Your Awful Media, Part 15,864,573

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

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

It was quick, clean, surgical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Newt Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tardocalypse Now

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

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

[Via Gin and Tacos.]

Freedom of Screech

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

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

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

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

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

A Star Is Bored

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Small Victory

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

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

Process, as they say, is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Card

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, a Baby's Arm Holding an Apple

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low-Hanging Fruit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

My Booky Wook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land of Milk and Phony

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duh, Winning

Onward to the Maghreb! As Hitchens once poetically put it, some people never learn, but then some people never intend to.

Les Mots Justes

Of course M'sieur IOZ is absolutely correct in this week's unceremonious roasting of EnriqueMatt Yglesias. The current era of economics reeks more of careerism and credentialism for self-selecting opinion-mongers and audiences, and less of empirical data-crunching and pattern-theorizing. Consider this paragraph of Yglesias' which IOZ excerpted:

The fact that the economics profession can offer so little in the way of consensus guidance about dramatic, crucially important events like the panic of 2007-2008 is a huge problem and a very legitimate knock on the enterprise, but it doesn’t actually undermine the overall epistemic status of the discipline.

First is that the bumptious prose of this sickly little paragraph may as well be a sixth example for Orwell to present in Politics and the English Language. It is merely a hymn plucked in church to appease the faithful. It is difficult -- at least for me, because life is too short to spend too much time reading Teh Woodchuck with anything approaching regularity -- to really know whether these guys actually believe the guff they spread, or they've simply sunk too far into the sales pitch to divest credibly.

It doesn't matter. Just in that stray paragraph one sees much more fundamental errors, namely the classic Princess Bride issue of words not meaning what the user thinks they mean. Yglesias mentions "the panic of 2007-2008", as if those wascally Hunt brothers had tried to corner the dang silver market and caused a stampede. "Panic" is as inaccurate a term to describe what happened as the more tendentious debate over whether the real-estate collapse caused a "recession" or a "depression". An accurate term would be correction, or perhaps heist. "Panic" merely implies unknown causation producing unpredictable results via mass alarm and random collective action.

As opposed to, say, a bunch of boiler-room shysters pushing loans on people they knew full well wouldn't be able to afford them, just so they could slice and dice and tranche a bunch of derivative side bets, knowing full well that their investment in Barack Obama would be recouped when the mathematical reckoning inevitably came. Causation was known, results were predictable, and on the off chance that the engineering of this mess wasn't flat-out deliberate, it was at the very least sociopathically indifferent.

A lesser, but still substantial, semantic failure to follow through in an intellectually honest fashion is the "knock on the enterprise" line. Look, if economics is not an out-and-out religion, as IOZ calls it, with its impenetrable dogma, its cloistered priests, and laity suckaz like Yglesias, then at the very least one can ham-fistedly paraphrase Yogi Berra and point out that it's 90% psychology, and the other half is mathematical.

The problem is, the math side of it has been perverted beyond all honest recognition by the economists' brothers-in-arms, the rentier financiers, who every now and again pay some Indian kid from MIT to swing by the offices of Lloyd Blankfein's subordinates, dump some esoteric algorithm on a spreadsheet for them, and figure out how to plug in the numbers on whatever scheme they devise for the next round of rubes. The banksters neither know nor care how the formula works, or that it doesn't actually produce a tangible good, merely a new twist on the numbers game they run.

Now, I realize that the "enterprise" Matty refers to is economics, but seeing as how that discipline exists more or less symbiotically with finance, perhaps the current lack of, ahem, "consensus guidance" can be attributed to a poisoning of the epistemic well. Finance is not so much an "enterprise" these days -- a system that generates ever more money for ever fewer people, without producing any tangible goods or wealth, even secondarily (such as loaning that money or creating jobs with it) is not an enterprise, it's a racket.

The financiers are always going to maintain the pretense, especially since they have the government by the balls, and the assurance that when the new algorithm becomes mathematically unsustainable, they get bailed out and keep their goddamned bonuses. This is not about the creation of value or wealth, this is about recoupment by the very few from everyone else.

To the extent that intellectually honest economists realize all of this -- and how can they not? -- they are collegially and professionally constrained from stepping up and speaking their minds, fearing to be recognized as dupes to a street-corner hustle, or traitors to the common cause. Financiers move money around, economists track the results and develop arcane theories about yesterday's motions.

But neither group cares to mention the huge behavioral aspect to both, preferring to pretend that it's all mechanical, and therefore predictable and controllable to some degree. And the biggest behavioral factor is the return of a Gilded Age mentality, a smug, patrician assumption by a shrinking claque of well-heeled rulers that the rest of the population are merely sheep to be fleeced.

So no, the lack of "consensus guidance" is not undermining the "overall epistemic status of the discipline". But that status is being undermined all the same, by the failure of its prime movers to simply call things what they really are.

Orwell intrinsically understood the obfuscatory power -- and intent -- underlying cluttered language. It does not have to mean some firebreathing propagandist trying to conceal his true intent; it applies equally well to professional catechists.

Bringing Crazy Back

With the advent of violent chaos across the Middle East, and chaotic violence in Japan, one might begin to fear that the End Times are near. Au contraire, mon frère! Raving assclown Sharron Angle, last fall's scary-silly entertainment, is preparing to throw her polyurethane foam helmet back into the proverbial ring, assuming she can wrest her arms free from the straitjacket.

It would seem that Sharron Angle is running for a House seat in Nevada. In a video on her Web site, Ms. Angle says she is “running for the United States Congress” but does not name the seat. Presumably it is the one in the Second District, which is being vacated by Representative Dean Heller, a Republican who narrowly defeated her in a 2006 primary run for the position. Mr. Heller is now running for the Senate seat left open by Senator John Ensign, the beleaguered senator who is not running again.

Not that anyone will miss fambly valyews champeen Ensign, who will now and forever be known as the guy who fucked his friend's wife, then tried to buy the cuckold off with some bullshit sinecure. But Heller appears to be cut from the same predictable cloth as the increasingly tedious teabaggers, attaining office during the vaunted Gingrich (that other fambly valyews champ) revolution, and reflexively voting against whatever Obammy's fer.

Not saying that anyone's going to miss a card-carrying asshole like John Ensign, but Heller and the recombinant ascension of Angle would be a statistical offset, and then some. Ultimately it's probably not a huge deal, just Nevada getting precisely what it deserves -- if it really wants it that badly then, to paraphrase Mencken, they should get it good and hard.

More an Art than a Science

You have to hand it to the American media -- Japan gets hit with the twin power punches of massive quake and devastating tsunami, and in mere hours a good chunk of them find ways to make it all about us, and our deep-seated fears of everything except what we should actually worry about.

Your average 'murkin is many thousands of times more likely to die of stress, obesity, type 2 diabetes, substance abuse, depression, auto accident, and many other things, than from radiation from Fukushima, or Islamic terrists for that matter. This is not to say that I know that there is absolutely no danger in the US from radiation from Fukushima; I am saying that I don't know, which is what the mediots would say if they had an ounce of honesty in them. I will go out on a limb and say that a panic run on potassium iodide in Texas straddles that fine line between merely stupid and flat-out hysterical (and not funny hysterical, either).
Fortunately for opportunistic scumbag and all-around hump Glenn Beck (and unfortunately for the rest of the planet), the aphasic venom he soaks in is not fatal. Though one can always hope.

It is certainly bad enough when a fat, bloated, ignorant nation becomes entirely oblivious to its own bad karma, not only from initiating pointless, perpetual wars, but from trading its future for toys on credit to utterly shameless thieves and frauds. One has to ask, if one is so masochistically inclined as to engage with a subhuman prick such as Beck, precisely what it was that Japan did recently to earn this sort of divine reckoning. (One could also ask the Tokyo governor the same thing, since he sounds like the same breed of asshole, but maybe he gets voted out or forcibly removed from office.)

Putting natural disasters in moralistic contexts is never not going to be intellectually offensive. Most of us know this by the third grade. But wallowing around in this solipsistic narcissism of wondering how international catastrophes will affect us is very nearly as awful.

I'm embarrassed for them, really. I mean, somebody should be.

Re-gyptian Strut

Everyone is expected to have formed an opinion on Egypt, on the asshole Mubarak, on the beneficence of him being our loyal asshole. The various potentates and kleptocracies that clutter the Middle East provide something of a tabula rasa for the spectrum of what passes for American foreign policy -- power to "the people" in Egypt, so long as they're the right people, and opportunism in Libya, to get rid of a loose-cannon bedouin colonel whose reach finally exceeded his grasp in a stuporous Castro-like tenure.

Notably absent from the conversation -- indeed, even modest official speculation -- is Saudi Arabia, which has an 86-year-old leader and an 82-year-old immediate heir, literally hundreds of inbred princelings after that, and a young, seething, jobless populace to placate. One would think that with that level of uncertainty, some of the more buffoonish tendencies of American vehicular self-actualization might give way to harsh oncoming realities.

One would, as always, be dismayingly wrong. There will be no shortages of single-occupant Excursions and jacked-up F350 king cabs with the requisite truck nuts, not until gas hits six bucks or so -- and then assholes such as those will be the first ones to siphon their neighbor's Honda, or knock over a liquor store to feed their insatiable addiction. One side preaches empiricism, physics and math, scientific prudence; the other pure id and gall and self-indulgence. There will be no respite from high bozoism, only a shift in its prevailing wind. Some halfwit knuckledragging House troglodyte, more likely than not from Texas, will sooner or later insist on opening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to contain costs and enable the guzzlers just that much further, just one more hit, man, they'll suck yo dick!

So it goes, while the rest of the country continues its death march into uncharted realms of banana republic disparities, a dwindling cadre of inbred plutocrats manipulating swelling, foundering masses against their own rational self-interest.

Which, of course, brings us to Wisconsin, the latest guinea pig in said plutocrats' ongoing experiment in accumulating the last bits of rotted corpse. Per usual, Chomsky sees right through the Dems' feckless posturing, and refuses to play their dismal game:

The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join [against union-busting tactics] is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions.

The sooner we stop playing this game, enabling the charade of two distinct parties, the clearer the picture becomes. There are no parties; there is a ratchet and a pawl, a device manipulated entirely by vested interests, rentier thugs in $3000 suits who seriously think the peons should fellate them in public for all the wonderful good they do. The amount of contempt people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon have for Main Street, for you and me, is almost incalculable; in fact, it would best be calculated simply in direct proportion to their compensation -- the more they profit from their bookmaking ventures and failures, the more they feel you owe it to them. Make sure you send Lloyd and Jamie a thank you card, m'kay, show your appreciation. They're good guys, really, just ask them, they'll tell you.

Wisconsin is just the start; as states get more and more in the hole, and get rolled into short-run schemes like selling off parking meter rights for the next 70 years to raise cash to pay off this year's bills, the public-sector union-busting tactics will metastasize to other, larger states. California politics is pretty much run through the prison-guard union, but if some sort of deal were to be struck that would allow them to keep theirs whilst throwing other public unions under the bus, of course they'd take it.

The lesson should be pretty obvious to all but the most deluded Beckalo -- that we love the "power to the people" jabber, until it actually occurs, and especially when it occurs here. Nothing scares the political and financial classes -- who, after all, own the very modes of communication by which "information" is officially disseminated -- more than the thought of a sufficient number of peons getting wise to their shenanigans. They needn't fear -- in times like these, people can be counted on to revert to the usual devil-take-the-hindmost mean.

Rumors of Demise

You know the drill, slammed to the gills -- working on two different case studies for a management control systems class (that finally ended on a high note, with a one-hour presentation/q&a session) and in the running for a promotion at work (that I didn't get, but turned out to be something of a pig in a poke anyway).

But I'm around, keep an eye out, there will be some non-Carlos Estevez material this week. Stay tuned.

Idiocracy

It's been a couple weeks since this nugget dropped, but it is still hilarious. Apparently CNN has a different understanding of "political" than the rest of the English-speaking world. Asking Snooki Palin anything about anything is less likely to elicit sensible answers than shaking a Magic 8-Ball, but especially a political question.

I'm not entirely convinced Bristol Palin can even put her fingers together in the dark, so the idea of her even knowing about anything enough to care about it enough to run for office and do something about it is incomprehensible. Maybe if The Situation were her campaign manager it would make more sense.

On the one hand, it's hard to imagine someone who was unqualified even to be on a reality teevee show to have the ability or inclination to run for any office whatsoever; on the other hand, the brain surgeons in Arizona just installed Ben Quayle as their US rep, apparently for no other reason besides being the smartass offspring of a notoriously ridiculous (even for a veep) person. Anything is indeed possible here in Jebus' Chosen Land. There are just enough morons to keep literally anyone at least slightly viable.

Super Bowl Shovel

So I suppose the game ended up the way I bet on it -- not that I bet more than a token amount, but I did take the Packers and the points. They tried to give the game back in the second half, but fortunately, Rapelessburger and the rest of them didn't quite take it back. Still, Dick LeBeau deserves some extra-special mention -- the guy runs what is clearly the most vicious, constantly innovative defense in the league. He's a Hall of Famer as a player and a coach, and is not only deserving of both, but is sorely underrated at both.

But sweet Jebus, what is the deal with the Black Guy Pees? It's like an entire nation somehow mutually decided not to hurt someone's feelings. I don't recall voting on this shit, do you? This group (I hesitate to call them a "band", since that would imply that they play and write actual music) of morons sucks so bad, the light from suck takes several years to reach them.

The use of lit crowd formations, to their credit, did evoke impressive formations from North Korean military drills, as did the incessant use of AutoTune to marginally disguise their utter lack of actual vocal talent. I suppose there must be some number of idiots out there who actually use their hard-earned money to purchase Black Guy Pees Music, since they got invited to the big show, but shit, are these people fucking deaf or what?

Anyhoo, the local kid won, that's all I cared about, to the extent I cared at all. But I think most people would rather see yet another washed-up rock band than this warmed-over halftime horseshit.

Parisienne Walkways

Hats off to one of the true greats of rock guitar. Gary Moore was a beast, like Hendrix in that he was untouchable when he chose to flip the burners on. But Moore also had that Jeff Beck-like knack with impeccable tone and taste, knowing the right note to hit and how. I recall being influenced heavily at the start by some of the stuff he did on Corridors of Power, Victims of the Future, and Run For Cover, figures which are now stock metal runs, but which were pretty innovative for the time.

Even the earlier jerkoff stuff resonated with solid tone and passion, which is what it's all about. Anybody who doesn't admit that Gary Moore was one of the most underrated guitarists of all time is just flat-out lying. So while I'm certainly sad that he's gone, there are worse ways to go than on vacation in Spain. Here's to the hope that we all go in such circumstances, preferably in the saddle. RIP, brother.

Reaganomics

Not sure why, with only 200 attendees, Miss Thang's latest bullshit venture into Ventura merits mention, But I guess it fits with the Lucy-with-the-football motif the lamestream media have going for them. With every little fart she poots across the mediasphere, they scramble to cover it uncritically, and she shits on them either way. Sounds like the original recipe for a Wasilla Steamer.

On the other hand, although my dad fucking loathed Reagan, primarily because of his union betrayals en route to political self-actualization (but later relented due to Reagan's Alzheimer-induced fall from grace and ultimate death), I can safely say that, having spent the day chopping firewood and barbecuing steaks for Super Bowl Sunday, I hewed closer to Reagan's ideal on his sainted centennial than did Mme. Palin.

Let's face it, friends 'n' neighbors -- whatever the tiresome jabber offered by Palin and her fuckwitted ilk, the fact is that Reagan, like Nixon, would have to run as a Democrat these sad little days. The sooner people remember that important tidbit, the sooner we might be rid of the tedious guff constantly lobbed by this shit-for-brains snowbilly.

The Big Game

So everybody likes a local-kid-makes-it-big story, and Aaron Rodgers starting the Super Bowl is exactly that story for this area. Pretty much everyone around here -- excepting, of course, Steelers fans -- are rooting for the Pack this weekend, regardless of their regular affiliation. Everybody at least knows someone who knows Rodgers.

It happens that my wife is a lifelong Packers fan anyway, since her family hails from Wisconsin, but as an added bonus, as an oral-surgery assistant a decade or so ago, she removed Rodgers' wisdom teeth, as well as those of his younger brother Jordan, who is currently at Vanderbilt. So we'll be rooting extra hard.

Palinoscopy

One assumes that 85% of the free world is with Milhouse'sMilbank's call to boycott the ongoing public martyrdom of Saint Sarah. I know I'm tired of talking about her, chronicling her misapprehensions, mischaracterizations, and calumniations. There's no denying that her fatuous nonsense has sucked the oxygen out of what passes for rational debate in this country. It's dragged what was already a bottom-feeder's game down to the level of a grub-eating reality-show fametard, which is Palin's true skill -- someone who will do anything for money and notoriety, and is able to get people to root for them, since just about everything in this country has devolved to a spectator sport.

But there is one great lie that can and should be clarified once and for all. That lie is that her detractors "hate" Palin, that they wish her literal, physical harm. Because political language is these days so polarized and polemicized, it's an easy lie to buy into.

I would be seriously surprised if, among all these blogonistas -- including myself -- that have beat up on Miss Thang lo these long 27 or so months, anybody truly hated her. I don't pretend to speak for others very often, but I'll bet money that the vast majority just wish she'd take her winnings and go the hell away. At this point, she's just a cartoon character, and an annoyingly popular one at that, like, say, Justin Bieber. But the difference is, Justin Bieber is not going around the country lying to gullible rubes and house-training them to vote even further against their own rational self-interest than they already do. Nor is Bieber writing books and starring in reality shows, both of which are not-so-carefully concealed platforms for which to spout the usual incoherent word salad of misguided political pronunciamentos. But the upshot is that it's hard to genuinely hate a cartoon character, you just want to not only change the channel, but know that you will see soemthing else when you do so. This broad is more over-saturated than our other favorite show, Dancing With People Who Useta Be Sorta Famous.

Palin has certainly mined a great deal of fandom with her thin-skinned persecution complex, but it's long past time someone called bullshit. The threats and acts of violence, the Nazi epithets and such like, are exclusively confined to the "right", to the extent that the anachronistic left-right construct still has any validity. There is no talk-show host or blogger on the "left" calling anyone a Nazi, or threatening Second Amendment remedies, or using crosshairs on a map/diagram as a checkdown visual. You know who else uses crosshairs? Anti-abortion fanatics, and they don't pussyfoot around with self-serving horseshit about "surveyor symbols". Say what you want about these fanatics, they fucking well mean precisely what they say, and don't try to dodge it.

But Saint Sarah needs to have both ways, all ways. And she is a saint, among her fans anyway, who have already bypassed the usual deliberative process of beatification and canonization, and anointed her outright, primarily for her ability to extend her middle finger to any and all who dare question or disagree with her. The complete lack of anything resembling substance is gravy to these window-licking fuckwits. And, as with Catholic saints, there is a verifiable miracle attributable to Our Lady of the Meth-Addled Welfare State -- she has never been wrong.

Think about it -- since we've gotten to know her, she has yet to say anything true or accurate or in remotely good faith, and despite all that, she has steadfastly refused, with the strength only a modern day Jeanne d'Arc could muster, to acknowledge -- hell, to even budge -- on any of it. Hell, the one thing she does seem to readily recognize is that the more obstinate she becomes, the more her legend grows in the hinterlands, where the unofficial coat-of-arms is a hunchbacked warrior (see what I did there, he's always got his back up! Hi-yo0o0oo!)

So I wish Dana success in convincing his fellow media humps to stop reporting on every twitterfart and undercooked opinion she floats. Usually these sorts of abusive, one-sided relationships are found with pimps and hos, the slapdown followed by the suckup. But it is really the corporate media that have kept her afloat, the bloggerati have merely commented pro or con on either her affability or aphasia.

The latter is definitely, as one might imagine, a full-time job. The fact that she has no clue wtf "Sputnik moment" might mean is just icing on the proverbial cake. Just when you think she's run out of stupid things to say, she goes and entertains you. Just like every other reality-teevee asshole.

Update: Sigh. She really does make it difficult not to loathe her, goes out of her way, in fact, to ensure it. But as usual, the jabbering throngs of dickless closet cases she speaks to are so much more loathsome. Not sure what these losers paid to listen to her shopworn bear-baiting and predictable schtick, but clearly they're not working nearly hard enough for their money. But it is a perfect place for her, evangelizing to a bunch of trophy-hunting freaks, warming up these inbred slobs for Larry the Cable Guy.

Maybe it is (as the anonymous commeter here notes below) time to give hate a real chance. A good place to start would be the Safari Club. I absolutely despise these skeevy fucks. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- hunting is fine, as long as you're filling your freezer. But people who just go out and kill things for the sheer joy of killing are fucking mental, and deserve every misery and tragedy that an entropic, uncaring void can visit upon them. I do sincerely hope that every one of them, the next time they go out to get their rocks off killing something, either the gun jams and blows up in their face, or just jams and allows the animal to step in, rip them limb from excruciating limb, eat their fill, and leave the rest for the vultures and beetles. Fuck these people right in the fucking neck.

Teachable Moment

So now that another tedious, utterly useless Prom Night has come and gone, and we have judiciously observed the meaningless rituals of political comity and kumbafuckingyah, whatever and ever, amen, let us propose a simple observation: somehow this thrashing dinosaur of a nation managed to go three solid weeks of fulminating endlessly about the motivations and ramifications of a deranged idiot slaughtering a crowd at a supermarket.

But I'll be damned if I heard anyone discuss even the possibility of devising some sort of system that might prevent said idiots from just lurching down to the nearest sporting goods shop, and purchasing a Glock and an extended 30-round clip, no questions asked, no nothin'.

Look, I like guns, I believe in the Second Amendment. I own guns, I know how to use them, and pretty much everyone else here in Alabama, California does as well. And it would certainly be unfair to punish the vast majority of responsible gun owners for the actions of a few deranged individuals. But that is quite a different matter than the insistence that everyone, regardless of temperament, should have equal access to them. I like cars, too, but I get that not everyone is capable of operating them (indeed, there seem to be more willfully reckless, stupid drivers than ever). Even an easy-to-pass test is better than no test at all.

Let's go out on a fragile limb and state categorically that a reasonable competency test is a handy, if certainly not foolproof, device to weed at least some of the yobbos out, provide at least some obstacle to mental patients. Of course this would also require a registration system, or maybe just a "moving forward" registration system, which would still leave some quarter-billion weapons out there free and clear. Not much to worry the NRA's purty little mouths about, but might actually prevent the next ward-o'-the-state from shooting up your nine-year-old at a fucking Safeway.

Before we know it, another "national tragedy" will take place, as it inevitably does. Someone will hole up in his mother's living room and take out a few cops, or they'll go public and shoot up a college campus, a shopping mall, whatever. And we'll have our public rituals, then go right back to what we were doing. It seems to be tacitly accepted as the cost of doing business or something. As long as it isn't us, or someone we care about, served up as target practice for the next lunatic asshole with an incoherent axe to grind. It should be a national embarrassment that volatile goofballs are allowed such easy access to such dangerous firepower, and predictably take out groups of innocents with such appalling regularity.

But because we and our betters in the beltway media are much more concerned with ceremonial pretenses of commonality, it is not even suggested. Nor will it be, until one of their asses gets blown apart by the next desert Pupkin.

Moron Better Democrats

Coupla points for the slow kidz out in Dummycratville:

1. When you've shot your legislative wad on, ahem, health care reform (which, like the Holy Roman Empire, may in fact be none of those things), and you lose your supermajority through dickless dithering, and the belligerent new House majority launches a scud across your bow with "Job-Killing" in the title of the bill, your first response should be to call bullshit on that assertion, not whinge about its intemperance. Fucking grow a pair already. This is why people vote for Nader, not to mention Republicans, you cock-gobblers. Talk about bringing a spork to a gunfight.



2. Sarah Palin, more likely than not by pure accident, did use "blood libel" more or less correctly, if you squint hard enough. The smart move in this case is not to spin your wheels parsing over the latent anti-Semitism of the phrase, but to send forth the appropriate media minions to muse aloud at the ability knack habit Palin has for turning even legitimate criticism into this twenty-four-seven persecution complex of hers. Just one (1) person needs to step up and say, "Look, honey, get off your fucking cross already -- the rest of us could use the wood."

Ah well. Maybe next election, or the one after, or the one after. The political system itself is Lucy with the football.

Trash Talk

Now, the Jets have gotten a bit full of themselves, but since my general rule thumb in the playoffs is Anybody But Brady/Manning/Rapelessburger, and Baltimore gave the game back yesterday, the Jets it is. But Brady getting called an "asshole" by a certifiable turd like Antonio Cromartie, who has apparently made it his goal in life to fuck/impregnate everything that moves, I dunno. On the one hand, I got your tuck rule right here, Tommy Boy; on the other, it doesn't seem right to get clowned by a guy with 9 kids by 8 women in 6 states.

So we'll see, but chances are the Jets bandwagon will stall right where it did last year. Pittsburgh's D does not give up rushing yards, so either Dirty Sanchez gets that noodle arm of his dialed in, or Rex "You Gonna Finish That?" Ryan and the boys are done for the year.

But at least they've kept it interesting. Meantime, I'll root for local hero Aaron Rodgers and his Packers to get past an overachieving Bears squad next week.

Angry Lo(ugh)ners

After all the usual hoo-ha over crosshair maps and Second Amendment remedies, and after all the Tucson victims have become useful totems for all sides concerned, perhaps the big takeaway from this weekend's events is how mundane it is anymore. Think about it -- the only thing that gives this story legs is its political context; without that it would be just another asshole shooting up another mall or whatever, and it would already have been forgotten.

The random-shooting-by-deranged-asshole seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon, not that most other countries don't have their incidents of lone nuts gaining notoriety the hard way. But we seem to generate them with alarming frequency, even for a large nation, but especially for a comparatively prosperous one. Violence in Third World countries and American metropolises predominates because people in those areas are frequently constrained in options.

But these suburban and rural commandos frequently have more options, yet choose to steep themselves in the toxicity of whatever's easiest, usually bad drugs and worse ideas. Arizona has always had a deep streak of yahooism, especially in its state politics but also in pretty much every square inch of real estate beyond the Phoenix city limits. It makes sense that something like this, should it turn out to be irrefutably political in nature after all, would happen in that state.

The desert landscape is beautiful, truly, but let's face it -- the people living out there have chosen to spend their lives in a wasteland of dust and scorpions and sweltering heat, while the urban areas live as if their water supply won't be gone in another 20 years, as the Colorado River continues to get siphoned off upstream. It takes a different breed of cat to live in Arizona, and there are some strange motherfuckers out in the boonies.

This useless prick that shot up the grocery store be-in, brave slaughterer of little girls and old women, is presumed to be mentally ill, though he damn sure well invoked the Fifth the second they started interrogating him about a possible Terry Nichols to his wannabe Tim McVeigh (which turned out to be the cab driver who dropped him off -- this fucking clown had a gun but no car.)

And of course on some level he must be, no rational person does this, yet the error is in presuming that his psychosis precludes any and all possibility of lucidity. After being told for several years by self-selected media clowns how Obama is about to institute a command economy and shuttle non-believers off to secret FEMA camps for RFID chip installation, somebody was bound to eventually do something about this imminent threat. Look, let's cut to the chase -- anyone who is sitting through Glenn Beck's teevee show, or buying Sarah Palin's "books", and attempting to glean some sort of coherent political analysis, is by definition mentally unbalanced. Law of averages, people, you get a couple million of these jokers, one of 'em's bound to snap.

In the end, it really doesn't matter what political ideology this jerkoff hewed to, because even reasonable speculation has revealed a great deal about some other folks. Here's the thing -- for the past two years we have watched a procession of increasingly crazy shit, the heightening of already volatile rhetoric, ever more disconnected from facts.

Declaring Obama a radical Moooslim Kenyan socialist, even after he faithfully catered to Wall Street thieves and continued almost all of Bush's most egregious policies. A former vice-presidential candidate schlepping around the country with a bunch of shopworn "don't retreat, reload!" slogans for the rubes, repeated ad nauseam, and endorsing House candidates via a map targeting opponents in crosshairs. A US Senatorial candidate threatening violent insurrection if the losers don't get their way.

Two dismal years of fist-shaking codgers disrupting town-hall meetings by incoherently screaming at their elected representatives. People strapping themselves with AR-15s to attend an event where the president is speaking, a previously (afaik) unheard-of notion. Faux News actively promoting the teabagger cause in a veil of fake populism, and hiring some of the loudest screamers. And so much more. Compared to what, the occasional antiwar protest, with the attendant burning of an effigy or two, and a guy with a Free Mumia tee-shirt.

So you gotta be kidding me that this all happened in a vacuum, that some disjointed and ineffective calls for self-admitted (and proud of it) war criminals Bush and Cheney to be indicted as such offset all this toxic guff these bozos have been leaking from every orifice. There has been an abundantly clear pattern of abusive, vituperative chunder and eliminationist rhetoric, not just at the usual soapbox levels but all the way up one side of this rotted edifice. These dopes try on their little tough-guy poses, getting all Travis Bickle on the full-length mirror before trying it out on unsuspecting passersby. They can't help themselves.

Something will come along, next week, two weeks, to fill this collective emptiness this society has carved between its ears, and out of its heart. And this will all be but a dim memory, another piece of meat for rabid dogs to fight over for our amusement and the Bickles to posture and preen, and pretend that this was a Second and/or First Amendment issue.

The main thing worth remembering is that the real victim here was Sarah Palin. Just ask her.

Hamsters on a Wheel

Let's cut the proverbial shiznit, a'ight? The "downturn" does not affect everyone, only almost everyone. But not anyone who matters. Have you checked the Dow lately?

The rentiers and grifters and credit default swap scumbags who lawn-darted the economy in the first place are making just as much money as they ever were. And fuckin' A if they don't practically seethe with pure contempt at the peons who dare question their deeds, their judgment, the consequences of their noble actions.

They get all bent about how hard they slave for what they earn, as if 70-hour weeks in an air-conditioned skyscraper with a supply of The Macallan and Ketel One and on-demand blowjobs from the secretary is such a tough ride compared to some unlucky schmuck who has to work three menial, stultifying jobs just to make rent. It does not seem to even occur to them how fucking galling that is to people who are not quite lucky or clever enough to have mastered the black art of corporate bookmaking, and therefore must actually work for a living.

The, ahem, "philanthrocapitalism" is all well and good, but perhaps doing things that actually have impact on this nation's most persistent economic affliction -- its banana republic level of income disparity -- might alleviate the resentment that troubles them so. Failing that, they could always make good on their threats to go Galt on us. Really, I just don't know how the rest of us would manage without being forced to bankroll their collateralized debt obligations.

Second Amendment Remedies

Nobody could have predicted....

Of course Mesdames Angle and Palin will rush to absolve themselves from any responsibility in this, and clearly this is a deranged individual (who of course must be allowed full access to firepower). No doubt one of their staunch defenders from the 82nd Chairborne will waddle forth with some sort of tendentious horseshit about how Ozzy Osbourne isn't responsible for every dipshit who kills himself with Suicide Solution playing.

But that is not this. This is precisely what Angle made a point of "rhetorically" warning about; this is the exact metaphor Palin chose to use for the entire campaign season. Well, someone locked and reloaded, honey; someone opted for that "Second Amendment [remedy]". How do you like it?

I do hope they're happy, Angle and Palin, if either of them even possess enough self-awareness to admit (if only to themselves) their role in this. More importantly, one or the both of them may slowly start to realize that they've got a tiger by the tail here, that the nasty guff they and their cohort have been peddling non-stop for two years has consequences when it reaches crazier ears.

But they won't, malignant narcissists never do. They just worry about how the blasting of Rep. Giffords -- and a judge, and a child, and others -- will affect them and their prospects.