Slouching Towards Oblivion

Friday, August 31, 2012

Condi Rice

"Dr Rice has a Chevron Oil Company tanker named after her.  She's a perfect symbol for the corporatocracy..." --Larry Wilkerson

I can't get the audio player to embed, so you'll hafta to go over to truthdig to listen to the interview.

And BTW - I'd like to know how Col Wilkerson doesn't get better traction for the things he'd trying to get us to hear.

Willard's GOP

What in the blue-eyed buck-naked fuck were they thinking?

Old (and maybe a little tipsy?) white guy arguing with an imaginary Obama.  That was the big electrifying surprise?

Really, Repubs?  You wanted us all talking about Clint Eastwood the day after your convention, and not about the guy you just got done nominating for president?



I can get a little squirmy when Alec Baldwin or Barbara Streisand start diving into it, but that Eastwood schtick was cringe-worthy on an epic scale.

The Mavericks

If McCain and Palin coulda covered Gram Parsons like these guys, I mighta been persuaded to vote for 'em.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Today's Pix







DumFux News

This kinda thing makes me wonder if the very fabric of the cosmos is raveling.

I felt compelled to copy the whole post because I have to think it's bound to be stuffed down the Memory Hole any minute now.

Under the title "Paul Ryan's Speech in 3 Words" at Fox News.com

1. Dazzling
At least a quarter of Americans still don’t know who Paul Ryan is, and only about half who know and have an opinion of him view him favorably.

So, Ryan’s primary job tonight was to introduce himself and make himself seem likeable, and he did that well. The personal parts of the speech were very personally delivered, especially the touching parts where Ryan talked about his father and mother and their roles in his life. And at the end of the speech, when Ryan cheered the crowd to its feet, he showed an energy and enthusiasm that’s what voters want in leaders and what Republicans have been desperately lacking in this campaign.
To anyone watching Ryan’s speech who hasn’t been paying much attention to the ins and outs and accusations of the campaign, I suspect Ryan came across as a smart, passionate and all-around nice guy — the sort of guy you can imagine having a friendly chat with while watching your kids play soccer together. And for a lot of voters, what matters isn’t what candidates have done or what they promise to do —it’s personality. On this measure, Mitt Romney has been catastrophically struggling and with his speech, Ryan humanized himself and presumably by extension, the top of the ticket.
2. Deceiving
On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.
Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.
Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.
Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn't what the president said. Period.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.
Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.
3. Distracting
And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.
Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters.

Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street.

Ryan didn’t mention his numerous votes to raise spending and balloon the deficit when George W. Bush was president.

Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit.

These aspects of Ryan’s resume and ideology are sticky to say the least. He would have been wise to tackle them head on and try and explain them away in his first real introduction to voters. But instead of Ryan airing his own dirty laundry, Democrats will get the chance.
At the end of his speech, Ryan quoted his dad, who used to say to him, “"Son. You have a choice: You can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution."

Ryan may have helped solve some of the likeability problems facing Romney, but ultimately by trying to deceive voters about basic facts and trying to distract voters from his own record, Ryan’s speech caused a much larger problem for himself and his running mate.
Sally Kohn is a writer and Fox News contributor. You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com or on Twitter@sallykohn.

Please, Mr Ryan

...can we try a little harder to keep the Nazi salutes to a minimum?


(my apologies to Mr Godwin)

Condi's Speech

I like Condi Rice - kinda.  I think she's exactly what we needed in the White House and over at the State Dept - in about 1983.  What the fuck, lady?

Fred Kaplan at Slate:
After describing a world of freedom fighters and tyrants, Bush’s former secretary of state and national security adviser lamented, “Everyone asks, where does America stand?’ Indeed that is the question of the hour,” she continued, for when “friends or foes alike don’t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place … We cannot be reluctant to lead, and you cannot lead from behind.”

The solution, she concluded, is to elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. “They know what to do,” she said. “They know that our friends and allies must again be able to trust us.”
First, it’s not at all clear that they have the slightest idea what to do or even—judging from Romney’s disastrously tin-eared trip to Europe this summer—how to think about what to do.

Second (this is the chutzpah part), Condi Rice—a top adviser in the most disastrous, reputation-crippling foreign-policy administration in decades—has no business lecturing anybody on this score.

Finally, Obama has done pretty well in foreign policy, and polls of actual foreigners—including allies—suggest that they think so too.
 Rice was Nat'l Sec Adv when the Daily Brief came out in August 2001, saying "bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The US".  It said exactly that - not buried on page 11; not parenthetically; it wasn't implying anything.  That was the fucking title of the fucking memo.

But when she's asked about it at he 9/11 hearings, she practically says the warning wasn't deemed actionable because it didn't say exactly when and where and how the attack would happen.



Same ol' nonsense - if the facts don't fit your narrative, then just make shit up.

Legitimate Rape

Wanna beat Repubs in an election?  Just remind the voters of what these fucksticks actually say once in a while.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Chick-Fil-A "Promo"

From the makers of Mr Deity.

And BTW - lotsa people try to frame this as a Free Speech issue - it isn't.  This is indeed very much about the 1st Amendment, but the point is not freedom of speech.

The 1st point is that he doesn't get to buy elections for politicians who then attempt to deny citizens equal rights and equal protection under the law.  Dan Cathay uses his money and his position and his access to political power trying to do exactly that.

Second, nobody's trying to silence Dan Cathay or to keep him from having his say - they're just trying to get him to stop being such a colossal douche nozzle.

And finally, this is about denying Mr Cathay the ability to impose his personal religious beliefs on all of us through the force of law.  Sometimes it actually is as simple as it seems.

RNC Pharmaceuticals

Newsroom

Another guilty pleasure from Aaron Sorkin - master of the This-Is-How-It-Oughta-Be TV series.




Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Working It Out

Of Growing Concern And Connecting Dots

When the American Conservative agrees with Rolling Stone (pay wall - which isn't working for me right now, goddam hippies) anyway, when those two agree, we may be seeing a monumental shift in political tectonics.

(hat tip = JG)
The American Conservative:
To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
A book review (LA Times) of The Betrayal of the American Dream, by Don Bartlett and Jim Steele that ran in The San Jose Mercury News:
Since the 1980s, a host of politicos, both Republican and Democrat, have sold their business-friendly reforms to the American people in the name of economic efficiency: Corporate America saves, and we all save! But the real winner, Bartlett and Steele argue, is the American "ruling class." Among other things, the economic elite have quietly, methodically and ruthlessly restructured the tax code on behalf of the wealthiest Americans, the authors say. Tax cuts on unearned income and carried interest allow the richest of the rich to pay less income tax with each passing year.
Put that together with NPR producing a whole segment around it:
"Everyone loves Apple. Apple makes nothing in this country anymore," Bartlett tells NPR's Steve Inskeep as an example. "But then, look over here on the other side and you have Intel, and their plants are massive, and they are good-paying jobs. They continue to invest in this country. And what we need in this country now are more Intels and fewer Apples."
For models of how to boost manufacturing and job growth in the U.S., Barlett and Steele look abroad. "Germany has had a fairly good record in recent years," Steele says. When the global financial meltdown happened, Germany adopted a policy that subsidized companies in order to help them keep employees on the rolls. "It's one of the reasons the German unemployment rate is much lower than in this country," he says.
Is anybody still really wondering why it just feels like there's something wrong goin' on?
 

And that graph is the rather generous way of looking at the disparity of income growth after taxes.  There's plenty of data suggesting Real Income has gone down for a huge percentage of American workers - especially when you look at the number of people who've been shifted into Salaried positions, and who're putting in longer hours and getting no overtime pay for it.

Here's a fun fact:
In 1979, there were more Americans employed in manufacturing - in this country - than there had ever been before or have been since then.

We're gettin' fucked with our pants on, guys.

It's Not Unusual

Repubs needed desperately to get rid of Todd Akin as a way of putting a nice looking slipcover over their extremely extremist extremism.  A bunch of 'em kicked Akin in the head as hard as they could trying to make us think he was some kind of outlier; some crazy uncle who just showed up uninvited (and drunk) at Thanksgiving dinner or somethin'.  They need us to see him as not one of their own - and definitely not of their own making.

As it turns out (and as many have suspected all along), Todd Akin is no real exception.  (hat tip =  Blue Virginia)

via MorningCall - in a post about a GOP candidate for US Senate named Tom Smith:
When a reporter asked Smith Monday how he'd tell a daughter or a granddaughter who'd gotten pregnant as a result of a sexual assault that she'd have to keep the baby, the Republican nominee told reporters that he'd "lived something similar to that with my own family, and she chose life. I commend her for that. She knew my views, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have to … she chose the way I thought."
--and--
Smith quickly clarified, adding, "Don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape,"
Smith then appeared to imply that having a child out of wedlock was similar to rape, but then quickly added, "No no no, but put yourself in a father’s position, yes. It is similar. This isn’t … but back to the original, I’m pro-life period.”
So it's pretty obvious that guys like Akin and this knot head Smith aren't the aberrations the GOP leadership is telling us they are - because oddly enough, guys like Mike Huckabee (arguably among the leaders of the party) are charging to Akin's defense, saying he's just articulating a core value of mainstream Republicans.

I think it's clear the GOP has a huge problem.  They've been pimpin' the wingnuts for 30 years to get themselves elected, only to turn around and punk 'em once they're in office.  Well, that worm's been turning at an accelerating pace for awhile now, and it could get real messy real quick.

Hurricane Isaac is a good thing, BTW, because it provides an excuse for the GOP to take this fight "indoors" - and we all know how much political parties love to make a show of their "open and inclusive process" while all the deals are made in private, and the outcome of every "vote" is known well ahead of time.

Anyway, I don't know what signals to watch for, but I'm betting this will get more interesting as it goes along.

Monday, August 27, 2012

The Dog Whistle

We hear a lot about the various dog whistle language that (particularly - tho' not exclusively) the GOP guys use to speak in public about the Southern Strategy items that can no longer be discussed openly.  It must be a constant struggle to come up with new ways to say "lazy scary uppity nigger" without actually saying the words themselves.

That's how we get to this latest one - Romney's "joke" about nobody asking for his birth certificate.  Which, BTW, was really just another of the standard plays intended to make a Democrat seem foreign and exotic and non-American blah blah blah.

Well, I've been wondering about all this and there's another one making the rounds.  And maybe it's just too subtle (these things do escape me with an annoying frequency), but it suddenly occurred to me that it's exactly the same kind of crap.

And here it is:












This junk goes right along with the big fluff the wingnuts have been putting up about "Obama's Victory Lap" and congratulating himself on the raid that got bin Laden etc.

And it's almost brilliant.  It downplays the facts:
  • In spite of Dick Cheney's warnings, we didn't "get hit again" even tho' we elected a Democrat.
  • As a political asset, Junior Bush decided Osama bin Laden was worth more alive than dead, so he stopped even looking for him - which left it up to Obama to get him, which of course he did, which now means that the "Repubs are better on Nat'l Security" thing is exposed as being total bullshit.
...but the main thing is this:  "conservatives" are pretending Obama is some kind of  braggart because they're trying to invite us to make a base-level inference - they want us to picture "the swaggering buck, struttin' his stuff, and showin' off his prowess".  

The bin Laden issue is the "My Dick's Bigger Than Your Dick" debate, and suddenly it's too painfully obvious that the GOP dick is a lot smaller than they've been telling us it is, and - holy fuck - the Democrat's a black guy.  This is gonna be real bad.

As Freudian and repressed as most of these bozos appear to be, I just don't have any real doubts about this.

Buncha sick fucks.

Packaging Paul Ryan

LA Times explodes the bootstrap myth that's being woven around Paul Ryan.  The guy is not quite the typical SIlver Spoon Legacy Fuck I love to hate, but damned close.
And yet Ryan, 42, was born into one of the most prominent families in Janesville, Wis., the son of a successful attorney and the grandson of the top federal prosecutor for the western region of the state. Ryan grew up in a big Colonial house on a wooded lot, and his extended clan includes investment managers, corporate executives and owners of major construction companies.
The seeming contradiction appears to have its roots in a family crisis in 1986, when at the age of 16, Ryan discovered his father dead of a heart attack.
The death of Paul Murray Ryan forced the family to make adjustments. Ryan’s mother went back to work. And Ryan took up jobs, as well….
But there was also more to it than work. Ryan’s rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions…
By the time Ryan had entered Congress in 1999 at the age of 28 and filed his first disclosure statement, he reported assets between $167,000 and $1.3 million, owned a home and had three rental units.
No more Roosevelts, no more Kennedys, no more Rockefellers, no more Bushes, no more Clintons etc etc etc.

No Dynasties, no Legacies, no Entitled Aristocracy.  Not here.  Not now.  Not ever.

Re-Inventing Willard

"I stand by what I said - whatever it was." --Mitt Romney

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Educate Yourself

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Uh Oh

From Up With Chris Hayes yesterday:
They're talking about what a party platform is, and what it should be, and what the candidate's obligations end up being regarding the various interest groups and constituencies that have to come together to hammer out the platform; which is the same weird mixture of sometimes competing groups of voters (ie Donors) you have to put together when you run for the only National Office there is.



MSNBC Video: Romney adviser says GOP activists will have ”very little” purchase on a Romney presidency

Didja hear it, Wingnuts?  Did you hear it, Independents?

Romney's gambling that he'll pick up enough Indies to offset the votes he's losing on the far right.  This seems like the kind of cynical calculus that gets worked on a regular basis, but with these Romney guys it's like they've decided it's not necessary even to try to disguise it anymore.  So get ready 'cuz here comes another Etch-A-Sketch moment.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Could Be A Good Thing

Andrea Seabrook (NPR's Capitol Hill Reporter) just couldn't take the shit any more.

So she split, and started DecodeDC:
"I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say.

...

We need to stop coddling lawmakers, stop buying their red team, blue team narrative and ask harder questions of them."



Hoping it works out great - worried that it won't.

The bit on NPR from a few weeks ago:



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Coupla Toons



Today's Line

The best line I've heard in a while:

"(Mitt Romney's) so stiff, every time I watch him, it feels like I'm witnessing gay porn."
--John Fugelsang

Friday, August 24, 2012

GOP's New Logo


More Fun With Guns

Breaking now is the story of the latest example of how safe everybody is in the US because of easy availability of guns.


Returns

Can we talk a little about ROI here for just a sec?

Tampa has spent $2 Million on surveillance cameras and other security thingies, and they expect the GOP convention to pump about $175 Million into the local economy.
ROI = 8,750%

Charlotte says they should get an Econ Bump of about $136 Million, after spending $766K beefing up their security systems.
ROI = 17,750%

Even in the very important Paranoia Sector, the Dems are a much better and smarter investment.

Because these "conservatives" are lying sacks of shit.

(hat tip = MoJo)

Akingate

Dems really shouldn't try to make Todd Akin the GOP Poster Boy, but then again, they probably should.  It's a tough call.  You should never let people forget about a fundamental failure of your opposition, but you also don't need to give "the independents" a reason to propagate the false equivalency of "both sides do it".

It's pretty hard to play this one - and ya gotta play it just right, but I think it's legit to demand a straight answer from every Repub candidate about where he stands on the Todd Akin question.

Another one from Addicting Info - this time making the case for defining the GOP as the party of Akin:
As has been repeated, ad nauseam, pregnancy by rape is not rare in the slightest (about 5% of rapes result in pregnancy. There is no worldview in which this is rare) and the very idea that a woman’s body would “shut the whole thing down” is not supported by any real science.
But that wasn’t the part which was supposed to remain secret.  Republicans mangle science on a regular basis. It’s kind of their calling card. No, the part that set off the firestorm from the right was the phrase “legitimate rape.” The idea that women are whores that have it coming is both widespread and deeply embedded among conservative politicians. It used to be a fringe belief and that is why Republicans rarely spoke out against making exceptions for women who were raped or the victims of incest. These days, the fringe is the mainstream so now? No more exceptions! But how to justify punishing women who have already been violated? Take away their victimization. Redefine “rape” so any woman not physically beaten to the ground wasn’t really raped. This is the bill Akin tried to pass last year. This is what Akin really meant and he did not misspeak in the slightest other than to forget to lie.

The New Navy

From Addicting Info:
Since its launch 18 months ago, the USS Independence has come down with a severe case of corrosion. You see, the hull construction is a composite structure with some components utilizing steel, and other components using aluminum. If you expose an item made up of both steel and aluminum to an environment containing an electrolyte, such as seawater, it produces galvanic corrosion...
So the US Navy will be able to continue America's totally righteous domination of the world - anywhere, any time - except in places where they have oceans.

Today's Pix







Thursday, August 23, 2012

Ridicule Is A Good Tool

America is a pretty weird place sometimes.  We have a tendency to see popularity and call it virtue.  eg: In the early 70s, no car was more popular than the Ford Pinto, and we assumed it was a high quality product because it was so popular - ignoring the poorly-kept secret that the Pinto was experiencing a high rate of failure which included the propensity to explode on a fairly regular basis whenever any other car crashed into it from behind.

I get the feeling a lot of people "got conservative" and started voting Republican just because they believed it to be the popular thing to do - and must therefore be the right thing.  All that hippie shit was cool for a while when we were younger, but eventually, you gotta "grow up and think like an adult" - "ya gotta live in the real world".  So that's what we did in the 80s and 90s.

But now (like always I think), things are shifting back in the other direction.  It's not nearly as cool to live in that libertarian cocoon - we're getting back to an understanding that I can't just be myself; having no regard for anybody else; demanding the whole world adjust to my needs and accommodate me.  That's the false premise that forms the basis of what passes for being "conservative" now.

So, at some point it becomes obvious enough that the zeitgeist has shifted enough to make ridiculing the "conservative" point of view a very effective agent for change.

Thank you, Todd Akin (R-Pluto) for kinda putting it over the edge for us.





The Satirical Political Report

The Freepers are having fits too.
The denial is so thick and sticky you could spread it on ice.

Y'know What Really Gripes My Ass?

This is what really gripes my ass:
A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1.
Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote.
Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives. Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will:
  • They’re too busy.
  • They aren’t excited about either candidate.
  • Their vote doesn’t count.
The first 2 excuses are just the typical high-school-fuck-around bullshit that way too many people seem never to outgrow, but that last one is an absolute triumph of self-defeating circularity.

Here's the thing, kids - the only way your vote doesn't count is if you don't vote.

How fuckin' stupid do you get?

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Laundry Day








Say What?

(via Democratic Underground)


This is what you call "clarification"?

As Virginia's Governor (Vaginal Bob) McDonnell was chairing the GOP Platform Committee meetings, adopting the Anti-Choice plank that reaffirms the official policy of the Republican Party (and commits their candidates) to pushing for an Amendment to the US Constitution intended to outlaw all abortions, we have Reince Priebus all over the joint on TV saying Romney doesn't agree with it.

'Scuse me, Mr Priebus; a question, sir:  What's the point of putting in all that work on a platform, if you then choose somebody who doesn't agree with that platform to be your party's national leader?

After 30 years of saying one thing (ban abortion), and doing as little as possible once they get elected, maybe the jig is finally up.  The Rubes are kinda hip to the tricks now - and it looks like the GOP is starting to implode.

Guns And Wildfires

Just tossin' it out there.

From MoJo:
Indeed, target shooters are becoming something of a scourge across the rain-starved West, and especially in Utah, where humans have caused more than 500 wildfires this summer. At least 22 of those have been set by people shooting targets, tin cans and what-not off rocks in the scrub brush, where sparks from the bullets hitting rocks have collided with bone-dry brush and caused massive fires. One large fire blamed on target shooters squeezing off rounds near the town dump in Saratoga Springs, home of tea party congressional candidate Mia Love, caused close to 9,000 people to be evacuated, and forced Love to miss an event with soon-to-be vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who'd been raising money on her behalf.

Key & Peele

Mr Obama and his Anger Translator.

(hat tip = Addicting Info)

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Monday, August 20, 2012

Amen, Brother

Roger Ebert on the Separation of Church and State:
I do not propose to discuss the issues of abortion, birth control and in vitro fertilization. I'm more concerned with those who would pass laws enforcing their religious beliefs. They apparently see no conflict between the laws they propose and the separation of Church and State.
What the First Amendment provides is that each and every American is entitled to follow the teachings of the church of their choice, or for that matter no church at all. What if your beliefs, or your church, permit abortion or in vitro fertilization? Are you now to become a criminal? The problem with such laws is that they would legislate the personal religious beliefs of the candidates.
It's interesting to note that Ryan/Romney (and their wingnut supporters) are pushing the issues of Women's Reproductive Health (eg) as "issues of morality", glossing over the simple fact that they'd surely tell us they get their morality from their religious beliefs - if the Press Poodles ever bothered to ask them.

The bible may be a fair place to start - and it's quite possibly the repository of the very best thinking of its time - but the probability has to be extremely high that people have come up with some stuff that's a tad more up-to-date; and at least as likely to make better sense for me than something written 8000 years ago.



Sunday, August 19, 2012

Wait - What?

So if it shows up in USA Today (with a feeder from the front page, no less), then it's like official? Like it's obvious and everybody's known about it all along?  Like McPaper hasn't ever helped the "conservative" dipwads peddle bullshit about how "the jury's still out on AGW", and how "smart people can disagree about the causes"?
Humans have already changed Earth's atmosphere by releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and similar heat-trapping gases from power plants, vehicles and other sources, scientists say. The resulting rise in air and sea-surface temperatures, along with melting glaciers and land ice, will push up sea levels globally by more than one-and-a-half feet by 2100.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Self

Your homework assignment for this weekend:

Starting at about 25:00, try not to think about Leo Strauss or Freddie Hayek (an elite group controlling the herd's animal instincts).

Part 1


Part 2
(at about 23:15 - getting the consumer to substitute your product for what she really wants - "nearly 4 inches longer...", and the lady goes "ooooooh!")
Nuthin' but brilliant.


Part 3


Part 4

Friday, August 17, 2012

Today's Pix








Watermelon Deluxe

(You're prob'ly gonna want your 10 minutes back)



Sorry.

Bad Lip Reading

I've missed these guys a lot lately.

Paulie Boy, We Hardly Know Ye

From The Atlantic:
...Ryan is both a product of and poster boy for the political city. And it is symptom of the corruption and divisiveness of contemporary Washington that a man who has not passed a single piece of substantive legislation, ever, can be hailed as a substantive and deep thinker and the voice of budgetary sanity while racking up an actual record consisting overwhelmingly of renaming post offices, honoring Ronald Reagan and Wisconsin, providing for the issuance of commemorative coins, and increasing the deficit through massive tax cuts.
And guess, what - it won't matter that Ryan is a phony; that his record is a phony.  He's the empty suit that the RNC puppet masters are looking for - a guy with just enough function in his being to sign his name to laws that get written by lobbyists, negotiated by industry shills planted on congressional staffs, and sold to us by advertising paid for by the anonymous campaign donors who will benefit most from the law itself, while "elections" are little more than the kind of corporate meeting where management says they're inviting our valuable input but are really just opportunities for us to agree with decisions that have already been made.

Welcome back to the 18th century.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

My Friend, Ed

Ed Freeman is a professor at The Darden School of Business, UVa in Charlottesville.  He teaches Business Ethics (insert oxymoron joke here), and his expertise is quite probably needed more right now than at any other time in my memory.

I missed this when it came out, which I wonder about less than I wonder about why this is the kind of thing that shows up fairly prominently in the foreign press, but never makes the cut here in the US.  I do in deed wonder.

Forbes India:
Business has to be a good citizen in the community and society. The old way of business presupposes the purpose of business is to make profits. This is akin to believing that making red blood cells or breathing is the purpose of life. Yes, we must have red blood cells, just as businesses must make profits. But the purpose of business is usually determined by a passionate entrepreneur chasing a dream to change the world.

Today's Quote


Connections(?)



From The Raw Story:
Michael L. Leisner, the man who became world famous for an anti-LGBT protest gone wrong, has died suddenly at the age of 65. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the father of four abruptly passed away while sitting in his car, waiting for his two sons to finish their Saturday afternoon tennis practice.
I can feel sympathy for the guy's family and friends of course - but, here's a picture of all the fucks I give about this booger-eatin', bug-fuckin' jag-off:

It Just Gets Funner

Rhetorical violence and revenge fantasies are "just talk", so there's "no way we can tie the things that are said and the images that are seen (coming from the Right Wing of the spectrum) to the violent behavior of individuals who're obviously acting of their own accord."

If I buy the arguments of Conservative Apologists, then every time there's a shooting spree, I can only shake my head and wonder where the shooter could possibly have gotten the crazy idea to start shooting people.

Heard alla dat before.

A few things.  First, violent imagery cuts a lot of ways that aren't predictable and can't be controlled.  It might be a good idea to remind the TheoCons about that "reap what you sow" thing.

Second, I suspect we're gonna hear a lot about "See?  Liberals shoot people too", so we'll get bogged down by the usual bullshit of "both sides do it".

Third - As bad as it is for the victims and their families, for the broader society it's not really a huge problem until "the other side" starts shootin' back.

We've been in a slow-motion Civil War Redux for a good 50 years, and I'm hoping we haven't just seen an important escalation.

From Addicting Info:
The incident is being treated as domestic terrorism. What Corkins intended to do if he had succeeded in infiltrating the building is unknown and what his motivations were outside of disagreeing with the FRC’s policies is unclear.
Rebutting the inevitable False Equivalence (Media Matters):
SPLC Intelligence Project director Mark Potok attributes this dramatic increase in right-wing extremist activity to three factors: "Resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government's handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities."

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

W




































Speaking of missing Ol' Shrub - which night does he speak at the Repub Convention?

Is that different from the schedule of speakers and guests in 2008?

Head Wind

Wanna know why "public schools are failing"?  Lotsa of reasons actually, but here's a good one (kentucky.com):
Another committee member, Rep. Ben Waide, R-Madisonville, said he had a problem with evolution being an important part of biology standards.
“The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up,” Waide said. “My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.”
And another'n:

"I think we are very committed to being able to take Kentucky students and put them on a report card beside students across the nation," Givens said. "We're simply saying to the ACT people we don't want what is a theory to be taught as a fact in such a way it may damage students' ability to do critical thinking."

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/08/14/2298914/gop-lawmakers-question-standards.html#storylink=cpy

(hat tip = Little Green Footballs)

It just amazes me that we feel the need to send armies halfway around the world to fight The Taliban, when we have our own homegrown version right here in places like Kentucky.

And while I'm on the subject of Theocracy, here's what I wonder:  If your religion is so great and your god is so powerful, why do you need an earthly government to force it on us?

Whoa

When you've got big bad evil Phil (Mr Librul) Donahue arguing in favor of religion and against the "arrogance of atheism"; while the spiritual mentor and intellectual idol of the Theocons' darling du jour is telling us how stupid religion is - well shoot; the whole world is no longer just a half-bubble off plumb, Bubba.  It's up-fuckin'-side down.



This could get really interesting.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Ryan's Medicare "Plan"

Repub spokesnut goes on and on about how people over 55 right now shouldn't even be part of the discussion, because Ryan's plan doesn't affect us at all.  It's all about how Repubs give younger people a choice in their coverage plans, and gee golly, isn't having a choice a wonderful thing? Wait just a fuckin' minute - if having a choice is the be all and end all, how come I don't get a choice, asshole?



And then, she lurches into the "un-elected 15-member panel that gets to decide whether or not her dad gets a particular procedure"...? What the fuck was that? Are we trying to dog-whistle the Death Panels again?

It's A Wonderment

Ever stop to think why Repubs are always trying to cut the funding necessary for the CDC to study Gun Violence as a Public Health issue?


























...because the NRA is lying - all the fucking time.



If Barack Obama...


Workin' In The USA






The Pro-Life Candidate

via Addicting Info:
In an article published by the National Catholic Reporter, an independent news source, civil and canon attorney and Duquesne School of Law Professor Nicholas Cafardi deems President Obama the most pro-life candidate in the 2012 Presidential election. Sorry Romney supporters.
--and--
...even though President Obama is pro-choice, by providing hundreds of millions of dollars through the Affordable Care Act to help poor women, Obama is actually giving more women the ability to decide against abortion, therefore cutting the number of abortions.
--and--
...Romney is running on what he calls a pro-life platform. But any honest analysis of the facts shows the situation is much more complicated than that. For example, Obama’s Affordable Care Act does not pay for abortions. In Massachusetts, Romney’s health care law does.
--and--
But let’s not stop there. Obama does not financially profit from the abortion industry. Romney does. Bain Capital, in the time Romney was listed as its legal head and even when he was attending Bain board meetings, was an owner of Stericycle, a major disposer of the dead bodies of aborted children in the United States.
Repubs claim they stand for a lot of things - claims that prove almost totally false almost every time anybody looks too closely.

They're against Government Expansion?
For 35 years, Government has grown more when Repubs are in charge than it's done under Dems.

They're in favor of spending cuts?
Spending has increased every year - even when they've held majorities in both houses; and even as they've jammed thru their giant tax cut schemes.

They're Pro-Family?
They vote nearly unanimously against anything that's designed to help families.
--Medical and Family Leave Act
--Planned Parenthood
--Minimum wage
--Affirmative Action
--Head Start
--WIC
--Lilly Ledbetter Act
--ACA
--Unemployment Insurance
--Pell Grants
--Student loan guarantee
--Public school funding

and on, and on, and on

These people have no soul and no honor.  Fire them.

Today's Pix