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Top 10 Reasons Why the 99% Should Take Turns Kicking CEOs and Lawmakers in the Nut Sack

2012-01-30T11:55:00.001-05:00

It's obvious our entire national economy from top to bottom, from side to side and from inside and out is completely predicated on fraud and malfeasance that always pulls back just enough and just in time before the whole bloody pocket-picking machine completely breaks down. What follows below are my top ten reasons why every interested American in the 99% should be allowed to kidnap every lawmaker on Capitol Hill and Wall Street Chairman and CEO, line them up against their office doors and take turns publicly kicking them in the crotch with steel-toed boots.

10) Buttfucking the American consumer for decades, tanking our and the world's economy, then demanding that we, their victims, bail them out so they can continue business as usual and refuse to share that bailout money even in the form of loans at double digit interest rates.

9) Steal a $3 loaf of bread to feed your starving kids, you get your name and picture on a wanted poster. Steal trillions from the Treasury and the Fed, you get your name and picture on the cover of Forbes.

8) Outsourcing American jobs to Chinese, Indian and Mexican slave labor by making collusive trade agreements and offering tax deferments to Communist countries then force us to sell those goods that we used to make at or near minimum wage.

7) "Jobless recovery"? Really? Really?

6) Keeping HMOs almost completely unregulated under the guise of "reform" then mandating every American carry health insurance at their rates whether or not we can afford it.

5) When people like Barney Frank tout Dodd-Frank and Republicans and Wall Streeters condemn it when in reality it's more watered down than gin mill draft.

4) Through patient capital investment and focused strategizing in setting up a system whereby hundreds get obscenely richer when that patience, effort and diligence would've been better put to use in favor of the 99%.

3) In having the nerve to continue trying to sell the easily-proven fallacies in our post-Reagan and post-Glass Steagall nation that permanent tax cuts, Trickle Down economics and deregulation actually works and creates jobs.

2) Bankers arrested for tanking the nation's economy by stealing trillions, and costing millions of Americans their pensions, jobs and homes: 0. People imprisoned for protesting such theft: 6,436 and counting.

1) For deliberately setting up a system whereby degreed college graduates are expected to pay off ten of thousands of dollars in student loans with minimum wage temp jobs.

The Seven Year Bitch

2012-01-28T12:25:00.003-05:00

The late former House Speaker Tip O'Neill once said that all politics is local. So are our priorities in crunch times but I'll get back to that later.

Today's my 7th anniversary as a blogger. I guess, in blogging years, that makes me something like a grand old man like IF Stone or Sy Hersh. Being a political blogger means exposing myself to tons of topical information and in the course of that exposure, certain erosions have taken hold. Among them are an encroaching paralyzation of how to approach, deal with, cogently define and eradicate racism and other forms of right wing stupidity.

Often I find myself tempted to publicly say, "We need to execute all Republicans, racists and evangelicals immediately if not sooner" when I read of the latest assault on humanity. Knowing that wouldn't fly, I then dial it down a notch and think, "OK, we need to vote out of office all Republicans on a local, state and federal level so the American people can finally advance back into the 21st century."

But I realize even that's far-fetched. Up to a point, you can judge a congressional district, state or even an entire nation by the lunatics it chooses to represent them. When, for instance, Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe keep getting re-elected every six years, you know there's something seriously wrong with the state of Oklahoma. When Florida's 8th district voted out Alan Grayson after one memorable and fantastic two-year term while Minnesota's 6th district re-elected pie-eyed psychopath Michele Bachmann in the same election cycle, it understandably makes one wonder what's in the drinking water supply.

And when I look at the back-sliding this nation of ours has done just in the seven years that I've been blogging, it makes me wonder just what's the use of blogging? Even A list bloggers like Aravosis, Hamsher, Amato, Kos and Duncan Black reach no more than perhaps 1% of the nation. Bottom-of-the-rung bottom feeders like me have reached a tiny fraction of that 1% and even that's taken me years to accrue with much of that traffic coming from misguided perverts and racists.

What's the sense when not only have I not made a difference, my elders and betters have still not been able to keep the right wing from turning these United States into a Terminator-style wasteland in the blind pursuit of corporate profits and the eradication of people who do not think like them?

But the alternative is to give up and to not oppose these obvious sick and depraved people. And this former Navy SEAL is a fighter who knows that the worst possible time to give up is right before you get pulled over the edge of the cliff. Because that's what the cocksuckers want. They loath and fear the power of the First Amendment and only want it for themselves.

And while the jury's still out on the overall efficacy of citizen journalism, as pressing as these issues of the day are, financial worries as well as politics tend to turn parochial and personal during crunch time. Now is such a time.

If you wonder why this formerly prolific blogger goes for a whole week at a time these days without posting, the reasons are manifold. #1, remember what I said about the erosion that the cruel and stupid produces in even the strongest human minds. Sometimes I'm just so overwhelmed and paralyzed by the stupid that's better to not try to launch a coherent response to it.

#2, as with the post-adolescent Dylan Thomas, my writing suffers because of constant money worries. After nearly three years of being unemployed, I'm still stupefied that a man with my experience and skills who had relatively little problems finding a job now almost cannot even get a pre-interview. I and many like me are living but dying proof that there never was a recovery and certainly will not be one until every American who wants and needs a job gets one and to do so for a living wage.

Even when the president, Congress and our various state governments make blatant power grabs designed to undermine working conditions, wages, our Constitutional protections and civil liberties and environment all in the unholy name of corporate profits and power, more and more often I'm unable to concentrate on these things long enough because my landlord, utility companies, insurance brokerage and the city, state and federal governments to whom I owe bill money, premiums and income and excise taxes do not care to hear what my problems are and what problems in the system face us. Life, and bill and tax collection, go on, business as usual, as if nothing horrible and terrifying is happening to our nation.

If you are even remotely able, Mrs. JP and I would greatly appreciate a donation through Paypal (or through snailmail, if you email me for my street address). I know I've alienated many of my readers over the years with what seems to be constant pleas for help these past two and a half years. I even made an appeal on my 53rd birthday which resulted in next to nothing. And that's OK. No one owes me shit. At the end of the month, all the bills are still in my name and my creditors don't give a damn where the money comes from, only that it's there and on time.

So whatever you can do for us would be tremendously appreciated by the two and half members of our household. It's hard enough dealing with the right wing and its surrogates in the Obama administration but it's immeasurably more difficult to do while the wolves are baying outside our door and beneath our windows.

The Arizona Brewers

2012-01-28T10:05:00.003-05:00

Since Sarah Palin has now embarked on a literary career that seems bound and determined to supplant literacy itself and Schwarzenegger has left Sacramento and is depending on his old rival and fellow right winger Sylvester Stallone to get his deflated body back on the silver screen, it could be said that Jan Brewer is now the stupidest Governor alive today and quite possibly the most racist one since George Wallace. And after the tarmac incident in Phoenix a couple of days ago, Obama could easily be imagined kicking himself yet again for making her predecessor, Janet Napolitano, his Homeland Security Chief.

Jan Brewer is simply a superannuated version of Sarah Palin, a brain fart-prone grifter who sees absolutely no problem whatsoever in abusing her authority as the state's chief executive for the advantage of her relatives. Like Palin and so many other right wing racists (or am I being tautological?), the Governor who signed the most draconian anti-immigrant bill in modern times (SB 1070, which even many prominent Arizona law enforcement officials define as unconstitutional), showed her true colors by waggling her finger at the President of the United States. She then showed another true color (yellow) by trying to downplay the incident in much the same manner that Cheney's office downplayed the "Go fuck yourself" incident with Sen. Patrick Leahy ("...a frank exchange of views" is how Cheney's dungeon masters tried to sweep it under the rug).

Whatever his reasons for trying to keep the peace, Obama didn't exactly help his own cause by ordering his administration, led by Jim Carney, to chastise the press for paying attention to this virtually unprecedented show of disrespect to the office of the Presidency. As if the look on his face in the lead photo isn't enough ("Yassa, massa, my name be Toby"), it only gives Obama the appearance not of a statesman taking the high road but of a long-suffering black man explaining away the whip scars given to him by a plainly racist right wing by saying that he fell down the stairs.

Sorry, Mr. President, but you were too far away from Kansas for a house to drop on top of Jan Brewer at the right moment.

Moreso than the union busting Scott Walker and Chris Christie, the anti labor Paul LaPage and the stupendously corrupt Rick Scott, Jan Brewer is on all counts a national laughingstock as well as an embarrassment and it seems only a vengeful God Hell bound to show us some Dutch Uncle lessons in how not to self-govern is responsible for Brewer not getting recalled. Perhaps it's more of a reflection of the rabidly racist constituency of Arizona, a place where pasty old right wingers go not to die but to accrue more political power.

Brewer's tall tale of "the scary black man intimidated me" was largely unsupported by witnesses to the incident and Brewer being flustered afterwards was more cerebral flatulence after meeting someone with a superior intellect. The office of the presidency and any person holding it can certainly be intimidating but if you're a state governor and you've met the POTUS before, as Brewer has, then your given moment of being star struck has long since past. It should not be personally held against the President.

But being biracial has made Mr. Obama a huge target and the most hated African American since Nat Turner and Dred Scott. His reluctance to call out Republicans on their overt racism and confirming that racism does indeed still exist does not do anything for the ongoing struggle for civil rights for his people or the American people in general. In fact, while Obama could easily make a case that he's being singled out for his race, his tack seems to be to simply ignore the fact that racism still exists in our supposedly enlightened age. Pointing out racism is not the same thing as pulling the victim card as so many white Republicans do and it is not dividing a nation that's already divided by racial differences.

And Jan Brewer's Phoenix had risen once again from the ashes of the civil war and the civil rights movement to rear its ugly hooded head.

Jan Brewer represents much of what is wrong with America and its politics today. She had abused her power while still a state legislator to lobby for more state hospital money "to prescribe a new drug for the treatment of schizophrenia. The drug, Risperdal, was later used to treat her son’s illness, according to court and medical records."

Ronald Brewer, as many of us know, is a mentally ill criminal who remains unconvicted only by reason of insanity after being charged with sexual assault and kidnapping. While that shouldn't be held against Jan Brewer, what more people should pay attention to is Brewer's conduct once it became clear that she was to move from Arizona's Office of the Secretary of State to the Governor's mansion. Even before taking the oath of office, one of her first thoughts was to appoint several high-ranking members of her transition team to seal her son's criminal and medical records, a highly unprecedented move. It had all the appearance of Sarah Palin sweeping under the rug her daughter Willow's own burglary and B&E past.

Then, after lobbying for that extra money for state hospitals, such as the one in which Ronald Brewer has been locked up since 1990, Brewer then decided to deny patients live-saving allocations from Mr. Obama's stimulus that would've offset Brewer's own cuts, a move that has resulted in the deaths of at least three Arizonans waiting for organ transplants.

Brewer's claim of beheaded bodies in the desert and trying to spin it as a rationale for SB 1070, which essentially allows law enforcement to racially profile and harass even legal Mexican Americans, was so over the top that even the perennially supine MSM pressed her on it, making her double down and then, finally, say that it wasn't true.

This is just a short, abbreviated list of Jan Brewer's crimes against the people of Arizona and the Office of the Presidency. If any Democratic Governor had ever waggled their finger in George Bush's face during his alleged presidency, the right wing would've called for that Chief Executive to be publicly drawn and quartered. But IOKIYAR, EITVIB (Especially if the Victim is Black).

Jan Brewer is the poster child for most everything that's wrong with America, with its politics, with the moribund and virtually dead civil rights movement and with the right wing. The shriveled Red Queen of Arizona, with her inexplicable book deal and incumbency, is in itself a damnation of the stupendous danger of stupid people working together in concert in large numbers.

Breaking...

2012-01-25T15:49:00.002-05:00

That's all I got. Since the 23rd, I've been painfully shaving about 2300 words off American Zen's word count since Amazon/Penguin's contest has an unreasonable bias against books that are greater than 150,000 words. What else is going on in the world? I hear there was a SOTU Address recently.

Open Thread

2012-01-22T14:46:00.002-05:00

We need a palate cleanser especially after last night's boondoggle over a primary in South Carolina. So Mrs. JP and I are going out to watch the Patriots advance to the Super Bowl over the broken bodies of the Baltimore Ravens.

Yeah, I know, the Ravens have always benefited from a stellar defense while the Pats' own D was ranked 31st out of 32 this year. But look at what our defense has done of late and when you have the best quarterback in the NFL and two of the best tight ends in the NFL, no defense scares you. hell, offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien's probably even more scared filling the big shoes of the late Joe Paterno at Penn State.

So consider this an open thread, thoughts on the NFL post season, etc.

Republican Voters Pull a Romney in SC

2012-01-22T11:00:00.004-05:00

The people of South Carolina have spoken. The folks that brought you the Civil War, Nikki Haley and Joe "You Lie" Wilson had suspended their Family Values long enough to vote for a old lech who got his cock sucked by a paramour in a car in full view of children, cheated on his wife before that with a staffer while calling for impeaching Clinton for doing the same thing and gave an award to a porno distributor.

Bravo. The sales of clothespins in South Carolina must've skyrocketed the week before the primary.

It was just a few days ago when Turdblossom Karl Rove, Charles Pierce at Esquire and yours truly were all on the same page insofar as one thing: Romney would pull off a clean 3-0 sweep with the first caucus and two primaries, that he'd get the GOP nomination even if he dug up Elizabeth's Edward's corpse and fucked her on the floor of the New York Stock exchange from trading bell to trading bell. The stars (or rather the unholy menage a trois of the MSM, the Bilderberg Group and Citizen's United) were all aligned and Mitt was going to be the Republican Party's Great Caucasian Hope.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the Republican analogue of Obama's Darth Vader tour bus: Rick Santorum was judged to be the winner of the Iowa caucus, after all, which is kinda like overturning the Ed Armbrister/Carlton Fisk interference call and retroactively giving the Boston Red Sox the 1975 World Series championship. And then, after Mitt was left in the dust as if he was married to Newt and had contracted cancer, 3-0 became 1-2. And the voters of South Carolina last night bucked the Powers that had already anointed Mitt as The One as if he was some sort of polymer-based Neo action figure to do battle with some imaginary Matrix solely of Obama's making and , shit, as they inelegantly say, happened.

Ergo, after a caucus, two primaries, 947 Republican debates with #948 coming tomorrow in Florida and four turtle doves, the GOP is back to square one with no clear frontrunner and no real identity other than the troublingly abstract mantra of, "Let's get the nigger out of the White House." Essentially, South Carolina voters didn't give a shit who the Supreme Court or Fox News or Karl Rove or the Bilderberg Group wanted and pulled a Mitt Romney.

The flip-flopping Republican voters in the Midwest, northeast and the south are essentially responding to one thing and it's just a matter of who can blow the dog whistle the loudest and at the right pitch. Santorum retroactively took Iowa after telling an all-white audience that he had no intention of "making black peoples' lives easier." In NH Romney railed about entitlements under Obama and Gingrich in South Carolina called Obama "the food stamp president", as if Obama unilaterally created SNAP all by himself.

One needn't be a political pundit or sociology professor to know what these men are saying under the frequency beyond which non-racists can hear: Elect me and I'll get the darkies off welfare and stop them from siphoning your tax dollars with their welfare checks. They're merely less blatant versions of Reagan's intolerably racist meme of the welfare queen driving Cadillacs to the welfare office to pick up their checks.

Obviously, it resonated in Iowa despite the fact that in the Hawkeye State, nine out of ten people on welfare are white and the percentage only goes down slightly on a national level. The Southern Strategy created four decades ago by Nixon and his piano wire-gripping psychopaths is still very much in full effect as is the lie of, "Liberals want to take away all your money and give it to them lazy niggers."

In the case of President Obama, however, the knuckle draggers who came out last night to vote in the SC primary are largely exempt as the president has consistently called for raising taxes on those making more than $200,000 a year and that Mr. Obama recently signed into a law a payroll tax cut that added another $40+ a week into the pockets of blue collar workers.

And long before all the poll results were in, South Carolina voters made their message clear: We'd rather replace the guy who just put another $40 in our pockets every week with a guy who wants to take our kids out of the classroom and into the janitor's closet 'cuz he thinks like us when it comes to them there welfare queens.

Romney's cult simply alienates those in a highly evangelized state like SC. The only true Bible-thumper left in the group, Rick Santorum, like Romney, has a slim public record and just one term in elected office. And Ron Paul, well, is Ron Paul, a small, embittered very old man who, while being perhaps the most viciously racist one of the lot (as opposed to the racism of convenience perfected by Romney, Santorum and Gingrich), just leaves them churchgoers colder than smallmouth bass on ice at the fish market.

So the series stands even 1-1-1 and the GOP primary process is rebooted. All the more reason to hope that Ron Paul takes the Florida primary in a couple of weeks to tie it at 1-1-1-1.

Thought o' the Day

2012-01-21T16:47:00.002-05:00

What's Mitt Fudging?

2012-01-20T10:17:00.005-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

Bain, citing privacy reasons, declined to provide a list of the companies it invested in. - The WSJ, January 9, 2012

OK, we've all heard the stories about Mitt Romney's wooden attempts to resonate with the proletariat. For all the jokes about Al Gore's stiffness in 2000 and John Kerry's blue-blooded egalitarianism in 2004, Mitt Romney makes both Gore and Kerry look like the Isley Brothers on Ecstasy with Jimi Hendrix on accompaniment.

In fact, if Mitt Romney was any stiffer, he'd have a Y-shaped incision on his chest. His infrequent and invariably failed attempts to resonate with voters who have actually touched a snow shovel and have actually felt sweat on their skin are invariable disasters. The man worth up to $264,000,000 recently told unemployed people in Tampa, Florida that he was unemployed, bet Rick Perry $10,000 on national TV and thinks getting paid over $374,000 for a speech "isn't much." Hell, the only difference between Romney and Lenin's corpse is that Lenin is perpendicularly challenged and isn't afflicted with terminal avarice.

But Republicans and the mainstream media who love them and take their cues as readily as they do Matt Drudge's every half-baked fever dream are losing their focus. While it's perfectly acceptable for Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich to ask Romney to release his tax returns (albeit because they just don't think Romney can beat Obama toe-to-toe, which he can't. If by late this summer it comes down to Romney and Obama, it won't be a David vs Goliath matchup as much as one featuring a Ken doll vs Goliath.), there's an even bigger question that the corporate MSM are leaving out of the debate.

Instead of worrying over Romney paying 15% on some of his Bain Capital dividends and stock options, money he hasn't actually earned in 13 years, and perhaps none at all since much of his vast fortune is squirreled away in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, we ought to focus, instead, on how many tens of thousands of American families Romney had ruined during his 15 year-long reign of terror since he'd founded Bain.

Even if the tax code was rolled back to the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, in which the wealthiest paid up to 90% in taxes, Romney would still have over $25,000,000 in the bank, hardly an amount that would inspire much pity among many in the 99%. But little attention has been paid outside of Newt Gingrich's SuperPAC and the DNC to the countless rabble left to starve by the side of the road in Romney's locust-like agenda at Bain Capital.

Let's take a look at perhaps Romney's most infamous acquisition, Ampad (which, in a masterful piece of spin doctoring yesterday, the right wing American Enterprise Institute not only downplayed but tried to claim Romney's Bain actually created jobs. Forget the fact that a venture capital investment firm's primary if not sole focus is to make money for itself and its investors and that job creation is merely incidental to that very same end.).

"Last I saw her, she was still technically alive."

American Pad and Paper was one of 10 businesses into which Bain had either invested or acquired outright that made 70% of the money that stuffed the pockets of their investors and, out of those ten, one of four companies to file for bankruptcy within three years. But there's an ingenious way to spin that: Romney and other supporters of Bain Capital piss and moan that it's unfair to assign blame for failed companies after Bain had essentially bankrupted them with massive management and consulting fees and from which they'd subsequently divested themselves. In essence, Bain is taking the identical position of a serial killer who absolves himself of guilt after stabbing a woman and leaving her to die by the side of the road.

At the same they're doing the Pontius Pilate thing and washing their hands of blood or red ink from companies they'd bankrupted (approximately 22% of them), Bain and Romney are also taking credit for building jobs that perhaps ought to go, instead, to a robust Clinton-era economy and senior management at Staples, Domino's, etc.

Romney once said to Newt Gingrich during a debate, "Doesn't he understand how the economy works? In the real economy, some businesses succeed and some fail." What Romney's really saying is something that we all already know but that he just doesn't quite have the guts to say without the varnish: That in the "real economy", in "real" capitalism, in the "free market", a company's success is measured solely by the money it makes for shareholders and executive management, not by how many blue collar jobs it creates.

Ampad's notorious example is a case in point and is fast becoming a verbal Armageddon for both the right and the left to the point where both Romney's detractors and supporters stumble over themselves with their half-facts and contradictions (such as professional banshee Ann Coulter a few days ago ascribing Ampad's failure to unions and a mid-90's America going green while forgetting that around the same time, Staples, a Bain-owned paper store, was making billions at the expense of smaller manufacturing companies such as Ampad.).

The facts are that the union, represented by Romney gadfly Randy Johnson, went on strike when Bain swooped in and raised health care costs for the workers. The deserted hulk and weedy parking lot that used to be the Marion plant was bought by Ampad which was of course owned by Romney's Bain. Despite the workers being represented by a union, Bain and Ampad thought it was more profitable to just fire all the workers and part out the company.

Typical of corporate raider firms, Bain's strategy for making money at all costs was manifold: Charging obscene management and consulting fees, insinuating their own people on the board of directors, driving up debts, selling stocks, inflating the worth of its holdings, with preserving blue collar jobs not even at the bottom of their list of priorities. From a landmark seven part story published by the Boston Globe in 2007 (but no longer archived and available in part here):

Ampad couldn't pay its debts and plunged into bankruptcy. Workers lost jobs and stockholders were left with worthless shares.

Bain Capital, however, made money - and lots of it. The firm put just $5 million into the deal, but realized big returns in short order. In 1995, several months after shuttering a plant in Indiana and firing roughly 200 workers, Bain Capital borrowed more money to have Ampad buy yet another company, and pay Bain and its investors more than $60 million - in addition to fees for arranging the deal.

Bain Capital took millions more out of Ampad by charging it $2 million a year in management fees, plus additional fees for each Ampad acquisition. In 1995 alone, Ampad paid Bain at least $7 million. The next year, when Ampad began selling shares on public stock exchanges, Bain Capital grabbed another $2 million fee for arranging the initial public offering - on top of the $45 million to $50 million Bain reaped by selling some of its shares.

Bain Capital didn't escape Ampad's eventual bankruptcy unscathed. It held about one-third of Ampad's shares, which became worthless. But while as many as 185 workers near Buffalo lost jobs in a 1999 plant closing, Bain Capital and its investors ultimately made more than $100 million on the deal.

To the folks at Bain Capital, that was all in a day's work, albeit an unusually lucrative day's work, and doesn't exactly paint a portrait of a venture capital firm dedicated to saving American jobs at all costs.

So the next time Romney tries to connect with the proles while pointedly and furtively refusing to release his tax records, instead of obsessing at how stiff and disingenuous Romney is, both political parties as well as the MSM ought to focus on those American workers who similarly don't pay much in taxes for the simple reason that Romney and Company put them out of work.

Land of the Free Lunch, Home of the Brave Old World

2012-01-19T07:32:00.005-05:00

How did we let this happen?

We, the moussed, Reeboked beneficiaries of the Great Experiment with cell phones plastered to our ears as we drive high performance, less fuel-efficient cars, have somehow let it all get away.

The "It" to which I'm referring is the now-risible, overarching rationale that guided the Declaration of Independence, the one that stated that all men are created equal. The mystery is not how and why we could let that principle be forgotten but how we could've been so gullible as to believe in it for going on three centuries.

Even a cursory look at American history, particularly labor and civil rights history, will inform one that far from being open to new ideas, championing labor and being spiritually vested with improving the quality of life for all Americans, the United States has consistently been a nation motivated by greed and maintaining the status quo even to the point of murdering our fellow Americans to that end.

The inequality and vicious attempts to maintain a tilted status quo began long before the Bread and Roses Strike that began exactly a century ago this month in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts. Coming less than a year after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City that killed almost 150 men, women and children, the brutality of the mills toward its workers was eventually spotlighted by Congressional investigations, exposure from the press and increasing political pressure from trade unions.

Literally gallons of ink and blood have been respectively spilled by worthy minds and worthy bodies explicating causes and effects, pros and cons and ramifications of why things need or don't need to change. But this facet of human nature does not need too fine a point put on it. And when you fully unpack the whole messy argument it boils down to one simple, atavistic imperative: When people derive good fortune in one way or another, they #1 do not wish to share it with a segment of society they deem unworthy and #2 they wish to keep things that way. (It's no wonder that, according to a recent OECD finding, America ranks 27th overall out of 31 nations in social justice.)

This has been a hallmark of human civilization perhaps since the days we lived in caves and fought each other over prime hunting and watering grounds. And the infallible human instinct of equating social standing with ill-gotten wealth derived at the expense of the happiness, opportunity and wellbeing of others, wealth that cannot be taken through this vale of tears and imported to the next, is a timeless story.

And among the perennially greedy landed gentry, virtually the only way to penetrate that veneer of culture and ossified humanity and to get a primal, visceral reaction from these people, for want of a better word, is to threaten their wealth and status quo. Fascism, which is partly characterized by a complicity with private industry, will never be as controversial with the working class and especially not with the wealthy for the simple reason that it doesn't threaten the interests of those who have access to the military and paramilitary power that's needed to maintain a semblance of civil order. Socialism will always be controversial because it threatens to take all that away.

Greed and selfishness will always be defining characteristics of human society and as long as we keep reproducing, despite our best attempts at nurturing, we will always produce children that will grow up to be exactly the same kind of sociopaths and psychopaths that we now see running Wall Street and Capitol Hill.

But these past couple of years, we've seen a difference. Far from seeing the status quo merely defended with police and military intervention and through propaganda campaigns, we've actually witnessed an incalculably vicious reaction that has produced a regression in the policies, principles and laws that helped us emerge from a feudal state in the 19th century into the more equitable, civilized industrialized superpower that we'd become.

As with Europe in the Middle Ages, early 20th century America thrived under a middle class that was largely if not entirely enabled by trade unions both public and private. With unions (or guilds, as they were known in the Middle Ages) came more equitably shared wealth and political power that rivaled that of the church and state. And yet, despite the fact that the 80 year-odd experiment with an actual middle class was an unqualified success story, we've seen a very successful move to actually push the United States back into the feudal/serf state it was before the rise of the union movement about a century ago.

Now, for the first time in my 53 year-long life, we're hearing Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah actually calling for the repeal of child labor laws that got children out of dangerous mills and back in school where they belong. Just a couple of days ago in South Carolina, Gingrich renewed his call to turn children into janitors to approving hoots and hollers from the yahoos in attendance. The overarching and stupendously ignorant rationale among Southerners especially is, as long as we defeat liberalism at all costs, fuck the poor and fuck our own kids. It's an anti-Communist/Socialist mindset engineered by the right wing in a post-Cold War era.

And, rather than merely indemnifying Wall Street from its excesses and refusing to drag into court the titans who's made the meltdown of 2008 possible, the American public, under a surly simulacrum of representative government, was forced to bail out that same Wall Street despite tens of millions of us protesting that bailout to our elected officials. And, absurdly, the Republican Party that was largely responsible for laying the foundation for those excesses was for a time on our side.

Occupy Wall Street may be dead but it hasn't been forgotten. Instead, it's been ossified into history regardless of the best spinmeisters Wall Street and Capitol Hill can buy. OWS forced the corporate mainstream media to put under a microscope the world-consuming greed that nearly resulted in the collapse of our planet's financial system. For those who couldn't get away to occupy Zuccotti Park or Liberty Square or McPherson Sq. in Washington DC, the movement showed that, yes, you are not imagining things and, no, you are not alone and you are not crazy for coming to the same conclusions.

The problem is, fighting to save the American Dream is a battle that's doomed to failure because, except for one brief, shining moment, the American Dream never existed, As George Carlin once said, "it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it."

And when those without guns oppose those who do, we all know what the outcome will be. The only difference is, the police and militia have traded in their clubs, fire hoses and truncheons with automatic weapons, pepper spray and tasers, mobilized not with horses but in tanks thoughtfully provided to them by an increasingly paranoid federal government.

Our landed gentry's track record on civil rights is every bit as spattered with blood and yet considering White America consistently being on the wrong side of history, the attitude of maintaining a racist status quo remains in full effect. Difficult as it to believe that we had to labor for nearly a century to abolish the enslavement of our fellow humans, that is exactly what we're fighting now.

How and why have we let this happen? How could we stop building on the progress we'd made throughout the 20th century to the point where we're seeing the dismantling of unions, the defunding of Social Security, the deconstruction of Medicaid and Medicare, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the outright theft of the voting rights of African Americans and calls to repeal child labor laws and even the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Well, as the right wing has taught us, neglect of progress and infrastructure results in this very same thing: The flagging of the vigilance that progress requires and demands will inevitably produce a backslide that will land us back into the 19th century if not further. Under the dominance of the right wing that began under the union-busting Reagan, America is now like a once-champion body builder gone completely to flab.

And now we find ourselves in the absurd position of protesting rewarding corporations and banks for their corruption and malfeasance, to fight to keep our children out of the janitor's closet and in the classroom, for African Americans to merely secure the right to vote in the face of a sleazy, racist onslaught from an audacious right wing hoarsely screaming about voter fraud in the face of its much, much more massive electoral fraud.

If we couldn't take our very survival for granted in the nuclear age, at least we were able to take comfort in the fact that if you got up every morning, went to work, upgraded your skills, got a good education and a better job and lived within your means, you'd do OK. And that when the day came that you couldn't get out of bed due to old age or illness, the social safety net would take care of you and reward you for decades of hard work.

All that's being seriously threatened while we are, for the most part, allowing this to happen. But our forebears risked and gave their lives to hand us the freedoms and rights that we now no longer can take for granted. Then again, they didn't have cell phones, video games and Twitter to keep them happily distracted.

Turning 53...

2012-01-16T06:41:00.002-05:00

...and watching the years grind out of this bloody extruder called Life is like watching an incipiently rickety assembly line struggling to make quota even though automation will someday in the near future make the process obsolete. Yep, at 9:50 tonight, your prehistoric porcine political pundit who's addicted to alliteration turns 53.

Still nothing on the job front, even though I'm trying like a one-nut on his honeymoon to even get an interview even as the wolves are pissing all over the perimeter of Casa Del Puerco. I know I mercilessly hit you all up for donations in a public plea in the month before Christmas but if you have a few bucks to spare, Mrs. JP, Popeye the cat and I would immensely appreciate any help in the form of a birthday gift before February 1st rolls around. As always, if you haven't already received a copy yet, I'll even throw in complimentary file attachments of both my novels on Kindle (The Toy Cop, my hostage negotiation thriller, is getting an overhaul before I submit it to a CreateSpace/Penguin-Putnam contest later this month).

Top Ten Facts About Tonight's New England/Denver Game

2012-01-15T00:00:00.003-05:00

Tonight. the New England Patriots beat the Denver Broncos 45-10 to advance to the second round of the NFL playoffs. Many amazing facts and stats were accrued, including Tom Brady's 363 passing yards and Rob Gronkowski's three touchdowns and 145 receiving yards, both tying for most in NFL postseason history. But there were some other surprising facts and stats in Denver's loss to the Patriots. What were they?

10) Patriots owner Robert Kraft ate more hot dogs by the first quarter than Tebow had completions all night.

9) Even Patriots head coach Bill Belichick screamed at Broncos offensive squad over subpar play.

8) John Elway called Denver locker room at halftime to offer to come out of retirement.

7) Jesus severed ties with Tim Tebow for better endorsement deal.

6) Fellow evangelical QB and Patriots victim Kurt Warner called Tebow after game to suggest suicide pact.

5) Tim Tebow was sacked only three fewer times than all of Bain Capital's employees combined.

4) Broncos cheerleaders smoking in Gillette Stadium's parking lot after halftime.

3) Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien caught slipping suggestions to Tebow and the offensive line.

2) Tim Tebow completed fewer passes than Herman Cain.

1) That Jesus stops trying to save Mankind every Sunday to personally help Tim Tebow. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Tebow it was Saturday night.

The Bain of Our Existence

2012-01-14T15:35:00.006-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

"The reason is simple: Romney is not a conservative. He's not, folks. You can argue with me all day long on that, but he isn't. What he has going for him is that he's not Obama..." - Unconvicted child molester and drug addict Rush Limbaugh on Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel.

It would be understandable if liberals were tempted to take a break this winter or at least until Newt Gingrich finally gets smart and drops out of the race. After all, the 28+ minute-long movie unofficially made for and by Newt Gingrich through his SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, is seamlessly indistinguishable from what liberal icon Robert Greenwald would produce through his production company (in fact, it's virtually impossible to imagine the people Winning Our Future had hired to produce the spot not looking to Greenwald's Brave New Films for cues, if the thorough research replete with touching music is any indication.).

In fact, as long as the former House Speaker is in the race, he'll be doing a lot of President Obama's heavy lifting.

Yet while proper due and attention is being paid to Mr. Gingrich's unofficial spot, it's notable that other prominent conservatives such as Sarah Palin have piled on. Uniting with Winning Our Future, the former Alaska Governor and failed Vice Presidential nominee and proven tax cheat has demanded that Romney to release his tax records, which he has staunchly refused to do (at the end of the video, you'll see why: Most of Romney's estimated quarter of a billion dollar fortune that was hoarded at the expense of American jobs and companies has long since been squirreled away in not-so-blind trusts and offshore bank accounts far from the apathetic reach of the IRS.).

The entire video would be an indelibly searing indictment on any candidate with Mitt Romney's history of financial predation at Bain Capital were it not for the fact that among other conservative voters, Barack Obama, a man whose middling stimulus bill still created 3,000,000 jobs, is even more loathed and feared than Mitt Romney.

While the president's entire agenda on job creation has been underwhelming at best these past 35+ months, it's hard to imagine why and how even rock-ribbed Republicans primarily worried about the economy and job creation would fear Mr. Obama more than the elitist Romney, a mannequin of a game show host who'd cost America countless tens of thousands of jobs in his 17 years helming Bain (or created about 100,000 for communist China, depending on how one chooses to look at it).

Perhaps Limbaugh in my epigraph succinctly explained it all. As with Romney's repugnance among Republican voters until late, his newfound if middling appeal can be summed up as, "He's not Obama." When dealing with the one-dimensional, reactionarily reptilian Republican brain, one cannot introduce more complex logic than that without subjecting oneself to endless head banging on the brick wall of racially-motivated "reasoning."

But Romney's so-called appeal, much of which was bought prior to getting endorsements from federal, state and local right wing politicians, is more a direct benefit from running in a weak field of Republican contenders than anything else. Romney, like McCain before him, is like the 83 game-winning 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (who went on to win the World Series.): A mediocre entity that vultures a berth more through process of attrition than anything else.

But as ill-informed and reactionary as conservative voters tend to be, the repugnance to Romney that still almost cost him the Iowa caucus to one term Senator Rick Santorum can perhaps also be ascribed to reptilian reactivism. Say what you want about George W. Bush and John McCain and many Republican presidential candidates before them but at least those men had human traits and could resonate with voters across a broad spectrum of the electorate (McCain, despite his age and clearly incipient dementia, still got almost 60,000,000 people to vote for him against Obama).

Mitt Romney, even on those mercifully rare occasions when he tries to connect with the grass roots, cannot help but show what an elitist scum he truly is, whether it's telling largely out of work Floridians "I'm unemployed, too," betting Texas Governor Rick Perry $10,000 over a minor squabble over a book passage during a nationally televised debate, telling hecklers at the Iowa State Fair that corporations are people, that income inequality should be spoken of only in "quiet rooms" or four years ago seeking out a reporter for special abuse when he rightly called out Romney's lobbyist Ron Kaufman as running his campaign.

In fact, the only time one can get a human reaction from Romney is when someone accuses him of being a flip-flopper, insists that corporations are not, in fact, people or calling him out for his long history of vulturism with Bain Capital. Even then, Romney, will break into the most plastic and disingenuous grin since Ken and Barbie or what Charles Pierce at Esquire calls his "Flog the Butler" face.

Mitt Romney, scion of a wealthy family who escaped the Vietnam draft and instead spent a year at a palace in France during a Mormon mission, far from being a cool, even-tempered customer, is one of the most viciously defensive Republicans on the map on the rare occasions when someone from a crowd or the mainstream media calls him on his lies and constantly shifting positions. Even the mere suggestion that Romney may have come by his quarter billion dollar fortune under less than honorable means is enough to make him scramble for his emotional launch codes, if his shameful speech in Iowa last summer is any indication.

Much of Romney's divorce from reality and the facts can be gleaned from his very perversion of the definition of what Bain Capital's primary mission was. Bain, a world-eating entity that has created one weed-clogged parking lot after another from coast to coast, is a venture capital firm. Ask anyone at a venture capital firm who doesn't have a current or former alumnus running for president if their number one goal is job creation and they'll laugh you clear into the street.

The mission statement of a venture capital firm is to make money and if any jobs are created it's merely incidental. In nearly 25% of the cases in which Bain Capital bought a business, it filed for bankruptcy and was parted out like an old Chevy while hundreds got thrown out into the cold.

This is the picture that Mitt Romney would like you to forget, one that seems to perfectly illustrate the entire philosophy and agenda of the universally-despised Wall Street. Does that look like a portrait of people who are primarily interested in job creation or one of cash-stuffed scarecrow psychopaths in the heady 80's of Oliver Stone's Wall Street rubbing their unseemly wealth in our faces?

RomneyCare here in Massachusetts is but a mere microcosm of what he'd do to this country if he was ever allowed to sit behind the Resolute Desk. That abominable mutation of MassHealth, which used to provide for the health care needs of those on welfare and other public assistance, was co-opted by the half dozen largest health providers in the Commonwealth. The rechristened MassHealth Connector now offers rates too high for any unemployed or underemployed person to pay unless they meet a stringent hardship guideline. And if you're not that indigent but still too indigent to pay the premiums these HMOs demand, you'll wind up owing Massachusetts your $900+ personal exemption.

It's impossible to imagine anyone not on Wall Street or who doesn't work for Bain Capital or who hasn't been paid off by Romney ever voting for him except out of a reptilian revulsion toward a man of African American heritage running our country. It's quite obvious that prominent conservatives such as Mr. Gingrich and Ms. Palin are trying to take down Romney simply because they know that he's unelectable or because they themselves are revolted by the cult to which he belongs.

Whatever their motives, we should welcome their opposition to a Romney presidency because it marks the first time in a while that well-monied Republicans have ever gotten their facts straight.

Caption Contest

2012-01-13T12:16:00.003-05:00

So, is Mitt Romney and the other vultures at Bain Capital made of money or full of shit? Discuss.

Introducing the Bobo Awards

2012-01-12T14:19:00.003-05:00

Perhaps Erik Loomis in his blog Lawyers, Guns and Money was being facetious but he may be onto something when he proposed earlier today creating the Bobo Awards for Socially Pernicious Journalism. I'm guessing that Loomis' name for this award is derived from D r i f t g l a s s 's sobriquet for Our Dear Mr. Brooks of the NY Times.

His nominee for the first Bobo award is ABC News' Matthew Dowd, for this eyebrow-raising frotting/fellating of overrated Broncos QB Tim Tebow (lately eviscerated by Tom Brady and my hometown Patriots).

Should this movement gain some traction, I'd only be too glad to host it as a monthly feature right here at Pottersville.

Caption Contest

2012-01-11T12:44:00.003-05:00

"Tonight, New Hampshire. Tomorrow... Mordor!"

Make me ashamed of myself by showing me whatcha got.

Facebook Post to a Young Man

2012-01-11T10:58:00.003-05:00

(Editor's note: What follows is a post I had to write to a young man, a friend of my son Adam who friended me on Facebook last month. This kid has the seedier side of humanity pegged, the part about us being materialistic lemmings and automatons who cannot think for ourselves. Unfortunately, my young friend, who's barely out of his teens, thinks this defines Humanity in general and I'm trying to convince him that's only half the story, that there's another side to people that seems to deserve the perks and potential of being a human being, those of us who have a vested interest in actually making the world a better place to live in. I know this message of conciliation to a budding misanthrope is coming from an unlikely source but along with encroaching old age (allegedly) comes wisdom. And my wisdom, such as it is, tells me that not all is lost regardless of the Maya running out of calendars after this year. And I truly hate seeing the young so incurably cynical toward Mankind in the abstract when their adult lives have barely begun. So I'd like a show of hands: Did I give this lad sound advice or am I just blowing smoke up his ass?)

Ah... you're too young and beautiful to be so cynical and hateful toward a race of which you're largely ignorant (there are 7 billion of us, you know). When I was your age, I said to my correspondent, the poet XJ Kennedy, pretty much exactly the same thing: That I hated Humanity with a capital H. I was a misanthrope in the making and the much older XJ recoiled in horror. I, too, thought I'd had all the answers by dint of a high intellect and a "poetic sensibility" that made me infallibly sensitive to the ills, absurdities and injustices of the world. And, God knows, I still live with a lot of rage, hatred and cynicism but that, at least, is more focused than it was when I was your age. Now, I can identify the wellsprings of my rage and realize from whence it springs (My parents, the Navy, etc.). But hating humanity as a whole is just going to turn off a lot of people who don't even come close to fitting your definition of Humanity with a capital H being "lifeless materialistic lemmings." Sure, it's one thing to peg the human race for being what it is with its hype-driven "getting and spending (Wordsworth)" but another thing entirely to let that color your perception of people as a whole, including those who would otherwise probably want to have a relationship with you but are turned off by your poisonous hatred. Now, granted, this is coming from someone who can still wield a razor-sharp pen when the spirit moves me but my anger and erstwhile hatred is at least FOCUSED and I don't piss all over Mankind because one Republican said something colossally hateful and stupid. I've learned in my middle age to see the hope and potential in humankind, to have faith that we will, indeed, pull back from the precipice if and when we ever push ourselves to the edge of that metaphorical cliff. Basically, what I'm saying is to cut people some slack. This is the only race running the roost, the human race. And the sooner you learn to cut people some slack the easier and happier your life will become. There are many, many good people out there who can think for themselves and who would probably wish to have a stimulating relationship with you (like me). But the world will not change for you no matter (how) much you grouse about it. There are battles that can be won and some that cannot be. And only wisdom and experience will teach you to distinguish the two.

Caption Contest

2012-01-10T17:03:00.001-05:00

"...now, class, please turn to page 121 in your textbooks that describes the Republican caucus and primary process..."

The Latest From Alan Grayson

2012-01-09T16:00:00.004-05:00

I've got nothing today and I'm in no mood to have one or two hours of hard work go completely ignored all over the internet. So I'll just outsource today's post to Alan Grayson. I reproduce in full the text of his latest email about Rick Santorum (R-Isle of Man-on-Dog.)

It’s getting really hard to be topical. In the issue of New Yorker magazine dated January 9, 2012 – that’s today -- the lead article is about the rise of Newt Gingrich.

Newt who? Newt Gingrich? Is he the guy who thought that if he stuck four fingers between the buttons in his shirt, he actually became Napoleon?

(By the way, America, Newt Gingrich is very disappointed in you. I just thought you should know that.)

But this note is not about Newt Gingrich; it’s about Rick Santorum. Who remains topical until 8 p.m. tomorrow, when the polls close in New Hampshire. Because New Hampshire Republicans are finding it difficult to square a Santorum state ban on contraception with the motto “Live Free or Die.”

But this note is not about contraception; it’s about weather forecasts. Which are always topical.

Rick Santorum tried to ban weather forecasts. Actually, not all weather forecasts. Just government weather forecasts.

I realize that you could possibly be a little skeptical about that, so here is the bill, at the official Senate website. Sections 2(b) and 2(d) of the National Weather Services [sic] Duties Act of 2005, S. 786, 109th Cong., 1st Sess.

By the way, Santorum introduced this bill a few months after four different hurricanes hit Central Florida, where I live. In one of those hurricanes, a big chunk of my roof collapsed, right into the living room. So weather forecasts are sort of important in my community. A matter of life and death, you might say.

Now you must be thinking, "Wow, that guy Santorum is a REAL conservative." Santorum recognizes that government weather forecasts are meteorological socialism; they are a serious infringement on your constitutional right not to know whether it will rain tomorrow. Santorum sees that weather forecasts are a government takeover of the skies. In fact, Santorum is such an astute and profound conservative thinker that he probably realizes that traffic lights are a government takeover of the roads.

But this note is not about traffic lights. It’s about Rick Santorum and government weather forecasts. And why Rick Santorum tried to ban them.

Here’s why. It’s because AccuWeather is a commercial weather forecasting company, and AccuWeather employees gave Santorum more than $5,000 in campaign contributions. Then he introduced the bill. Which subsequently and consequently led to Santorum being named as one of Congress’s “most corrupt politicians.” Which is saying a lot.

I can picture the conversation:

AccuWeather lobbyist: “Here is $5000 in bundled contributions from AccuWeather. Now introduce a bill to ban government weather forecasts.”

Santorum: “OK. Sure. Why not? Whatever. I love this cheesecake.”

And that is what I’ve seen over and over again. This thing called “conservative ideology” has degenerated to the point where it exists simply to spew out rationalizations for something else entirely: whatever the corporate lobbyists want.

A topic that will remain topical, I’m sure, well after the polls close in New Hampshire tomorrow night.

Courage,
Alan Grayson

Last Night's NH Debate: Live Free or Die of Embarrassment

2012-01-08T11:05:00.004-05:00

Willard "Mitt" Romney practices sucking lobbyist cock before last night's debate.

By now, we've seen the six remaining GOP presidential contenders on TV more often than Madge the Manicurist and Josephine the Plumber combined. And the Republican Freakazoid, Willardpalooza, DSM IV Come to Life, Parade of Penises last night proved only one thing: Willard is the One. He is, in mob parlance, a "made man." He is untouchable, as Teflonic as Reagan and his own hair.

Willard, leader of the rat hordes, is da Man. Meet your new 2012 Republican Car to Nowhere.

There was no Night of Long Knives or even a Dusk of Apple Paring Knives. Newt and the others, save possibly for Jon Huntsman in this, his Brian's Song of a national appearance, went after Willard with about as much real zeal as so many crocodiles recently bloated with baby hippos would look at a full-grown hippo. Huntsman did channel Herbert Hoover by muttering something to Willard in Mandarin Chinese, which came off sounding like a chess nerd explaining the Sicilian trap to a bunch of football jocks just before they folded him six ways into a locker.

So, they did what Republicans do: They instead attacked each other and the President for entirely the wrong reasons (that would be the President who supposedly blamed George W. Bush for the Iraqi skeletons in all the WH closets, the reservoir of red ink pouring out of all the bathroom faucets and the Everest-sized pile of dirt under the rug he left behind in the Oval Office).

But the fact that Romney, a man with a first name that's onomatopoetic with "the chill that crawls up your spine when you feel something cold and clammy in the dark", was able to so easily deflect so many damning charges proves right then and there that this is the greatest fix since (pardon the pun) Jack Johnson/Jess Willard in 1915.

Forget the fact that, as Vulture Zero for Bain Capital, Willard did indeed create 100,000 jobs... for Communist China. Forget the fact that Willard has a position paper that looks as though it was written by a schizophrenic with multiple alter egos. Forget the fact that Willard is a psychopath that edges closer and closer to scratching out of that vinyl substance charitably referred to as skin every time someone challenges him or mentions an inconvenient truth about his past or present.

They've given up on waiting for the zombie Reagan to come shambling out of his grave, they've given up on Republican Jesus coming down from heaven in a golf cart made of light and attended to by cherubic caddies. This is their man, Mormon or no, even though, come November 6th, it would be a very good time to invest in clothespin manufacturers, which is about the only way Willard will create any manufacturing jobs for countries that don't limit couples to two children and a shot glass full of rice per day.

Forget the fact that Rick "Will You Fucking Stop Googling Me???" Santorum came in a virtual dead heat with Mitt Romney in the Slipknot Caucus last week. Santorum brought more people back down to earth than Harold Camping's failed Raptures last year by insisting that there were no classes and that even mentioning the word "class" was a nefarious liberal plot (sure, there are no classes. We'll all reap billions from not having to pay capital gains taxes under Willard's plan and routinely bet each other $10,000 over petty squabbles).

Santorum's eight vote deficit might as well have been 80,000 to judge by the fix that's obviously well in place thanks to Citizen's United and the Bilderberg Group who no doubt see Willard as their real-life Manchurian Candidate. Santorum's even more extreme than Israel regarding the settlements, is so Catholic he makes the Catholic League's Bill Donohue look like a goat's head-wearing pagan and, well, there is that Google/Dan Savage thing to live down.

The Powers That Be have already decided, rightly, that Santorum doesn't have what it takes to get people excited. He's the anti-Jon Huntsman on the other end of the spectrum of Republican lunacy: Whereas Huntsman isn't nearly crazy enough, Santorum's just a little too batshit. Willard, obviously, benefits more than anything else, as the one candidate who's the least embarrassing, the one who's fine-tuning that perfect balance between being a ho-hum conservative pragmatist and someone who paints elephants on walls with his own fecal matter.

The Republican field of nightmares, after the three horse race in Iowa, has now become Six Characters in Search of an Offer. With Cain and Bachmann now rightfully relegated to the shit pile, the GOP's offerings have now become what it's always been and likely always will be: a half dozen middle-aged to elderly, white, male Republican multimillionaires. The Bilderberg Group has very good reasons to be concerned, considering the heterogeneous makeup that requires looking at which lobbyists and corporates interests support whom in order to tell them apart.

Oh, and Rick "Fuck you, NH, I'm Gonna Leapfrog Over Ya'll on the Way to SC" Perry was also there like some pot head wandering in and auditing a college course on Hempology.

Your Daily Douche

2012-01-07T10:48:00.002-05:00

Your Republican douchebaggery of the week, culled from all over the internets, the Twitter box and Facebook machine.

Heading off the always-active Republican police blotter is yet another embarrassment for South Carolina, this time State Representative Thad Viers, who was arrested recently for stalking and harassing his ex-girlfriend. This made Viers drop out of the race for the newly-created 7th District as well as resign from his current post. In his press release, the poor man was able to put aside his personal problems with his love life to ~~address bigger problems~~ take some parting partisan shots:

While I had hoped to join South Carolina's conservative congressional delegation in fighting back against Washington's out-of-control spending spree, now is not the time. Instead, I will focus on building my law practice and advocating free market principles here in Horry County.

Oh, and this wasn't the first time this has happened. Viers has a well-established pattern of obsessive/compulsive behavior toward former flames. Back in 2007, "Viers' arrest came nearly four years after he pleaded no contest to threatening to beat and sexually assault a man dating his estranged wife." And this guy wanted to run for Congress? Sadly enough, he would've fit right in with the other psychopaths the Republican Party has fielded.

Covering himself with glory on the Presidential campaign trail, Rick "Damn You, Dan Savage, Damn You to Hell!" Santorum recently told the mother of a cancer survivor that people with pre-existing conditions are to blame for their conditions and that they should pay more for health care despite having their earning capacity crippled due to an illness they probably weren't too crazy about contracting.

Yeah, like Thomas Franks we've all asked ourselves what the fuck is with Kansas. The latest WTF moment came from none other than racist Republican Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal who forwarded a cartoon to his fellow racist Republican lawmakers comparing the First Lady to the Grinch and calling her "Mrs. YoMama." The message from O'Neal read, “I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation — at our expense, of course.”

The backlash resulted in the typical Republican non-apology, which basically boils down to, "I was just funnin' on her. Sorry if ya'll are too thinskinned to get Republican humor." Just two days ago,

O’Neal had defended the email, contending that he was only making fun of his own bad hair days. In a statement, the speaker’s office said that “political cartoons are a part of American culture.”

Sure. And this isn't indicative of a pattern of racist behavior by fat, pasty old white Republican men who must be consumed daily with frustration that they can't put on those pure white robes with the pointy hoods (Limbaugh, Sensenbrenner, et al).

Common Dreams tells us of a study by the Center For Responsive Politics informing us that Republicans in the Tea Party Caucus, who comprise almost exactly a quarter of all Republicans in the House, elected by Tea Baggers to represent the middle class, are actually wealthier on average than even their fellow Republican lawmakers (which is saying a lot).

The median average net worth of a member of the House Tea Party Caucus was $1.8 million in 2010. (Financial disclosure forms require lawmakers to value their assets and liabilities only in ranges, so it's impossible to know exactly how wealthy a particular elected official is. However, it's possible to calculate an average net worth for each member of Congress.)

That's significantly higher than the comparable number for the median House member: $755,000. It's also more than 130 percent above the $774,280 average net worth of the median, non-Tea Party Caucus House Republican.

Furthermore, the caucus, a group of 60 House members founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), includes 33 millionaires and six members worth more than $20 million, according to the Center's research...

So remind me again what those lunatic Tea Baggers were thinking when they elected dozens of psychopaths who plainly don't represent the middle class and have time and again threatened to shut down the government in their quest to cut taxes for their own kind while slashing programs and unemployment benefits for millions of middle-class and lower income folks?

Apparently, Voter ID should only be made mandatory where black, red and brown Democratic voters are concerned, not white, Republican Iowans voting in last week's caucus.

Just when you think Creationism and global warming denialists represent the nadir of scientific head-up-the-ass ramming, along comes Peter Duesberg who recently published in an Italian journal that HIV does not cause AIDS. Doucheberg's ideas are thought to result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people since the AIDS/HIV retrovirus was identified in the 80's. Doubling down on his, er, remarkable theory, Duesberg also claimed that there was no AIDS epidemic in Africa.

By the end of the year we'll be hearing things like, "Now, so-called experts and elitist eggheads will tell ya'll the earth is round, that's gravity's not a theory and that we revolve around the sun but don't you go believin' 'em..."

Duesberg actually writes for Scientific American, if you can believe that.

Just when you thought Deadbeat dad Joe Wilson and Don Young were two of the surliest, nastiest cocksuckers this 112th Congress has to offer, then take a gander at Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack screaming at one of his constituents. And why was he screaming at her? Let's let Blue Arkansas field this one:

Kelly (Eubanks) works two jobs to support her two kids and is trying to finish up her degree, going to UofA in Fayetteville full time in addition to taking care of her family and working. She went to her Congressman’s town hall (something Womack rarely holds) to ask why he voted to cut the Pell grants she depends on to go to school but wouldn’t cut oil subsidies.

During the town hall, Eubanks got hissed at Womack's other constituents to "get a job" despite the fact she'd said she had two and they tried to take the mic away from her. After the Town Hall, she was cornered by Womack's constituent service representative, Pam Forester, "to inform (Eubanks) that if she wanted to talk with the Congressman again she needed to go through her and set up an appointment (which is to say, no way in Hell you're getting to him ever again.)."

This is what you get when you elect Republican plutocrats to represent you. If you challenge them on their corruption and hypocrisy and put their feet to the fire, they'll act like a Town Hall is a Spanish Inquisition and bellow and bully you into submission.

Rick "Fecal Anal Lube" Santorum pulled double-duty this week at a recent stump speech in which he said gays don't deserve the "privilege" of serving in the military and getting married within their own gender, while saying he didn't want to discriminate against any Americans' rights. Because, according to former Sen. Man on Dog, these are privileges, not rights. And privileges, as we all know, ought to be earned. So, if you're gay, you have to earn the right to defend your country (despite DADT's repeal) and to marry within your gender.

When an AP reporter held Mitt Romney's happy, dancing feet to the fire by telling him it was obvious that lobbyists were running his campaign, Romney had a Norman Bates moment and confronted the AP reporter. After informing the reporter he'd like to speak with him later, he was inevitably confronted with Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom who told the reporter he was acting unprofessionally and was "argumentative with the candidate". Oh, and his easily provable facts were downgraded to mere "opinion".

Ron Kaufman has a long and storied history as a big time lobbyist and it all devolved into Romney's personal semantic interpretation of what "running" his campaign really means. Even Romney admitted that Kaufman was present at "debate strategy meetings" but not "senior level strategy meetings", which, I guess, never involves something as unimportant as debate strategy.

It Was a Good Life

2012-01-04T09:54:00.008-05:00

Now that the Billy Mumy caucus has finally ended and the bad people have, alas, escaped the cornfield to metastasize across the nation, let's take stock of what we learned or should've learned last night from the Iowa Caucus.

An 8 vote victory for Mitt Romney (R,D,I- ~~Utah~~, ~~Massachusetts~~, whereever) in a caucus in which barely over 30,000 voters across all of Iowa turned out to vote for both him and Rick "All Black People Are on Welfare So I Don't Want to Help Them" Santorum, is not a victory. That's pretty much how many people voted for last year's Typhoid Mary of the publishing industry, Christine O'Donnell, in Delaware's Senate primary. In other words, if Mitt Romney's entire immediate family had turned on him, it would've been a virtual dead heat with a guy named after scatalogical leftover anal lube. So please let's stop proclaiming this a victory for Gov. Dog on Car over Sen. Man on Dog.

2nd, only half the Republicans who won this glorified popularity contest in Iowa went on to win the GOP presidential nomination, according to CBS. For those of you who needed a calculator during high school math, that comes out to 50/50, meaning that the networks and their sponsors could've saved a shitload of money and spared us the needless, misleading hype by simply televising a coin flip like they do before every NFL game.

3rd, despite conveniently forgetting that she now represents the 6th District in the Land of a Thousand Lakes and trumpeting her John Wayne/Gacy Iowa roots, Michele Bachmann couldn't muster better than a distant 6th with 5% of the vote. In fact, only 6,073 corn farmers could hold their nose long enough to vote for a hometown girl who thinks slaves were better under slavery than Obama and that the eight year-old John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father.

4th, Newt Gingrich is politically deader than Ronald Reagan, who still has vaster amounts of appeal than a guy who received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac as a lobbyist and would like to turn our schoolchildren into so many chimney sweeps. Since the Lizard King is now 65, that means he won't be able to run for President at age 69 unless every other Republican in the land is delivered their comeuppance and dies of septic shock after biting their forked tongues. Hopefully, after last night, we won't be seeing Newt on TV again except for the occasional Goldline or juicer infomercial on QVC, or the usual talking head gig on Sunday morning while Sean Hannity rests his massive chin in his hand in a pose of seriousness while Newt's hoarsely screaming about Sharia Law.

5th, when are we going to realize that straw polls right before a caucus, primary or election are more volatile than alcohol and seemingly inspired by it? In the months leading up to Iowa, every single GOP contender save for Jon Huntsman was, at some point, leading in at least some of the polls, including the Rick James of homemade politics, Herman Cain.

6th, the only way in which Iowa represents "real" America is in its fickleness, susceptibility to hype and general apathy. With over 99% of the polls reporting, only 122,255 Republican voters came out last night to vote for one Not Reagan or another. Iowa is a state with an estimated 3,062,309 people. Assuming about two thirds are of voting age, that leaves roughly 2,000,000 people. Assuming, generously, that only half of them lean Republican (although we all know the percentage is much higher), that leaves one million registered Republican voters. Yet Iowa saw just barely over 120,000 and no one candidate could capture more than a quarter of that vote.

That means both Romney and Santorum each garnered just 30,000 out of a potential 1,000,000+ Republican votes, or less than 3%. That's hardly a political bellwether of any type. And they're the big winners from last night.

7th, Maybe this meathead or your spiritual Godfather Adolph Hitler would agree but no, Ron, we are not all Austrians.

8th, All the rest, especially Rick Perry, are good for nothing but Letterman and Jon Stewart fun fodder. So, Rick, you can go back to Niggerhead and continue executing innocent people.

So please let's stop pretending that Iowa is America's crystal ball for deciding who the next president is. Neither Romney nor Santorum, literally, could get enough people to vote for them to fill Fenway Park even with the centerfield bleachers closed for a day game. The Iowa caucus is a joke just as every Republican contender is a joke.

Billy Mumy fucked up and the psychopaths have already fled the cornfields until the primaries this summer.

Iowa Caucus Results

2012-01-03T22:48:00.003-05:00

...as of 10:50 PM, with almost all precincts reporting in, Santorum is creeping out from the rear (pun intended).

He's actually in a dead heat with Romney 25%-25%.

Caption Contest

2012-01-02T15:58:00.003-05:00

In campaign shakeup, Mitt Romney announces new campaign chairman is Mr. Miyagi.

It Was a Good Run While it Lasted

2012-01-02T10:01:00.003-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

Astute readers will also notice that Obama's signing statement has no legal binding whatsoever and only refers to Obama's momentary intentions on how he "wishes" to interpret the law. It does not place any limits whatsoever on how a future President might use the law as written. - Mike Adams, Natural News

RIP Bill of Rights, 12/15/1791-12/31/2011.

It's pretty telling that Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law on New Year's Eve, one of the many days of the year when Americans are dedicated to the proposition of getting as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.

The bill was a necessary one, the biggest and most immediate one being the continuation of the paychecks of our servicemen and servicewomen. Of all the possible government shutdowns, the Republican Party is all too well aware that, in this paranoid, post-9/11 nation, most intolerable would be one of our national defense. The GOP, true to their sweaty, gun-to-the-head style of legislative hostage-taking, were already making noises to the effect that they were quite willing to let this happen if Obama didn't give them what they wanted. After all, they were still smarting over having to give Obama the two month payroll tax cut extension while the liberal media was declaring this a major victory for the Democrats and the administration. Somehow, the GOP needed to save face.

And if this was simply a matter of Obama being painted with red ink into a corner and being forced into a lose-lose situation, then his limousine liberal constituency who think he's the greatest thing to come out of Chicago since the World's Fair of 1893 might be able to make a case that he was once again forced to make an unpalatable decision. After all, the Supreme Court had already stated at least twice that the President of the United States should not have line item veto powers.

But the operative word of the phrase "the lesser of two evils" is still "evil." And that doesn't explain everything in the National Defense Authorization Act. And it also doesn't explain Obama's use of signing statements, used heavily by Bush and several of his predecessors for decades, a homemade Presidential style of line item vetoing that essentially gives the executive branch the unofficial ability to create, water down, alter or nullify laws, provisions and amendments in a bill (and, don't forget, on the campaign trail three years ago, Mr. Obama came out swinging forcefully against signing statements in a populist response to liberals pissing and moaning about Bush's excessive use of them).

The most notorious provision in this military funding bill is Obama essentially giving himself the power to accuse, arrest, detain, prosecute, torture and even execute any American citizen that he or his pogrom arbitrarily designates as an enemy combatant or even just a dangerous critic of the administration and its policies.

In spite of the fascist psychopaths that made up much of the Bush administration, one that allowed faith-based initiatives to guide Bush's policies, one that basically redefined hence legalized and implemented torture, one that invaded two sovereign nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than we were in 2001, one that outed a covert CIA agent and purged part of the Justice Department in the interests of simple, vicious partisan politics then thumbed its nose at congressional subpoenas...

...in spite of the consistently ruinous and ultra right wing agenda of what had been judged, until now, as the worst presidential administration in history, even Bush didn't dare give himself the power to assassinate American citizens and their children without due process and to arrest and detain American citizens in the dead of night with as little due process and transparency.

What Obama's strangely silent supporters seem to forget is that the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, was written and ratified by the Founding Fathers for the express purpose of preventing future federal governments like Obama's administration and the 112th Congress (also, arguably, the worst legislative body on record) from running roughshod over the basic, inalienable rights given to us in the 18th century. Recognizing the potential for abuse, the Founding Fathers were not content to merely not give the government the right to abridge basic freedoms. The Bill of Rights, in many clear ways, actually prohibits the government from making power grabs such as those seen since 2001.

And, indeed, one could ask where all the liberal outrage is. If Bush had made such a power grab, liberals would be screaming loud enough to make God reach for his earplugs about impeachment. Oddly enough, or perhaps not, limousine liberals who'd voted for Obama over three years ago aren't even whispering the "I" word because, well, think of the alternative.

Well, I'm here to say that Barack Obama is the alternative. In many ways more fascistic than George W. Bush and every Republican before him, Barack Obama had at the end of last year proven once and for all to be a traitor and an enemy of the people. And calling for impeachment wouldn't even be a viable option. That would require two major Acts of Congress. And, as dearly as the Jim Crow GOP would love to legislatively lynch Mr. Obama, they certainly will not do it over the purging powers of the NDAA. And what does this mean for anyone suddenly stripped of their first, fourth and God only knows how many amendment rights?

If it wasn't for liberal blogs such as Firedoglake, accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning's name wouldn't even be an asterisk (and it hasn't even been close to proven that Manning even leaked classified material to Wikileaks much less than he was even the official conduit). Imagine a whole nation of Bradley Mannings, silent and invisible victims of the USA PATRIOT Act and this new encroachment of the civil liberties of any dissident American. Bush left behind a completely altered government of which Hitler would've been proud and, as predicted years ago in this very forum, Obama was all too eager to exploit those sweeping Unitary Executive powers given to him by his predecessor. What indications has Obama given his base that the next guy wouldn't be as exploitative if not moreso?

My Top Ten Resolutions

2011-12-31T14:43:00.002-05:00

(Guest-blogged by Popeye the Cat.)

Maybe my bipedaled pets don't believe in making resolutions and bettering themselves as the second-most dominant life form on the planet but that doesn't mean I can't make my own resolutions in the interests of self betterment. So here are my top 10 resolutions for 2012.

10) I will not stick my rectum and admirably large package in Mommy and Daddy's face anymore. There's such a thing as too much of a good thing.

9) I will not follow them into the bathroom every single time for a head and butt scratching. My sense of smell is extremely powerful. Trust me on this.

8) I will not put myself between Mommy and Daddy and their monitors, especially if there's a chance they're ordering food for me online.

7) I will not lick my admirably large package in front of Daddy. I hate it when he gets jealous.

6) I will not lay down on top of Daddy's manuscripts and Mommy's magazines while they're using them. The ink is a bitch to lick off.

5) I will try not to be too finicky in the future, provided my zebra meat is still grilled gently over moon rocks by Japanese ventriloquists.

4) Next Christmas, I will not tear apart everyone's presents in an attempt to get at mine.

3) I will practice more restraint when Daddy gives me catnip. The last time, I put over $100 on his debit card and he was not happy.

2) I will stop pissing in the bathroom closet, on the bedroom floor and on Daddy's tote bag if my litter box isn't cleaned every hour on the hour.

1) Naming me was still an exercise in futility but when they call me from now on, the least I can give them is a contemptuous, bored look.

Profiles in Cravenness

2011-12-30T12:44:00.002-05:00

There's an old saying, "Treason is a matter of timing." Same thing goes for statesmanship and patriotism, especially at the beginning of an election cycle.

Much has been made about Obama's "tough stance" on not caving in to the Republicans, especially the ones in the House who found themselves in the absurd position of saying "No" to Obama's stopgap payroll tax cut plan. Republicans saying "No" to tax cuts??? Say it ain't so, Joe McCarthy!

But here's how it really down on the seedier side of the aisle:

While Obama was posturing like the Lion King and publicly calling out the Republicans for what we already knew they are (racist refugees from the DSM IV), the House Republicans realized they'd painted themselves into a corner, Tea Party caucus or no Tea Party caucus. It was a lose-lose situation for the House Repukes, especially since the tax cut measure sailed through the Senate by a pretty wide bipartisan consensus.

So House Speaker John Boehner did what Boehner usually does when he saw his troops tip-toeing off into the sunset of the Great Experiment: Boehner waited until virtually everyone left for their home districts or the nearest golf course, put up the bill under "unanimous consent" (which he should've done in the beginning while everyone was still in town) so that any lone Tea Bagger could do the House's version of the filibuster and oppose it. Naturally, none of them did and Boenher got the bill passed without expending any political capital (or so he thought). When the president signed the bill into law on the 23rd, it was even billed as a Christmas present to the American people! Scrooge caved just like the story goes. Dickens couldn't have penned it better!

Even Alan Grayson, in his latest fundraising email, is hailing this as a great victory for President Obama and the Democratic Party, for standing tall like Bo Svenson or The Rock and just saying, "No!" to the House Republicans who were all too willing to shut the government down just so they themselves could say No to a Democratic President who wanted to extend tax cuts to middle class families for another two months. This, at the very least, enabled unemployed Americans to keep living considerably below the poverty line instead of at the very bottom of the graph.

But even Grayson's usually dead-on cynicism missed the point. Because given his track record these past three years, it's tough to imagine President Barack Chamberlain standing up to the Republican Party in any other but an election year. This is about the most far left Obama will ever allow himself to lean even as the 2012 election year looms closer. Insisting that the House GOP pass a pitifully stopgap measure that will last only until the end of February when the 113th Congress convenes is hardly what a shrewd and perspicacious political observer would call "courageous."

We'll see if this victory will embolden the President to continue taking a firm stand against the congressional GOP just as Obama's every appeasement has emboldened the right side of the aisle to ask for more and more. It was a stalemate in which there were no real winners. The Democrats squeezed a two month payroll tax break out of the Republicans and the Republicans can always say to their lunatic fringe (and they will) that they played ball with the Commie Muslim Kenyan just long enough to keep the money spigots on until Congress reconvenes, see how much we love you out of work folks?

It's still possible that Obama will continue to eyeball the GOP. But even if he does throughout 2012, how do we know that this so-called populist position isn't just basic election year political gamesmanship? And how do we know the GOP won't pull their same old bullshit, with the same old results, when the fight begins over a longer payroll tax cut that will put more of their political capital on the line?

Popeye's 3rd Christmas

2011-12-25T10:15:00.006-05:00

I figured I'd take a picture of our tree before Popeye completely destroyed my already haphazard arrangement.

Here's Popeye once the catnip got broken out. Looks as if my trepidations were well-founded.

Peace on earth and ~~good will~~ fewer violent tendencies toward Mankind. And a merry Xmas was had by all.

Merry Xmas from Funtwo

2011-12-25T07:26:00.000-05:00

Craven Little Shitbag

2011-12-22T13:43:00.006-05:00

See this? I awoke this morning to four of these. Actually, three were slashed and the only one that wasn't touched was still flat as a pancake. After hoofing it to the nearest garage, lugging back a portable air tank with 100 pounds of air, I was able to partially blow up the tires to where I could get it to the nearest air hose and even then I couldn't put even 30 pounds in any of them.

When I dropped the air tank back off, the mechanic on duty told me three of my tires were slashed, with three puncture marks in the tread of the rear passenger tire. Only one tire was actually slashed in the side wall and I had to spend beaucoup bucks I didn't have on even the one used tire they had that was compatible with my wheel.

I can only imagine the cowardly, craven little psycho shit bag who did this. Imagine kneeling down next to someone's car during a lightning storm and puncturing the same tire three times in a row. I have a fairly concrete idea who did this and I already told their mother in a voice mail on her work phone to spread the word to cut the shit. I've completely stayed out of her and her family's life for nearly two years and I do not need this constant vandalism (last night's was the fourth). I also reported this to the police at the garage so now all the vandalisms are documented and suspects named.

There is no excuse for this. You have a problem with me? Knock on my door and talk to me like a man. Don't take out your petty little grudges on my personal property while trespassing on my landlord's property.

Bottom line, I just had to spend over $100 that I don't have three days before Christmas on a used tire and for work being done on the other three. I need a safe car to drive because I have to go to the next town over in less than 48 hours to pick up my son and his fiancee on Xmas Eve. I need a safe car to drive Mrs. JP to the airport in Rhode Island early next month and then back again in a week so she can fly back to Florida to see her ailing mother. I know this close to Xmas most of you are tapped out. Yet we desperately need help again and anything you could do would be tremendously appreciated. I'll throw in free copies of either or both my novels on Kindle on request.

Addendum: The tire that wasn't supposed to have a hole did have a hole and the used tire I bought also had a hole. Bottom line, I've suffered six flat tires and have two dodgy tires, with a second used tire (costing an additional $32) not on the rim. I'm having neighbors watch the car whenever they can, so if you're reading this you little piece of shit, be forewarned: You never know when you'll be watched and the police have already assured me I will not be responsible for the shape you'll be in when they come to arrest what's left of you. Once you set foot on someone else's private property, you're fair game.

Putting the Fun Back in Dysfunctional

2011-12-21T12:17:00.002-05:00

Go to NewtGingrich.com for the latest on the most dysfunctional presidential campaign ever. Go back often, report the results (My personal favorite is the Tiffany's ad). How, after all this time and after collecting millions from well-heeled millionaires, Newt never thought to buy this domain is simply beyond me.

Failed Dictator Dies, Millions Mourn

2011-12-19T10:34:00.006-05:00

"Look in my eyes.
What do you see?
The Cult of Personality."
-Living Color, "The Cult of Personality.

The man called a "pygmy" by mental pygmy George W. Bush, Kim Jong Il, has died. After the boo-hooing over "Dear Leader" has somewhat subsided, I hope that posterity's final word on Kim Jong Il is that he brought out the failures and shortcomings of virtually every non-Communist nation that was ever forced to deal with him and the failure of the Communist state. That's all that posterity should say about him.

The Clinton administration tried dealing with him in its final months, sending Secretary of State Madeline Albright to talk him into drawing down his missile program and she failed. George W. Bush, reduced to impotent sputtering and name-calling, failed to deter Kim from his single-minded course in obtaining 6-8 nuclear weapons and was aided in his failure by John "Group sex" Bolton, who, as Undersecretary of State monitoring the development of the weapons programs of other nations, helplessly watched as North Korea detonated its first nuclear weapon. Underscoring the Bush administration's failure was in bribing Kim with over $20,000,000 taxpayer dollars which Kim then used to throw himself a birthday party and pursued his nuclear program, anyway.

Kim's 17 year-long reign as North Korea's dictator, a mantle reluctantly handed to him by his father after years of relentless campaigning for more power, also represented the ultimate failure of one of the last Communist states on earth. The belligerent and maddeningly stubborn Kim was so focused on harvesting every single scrap of fissionable nuclear material to create a pitiful arsenal of 6-8 nuclear warheads that he forgot how to feed his own people, depending on his enemies South Korea and the United States to do it for him.

Like Gadaffi and Bush, he was an international punchline, a man who benefited more from the cult of personality and nepotism than any other ruler of his time. The reputed owner of some 20,000 foreign movies, perhaps he saw something in himself in the complete James Bond series, perhaps in Dr. No or Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Kim also represents the absolute stupidity and cluelessness of the human race even while he was turning George Orwell's 1984 into a historical document. The North Korean people knew nothing of him, not even his exact date and place of his birth. News of his declining health were mere rumors and began to sound like the multiple accounts of Big Brother's ceaseless amputations in György Dalos' 1985.

Like Pinochet and other recently-departed dictators, Kim somehow, exclusively through a bloodline based on murder and terrorism, earned the love and idolatry of a people despite the facts that during his reign, roughly two million North Koreans starved to death, dissidents abroad were tracked down by Jong Il-dispatched assassins and countless thousands of men, women and even children were and still are kept in internment camps all over the hermetic nation. Yet in picture after picture, we see this runt in his Michael Meyers jumpsuit, smiling for the cameras while empty suits and military uniforms nervously smile, hands clasped across their genitals.

Kim Jong Il was a joke outside North Korea, so much so that he earned a starring role in the comedy hit Team America. But even worse than a joke, he was such a bad joke that he turned every nation that ever tried to deal with him into a joke, including two presidential administrations and his rival to the south that was obliged to feed the people that he plainly had no problem starving to death. We were forced to treat this man as if he was a legitimate world leader simply because the failures of the Bush and Clinton administrations allowed him to acquire The Bomb. And American foreign policy (especially with Israel) these last several decades has taught us that as long as a country has even one nuclear warhead, it has to be taken seriously.

Kim Jong Il exposed the stupidity and impotence of some of the mightiest nations on earth and ought to be viewed as an object lesson in how not to deal with heads of state in the future.

(Editor's note: Demands on my time this holiday season and the almost complete absence of a legitimate readership and commentary has compelled me to hang it up for at least the rest of the year. The amount of time and energy I put into this almost completely ignored blog fills me with a sense of neverending failure and valuable, dwindling resources going completely to waste. I may post some greeting on Christmas morning but beyond that, at the very least I cannot guarantee I'll be back for 2012, election year or no. The very minimal and intermittent rewards, financial, intellectual and otherwise that I derive from this thankless endeavor simply do not justify the resources I pour into it like a jug of water into a sand dune. I cannot do anything about being utterly and completely ignored but at least I can minimize the sense of unending failure and wasted effort by discontinuing to bang my head against the immovable wall of apathy and ignorance. To my very few readers aside from the perverts who stream in from all over the world looking for .jpegs of "naked fat men" [I am so sorry I wrote that post, "One Minute in the Teabagger Chat Room"], I apologize but there simply aren't enough of you out there to justify this expenditure of time and effort.)

A Republican Christmas Carol

2011-12-18T11:54:00.003-05:00

(With grave apologies to Charles Dickens.)

Lay was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that, unless one believed in liberal conspiracy theories. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner (pay no attention to the fact that his best friend did the autopsy and the cremation was carried out without even a viewing). Richard B. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Lay was as dead as a door-nail.

Lay was really dead? Just ask old Richard B., his partner in crimes across the energy industry, Ken Lay in electricity, Richard Scrooge in oil services. Richard was his sole friend and mourner but didn't seem terribly cut up by the rather sudden event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral (witness the California wildfires), and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

Oh! But Richard B. was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone! When Katrina knocked out power up and down the Gulf Coast, old Scrooge demanded that power be diverted from the hospitals so the refineries could get back to work.

Once upon a time, long after Scrooge had left the White House, Richard B. Scrooge sat in his counting house counting his stock options that had split during the late war in Iraq that had just concluded. His counting house door is ajar and we can see the fire beside him is so very small but not as small as that of his clerk, "Scooter" Crachitt, who had only a much smaller fire to warm him.

Libby had had the temerity to ask for Christmas day off so he could go skiing with his lobbyist friends. "Bah humbug and go fuck yourself!", Scrooge was tempted to bellow at his sole clerk but realized he could use this opportunity get out of paying Crachitt a day and to make him come in all the earlier the day after the ridiculous holiday. The fool had already broken his leg just before the Plame trial. Let him break it again.

Presently, two cheerful men of middle age walked into Scrooge's counting house, loudly exclaiming, "Merry Christmas! This is Scrooge and Lay, I presume?"

"You presume correctly, sirs," Scrooge said. "And what can I do for you today?"

"Sir, we are making our yearly rounds soliciting for donations for the poor. How much can we put you down for?" The gentleman with the greater moustache put his pen to his pad, quivering with anticipation.

"Nothing."

"N-nothing? But, sir, surely you realize Christmas is coming and there are a great many people in want, those without food or adequate shelter, affordable health care or heat for the encroaching winter."

"They can go fuck themselves," Richard B. thundered. "Are not the debtor's prisons and repo men still in business? Nor high finance rates for scofflaws?"

"Well, yes, sir, they are, but..."

"Then begone with you! Everyone who celebrates Christmas should be boiled in boiling oil, with their heart impaled with the shin bone of an Iraqi child. Begone and go fuck yourselves!"

"But, sir..."

"I said go fuck yourselves!"

Richard B. Scrooge looked at the clock and realized with regret the trading day was coming to an end. So he trudged home in the dark gloom and frigid weather, praying he wouldn't meet up with his lesbian wife with whom he'd managed to avoid sleeping since his little Vietnam deferment was conceived in the 60's. He was tired, so very tired! that the poor old chap fell atop his four poster bed and fell fast asleep.

Presently, there came a clanking in the hallway, like the sound of a hundred chains abusing the hardwood floor. Then Scrooge's chamber door opened with a loud creak. It was Lay.

"Kenny boy! How can this be? You are dead! I had you cremated myself immediately after your conviction!"

Lay's chains were laden with lock boxes and bundles of worthless shares of Enron stock and 401(k) plans. "Oooooh, Dick," he replied in a hoarse whisper, "you and I did fabulous business together in life but there is comeuppance in the afterlife. Clarence Darrow is God's Attorney General and I am condemned to roam the world and telling all who would listen about the error of my ways."

"Error? But Kenny boy, we made a mint fucking over the poor and powerless!"

"Oooooh, Dick, I am here to tell you that money isn't everything."

"Bullshit."

"Tonight, you will be visited by three special prosecutors..."

(Part Two will resume tomorrow.)

Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62

2011-12-16T16:34:00.007-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday and, in a special, rarified irony seemingly peculiar to or reserved by a (gasp) malicious Higher Intelligence for the high and mighty, he also died the same exact day we officially began the troop drawdown in Iraq.

In build and physiognomy if not ultra right wing, pro-national polemics, Hitchens looked remarkably similar to fellow Brit Roger Allam, the fine actor who played Lewis Prothero in V For Vendetta. But in the run-up to war with Iraq, Hitchens shocked many of his running buddies on the left side of the street to side with the Bush administration. To paraphrase Charles Pierce, it was if, like Dick Cheney, Hitchens completely lost his fucking mind after 9/11.

But, like Mitt Romney and so many other extremists of all stripes, Hitchens was cherry-picked and even reviled by the right after his death (Professional, dues-paying asshole Bill Bennett even went as far as to say that Hitchens would have a surprise waiting for him when he got to the Pearly Gates.). To Republicans and liberals alike, it's not enough for one to agree with another on one key issue: They have to be 100% like us.

Indeed, liberals like me could never quite reconcile Hitchens' cheerfully destructive tirades against organized religion because of those very same uncharacteristically ignorant cheerleading of his adopted country sending hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children to their 72 virgins.

That left Hitchens in a No Man's Land populated only by the very few lone wolves who also occupy that lonely wilderness, seemingly comfortable in the alleged contradictions of being an atheist and a war drum-beater. No one could be said to understand Christopher Hitchens. As Miles Davis once famously said, "If you knew what I was talking about, you'd be me."

But whatever your ultimate views on Hitchens, you cannot deny the man's literary talent. His videos on Youtube are always treats regardless of your political, religious or ideological stripe. He never had to thunder and bluster his views like the fictional Prothero, never had to raise his voice and, even while he was eviscerating you for your ignorance, you felt as if you weren't boxed about the ears but had your ass wiped with silk. Vanity Fair's contributing editor was a pundit who was a jack of all topics, master of most, sort of a Dylan Thomas with a defined political sensibility.

His literary ability was so good and so obviously earmarked for posterity he could make Esquire scribe Charles Pierce and James Wolcott (the Andy Rooney of Vanity Fair) gnash their teeth into ground meal. He was, to quote a notorious Republican, a smart man's version of what a smart man sounds like.

And considering Hitchens' necessary intellectual limitations on Iraq and heaven, there's a chance St. Peter is waiting for him to get off that express elevator to the Pearly Gates. And, knowing Hitchens, even when confronted with evidence of his error in judgment in the person of St. Peter, I can perfectly imagine Hitch saying, "So you say, old man. But I still need identification."

The Real Intent of the Right Wing War on Culture

2011-12-16T11:25:00.004-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It's extremely important to distinguish the difference between a mere culture war, which suggests some parity, from an actual War on Culture. If what's going on here in the United States doesn't clue you in as to why, then perhaps you need an objective look at what's going on in Hungary, for instance.

Every now and then, I'll read an article that changes my entire belief system or at least one that allows me to sharpen my focus on a particular topic. This article by Philipp Oehmke in Der Speigel, one ironically translated from the original German, on the right wing war on culture in Hungary is one such example.

It stresses the need for a nation to have a national identity and a thriving, free-thinking culture in order to guard itself from outside influences such as the homophobic and anti-Semitic Jobbick Party in Hungary. One needn't squint too hard or pull a muscle stretching to draw parallels between the extreme right wing Jobbick Party, which is now the third largest in the Hungarian Parliament, and the National Socialist Party of 1930's Germany.

Budapest, as with Berlin 80 years ago, is a sophisticated cosmopolitan city with a thriving culture and a strong theatrical tradition. It's no less tolerant of its gay community than any other major city and, being the epicenter for cultural and political thought, it's an accurate barometer for what's going on in the rest of the country. Hungarians are renowned for their leftist leanings and liberalism, which makes it all the more mysterious why they'd vote in so many right wing bigots from the Jobbick Party so that now they're in roughly the same position as the Nazi Party was before the 1932 elections that saw the ascendance of Adolph Hitler.

Hungary currently has a conservative government in place, one that saw the ouster of the 20 year-long administration of the former liberal Budapest mayor's office and replaced with István Tarlós, described by one of his critics as being, "a reptile of Hungarian politics, muscular and well-fed."

I have a dear friend in Budapest, a young gay man, who's the victim of near-constant bullying from homophobic classmates. The school administration turns a blind eye to his victimization and when I recommended he go over their heads and air his grievances to the mayor of Budapest, he said that his letter was met with stony silence. Given Tarlós' track record, I no longer wonder about the apathy.

The leadership of the New Theater, the closest thing Hungary has to a national theater, was handed over to György Dörner, a right wing activist and sympathizer, by Mayor Tarlós after receiving a sloppy 20 page proposal essentially asking for control of the theater. The governing board, consisting of eight members, had no taste for any leadership change. Of the eight, six voted down the change and the other two abstained from voting. Despite the virtually unanimous consensus to maintain the status quo, Tarlós gave the reins to Dörner, who condemned the theater in his proposal for its "degenerate, sick, liberal hegemony." (He also wanted to rename it the "Home Front Theater", which even the rabidly right wing Budapest mayor found beyond the pale.).

Nonetheless, the soup sandwich of a proposal was approved by the mayor with absolutely no regard for the recommendations of the theater's board members and the new director will obviously use the theater as a propaganda tool. The outgoing director, István Márta, seems to be a capable one, providing Budapest's theater-going community with an eclectic range of well-reviewed plays spanning different countries, different eras and from different playwrights from Shakespeare to (believe it or not) our own Tom Waits. The theater is making money and doing more than its fair share that Budapest maintains its all-important if all too elusive cultural identity. One gets the feeling that when the new guy takes over, feeding the bottom line in the interest of a right wing hegemony won't be so important.

I do not agree with the author when he says, "Hungary today is a country trying to awaken a sense of national identity that never actually existed," although he contradicts himself earlier by writing, "In Hungary, culture is leftist and liberal, as it is in many other European countries." (Sidebar: How a nation can have a thriving, open-minded culture while not being possessed of a national identity mystifies me. Were it not for Hungary's proud national identity, the Uprising of 1956 couldn't have happened. But that's immaterial.) Yet culture is at the bottom of this issue, this Speigel article and my own.

Hungary for Change

The purge and rewriting of the laws, part and parcel to Hitler's extreme right wing agenda, has long since begun. Márta's been given the bum's rush despite the voice of the board and his counterpart in the National Opera in Budapest has since also been 86'd. There's this:

The government is investigating 82-year-old Agnes Heller, Hungary's most famous philosopher, a former dissident, Marxist and student of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács. The government, with massive support from the right-wing press, claims that she squandered European Union grant money.

And this:

A monument to the poet Attila József on a square in front of the parliament building is expected to be taken down soon. József, whose works are classics of proletarian poetry, was a humanist with a Marxist worldview. He threw himself in front of a freight train in 1937. The new government does not believe that a monument to this sort of a person ought to be standing in front of the parliament. It's as if the Germans were to remove a statue of Friedrich Schiller because the poet had long hair.

The cracking down on dissidents with show investigations and trials, the disappearance of monuments honoring proletarian heroes (echoed most recently in Paul LaPage's Maine) and the purging of secular, humanist liberals and potential enemies of the state are just beginning, right out of the dog-eared playbook of right wing dictatorships.

Then there's this, perhaps the most chilling revelation of all:

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party controls the country with a two-thirds majority in parliament -- enough, in other words, to reconfigure a parliamentary democracy or even reshape an entire country. A new constitution takes effect on Jan. 1, 2012, and a new press law designed to prevent unwanted criticism of conditions in Hungary has been in place for the last few months.

The Fidesz Party, as far as I understand it, is the mainstream conservative government which is bad enough. But even they're being challenged by the Jobbick Party, Hungary's answer to the Druz Party of Lebanon, Israel's Likud, Germany's NPD neonazis and our own Tea Party Republicans currently infesting Congress like so many ideological heartworms.

For a minute, let's shelve the speculation as to why a famously leftist nation such as Hungary would give a nearly 80% majority to right wingers and make the Jobbick Party the third largest in the nation and focus, instead, on where this is leading.

Oehmke's contention (one that may partially explain the political shift of the electorate) is that, bereft of a national identity, Hungary is weakened and made susceptible to political change no matter how radical and intolerant. Hitler's National Socialist Party was able to transform cosmopolitan, sophisticated Germany into a totalitarian state within a few short years by exploiting the peoples' dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic of Bismark that to this day is closely associated with hyperinflation and rampant unemployment.

Hungary at this moment is a relatively stable democracy (at least in name) that never gets listed with the usual suspects in doom and gloom prognostications of the fall of the European Union. But even if Oehmke's assertions about Hungary's lack of a sense of national awareness and identity can be taken at face value, one cannot deny he has a point where he writes,

But a country's culture can't be changed that easily. In Hungary, culture is leftist and liberal, as it is in many other European countries. Culture does what it pleases and what it thinks. But to gain complete control over a country, one has to control what people think. This is precisely the issue on many people's minds in Hungary today: a battle for people's thoughts.

And this, as Frank Zappa once said, is the crux of the biscuit. This explains in a nutshell the wearisome Republican mantra of defunding the NEA, calling Bert and Ernie gay, slinging mud at the Teletubbies, calling for the abolition of NPR and PBS, waging a war on science, calling the mainstream media and Hollywood liberal, in essence, literally embracing ignorance. It would be all too easy to assume they're trying to clamp down on dissident or potentially dissident thought but it would be all too easy.

If you want to undermine a country and get a toehold, tapping into mere dissatisfaction with the establishment isn't enough if you want to change a nation's thought and win over hearts and minds. Because the electorate has to be bereft of a culture and/or a national identity. And I've been saying for years that the United States has no culture other than what it's borrowed from others and that the closest thing we have to culture is hyperactive consumption that even this economic downturn can only slow down.

This goes a long way toward explaining why some of the stupidest carbon-based life forms in the solar system get elected to public office virtually every year. We're the type of nation that tweets about National Cupcake Day exponentially more times than the long-overdue drawdown in Iraq, one that shrugs at reports that global warming is worse than we'd been told and that we have only a five year-long window to correct potentially world-ending trends while obsessing over the Kardashian divorce. When you give electoral power to a people such as this, it's only inevitable that we're going to elect to public office ex-wrestlers and action stars as governors and dummies like Fred Grandy and Sonny Bono to Congress.

That's not to say we're illegitimately dissatisfied with the road our government is taking our Republic. However, since we are a solipsistic, selfish nation, our criticism of any administration seems to be largely predicated on what suits or doesn't suit us, as this now-notorious op-ed reminds us. As long as we can pay our bills and hang on to our jobs and can afford cable so we can watch the new season of Mad Men, the rest of the country can go fuck itself in the fieldstone square that was the foundation of where our homes used to sit.

The extreme right wing, fascist elements of the Republican Party had only partially or imperfectly tapped into this dissatisfaction with the current government but that dissatisfaction is largely squandered. It'd since been refocused and refined with a vengeance in the form of Occupy Wall Street, which isn't getting so much press anymore.

But if early 1930's Germany proved one thing, it's that all an extremist party needs is widespread dissatisfaction with the current government (which also explains the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917) and a promise of, well, hope and change to get a toehold. Once that toehold is established, anything's possible.

And right wingers are (until recently) very adept at recognizing that weakness. Dissatisfaction and polarization robs a people of whatever national identity left to them and they're susceptible to any political movement that at least promises to break the status quo.

Russia began its march toward Communist hegemony through a revolution. Germany's own paradigm shift was through a Democratic process that rendered revolution redundant and enabled by populist dissatisfaction. And when our own history begins to get too blurred by right wingers to read, we'll all too soon forget our identity, that our own Republic was founded on a thirst for liberty and a refusal to live in fear. If you want to see where America's headed in 2012, look no further than Hungary.

Quote O' the Day

2011-12-15T19:02:00.003-05:00

"They want to touch you, feel you, and sniff on ya." - Rick Perry

"I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him." - Hugo the Abominable Snowman.

This is the Way the War Ends...

2011-12-15T11:57:00.006-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

“Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
Or fill these void veins full again with youth
And wash with an immortal water age?” - Wilfred Owen, (1893-1918), "The End", inscribed on his tombstone.

...not with a bang but a whimper.

Something interesting happened today about 6000 miles away. Our major combat operations in Iraq ended... for the third time. Yawn. If you missed it, you'll be given a free pass. After all, how can the ending of a nearly nine year-long war that cost nearly 5000 American lives, over 1,000,000 Iraqi lives, displacing four million more and nearly a trillion dollars compare to other news items such as Herman Cain wanting to be Defense Secretary, the upcoming Golden Globes and, thank you, Tweeps for saving this for top honors, #Nationalcupcakeday. (Just to be fair, at press time, #Iraq has barely broken through the top ten trending topics in the US.)

So why the muted trumpets and drums? Where are the headlines bellowing in 60 point bold as a necessary counterpoint to those of nine years ago when Dan Rather, Geraldo, Judith Miller and every single talking head on Fox "News" was screaming about smoking guns, mushroom clouds, Freedom Fries and Rah Rah, Sis Boom Bah-ing us into a plainly illegal war contrary to the UN Security Council's Resolution 1441 and every single pertinent international law despite a complete lack of evidence of WMD, Saddam's complicity with al Qaida and the slightest shred of proof of his involvement with 9/11?

Where are the randy sailors at Times Square grabbing and kissing random nurses and immortalized for posterity by Alfred Eisenstaedt's successor before melting into the NYC subway system, where's the Victory Day ticker tape parades for the returning troops, the booming postwar economy that naturally followed and continued well into the 70's? Where are the grateful, liberated Iraqis offering their daughters as thanks for liberating them from a dictator who'd killed tens of thousands to an occupying force that had killed hundreds of thousands?

Yeah, where's the gratitude for we, the liberators, the flower petals showered on our departing tanks, the new, shining Iraq filled with shiny, happy people that, according to the Geneva convention, is mandated to be rebuilt by the occupying and victorious country? Surely, Iraq will become the next West Berlin and the economic superpower that Germany became, no?

"Suck it."

I hope that you, Constant Reader, will forgive me my unpatriotic snark. However, in my defense, I was hoping for something a little more substantial, something more closely resembling the red, white and blue cock-wanding that celebrates American arrogance than the way we slunk out of Iraq earlier today with barely more dignity than our back door lover's exit from a roof in Saigon almost 37 years ago.

Let's take a closer look and see what we're leaving behind and what our uncharacteristic modesty prevented us from saying:

~~Ultimate chair-warming bureaucrat~~ Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and other top civilian and military officials flew in to Baghdad to mark the formal end of the U.S. military effort, one of most divisive wars in American history.

Instead of addressing the deep questions about the war, Panetta paid tribute to U.S. troops, arguing that the combat losses and the enormous expenditure of resources since 2003 had not been wasted.

"To be sure, the cost was high -- in blood and treasure for the United States and for the Iraqi people," he told the audience of around 200 troops and a few Iraqi officials. "But those lives were not lost in vain -- they gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq."

But, but... if Iraq is now truly free and purged of all destabilizing, destructive influences, then how do we explain leaving this in our deflowered wake?

Yet an atmosphere of uncertainty permeates the U.S. exit.

Though security has improved dramatically since the insurgency's height in 2006 and 2007, Iraq remains riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and beset by fears that the U.S. departure will cause violence to increase once again.

But fear not, Constant Reader, ~~Blackwater~~ Academi is trying to save the day. The murder artist formerly known as Blackwater is trying to worm its way back into the same country that had kicked them out over four years ago after a frenzied bloodbath in Nisour Sq. that had claimed the lives of 17 innocent Iraqi civilians. After all, the hated Eric Prince is out and Blackwater can now be trusted again because they have a new smart-sounding name like Academi (although, by that rubric, that means we can also trust British Petroleum again after Tony Hayward was shown the door so he could get back his life racing yachts again.).

No doubt, the first thing the newly-collegial mercenaries will focus on is building the nearly 6000 schools that Iraq's Education Ministry says it needs to meet the school building shortage. Perhaps Eric's band of merry mercenaries can also address the problem of why Iraqis, after over eight years of American occupation, are still getting just a few hours of electricity a day after a particularly brutal summer a few months ago that killed more Iraqis who desperately needed relief from the Middle Eastern sun.

And maybe, just maybe, if Blackwater has its hands full building all those state-of-the-art schools and rebuilding a once-functional electrical infrastructure, we can talk the British and American oil companies that have resumed their permanent residence there to look into the water problems that had plagued Iraq since our March 19, 2003 invasion (pdf file). Yeah, maybe they can take some of the burden from those NGO's such as UNESCO, burdens from which we'd decided years ago to quietly divest ourselves years before it broke that we couldn't account for almost 100% of the Pentagon's funding for their reconstruction.

And then, once they get a handle on the ongoing water problem, perhaps those petroleum giants can start building the hospitals for which we'd contracted Bechtel, a shortage that has received virtually no attention from the liberal mainstream media, if this Google search is any indication (although, in the interests of fairness, the children's cancer hospital in Basra much touted over seven years ago by Laura Bush finally opened last year when the Army Corps of Engineers completed it.).

No doubt, it'll be a special Christmas for the thousands of Iraq veterans who will be reunited with their families and loved ones in the coming days. Well, not all of them are coming home right away. First, we have to make a diversion through eastern and southern Asia.

Top 10 Rejected Slogans of the Romney Campaign

2011-12-14T15:15:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week, the presidential campaign of former Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hit a snag when it was discovered that his catchphrase, "Keep America American", was also used by the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Obviously, this is quite embarrassing for Mr. Romney's campaign but sources say there were actually other slogans that were eventually scrapped in favor of the racist one. What were they?

10) "My hunting lodge still wasn't called Niggerhead."

9) "NeoKnow Nothing and Proud of it!"

8) "Keeping America Like Me and My Shirt: White and starched."

7) "#Occupyabananaboatbackhome"

6) "I Marched With Dr. King While Cycling Through France During Vietnam."

5) "I ♥ Philadelphia, Mississippi."

4) "How Do You Like My Driving a Racial Wedge Through America? Call 1-800-GET-MITT."

3) "Check Out What the GOP Has Under the Hood!"

2) "Want Transparency in Government? Elect a Guy Who's So White He's Practically Translucent."

1) "Corporations are people, too, my friend, but brown carbon-based humanoid life forms are not."

Caption Contest

2011-12-14T10:11:00.002-05:00

Luke Skywalker's Holy Father.

I got nothing else today. What have you got?

Assault by Battery

2011-12-14T10:07:00.000-05:00

So there I was a few nights ago, turning the key and getting a brief reluctant whine like my cat after a nudge that woke him up, followed by a loud clacking. My battery that I'd gotten at Wally World just summer last year was now officially dead and incapable of holding a charge. By now, the battery acid was so watered down you could drink it and it was high time for a change. In a little over 12 hours, I had a job interview across town and I had no choice but to bite the bullet.

After a neighbor jumped me the following morning, I drove straight to a service station I'd worked at for eight years and asked them to change out the battery. I got a 650 CCA NAPA Gold battery that fit under the hood but that plus labor cost us $145 at the worst possible time. Between bills, modest Xmas shopping and postage, that means it's automatically cutting into our bill money for after Christmas (Fortunately, I made the job interview and hopefully should hear some good news by early this week). Plus, I have to send Mrs. JP to Florida the week after Christmas so she can be with family ($233 round trip air fare right there).

If you can help us out a little during this holiday season, we'd surely appreciate it. Regardless of whatever you can kick in, ask and I'll even throw in by file attachment one or both of my novels, the Mike Flannigan-penned tragi-comedy American Zen and my hostage negotiation thriller The Toy Cop.

Encyclopedia UnAmericana

2011-12-13T19:36:00.002-05:00

Nearly 15 years ago, scholar George Thomas Kurian published a massive 1800+ page-long work called The Encyclopedia of the Republican Party, a companion volume to a history of the Democratic Party. And that is precisely what Mr. Kurian's books are: Exhaustive histories of both our political parties up to 1997.

From the start, however, the recent Republican Party's field of presidential candidates have been challenging accepted facts about American history, science, geography and a whole host of other topics and disciplines. This naturally would necessitate, or should necessitate in the interests of fairness and equal time, a separate scholarly volume of facts known only to the Republican Party. Allow me to humbly propose as I present these first contributions of what will no doubt be a massive volume of conservative erudition that this alternate tome of human knowledge be called The Encyclopedia UnAmericana.

Adams, John Quincy 6th President of the United States of America (1825-1829) and, avers Rep. Michele Bachmann, by far the most precocious of the Founding Fathers as he was not quite nine years-old when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Perhaps Adams fils attempted to draft part of the Declaration in crayon but was stopped just in time by Adams père.

Alaska, the 49th state in the union and the only one that produces more oil than all of Saudi Arabia, according to the late petroleum savant Ronald Wilson Reagan. The Carl Sandburg of the Klondike, half term Governor Sarah Palin described her adopted state in her resignation speech thusly:

“Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? ... It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.”

It was Gov. Palin's express lifelong ambition to be even less accessible than T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound combined. America has reached a consensus that she had very admirably succeeded.

Freedom In human civilization, a state of liberty peculiar only to the United States and the usually rubble-littered Third World countries with whom it shares its liberty. According to Russian language linguist Ronald Wilson Reagan, there is no word for "freedom" in Russian.

HPV An acronym for human papillomavirus, the viral precursor to a cervical cancer treatable by a vaccine made controversial by some evangelical Republicans such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN-06). According to the non-doctor Bachmann, this vaccine not only causes mental retardation in fictional people and, free from worries about cervical cancer, would cause nymphomania in pre-adolescent girls younger than 13. When pressed to validate this startling scientific finding, Rep. Bachmann proved her modesty by claiming she'd never made such a brilliant conclusion.

New Hampshire The rock-ribbed Republican state succeeding liberal, gay marriage-loving Massachusetts as the cradle of the American Revolution, thanks to Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The Lexington and Concord of "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" was moved from the North Bridge in Lexington, Massachusetts to an undisclosed location in New Hampshire, possibly the other Concord.

Slavery The dark, shameful period in North American history in which white textile and slaver merchants captured, sold and forced captive Africans to toil in cotton fields despite the best efforts of the slave-owning colonial American government to stop such a practice, according to eminent amateur historian Rep. Michele Bachmann. Said Prof. Bachmann,

“But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States, men like John Quincy Adams… would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

What other historians fail to note is that perhaps the reason why the son of the second president wasn't listened to in his impassioned plea to repeal slavery is because the future sixth President was but eight years old when the Declaration of Independence was being written and ratified. Slavery was actually repealed in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment thanks to the tireless efforts of Adams fils, now a zombie, seventeen years after his demise.

Social Security A massive criminal enterprise created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, as revealed by Texas Governor Rick Perry, who called it "a Ponzi scheme." Long disguised as a somewhat effective and solvent social safety net funded through payroll taxes, this example of subterranean fraud and malfeasance, while it did not put one penny in President Roosevelt's pocket, nonetheless was redistributed back from whence it came: Out of the pockets of the victims of this inverted Ponzi scheme who actually got back more than they'd kicked in beginning in 1937.

Solyndra, aka Solynda Formerly, a bankrupt solar energy company transformed by Texas Governor Rick Perry as a new nation known as "Solynda." Joining other fictional nation states such as Narnia, Mordor and Gondal, its denizens (presumably known as Solyndarians) are heathen, pagan liberals run by "a gangster government" (Bachmann) adept only at losing a half a billion dollars from its national Treasury given to them by a Socialist/Marxist dictator. Solynda is the first ever instance of a Republican attempt at nation-building.

Supreme Court The highest judicial body in the United States, formerly comprised of eight associate justices and one Chief Justice. In late 2011, however, the SCOTUS felt the downsizing pinch as the rest of the nation when Texas Governor Rick Perry suddenly laid off one justice by claiming the Supreme Court now numbered eight. At press time, it is unclear which Supreme Court Justice was pink-slipped (leaving open the ever-present possibility of 4-4 votes). However, one likely candidate is the second-least senior justice, Sonia Montemayor (formerly Sotomayor).

Swine Flu The more popular name for the N1H1 virus, one that had broken out, according to History Professor Emeritus Michele Bachmann during Jimmy Carter's presidency in 1976. Rejecting firm, accepted historical fact seemingly supported by many still living today. this would involve a secret and forcible takeover of the outgoing Ford administration by the Carter campaign.

Tree Outsized vegetation. In conservative i.e. progressive circles, trees obstruct progress by standing in the way of potential parking lots, mining extractions and strip mall development. Most inimically, trees cause, according to famed botanist Ronald Wilson Reagan, "more pollution than automobiles do."

Uzbekistan Formerly a sovereign nation once part of the Soviet Union and led by a tyrant named Islam Karimov. Yet, according to former presidential aspirant Herman Cain, is actually named Ubekibekibekibekistanstan (with a silent "z"). Its leader is unknown and it is a badge of honor to be ignorant of this mysterious leader's identity.

Voting Age: 40 years ago in 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 years largely because of student activism protesting the war in Vietnam. However, in 2011 the minimum voting age was raised from 18 back up to 21 by one of our most generous contributors, Texas Governor Rick Perry. In the same breath, Gov. Perry also pushed Election Day 2012 (formerly on November 6) forward by six days to November 12th. Purely by coincidence, of course, this is eerily consistent with a Republican tactic of offering false election and ballot return dates.

Have a Republican Xmas, Pt 2

2011-12-13T11:50:00.004-05:00

What better, more Christian and humane way is there to celebrate the birth of Christ, a man who renounced all possessions and preached unconditional love and charity, than to glut the hyperconsumerized retail industry and fund in the process causes, organizations and agendas that seek to glorify and subsidize militarization, suppress unconditional love, charity, peace as well as undermining child labor laws and all that good shit?

Because Republicans and conservatives who constantly scream about "partisan politics" when their moral turpitude and avaricious enterprises are dragged kicking into the light of day nonetheless have no problem in politicizing even Christmas and this annual holiday series here at Pottersville shows year after year that Republicans just never give it a fucking rest.

In the spirit of shedding light on this pathetic phenomenon, let's kick off this year's edition with this, an opportunity out of Arizona for your kids to have their picture taken with an armed Santa Claus. I guess all those times Santa and his eight tiny reindeer were shot out of North Korean and Soviet Russian air space radicalized him. Now he's taking his "naughty or nice" list to a whole new level! And this Scottsdale Santa won't tell any gunlovin' Ralphies that "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" That would be liberal propaganda like when Obama wants to indoctrinate and radicalize our youth.

And in case any of your kids was inspired by the North Pole's deadliest elf and want to take it to the next level, there's this honest-to-God ghillie suit made for kids and for sale on Amazon.com, courtesy of Pine Creek Outdoors. Yes, for just $55 plus s+h, your kid can look like a rotting compost heap as he stalks his neighbors while cultivating revenge fantasies on his future high school just like American heroes and 2nd amendment icons Klebold and Harris.

Wait, not so fast! Before you leave Amazon.com, don't forget to check out this "Jesus Weeps When You Smoke" ashtray. Seriously, how can you put out your unfiltered Chesterfield on the face of our Lord and Savior, especially when his eyes are already artificially reddened by your rude second-hand smoke? True, I don't seem to recall the Stigmata being composed of cigarette burns from the Romans but what do I know?

Speaking of Jebus, in what is surely the hottest-selling gift this year for all ye faithful, Jesustoasters.com takes the randomness and squinting and matrixing out of your breakfast food. Now, every morning can be automatically blessed and the Holy Eucharist can now be automated and mass-produced with the push of a finger. Now, you can be holier than liberal heathens without the conflict of whether to eat the loving face of Jesus or selling His likeness on eBay.

Oops. Doesn't look like the DVD distributor for this year's bomb, Atlas Shrugged, didn't recall the entire first edition that described Ayn Rand's Objectivist ode to selfishness as "a timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice." The DVD has since been repackaged with a new back cover that replaces "self-sacrifice" with "self-interest", which sounds a whole lot more in keeping with the theme of giving to others during the holidays. Incidentally, Randian law forbids you from buying it for others. You can only buy it for yourself.

Meanwhile at the GOP Store, the Reagan centennial is still going strong and has spawned a Republican cottage industry that's successfully mined millions off Reagan's rotting corpse. For instance, you can buy your loved ones this framed photograph of Reagan's second inaugural in 1985 when he decided to break from tradition when it got too cold outside. Forget the fact that you'd need an electron microscope to see the man of the hour. It's the thought that counts and a 27 year-old photo of a bunch of nobodies is certainly worth the $400 this snapshot will cost you.

Also from the GOP store: As a rebuke to those mean, nasty, hateful lib'ral naysayers who keep accusing Republicans of playing dirty pool, you can show them this picture of every Republican President in American history playing pool. A variation of last year's hit of Republicans playing poker, this instant classic is a steal at just $17. Although it's hard to imagine how even a guy who suspended habeus corpus on Confederate soldiers would want to play pool with at least five Republican war criminals who did their level-headed best to divide a country that Lincoln devoted his entire presidency to uniting.

As we prepare to reluctantly depart the GOP Store, take a gander at this. No visit here would be complete without the perfect symbol of not just the Republican Party but an apt one perfectly describing the GOP presidential field: An inflated, empty pachyderm. Why anyone would want this on their lawn or anywhere else is anyone's guess. I'd ask a republican for their thoughts on the subject but they're not exactly renowned for being the party of ideas beyond "Cut taxes!"

As the perfect way of dispelling the lib'ral notion that President Obama is a magnet for inbred rednecks, you might want to consider this racist magnet as a stocking (or hood) stuffer, courtesy of Cafe Press's proud Racist Gift line. For just $4, this neat little stocking stuffer would be perfect for any (hopefully white) refrigerator on which you can affix your kids' picture with an armed St. Nick or this year's liberal hunting permit.

Speaking of stocking stuffers... In case any of you were still wondering why the GOP presidential field is so amorphous and why there seems to be a new front runner every month, perhaps this bumper sticker will explain why: They'll vote for anybody as long as it isn't the Karl Marx wannabe in the WH. And if you know 50 Ford pickup owners, you can buy this pack of patriotic bumper stickers for $155 from Cafepress's right wing line (in Canada).

The Clare Boothe Luce Institute is selling its new 2012 calendar, which for some reason Sarah Palin doesn't ever seem to wish to be a part of. But luckily, even though America has been taken over by the vast left wing conspiracy, there are plenty of other libertarian lovelies to go around, including Anorexic Annie, Michelle "Our Lady of Manzanar" Malkin and two obscure Fox "News" talking heads! Personally, I can't think of a better and more enjoyable way of counting down to Armageddon on December 21, 2012.

A few years ago, I'd found a fetus Christmas bulb but if you're less like George W. Bush and more like Rick Santorum, you'll want this pewter fetus Christmas ornament courtesy of Flaming Lips. Now, instead of merely looking at an eponymous fetus that's every bit as much trapped in a plastic bubble as our 43rd president, this lovingly tactile unborn pewter snowflake baby can be touched, fingered and snuggled (umbilical cord and placenta extra).

Have a budding young college Republican in your household of the female persuasion? Well, Herobuilders.com has got that covered with Republican action figures of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann...

...and even an eponymous heroic schoolgirl in a skimpy plaid skirt in case your Republican hubby has some Kill Bill fantasies that he'd rather not share with the rest of the family.

(Bachmann action figure comes with lots and lots of extra baggage. Marcus Bachmann arm ornament not included.)

Republican Populism

2011-12-11T13:26:00.002-05:00

Because nothing says populism and nothing strikes a chord with blue collar voters like two old multimillionaire Republican white guys betting each other $10,000 on national television. That $10,000, by the way, could easily feed a family of six for a solid year. Or am I guilty of class warfare by pointing that out?

Meet the Yahoos

2011-12-11T08:35:00.003-05:00

Now that Herman Cain has "suspended" his campaign so he can spend more time with his attorneys and the GOP field once again bleached to its usual levels, the differences between the candidates become less obvious (four of the five men taking part in the debate wore red ties). Minus Jon Huntsman, last night's ABC News-Yahoo debate looked like the 19th Hole at Augusta with Michele Bachmann as the barfly at 1:59 AM hoping to get noticed.

Obeying the laws of campaign politics, the other nominees played Capture the Flag, taking turns taking swipes at Grand Old Philanderer Newt Gingrich. At 68, this is obviously Newt's last hurrah in his quest for the Oval Office. By process of attrition and running against a clearly mentally unbalanced field consisting of non-entities, morons and psychopaths, Newt is currently on the top of the dunghill even while crowing about making children janitors. And Mitt Romney, Newt's closest competitor and in a process straight out of Last Action Hero or The Purple Rose of Cairo is playing Gordon Gecko to the hilt, proving, as always, to be about as popular as Pat Buchanan in the Castro.

As usual, the punches and counter-punches were done under the guise of civility, with Mitt stiffly laughing as only a possessed Gentleman's Wearhouse mannequin can at Newt Gingrich's jibe that the only thing that kept him from being a career politician was getting his uptight ass slapped over his well-coiffed head by Ted Kennedy, which is true (One can only imagine Romney after the debate, seething with fury and looking for someone's dog to strap on a car roof). But it hardly made Gingrich any less of an insider, an image that he's trying to belie in the current wave of anti-incumbency that was powerful enough to make even Barney Frank retire.

Rick Perry's neurons fired together just long enough to note that the American electorate is quite justified in factoring in a man's infidelity to his wife and to extrapolate from that a suspicion about his moral turpitude in general. Gingrich got points in the always-supine MSM for "smoothly" parrying Perry's thrust. Yet it's notable that while agreeing the American public has a right to ask any questions of any presidential candidate, he also referred to his own serial adultery as if talking about some other Newt Gingrich or a ne'er do well kid brother. Never once in his agreement with Perry did Gingrich admit to any wrongdoing except to say in the abstract, "I've made some mistakes". Nor did giving the American public a blank check to ask any questions it saw fit jibe with the typical Republican surliness and thuggery that comes with trying to hold the candidates' feet to the fire.

Despite currently leading in three of the four early primary states. Gingrich will not survive the holiday season and will be put on a shelf with the other fruitcakes so we can start all over again. Romney is running away from his "liberal" past and flip-flopping about as successfully as a three legged elephant. Romney's detested for that and two other reasons: His Mormonism and the fact that he's just not nasty enough. Republican voters, I think, have come to the consensus that Romney intends to do what's best for Wall Street and purging the nation of unions, gays and liberals may be just an afterthought.

Huntsman and Paul, who are more adroit at hiding their own particular lunacy, are the two scrawny kids always picked last for the kickball game and will never even get to be the flavor of the day. And even among a demographic that revels in watching traffic at NASCAR tracks and WWE wrestling, Bachmann and Perry are just too stupid for even these people to elect (although, how George W. Bush slipped by them 12 years ago is still anyone's guess).

Santorum can forget having any political future ever again thanks to Dan Savage and Google. Plus, as the field's only other Catholic, he'll never pass muster with the evangelical vote that's still waiting for Republican Jesus to come down in a golf cart made of light and wearing a Brooks Brothers suit. Santorum is the worst of both worlds: He's simply crazy and stupid, a shithouse rat that's been clonked on the head too many times with a pipe wrench.

That leaves Romney, a guy who could name his campaign "Bridesmaid Revisited" and who changes positions more often than a double-jointed porn star with ADHD. But the truth is, Romney and Gingrich both have one thing handicapping them: They both present an appearance of being career politicians at least in ambition while being miserable failures at it. Year after year, after getting hounded out of the House when his Contract With America crashed and burned on the Lakehurst, New Jersey part of the political landscape, the Lizard King has spent his time forming exploratory committees that told him every fours that no one wanted him as President.

Romney, when he wasn't taking over weakened companies in hostile takeovers with Bain Capital and throwing American workers on the streets, has only a failed single term as Massachusetts' Governor to point to and otherwise has failed like he's failing now to secure any other position. Because even the mouth-breathing electorate that make up Crazy Base World know the difference between someone who wants to do something (even if it's destroying our social safety net and making unions a quaint thing of the past) and someone who just wants to be something.

Romney and Gingrich, moreso than the also-rans, are coldly ambitious. Beneath that transparently disingenuous veneer of affability and reasonableness squirms two wannabes who would literally cut the tendons above their grandmothers' heels if they thought it would augment by one iota their chances of getting into the Oval Office.

And, as always, the biggest thing they have going for them is the "R" after their names and their dedication to getting that Muslim, Kenyan, Commie nigger out of the White House. And Gingrich has the edge simply because he's not Mitt.

Pottersville in Pictures: Christmas edition

2011-12-10T17:55:00.009-05:00

No one got Scott Walker's official Christmas card last year after he found out it was going to be printed by a union shop.

The NRA's official 2011 Christmas card says, "Here's hoping for a very white Christmas, especially on the good side of the border."

"Psst. I saw Mr. Bachmann kissing Santa Claus."

Adding to his list of literary triumphs is Glenn Beck's sequel to The Christmas Sweater or The Magic Mormon Cocksack.

The boys knew they were in for a long night when the door was opened by Jerry Sandusky.

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas II: The Bachmann Campaign

"OK, you brought frankincense this time, right? 'Cuz we don 't want a repeat of last year's Frankenstein manger massacre."

The problem with the Republican Party is they just can't quit Rick Perry.

Scarlet BillO

2011-12-08T12:09:00.002-05:00

Here's Bill O'Reilly, a man who is to history and rational, informed, civil discourse what Jack the Ripper was to women's rights, walking out of a Newt Gingrich fundraiser. The rest of the video tells you everything you need to know and provides all the context.

Mediaite is now trying to claim that, since Fox "News" denied O'Reilly being at the Gingrich fundraiser that just happened to be in the immediate vicinity, Mediaite's dropping the matter and is also happy to believe that a violence prone right wing stooge like O'Reilly was on his way to a White House dinner.

It hardly matters where O'Reilly was coming from or where he was going. If he wasn't at the fundraiser all he had to do was take the opportunity to deny it and move on. But this ignorant, elitist prick, instead, acts like Mary Poppins' evil, insane uncle and tries to jab the reporter with his umbrella before scurrying to the police and reporting a reporter for doing his job.

It was well worth seeing BillO's umbrella and combover get blown inside out as he whined to the police about being asked a question.

So the next time you see or hear about Occupy protesters getting maced, tased and the shit knocked out of them for nonviolently protesting, think about this video and BillO getting off scot free after assaulting a journalist for doing absolutely nothing but asking a single question of a public figure. Next time you hear about liberal rage from O'Reilly and other conservative peckerheads, think of this video and all the other ones of O'Reilly losing it over minor or perceived slights and, well, people speaking their own minds.

Wednesday Cat Blogging

2011-12-07T11:45:00.002-05:00

"I can haz cheezeburger and bwog wike HuffPo?"

Gonna be a busy hump day so this is all I can manage for the time being. Keep on rockin' in the (formerly) free world. Peace.

What's So Awful About the 99%?

2011-12-06T10:26:00.005-05:00

A couple of days ago, Bradley Schiller, "a professor of economics at the University of Nevada-Reno", wrote an op-ed piece for the LA Times that has to be read to be believed. The title, "What's So Awful About the 1%?" pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the eventual intent of the article. It begins on pretty firm ground by reiterating concerns with which virtually everyone in the 99% can agree:

In the rhetoric of this war, we are fighting the 1% because they possess most of the nation's wealth, bankroll their handpicked political candidates, control the banks and get million-dollar paychecks and billion-dollar bailouts; yet they don't pay enough taxes or invest their wealth in creating American jobs. They're the "millionaires and billionaires" President Obama has called out as needing to pony up more for progressive reforms of our healthcare, banking, tax and political systems. They are the enemy of "us" — the 99% who toil at low-wage jobs, hold underwater mortgages, face foreclosures, suffer recurrent and protracted job layoffs and plant closings, and yet pay our fair share of taxes.

But, apparently, that was set up as a fake straw man argument that the Schiller for Wall Street then imagines he effortlessly deconstructs by continuing,

But there's a flaw in this strategy. The Occupy Wall Street movement envisions the 1% as a monolithic cadre of entrenched billionaires who have a firm and self-serving grip on all the levers of the economy. But a closer look at that elite group reveals how untrue that perspective is.

He then lists Forbes 400 people such as the co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, by saying, "The late Steve Jobs was in that elite club this year. In his earlier days, Jobs would have been camped out with the OWS crowd, probably passing around a joint."

Uh huh. So Jobs, the avaricious version of Skeletor, a guy who in 1974 fucked his own partner out of money and had no problem whatsoever installing tracking software into his iPhones that outright fractured the 4th amendment and outsourced thousands of US jobs overseas to Chinese sweatshops in which suicides are rampant, didn't belong in the "bad" 1% and, instead, ought to continue being exempted in our ongoing collective hagiography by being kindly reinserted in the "good" 1% (I guess that would be overseas job creators who are more interested in making another several billion dollars that can't possibly be spent in one's lifetime.).

#OWS also smokes pot like Jobs would've if he'd been, like, young and alive again and still, you know, smoking pot and had been at Occupy Wall Street. Just ignore the countless hypotheticals this scenario requires and squint harder, Goddamnit!

Schiller also lists for conscientious omission Facebook founder Mark "Zuckerman", another thief by whom Steve Jobs would've been proud to be boned up his bony ass, someone who not only has made his tens of billions by similarly violating the privacy of his website's followers by selling their private information to Wall Street companies but even earlier this year crawled into bed with Goldman Sachs. He did that 500,000,000 times so it could continue to avoid scrutiny by federal auditors. Yes, that Goldman Sachs, one of the biggest targets of Occupy Wall Street. (Sidebar: Not only did Zuckerberg fuck over his best friend just as Steve Jobs did in the 70's, even the name "facebook" isn't original, as Harvard alumni will attest.)

Predictably, Schiller the shill then dives more deeply into his rabbit hole and comes up with the names of the founders of Google, whose own phone, the Android, has also been charged with violating privacy. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were, until recently, complicit with the Red Chinese in their vicious, ongoing censorship of over a billion people, has a mysterious, top secret data storage facility in Oregon and recently agreed to spend $200,000,000 building three more data storage facilities in the Far East.

Considering Google's generous cooperation with the Red Chinese and American governments (94% of the time, in fact), there's really nothing to worry about, is there? Throw in sundry and assorted other charges such as "possible misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, possible censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as antitrust, monopoly, and restraint of trade," and we're supposed to believe that Google is staying true to its promise to "not be evil?"

Schiller goes on to say,

Not every member of the Forbes 400 is a high-tech folk hero. There is a lot of inherited wealth on that list too (the Mars, Walton, Cargill and Ford dynasties). But 70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), "Star Wars" (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?

Steve Case (who said earlier this year on Twitter, "@SteveCase They say dream big,I say do it big. they say money is the root of all evil/I say the lack of it is the root of all evil.")? THE Steve Case now working for the White House to head a program designed to bring together the fraternal orders of corporations?? Meg Whitman??? Really, Brad??? These people aren't the enemy and don't deserve to be lumped in with the reviled 1%?

Shill is obviously cherry-picking who shouldn't be lumped in with the "bad" 1% (Making a distinction between the good and bad 1% harkens back to when doctors were making distinctions between "good" and "bad" lipids) while painting the entire Occupy Wall Street movement as a bunch of latte-sipping, pot-smoking pseudo-intellectual elitists.

But fear not, for Bradley has pinpointed as only a pinhead can do who the REAL bad guy is:

Our frustrations are more the product of Washington than Wall Street. We have been promised a lot and received little. Obama (who made millions in book royalties the last few years) sowed the seeds of disillusionment when he overpromised what his February 2009 stimulus package could deliver. A series of policy failures and political deadlocks has left people feeling disenfranchised and forgotten. Calling out millionaires and billionaires as the culprits in this economic saga is disingenuous and ultimately self-defeating. Those 1 percenters are not an avaricious "them" but in reality the most entrepreneurial of "us." If we had more of them and fewer grandstanding politicians, we would all be better off.

Gee, and here all this time I thought that Obama's stimulus package wasn't watered down at all by a hostile Congress and that it was the product of failed imagination on Obama's part (although I almost hate to point out to his right wing detractors that the President's stimulus bill still created about 3,300,000 jobs, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Oh, by the way, Brad: Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all also made millions in book royalties and advances this year. Did any of them create 3.3 million jobs like the President? Didn't think so.)

So to Occupy Wall Street: You all can go home now or move on to Washington DC so you can blame the real evil overlord, President Barack Obama, the guy who kicked off his presidency by creating 3.3 million jobs. The people who outsourced your jobs overseas to save beaucoup bucks by getting around those pesky minimum wage laws, moved their headquarters overseas beyond the jurisdiction of the IRS, the Wall Street banks who bundled your mortgages and made billions by betting against them while making sleazy, backroom deals with the Treasury and the Fed...?

Those aren't the bad guys, you pampered potheads. They're not the 1%. They're what the Great Frank Luntz now calls "entrepreneurs."

I think that if Frank was put upon, he might even rechristen Bradley Schiller as a "pro-corporate first line historian." I just call him a semen-flecked, shit-stained tool of Wall Street whose effigy should be impaled on the bull's horns and burned at both trading bells.

Top 10 Reasons Herman Cain Suspended His Campaign

2011-12-04T11:14:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, former pizza mogul Herman Cain announced at the opening of his new campaign headquarters in Atlanta that he was "suspending" his presidential campaign. Citing "prayer and soul-searching", the major reason is obviously the distraction from his campaign created by sexual harassment and adultery allegations. But there were other reasons Mr. Cain suspended his quixotic quest for the White House. What were they?

10) Couldn't tolerate the idea of another one-on-debate with Newt Gingrch, especially one moderated by Donald Trump. Even THE Herman Cain has standards, bitches.

9) Campaign was beginning to seriously cut into his texting and phone sex addiction.

8) Soul-searching turned up no results.

7) Newt Gingrich convinced him the election wasn't big enough to contain two egomaniacal serial adulterers from Georgia.

6) Mark Block announced on campaign blog he was considering quitting smoking.

5) Admitted he only wanted to show off really, really cool gold tie given to him last year for Christmas.

4) Admitted Secret Service would've cramped his smooth style.

3) After speaking with Mrs. Cain, was faced with the reality of making the transition from imaginary victim to very real one.

2) Wife wasn't too thrilled with her husband being the Charles Kuralt of the pizza business.

1) Campaign not really suspended. The head-shaking racists determined to look post-racial by supporting Cain are just seriously let down.

Your Sunday Funnies

2011-12-04T10:42:00.002-05:00

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Mrs. JP. Click image for larger view.)

Now that Herman Cain's made official the previously unofficial suspension of his campaign, we can get back to ridiculing the other GOP rodeo clowns. Let's follow Gary Trudeau and start with this Bozo.

Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

2011-12-03T09:30:00.002-05:00

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to?

I'm not one to make to make resolutions because I'll be the first one to admit that when it comes to self-discipline, I have about as much intestinal fortitude as a warm chocolate eclair. However, as the holiday season approaches, I've resolved to take a slightly less politically partisan tone, a posture that's less arch and nasty to my conservative readers and to spend the rest of the month writing about political and social matters in a more downbeat, respectful tone of voice. After all, this is the holiday season in which all humans regardless of race, creed, religion, gender or political ideology ought to join together in the spirit of brotherhood and... oh bloody fucking hell! Not this jerkoff again! So much for that resolution.

Jill Hussein, your head server at Brilliant @ Breakfast, shows us what where our Attorney General's true priorities are at. I'd copy and paste an excerpt but I'm afraid of getting sued.

Saint Bernard was a sly devil, as Teh General said recently, and America's most manly sidelines CO proves it. Apparently, having a fat, sloppy, ill-tempered dog named after him wasn't enough. He could also catch a lactation stream in his mouth clear from the other side of a chapel. In the spirit of Catholic bipartisanship, Newt Gingrich and I both share a common amazement at this feat.

A guy like D r i f t g l a s s incessantly kicking around someone like David Brooks starts to look like a WWE wrestler curb-stomping a 98 pound crack head. But our dear, inexplicably-employed Mr. Brooks and his equally incessant jeremiad against the patchouli-oiled sons and daughters of Abbie Hoffman needs to be taken to task as often as possible and by as many of us as possible.

I dunno. Maybe it's just me but I'm getting the impression that Busted Knuckles isn't the big Rick Perry fan I'd hitherto judged him to be. After all, what's to dislike about a guy who's already threatening to banish to Siberia any civil servant who doesn't agree with his Crayola-illustrated ideology?

Digby brilliantly deconstructs as only she can the fallacious and risible argument of an American Enterprise Institute "scholar" who claims that the income disparity between the 1% and the 99% isn't because Wall Street's been loading the dice and marking the deck. Oh, no. The fault lies not in the stars of the financial world but within ourselves because our rapacity and avarice isn't as enterprising as theirs.

Greg Palast is more of a journalist than a blogger but yesterday at his place he announced that Paul Singer made him a marked man. Singer, you may remember, was George W. Bush's biggest campaign contributor from New York. This time around, he's bundling huge amounts of cash for Mitt Romney, the official sex doll of Wall Street. Singer is also perhaps the biggest vulture fund manager in the world, a man (for want of a better word) who's bankrupted entire third world nations. One of Singer's goons actually called the BBC and said, "We have a file on Palast." Small wonder when you read just the basics of what Palast found on Singer.

Finally, I usually don't have time to do more than one picture and caption at a time but Fearguth at Bildungblog does it wholesale most every day. Go give him some love.

Caption Contest

2011-12-03T09:17:00.003-05:00

(Courtesy of the Daily Show co-creator Liz Winstead)

The baby Jebus as a Vienna sausage? Now, that's a eucharist I can get into!

First They Laugh at You...

2011-12-02T09:45:00.005-05:00

...then they laugh some more, then they laugh so hard they cry...

Herman Cain's unwillingness or inability to pull out of the GOP presidential race cannot be explained by mere stubbornness. The only man in the race who makes Bachmann look like legitimate presidential material by conspicuous relief, you'd think Cain's hideously elongated joke of a campaign would take the latest allegation by Ginger White as a welcome opportunity to finally call it off and get back to trying to spread his white sauce from coast to coast.

The only ones who aren't laughing at him are diehard right wing voters who look at Cain as a handy-dandy lawn jockey they desperately want to see on the south lawn of the White House by 2013. Cain is obviously the cover they need in their desperation to get the uppity black guy out of the Oval Office while not looking racist in doing so.

(As a sidebar, it'll be interesting to see how enthusiastic his temporary KKK apostates will remain if Cain decides to name another African American as his running mate, say, Michael Steele or J. Kenneth Blackwell. Hm. All black, all the time? "Git the hood an' robe from the dry cleaners, Ma! It 'pears we ain't done wit' 'em, yet!")

And, after making a show of "reassessing" his campaign, the Cain train has decided to go full steam ahead while miraculously remaining completely oblivious to the fact it's been diverted to a track leading only to a train yard populated by other political punchlines (And, yes, I'm looking in your direction, Dan Quayle.)

What's even more mystifying is that Cain still has not reached that tipping point that should've by now told even his diehard supporters (such as this mouth-breather who has remained mysteriously silent on the latest allegations and is now casting about for a new champion such as someone who's already said she's not running) that this man needs only a squeaky nose and size 52 shoes to complete the image. It brings to mind all the people who thronged to Queen concerts in the 80's and remaining completely clueless that Freddie Mercury was pleading for people to finally realize what he was even while he was wearing assless leather chaps.

It appears as if their reverse racism will not allow them to completely dismiss this man even if he proudly displays a complete and total ignorance of foreign policy ranging from fears the Red Chinese will one day have the bomb to defiantly remaining ignorant about who's leading Uzbekistan to having a brain fart about Libya to not knowing what "right of return" was, a man so steeped in his moral turpitude that the woman who'd accused him of having an affair with him for over 13 years has proved that Cain was trading text messages with her up until last month (two weeks ago, to be more exact).

It's just as hard to square this undying support for a man who had no problem keeping a mistress on the side and giving steady financial support to her while essentially promising to give no aid to other poor, desperate people who don't happen to be sleeping with him.

Just think about what these same Tea Baggers would be saying if it was found that the President was also having an affair with another woman for 13 years and that four women (even if they worked for ACORN, who no doubt would suddenly be very credible) accused Mr. Obama of sexual harassment.

I think it's fair to say it would set civil rights back to the 15th century and our 44th President would be the first Chief Executive to be lynched. It would be Clinton/Lewinsky II and the Republican Party would suddenly get very motivated while Congress was in session and be devoting 24/7 to writing articles of impeachment and badgering the Justice Department to launch a grand jury investigation. Fund raising within GOP circles would reach a fever pitch and the sale of rope and axe handles would skyrocket from coast to coast, especially in the south.

But, hey, when Herman Cain does it? They're unproven allegations, smear tactics, politically motivated, gold-digging. And who cares that his 9-9-9 tax plan was derived from Sim City, that he quoted a Pokemon movie line as poetry and this man is otherwise less knowledgeable about basic abstract facts expected of a man running for the highest public office possible than a D list blogger?

As Ann Coulter said, our blacks are better than theirs and we want one of our own, someone who thinks like us, in the Oval Office to replace the uppity one, as Rush Limbaugh would say.

Caption Contest

2011-12-02T09:30:00.003-05:00

(Courtesy of Bag News Notes.)
If there was ever an iconic photo that sums up the entire class warfare between Us vs Them on Wall Street and the true priorities of the power elite in this country...

Here's my contribution: With great suit comes great disproportionately preferential treatment and immunity.

The Next Time a Right Winger Accuses the Left of Hateful Rhetoric...

2011-12-01T11:31:00.002-05:00

...remind them of British shitheel Jeremy Clarkson and show them this clip.

Maybe someone from one of those striking unions in the UK should take him to the Dumpster behind one of the country clubs he goes to and blow his brains out in front of his similarly coddled buddies as an object lesson. Then throw his bloated carcass in the dumpster for the rats to pick over. I could live with that.

We are all Herman Cain's Wife.

2011-11-30T11:05:00.010-05:00

or Why Herman Cain Ought to be Cock-Punched From Coast to Coast With Spiked Brass Knuckles From Now Until the Iowa Caucus.

(In which Jurassicpork taketh a semen-spattered page from the Rude Pundit and regurgitateth with much vile and scatalogical spleenitude.)

Rachel Maddow had it figured out weeks ago when she finally discovered that Herman's Cain's candidacy is really nothing more than performance art.

And just yesterday, Charles Pierce, from his elegantly nasty nest at Esquire (think of James Wolcott on a really cranky day), in his usually eloquent way, not so gently exhorted Cain to take his leave from the race like the buffoonish wedding crasher that he is.

Seriously, now, folks, and this especially goes out to you post-literate dingleberries still stubbornly clinging to the rotting rectum of Ronald Reagan while desperately trying to convince yourselves and your fellow dead-enders that the Great Communicator was reincarnated through a former pizza mogul whose greatest claim to fame was in hurtling his peoples' image back to the days of Mandingo:

It's time to finally own up to this hideously elongated joke known as the Cain Train and admit it has long since passed and that now it's up to those of us in the reality-based community to add the final exclamation point to this seemingly neverending punchline.

This man had made more passes than Tom Brady with no running game. His mind went blank when asked about Libya. His mind went blank again when Chris Wallace asked him about right of return. Both times, Cain had that elephant in the headlights look and yet his supporters still threw millions at his feet.

He's now been accused of actually scoring for 13 years in a row by a woman in Georgia and his Arizona campaign chair Lori "Annie Oakley" Klein didn't make matters better for him with her own defense. And she'd actually done better than Cain's own lawyer who, in his own spirited and speedy defense, didn't exactly deny the allegations.

His campaign spots make less sense than Fellini if he made films on purple microdot. He thinks Pokemon is a poet, got his 9-9-9 tax plan from Sim City and, for all we know, his national security strategy was based on Doom. His defiantly and proudly ignorant thoughts on other countries such as Uz-beki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan make Rick Perry look like a foreign policy wonk.

He contradicted himself on abortion and women's rights faster than Mitt Romney on black beauties and has otherwise shown himself to be so stupendously unqualified for any public office let alone the presidency that millions of liberals are getting the dry heaves at the thought of another George W. Bush.

So here's my idea: We have SEAL Team Six abduct Herman Cain, put him in four point King Kong shackles like some right wing version of the Vitruvian Man, tour him like some village roadshow from coast to coast where anyone with a couple of bucks and a proper sense of outrage at this obscene mockery of the electoral process can then cock-punch Herman Cain from now until the caucuses.

We can sell it on PPV for $49.95 and, combined with the CPR (Cock-Punching Revenue) generate some income for schools, hospitals, unemployment benefits and infrastructure rebuilding, which immediately is a better and more humane plan for addressing these issues than anything Herman Cain and the rest of the GOP has come up with.

Seriously. Let's all punch Herman Cain so hard in his nether regions that his scrotum pops in like an inverted nipple. Because it's a masterfully sinister feat of dexterity when you can make people like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin sound like voices of reason for the Republican Party, as well as taking the heat off the other GOP psychopaths such as Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

We are all Herman Cain's wife. No doubt, there are many of us who wonder aloud or to ourselves what is keeping that woman silently and invisibly Velcro'd to her husband's hip considering all the allegations from at least six women. How loathsome do you have to be in your long-standing moral turpitude when a New Hampshire newspaper and several other conservative media outlets pass you by to go for another serial adulterer like Newt Gingrich?

The General Excommunicated?

2011-11-30T06:18:00.002-05:00

To whom it may concern:

I'd like to know why Patriot Boy (aka Jesus' General) was banned from your website. The General, who is an 11 on a manly scale of absolute gender, has been nothing but a throbbing pillar of support for Pastor Steven Anderson and during the most trying times of both their lives. I'm speaking, of course, of the time the Border police beat the shit out of him when he stood up for his somewhat vague rights and then when he openly wished for the President to die and then when he sent a man named Chris Broughton to an Obama gun rally with an AR 15 (Oh sorry. It wasn't a gun rally. It was a Town Hall on health care reform. My bad).

The point I'm making is that I think you have banned him for the wrong reasons. Just because he oils up like a Spartan of old and wrestles other manly men and his fist occasionally (and purely by accident, of course) winds up in the tight rectum of another hard-bodied, glistening male it does not make him a homosexual.

Therefore. I must issue an ultimatum: Either you reinstate the General immediately or I will be forced to abandon Mr. Anderson's glorified cult, as good as the butter cookies are (the ones made by his wife whose vagina doubles as a clown car). And in that case I will join Michael Parks' somewhat more even-keeled religion as that seen in the Kevin Smith movie, Red State.

I await your reply with baited breath.

JP (aka Jurassicpork)

Nyuk Nyuk of the Day

2011-11-29T20:39:00.003-05:00

Further proof that Rick Perry has got to be without equivocation and without a shadow of a doubt the stupidest carbon-based life form in the entire solar system. Because in Rick Perry's Bizarro dimension:

1) The legal voting age is still 21.
2) We live in a part time country.
3) Election Day 2012 is actually six days later than we've been told.
4) With good hair comes no accountability.

Let's All be Frank

2011-11-28T18:23:00.006-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

It almost seems like a betrayal that, in a festering cesspool of corruption and stupidity, a man like Barney Frank would lay down his arms and walk off the field of battle. When political correctness was draped over the Beltway during the Reagan era like a wet Christo, Frank either didn't get the memo or balled it up and threw it in the circular file. However abrasive he was toward his detractors, whether it be a student full of himself, right wing pundits or misinformed Tea Bagger constituents, it can't be said that Congressman Frank suffered fools gladly.

Frank, the ranking Democrat and former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection. His reason was that his CD had been redrawn. Frank found himself in the ironic and absurd position of fighting a wave of anti-incumbency from new constituents who've never been represented by Frank. What was once arguably the safest seat in Congress, MA-4, is now conceivably vulnerable to a Republican challenger in an ominous environment of gerrymandering that almost always seems to favor Republicans (Frank lost the entire town of New Bedford, losing in the process many reliably Democratic-voting Luso-Americans and the bedrock of his support on the South Shore).

And, most inescapably, he's 71 and understandably wants to put up his feet in his golden years.

So let me add to the growing pile of premature political elegies by saying that the beginning of Frank's farewell is almost like eulogizing intelligence itself. As any real liberal knows, it is the moral and intellectual imperative of every one of us to lampoon and pillory stupidity, ignorance and bigotry whereever we find it. It's a long established if unwritten code on the Beltway and beyond and the 16 termer took full license of that invisible rule and then some.

The Frank anecdotes are as plentiful as those of the late Molly Ivins. After being called "Barney Fag" during a Dick Armey interview, which Armey then tried to worm out of by stating it was a slip of the tongue, Frank replied, "I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag."

To a Tea Bagger who likened ObamaCare to Nazism in Dartmouth two years ago: "Madam, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."

To ignoramuses who'd blame Frank for not being able to understand him, he'd once famously said, "I can read it for you. I cannot understand it for you."

No, Frank did not suffer fools gladly any more than did Anthony Weiner or Alan Grayson. Hopefully in '13, former Congressman Grayson will be occupying his old chair with the stubbornness of an Occupy Wall Street protester in Zuccotti Park. Congressman Frank's quick and incisive wit desperately needs to be succeeded.

As well as his quite impressive record, one that almost rivals that of Ted Kennedy, on issues ranging from financial reform, gay rights and human rights in general and the economy and how it impacted on the working class people in MA-4, the most valuable lesson that Frank has taught us is that it's OK to call a spade a spade or a moron a moron. It's that kind of Bulworth-class straight-talking that used to be part and parcel to American political discourse until Ronald "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of a Fellow Republican" Reagan decided it was far better to hide our lights under a bushel if they threatened to torch any dessicated political egos. Barney Frank at low ebb could still make a mockery of John McCain's straight talking.

Frank shattered the longstanding tradition of politicians seriously entertaining college students. Once, on national TV, a right wing Harvard law student dutifully parroted right wing talking points by saying, "You're a public representative, I'm a student..." and Frank immediately shot back, "Which allows you to say stuff you don't back up?"

When Republicans shied away from all but soundstages owned by Rupert Murdoch, Frank was almost a regular fixture in the lion's den of Fox, always girded for battle. To a theatrically "out of control" Bill O'Reilly, an exasperated Frank finally said, "Your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion."

Nobody was sacred to Frank whether you were a college student at a prestigious Ivy League University or a fellow member of Congress: If you were stupid, ignorant, impertinent or disrespectful, you were fair game. Barney would shoot you, bag you, hollow you out, stuff you and mount you over his mantle before it was shown to all on the 5 o'clock news. And he'd get away with it with comebacks zooming in on the weak point of a fallacious argument, ripostes mercilessly delivered with stunning dispatch and accuracy.

Sadly, Frank will never be emulated as a role model for straight talking that gleefully skewers the willfully ignorant and stupid. Parliamentary protocol, political correctness and an ever-vigilant eye on demographics and a fear on the cellular level of pissing off thin-skinned Republicans means we won't see another Barney Frank again any time soon.

But it ought to be remembered that Frank did it often enough with relative impunity that it should serve as an object lesson to all of us, both private citizens and elected officials alike, of the importance of all of us being Frank.

Open Thread: Assclowns of the Year #4?

2011-11-28T12:05:00.006-05:00

Late last summer/early fall, I got a great jump start on my annual year-end feature, amassing loads of pictures, links and about two thirds of my dishonorees for 2011. Then I developed a problem with my laptop and had to set it back to factory standards to get C++ and other programs to work again. This, of course, meant that I lost all my files and programs, including the document where I got a running start on Assclowns of the Year #4 that I stupidly didn't bother to save on disk.

So, considering I'm starting relatively late in assembling this feature, we're probably looking at a New Year's Day debut before this comes out although I'd like to give ya'll a Christmas present. You could help me out immensely by making some suggestions as to who you think should be the top 50 assclowns of the year. Try to think outside the box and avoid obvious targets like Bachmann, Bush, Perry, Obama, etc. I can't look for .jpegs or hyperlinkage if I don't know who I'm writing about.

The Real Predators

2011-11-26T11:34:00.002-05:00

Just think for a minute what you can do with $1.415 trillion a year.

That would be enough money to provide every single American citizen with quality, affordable health care for a decade, with over $400 billion in change. And I didn't pick the number $1,415,000,000,000 out of my ass. That's the high end of the proposed defense spending requested of Congress for FY 2012.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made headlines earlier this month with his doom-saying scare tactics, claiming that if the Super Committee decided to cut defense spending, it would be "devastating." The proposed budget for the military is just over $700,000,000,000, up about twenty billion from last year's budget of $685.1 billion. Panetta argued that defense spending cuts would result in the curtailing if not the cancellation of "ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, cancellation or delays in plans to build a new strategic bomber, and cuts to missile submarine production."

Yet, considering the Irwin Allen-style disaster economics that have taken place all over the nation from the smallest hamlets to the federal government, it's far likelier that even if the Super Committee agreed to cut the Pentagon's discretionary spending the shortfall would be made up by cuts to the salaries, pensions and health care benefits to our nation's service members (pensions to veterans are expected to reach $54.6 billion, a rich, ripe target right there. Veteran's Affairs accounts for another $70 billion, a total of nearly $125 billion.).

So, if the Pentagon's requisition for 2012 is $705 billion, where does the other $740 billion come from? Well, that's the ancillary budget for national defense that you rarely, if ever, see added to the Pentagon's budget, money that goes to the FBI, NASA, Homeland Security and other agencies within the federal government. When you add everything up, the total defense budget is expected to be as high as $1,415,000,000,000. And that doesn't include the separate budgets that fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which comes out to another $80-100 billion a year.

If you look at the annual general breakdown of defense spending, you'll note categories such as Operations and maintenance, Military Personnel, Procurement and so forth. And if you've been keeping track at how much we've been spending annually on war profiteers, you'll note that in virtually every general category (especially procurement), there's always some way to fit private industry into the mix.

For instance, the 15 costliest research and development programs this year add up to $53.3 billion. In all but four cases, there have been cost overruns of up to nearly 58% (The Predator and Reaper unmanned drones that have killed hundreds of not thousands of innocent civilians worldwide.).

Match that against this year's educational spending, which is less than 1/10th that of the Defense Budget. (Just to be fair to the president, his budget proposal for educational spending was $76 billion, which is still just over 10% of what we'll plan on spending for the Pentagon. The federal government also kicks in only 11% of what we spend annually on education.). The interest alone on the national debt, OTOH, is estimated to be almost a quarter of a trillion dollars, or over three times what we'll spend on education.

In January of this year, the Pentagon's Inspector General issued a report (.pdf file) citing "material internal control weaknesses ... that affect the safeguarding of assets, proper use of funds, and impair the prevention and identification of fraud, waste, and abuse." Just the day before that, the GAO issued its own report (.pdf file) explaining why it couldn't offer Congress a comprehensive audit of defense spending for roughly the same reasons.

It's an age-old story that we hear year after year from one Inspector General or another yet Congress keeps tamping hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars down the throats of private industry while education, health and infrastructure are crumbling around us. And many of those war profiteers offshore their headquarters overseas (like Halliburton and Blackwater, to cite just two of the more notorious examples) while virtually all of them, especially GE, offshore American jobs to be done by foreign labor for pennies on the dollar in order to maximize profits.

Instead, Obama decided to make Jeff Immeldt, GE's CEO, as his jobs czar. If there's a more effective way to twist the knife with sarcastic glee, the President has yet to find it.

So if Occupy Wall Street wants to make a statement to the government, they could start with military spending, contractor corruption and this Congress' and this administration's unwillingness to do anything to stem the tide of corruption and contractor abuse that is literally bankrupting this country at the expense of our and our children's health, education and general welfare.

Thought of the Day/Open Thread

2011-11-25T09:43:00.003-05:00

Austin native Dave O'Brien said something on Facebook recently in response to a link that someone had put on their wall. It was to a WaPo editorial entitled, "OWS is Over." Oh, really? I'd asked. And who wrote that? Their right wing ombudsman who'd replaced the late Deborah Howell? Then Dave chimed in with a rant of his own that was more cogent, precise and coldly furious than perhaps anything I could've written. This is what Dave said in full:

I do not find here, nor have I found in Sean Hannity and other detractors of the OWS movement, any thoughtful discussion of the issues that OWS broached. It is easier to point out the fact that persons who live in tents don't shower every day (this hygienic argument, blunt though it is, seems to be the sole arrow in the detractors diminuitive quiver) than it is to address the causes and reasons why it is done in the first place: the financial meltdown of 2008 brought on, in significant measure, by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of Gramm-Bliley-Leach; the concentration of wealth within fewer and fewer hands conjoined with the purchase of influence at all levels through unlimited campaign contributions, et al. Should we raise the issue of high unemployment which is in part the result of the gutting of American manufacturing productivity and the location of corporations in off shore locations and a work force that has been procured in underdeveloped countries? Or the fact that the mortgage industry has sold its paper to Wall Street speculators, short-ciruiting the process of foreclosure of homes which is occurring at record levels? Or the fact that the banking industry has been bailed out at taxpayer expense with funds which are not loaned back to the persons who are making the bailout possible? Talk about pouring salt on a wound. Small business loans are rare because bankers find more lucrative returns elsewhere. And because of the infrequency of these loans, employment levels have been stagnant if not sinking. (Let's not discuss the high bonuses that are given to these predators while the persons making it possible, one in three of them, are living at the poverty level.) This list, while not exhaustive, might well provide the stimulus to revolutions, in other countries and in other times. Some revolutions, I dare say, were initiated for far less. Why it should be different for us, only time and will can tell. While this article is short, the time required to read it is not time well spent and is palpable evidence of a cynical catering to a populace that is perceived as ignorant, unwilling to delve beneath the surface because of an inability to retain an attentiveness toward any given issue that exceeds that of a two-year old.

Not to be outdone, I then went off on a different tangent, making a distinction that I've never seen made anywhere in the MSM:

Another very important distinction, one you'll never hear in political, financial and RW pundit circles, is that OWS is not a flash mob like the fat, pasty racists of the tea bagger movement. OWS and its various analogs all over the country (the world, even) are crucially distinguished in that they're occupying #1 strategic strongholds of financial and government power and #2, they're holding their ground or occupying new ground day after day, and month after month. The flash mobs of the Tea Party would show up for an hour or two then go home. They suffered no privations, made no sacrifices, experienced no discomfort and, because they were never around at their own events long enough for the punditry or the cops to get sick of them, no persecution. When people like Obama and Biden compare OWS to the Tea Baggers, it elevates the Tea Baggers to a position more exalted than they deserve and immediately undermines what the OWS movement is all about. Anyone comparing OWS to the Tea Baggers is doing so from a criminally stupid and shallow presumption.

Thoughts, comments, complaints, suggestions, lost or stolen items such as $700,000,000,000 in taxpayer funds?

Sorry for the open thread. It's wash day for the missus and me, thereby reducing me to recycling Facebook comments.

Happy Thanksgiving, Ya'll.

2011-11-24T12:30:00.002-05:00

No, it won't be quite like this. It'll be just Mrs. JP, the cat and me and an outside chance of seeing my son Adam and his fiancee later on. It won't be KFC but a pork loin. With my luck, that means, somewhere in America, there's a three-legged pig on a crutch that's looking for me.

So before we clear the table and put up the laptops, let me take this opportunity to tell ya'll what I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving.

I'm grateful for having the few loyal readers I do. You guys prove that quality is always better than quantity. In these brutal times, we have a roof over our heads, a working car on the road and no creditors (yet) knocking on our door.

One of those readers is Mrs. JP, who thought enough of me to walk away from her family to drive 1355 miles alone two and a half years ago in a rickety 15 year-old Chrysler LeBaron on its last legs in the name of love.

I'm grateful that I have strong, healthy sons. It's a shame the mother of two of them didn't live long enough to even begin watching them grow up.

I'm grateful that I didn't succumb to the racist wingnuttery into which my father fell later in life and that I remained independent and strong-minded enough to reject the diktats of all organized religion. I've always been a big believer in Altruism whether I was the giver or recipient. As the poet Percy Shelley once bemoaned to a friend, if only we had a religion founded on charity rather than faith.

I'm grateful for Occupy Wall Street and its countless incarnations and all the hell they're enduring for us to remind us that, yes, the First Amendment does indeed exist and to we who wring our hands at the festering cesspool of corruption this country has become, OWS gives us vibrant, indelible proof that we are not alone.

So as we sit at the dinner table this Thanksgiving, let's offer a vocal or silent thank you to Occupy Wall Street and all those who were swept up in the movement. They, especially those in Occupy Boston and the other colder states, are undergoing tortures and persecution that the rest of us can only imagine. And they'll be right out there again tomorrow decrying corporate greed while the rest of us camp out (without being beaten or pepper-sprayed) outside Wal-Mart, Target or Best Buy.

If John Pike Had a Time Machine.

2011-11-23T14:49:00.028-05:00

We would've seen this:

The John Pike Museum of Art

2011-11-23T11:08:00.023-05:00

What am I grateful for this Thanksgiving? One of those things is that I live in a country of people who are both culturally informed and have a robust sense of humor. What follows are some of the Photoshopped works of genius by people appalled at John Pike's pepper-spraying of 11 peaceful UC Davis protesters, people who also know their art.

And a variation using Picasso's Guernica:

Here's a variation of the same...

Finally, my personal favorite,

Assclowns of the Week #89: Occupy the Catbird Seat/Thanksgiving edition

2011-11-21T14:57:00.020-05:00

(Editor's note: If you could help Mrs. JP and I weather another month so we could make the rent after the holidays, we'd surely appreciate it. Doing so in any amount would certainly help keep online fine ~~programming~~ blogging such as this.)

(Image courtesy of iconic artist Shepard Fairey.)

What a week, eh Pottervillians? These past seven days, we’ve seen the pepper-spraying of virtually the entire First Amendment (free speech, peaceful assembly, press and petition of grievances) and enough wingnuttery on the campaign trail for a whole year. Included in this week’s lunacy was Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD (2) valiantly defending Wall Street’s interests by spending millions to clean one small park; Lt. John Pike and Linda Katehi (1) gave us a less lethal but spicier version of Kent State and Newt Gingrich (5, 7) showed us why he deserves to lead the rat pack of GOP presidential contenders.

Add to that NASCAR fans (10) who doffed their ballcaps to the veterans and replaced them with hoods for Michelle Obama and the Super Congress (3) for showing us they’re just a microcosm of the usual gridlock on Capitol Hill. So hop on board the rickety shopping cart of the 99% as we review this week’s unpardoned turkeys and much, much more!

10) NASCAR fans

Nothing quite says “class” like a pack of badly-shaved NASCAR inbreds booing our first African American First Lady for simply trying to honor the troops. On Sunday, First Lady Michelle Obama and the Second Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, appeared with a group of children as grand marshals at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Their joint appearance was to publicize a charitable endeavor to help the families of our fighting troops. Everything went well until Mrs. Obama’s name was announced. Great example to set for the kiddies, Billy Bob.

This is a pretty typical tactic this year for the Tea Bagger faction, which has no problem cheering on the death of a hypothetical comatose man with no health insurance and booing a gay veteran fighting in Iraq during GOP presidential debates. And, of course, far be it for the GOP frontrunners of the week to encourage that faction. Wait for Newt, Willard and Herman to be showing up at future NASCAR events waving Confederate flags and gingerly sipping Pabst Blue Ribbon draft while talking about states’ rights and championing the racist blowhard coming up next.

9) Rush Limbaugh

Today, Grand Dragon Rush Limbaugh mud-wrestled his ongoing pathological obsession with Michelle Obama to new depths when he explained why the sons of the soil booed the First Lady yesterday: It was their “recognition of uppity-ism.” Because, in Rush’s antebellum world, if you're African American (even if your husband is President of the United States and you’re the First Lady), you’re supposed to shuffle along in rags with an Aunt Jemima kerchief on yo nappy haid, never look da white folk in the eye and mutter, “Yassa, massa.”

I realize, people, that we have something called the First Amendment, which guarantees Freedom of Speech. But every great rule has an exception and may I humbly nominate El Rushbo, the world’s richest and most beloved pill popping child molester to be the exception?

8) Clueless Joe Walsh

The longer his inexplicable term stretches on, the more Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh sounds like Howard Beale’s evil twin. Earlier this month, Clueless Joe ordered a double shot of infamy by going off on a constituent during a beer hall putsch in Gurnee. But last Saturday, Walsh delivered an encore performance at a town hall that he could’ve just as well have called “The Torpedoing of Truth Tour.” I’d encourage ya’ll to take a drink every time Walsh lied and attempted to mislead the public but I’d never encourage cirrhosis of the liver.

Essentially, Walsh revealed once again what a shameless, squishing cum dumpster he is for Wall Street by telling his constituents that war veterans are “clueless” and Occupy Wall Street is a “well-funded, far left” movement of the “spoiled and pampered” that’s encouraged by the Democrat Party (if they’re so well-funded then how come the Occupy Wall Street library is now in a shopping cart?). It’s not worth refuting his talking points but I’ll only suggest watching the video. I don’t know what Bizarro dimension Joe Walsh lives in but it’s obvious it doesn’t have truth and facts any more than it does child support.

7) Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich is actually a lobbyist. He just doesn’t play one on TV.

Mr. Advise and Contort Newt Gingrich heaved himself to the top of the GOP heap when the rest of the country found out that last month’s front-runner Herman Cain was an EEG flatliner on everything from foreign policy to women’s rights to the economy. Republican voters are so desperate to get that Kenyan, Muslim Socialist Fascist out of the WH that they’re even willing to reanimate the corpse of the Gingrich campaign whether or not he took $300,000 as a Freddie Mac lobbyist who sold in return for that moolah influence and access.

If you’re as forgiving as the tea bagger racists who are momentarily supporting Newt despite him accepting over a quarter of a million smackeroos, some of which being taxpayer bailout money, then Newt’s choice thoughts on Occupy Wall Street ought to justify him getting the #8 spot in this week’s roundup.

“Hey, everyone! Newt says to ‘Get a job.’ Why didn’t we think of that? We’re Saved!” “Yippie! The jobs are back!” “We’re going home now, Officers. Newt Gingrich just saved us all!”

6) Mitt Romney

“Did I ever say I was a Republican? I never said that. Massachusetts? Never heard of it.”

After months of denials, Mitt Romney finally admitted in an interview just this past Monday that he and his staff had destroyed and bought work hard drives, emails and other documents pertaining to when he was governor of Massachusetts so his political opponents couldn’t find them and use them against him. Strange tactic for a public servant to make. True, no previous administration had even left emails lying around but how many other gubernatorial administrations before Romney’s had used email?

Willard’s also screaming about greater transparency in the federal government. Oh, yeah. You’re a regular rock of consistency, aren’t you, Mittens?

5) Newt Gingrich

Come for the education, stay for the litter.

Echoing Mike Lee when he said last year that child labor laws were “unconstitutional”, Newt Gingrich pulls double duty this week for saying that children should stay in school… not for the education but the menial work. At least Lee was attempting to put a patina of semi-intelligence to his opposition to child labor laws. Newt just called them “stupid.”

In fact, this is exactly what Gingrich told CNN the other day:

It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. Saying to people you shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16. You're totally poor, you're in a school that's failing with a teacher that's failing. What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don't do it. Remember all the stuff about not getting a hamburger-flipping job? Worst possible advice to give the poor children.

Yes, Newt actually thinks we’re enslaving and “entrapping children” with those pesky child labor laws imposed on them by Big Gubmint. And, if you’re an inner city kid and want to do better than flip burgers for Newt’s voters, don’t let the grownups fool you into thinking you’re destined for better, more fulfilling jobs. Embrace Calvin and accept your fate.

Gingrich adds, “You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America.” I can’t wait to hear this. No doubt, it’ll include the return of debtor’s prisons and workhouses for the poor.

4) Wisconsin Cheeseheads

It’s one thing to vote Republican. That’s everyone’s right, however misguided it tends to be outside of the corporate sector. But openly opposing a gubernatorial recall petition by ripping up petitions and otherwise resorting to theft and death threats is a little beyond the pale. Recall activists need to gather just over 540,000 signatures (or 25% of the number who voted in the last gubernatorial election) to force a recall election. But some charitably-named “conservative activists” are opposed to the idea. In fact, these cheese-headed thugs are so venomously brazen about subverting Wisconsin state law, they’re even announcing their plans on Facebook.

Basically, it’s the tried-and-true “Nice recall you go goin’ here. Be a shame if something… happened to it” tactic. One recall activist reported getting a 4 AM death threat from as far away as Minneapolis. This is a typical tactic of a right wing that pretends to take one side whether or not it’s beneficial to their self-interests just as an excuse to bash and intimidate liberals. They know Walker will get recalled and they can’t stand the idea of liberals and unions winning in “their” America.

3) The Super Committee

God only knows what our government was thinking when they decided to set up the Super Committee when it’s obviously just another synonym for “oligarchy. I guess some dimbulbs thought that by freezing out over 97% of Congress they’d somehow avoid the usual gridlock. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Super Committee that’s made up of six Republicans and six Democrats weren’t able to agree on anything as the trigger deadline looms. Republicans want to trim $1.2 trillion on the backs of the poor and not make the 1% pay a penny more in taxes. Democrats want the 1% to pay more in taxes instead of making unnecessary, Draconian cuts to the safety net. Gee, who could’ve seen this coming?

But just to show that we still need a Congress to tackle the other big issues of the day, they decided that pizza sauce is a vegetable (tomatoes are actually a fruit, according to accepted scientific definition). So, while Congress didn’t actually call pizza a vegetable, I mean, come the fuck on. This ranks right up there with Reagan supposedly calling ketchup a vegetable. And whether or not they designated pizza as a veggie, our nation’s schoolkids will still be that much more nutritionally poor thanks to an army of frozen food lobbyists.

(Btw, here’s Firedoglake’s petition for you to sign to tell the Super Committee to keep their grubby paws off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).

2) Mayor Michael Bloomberg & the NYPD

Typical of special ops tactics, early Tuesday morning and on orders from ~~High Chancellor Sutler~~ Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the NYPD swooped in on Occupy Wall Street in the wee hours of the morning and began tearing down tents and arresting what would later be estimated as 200 (including at least five NYPD-credentialed journalists who don’t happen to work for Bloomberg’s media empire). The predawn eviction made headlines but no sense. The eviction was done ostensibly in the name of “health and public safety” so they could clean Zuccotti Park. This obviously required sound cannons, helicopters and a bulldozer. Essentially, this means Bloomberg squandered more valuable time, money and resources in cleaning one park than he ever did cleaning up Wall Street itself.

By 6:30 that morning, State Supreme Justice and ACLU veteran Lucy Billings issued a temporary restraining order against the city, NYPD and other entities that was thrown out a few hours later by another State Supreme Court Justice and useful Bloomberg idiot, Michael Stallman, who said #OWS could go back to the park but were not allowed to stay overnight, bring tents or sleeping bags. This means that two NY State Supreme Court Justices couldn’t get on the same page in the same day about the same first amendment in the Bill of Rights.

1) UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi and Lt. John Pike

Since he hates obstructionist people sitting on their asses & doing nothing, I say we draft Lt. John Pike to pepper spray the Super Congress.

Michael Bloomberg will be saying a silent prayer at the dinner table this Thursday for Lt. John Pike and UC Davis Chancellor ~~Eva Hitler~~ Linda Katehi for taking the heat off him. Katehi told ABC early on Monday that she refused to step down because the university “needed” her (despite faculty members, much of the student body and the Davis Faculty Association clamoring for her immediate resignation). By now, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you why. Last Saturday, Katehi sicced the UC Davis campus police on peaceful student protesters who were sitting down and linking arms to support Occupy Wall Street. Lt. John Pike then whipped out a can of pepper spray, held it up like an over-the-hill WWF bad guy brandishing a weapon and proceeded to spray the students in the face at point blank range (Note: the canister of pepper spray is military grade is meant to be fired from no less than 15 feet).

The night of the incident, Katehi met with student representatives for about a half hour then refused to leave the building for several hours while trying to mislead the press into thinking the students were holding her hostage. Finally, the blue-blood bitch emerged to begin her walk of shame, clearly shaken if not stirred, as if it was her and not the dozens of students who were brutalized and hospitalized on her orders. She even had the nerve to demand, through a mouthpiece, “a silent, respectful exit.” Linda Katehi became, literally, a walking disgrace.

What made Pike’s act especially brazen was that he had no problem doing this while knowing good and well that his despicable act was being documented by no less than 15 photographers and videographers. I’d give you his phone number and professional email address except that Pike, the campus police chief and several others have been put on administrative leave. (Btw, there’s no truth to the rumor that Lt. Pike’s nickname is “Agent Orange.”)

Think it's any coincidence...

2011-11-20T06:01:00.003-05:00

(Editor's note: If you could help Mrs. JP and I weather another month so we could make the rent after the holidays, we'd surely appreciate it. Doing so in any amount would certainly help keep online fine ~~programming~~ blogging such as this.)

...that Michael Bloomberg's thugs are forcing the #OWS protesters to wheel around their library and pet supplies in shopping carts like homeless people? It's not coincidence and it's not even ironic: It's by design. And Wall Street and city officials are probably making their fat asses jiggle with amusement that they've reduced the protesters to pushing their belongings around like bag ladies.

But when you stop and think about it, this manufactured irony just underscores what Wall Street's been doing to the 99% for decades. And what better way to convey a message and protest of world-consuming greed and arrogance than to look the part?

And Zuccotti Park and, at night, Foley Sq. are becoming a cross between war zones and protest sites in Third World countries. How much is Wall Street beginning to resemble downtown Tehran during the riots of June 2009, with unarmed people getting attacked by ebony-garbed basij thugs? How much does it look like a war zone when medics with red crosses taped to their bicycle helmets have to tend to the wounded?

And how much more like a Third World country does the richest area in the developed world have to look when people have been deprived of their only shelter, deprived of their safety and deprived of their dignity in a microcosm of what Wall Street's been doing to the bottom 99% all these years and decades?

And like Ahmadinejad's thugs after Iran's "elections" 2 1/2 years ago, the NYPD and Bloomberg's office and police departments literally from coast to coast are nakedly making up the rules as they go along. Now in NYC, you can be arrested for driving without your headlights and wipers on, especially if you're caught driving a wikileaks truck rumored to be carrying blankets. No search warrant? No problem! We'll just confiscate the whole fucking truck!

They want to deprive OWS of shelter, of literature, they want to reduces us all to the level of transients just blocks away from their offices? Fine. We'll be glad to play the part. And let the entire world take notice.

(Addendum: If someone would be so kind as to tell me who linked to me, I'd appreciate it. But someone linked to this post and I'd like to know who.)

Republican Spider Man Sez:

2011-11-19T12:33:00.009-05:00

"With great power, comes great immunity."

That's the message we've been hearing from Wall Street, many Republicans on Capitol Hill and self-styled right wing pundits like Andrew Breitbart, Bill O'Reilly (who this year had replaced Christine O'Donnell as the Typhoid Mary of the publishing racket) and others who channel and filter their partisan passions directly through their rectums and bile ducts.

We've heard the amateurish, high schoolish smears: OWS protesters defecating on police cars; attacking the police; having sex in Zuccotti Park; women getting raped and told by the OWS movement not to report it; they're lazy, dirty, drug-taking, unemployed bums; they want a handout like Wall Street; the guy who took 2 potshots at the White House was an Occupy protester.

Basically the same propagandistic bullshit we heard about the hippies in the 60's from the right wing hard hat crowd when they were righteously protesting the war in Vietnam. Yawn. Each and every one of these charges had been shot down faster than John McCain over Hanoi.

Now, it's time to let the professionals take over.

Earlier today, Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's eponymous Up w/Chris Hayes, revealed a corporate conspiracy involving a high-powered lobbying firm that employs two former John Boehner staffers and the American banking Association. The memo makes for some pretty eye-opening revelations (.pdf file), not the least of which is the fear that Occupy Wall Street is inspiring fear on not only Wall Street itself but also Capitol Hill.

While it would be very easy to envision an impotent and unpopular Democratic Party cynically "embracing" (read: exploiting) OWS in order to manufacture ground on Republicans who are hardly more popular than the GOP that'd exploited the Tea Party, this admission is extremely important in that it betrays OWS is getting under the thin skin of Wall Street.

To that end in their "opposition research" (read: propaganda), Wall St. is all but too prepared to throw one of their own under the wheels of progress: The right wing's billionaire boogey man, George Soros. The memo's proposed tactics, which the American Banking Association told MSNBC is it "did not solicit" and "chose not to act on it in any way (which sounds laughably disingenuous considering last month's revelation)", are tried and untrue right wing tactics right out of Richard "Defund the Left!" Viguerie's dog-eared playbook.

What the Republican Party fears more than anything, besides OWS pissing off Wall Street more than they already have with the completely discredited GOP hardly in a PR position to do anything about it, is that the Occupy movement may actually do something the flash mobs of the Tea Party never came close to doing: Physically closing the gaps and linking until it becomes an honest-to-God daisy chain of humanity stretching from coast to coast.

The memo to the ABA, quite justifiably, fears that OWS could become as potent, if not a more potent, political movement than the Tea Baggers ever were. And, with nearly a year before Election Day, it's only inevitable that the Occupy movement starts drafting, supporting and even funding their own candidates for 2012.

While it's screamingly obvious that since late this summer, with hardly any fanfare (of course) from the corporate MSM, there was actually a bill in Congress that almost gave civil and criminal immunity for Wall Street for crimes that haven't even been seriously investigated. But what may be even more troubling to these ex Boehner staffers is that the right wing may be capitalizing on #OWS and the populist fervor they're slowly but surely generating.

Without specifically mentioning Occupy Wall Street, Tom Coburn shocked the political blogosphere when his office issued a report claiming that the 1% should pay more in taxes. Rush Limbaugh proved that a stopped clock is right twice a day by hitting the bullseye on the absurdity of Chelsea Clinton getting a job as a top correspondent with NBC. Limbaugh tied this in to the frustration felt by the 99% when he said to a caller,

Let’s go down to Occupy Wall Street or wherever else that there’s an Occupy, or go wherever there is a collection of liberals. What are they mad about? They’re mad about the 1 percent, and what are they mad about about the 1 percent? The 1 percent’s got it all. The 1 percent has everything and they’re not sharing it with anybody, and they didn’t work for it. There aren’t any jobs for anybody else because the 1 percent are making sure they’ve got all the jobs and they’ve got all the money.

So here we come with Mr. Democrat Party, the highest ranking, biggest star, most respected member of the Democrat Party, and with pure nepotism and nothing else his daughter, who is unqualified for this job, gets pushed ahead of everybody that works at NBC and gets this job. This is the quintessential thing the 99 percent are fed up with, that they don’t have a chance, that the game’s rules are rigged, that everything’s stacked against them…

And most recently, Sarah Palin's ghost writer put out on the pages of the WSJ what actually amounts to policy proposals with some heft, a screed that actually seems to "get" what #OWS is all about. (Just to reassure you all that I'm not falling in love with Sarah Barracuda, I will point out that her ghost writer's approved script did ask this ironic series of questions that could've just as easily been turned on her: "How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech." Obviously, if asked in Iowa how she herself could've left midway through her gubernatorial term as Alaska's governor only to see her own finances and stock portfolios dramatically improve, she would've had a considerably tougher time answering that.)

One can hardly stifle laughter at Palin's usual and disingenuous claims about fighting the "good ol' boy political class in Juneau" and how she'd "been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career." But it's a huge step when a partisan pit bull like Palin can dredge up enough honesty to say that both parties have been occupying Wall Street long before the 99%.

The Republican Party, obviously, has no answers and are as a whole stubbornly resistant toward the idea of even looking for them. Asking the Republican Party to help rebuild this country is like offering a building contract to the same thugs that had trashed your house. And while Michael Bloomberg was engaging in gimmicks involving fictional heroes exactly a year ago to "combat" unemployment, Occupy Wall Street's 99% was gearing up to do the real thing.

The eminently quotable science fiction author CJ Cherryh once drew the invaluable distinction between the self-interested warrior and the (in an ideal world) soldier:

The warrior may fight for gold or for an immediate gain, or for something to take home for the winter to feed the family. The soldier is part of a more complex society. He's fighting for a group ethic of some sort.

Occupy Wall Street is a long-festering sore on the long-neglected hind end of America with the scab torn off, running with blood, pus and lymphatic fluid for all the world to see. Wall Street doesn't want you to know about that long-festering sore because it and the politicians they employ like doing what they do in secret. Bloomberg's NYPD may have physically exposed the OWS soldiers by depriving them of shelter. But Occupy Wall Street has more than returned the favor.

I Need a Job, Not to Be Job

2011-11-19T06:01:00.001-05:00

Even Job, the Rodney Dangerfield of the Bible, eventually got a break. So it's only natural for one in my ongoing predicament to wonder, When will this Mr. Bill shit finally end?

I've been in the work force for a third of a century. Over the last 33 1/2 years, I've done just about anything and everything for which you don't need a college degree. The problem is, something sinister happened during the next-to-last administration, a sinisterness that has only increased its dexterity in the current. Now, many of the jobs into which I got either promoted or for which I was hired without qualification now demand a college degree and/or some ridiculous equivalency of on-the-job experience.

Quality control is one of the prime examples. QC was a profession into I was promoted when I worked for an automotive/aeronautical/aerospace/medical device company and there was no silly talk of my needing a college degree to use Vernier calipers to check the wall thickness of a hose or to fill out a CoC template. I was promoted on the initiative of a senior engineer at Boeing and my company did a full court press to get me in their QC lab.

Nowadays, it's a whole new ball game and the game is rigged. Now, temp agencies have co-opted all the QC jobs as well as all the manufacturing positions because companies even in a right-to-work state such as Massachusetts have been fooled into thinking they have to sign contracts with temp agencies for the standard 90 day probationary period. And they wind up paying the temp agency 50% over what they'd spend on payroll by hiring directly.

Now, temp agencies, rebranded "staffing" agencies, don't send out people, they send out electronified resumes, giving their reluctant and picky-choosy "clients" first refusal rights for someone they have no intention of hiring, ever, despite the laughable come-on of "temp to perm."

I'd never gone for longer than 15 months without a job and usually the downtime could be counted in terms of days or weeks, not months and especially years. Between outsourcing and the Obama administration's inability to unlock the job market with programs that would incentivise companies to hire, we've become a nation of shopkeepers, to quote Napoleon, and even the retail positions are getting scarce. It's only a matter of time before all stores in the US completely buy from China and making all their checkout lines fully automated.

Make no mistake about it: We're in a deep recession if not an outright depression. There was never any recovery and despite what the government, pundits and MSM tell you, there's no way anybody or anything can endanger a recovery that never happened.

I've been out of job for 2 1/2 years now. My last job interview was going on 2 weeks ago and even then I had to drive about 40-45 miles out of my way and spend about $10 on $3.50 a gallon gas to get there and back for a 4 minute pre-interview for a QC job. This wasn't the first time I was brushed aside and brusquely told by some arrogant employee to wait in line, don't call us, we'll call you. Sometimes I've driven that far just to hand off a few sheets of paper and didn't even get the pre-interview.

It's Us vs Them. That's the mentality. And the longer a person's unemployment stretches, the less desirable you are because someone sitting behind a desk will eventually ask themselves if not you, "What's wrong with you? Why can't you get a job?" What are you going to say? "Because of hemming and hawing morons like you"?

And it's not just me. Mrs. JP, despite racking up nearly two decades in the graphic design business making some of the snazziest and most professional signs you'll see anywhere, has herself been out of work for nearly a year and a half despite sending out no less than three resumes a week to sign shops all over Massachusetts. If we're still unemployed, it's not through lack of trying or lack of qualifications and experience.

Bottom line, we're looking at the very real possibility of living in our car after this month. I've tried holding off asking for help both publicly and privately since late last summer. But we have zero chance of making the rent let alone meeting our smaller but no less important bills such as utilities and insurance. I'm not asking you to fund our Christmas. This is bare bones survival I'm talking about and we just need a push to get us into next year.

Hopefully, something will break for either or both of us. But now we're really in a bind and anyone who's known me for any length of time knows how much I hate doing this. I never set up that Paypal button with the intention of it being a primary source of income let alone a secondary one. So anything you could do for us would be immensely appreciated.

Pottersville in Pictures: Occupy Wall Street edition

2011-11-19T05:00:00.000-05:00

It was considered a major triumph by the right wing when Mayor Michael Bloomberg paid more attention, allocated more manpower and spent more money cleaning up one park than Wall Street itself.

Suddenly at dawn, things took a dramatic turn for the worse at Occupy Moscow. Over 100,000,000 were arrested.

Meanwhile, at Occupy Vegas, there were mixed results. Occupy representatives met with city and police officials but found themselves down by 30 large.

Mayor Bloomberg's office added, "It's not our fault their badges aren't big enough to include 'Wall Street' after 'To Serve and Protect'."

Wall Street was literally occupied by orangutans inspired by Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Tx Governor Rick Perry is stumped when asked at the last Republican debate where Occupy Wall Street started.

At the same debate things hardly went better for Herman Cain. Here, the Republican presidential candidate eventually gives up after being asked by a reporter if he could find the planet earth on a globe.

Even those in the white slavery business are offering early spectacular deals this coming Black Friday.

Actual royalty meets impotent royalty. Guess which is which.

Republican wet dream #1965: black people not voting.

"Hello, this is NStar. How may we help you?" A typical commute to work for Jerry Bruckheimer.

The Invisible Man joins forces with First Lady Michelle Obama and her fight against childhood obesity by imploring children to eat more produce.

Minutes after President Obama delivered a dusk speech at Kapolei, Hawaii, the headline at Drudge read, "Sun sets on Obama administration."

A cloud covers this Faroe island Litla Dimun, making its top too foggy to penetrate. It's slated to be renamed Perry Island.

"Yeah, kid, the picture will start in a minute but first you have to step inside. C'mon, you can trust me. I'm the Lion King."

Caption Contest

2011-11-17T21:14:00.003-05:00

The O'Reilly Factor, where the Georgia Guidestones went to die.

Fox News' Base, at its Finest

2011-11-17T11:30:00.000-05:00

You may've heard by now that some crackpot took a potshot at the White House yesterday. When Fox "News'" website reported it, it drew some, uhm, interesting comments from Tea Baggers who still bristle at the idea of being called racist. Then, suddenly out of nowhere, the Latino shooter was pronounced an OWS protester and that's when the fun really got "fast and furious." (Click on each image to expand.)

I'm sure you get the idea by now, not that you should've expected any surprises. I would've delved further into the fetid underworld of Fox "News'" comment section but even your tough old prehistoric porcine and his caste iron stomach can take only so much wingnuttery and its attendant racism.
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To all you fine patriots, I give an old fashioned ascii one finger salute.

OWS: Orwell's Wickedest Scenario

2011-11-17T05:28:00.002-05:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein)

The only good thing about fascism and its brutal and oppressive tactics is that it's never subtle. Push these people and you'll always get the answer to Inspector Finch's rhetorical question in V For Vendetta: "What usually happens when those without guns stand up to those that do?" And always there are billions who listen to the answer and its inevitable, blood-tinged physical syntax.

Anyone out there remember the late Mario Savio? Mario Savio's name has been all but lost to history even to well-meaning and well-educated liberals who didn't happen to watch Rachel Maddow's eloquent show the night before last. Savio's speech on December 2, 1964 on Sproul Hall's steps briefly put him in the news in relation to the increasingly hostile conflict between University of Berkeley officials and the students' right to free speech.

Savio's fiery, impassioned "bodies on the gears" speech, as it came to be known, proved once again that great rhetoric is recyclable and that the abstract ideology underpinning it can be used to illuminate many controversies that endanger the rights of our fellow humans. As Maddow said, he could've been talking about Vietnam, civil rights or a whole host of other topics. But on December 2, 1964 he was calling the university on its greater allegiance to its board of governors than to the first amendment rights of its students.

Savio's spirit lives on in Occupy Wall's Street movement and it's impossible to imagine the man who'd briefly shared the same ideological stage as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X not supporting this beginning of the uprising of the 99%. And perhaps some of the countless thousands of young people braving police brutality and exposure are the grandchildren of some of the people who'd surrounded Savio and the police car atop which he'd stood after they'd arrested Jack Weinberg for simply handing out leaflets informing people of their civil liberties.

That massive and frightening show of support for one of their own is reincarnated in Occupy Wall Street and its countless analogs all over the world. We see it when the NYPD tries to pick up and arrest a protester and the others link arms with him or her. We see it when police departments all over the nation forcibly evict Occupy protesters, even coming close to killing them, and they always, always come back in greater numbers.

Arrest one and they will, like the Hydra, come back twofold. Teargas them, they will wave away the smoke with their signs. Take away their tents, they'll huddle together against the cold even if they have to change shifts every hour. You could blow them up with mortars. They'll bury the chunks, hose down the street and come back after the funeral.

Friedrich Nietzsche, anyone?

"Stop Or My Mom Will be Shot!"

This is a picture from Occupy Seattle taken last Tuesday night immediately after an 84 year-old woman named Dorli Rainey was pepper-sprayed by police who apparently have lived their entire lives boning and chipping their batons and making X's across the tops of their bullets for the return of the 60's. It's getting some play in the blogosphere and the Twittersphere and for Goddamned good reasons. It serves to show that even the eldest and frailest of us are not immune to police brutality and that they hold nothing sacred save for the financial institutions and the political institutions they obviously control. It betrays a fascist, paranoid mindset that even regards a peaceful physical presence as a crime. No one can read the thoughts of the man on the street unless they're holding a sign showing it. But when anyone and everyone venturing outside their homes near a protest are assumed to be sympathizers or protesters and are pepper-sprayed in a frenzy of retaliation, we come dangerously close to committing what George Orwell infamously called "thoughtcrime."

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the corporate MSM knows it would be remiss in its responsibilities (or more than it already is and almost always has been) if it didn't repeat, therefore amplify, the movement's concerns: Corporate greed, its fallout and it buying up our democracy and the electoral process that renews it. For once, in stark contrast to its fawning over the Tea Bagger astroturf movement funded by the Koch brothers, the US Chamber of Commerce and Dick Armey's Freedom Works, the mainstream media get to report factually for a change about a populist movement that makes the all-but-forgotten Tea Party look like exactly what it was all along: A glorified and intermittently-armed flash mob comprised almost entirely of ignorant, hideously-educated racists that unwittingly became tools of Wall St. as well as poster children warning of the self-sabotaging genetic fallout of incest.

Big City mayors have hardly made a better account of themselves and couldn't have possibly handled the nationwide Occupy movement worse than if they'd held a strategy session with Hitler and Himmler themselves. Obviously, the irony-deficient Michael Bloomberg, a nasty little scorpion in an empty gabardine who has the look of a man who never once had to remove the top of the shell of his ~~Eggs Benedict~~ soft-boiled egg, never once stopped to consider what it would look like for a multibillionaire to evict protesters from a public park who are calling attention to the crimes of his vulture fund-managing running buddies on Wall Street and are managing the information better.

Indeed, Bloomberg, as well as jurists, banksters arresting those who try to withdraw their own money and police officials are giving the unmistakable impression that they're making up the rules as they go along. And this is understandable because, despite the long-gutted First Amendment, there's no actual mechanism in place to respect the thoughts, feelings and rights of people who do not agree with the system. And what does it say on the state of the greatest democracy in earth's history when two jurists on the same State Supreme Court, on the same day, can't even get on the same page regarding a simple abstract law such as the First Amendment?

That's why, in a frenzied retaliation in lieu of an actual rational and respectful response, the NYPD and the Portland, OR police department early Tuesday morning viciously tore down tents and removed protesters with batons, pepper spray, sound cannons (LRADs) and bulldozers, with helicopters circling overhead in case they needed air support from harsh language. The NYPD even arrested journalists and restricted the air space over Zuccotti Park with the avowed intention of keeping news helicopters from documenting their oppression and brutality.

And those on the side of that brutality, those who champion the curtailment of the rights of any faction of humanity, whether they be pro-slavers, southern racists, antiCatholic, antiSemites, homophobes or misogynists will always, always end up on the losing side of history. And such a fate is 110% guaranteed when trying to curtail the rights of 99% of a nation of 300,000,000.

Attention Unemployed

2011-11-16T12:15:00.003-05:00

There is a spectre sitting on the face of the unemployed. It's like a giant, suffocating cat only less concerned whether or not you can breathe. It's what Wall Street, Congress, several successive presidential administrations and other entities have done to us these past few decades. Unemployed workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but hope and change.

Every once in a while, Mrs. JP will send me something that's both useful and informative. Lost to posterity are the countless blog posts her communiques have inspired and today is no different. This morning she sent me something from Unemployedworkers.org, one that invites us to send them our stories.

To a lot of the right wing morons reading this blog, especially those who feel entitled to smugness for no other reason than having a shitty job with little to nothing in the way of benefits and an actual future, save your comments. I stopped reading them long ago. While I hate asking for assistance, I will do anything within my powers to keep a roof over our heads. And unless you've been in approximately the same position I am currently in, having lost a job of several years through no fault of your own, tearing through your UI benefits and being roundly ignored and disrespected after applying for jobs you've already held down because some scumbags decided to move the goal posts back into the next area code, then I can't expect you to appreciate the devastation to my mindset, to my self-esteem.

However, I know that some of my regular readers are also unemployed and just clinging to life. Being possessed of some writing skills, my eloquence will always be there to help give you and others like you a voice.

What follows below is the exact same letter I just sent them. I don't pretend it's the most horrible story ever written but it still reads like something that's a cross between Stephen King and an inverted Horatio Alger. You may dismiss it as whining and may even ludicrously follow it up with "Get a job." That's the problem. That's exactly the problem and if there was no problem getting a job, then letters like this wouldn't have to be written and Unemployedworkers.org wouldn't need to exist.

After my last, right wing, boss nearly bled his company dry with neverending, longterm embezzlement, I, his soon-to-be ex wife and two others lost our jobs on April 27, 2009. This was exactly a month after my g/f of 15+ years kicked me out of the house and I locked myself into a one year lease with my new landlord. In the ensuing 2 1/2-3 years, I've registered with 8 temp agencies and have not gotten a single interview with them. I've been on less than two dozen job interviews that I've set up on my own and they'd, obviously, not resulted in a single job. What few production jobs that haven't been outsourced to China or Mexico or India have been almost completely co-opted by scumbag temp agencies (look on Craigslist, if you don't believe me) offering minimum wage positions and demanding unrealistic qualifications (background, drug and credit rating checks? Really???).

In late July of 2010, my fiancee who has nearly 20 years graphic design experience lost her job at a busy sign shop at which she'd been working for close to a year. Her bosses, also right wingers, cheerfully told her as they were laying her off that she could easily get by on UI. Since she was making minimum wage all that time and forbidden from working close to 40 hours a week, her average weekly gross check was $270, ergo $135 on UI. Her (likely) last extension will end in a few weeks. I exhausted my own benefits, out of which I was paying over $100 a week in child support, leaving me with $137 weekly, back in March of '11. Our rent is $650 a month. You do the math.

Never in my life have I gone for more than 14 months w/o work and usually I could find a new job within days or weeks. Sometime in the last 10 years, something awful happened to this country. Being a political blogger who covers this kind of stuff, I was following the trends and figures. But knowing the statistics and becoming one of those statistics are two entirely different things and there is definitely a widening Us vs Them gulf separating the gainfully employed from the unemployed. I have been roundly ignored and disrespected and I've driven as much as 50 miles round trip just to drop off a few sheets of paper after a Craigslist cattle call while being refused a interview.

To people in a position to give jobs, we're just surplus humanity, expendable intake and their contempt for the unemployed knows no bounds because a 9-10% unemployment rate allows their darker, nastier side to come out with impunity. Temp agencies no longer put people to work: They now send out resumes to picky and choosy clients who gauge your worth on a couple of sheets of virtual paper. Companies, overjoyed about the current state of fear and desperation, cheerfully add more and more responsibilities onto increasingly open-ended job descriptions. Then when I apply for jobs I've already held & at which I've succeeded, I get rejected and/or ignored for not knowing how to do 5% of the job.

If it wasn't for my blog readers kicking in once in a while with Paypal donations, my g/f and I would've been out on the street many months ago. As it is, it's a constant struggle to remain 1 step ahead of our creditors, keep food in the house and a roof over our heads. We are on SNAP and that won't last forever. I'd even sent out resumes accompanied by letters to employers telling them how desperate my situation was, that I lost my last job through no fault of my own. All but one was ignored and the one company that showed me some encouragement then turned on me the next day without explanation.

The current administration is one that employs GE CEO Jeff Immedlt, who has done more to offshore US jobs than almost every corporation, as jobs czar. In light of that and other troubling facts, I don't see Obama and especially Congress doing anything significant in the way of job creation. It isn't enough to create jobs that companies resist creating. We have to first get back the jobs that people like Immedlt had outsourced to Third World countries employing glorified slave labor for pennies on the dollar under the risible rubric of "remaining competitive." Two-three weeks ago, remembering that the President reads 10 letters a day from Americans, I'd written to the Obama administration about this and more and have not heard back from the WH, nor do I expect to.

My fiancee and I are just 2 stories out of 14,000,000 who are presently unable to find work. We have little cash on hand, no hope of celebrating Christmas in any traditional way, have no health or life insurance whatsoever. I am a QC inspector with ISO experience, have worked in factories all my life, have retail management and sales experience and am a talented novelist who once had an agent. Yet I cannot even get my foot in the door through a temp agency and literary agencies just as studiously and strenuously ignore me.

If I had more of a suicidal mindset than I already do, I would've done away with myself long, long ago. But as unrelievedly bleak as our life together is, as hopeless as our future looks, I have a g/f to look after. But I've been tap-dancing for almost three years now and my legs are getting mighty tired.

Robert Crawford

Welcome Back to Pottersville

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Land of the Free Lunch, Home of the Brave Old World

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Top Ten Facts About Tonight's New England/Denver Game

The Bain of Our Existence

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Last Night's NH Debate: Live Free or Die of Embarrassment

Willard "Mitt" Romney practices sucking lobbyist cock before last night's debate.

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It Was a Good Life

Iowa Caucus Results

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It Was a Good Run While it Lasted

My Top Ten Resolutions

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Popeye's 3rd Christmas

Merry Xmas from Funtwo

Craven Little Shitbag

Putting the Fun Back in Dysfunctional

Failed Dictator Dies, Millions Mourn

A Republican Christmas Carol

Christopher Hitchens Dead at 62

The Real Intent of the Right Wing War on Culture

Quote O' the Day

This is the Way the War Ends...

Top 10 Rejected Slogans of the Romney Campaign

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Assault by Battery

Encyclopedia UnAmericana

Have a Republican Xmas, Pt 2

Republican Populism

Meet the Yahoos

Pottersville in Pictures: Christmas edition

Scarlet BillO

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What's So Awful About the 99%?

Top 10 Reasons Herman Cain Suspended His Campaign

Your Sunday Funnies

Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town

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First They Laugh at You...

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The Next Time a Right Winger Accuses the Left of Hateful Rhetoric...

We are all Herman Cain's Wife.

The General Excommunicated?

Nyuk Nyuk of the Day

Let's All be Frank

Open Thread: Assclowns of the Year #4?

The Real Predators

Thought of the Day/Open Thread

Happy Thanksgiving, Ya'll.

If John Pike Had a Time Machine.

The John Pike Museum of Art

Assclowns of the Week #89: Occupy the Catbird Seat/Thanksgiving edition

“Hey, everyone! Newt says to ‘Get a job.’ Why didn’t we think of that? We’re Saved!” “Yippie! The jobs are back!” “We’re going home now, Officers. Newt Gingrich just saved us all!”

“Did I ever say I was a Republican? I never said that. Massachusetts? Never heard of it.”

Think it's any coincidence...

Republican Spider Man Sez:

I Need a Job, Not to Be Job

Pottersville in Pictures: Occupy Wall Street edition

Caption Contest

Fox News' Base, at its Finest

OWS: Orwell's Wickedest Scenario

Attention Unemployed

Top 10 Trending Topics on Twitter During #OWS Eviction