Maurice Graham, said he informed Wal-Mart about the settlement and believed the Shanks would be allowed to keep the money.

"We assumed after three years, they [Wal-Mart] had made a decision to let Debbie Shank use this money for what it was intended to," Graham said.

Okay, here's the thing. As awful as this story is, and as heartless as Wal-Mart is coming off (and believe me, we'll get to that), this is simply a case of a trusting family being taken to the cleaners by an incompetent -- if not outright unscrupulous -- lawyer.

Let's see if we have this straight: this assclown took 58.3% of the settlement, and for his services, he assumed that Wal-Mart was just going to good-faith their recoupment of this health-plan clause? And this clause, which is pretty standard stuff, went completely unnoticed? What exactly does it take to get a license to practice law in Mizurrah, a pulse and a stack of self-printed cards?

Seriously, what exactly did this guy do for these people for a 58.3% cut? It looks like he failed to read her health plan clauses and assumed that Wal-Mart was some sort of benevolent creature. A third-grader could have done that for free.

"The recovery that Debbie Shank made was recovery for future lost earnings, for her pain and suffering," Graham said.

"She'll never be able to work again. Never have a relationship with her husband or children again. The damage she recovered was for much more than just medical expenses."

And all he could get for all that was a million, more than half of which went in his pocket? Again, what is up with this Lionel Hutz crap, and why hasn't Jim Shank gone out and found another attorney to grind it out of his ass? I honestly can't see what this guy did to earn his keep. And I've never heard of a contingency lawyer taking over 40%, and even then only in lawsuits with higher payoffs.

Anyway, it seems pretty clear that Wal-Mart is well within their legal rights, and their duties to their stockholders. But come on, people, what's legal is not always what's ethical:

In 2007, the retail giant reported net sales in the third quarter of $90 billion.

Legal or not, CNN asked Wal-Mart why the company pursued the money.

Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley, who called Debbie Shank's case "unbelievably sad," replied in a statement: "Wal-Mart's plan is bound by very specific rules. ... We wish it could be more flexible in Mrs. Shank's case since her circumstances are clearly extraordinary, but this is done out of fairness to all associates who contribute to, and benefit from, the plan."

That's a crock of shit. Plans can be and are contingent upon external factors at times. Simley is really just saying that if they do a favor for the Shanks, they'll have to throw everyone a bone. I don't think that's true; these are obviously extraordinary circumstances, and considering that CEO Lee Scott makes enough to recoup that $470K in a very short week, perhaps Wal-Mart might reconsider its intractable stance.

Or not. I've never gotten the impression that the throngs of Martards have it in them to put their principles where their mouths are, and shop elsewhere. Something shiny will come along within the week, by which time Debbie Shank will have been reminded of her situation another half-dozen times, but be forgotten herself in the shuffle.

[Update: If you want to donate a few bucks to the Shanks, Wal-Mart Watch has set up a fund here. And again, while a write-in campaign might make people feel a bit better temporarily, and might even get Wal-Mart to give the Shanks a much-needed break, if people are truly morally disgusted, stop shopping there. It's better for you anyway; as the Rude Pundit points out, they are fundamentally unpleasant and oppressive in a lot of ways.

The only times I've ever been there is when we had a cat with a propensity for urinary tract infections, and for the last couple years of the cat's life, Wal-Mart was literally the only place in northern CA to carry the Purina UTI food. Since the cat died in 2006, there's been no need, and frankly, trudging through narrow, over-stocked aisles with people who can't afford the cheap shit they're buying is not my idea of a good time. I'd rather pay a little more and buy less stuff locally. I have too much stuff anyway. I think most of us do.

Also, I have been picking on the Shanks' lawyer, Maurice Graham, and Rude Pundit links to an interesting interview with Graham, which fleshes out a great deal of the story. The trucker was probably driving too fast, and Debbie Shank pulled out in front of him (going to yard sales, I read elsewhere), thus the liability was shared, and the trucking company was some podunk outfit that had the bare minimum required insurance, thus the measly payout. Accident reconstruction experts were required to properly assign liability, and no doubt that is recouped in the lawyer's fees, part of that 58.3% cut.

I still question Graham's assumption that Wal-Mart would just let the case go, but he's right in that it's strange how they waited around three years to initiate action. So I'll retract my unkind assertions about Graham earning his keep. It looks like he did what he could with a pretty bad hand to begin with. And it sucks that at the end of a series of incredibly horrible occurrences, the Shanks are basically at the mercy of Wal-Mart deigning to lift their corporate thumb. It might be interesting to see how this sort of situation is dealt with in a universal health care system, and how the costs would be subsumed in such a system (for example, the Shanks had to buy a wheelchair-accessible house). Just a sad story all the way around.]

A Friend In Greed

Shorter Richard Cougar Melloncamp Scaife:

I still think she's a lesbian vampire who had an affair with Vince Foster before she killed him with her rapier talons, but we might be able to play ball with Hillary Clinton, just as soon as we ratfuck Barack Obama.

Money

Awful nice of Comrade Bob Mugabe to do his part to make the good ol' American dollar look pretty damned good by comparison:

With inflation estimated at 200,000 percent -- easily the highest in the world -- Zimbabwe's currency is barely worth the paper it's printed on. (The largest Zimbabwean note, 10 million dollars, can't buy more than a couple of sodas.) Foreign currency runs this economy now, mainly the U.S. dollar and the South African rand, nearly all of it traded on the black market.

The government of longtime President Robert Mugabe, who faces a critical reelection test on March 29, has pegged the exchange rate at $1 to 30,000 Zimbabwean dollars. But the currency is losing value at such head-spinning speed that on the streets of Harare, one U.S. greenback will soon fetch about 2,000 times that.

I don't even want to try converting all that to euros, or loonies for that matter. Guess that "land reform" thing is doing about as well as expected. Where they've tried actual "parecon" schemes in South America, they sound like they've actually worked, and people finally have a tangible share in what they do. Mugabe just let every bozo with a machete take whatever wasn't nailed down, turning what was at least a decent economy under the predations of Ian Smith into just another sub-Saharan subsistence regime.

I Can Haz Dummycrats?

For what it's worth, it seems highly doubtful that these numbers will hold -- or are even fundamentally true.

Clinton supporters appear to be somewhat more reactive than Obama supporters. Twenty-eight percent of the former indicate that if Clinton is not the nominee -- and Obama is -- they would support McCain. That compares to 19% of Obama supporters who would support McCain if Obama is not the nominee -- and Clinton is.

But allowing for the likelihood that there is at least some truth to this, it behooves every faithful Dem with their god-bothering Thanksralph! plaint these past seven-plus years to keep each other in check now. Because scarcely a month after announcing his tilt at the windmill, Nader is all but forgotten. He will not remotely be a factor in any state. But even a vote for Nader would at least be a direct expression of principle. I have no idea what the hell a Clinton or Obama supporter going for McCain is thinking about anything. It is literally the dumbest fucking thing they could do, politically, intellectually.

The perfidious dipshits who plan on stamping their wittle feet if they don't get their preferred nom are invited to kindly go fuck themselves for a good long time. Anybody who claims to hate this war, to be tired of the malicious incompetence and indifference of the current junta, to desire improvement in practically every quality-of-life factor, cannot be an actual Democrat and then decide to vote for John McCain. Period. No exceptions. You have abdicated your responsibility to pay attention, and thus your right to be part of a rational debate.

McCain has made it clear that he is Bush without the MBA, Cheney with a couple of borscht-belt zingers. And to his credit, he has been quite upfront about all that. So there's no excuse for any of this "McCain Democrat" horseshit. It couldn't be any clearer. I cringe at the idea of another eight or even four years of the Clintons and their tedious games of triangulation and gutless parodies of idealism. And as well-intentioned as Obama appears to be, he needs to acquire some brawling skills if he's going to survive the big boys' game.

And really, neither Democrat is going to "fix" or "change" all that much, because Americans haven't quite hit rock-bottom enough to get their heads out of their asses. They still think someone can come along and return things to what they were. Eight years of magical thinking and brain-dead stupidity can have that collective effect.

But neither Clinton nor Obama, whatever their respective weaknesses, is nearly as likely to continue digging this hole and servicing the clump of superstitious goons that holds this country in political and intellectual stasis, whereas McCain has made it abundantly clear that he'd be perfectly happy to do exactly that. You want Fred Thompson on the Supreme Court and Chuck Norris for Secretary of Defense, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of State, then McCain's probably your guy. Cartoon people for a cartoon agenda.

Otherwise, these self-indulgent idiots need to grow the fuck up and pay attention to what each candidate actually stands for, not what you wish they stood for. The problem with democracy, American democracy in particular, is that too many individuals are under the impression their vote is some sort of idealized affirmation of how they see themselves, rather than a response to how things are, and how issues can be addressed.

Fuck Fred Phelps, Part 47,893

It's bad enough when some small-town asshole snaps and clubs his wife and young children to death like it ain't no thing:

Funeral services have been scheduled for this weekend for the six members of the Sueppel family, killed in a murder-suicide by the father, who had been facing embezzlement charges.

....

Steven Sueppel apparently beat his family to death with a baseball bat late Sunday or early Monday before driving the family minivan into a concrete pillar along Interstate 80 and killing himself.

But then the pond scum known as the Westboro BastardBaptist Church crawl out from under their rock to capitalize on this ugly situation.

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., known for picketing funerals in protest of homosexuality, said in a news release that "God sent the shooter" to the Sueppel home as punishment for Iowa's sins, and that it would picket their funeral in a "respectful, lawful" manner.

Iowa City Police Sgt. Troy Kelsay said he thinks the group is attracted to the event because of Iowa City's "liberal stance" toward homosexuals and the media attention surrounding the Sueppel deaths, and that police would work to limit any intrusion upon the funeral. The best response is to ignore the group, Kelsay said.

Actually, I think the best response would be to wait until the next "service" in this cult of soulless freaks, bar the doors, and torch their outhouse of a "church". Failing that, hopefully every godless fag out there is counting the days 'til Ole Fred's overdue and hopefully excruciating death, when they commence with endless rounds of buttfucking and such on the old bastard's grave, until the grass is completely torn up and the dirt glazed and turned to mud with homo-chowder.

Hell, these inbred retards can't even get their fundamentalist hate right. There was no "shooter", assholes; the guy beat his children to death with a baseball bat, which means that the Phelps' evil, spiteful deity is as gratuitously cruel as they are.

Die already, you vile morons.

Five Years On

I don't know why the mediots persist in pestering Bush and his claque every time a "milestone" is "reached", implicitly saying that the 4000th troop killed is more or less notable than the 2197th, or that any of them are more or less valuable than a civilian child perforated by random fire. This is the business of death, and that business is wholly indiscriminate.

But to the matter at hand, Bush per usual displays an astounding capacity for the sort of magical thinking that has typically set American exceptionalists apart from most sentient bipeds:

President Bush today marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war with the message: "The world is better, and the US is safer."

....

He also claimed that the surge into Iraq, launched last year, had been a success in reducing attacks against US troops, restoring order, and opening the door to "a major strategic victory in the broader war" on extremism.

This is true only to the extent that the residents of the occupied country allow it to be so, and everyone, including Bush, knows this. The rest is simply wishful thinking, a vain attempt at saving face long after that face is gone.

There is no way a person can rationally defend Bush's preamble, and tellingly, Bush himself declines to do so, preferring instead to wallow in the more obvious refrains of "Saddam was an asshole!" that has spiced his stubbed-toe oratory almost since day one.

Blackout

I've been thinking about the big Obama speech since he made it. I thought about it in the context in which most white people perceive what they believe to be the "black experience", and I've thought about it in the context in which I observed what I presumed to be that same experience, spending childhood summers in places such as Compton and Bellflower and Phoenix, sometimes being literally the only white kid for ten or fifteen blocks.

Obama's speech cannot and should not be regarded in any other context but this: the media's interpretation of his speech is complete and utter bullshit, engineered to contrive contention and controversy out of the fairly mundane (yet incendiary if you ask the media rubes) rhetoric of Rev. Wright, especially when contrasted to the widely distributed "you brought this on yourselves" chunder from Falwell and Robertson immediately after 9/11. Funny how nobody bum-rushed the stage to repudiate those jowly motherfuckers. Indeed, the current Republican nominee repudiated his own words to give the commencement address at Falwell's clown college.

Now, Obama's primary mistake may simply lie in the fact that he chose to address Americans as if they were adults on this subject, which many of them most assuredly are not. People laughed at the irascible Archie Bunker back in the day, but what many fail to acknowledge is that a good chunk of 'murka really is Archie Bunker -- unrepentant in their ignorance and bigotry, although more than willing to go through the usual motions to demonstrate that they like the "good ones". This is concurrent with their insistent opinions on wimmins and queers; they know at least one of each that they can put up with, but are still for some reason apprehensive about giving all of them fundamental rights. Funny, that.

You're not really going to win with such people, because they aren't looking to be convinced. Still, Obama needed to stop the artificially induced bleeding, and after mulling over the text for a week, I still think he did very well. But what a certain part of the audience expected, to confirm their prejudices and apprehensions, was for him to give the entire speech in "izzle" talk, and perhaps sport a gold toof and a medallion or two. Maybe Obama can assuage their nonsensical fears by wearing a giant clock around his neck next time, so's everyone knows exactly what time it is.

It's times like these when I remember that motherfuckers get exactly the kind of gubmint they deserve, because they lack the testicular fortitude to stand up on their hind legs and expect -- no, demand -- something better.

Crash Test Dummies

Every year there's at least one of these goofy-ass looks at how the Wonderlic test affects NFL draft prospects.

Look, if you told me I had to take the SAT cold tomorrow morning, I wouldn't come close to getting the 1270 I got in high school. If, however, you gave me a few weeks to study and take some practice tests and such, I might surpass that score.

Ryan Clady knew this Wonderlic test was coming. He had plenty of time to take practice tests and get himself ready. That 13 indicates that he did not put in the necessary study time. If he didn't study for this, what else won't he study for?

You know, I not only didn't study for my SAT, I refused to study for it. Can't really explain why, something along the line that studying is for pussies. And I was pretty hungover when I actually took the test. I got a 1300, fourth-highest in my school, sixty points from the top score in the school. So much for studying; the three guys who scored above me studied for fucking months, and they were all pretty damned smart to begin with.

And there are plenty of sites where you can take the Wonderlic, which is also used as a corporate evaluation tool. I decided to see what all the hoo-ha was about some time ago, and got a 42 (out of a possible 50). Not terribly difficult. Suck on that, Dan Marino!

And yet. Forgetting that the Wonderlic, being a logic test (essentially a poor man's IQ test, which themselves are no great shakes), cannot by definition be truly "studied" for the way conventional tests can, the fact is that these tests do not sufficiently measure a person's ability to throw or carry an oblong pleather ball downfield, nor block nor tackle.

The best way to test a person's ability to do those things is to -- bear with me here -- put them on the field and have them do those things. It's not that complicated. I know a lot about football, and I can sport the test scores, and I'm not a small guy. But there was never a time where I would have been anything but useless on a football field. I just don't have the knack for it.

Tests in general are overrated; people are either test-takers or they're not. Spelling bees are a prime example of this syndrome. Bad spelling is an annoyance, to be sure, but spelling in and of itself is not a terribly marketable skill. This is not a sour-grapes thing; I was a two-time California state finalist, and three-time regional champion. It's just that it is a correlative rather than causative skill. There are plenty of very intelligent people who can't spell for shit.

Same with the Wonderlic. Offensive linemen (centers in particular), believe it or not, are generally the most intelligent people on a football team. But football intelligence is not the same as the associative and spatial intelligence sought out in conventional IQ tests.

And still, twenty years out of school, I say the same thing -- studying is for sucks. Either you know the material or you don't; either you read what you were supposed to read or you didn't. The idea that cramming is some sort of substitute for actual understanding of the material is itself a cheat.

Belle of the Balls

For the amount of money the Jaguars shelled out for Jerry Porter, one would expect him to be as happy as he appears to be. And yet, as any attentive Raiders fan knows, this guy was a tremendously under-utilized player, and a consummate Raider. Shit, he expressed his displeasure with management by parking in Al Davis' reserved spot. That alone should have netted him a substantial raise.

“This is me. I smile a lot. I’m happy to be here, too,” Porter said. “It’s good to be back to expecting to win instead of hoping to win. When you have to play this team, you better bring your hard hat because it’s going to be a slugfest. I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t want to be on a team like that.”

For some reason, since the Raiders have been on their laughable half-decade (and counting) slump, I have watched some of the "cat" teams as seconds, especially Jacksonville and Carolina. And I was rooting for the Jags this post-season; one of the brief highlights while my family was holed up in a hotel room during the massive storm at the beginning of this year was watching the Jaguars squeak by the Steelers in the playoffs.

So while I've picked on Randy Moss for his perfidy as a player and teammate, the opposite stands for Jerry Porter. He's a guy who has several great seasons ahead of him, and has managed to land with a team that can make the most of that. The Jaguars have a very good team, and an excellent QB in David Garrard, and Porter may actually help them win the division finally.

Week In Review

It's hard to complain sometimes. Drinking profusely, doing yardwork in truly fantastic weather, and exploring the new and severely tightened job market have all conspired to make this a glorious week.

Coupled with all that, having to dick around with my hooptie of a computer has strangely allowed me to get several drafts in the can, yet not get 'round to actually posting them. Shit happens, hence the extra quiet on the ugly front. And some (probably all) have already expired their shelf-life; this is, after all, a quick man's game. So I'm currently in the process of flipping coins to trash a few, post others, and intersperse sage football observations in the mix. This is, sadly, the way I roll.

Nerds of a Feather

30 Rock is a pretty solid show with a lot of genuinely funny moments, and I dig Tina Fey, and not just in the "no no, leave the glasses on" milfhunter sense. But here, as amusing as all the butt-hurt commenters are, she is a bit out of line, not in the general comparative sense but because their styles as writers and performers seem so similar. They both utilize self-effacing, nebbishy humor, and seem to have each become nerd sex symbols in the process. For someone who appears to be fairly organized and intelligent, Fey's comment shows a surprising lack of self-awareness.

And basically, if you took Weekend Update and made it, well, funnier, you'd have many of The Daily Show's strongest elements. A good chunk of WU's schtick consists of the same lukewarm choir-preaching to a self-selecting audience, just as Fey murmurs about TDS. Indeed, WU and TV Funhouse have frequently been the only watchable things about the show, especially in its current heavily-padded incarnation. (This is actually somewhat surprising, since there are very good performers in the cast, but there's generally not much for them to work with.)

If anything, TDS and Colbert have generally strived for an "all killer, no filler" approach, with decent results most of the time. That alone places it well past SNL since at least the Phil Hartman days. Again, though, this is not nearly the big deal the kids are making out of it. Before you know it, Fey will be on to plug Baby Mama, Stewart will give her a gentle nudge, she'll kiss his ass, and all will be right with the world. I mean, if Jon can put up with Billy Kristol's shameless horseshit, Tina Fey's off-the-cuff comment should be nothing.

Things We Like

I fuckin' looooves me some Time Bandits like Rosie O'Donnell loves a fifth Devil Dog. Awesome movie.

Dancin' Fools

I've said this many times before, but as contemptuous as I am of the whole "reality" teevee thing, some aspects in particular are simply confounding, such as the dancing thing. Okay, first, if you have the word "stars" in your title, this should at the very least mean people who, if they were not on your show, would be doing something else. I did see Steve Guttenberg on a Law & Order a couple weeks ago; other than that, not so much. Hell, I've been on game shows and I can't dance either. Do I qualify?

But really it's the idea that watching people who used to be moderately famous try to dance -- and get critiqued by people no one's ever heard of -- would be entertaining for more than five minutes. (No doubt this is in the usual context of reality tropes that I have gleaned second- and third-hand: pregnant pauses, protracted explanations, contrived diversions, anything to stretch ten minutes of actual material into forty, plus commercials.) It sounds like something that the kids find on the YouTube and talk about for a couple weeks, like the fat kid working on his Jedi moves in the garage.

But once the novelty's over, you're watching the guy from Police Academy dance, which must be only slightly more exciting than watching him take a dump. And we're several years into this, um, phenomenon, which says as much about the viewing audience as it does about the laziness of the network programmers. To each their own and all, and I'm certainly not insisting on the elitist rigors of Mawsterpiece Theatre. But I work ten hours a day at a job I tolerate just like everyone else. And when I turn to the nutworks at 9PM and my choices are people dancing, people losing weight, and people doing whatever the fuck it is they do on Big Brother, I start to wonder more and more why it is I pay sixty bucks a month for satellite service when I could just boost my Netflix to the top level and pocket the difference. If it weren't for football and Daily Show/Colbert Report, I'd probably do just that.

Used to be that the minimum requirements for entertainment were that people were doing something that you probably couldn't do yourself -- act, write, tell stories, do stunts, direct, etc. This is like holding something sparkly in front of a mirror and staring at it for several years.

Sex Tape Thing

A Kristin Davis sex tape? Really? This would have nothing to do with her movie (a movie no one aside of urban cougars, fag hags, and gay men will see, but will nonetheless determine the viability of future HBO franchise movies, no doubt) coming out shortly, would it?

Ah well, a hummer's a hummer, n'est-ce pas?

Does A Bear Shit in the Economy?

The bailout has begun:

Q: Why would the Fed [guarantee $30 billion worth of Bear Stearns' nearly worthless assets]?

A: Experts say the risks of inaction were far greater. With investors backing away from anything linked to the U.S. mortgage market, the Fed aims to prevent the value of those investments from plunging even further, which could cause widespread fallout among big banks. "The problem is that unless the major financial (companies) are kept solvent, the economy will suffer (so much) that everybody's livelihood will be affected," said Peter Walliston, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Q. Does this mean my tax dollars are being used to bail out Wall Street?

A. Not exactly. The Fed has vast resources on its own, thanks to its ability to sell Treasury securities that investors consider extremely safe. Still, some fear the mortgage crisis that engulfed Bear Stearns will soon spread to other companies and ultimately test the Fed's resources, especially after the central bank last week said it would lend up to $200 billion in exchange for mortgage investments.

Q. Might taxpayers ultimately be on the hook?

A. Potentially. The Federal Reserve's actions could augur much broader government action to stabilize the mortgage market. Calls are growing in Congress for government-funded efforts to help borrowers refinance out of troubled loans.

You know, there's a much shorter answer to all these questions: Because they can. What the fuck are you gonna do about it, bunky -- turn off Dancing with People Who Used to be Sorta Well-Known and register your disapproval somehow? Not bloody likely.

I don't know if it's a more standardized reference in financial circles, but I like the "shadow financial system" descriptive Roubini employs:

All these institutions look similar to banks because they are highly leveraged and borrow short and in liquid ways and invest or lend long and in illiquid ways. This shadow financial system is, like banks, subject not only to credit and market risk but also to rollover or liquidity risk, i.e. the risk deriving from having a large stock of short term liabilities (relative to liquid assets) that may not roll over if creditors decide to withdraw their credits to these institutions.

Unlike banks this shadow financial system does not have access to the lender of last resort support of the central bank as these are not depository institutions regulated by the central banks. What we are now observing – with the case of Bear Stearns and the recent disaster among SIVs, conduits, run on a number of hedge funds and money market funds is a generalized liquidity run on this shadow financial system.

Although "casino running on borrowed money" is also pretty accurate.

Finally, First Draft has an excellent takedown of the billionaire welfare queens.

Let me ask those questions, those questions we ask of every beneficiary of the smallest drop of government assistance. Let me ask why this is the ONLY scenario in which our parsimonious bullshit about personal responsibility, about choices and consequences, about "survival of the fittest" and other forms of sicko math, need not fucking apply.

Let me ask just how the unholy fuck it is that we can quibble every single day for hours over lunches that would feed a small village for a week about the ten dollars a year we give to some social program and how it's going to waste because somebody fed us an anecdote about somebody somewhere faking their need. Let me ask just how the bloody fucking blue hell we can get all worked up over how the homeless people downtown don't deserve our pennies because one of them said something rude to us on the way out of a store, and how they're just gonna spend our 65 cents on booze and then pee on the stoop. Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

And the minute the majority of rubes out there finally disabuse themselves of this notion that each of them will somehow get a cut of all this phantom finance and percentage-point diddling, maybe then we can cut these grifters loose once and for all. Not that waiting until we were $2 trillion deep into two endless wars wasn't bad enough. Maybe it does take going under to encourage fools to finally learn to swim, and let the weasels drown.

Last Throe Update

Looks like the welcoming committee came out for Big Time's surprise visit:

A female suicide bomber apparently targeting Shiite worshippers killed at least 33 people and wounded at least 50 in Karbala on Monday, according to an Interior Ministry official.

....

Also Monday, two American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, officials said.

The incident occurred about 12:20 p.m. as the soldiers were "conducting a route-clearance combat operation north of Baghdad," according to a news release.

The names of the soldiers were not immediately released.

Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in the Iraqi capital Monday on an unannounced visit.

Cheney told reporters that the five years in Iraq since the war's start has been "well worth the effort."

I'm sure Cheney's financial advisor would be happy to confirm that.

The Straight Talk Express also paid a surprise visit, because nothing says "success" like having to skulk in unannounced.

McCain traveled there with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, both of whom serve on the Armed Services Committee with McCain, the committee's ranking member.

You have to give these people credit -- at least you know exactly where they stand. There is no room for any confusion on this, and the harmonic convergence of Cheney and the Straight Talk posse says it all. Any bullshit about disaffected apostate Democrats not clearly understanding that POST openly promises more of the same should be slapped down instantly. Your wittle feelings about Clinton or Obama, distasteful as either or both may seem at times, do not matter. Either you want to prolong the current regime's efforts, or you don't. It's that simple.

Conspiracy Guy Notes and Errata

Regardless of topic, Rigorous Intuition is never dull, and the same is true of its chat fora, this one discussing an interesting, appropriately ominous article in the Financial Times:

John Lipsky, the IMF's first deputy managing director, said: "We must keep all options on the table, including the potential use of public funds to safeguard the financial system."

The statement by the senior IMF official marks the second radical policy intervention from the IMF this year. It had previously called on governments to consider using fiscal policy to offset the impact of the credit crisis on growth.

Mr Lipsky said: "I fully recognise an appropriate role for public sector intervention after market solutions have been exhausted."

He urged policymakers to "think the unthinkable" and prepare now for what they would do if the worst case scenarios materialised and "low probability but high impact events" threatened to jeopardise global financial stability.

He warned of the risk that a "global financial decelerator" could take hold, in which rising defaults and margin calls from lenders triggered forced asset sales, driving down the value of collateral and forcing further forced sales.

The speculation as to what such a catalyzing event could be is reasonable enough, I suppose. It would not take much to kick over a war with Iran; an Iranian-backed Sadrist strapped with a dirty bomb penetrating the Green Zone would be pretext enough. And Poor Ol' Straight Talk has already begun establishing rhetorical turf in the brief border incursions between Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia recently. Venezuela being the third-largest oil exporter to the U.S., if Chàvez suddenly gets any bright ideas about turning off the tap, or even just screwing up production with his nationalization programs, his Bolivarian dream may be brought unceremoniously to heel.

But whatever. We can all nurse our pet theories till the cows come home. What I find interesting is the notion that, in the face of such a catalyzing event, Le Dauphin and his éminence grise would have an excuse to suspend elections and retain power, which presumes that they are looking for such an excuse. Folks, I think this is making rhetorical toothpicks out of logs, as it were; you can be quite certain that, should a Democrat happen to accede to the figurehead position come November, he or she will assiduously continue most of the operational prerogatives currently in play. Obama (and perhaps Clinton) is surely less predisposed to mindlessly attack another country, but with the required pretext, he would have little choice.

There is no need whatsoever to suspend or postpone elections. Indeed, maintaining their due course is critical to continuing the notion that they matter in any substantial way, other than elites sending signals amongst themselves. Plus, without the election industry, consultants would have to return to their former occupations, and there's only so many hobos to blow.

Why on earth would Bush want a third term anyway? He's done his bit; he'll spend a couple years scooping up money on the rubber-chicken circuit with Benito Giuliani and then amble off to Crawford -- or perhaps Paraguay.