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Mr Giuliani seems to think speaking the truth isn't wholesome.  He's saying having an opinion, stating an opinion, and defending that opinion is OK but only in places and/or circumstances prescribed by - who exactly?  The masters?  The Ruling Class?  Some blobby "majority" or "the American people"?  It's always some vaguely-defined image of an America that can be changed to fit whatever narrative they're flacking right now, but it always always always comes down to inviting the inference of a kindly white hegemony in a soft-focus past where all the black people were the good kind of black people who knew  how lucky they were to spend their lives cleaning our toilets and then conveniently dying with nothing to show for it - long before we had to think maybe we should pay them back for any of it.

The authoritarian mindset is always trying to tell everybody to shut up; get with the program; and don't say or do anything that might make anybody feel uncomfortable with the way the boss needs people to believe things are. And one of the main tools is Divide-n-Conquer. They work hard to pit us against each other to make sure we go on paying their rent, while looking for any opportunity to point and say, (eg) "Hey, look - Beyonce is being divisive".

They talk "Unity", but if you make any attempt to get people together, they'll be happy you've given them another chance to slag you by saying you're the one "tearing this country apart".

We're being fucked with like we've got tails.

Bowden's Trump

It's not a long piece, so I just grabbed the whole thing.

From Vanity Fair, by Mark Bowden:

Over a long weekend on assignment for Playboy Magazine, Mark Bowden found that behind the garish Trump façade lies only more ugliness. --MARK BOWDEN

I spent a long, awkward weekend with Donald Trump in November 1996, an experience I feel confident neither of us would like to repeat.

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.

He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.

I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.

“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the time, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

Yikes

So - should we be afraid for ourselves?   Or is it that we should be afraid of ourselves?

Isn't that pretty much what it comes down to though?  Politicians in general (and Repubs mostly in particular) are eager to peddle the panic.  They know how to play on our fears to keep us divided, and to use that division to get what their big money donors are paying them to get.  

But over time, we become conditioned to the fear, which starts to drive a trend towards ideological purity, which always gets us out to the logical extreme in one big fuckin' hurry.  ie: Everybody's a traitor to the cause except you and me, and I'm beginning to have my doubts about you.

We can have some fun pointing and laughing, but this shit gets real if we don't smarten up and stand in its way before it has a chance to reach critical mass.

And BTW - in case it's not obvious enough, lemme state the obvious for you - smart guys working for John Kasich put this together using Trump's nutty-tude to make Kasich look like something other than the radical god-knobbing authoritarian freak that he actually is.  It's not like Kasich doesn't think very much along the same lines as Trump does, it's just that Kasich doesn't say that shit out loud.

And of course, that's kinda the problem - Trump gets a boatload of support for being "Anti-PC".  But here's the word on that one, guys.  It's Politically Incorrect to say certain things because they're shitty things to say. And since words comprise the expression of thought, PC becomes not much more than a general attempt to get you to stop thinking shitty thoughts about people.  

Putting it another way - if you can learn not to talk stoopid, it'll help you learn how not to be stoopid, and then we can stop calling you stoopid, and then you can stop bitchin' about how everybody's always callin' ya stoopid.  Deal?  

And BTW also too - Since the "voting" in Ohio appears to be nearly as honest and forthright as it was in Noriega's Panama, I'll go out on a limb and say this: Assuming Kasich's still in this thing next March - and even if he's polling behind by 20+ points - he'll somehow manage to eke out a landslide upset.   Just sayin' - again.  

I guess my main problem now is deciding how to defend myself from accusations of peddling a little fear my-own-bad-self.

What We Already Knew

So there's this new study out of Yale, published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that says Climate Change Denial is all about a Cash-For-Comments system used to manufacture an "opposing view".  

And what that allows is for the political operators to separate voters along imaginary ideological fault lines, which makes it easier to keep us bitching at each other rather than voting to send the Coin-Operated Politicians back home so they can open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to have - which would be a much closer career match for their skill sets while still meaning most of them would be vastly over-employed.

Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.

Like I said - that's not something we didn't know.  But I'll take it as a positive sign anyway, because while it's not likely to convince the hard core rubes, it's one more bullet point that rebuts the Both-Sides crap and might be useful convincing the Hipster-ish I'm-Too-Cool-To-Vote crowd to get up off their suspended-adolescence butts and realize they've got skin in this game whether they like it (or whether they even realize it) or not.

hat tip = truthout

Big Change Maybe

The faintest of wry smiles comes across my face when I find something that even barely hints at the prospect of the death of Commodification coming sooner than expected.

From a short bit at NASDAQ earlier this month:

The critical natural gas transit country, Ukraine, reached a supply agreement in the last week of September with the EU’s largest fuel supply partner: Russia.

One could argue that this agreement could actually have come too late. Natural gas supply to Europe heading into winter 2015 seems more secure than ever before, a sharp contrast to the icy winters of 2006 and 2009, in which Russia cut off natural gas supply to Eastern Europe over a conflict with the Ukraine. The following factors have turned the European natural gas market from a ‘’beggars can’t be choosers” into a true “buyers’ market’’.

And this from CNBC today:

Kilduff said gas was being hit by expectations a record amount of natural gas will soon be in storage. Weekly data show gas storage at 3.81 trillion cubic feet, and the record is 3.929 trillion cubic feet in November 2012.

The Energy Information Agency predicts a peak of 3.956 trillion this November, said Kilduff, who projects it to reach more than 4 trillion. He said the most recent weather report shows above-normal temperatures for the eastern region, a significant user of heating fuels

The oversupply is also causing problems. "The producing region is at a record storage level," said McGillian. He said if more gas is forced into the spot market, the price will drop even more.

But then again, I can't ignore that this is part of the little political game we love to play.  So instead of taking any real steps toward understanding that resources are limited and we have to figure out how to move ourselves past the self-destructive nonsense of Chop-It-Down-Burn-It-Up-Dig-It-Up-Burn-It-Down, here's what I think is most likely to happen.

Nothing.

Not much that's different anyway.  And prob'ly nothing but the usual and customary crap of tax-payers gettin' stuck with the check.  We more or less bank-rolled the drive for all this "energy" - sweetheart tax incentives and access to public land; roads and utilities; and sometimes direct subsidies; not to mention having the watchdogs conveniently look the other way while Halliburton (eg) gets to poison the living fuck outa everything.  Plus, we get to pay for some pretty high-priced consultants and PR pricks to make the products of USAmerica Inc more palatable to "foreign markets" etc etc etc.  And now that those markets are reacting to a supply glut (that we manufactured btw), guess what all those high-rollin' entrepreneurial self-made macho assholes are gonna do next.  I think we can pretty much count on 'em to go crying to "their" congress critters that the sugar bowl's empty now and they just can't possibly be expected to take it all on their-own-poor-selfless-selves to clean up the ginormous fucking mess they made while soaking the last dime's worth of life from one more patch of a dying planet.

We can bumper-sticker-ize it: Privatized profits and Socialized costs, but here's the kicker - since they did it on our dime (and because nobody's complaining about 2-dollar gas), they can make a lot of us believe they did it all because we asked them to do it.

And they can make it stick - shit, we'll pay 'em to do it.

And they can do it all over again next time.

No soul and no honor.

Today In Stoopid

The Super Blood Moon got some folks pretty spooked, I guess:

The AP said it’s unclear how many Mormons are buying into the end-of-the-world prophecy, but leaders of the church were concerned enough to issue the statement assuring them that the world is not about to end.

Preparedness is one of the tenets of the Mormon faith, which believes that a period of disasters and tribulations will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ. Many Mormon-built homes in Utah and other southwestern states feature special built-in shelves for rice, flour, canned goods and other nonperishable supplies.

The pronouncement by the church, said Patrick Mason — chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University in California — indicates that fear of the End Times must be fairly pervasive among Mormon families if church elders felt the need to address it.

“For it to filter up to that level and for them to decide to send out a policy letter means that they felt there was something they needed to tamp down on,” said Mason.

Sometimes I wonder why you'd spend time or effort telling these pea-brains to get ready for the shit when ya gotta know you'll have to talk 'em down off the ledge when they get all worked up and thinking the shit you've been "warning" them about is here and real and happening.

But then I remember this is all part of the big bamboozle anyway, so it's just the cost of doin' bidness.

These particular believers are so thoroughly hornswoggled they're wearing magic underwear.  So I'm thinking it comes as no surprise to church execs when they hear the faithful are willing to buy into some bullshit about the moon.  And of course it's easily debunkable, but why would the rubes not believe it when they've been very well taught to be totally committed to staying ignorant and superstitious?

Satan's greatest trick was convincing us that the people who insist that Satan exists will deal honestly with us if we just give them enough money.

And I don't really have to make this last little connection for anybody, right?

Wherefore, Repubs?

There's no Republican Party anymore.  There's just a string of independent contract franchisees, looking for the opportunity to make a tidy commission on helping their billionaire sugar daddies take their pound of flesh.

These guys know a coupla important things about USAmerica Inc.

First, they know this joint's net worth is something like $124 Trillion.

One Hundred-Twenty-Four. Trillion. Dollars

Second, they know the hard part is done; we're convinced we have the requisite imaginary disease(s)...

• Immigrants-Gone-Wild
• FEMA Camps and Gun-Grabbers
• Muslims hiding under our beds waiting for a chance to kill us and rape our house pets
• Scary Black People
• Foreign Competition
• etc etc etc

...so all they have to do is look for a chance to sell us the miracle cure; the make-believe crutches - and some snake oil to take the edge off tomorrow morning when we get that nagging feeling that this is the same old shit - zealotry dressed up to look like common sense - and that we fall for it every fuckin' time.

This isn't an election - it's not even a hostile takeover - it's a leveraged buyout to be staged during the run-up to the Stockholders' Meeting next November.  And guess who's gonna end up holding the bag when it's done?

These people have no soul and no honor.

Is We Learnin'?

Some of us just never get tired of being played for suckers.

Police charged 45-year-old Scott Lattin with making a false report after arresting him at his home in Whitney, Texas. While the suspect denied the accusation during a brief on-camera interview, his arrest warrant stated that he admitted to damaging the truck for “insurance reasons.”

Lattin organized the fundraiser after claiming last week that vandals spray-painted “Black Lives Matter” across his truck as well as “F*ck the police” because he had decorated the vehicle with the phrase “Police Lives Matter” in support of Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth, who was shot and killed at a gas station last month. Both authorities and conservatives have attempted to connect Goforth’s death with the movement, seemingly without any evidence.

Go, Bernie

Try to look past the very simple and very obvious fact that Mark Halperin is an Authoritarian Corporate Propagandist trying to pass himself off as a Political Journalist.

We didn't just get into this mess yesterday, so we're prob'ly not gonna be able to fix it all by tomorrow.

But more specifically - on the usual crap that "conservatives" are always tossing around about "Balanced Budget From Day One", here's your line, Bernie:  "While you can definitely spend your way to oblivion, you can't save your way back to prosperity."  

But while we're working on getting The System back up and running, we have to get a coupla things thru our thick skulls.

First and foremost - stop giving these guys the benefit of the doubt. 

--It's not like Halperin doesn't know what makes the economy work.  

--And it's not like Jeb isn't aware of the fact that Supply Side is bullshit.  

--We have to stop thinking Ted Cruz is trying to practice some good old fashioned democratic self-governance, but he's just not very good at it; or that we simply disagree on the questions of how we should go about moving towards that more perfect union.

I look at what the GOP has been doing for 30+ years, and I get a very bad feeling very deep in my gut.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Today's Lesson

...in household budgeting and money management - just a reminder about the money we're spending on gasoline.

We'll start with the basics, and say you drive a good medium size car getting about 25 mpg, and your daily commute is a short one at 20 miles per day; plus you go to the gym, and there's daycare/school, and you make groceries, and you go to the dry cleaners, and you run all the other errands in a very well-planned kinda way etc etc etc, which brings your total monthly drive to about 1100 miles.

@ 25 mpg, you're burning 44 gallons of gas, which is gonna cost you about $90 right now because gas is down around $2.05 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.

But hang on a dang minute.  You also get to pay your share of the tax breaks, and the sweetheart loan terms, and all the other subsidies that American oil companies get in various forms in order to help them provide us with all that "cheap" fuel.  

Then you get to add in your share of what it costs for the US Military to protect our (ie: Halliburton's) vital interests, the VA bennies for the vets, the increased healthcare and insurance costs, and the cost of lost productivity for the millions of us who get sick and die every year because of the toxic shit left over from drilling, pumping, storing, shipping, retailing and burning that crap and and and.

This "help" suddenly gets pretty expensive, even tho' it's next to impossible to get anybody who actually knows what the real amount is to say straight up what the real amount is.  Ya gotta figure it's pretty bad when it seems like so many people are going so far outa their way to keep us from getting at the answers.

Estimates on all this help run as low as about $40 Billion (which everybody knows is the PR Consultant Bullshit Number), and as high as $500 Billion to $1 Trillion per year, (which some think is the bullshit radical hippie pinko number).

But even if the low estimate is ridiculously low and the high end is ridiculously high, the ugly truth is that the gallon of gas you bought for $2.05?  That gallon of gas cost you more like 8 bucks.

8 fucking dollars for a gallon of gasoline

But hey - all that other stuff - that renewable stuff - c'mon, man - that's really expensive, and it's new, so it's scary.  And ya know what happens when we get scared?  That 8-dollar gas might have to go up to about 10.  Don't fuck with your betters.

Other Trump's Money

Policy Mic:

The root cause of Donald Trump's astonishing confidence is that he's better at making money than you. Behind nearly every imperious comment he makes about America's inability "to win anymore" is a sense of self-worth derived from his considerable net worth: nearly $3 billion, by Bloomberg's count.

Trump's ability to amass wealth is at the heart of his bid for the White House. It serves as the entire basis of his credibility on any matter he'd have to manage as president, whether related to the economy or immigration or foreign policy. If Trump can negotiate his way onto a list of the wealthiest people in the world, his argument goes, then he should be able to negotiate effectively on behalf of the American people.

But just how savvy of a businessman is Trump? Apparently not quite as savvy as he makes himself out to be, according to a new analysis of his finances by S.V. Dáte at the National Journal. Had Trump never gone into the business world and simply invested his share of his father's real estate company into a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks in the 1970s, he'd be worth around the same amount that he is today. It's a reminder that the biggest reason he has so much wealth, as Vox's Dylan Matthews points out, is because he was born into it.

So let's look at the actual mechanism of this whole American Dream / Meritocracy setup, shall we?

1. pick rich parents
2. sit on your ass and get somebody else to do the work

This is how it was for the 40,000 years before about 1789.  And apparently that's how it went right on being this whole time - I guess we just pretended it was something else for a while because it still fucking works that way.  

So please tell me again, what exactly are we supposed to be the "exception" to?

So Here I Am Again

Enjoyed my time away from most things.  I'm pretty much all moved into the new joint now,  so if I haven't lost everybody yet, I'll just try to slide on up in here and get back to pretending I'm making some kinda headway.

Listening to a Car Talk rerun last week while I was off in search of a laundromat, I decided to steal this bit, and try to add some of my own.  It was generally about women knowing what they know and having the good sense to say "I don't know" when appropriate, while a man will just jump into it whether he knows anything or not (stoopid men).

BTW, I guess this is where you should feel free to insert your rant about Reverse Sexism or Man Bashing or Men's Rights or whatever silly shit you can think of to remove all doubt that you really are a testosterone poisoned ape-child who's so blissfully ignorant of your own egocentric arrogance and so deeply in denial of being born to Manly Privilege that you're thoroughly terrified that somebody will gain some equality of power, which means, even tho' you don't know it - or you just can't bear to admit it - that you're simply terrified somebody could start treating you exactly the same as you've been treating them.

So anyway:

The guy who can't manage not to get into a screaming match with his own family over Thanksgiving dinner is the same guy who thinks he has the perfect solutions for problems in the Middle East.

The guy who never bothers to balance his check book, and has a world of trouble with his credit card debt knows what to do about tax revenues and budget deficits and the Federal Reserve system and fiat currencies and all things economic.

There are guys who'll tell us exactly what's needed to colonize Mars because they know how to ride a bicycle.

The guy who gave up on the whole parenting thing and sent his only kid to 3 different military schools is the same guy telling us how to fix public education and the prison system.

The guy who's spent his whole life enjoying the benefits of having been born to white middle class suburban parents in the 1950s knows everything there is to know about how to get things down in the ghetto all squared away in 2015 (hint - whatever else he comes up with, you know he's gonna sneak baggy pants and hip-hop in there too).

We've been hornswoggled.  We swallowed the myth of de-mystification whole.  "They've" been telling us we can do anything - from instant breakfast to walking on the moon.  And in the time it takes for one generation to grow old, we've managed to forget the second part of "we can do anything", which is basically that we have to have some education or training or experience; or just the tiniest bit of talent or skill or knowledge - it all gives us the misguided idea that anybody can step in and do any job - teacher, cop, mayor, NASA admin, POTUS, whatever.  Here's the deal, kids: No, ya can't.  You hafta to know something first.

"We can do anything" is not the same as "anybody can do that". 

Donald Trump didn't just come outa nowhere.

Iraq-mire

NYT:

WASHINGTON — In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province, Iraq, and to send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.

The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a plan that follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.

The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.

The additional American troops will arrive as early as this summer, a United States official said, and will focus on training Sunni fighters with the Iraqi Army. The official called the coming announcement “an adjustment to try to get the right training to the right folks.”

--and today's Understatement-That-Makes-It-Sound-Like-Ya-Really-Don't-Give-A-Fuck award goes to:

The United States Central Command’s emphasis on retaking Mosul depended critically on efforts to retrain the Iraqi Army, which appear to have gotten off to a slow start. Some Iraqi officials also thought the schedule for taking Mosul was unrealistic, and some bridled when an official from the Central Command told reporters in February that an assault to capture the city was planned for this spring.

A slow start - from 2003.  12 years.  That's not a slow start.  That's not a start of any kind.  That's an ending, and it's called "petrification"; or "putrefaction"; or some other term we use to indicate that it's over.

Iraq has no army, and Iraq has nothing out of which anybody can hope to build an army; because there is no Iraq.  Iraq exists only as the memory of a few arbitrary lines the British drew on a piece of paper 90-some years ago.  It's Done. It's Kaput. It's Finished. It's Dead Dead and Fucking Dead.  Give it up already.

And gee - it's almost as if somebody put the whole thing in motion on purpose; like they figured on it being one big unfixable FUBAR; and they'd leave it for the Dems to waste time and resources trying to tidy up for a while; and when enough Rubes are ready for the Etch-A-Sketch move, they amp up the rhetoric with, "well - it's Obama's problem now - been Obama's problem for a while - he can't just blame it all on Cheney forever - looks like leadership trouble to me - y'know the Bush Doctrine is good policy, but Obama's incompetence blah blah blah..."

This is a very standard play. 

• Fuck something up
• Point at it and say, "Hey look - it's all fucked up"
• "I have a plan..."

But let's be sure not to talk about any of that.  And let's definitely not concentrate on how our mighty military will once again be showing us their Selflessly Courageous Awesomeness by going back to some desert shithole to fight and to bleed an to die so Halliburton and Royal Dutch Shell and Northrup Grumman can add a coupla nickels to their Quarterly Earnings Reports, and then turn around and use a good buncha those hard-earned Blood Dollars to create an even more reliable generation of Coin-Operated Politicians.

Let's just keep blabbin' about what a wonderment it is that there can be so many voters in the big squishy middle who can't quite make up their minds about all this.

Fuck me silly, Bubba - I just can't stand this shit sometimes.

On Memorial Day Eve

Relax and be mellow - and melancholy if you've been reflecting at all on the extraordinarily shitty reasons for feel-good bullshit celebrations on a day intended to memorialize lives cut short in service to the venal ambitions of politicians bent on conquest driven by corporate profit.

Freedom rings loudly now
Listen up, hear the sound
Screamin’ as the shots ring out
That’s what freedom sounds like now

Beating drums, fathers’ sons
Teach ‘em well to kingdom come
Steal the daylight from the sun
That’s what freedom has become

Stand over the shadow of a man
Starin’ at his lifetime with blood-stained hands
What had you planned to say?

Underground, out to sea
Bodies come to rest in peace
Fighting for the right for more
That’s what freedom has in store

Asphalt burns the un-soled feet
Vacant eyes in defeat
Lost the thread on every dream
That’s what freedom’s come to mean

Stand behind the handle of a gun
Starin’ down the future, darin’ time to run
Like time could run away

Freedom’s blowin’ sadly now
Listen up, love came ‘round
Candles burn in memory
Freedom is a fading dream

Today's Quote

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge—even to ourselves—that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) --Carl Sagan 

I think of this quote pretty much every time I hear any "conservative" start to talk about almost anything.

Supply Side Economics & Trickle-Down
Religion
Nicotine isn't addictive and smoking's not really all that bad for ya
Tea Party
Antonin Scalia
Post-Racial America
Climate Change is a hoax
Tax Cuts boost government revenue
Cops aren't fucking us over
Freedom of Speech means billionaires should own everything
DumFux News
We were founded as a christian nation
Jade Helm 15

and on and on and on

The Big Bamboozle

Everybody loves to hate Wal-Mart.

I think ya gotta be careful with the whole 2-Minute Daily Hate thing, but there's something pretty satisfying about it once in a while. Especially when you can point it in the right direction.

Told Ya

A coupla days ago, I posted a bit about the Great Gathering of Grifters aka: Kaptain Kornball Klub, aka: The Iowa Freedom Freakout Summit.  And in that post I opinionized about how certain of the "candidates" were there for reasons other than Public Service.  Well - imagine my surprise when I find out that there are people out here in the Blogoshpere who do more than just opinionize - they actually look into this shit.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Mike Huckabee used his PAC to funnel more than $400,000 to his family. This week, Politico’s Ken Vogel gives us a story about scammy conservative PACs that make thousands of dollars from home with just one weird trick. These “scam PACs” play fast and loose with federal election rules by claiming-but-not-quite-claiming to represent Tea Party favorites like Ben Carson, Allen West, or Donald Trump’s hair plugs. The catch is that almost none of the money these scam PACs raise goes to those candidates. It’s the political equivalent of selling beachfront property in North Dakota, and because it’s politics, it’s somehow not fraud. ‘Tis truly a blessed time to be a conservative grifter!

Aha!  I posted mine 2 days ago, and then all of a sudden, there it is all over the place.  Post hoc ergo propter hoc, muthuhfuckuh.  Well, Ok, except for that 'last week' thing.  shit

You're welcome, Wonkette - glad I could help. Please keep doing that part of my job for me.

Unintended Truth

Some of those dirty fuckin' hippies have been trying to tell us for a pretty long time about how the "political center" has moved way to the right over the last 30 years, and practically everybody I know either shrugs it off or tells me I'm a fool for believing the left-leaning media which we all know has a wicked librul bias.

But then, along comes Steve King making a bit of a slip as he introduces Moose-alini at the annual meeting of the Kaptain Kornball Klub in Iowa.  

This turns into the Mother of All Word Salads as it appears Palin tries it without the teleprompter, but listen close in the first few seconds:



Yeah, I know - I couldn't stay with it either.  After the first few minutes, it's like you can hear your brain cells screaming as they start to die.

BTW - everybody and his fuckin' uncle is running on the Repub side so far, and I think it might be because the rubes' pockets aren't quite as deep as they used to be - having nuthin' at all to do with stoopid GOP economic policies of course - so you have to show up and do some of the huckstering in person - gotta work 'em a lot harder than just a coupla years ago.

I'll go out on what I consider a very short limb here, and I'll say that everybody not already positioned to get rich by holding an elected office is in this thing to boost their mailing lists, bolster their networks of "supporters", and make it all pay off by hittin' up every yokel for a generous donation...cuz that's what most of these jag-offs are - they're panhandlers; they're fuckin' moochers playin' every sucker for every dime, every chance they get. And boy has it been a good long run.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Per military.com:

At least 184 Humvees, 58 tanks and nearly 700 other vehicles have been destroyed or damaged in the more than 1,600 airstrike missions that have hit more than 3,200 ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since bombing began last Aug. 8, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.

In addition, a total of 26 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 79 artillery and mortar positions, and 673 infantry fighting positions were destroyed, CentCom officials said.

An unknown number of Humvees, M1A1 Abrams tanks and MRAPs were captured by ISIS when Iraqi national security forces fled and abandoned their equipment as ISIS swept into Iraq last June.

The formula for success in American Capitalism is pretty simple - at least it is in certain sectors of our economy, and once you've managed to put in place the basics of the incestuous Revolving Door setup that's been cultivated since before WW2:

Military Brass at the Pentagon recruited and groomed for executive positions at Big Defense once they "retire"

plus

Lobbyists who are almost invariably former and/or future Staffers at the Pentagon or in Congress

plus

Coin-Operated Politicians who collect monster campaign donations from Big Defense in return for their influence when it comes time to "appropriate" the Tera-Bucks for all the National Security shit we need in order to fend off invaders from anywhere from Ulan Bator to Alpha Centauri.

plus

The Press Poodles necessary to keep us confused as to who should be held responsible for fucking us with our pants on - paralyzing us in the middle with the Both Sides Narrative

But once in a while we hear the story I quoted above, and it gets a little clearer that some of these jokers are playing an even simpler and much shorter version of the game.

1) Sell large quantities of materiel to the Federal Government in order to supply "our friends" (Iraq, Syria, etc) with the means to defend themselves, making sure of course all that gear is not the latest and greatest.

2) Wait for "our friends" to lose all that gear to ISIS (eg) - we all knew that was gonna happen, but hey, how do we just sit around and do nothing blah blah blah.

3) Send in the air strikes that destroy the gear, which makes it necessary to supply more gear, which makes it necessary to destroy more gear as it falls into the wrong hands - and which also makes it vital to develop even better gear for ourselves, because - remember(?) what if that gear falls into the wrong hands!?! (and then begin again at #1 above).

All That Snow

I haven't been following it closely, but I know that the Buffalo area got something like 88 inches of snow over just a few days at the end of last week.  And now the weather is turning a lot warmer, so they're expecting to add the problem of significant flooding to the problems of dangerously stranded people and collapsing roofs and assorted other calamities.

But as I read thru some of the articles posted online and as I browse thru the video reports being run on Big Media, I keep wondering how it is that nobody's asking, "When was the last time something like this happened?"

I've been in Buffalo during a Lake Effect snow storm, and I wanna tell ya, it's impressive watching 15 or 20 inches of snow pile up overnight, but here's the thing:

Seven Fucking Feet in about 2 ½ days

And yet nobody's the least bit curious that it might have anything to do with a little thing quaintly referred to as "Climate Change"?

It was said years ago that people had already been born who would die as a result of catastrophic disruptions due to shifting global climate patterns.  Well, there're at least a dozen dead because of this storm, which means Climate Change is (and actually has been) killing Americans.  And here we sit doing nothing but watching coin-operated politicians and corporate managers and lobbyists and press poodles playing grab-ass in the mud for another 2 years?

We are so very fucked.