Fifteen Minutes of Lame

So at least one (1) intrepid media herd animal is starting to have some, erm, misgivings about the veracity of some of the things Miss Wasilla pulls out of her bumptious ass with disturbing regularity:

Has Sarah Palin learned anything since she was plucked from obscurity almost two years ago? Not that I can tell.

Nonsense. Palin has clearly learned that she can fabricate virtually anything, and there will be plenty of people out there not only eager to believe it, but more importantly, willing to pay her handsomely for the privilege. There is no accountability for just making shit up.

This is one of the more valuable lessons young entrepreneurs can learn in a heavily addled, easily rattled, reality teevee saddled, hyper-consumerist culture -- there is almost literally nothing you can say that is so stupid or so easily disprovable, that someone won't buy into it, if only for a while. Has Ruth Marcus never heard of P.T. Barnum, or L. Ron Hubbard?

I've started to write this column several times and put it aside. I worried: Was I being harder on Palin because I disagree with her politically? Was I being harder on Palin than I would be on a man spouting similar pablum? In a world where everyone already has firm opinions about Palin, pro or con, is there a value in pointing out that the empress has no clothes?

Palin's appearance on "Fox News Sunday" pushed me over the edge.

Let's see if we have this straight -- Palin has been slithering her way around the country for nearly two full fucking years now, making shit up every step of the way, and only now Marcus is having her come-to-Jebus moment. Seriously?

Let's put it in a way that Ruth Marcus and her ilk, no matter how far "over the edge" they are "pushed", will never have the sack to put it:

Every word out of Sarah Palin's mouth, including "and" and "the", is a goddamned lie.

Hopefully this helps, because they really don't seem to get it. Palin's by-now routine schtick about the (oh ho ho) "lamestream media" is perhaps the only thing she's ever said that even has a ring of truth to it. But that is only because of the corporate media's own diffident, gutless, yet maddeningly constant coverage of her nonsense.

Now, some folks will simply write off Palin as a dunce, while others will mutter about how she plays fast and/or loose with "the facts", that is, verifiable data points regarding the people and/or events she talks about at her various rubber-chicken stops.

I submit that the problem is deeper, more pernicious. The problem is no longer whether or not Palin knows what she's talking about. The problem is that she doesn't care what "the facts" are. It doesn't matter that Big Oil donated more than twice as much money to her and her doddering running mate than to the Kenyan-born communist Moooslim Barry Soetoro; she says otherwise, and by divinely ordained fiat, it is so.

It doesn't matter that this is about the umpteenth time she's been caught inventing facts to suit her tired-ass talking points; she'll do it again and again, for as long as there's the opening of an envelope for her to show up at. And her drooling retard fans will never hold her accountable for it, anymore than they can actually explain a single policy of hers that they endorse or agree with.

It is not enough to merely write Palin off as a garden-variety "liar", with which Washington is obviously overrun. What Palin really is -- and this oughta bear some weight with people who at least pretend to be good Christians -- is a calumniator, a bearer of false witness, a person who deliberately invents or misrepresents things about their opponents in order to slander or defame them. That is really all she's done since day one, since she proclaimed that Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists" while she, brave Saint Sarah, devoutly said "no" to the Bridge to Nowhere before taking the money anyway.

You'd think someone with such a high fatuous-boilerplate-to-pseudofactual-talking-point public-speaking ratio would be more discriminating about their opportunities to zap an opponent with an inconvenient truth. Palin's advantage is that neither she nor her fans care about the factuality of her charges.

Incidentally, this theme of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness applies not only to Palin's professional life and her trenchant political observations. Palin famously (and tediously) characterizes herself over and over again as some tough cookie, utilizing fearsome, marauding beasts such as pit bulls and grizzly bears as totems with which to compare herself.

Yet the opposite is patently observable -- she is notoriously thin-skinned, about people rejoindering her falsehoods, or mentioning word one about any of the various kids she trots out as convenient props. She dishes it out with relish, yet flies into a hissy fit if anyone dares to respond. There is always an equilibrium point where you start running into the law of diminishing returns, and Palin's tedious stunt-jabber, her insufferable nonsense and empty-calorie schtick is finally getting her as much attention as her brain-dead ankle-biting.

It will be a fine day when she finally takes her ill-gotten pelf and heads back home by way of Neiman-Marcus, but until then, it would not kill the media folk to simply and sharply identify a spade as an entrenching implement. Let's stop pussyfooting around this -- Palin is a pathological liar, full stop, when she bothers at all to get past her usual hokum. Start hammering on that, and watch the whole façade crumble. One supposes it will have to be a media entity without any attachments or agreements with whatever incestuous publishing consortium bankrolling her upcoming two-ply opus.

Lately Palin seems to have finally bought into a little too much of her own hype, and may have overstepped. Two of her most famous endorsements this election year are Senate candidates Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina. One is a card-carrying moron way out of their depth, and the other is Rand Paul. Paul can ride his daddy's coattails and excite the Paultards to some extent, but so far he has yet to open his mouth without risking a serious case of asshole'sathlete's foot. Both Democratic primary candidates got more votes. As for Fiorina, she may have the money (ask E-Meg Whitman, aka Griff Harsh V's mom, how that's worked out), but she is widely disliked in California, and people will be less than whelmed at her (one assumes in advance) whimsically creative version of how she lawn-darted Hewlett-Packard.

These are high-profile, but also high-risk endorsements for Miss Thang, and the more she runs her mouth about the only entity that keeps her name in play -- that stupid, stupid librul media -- the likelier it is that they actually take their gloves off at some point and give her the fisking she's been begging for.


Update: OK, this is pretty good. She really does make Dubya look like a Rhodes scholar.

Man on the Silver Mountain

Dio has rocked for a long, long time.
Now it's time for him to pass the torch. -- Tenacious D

I don't normally do the "read the whole thing" schtick if I can help it, but Mark Morford's appreciation on the passing of Ronnie James Dio was superb. Can't think of anything substantial to add really, I would just agree with Morford that Dio was kind of a man out of time at this point, an anachronism but in a good way.

Dio didn't have a coke habit, or a whore habit, or a seven-kids-by-five-women habit, or a branding-everything-that-moves habit,or a resting-on-his-laurels-for-$200-a-ticket habit. The guy just showed up for work, did it with competence and love for the work itself, and didn't abuse his career and his fans by turning his life into some retarded "reality" freak show. He respected his craft, his colleagues, his fans. That's something, especially for 35 years.

Yes, some of the theatrics and lyrics could be corny and cheesy at times, but even that was part of the fun. He knew exactly what he was doing. And it really wasn't all that cheesy -- look at any current Top 10 list, and tell me anything from Dream Evil wouldn't just smoke every song on there out of their AutoTuned buttholes. Ke$ha and Pee Diddly are cheesy. Katy Perry is fucking cheesy, but with huge cans. Dio could actually sing, and he worked with musicians who could -- get this -- actually play musical instruments.

People don't really sing much anymore, they either ProTool it to death, or take the opposite tack and sing through their noses like Bob Dylan. There are some good ones out there if you're willing to look, but they don't move much product. I had to crank up the live Sign of the Southern Cross when I heard the news Sunday afternoon, and remember how actual singers used to roll.

A little guy with a huge voice, and a huge passion for his music. Nicely done, Dio. R.I.P.

Apocalypse How

People have been prophesying doom since the dawn of civilization, no doubt. Any and all Cassandras should be taken with a grain of salt.

So should we, knowing what we know about the world around us and the various elements that propel its crises, retain a dollop of healthy skepticism about the "rational optimists".

Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Yes, indeedy, if one occurs, generally the other follows. However, to take a cursory glance at the (for now) largest economy and proverbial 800-pound gorilla, real wages have stagnated (other than a blip during the Clinton years) since the mid '70s. Other notable metrics -- life expectancy, infant mortality, educational level and achievement -- have regressed. We don't manufacture anything anymore; we refuse to force the 1% who own half of everything to spread even 1-2% around the bottom quintile, because we think we'll win the lottery someday; and as anyone who observes the California referendum process year after excruciating year, we want all services without having to, you know, pay for them.

There is always the quantum possibility of unforeseeable, catalyzing "black swan" events, but even without that, we seem perfectly content with turning "stupid" into an active verb, and "stupiding" ourselves to death, or at least penury.

Allah Hates You

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

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

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

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

Mad Cow Disease

Just when we were starting to think that maybe we would get a brief respite from our favorite idiot savant, suddenly there's a barrage of Stupid Shit Sarah Said "news" stories. Islamofascistsocialistcommieneegrow Obammy is responsible for anything and everything, from illegal immigrants to the heartbreak of psoriasis. Also, he wants to take away your guns, the easier to force everyone to get abortions, one supposes.

Oh, and speaking of abortions, while Miss Thang is on high alert for all the choices Obammy and Pelosi and Reid and the rest of the Gestapo wish to take from you, fortunately Saint Sarah has taken the trouble to establish the "right" reproductive choice for all women. Four legs good, two legs better and all.

And the only thing we've learned from a rapidly worsening catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is that we're not drilling enough. It is truly a technological marvel, to be able to drill five miles down at the bottom of a large body of water; less impressive is that the technology has far outdistanced the ability to contain problems and accidents. And nowhere is the notion of conservation, the formerly Christian idea that waste is a sin, even mentioned. Drill baby drill. No matter what is destroyed, or who dies in the process.

Since Palin is -- you guessed it -- having another book cobbled together for her to slap her name on, this is all just another piece of what is becoming an endless publicity tour. The only interesting part of all this is whether the Republican Party seriously thinks she is viable (or even if she wants to run) in 2012, even though right now she would lose in her home state.

The fact of the matter is that the loose, sloppy alliance of Palin and the teabaggers -- both creations of the party and its lobbyists -- threaten to undermine any claims to moderation or legitimacy the Republicans might still have clung to.

Then there's Palin. She poses absolutely no threat to Obama's solid or lukewarm Democratic base. The mere mention of her as a possible presidential candidate is more than enough to terrorize disappointed liberal Democrats out of their Obama inertia. The real damage that she can do will be to further confuse, rile up, and split Republicans. Polls show that while voters in general say Palin's not presidential timber, a huge minority of Republicans say that she is. This could translate into a stock of disgruntled, frustrated voters who would be sorely tempted to push, prod and hector the GOP to give Palin her due as a possible presidential candidate. This kind of talk will propel even more independents away from the GOP.

Palin can talk all day about "mama grizzlies" ousting Democrats from power in November and beyond. But the stark political reality is that so far the only ones who have been threatened or devoured wear the GOP tag. This wasn't in the GOP mainstream's script for Palin and the Tea Party.

True dat. Notice how quickly they stopped crowing about Scott Brown, once he turned out to be a bit more moderate than they'd presumed. This is a crowd with truly dangerous levels of delusionary projection; they automatically assume that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. It doesn't occur to them that perhaps Brown sensed a unique opportunity in a miserable, presumptuous opponent and bitter political and economic winds. He tacked his sail correctly and squeaked in, simple as that.

It's amazing and appalling how the most incoherent, cognitively dissonant political players have managed to suck so much of the oxygen out of the room, from admirers and detractors alike. Enabled by a corporate media that has a vested interest in keeping the proles addled and bamboozled, these bozos muster on, like locusts mindlessly destroying field after field.

Not sure exactly how much of the American political landscape, such as it is, needs to be destroyed just so Sarah Palin can peddle another ghost-written doorstop, but the pestilence is cutting an ever-wider swath. Seems like three possibilities are most likely: one, that this nonsense gains traction, and a bunch of yahoos take office in November; two, that some catalyzing event pushes an already unstable claque into violent action; three, that enough people come to their damned senses and start forcefully repudiating this nonsense.

The trick is whether or not we believe that the morons have been covering their lack of real numbers with sheer volume, or if enough people think that their disaffection for a broken political system should automatically translate into them joining with a "movement" that has no policy proposals, no leaders, no coherent manifesto.

Imitation of Life

I'll admit right from the start -- all I know about the Twilight thing is that it was a bunch of books written by a Mormon housewife, about some teenybopper vegetarian vampires. And now it's a bunch of movies that get adolescent girls (and, weirdly, their mothers) wet. Have I got the general thrust of this, erm, cultural phenomenon? Very well, then. Can someone explain this to me, per favore?

When Oprah Winfrey called all Twilight fans in April to submit stories about how the hit supernatural series changed their lives, Maria Mele knew she had to e-mail the daytime talk show host.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- Oprah Winfrey has probably done more than any other single person to turn Americans into a moony-eyed claque of simpering morons. From giving Sarah Palin far more face time than she deserves, to endlessly cultivating this sort of fan-club nonsense, Oprah's efforts in toto conveniently elide for her housewife cult the important differences between self-actualizing and self-indulgence, between knowing and understanding oneself, and merely flattering oneself for every fart and bunion.

Really, and not to get too heavy about it but there it is, it's the difference between being a spectator and being a participant in one's own life. Getting Oprah's favorite brand of bath beads at Occitane doesn't make you any better or happier, it just makes you an easy mark, because you'll shell out thirty-five bucks for a jar of pleasantly-scented sand and soap.

Back to the actual sentence, and what it really means if we take a second and think about it. Now, I know what it's like to be a fan -- it's just pure fun to be a fan of something, to enjoy the thing, whatever or whoever it is, in all its facets, turning it like a coveted jewel, finding nuances that only you can really perceive. This is a fine thing -- when you're in eighth grade. When you're an adult, it's kinda weird, moreso when it's clearly something aimed at, well, eighth-graders.

There is a transformative power to art in all its forms, of course. That's what makes it art. Thirty years on, I still recall the first time I heard Rush, or Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd's The Wall. I had only heard R&B, country, and AM classics (what would now be called "oldies" on your local niche-market station). I had internalized the conventional song format, and bands and albums like those quickly changed the way I heard and thought about music and the role of the musician.

Similar perceptive changes occurred the first time I saw the work of Magritte, or Kandinsky, or local hero Sal Casa. Or movies, ranging from Goodfellas to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, can have a profound effect on how you perceive form, motion, composition, or even the medium itself. That's pretty damned cool. But it's not "life-changing", so much as simply expanding the scope of things that you consider interesting or creative.

None of that, near as this outsider can tell, applies to the Twilight movies/books/franchise merchandise, no matter how much the Twi-tards wish it so, no matter how many babies [rolls eyes audibly] get named after the characters. It's just a love story with vampires, two of the most overworked themes in books and movies. This is nothing more than the sort of gushy fandom that is tedious enough in teenaged girls, but inexplicable in adults. Pattinson is a good sport for taking part in these goofy events, but let's face it -- he could have taken a dump on their front porch, and they would have put it in a jar. It's worse than sad, it's kind of disturbing.

Flag Hags

Generall all "political correctness run amok" stories should be taken with a large block of salt (especially if they happen to emanate from the rabble-rousing journamalistic sphincter of Faux News. But this is one of the dumbest things I've seen in some time, and I live in California, for fuck's sake.

Five student-athletes exposed raw feelings about race and immigration in a Northern California high school this week when they made the provocative choice to wear shirts and shorts bearing the stars and stripes of the American flag to school on Cinco de Mayo.

Now their actions - which an assistant principal at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill labeled "incendiary" - are spilling across the small town's borders, igniting a polarizing national debate on cable television's 24-hour talkfest.

Wednesday, as the school's Latino pupils - nearly 40 percent of the Live Oak student body - were celebrating the Mexican army's victory against France in 1862, many wearing Mexico's colors of red, white and green, the five boys showed up dressed in the American flag.

Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez told the boys to reverse their colors, or go home. Three boys left campus because they found the other option to be "disrespectful" to the flag, and two remained in school anyway, without changing, their parents said.

Rodriguez could not be reached for comment - the school was referring all calls to the district office - but parents said he indicated to them he was concerned about the boys' safety.

Oh, please. If that was truly the case, the two who remained without changing would have been sent home, per the assistant principal's empty threat.

Look, there may have been -- indeed, on some level almost certainly was -- some undercurrent of needless provocation in the boys' culture-warrior antics. So what? There's nothing violent or incendiary about wearing a t-shirt with an American flag on it; there was no nasty anti-Latino sentiment scrawled next to the flag. They chose an awfully convenient time to demonstrate their patriotism, sure, but in and of itself, that's not a crime, nor even a suspendable offense.

Of course, we are talking about the public school system, which is not meant to educate or even indoctrinate, so much as housebreak, to encourage mindless conformity, whether through anodyne "cultural awareness" outlets throughout the school year, or some other expression of collective solidarity on this or that meaningless issue. As long as kids come out the other end as docile employees and consumers, lifelong receivers of baldfaced lies from their superiors, everything is jake. The second they pose an inconvenient question, or show any independent thought, instead of trying to talk with them, bureaucratic feathers get ruffled, and the warden drops the hammer.

A group of about a dozen Latino students expressed their dismay Thursday directly to the school's white students - particularly the boys who wore the flag clothing. "We respect them on Fourth of July," said sophomore Biana Coreas. "We don't go with our Mexican flags waving it up that day, so why can't they respect us too?"

Well, that's awful large of them, but get this -- it is America, and not Mexico, and while all cultures should feel free to express themselves on their important occasions, it's not the sharpest tack to take, to act like you're doing everyone a favor by holding back on the Fourth of July.

This is a very silly argument all the way around, the way people get butt-hurt over symbols and colors, especially over an occasion where a substantial portion of participants probably cannot tell you what is being commemorated. John Robb would probably characterize this as collective expressions of primary (tribal) loyalties, which in the continuing regression of defensible extended (belief and alignment with government and society) loyalties, makes sense. The more immediate effect is that this gives reactionary cultural "conservatives" more unnecessary fuel for their colorful assumptions.

Milf Does a Body Good

Here's a heartwarmer for all you Mother's Day aficionados out there:

Over at Momlogic.com a story reports that a dating Web site for married people has its second-busiest day for female member sign-ups on the day after Mother's Day. (The day after Valentine's Day is the busiest.)

So many things so profoundly wrong with just that introductory paragraph. A "dating Web site for married people"? What the hell? That's just lovely. Second, the two busiest sign-up days on this site are the day after Valentine's Day and the day after Mother's Day? I assume that's just a stop-gap whilst these broads head down to their local watering hole to surreptitiously pocket their wedding ring and look for a handy pole to smoke.

Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I met my (and probably your) share of these women in my early twenties, not then realizing they weren't actually single. Bored thirtyish milfs tired of their paunchy husbands' half-hearted attempts at sex were, as they say, in my wheelhouse, long before "milf" was even a word. That's not bragging so much as a warning, guys -- throw your back into it. Always. Do it like you mean it. Surprise them with a new move once in a while. And foreplay -- it's not a golf term.

Not that, say, Tiger Woods or Jesse James have exactly set the bar high for us men when it comes to basic honesty and morality. Fucking everything that moves is one thing when you're 22 years old and have no commitments; it ain't even remotely cool when you're in your mid-thirties, are married, and have children. It's time to grow the hell up.

As the woman in the final paragraph says, in a good marriage, partners spoil each other whenever they can, they don't wait for florists and greeting-card manufacturers to tell them when they should. So if you have somebody you love, or even like, be nice to them today, tomorrow, as often as possible, and count your blessings that you aren't stuck with one of these narcissistic dingbats -- or even worse, Tiger Woods.

Family Gay

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Let Us Prey

O invisible sky buddy, deliver us from the tedious ministrations of your self-righteous minions:

In small groups and alone, about 100 people gathered Thursday on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for what participants said was to be a low-key ceremony to mark the annual National Day of Prayer.

Amid the liquid noises of a nearby fountain and the sounds of people just walking by, participants could be heard making hushed pleas to God.

"Don't expect any music or sermons. Don't expect any pomp. Just prayer," said Nancy Sharman, area leader of the National Day of Prayer Task Force. "No personalities. Just prayer. No party divisions. Just prayer."

How about no media coverage, just prayer. No, of course not. That would be too much to ask. After all, it's not really a national day of prayer, if you can't nag the entire fucking country about it.

Thursday's prayer event marked the conclusion of a five-day, four-night Bible reading held on the Capitol steps and organized by the Rev. Michael Hall, executive director of the International Bible Reading Association. More than 1,000 participated in the marathon reading, said Hall, who is also pastor of The Peoples Church on Capitol Hill.

"As Christians we don't need a political strategy, we just need God's word," Hall said.

Uh-huh. And a church. Don't forget church, where every day is a national day of prayer. Gee, that was handy, if less public.

The Rev. Franklin Graham prayed briefly Thursday morning outside the Pentagon, which had disinvited him from a prayer day observance because of anti-Islam remarks.

Graham then went to the Cannon House Office Building, next to the Capitol, to participate in what amounted to a Christian worship service.

There, he preached a 30-minute sin-and-salvation sermon to an audience of several hundred that included members of Congress, the judiciary and the armed forces.

"My prayer is that America once again will worship the Lord Jesus Christ," Graham said. "My prayer is that America will trust Him once again. My prayer is: 'Lord, if You're willing, make our nation whole again. May we turn to You, worship You, acknowledge You, live by your ways and your standards.' God bless America."

Graham is honorary chairman of the largely evangelical National Day of Prayer Task Force, which is led by conservative Christian leaders James and Shirley Dobson.

Before he preached, Graham alluded to the Pentagon controversy: "I know we have people here of other faiths, and I certainly want to say that I love you, but, please, allow me to speak today as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I don't want to be offensive to anyone, but the only way I know how to pray and to preach is the way the Bible instructs."

There's something in practically every sentence of that last excerpt that makes anyone with a triple-digit IQ want to slap their forehead in frustration. But it really comes down to the final piece. This is a purely Christian jihad, and they may as well just insert the C-word right in front of "Prayer", in naming their little fake holiday and little fake "task force".

In a land chock-full of noisome, childish pseudo-customs, this is certainly one of the pound-for-pound more obtrusive. Especially since, according to the very first sentence, only 100 people showed up. That certainly merits national coverage.

Casino Logic

Here's something that even a complete retard (such as, for example, Jim Cramer) should be able to understand -- a financial system that goes into full poncey-hairdresser panic mode because some cokehead at Citigroup didn't know the difference between "million" and "billion" is not a system. It's a house of cards.

What is worth panicking (or at least being genuinely concerned) over is debt, which is why it makes more sense that the panic was really over the Greek debt crisis spreading in general, and Mohamed El-Erian's speech in particular.

"We've seen a crisis start in a country—Greece—become regional, impact the whole of the Euro zone and is on the verge of truly going global," said El-Erian, CEO of the world's biggest bond fund.

He said the debt is a "transmission mechanism to go from country to region to global. So we should take this very seriously."

S&P 500 banks fell financials fell nearly 5 percent as investors worried about the financial system freezing up again, similar to what happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

One trader who spoke on condition of anonymity said fixed-income desks in Europe shut down early for the day and that "European banks are halting lending now."

Similarly, the US faces a debt burden that, while not as large a percentage of gross domestic product as Greece, is approaching that level and could spark major problems domestically.

"We are not Greece. We have more time. But what the Greek crisis tells you is debt and deficits matter," El-Erian said. "The structure of your deficits matter and the US doesn't have much flexibility."

"Don't underestimate how quickly this can happen," he added. "There are structural headwinds out there and we better get our act together before those structural headwinds become overwhelming."

Good thing Lloyd Blankfein is doing God's work, right? Strap in folks, it's going to be a bumpy economic summer. Just remember -- someone will make money off your misery. Someone always does, even (perhaps especially) when they don't make anything of actual value.

End of an Error

So at long last, the JaCarcass Russell era has come to a suitably ignominious -- if belabored and long-overdue -- end in Oakland. Let a thousand post-mortems begin in earnest.

One of the more entertaining -- and by "entertaining" I mean "ludicrous" -- assessments of Russell is that of SF Comical root vegetable Zennie Abraham, who manages to be wrong about a variety of subjects with stunning regularity:

In 2007, the Raiders Drafted Jamarcus Russell and before they selected him there was a big splash about his size and talent. The choice for the Oakland Raiders was between Russell and then-Notre Dame Quarterback Brady Quinn, who's [sic] stock had risen after a very good performance at the NFL Combine. At the 2007 NFL Draft Luncheon at Chelsea Piers, Russell said he'd heard "nothing" from the Raiders. The word around the NFL Draft was that the Raiders were set to take Quinn.

Nonsense. Every team plays their draft preferences close to the vest (duh), and few more so than the Raiders, invested as they are in cultivating their "mystique", even after a miserable 2-14 abortion of a season. The 2007 draft class was pretty thin at QB to begin with, and none of the marquee names from that year -- Russell, Quinn, Matt Leinart -- have been worth a shit. Quinn's stock was boosted because he had run the closest to a legit pro offense at Notre Dame, briefly overshadowing his noodle arm, mediocre decision-making, and lax work ethic. But Quinn wouldn't have been any better with Oakland, because he was even less suited for Al Davis' archaic offense.

To everyone's surprise, the Raiders took JaMarcus Russell. I felt then and now that Russell was the better choice. JaMarcus has the rare combination of size and speed. He's the best talent to run a short passing game designed around his abilities.

Note, short passing game.

The Raiders under Lane Kiffin inserted Russell into an offense not designed for him and at that incredibly inept in it's [sic] function. On one particularly memorable play, the Kiffin-led Raiders asked Russell to call a weakside bootleg out of I-Formation against the Denver Broncos and while the Broncos had an obvious blitz called to that weakside.

Kee-rist. First of all, the Raiders haven't run a short-pass offense -- or anything resembling a "west coast" style -- since Gruden was coaching, and it ended up costing him his job, and costing the Raiders their last decent record. Second, Russell is precisely not suited for a short passing offense, which is exactly why Davis wanted him.

Third, what a piss-poor example of a play with which to defend Russell, when a competent quarterback should be able to pick up an "obvious" blitz. And it means nothing, one play in the course of three phenomenally bad seasons of play.

True, Russell has had little or no continuity at coach, a problem that is amplified when the player in question is notorious for his lack of motivation. True, Davis is a capricious, meddlesome owner who toys with his fan base routinely. And true, Tom Cable was a terminal fuck-up as nominal OC last season, regularly finding his offense's back to their own end zone, and instead of using his three decent running backs to methodically, patiently build a drive, eat up the clock, and give his incompetent quarterback at least a glimmer of confidence, frequently chose to have Russell heave it forty yards downfield, to clank off one of the young, inexperienced receivers if they were lucky.

But Russell is the one who chose to hold out his rookie season. Russell is the one who quickly gained a rep for walking through practices, showing up late and falling asleep in meetings, and not having the playbook tight. Russell is the one who lackadaisically deflected any and all critiques of his performance, no matter how objective and legitimate. Russell's the one who chose to flash his bling in public appearances, like a fucking buffoon, without having earned the right to. People flicked Joe Namath shit for wearing a fur coat back in the day, and he actually won a fuckin' Super Bowl.

Most damning of all, Russell got fined in last year's training camp for showing up overweight. I think most fans ran out of patience at that point. Look, I may talk trash about Peyton Manning and Tom Brady when the occasion arises, but there's no doubt in even the most ardent hater's mind that those two earn their keep (and they make about as much money, so the argument of money as a demotivator is a non-starter). They show up for work, they know the plays, they know the system, they know their shit so that when the play breaks down they find something to make it work. And their teammates know it, and they play harder as a result. By mid-season, every time Russell came in the o-line's shoulders collectively slumped, and they transformed into turnstiles as Russell went fetal trying to hold onto the ball. The problem was as obvious as it was intangible -- Russell's lack of self-accountability had become contagious.

Debates will be had among football fans for some time: Was Russell a bigger bust than Ryan Leaf (about tied, but Leaf was a bigger asshole)? Will Russell ever play again (maybe for the league minimum, and only for a desperate team)? Why did he fail so badly (many reasons, the main one being poor work ethic)? Is Russell Exhibit A for a rookie salary cap (hell yes)?

But there's a larger argument to be made about how interdependent talent and management really are, how a dysfunctional organization can bring out the worst in people, no matter how much raw talent they may have. It's true in just about any walk in life -- sports, music, business, politics. It's always a risky proposition to give a 21-year-old kid $30+ million guaranteed, before he's ever taken a snap or run a drill or done a goddamned thing.

Either way, it's Christmas Day in Raider Nation.

Absence of Malice

I never know what to make of bloggers who apologize for not being around as much as they oughta should, as if they had no real lives, but explanations are usually at least interesting, if not necessarily helpful. Basically I've been caught between ramped-up activity at work (if you want job security without the sanity, try social services in a crap economy) and an ops management class that quickly morphed into the calculus end of a supply-chain management course. And the last time I took a calculus class was, I shit you not, 1986.

But there's been simply too much fun stuff to cover the last couple days, so sit tight -- tonight is going to be busy. Must be sunspot activity or something.

Big Babies

Holy crap, what a self-righteous bunch of hypocrites. It's both okely and dokely for a bunch of unemployed yahoos, most of whom benefit from one gubmint program or another, to waddle around the park all afternoon with a bunch stupid signs and stupider slogans, festooned with misspelled words that don't mean what they think they mean. But heaven forfend a cartoon insurance mascot make fun of them for being a bunch of perpetually butt-hurt maroons.

I keep thinking that the best way to disperse these ridiculous public park putsches would be to give jobs to the participants, but for the life of me, I can't imagine anything these people are good at, besides pulling oddities out of their asses.

Hume's Paradox

I'll see Monsieur IOZ' refutation of Clinton and raise him a McVeigh. On the one hand, the "Tea Partiers", whatever they may be or not be, are so far largely a media-driven phenomenon, albeit one that has found some traction for its aspirations of incoherent political mischief.

On the other hand, Tim McVeigh was a bad guy and an unrepentant asshole, but he could think and speak in complete sentences, and had an actual point (however indefensible) that he was able to argue. You look at the braying gaggles of unemployed morons, presumably collecting unemployment insurance at some point in their imposed vacation, many of them collecting Social Security and/or Medicare, taking a public road to a public park, in order to dress up like Paul Revere and rant about obamacommienaziblarghsoshalizm, and it is difficult to imagine Tim McVeigh hanging around these suckas.

So when Clinton talks about the "serious and delirious" in trying to conflate the suburban-asshole park-rats with McVeigh and his crew, he's missing the point. McVeigh was dead serious. The teabaggers have yet to coherently explain much of anything about what they stand for, what they would do if they had the opportunity, etc. It's just a bunch of sorry-ass "...and then Sarah told Obammy he could keep the change!" heh-indeedy lines repeated ad nauseam, and nothing more. McVeigh, on the other hand, articulated his sick rationales with clarity and purpose, lucid in his own way right up to the very end.

And, coming back to IOZ' theme, McVeigh was protesting the government's actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco -- which were, after all, overreach in efforts to preserve the monopoly of force. The siege at Waco was presented as the usual Protecting The Children guff, but let's face it -- if the government wanted to protect children from being molested by religious fanatics, they'd shut down every diocese from Seattle to Miami. No, David Koresh was also running guns, and possibly planning an armed insurrection, and it was (rightly) presumed that if Koresh was allowed to get away with it, pretty soon you'd have plenty of Koresh imitators out there in the boonies (and in fact, they're out there anyway).

Odds are there's bound to be at least one lone nut at one of these stupid rallies, which are needlessly kept afloat by a flailing corporate media, out of ideas and useful news but always able to sniff out a bullshit conflict to be ginned up. It's just the law of averages.

But that lone nut will probably not be one of the on-camera bozos, dressing up and shouting slogans while hoisting a sign he spent all weekend making because he has neither a life nor a job. The angry loner will be a guy like McVeigh, off-camera, quiet, possessing some relevant skill set, nursing his problems with women and gambling along with his perpetual grievances against Big Gubmint, eventually conflating them into a toxic spew, taking it out on whatever seems handy. In the end terrorists never quite know how to get what they want, they only know what they don't want, and have abandoned the conventional avenues toward achieving that anti-objective.

As for the teabaggers, if you really want to disband them, give the younger ones jobs, and call out the old farts collecting SS/Medicare checks, tell them to pay their own freight or kindly fuck off already. Or you could just stop giving them free publicity.

Steele Magnolias

The hilarious thing about Ben Stein's column is not that Stein is tired of being played for a sucka donor for Michael Steele's private jets and donut-bumping bondage-club excursions, but his wistful reminiscences of what his party "is" or "was":

But we also give because we have a lingering belief (and a hope) that the GOP is the party of small town, all-American virtues and verities.

Dude, fucking seriously? Did Stein move out of Hollywood at some point, or did I miss it? Nope, he mentions in the column that the Voyeur club is not far from where he lives. This is the sort of happy horseshit Bobo Brooks shovels with a brainless grin -- cushy, pampered suburbanites peddling long-lost dreams of bucolic villages where they themselves wouldn't live in a million years.

More hilarious than that is the idea that either party gives two shits about small towns or their "values", which are every bit as decadent as a Tarantino gutbuster, once you've lived in one long enough to know everyone's shit. Small-town America is unemployed, alcoholic, dealing and doing meth on the side, fucking each other's ex-wives. There's not much else to do, really.

But the Corporate Party, of which both Republicans and Democrats are members, has done its level best to eviscerate small-town America, the idealized one and the actual ones alike. They've fucked over small-towns every chance they've gotten, undermined their tax base and infrastructre with enormous tax deferments -- when they can be convinced to stay in the country, that is. Everything else has been outsourced, apparently with the goal the we'll all just sell each other five-dollar cups of coffee.

Steele's big crime is that he's just been a lot less circumspect about the type of organization he leads than his peers and donors would prefer. He may be counting on the GOP's seeming reluctance to shit-can one of their few non-white players, but that just shows how little he really knows his party, and the sort they cater to. The Republican party is much more concerned with dog-whistling neo-confederates and the like than with preserving a veneer of political correctness.

Khmer Rogue

Like just about everything else this fucking dingbat does, I had to check around to make sure this wasn't some sort of late April Fool's Day goof:

Big hair, white jacket. And now a salute to the “beautiful people working so hard in Nevada.”

Heck yeah, I want to speak at this convention! Three bad wine puns in a row: “Going rosé”, “stand on a wine box (instead of a soap box)”, “in good spirits”.

Apparently Todd is in a snow race this weekend. Wow, this woman could have been president. Shudder.

[Editor: What is the crowd's reaction?]

TOTAL SILENCE

She just made up a Ronald Reagan quote. And now she’s talking about the deficit, using “heck” a lot. If her commercial fishing business is in trouble, she’d fix it, not borrow money.

She is avoiding any sort of industry specific comments, but seems to be all about deregulation. In Wasilla, she fought regulations that would dictate whether barber poles could rotate.

....

I think she would make a fantastic elementary school principal.

....

“Think of cultured yeast as a mentor.” That was an attempt to link winemaking with the habits of successful people.

She keeps focusing on small business. An interesting choice, given the crowd.

Indeed, but no doubt the distinction is completely lost on her. (And hey, awesome new tagline. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.) This is that "shows up to the opening of an envelope" thing I mentioned before -- she's just there to grab a check, run through her usual schtick, make a few fat white middle-aged closet cases who can't get it up anymore anyway slobber over her, and move on to the next mark. Not a bad gig, so long as it stays on the usual rubber-chicken circuit.

The problem is when this bozo thinks she knows something about anything, and arrogates unto herself the right to tell the adults -- people who actually have skills and knowledge about the great big world, not beauty-pageant-scholarship-winners who took five years and six cow colleges to slap together a fucking communications degree, ferchrissakes, and have learned nothing since -- how to do their jobs.

Palin, whom Obama dismissed recently as "not much of an expert on nuclear issues," fired back at the president, mockingly referring to "all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator and a candidate for president." She said Obama had accomplished "nothing to date with Iran or North Korea."

Okay. What do you want to do, Sarah, li'l miss armchair tough-chick? Start wars with Iran and North Korea? No problem, so long as your kid is in the first attack wave. See how that starty-fighty thing works out for ya, since the two wars we're still in have gone so smoothly this past decade.

There is never going to be a point where any serious, truly non-partisan observer of world or domestic politics is going to take a tomato-lobber like Palin seriously, anymore than such a person could take George W. Bush seriously. It's hard to say whether she actually realizes that part of it or not. Probably a little of both; like any other person who manages by luck and circumstance to transcend their normal Peter Principle boundaries, the desire to believe the hype has to be at least internally tempered by the knowledge that they're in way over their heads. All that's left, since they know they are incapable of dazzling anyone with their brilliance, is to baffle 'em with bullshit.

The problem is the effect they can have on truly stupid people, which every country has in no small measure (especially in the realm of politics), but who are especially empowered in the media-stirred swamp of American politics. It devolves into the slop of dishonest, hypocritical rhetoric being received as some sort of gospel:

"Don't retreat. Reload!" she said, invoking a slogan that has lately earned her some criticism. The crowd cheered deafeningly as she added, "And that is NOT a call for violence!"

Like everything else she bleats, this is too clever by less than half. The goal here is twofold -- one, to evoke clearly revolutionary jargon with implicitly violent choices of words ("reload") and images (the crosshairs on "targeted" congressional districts). This is of a piece with the rest of her nonsense, dating back to the very of start of her being foisted on an adipose, reality-teevee-addled electorate, all but calling Obama a domestic terrorist outright. The other goal, of course, is more prosaic -- to jab libruls with their usual "fuck you" posturing, creating opportunities to do so if needed.

But the fact of the matter is, while the "left" (whatever that encompasses, other than people with triple-digit IQs) have mercilessly lampooned and roasted her, none of them (afaik) have even rhetorically or satirically advocated violent actions, or used implicitly violent catch-phrases. The tough talk, death threats, garment-rending over issues such as abortion funding, etc., are part and parcel of the right's reactions to pretty much everything.

It's a very frustrating phenomenon to watch, over and over again, primarily because it is impervious to factual argument -- indeed it thrives on its capacity to establish and populate a consistent alternative narrative, no matter how ludicrous. It achieves its most clear expression in its implications of violent overthrow, an endless Red Dawn fantasy of defending the divinely-anointed motherland against an unceasing series of Dolchstosslegende usurpers and traitors.

Never mind that there was indeed an election, and it was far too much of a blowout to be subject to the contested counts of the previous two. Never mind that, even had McCain and Palin won that election, they would have -- get this -- done the xact same thing with the banksters that Obama did, which was, let's recall, initiated by the Cheney regime in the first place. Remember, McCain's primary economic adviser was Phil Gramm, who personally engineered the regulatory unraveling that precipitated the destruction of the economy in the first place. Anyone who seriously thinks that McCain, Palin, or Gramm would have just told Goldman Sachs to piss up a rope knows fuck-all about the issue or its players.

The thing is, Palin may actually think that she would have struck some heroic, principled stand for the little guy in the face of Wall Street. She does seem to have a bit more invested in her own hype than most at that level. This is more a result of her not having even the foggiest idea about what she doesn't know, than of any noteworthy amount of intestinal fortitude.

Indeed, for someone who flashes their "maverick" credentials more than drunk coeds flash their tits at Mardi Gras, Palin's path is remarkably establishment -- Republican party, appearance on Oprah to pimp transparently ghost-written "memoir", shameless know-nothing and calumniator, mau-mauing the opposition with schtick and fabrications for the highest bidder. Doesn't get much more predictable than that.

God Hates Fred Phelps

Of course, the Big Guy clearly doesn't think much of 'murkins or troops neither, since He keeps allowing this sick bastard and his inbred cult to harass military families at the funerals of their loved ones. And now, the ultimate insult to injury, a family being forced to pay the cult's legal bills, for daring to sue them for heckling his son's funeral. Christ, this is like fifty different kinds of wrong.

Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn., predicted that the Supreme Court will not address issues of where protesters are permitted to demonstrate, as it has in the past in the case of abortion protesters. Instead, he said, the case is important because "it has the potential to define whether we're going to create a new exemption to freedom of speech that is emotionally distressing."

"You can imagine that Martin Luther King and others inflicted emotional distress on people, if they were committed to segregation," he said. "I shudder to think if those people were armed with the weapon of suing him because the issue itself was repugnant to them."

Ugh, these idiots give the whole idea of "freedom of speech" a bad name. Look, asshole, there's no slippery slope here, and there sure as hell isn't any intellectually honest comparison between Martin Luther King and these bottom-feeding scum. Sometimes you have to be an adult about shit, and realize that your sacred principles are only useful insofar as they uphold something of value, as opposed to something merely symbolic of value. Hey, maybe those Bahhhston Bullies (whose parents must just be soooo fuckin' proud) who harassed a classmate into hanging herself were just exercising their free speech, right? Sheesh.

The question of intent renders the free-speech douchebag's comparison useless. King's intent, it scarcely needs pointing out, was to end the violent, systematic oppression of an entire race of people in a large portion of the country. Phelps' sole intent is to cause emotional distress to families who are already enduring plenty. It is a particularly low form of abuse of that First Amendment right, no better than shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Obviously Phelps would love to incite someone to violence against him and his fellow turds, and I honestly am amazed that someone in the long line of families Phelps has harassed hasn't just said "fuck it" and snapped off one of those stupid "God Hates Fags" placards in someone's ass.

One of the commenters in the linked Sun article asserts that Bill O'Reilly is going to pay the $16K legal bill in its entirety, which if true is a pretty damned decent thing to do. Now, if someone wants to pass the hat around to give Ol' Fred a taste of his own poison, I'm sure we'd all kick in a few bucks.

Moral Credibility

Shorter Joey Ratz: It's not a crime if the pope does it.

On Saturday, the Vatican’s chief spokesman acknowledged that the Church’s response to cases of sexual abuse by priests was crucial to its credibility and it must “acknowledge and make amends for” even decades-old cases.

“The nature of this issue is bound to attract media attention and the way the Church responds is crucial for its moral credibility,” the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said on Vatican Radio.

Listen up, you withered eunuch bastard -- there is no debate outside your church as to what should be done. The only appropriate response when you find out one of your priests is raping children is to -- get this -- inform the law. Quietly shuttling the rapist to another diocese where he can rape more children would not even occur to a morally responsible or credible human being.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? When the priest-rape scandals in America were happening a few years back, Ratzinger's response was that it was an American thing, that our sexually permissive culture roped these men of god into vile acts. He said this, mind you, having personally transferred child-rapey priest Peter Hullermann (and yes, I'll go out on a limb and stipulate that Hullermann's acts of taking an 11-year-old kid up to the mountains, getting him drunk, locking him in a room, and forcing him to suck Hullermann's cock constitutes rape, pure and simple) around Europe. So he's a liar as well as an abetter of child molesters.

You know, believe it or not, this is not an indictment of individual Catholics, who are finding some measure of grace somewhere in the tradition of faith, and that's fine. But look, folks -- if you're giving money to these people, then you're also giving money to these people. Anyone can argue like a Jesuit about degrees of moral complicity, but at the very least, I'd feel like a straight-up sucka. Maybe consider giving that tithe money to something with a bit lower (moral and financial) overhead. The problem is not that they have rapists in their midst, it's that they think they're above basic accountability for it.

Euphemisms

So the circus comes to Harry Reid's backyard, and everyone's favorite clown does her schtick. Yawn.

"The big government, big tax Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree is over," [Palin] said, referring also to the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. "You're fired."

Oh-ho-ho, I bet she stayed up all night memorizing that li'l zinger. Then she looked at her scribbled palm and called it a "poor man's TelePrompTer". Because, you see, nobody in the history of the universe ever used a TelePrompTer before Barry Hussein came along. True story.

Calling this collection of addled malcontents a "conservative Woodstock" does a serious disservice to both of those terms. These people are not "conservatives", they're a bunch of hypocritical morons who are angry, yet can't explain precisely why. Something about "freedom Jesus values great bailout scrotum Warshington". Also, booga-booga!

Much as Woodstock featured an eclectic lineup ranging from the Grateful Dead to Sha-Na-Na, Saturday's speakers included Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, Orange County Assemblyman and Tea Party Express-endorsed Senate candidate Chuck DeVore, and former "Saturday Night Live" star Victoria Jackson.

Sweet Jesus, I had to read that twice to confirm it, then bleach my eyeballs. Does anyone have the heart to tell that vapid cow Vicky Jackson that she was invited to make Sarah Palin look intelligent? Not that she would understand. Hell, even Sha-Na-Na would have more political erudition than Jackson, whose crosseyed-borderline-retard-with-funbags schtick was old in 1995, and who went around the bend on dispensationalist eschatology several years ago.

Frankly, it's dismaying that anyone even pretending to want to be taken seriously would get in the same cornfield as Victoria Jackson -- but then, when Palin headlined the $600/head teabaggers' convention, the opening acts were WhirledNutDaily's Joseph Farah and Tom Tancredo. Clearly, she'd show up to the opening of a fucking envelope if it gave her the chance to tell the same three jokes for the millionth time.

I mean, consider -- Palin, Wurzelbacher, DeVore, Jackson. These are the stars of the event. There's more intellectual firepower in the Jersey Shore mooks. The average IQ of the event could have been raised ten points just by inviting The Situation.

It pisses me off that these assholes get front-page coverage, and it's especially irritating that attendance is listed merely as "thousands". Well, how many "thousands", Chief -- two, ten, thirty? The NY Times mentioned it as "several" thousand, which we assume means three or four. So, yeah, exactly like Woodstock, divided by, say, a hundred or so. "Several thousand" people show up to the fucking farmers' market out here in the sticks, why is this not back-page "what is the deal with these loons" fodder?

The teabaggers are entirely a creation of the librul media they despise so, and it's unconscionable that they continue to enable these dirtbags.

If there is an overriding thread tying together the quilt of Tea Party dyspepsia, it's expressed on the yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flags waving from the sea of RVs.

And there's the incoherence right there in a nutshell -- a bunch of angry codgers collecting Social Security and Medicare, traveling out to the high desert (at 40 mph with the right turn signal on the entire way, no doubt) in an RV paid for at least in some part by the savings generated from gubmint-subsidized health care -- wait for it -- to rant incoherently and listen to others rant about health care. As a taxpayer, I fucking resent their lack of basic decency and gratitude, and I insist that they hold true to their solemn vows and principles, and give back any and all assistance they receive from the evil "communist dictator who is taking us to hell", as Vicky Jackson so profoundly put it.

I think we'd all be shocked if any of these people had the goddamned balls to put their money where their big mouths are, and get off the gubmint tit already. Give it back, folks. Step up and give back your blood money. Get hold of that free market insurance yer always yammerin' about, and let us know how that works out for ya.

In other "impossible to parody" news, Palin is said to be ready to unleash a barrage of Facebook and Twitter posts momentarily, in which her saucer-eyed cult followers will be exhorted to "assassinate the Demonrats' hopey-changey stuff" and "plant an IED of freedom under their campaign roadbed", before "ethnically cleansing" that party. "What?" Palin will inevitably reply when called on her stale bullshit, while smirking and shrugging her shoulders disingenuously. "It's one-a them metafer thingies, doncha know. When I talk about "bloodletting", I just mean political bloodletting, see. They know what I mean. You can't tell us to sit down and shut up, Mister Man! Lock and load, motherfuckers!

"Metaphorically speaking, of course."

Total Recall

So here in the Golden State we have a little karmic twist:

More Californians disapprove of the job performance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger than any governor in modern state history including Gray Davis, who was ousted by Schwarzenegger in a popular uprising, according to a Field Poll released today.

Seventy-one percent of California voters surveyed said they disapprove of Schwarzenegger's handling of the job, while 23 percent approve. The low ratings are shared across all demographics including party affiliation, region of the state, age and race or ethnicity.

....

The governor's numbers are nearly identical to those of Davis in the run-up to the recall. In August 2003, 70 percent of California disapproved of how Davis did the job while 22 percent approved.

Well, gee, maybe we should be like the whining, tantrum-throwing crybabies who chucked Davis and installed Schwarzenegger in the first damned place, and blow another $50 mil on some bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of freaks, right? I mean, who doesn't miss the glory days of '03, when Gary Coleman and Mary Carey and such like were "running" for the executive post of the planet's (then) seventh-largest economy?

No. Unlike those douche-nozzles, people with integrity and intellectual honesty are consistent in their realization that California has well and truly screwed itself in no small part by a serious over-reliance on its referendum process, which is nothing short of a joke. It has gummed up the works in this state, and needs to be overhauled.

Worse yet, look at who's running to take Ahnult's place -- a couple of asshole plutocrats trying to out-conservatard one another, one of them ready to spend $50 mil of her own money on the seat, and having already given her frat-boy jerkoff kid (with the villain snowboarder name) "consultant" loot. Oh, and Jerry Brown. Maybe Mary Carey's not such a bad option.

Schwarzenegger's low rating is driven by the severe economic downturn, DiCamillo said, while Davis touted his experience and competence when he ran for office only to be undermined by the energy crisis.

Oh, is that what "DiCamillo said", because while the first half of that sentence is undoubtedly true to a great extent, the second half ("undermined by the energy crisis") comes off as if it had been a natural event, the predictable consequence of one of Kepler's Laws of Motion of some such. And that's just not even true, podna:

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “solutions to California’s energy woes” reflect those of former Enron chief Ken Lay. On May 17, 2001, in the midst of California’s energy crisis, which was largely caused by Enron’s scandalous energy market manipulation, Schwarzenegger met with Lay to discuss “fixing” California’s energy crisis. Plans to “get deregulation right this time” called for more rate increases, an end to state and federal investigations, and less regulation. While California Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante were taking direct action to re-regulate Califonia’s energy and get back the $9 billion that was vacuumed out of California by Enron and other energy companies, Schwarzenegger was being groomed to overthrow Davis in the recall. Thus canceling plans to re-regulate and recoup the $9 billion.

After the California’s energy debacle of 2000, Davis and Bustamante filed suit under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act,” which would order all power companies, including Enron, to repay the nearly $9 billion they extorted from California citizens. The single biggest opponent of the suit, with the most to lose, was Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay.

Lay, a very close friend and long time associate of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, and one of their largest campaign contributors, hastily assembled a meeting with prominent Californians (confirmed by the release of 34 pages of internal Enron email) to strategize opposition to the Davis-Bustamante campaign and garner influential support for energy deregulation.

Included in the meeting were Michael Milken, “junk bond king” convicted of fraud in 1990 who currently runs a think tank in Santa Monica that focuses on global and regional economies; Ray Irani, Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum; former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Riordan and Schwarzenegger were at that time being courted as GOP gubernatorial candidates.)

Attendees of the meeting received a small four-page packet entitled “Comprehensive Solution for California.” The packet called for an end to the federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in California’s energy crisis and proposed saddling consumers with the $9 billion loss. Discussions further focused on preventing Davis’s proposed re-regulation of energy markets.

With Davis in office and Bustamante his natural successor, there would be little chance of dismissing rock-solid charges of fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, fake power delivery scheduling, and blatant conspiracy. The grooming of a governor amenable to a laissez-faire and corrupt energy market was essential. Recalling Davis and replacing him with Schwarzenegger was the solution. With Governor Schwarzenegger in office, Bustamante’s case is dead, as few judges will let a case go to trial to protect a state whose governor has allowed the matter to be “settled.”

It's too bad Kenny Boy Lay got off as scot-free as he did, avoiding jail and dying quietly just as his role in sending the nation's largest state into a tailspin (since turbocharged by the subprime scam) would have been elucidated more fully, just as his role in Cheney's Energy Task Farce (whatever happened to that, anyway?) might have been clarified even a little. It's too bad Lay wasn't staked to an anthill and torn apart by rabid dogs, frankly.

And it's too bad that a significant part of the driving force of this state in the past decade gets brushed under the rug with some cheap elision from a pollster. Gray Davis' biggest flaw as a politician was that he had zero charisma, but the fact of the matter is he got totally hosed, with total deliberation and extreme prejudice, by forces much larger than him, for a very large payday.

Wonder where Kenny Boy's $9 billion, poached out of the pockets of 35 million Califorians and never repaid, ended up. Maybe on a pallet in the sands of Iraq, maybe in Unca Dick's undisclosed location. We'll never know, of course, because we peons are on a need-to-know basis, but the least we can do is not be a bunch of chumps and pretend that it was all some kind of "shit happens" accident.

Crazy Trained

As brutally flawed as the fox-in-henhouse health-care clusterfuck is, the fact that it gets these troglodytes all riled up is proof that at least it's a step in the right direction. You know, back in the good ol' days when the Cheney regime was in charge and the land of milk and honey was populated by rainbows and unicorns, it was annoying and unhelpful enough to see the "Bushitler" placards. These clowns show with no argument or counter-proposals, just a brick in one hand and a fistful of "nigger" and "faggot" epithets in the other. Maybe someone can translate the Horst Wessel Song into Hicklish for them, so's they have something to chant while the effigies are burning.

And again, unlike both Chimpy McHitlerburton seizures of the throne, there is not and will never be any debate about the legitimacy of Obama's electoral blowout. It's his own damned fault that he's managed to piss all that away in less than 18 months, but the fact of the matter is that he won fair and square, and these goobers would prefer to govern by tantrum and slur. I've spent years noting what sore winners they always were, and am not at all surprised that they're even worse losers.

As always, they can go straight to hell; with any luck every one of these losers will have to contend with a serious, financially catastrophic health crisis befalling a loved one, and maybe they'll finally start to learn a thing or two about what they think they're protesting. Or, you know, not. If any of these bozos have learned anything more profound than which foods they can deep-fat fry, they have yet to demonstrate it with any reliability.

It's a very strange dynamic to contemplate -- an industry whose revenue model is explicitly predicated on not providing the service for which they've already been paid, can count their most vulnerable victims as their most vocal supporters, for free at that. Weirder still, some of these morons think it's actually a gun-control debate. They deserve what they get, good and hard and none too soon.

Meta-victory

Lot of interesting pro-con comments re Taibbi's question as to whether the "health-care" "reform" "effort" really does suck as badly as he, Taibbi, thinks it does. Well, if anything, it probably sucks even worse than we think it will, if the rest of the usual product out of the cracker factory is any indication.

And yet, it is probably just as critical as the Democrats think it is that this abusive sellout actually gets passed -- at least from their POV, which they have done every blessed thing they can think to render utterly irrelevant. Probably the truest comment is way down there, simply stating that whether or not this thing passes now, the Dems are going to take a hit in November.

And it's their own goddamned fault, per usual, since they let Rahmbo wheel-deal them into the back pockets of card-carrying assholes like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson. But only after Obama let the insurance and pharma lobbies write the thing in the first place. Yeah, that's visionary planning there, Chief. Could it be that Obama's vision is nearly as overrated as the Rahm's arm-twisting ability? Ya think?

They've shot their wad on this thing, and now cannot afford to walk it back, especially since they don't have the balls to fight for anything substantial in the first place. But the thought of the mouth-breathers on the other side becoming even more emboldened could only mean they'd find someone even dumber and more useless than Fredo to lead their next ticket, probably even more toxic and ridiculous than the sideshow carnies like Palin or Beck.

And yet "victory" will be meaningless in any real sense, merely a front-loading of tax dollars to a mandatory insurance policy, just another vast upward wealth transfer, a subsidized captive market with no mention of the driving issue, exorbitant costs. The costs will be the same and the profits will go to the same rentiers, it's just that the scheme will be socialized. Awesome.

As always, the system isn't broken -- it's fixed.

Incoherence

I'm not sure the English language contains words sufficient enough to convey the sheer contempt I have for these fools. Oh sure, there's always the reliable stream of inventive expletives, but sometimes circumstances call for something special. The too-clever-by-half sign held at half-mast by the addled crone in the photo exemplifies this need. Seriously, le mot juste, granny.

What freedom, one might hesitatingly ask this senile cow, has Barry O taken or threatened to take, that was not already at risk by the previous regime? Is he taking away your Murder She Wrote marathons or something? Precisely how and why is it that you people chose this particular moment to get riled up about creeping corporatism and state power? They're a bunch of Rip van Winkle types -- it's as if they fell asleep under a tree during the Eisenhower administration, and suddenly woke up, engaged with this befuddled yet passionate engagement. Maybe their nee-grow sensor is hooked up to their clapper, and the damned kids on their lawn set it off.

Whatever. They're a bunch of jerkoffs, completely detestable, not the least for their hypocrisy. Any time one of these human prunes is photographed "protesting", preening with some bullshit sign about their freedom to be a public jackass, the question needs to be asked, perhaps even by the journamalist giving them free coverage -- are you on Medicare, do you collect Social Security? Are you in any way, shape, or form receiving aid from the big ol' eeevil gubmint? If so, then kindly go fuck yourself. Hard.

I have yet to see, hear, or read about a single teabagger coherently defend or elucidate any of their "principles", and it's not for lack of trying to find an honest protester. The fact of the matter is that Obama, as a member of the center-right wing of the Corporate Party, has upheld almost all the policies of his universally-loathed predecessor, who hailed from the far-right wing of the Corporate Party. There is legitimate protest to be found and mined here, and somehow these obtuse individuals have failed, and continue to fail, to see it right in front of their gin-blossomed noses.

Worse yet, their name doesn't even make sense. They're not the pseudo-patriots they think they are. Here's the thing, you goddamned retards -- the Boston Tea Party was organized to protest taxation without representation. You, on the other hand, have elected representation. You may not like it, you may disagree with it, you may rant and rave about it even as you sell off your fungible assets in order to hoard gold because Glenn Beck told you to, but you do have duly elected representatives. There was an election, it was in all the papers and everything. They don't represent your interests, true enough, but mostly you just don't like how it turned out. Your name, dear morons, doesn't mean what you think it means. Epic fucking fail, assholes.

If it were up to me, I'd set these hypocritical codgers out on an ice floe, reminding them of their ultimate destiny as a steamy pile of polar bear shit. Failing that, I'd settle for the media asking them some questions and forcing them to elaborate on their oh-so-brilliant placards once in a great while. Collecting government largesse while simutaneously bitching about it should be an instant disqualifier from the debate, at the very least.

Sideshow

Taibbi is being rhetorical, of course, but I think we all know what Rick Santelli "means" by saying that you can't cheat an honest man. It's just that Rick Santelli is a loud and proud spokes-tool for profoundly dishonest people to begin with, a nasty symptom of a deeply compromised media system. Who the hell is Rick Santelli, and why does he have a teevee show, and what sort of person should take his spoutings at all seriously? Were those questions to be adequately answered, Santelli would probably be selling sacks of oranges at the corner of Woodruff and Rosecrans (I spent a few magical summers from ages 10-13, in the late '70s, nearby on the Faywood Street that runs off the Somerset/Woodruff intersection. Good fucking times, Bro Namath. I can show Little Ricky around the 'hood.)

Meanwhile, Frank Rich poses the heavier queries that pester the finer minds of the commentariat; namely, whither Obama the Fighter, sword inexplicably sheathed post-campaign?

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

No. The problem is not the absence of a message, it is the absence of a will to fight, more importantly to punch back. Fuck punching back, forget the Republican cheap shots and incoherent teabagger rants. He gets cock-blocked by Mary Landrieu, pushed around by Joe Lieberman, undermined by (ahem) something called Bart Stupak. The problem is a lack of party discipline, an understanding that sometimes it really is better, from a purely operational perspective, to be feared rather than merely respected.

Last week featured the bloodless pimping of Obama's sudden sense of urgency on this here health-care thingy, smash cuts of hortatory rhetoric, encouraging of the masses to alert their duly elected representatives to the crisis afoot.

Listen close, pally -- we did our fucking jobs already. We voted, and some of us even paid due attention after the election circus had left town. Now I'm supposed to harass my neighbors to pester their congresscritters over something they already know goddamned good and well they should do? Just to squeak through an industry-written abortion of a bill that won't change much for most people in the end? Are you fucking serious?

I resent the notion that, despite the unholy amounts of money these people make, we're supposed to continue to do their ground-work for them in our off-hours. Motherfucker, I have a job -- and so do they. What say we all do our damned jobs? You want me to help pass bullshit health-care legislation, pay me mid-six-figures and perks and lifetime free health care and I'll do your grunt work. Otherwise, kindly piss up a rope, Jack. We told you what we wanted a full eighteen months ago, fucking do it already with yer superdupermajority.

Back to Santelli and the media system, how it lets animals like that in. Yesterday and today -- and for all I know, the next week -- the Today show has had "exclusive" interviews with professional scumbag Karl Rove. Forgive my assumption that some vertical integration of ownership between NBC and Rove's publisher exists, but it's not exactly unheard of. But for some reason, I couldn't help but think of the recent death of the late great Howard Zinn, and how different our political culture might be if Zinn or Chomsky or practically any sentient being with opposable thumbs were allowed even 1% of the mass-media time accorded to a fucking piece of shit like Rove. Every time you flip on your teevee and get force-fed intellectual gruel, you can count on that being the very root of the problem.

Bean Ball

I suppose this week would be as good a time as any to reiterate that Jim Bunning is a bastard's bastard, the sort of vicious codger one would normally just write off as a senile coot, but who in fact was a card-carrying asshole even in his ball-playing days. Okay, there ya go, it's been said once again, many times many ways, Merry Christmas, fuck you.

No, Bunning's latest really just reminds me of a few rather important things that, were the media even to consider them, would immediately dismiss them as peripheral, though they are highly central to the system's dysfunctions:

1. Bunning is retiring at the end of the year, but has this episode alerted Democrats as to the urgency of making sure the homestretch of his term is as miserable as possible? Does anything motivate them to punch back, I mean like ever? Prove me wrong, ladies, prove me wrong and sideline this dickhead for the duration.


2. The median age in the Senate is 63 years now, with 26 senators in their seventies or older. Are the interests of an increasingly impoverished nation being well-served by an insular group of wealthy old farts -- such as, say, Jim Bunning? Term/age limits would have unintended consequences, but so does wheeling Strom Thurmond into chamber long after his brain had turned to oatmeal.


3. Parliamentary procedures need to be changed, pure and simple. It has somehow become a token assumption that a supermajority is the only true majority, and now Bunning is able to cock-block a $10 billion apportionment by himself. What the fuck is that, besides the cheap trick of a group of people who each think they could and should be in charge?

Like many of the institutions that determine the course of our lives, these people frequently seem more concerned with the pomp and ceremony of their station than with actual performance. It shows in the results.

Future Breed Machine

I don't know if the Duggars are living up to the true definition of "cult", since they don't seem to do much proselytizing. Of course, they have their reality show to do that for them, not to mention the circuit of mindless network morning shows every time the missus gets knocked up.

Regardless, the "religious" "discussion" about them bores the hell out of me, personally, and is a complete non-starter. Supposedly the kids are generally polite and well-adjusted, the family cares for one another, and unless there's some contravening evidence, it's hard to completely dump on that aspect of it, as creepy and obnoxious as the annual visits to the World's Busiest Womb have become.

But yes, in terms of religiosity, the Duggars merely represent the turgid, entirely predictable apotheosis of the dispensationalist belief in divine providence, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. As most such families can attest, it helps if you never leave the compound.

The idea that a small sliver of a country, one that is only 5% of the world's population to begin with, can eventually outbreed the other half of the world through dogged determination and annual pregnancies is almost charming in its mathematical hilarity. It doesn't help that the Duggars attribute beginning their long, strange trip as a result of, ahem, birth control (or more accurately, a miscarriage supposedly caused by birth control).

Anyway, here's the point (and I do have one): what's true in Bangladesh is true in Arkansas, or Nigeria, or New York City -- the key to alleviating poverty (material and intellectual) revolves more around empowering women, educating them and giving them real freedom in employment and reproductive rights, than any other single controllable factor.

The planet is exhausted and overcrowded, in the midst of a mass unprecedented extinction of mammalian species, methane pockets warming and jellyfish swarming the oceans, etc. It's entirely preventable, and it's just unconscionable that people resort to outdated mysticism of any stripe to justify adding to the problem.

Accidentally On Purpose

You know, I've stuck up for Niall Ferguson in the past because he's really not an idiot, but here I can only assume he's simply being willfully obtuse:

Whether the canopy of a rain forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect." A vaccine, for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile, causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of "self-organized criticality": it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year's is roughly four or six or eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern -- known as a "power-law distribution" -- is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to full-scale world wars.

What matters most is that in such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate -- and sometimes fatal -- disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment, threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

Well, certainly the financial regulatory regime did begin its long, inexorable rollback in the '80s, but Ferguson is correct in a backhanded way -- what really set the stage for the current problem has more to do with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the evisceration of any meaningful regulatory and oversight mechanisms. Remember during the 2000 campaign when folks made fun of Dubya's use of the little-known jargon word "securitization"? That's what he meant, friends 'n' neighbors, it's just that after all his other malaprops that magickal season, people just assumed it was another by-product of his hopeless syntax.

At any rate, yes, thanks to animals like Bob Rubin and Phil Gramm, the current economic failures owe much more to Clinton- and Fredo-era policies than to Reagan. Ferguson misses the forest for the trees here though, and I think it's because he's a true believer in the system, not only cannot believe in its capacity to fail, except in the most mystical and theoretical terms, but believes in its goodness, that it is right more than it is wrong.

This is a seductive belief, and it manages to roll in most of us at some point or other. I could probably read Chomsky and Zinn for the next fifty years, and not entirely overcome the socioeconomic conditioning provided by the public school system. I like the idea of anarcho-syndicalism, and a more even societal sharing of risk and reward, even as I accept the idea of hegemon, so long as it's an American hegemon. Why? Because societies are still at the stage where hegemony predominates, and a Chinese hegemon, for example, is even less likely to provide any ancillary benefit to my rational self-interest than a thoroughly corrupted American corporatocracy.

That's just one (rather extended) example, but here's the thing that gets me about Ferguson's baroque naïveté -- he's looking for birth-death civilizational cycles and perturbations for rational explanations. Here's the deal, bro-ham -- what we've gone through, what we're still going through, most of us, this is not a recession, it is not a depression. It is a correction, it is the natural outcome of deliberate actions buttressed by looting and constrained only by imagination.

Consider: a small but economically and politically powerful subset of people grants "loans" which are bullshit, backed by nothing, to a great mass of people, which the small subset knows with absolute certainty will never be able to pay back. They then place bets accordingly, again backed by imaginary assets. When inevitably the scam "fails", they use their financial and political power to force the government to repay their imaginary losses, keep their bonuses intact, and allow them to continue doing "business" as before.

In what way is any of that a "perturbation"? It was not anomalous; it was not unpredictable. It was not a behavioral outlier. It is perfectly in keeping with what is a clear pattern of sociopathic behavior, precisely because of the lack of disincentives to such behavior.

Look, I enjoy the armchair study of collapsonomics as much as the next guy, finding parallels between current events and ancient ruins, looking for causes of systemic failure. Natural disasters, internal corruption, barbarian onslaught, lack of moral fiber -- it's the ultimate in Monday morning quarterbacking. But there's nothing accidental about any of this. The Wall Street rentiers knew and know precisely the consequences of their actions -- there are none. Why wouldn't they continue to do so?

Immediately after the recent earthquake in Chile, we heard plenty of mortified plaints about looters and such, vile opportunists taking advantage of everyone else's misery. At least in Chile, the looters didn't actually cause the earthquake. There they get shot; here they get to keep their fucking retention bonuses through sheer chutzpah. It's a mistake to continue believing in the historical tendencies of goodness and rationality and utilitarian integrity of "the system" anymore -- these people have been given unbelievable control and leverage, and they're rotten to the goddamned core, utterly indifferent to anything but getting theirs.