And There It Is - With Some Pix

Privatization is a bad idea.

A retired judge in Virginia, filling in for the regular guy, ruled against the argument that a private firm can charge a toll for the use of public facilities in order to fund improvements and maintenance.

Cales decided that a plan to have a private developer toll users for $2.1 billion in tunnel upgrades in crowded Hampton Roads is unconstitutional. Only the state has the power to tax and that’s what tolls really are, Cales ruled.

If his ruling holds, a number of critically important highways that involve privately operated facilities, such as parts of Interstate 495 in Northern Virginia, Route 895 near Richmond and a proposed $1.3 billion toll road from Petersburg to Suffolk, could be affected. State contracts for all of them could be voided.

If so, it would be a huge defeat for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and earlier governors who have made good use of the Public-Private Transportation Act of 1995 to push ahead with highways that the tax-averse state otherwise was too short of money to build.

Actually, two things at work here.  First, when you get allergic to paying for the things you want, you're gonna end up with some pretty weird shit to deal with, like this thing swirling around here in Virginia, which is really about privatization.

We have to hold certain things "in common".  Things like Schools and Roads and Cops and Prisons (et al) need to be owned by everybody.  Turn those things over to private interests and suddenly corporate managers are the ones with the power to levy taxes.  When was the last time you were asked to vote on some corporation's policies - or its leadership?  And I'm not talkin' about the silly letters you get inviting you to some stockholders' meeting on a random Thursday someplace 8 states away from where you live.  If you really equate that with democracy, then I'll have to call you stoopid to your face, cuz seriously - you've got that one comin'.

Second - the "unaccountability of appointed judges" can be nettlesome.  This decision landed where I think it should be so I'm all like 'woohoo', but of course if it goes the other way, I'm jumping up and down screamin'.  That 3rd Branch is a tough one to figure out, and I don't have good answers for how to get us to a solid middle-ground position.  But I do think the one thing that makes it harder to find that position is money.  It's not so much the money in the politics of The Judiciary, but rather it's the money being spent in an increasingly successful bid to control the political process - the election of "business-friendly" candidates whose seats are bought and paid for, who then pass laws to make it harder for people to vote in the first place, and who then set themselves about tearing down everything that's been built for the last 230+ years by better people than they'll ever dream of being.  Keep the corporate flacks out of office, and at least some of the problems in The Judiciary start to disappear as if by magic.

I should say that I'm not generally opposed to every 'paradigm shift' just because I'm conservative and I wanna keep things nice and steady.  Some things need to change and sometimes, you have to rip shit down to make room for something better.

But when your current paradigm is democracy, and you have (mostly) one political party working mightily every day trying to shit-can that paradigm -  well yeah, I gotta problem widdat.

Virginia's Finest

A coupla years ago, the Repubs in the Virginia legislature tried to get a little too cute enacting laws (eg) requiring women to have an extra and totes unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasound before being allowed to exercise their rights under the US Constitution, and ever since then I've felt a deep compulsion to refer to the "honorable" Gov McDonnell (R-VA) as 'Vaginal Bob'.  Well - as Rachel is kind enough to not-quite-explain-in-full, we might have to add a second orifice to Ol' Vaginal Bob's monicker.

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It just never fails, kids.  You put authoritarian assholes in office, and they eventually start acting like authoritarian assholes.  Why does this continue to come as a surprise to people?

Now, you can make a fair case that most people who wanna run things are usually a bit on the authoritarian side of the spectrum (especially when they wanna run an organization that comes with a police force and a military and all the cool guns and tanks and bombs and shit), but that tendency to swing the big power dick is why we're supposed to have this little thing called "a system of checks and balances".

Guys like Vaginal Bob McDonnell and Ken (Kenny the Kooch) Cuccinelli have been playing this game all over the world for as long as we've been up walkin' around on our hind legs.  But we're the exception, remember?  We don't play that shit here.

Sarah And Emmy Lou

"Angel"

Spend all your time waiting
for that second chance
for a break that would make it okay
there's always some reason
to feel not good enough
and it's hard at the end of the day
I need some distraction
oh beautiful release
memories seep from my veins
let me be empty
and weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight

in the arms of the angel
fly away from here
from this dark cold hotel room
and the endlessness that you fear
you are pulled from the wreckage
of your silent reverie
you're in the arms of the angel
may you find some comfort here

so tired of the straight line
and everywhere you turn
there's vultures and thieves at your back
and the storm keeps on twisting
you keep on building the lies
that you make up for all that you lack
it don't make no difference
escaping one last time
it's easier to believe in this sweet madness oh
this glorious sadness that brings me to my knees

in the arms of the angel
fly away from here
from this dark cold hotel room
and the endlessness that you fear
you are pulled from the wreckage
of your silent reverie
you're in the arms of the angel
may you find some comfort here
you're in the arms of the angel
may you find some comfort here

(not the version you just heard, but hey - I need the click fees) 

Today's Pix

 

Show Of Hands, Please

Katrina; Rita; Sandy.

Tornado season starts in March now and Wild Fire season starts in May.

Floods aren't just about heavy rain in the spring any more.

The Maldives and some of the best farm land in India and Bangladesh are disappearing.

Some significant portion of the sidewalks in Venice are now always under water...

and
and
and

OK, real quick - everybody who kinda figured we should be kinda expecting the kinda weird weather-related shit we've been seeing over the last 8 or 10 years, raise your hands.

Pretty good - now - everybody's who's been pretending Lord Monkton and Sarah Palin had something real to say (about anything really - but about Climate Science in particular); and anybody who claimed to have "looked at the Vostok Ice Core samples myself"...and/or stated straight up "y'know, computer modeling isn't really all that accurate - you can make those things tell you anything you wanna hear"...  All those who think it's just another game the politicians play because they're all alike, and they just wanna scare us, and those Librul Scientist fellers are all a buncha freeloadin'-looter redistributin'-Commie-Nazi-Muslim faggots who just wanna force us all to have buttsex with Al Gore... all you serious adult smart guys who are now revealed to have had your heads up your asses, raise your hands for me one time.

Thought so.

And do we wanna talk about the role of The Press Poodles for a minute?

Yeah - OK - prob'ly not.  Never mind.

Eat It, Haters

hat tip = Addicting Info

Homemade Music

A little kid and his brother(?) just tearin' it up for Fathers' Day.



Back when I was a child
Before life removed all the innocence
My father would lift me high
And dance with my mother and me and then
Spin me around til' I fell asleep
Then up the stairs he would carry me
And I knew for sure I was loved

If I could get another chance
Another walk, another dance with him
I'd play a song that would never ever end
How I'd love, love, love to dance with my father again

When I and my mother would disagree
To get my way I would run from her to him
He'd make me laugh just to comfort me
Then finally make me do just what my momma said
Later that night when I was asleep
He left a dollar under my sheet
Never dreamed that he would be gone from me

If I could steal one final glance, one final step
One final dance with himI'd play a song that would never ever end
'Cause I'd love, love, love to dance with my father again

Sometimes I'd listen outside her door
And I'd hear how my mother cried for him
I pray for her even more than meI pray for her even more than me
I know I'm praying for much too much
But could you send back the only man she loved?
I know you don't do it usually
But dear Lord she's dying to dance with my father again
Every night I fall asleep and this is all I ever dream

Dear Mr Clinton

Yo, Bill - shut the fuck up already.  You can't get me to vote for Hillary no matter how big you want me to believe her balls are.

I dunno what we're supposed to do about Syria.  I'm not convinced we're "supposed" to do anything at all.  My default position is that we mind our own damned business, until or unless their shit starts to spill out over into our shit.

So there's the determinative question:  Who's shit is where right now, and where is that shit likely to be later on?

Another default position for me is that when it comes to the Middle East, nobody knows more about it (or about how weirdly fucked up it is) than Juan Cole - so it's always a good idea to listen to somebody who actually knows his shit.

Obama seems to be attempting to find a face-saving way of getting a little involved but not too much, by sending light weaponry (which of course is not what the rebels need).

Clinton compared what the US could do in Syria to Ronald Reagan’s effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But that covert operation of giving billions of dollars and high-tech weaponry to Afghan jihadis was a huge catastrophe, contributing to the creation and rise of al-Qaeda and setting the background for the emergence of the Taliban. It surely would have been far preferable to let the Soviets try to build a socialist state in Afghanistan, as they tried in Uzbekistan. The whole thing would have fallen apart in 1991 anyway. (There is no truth to the notion that the Afghanistan war bled the Soviet Union or contributed to its collapse. Soviet military spending was flat in the 1980s). The Reagan jihad destabilized both Afghanistan and Pakistan and left us with a long term terrorism problem. We let the Soviets alone in Kazakhstan, and we never worry about today’s Kazakhstan.
You never, ever want to encourage the rise of private militias and flood a country with high- powered weaponry.

My other (and over-arching) default position is that I'm real tired of having to babysit these fuckwads all the time. 

Confidence

Gallop put out another popularity poll - trying to discern the level of 'confidence' Americans have in various institutions (eg: SCOTUS, Congress, Military etc).

And guess what?  It shouldn't come as any kinda news to anybody that we love the US Military and we hate Congress - even though we continue to re-elect the people who make up the institution that gets a whopping 10% confidence rating.

90% of us say we don't have confidence in our #1 governing body, and yet the incumbents get re-elected 96% of the time.

Here's the thing:  We do what we're told to do.

Every time we turn around, there's somebody somewhere telling us every jarhead, zoomie, dog-face and squid is so Star-Spangled Awesome that God his-own-self steps aside whenever one of 'em walks into a room.

We are also constantly badgered to the point of befuddlement about how fucked up every little thing is when it comes to Government - except of course in those state and local rural centers where the good Christian small-government conservative dirt-huggin' gun-totin' real people hold power like an abused and frightened 4-year-old clutches a suffocating duckling on Easter Sunday.

We don't need to be brain-washed.  And we don't need to be turned into programmable automatons.  All anybody really has to do is keep us a little off-balance; getting us to consider just for a moment that (eg) Niall Ferguson's opinion that "hey, fracking isn't all that bad" is just as valid as the actual research that's been done proving there's at least real cause for concern, and that maybe we shouldn't be turning everything over to The Suits at giant corporations who feel nothing for anybody or anything that doesn't pump an extra 2¢ per share into their quarterly reports.

The enormity of the bamboozle is practically never revealed until well after the enormity of the crash caused by the bamboozle starts to sink in.  And if you wanna know what that's like, ask a Russian some time - or any of a rapidly-growing number of Greeks or Irish or Americans or or or.

Our Mr Brooks

I list a blogger on my Blog Role who values anonymity above notoriety (I know, weird ain't it?) and so he writes under the moniker "driftglass".

He's been watching out for us by keeping a sharp eye on David Brooks.  Most of it's pretty good; all of it's readable; and sometimes he straight up blams it into the bleachers.

Full of that Yankee Doodle Dumb.

In that dim and distant Whig utopia of Long Ago we celebrated stick-to-itiveness, Jesus, the Torah, lunch-pail heroes, and people who got rich by gumption and grit.

Now everybody grubs for money, people wipes their heinies with the Book of Corinthians, the rich behave like assholes and nobody cares.

Nobody except David Brooks.

Congratulations, you have now read today's contribution to American journalism by David Brooks in its entirety.

He's also something of a PhotoShop genius.

And he's half of the The Professional Left podcast crew - sharing the mic with the lovely and talented BlueGal.