Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau of The Fifth Column

I get that they have to be careful with Prior Restraint, but when a law enforcement agency opposes applying a very sensible standard like: You don't get to join the force if you've been posting racist shit online - we have to ask, "Where the fuck have you been getting your recruits?"

Jim Explains

Jim Jeffries

The War On Socialism

Cult45 believes the old formula of assigning scary wording to the Dems is how they'll bulldoze their way through and stay in power.

Call it whatever your fragile little ego requires, but Socialism is a pretty great thing when it shows up and arrests the guy trying to rob your liquor store.

Or when it makes sure a homeless veteran gets a hot meal and enough medical care to keep him from attempting suicide.

Or when it sends a helicopter to rescue your neighbor and his family, who're stranded on their roof because of a flash flood.

Or when it takes some of the burden off some old guy struggling to pay for the 12 or 15 pills he has to take every day to stay alive.

Or when it comes in after a big snow and clears the streets so we can all get to our jobs.

Or when it gathers a few bucks from lots of different people so you can get your car fixed after some dumb fuckin' drunk sideswipes it in the parking lot.

Or or fucking or.

So first off, we have to stop being afraid of words, and start using them to turn this shit back around.

EJ Dionne, WaPo:

“We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”

Political scientist Mason B. Williams cited this cheeky but accurate comment by New Deal lawyer Jerome Frank to make a point easily lost in the new war on socialism that President Trump has launched: Socialism goes back a long way in the United States, and it has taken doses of it to keep the market system alive.

Going back to the late 19th century, Americans and Europeans, socialists and liberal reformers, worked together to humanize the system’s workings and to find creative ways to solve problems capitalism alone couldn’t. This has been well documented in separate books written by historians Daniel T. Rodgers and James T. Kloppenberg. “The New Deal,” Rodgers wrote, “was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”

Capitalism is the closest approximation of the "natural order of things" - and that's good - it works really well. But once in a while, we have to reassert the rules to keep the capitalists from ruining capitalism.

Anyway, the short and sweet version is: I have to take in a number of calories sufficient to fuel the work required to go out and find my next meal. ie: I have to make some kind of profit to sustain my existence.

So I'm a capitalist because god's a capitalist.

But part of the deal - the part always ignored by the Unfettered Free Market pimps - is that god also insists on appropriate regulation to keep things in balance. And also too, god gave me a brain that I can use to sort these things out.

• Blood sugar - Insulin
• Adrenalin - REM sleep
• Shivers - Sweats

These are all really great things, but too much of one &/or not enough of the other makes me - uhh - dead.

Capitalism is a good thing, but without a good regulatory system in place, it becomes exactly the problem this country was founded to defeat.

What's so fuckin' hard to understand about this?