Today's Re-Definition

GOP: Guardians Of Privilege

Let It Roll

My crush on Elizabeth Warren just won't quit.

It's been said that if you want loyalty and friendship in Washington, get a dog.  Warren is very busy not making friends in DC, which is generally a solid indicator that she's doing the hard work of representing regular citizens in the best way possible - even though an awful lot of those regular citizens are openly hostile to the help an Elizabeth Warren can make our government provide for them.

After 30 years of conditioning (gubmint sucks), I have to make an effort to remember that people aren't just gonna turn their attitudes around overnight.

We're in a pretty weird place right now.

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:

Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.

Face It

This clip is embedded so it fast forwards to where the really bad shit starts (at about 28:30). Kinda like the really bad shit doesn't actually start til after the war is "over".

And don't you dare look away.  This is what we did.  This is on us.



Gosh - it seems Iraq is all fucked up.  Just like some of us said it would be.

And some of the people we turned into the tools we used to fuck up Iraq are all fucked up too.



But we just walk away.

Connor And Kermit's Epic Fail

Some of the worst aspects of humanity are chronicled in the story of one Dr Kermit Gosnell - who must forever be known as the Butcher of Lancaster Avenue.

Here's the beginning of Connor Friedersdorf's mostly excellent article:

The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I've read. "This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," it states. "The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths."

Friedersdorf is fairly careful not to allow himself to project the savagery of Gosnell's actions onto the larger Abortion Issue - I gotta give him some props for that part, even tho' he made sure to include lots and lots of the gory details so the Dead-Fetus-Porn crowd gets a chance to do as much of that projecting thing for him as he could ever hope for (which he's smart enough to understand in the first place), so ol' Connor kinda restricts himself to some harsh criticism of "The Media" for not picking the story up and running with it.

OK - but if anybody's gonna see this god-awful mess as an opportunity to make some political hay on the "Pro-Life" side, then here's the turnaround:

What Gosnell ending up doing is almost exactly what we can expect in any sector of a totally Unfettered Free Market, unencumbered by Intrusive Gubmint Regulation.

Argue against Government, and insist on letting the Invisible Hand work it's magic.  All well and good.  Just don't act surprised and start to piss and moan about it when you get what you've been wishing for.

It's All In Your Head

(click the picture to advance to the next slide)

hat tip = All In with Chris Hayes

Making Way Too Much Sense

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) co-founder Peter Christ talks sense about "The War On Drugs".



The main problem is the one that (as usual) is all about the cash.  There are people who've spent their entire careers riding the swirling torrents of money and power that surge through another Industrial Complex here in God's America - this one involving a very lucrative marriage of Corporatized Prisons, Illegal Drug Cartels, and a Justice System Consortium of courts and cops who can sometimes fund themselves just thru the goodies they legally confiscate under the protection of Zero-Tolerance Policies (and the hyper-macho politicians who use the Drug War to scare us into keeping them in power).

The billions we piss down the rat hole every year would do wonders if we spent the money treating our drug problem as the Healthcare issue it actually is.

Of course, just like all the other really stoopid "conservative" ideas we fell into bed with over the last 40 years, The War On Drugs isn't going away easy.

(hat tip = facebook buddy Bill Davison)

Oops - Almost Forgot

In honor of Confederate History Month here's my tribute to The Lost Cause, and to the nobility of the great struggle to defend our proud traditions during The War Of Northern Aggression:

Offended?  Bite me.

Today's Turnaround

Fox Nation has this story about how Obama's ratings began to fall as he was releasing some of the points in his Budget Proposal which includes the offer to fuck up Social Security and Medicare:

I have a coupla questions.  First, how come Obama's approval ratings always start to tank whenever he starts to talk and to act like a Republican?

And second, how come the knuckleheads watching DumFux News never fucking notice that?

The Krugman Speaks

Slowly - we're startin' to get it.

Here's Paul Krugman on the Budget:

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

After all, if whoever it is that Obama is trying to appeal to here — I guess it’s the Washington Post editorial page and various other self-proclaimed “centrist” pundits — were willing to admit the fundamental asymmetry in our political debate, willing to admit that if DC is broken, it’s because of GOP radicalism, they would have done it long ago. It’s not as if this reality was hard to see.

But the truth is that the “centrists” aren’t sincere. Calls for centrism and bipartisanship aren’t actual demands for specific policies — they’re an act, a posture these people take to make themselves seem noble and superior. And that posture requires blaming both parties equally, no matter what they do or propose. Obama’s budget will garner faint praise at best, quickly followed by denunciations of the president for not supplying the Leadership (TM) to make Republicans compromise — which means that he’s just as much at fault as they are, see?

The Beltway Bubble has become nearly impervious even though once in a very great while there's some evidence of a thin spot in the outer membrane. Joe Manchin's teary-eyed performance yesterday while responding to reporters after he met with Newtown parents is a pretty good example - but mostly, our glorious representatives are all too busy talking to each other or to the Press Poodles or to their Pollsters or to Lobbyists or to Wall Streeters and Fund-Raisers and Big Contributers; or whatever - they're just too busy to be bothered to talk directly to real people.

Maybe on those rare occasions they do talk to real people, they're reminded of why they're supposed to be there and that's what makes a Joe Manchin cry.  But I don't think those are tears of sadness or even of shame so much as they're the tears you cry when you really start feeling the stress.  Manchin has to put on a good show, promising people he'll do something about their issue, and then he has to go into a committee meeting and basically fuck 'em over while making it look like he fought the good fight for them.  That makes for an awful lotta stress.  Let's hope I'm being overly skeptical.  Maybe Manchin was crying tears of relief; grateful that he can say "the people made me do it", but let's not count on that one, OK?

With very few exceptions, it doesn't much matter what the "issue" is.  Guns, Abortion, Immigration, Gay Marriage, Jobs, The Budget - none of that matters because it's not  about the 2nd Amendment or Privacy or E-Verify or Equal Rights or Taxes vs Spending.  The issues don't get resolved because politicians need those issues to get the money, and they need the money to get the votes.  Which I think is the main contributing factor in why so many people believe the centrist baloney of Both Sides Do It / They're All The Same.  For one thing, if you buy into it, then you don't have to take a real stand on anything, which means you don't have to defend your position if it comes up in conversation, which means you don't have to do the real work of a citizen participating in a democracy.  Cuz hey - ain't nobody got time fuh dat.

Cutting to the chase - solve the problem of Coin-Operated Politics, enabled - if not driven outright - by a Corporatized Media (which has far more interest in keeping the fight going than they have in the outcome of the fight), and a lot of these horribly complex and nettlesome problems start to disappear as if by magic.

In the meantime, remember that while there's plenty that's seriously wrong with our system, there's something way more seriously wrong with a radicalized GOP right now - which could easily be the main reason why there's something so seriously wrong with our system.