Today's Poodling

Jason Chaffetz (R-is-for-rocks-in-head):

"Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that's a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate...It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do? Why aren't we empowering that person?"

The basic dig against Chaffetz of course is that his guys have blocked Obama's nominee for SG, so he sounds pretty stoopid - not that that's gonna matter to the rubes.  OK, maybe he was referring to the "Acting SG"?  No way of knowing because of course the DumFux News Poodle managed not to mention any of that.  Which kinda reinforces the basic point that DumFux News is not a news thing.  It's a GOP thing.

A New Meme

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Unfortunately, even as monumentally stoopid as it sounds - and even tho' somebody's bound to say he put it up just to see if he could get a rise outa the Libtards -  ya gotta know there's a whole-number percentage of rubes out there who're gonna buy into it no matter what.

So OK - let's play:

We haven't had a catastrophic economic crash since Obamacare.
We haven't mistakenly invaded Iraq since Obamacare.
Terrorists haven't flown any hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center since Obamacare.
There's been no Zombie Apocalypse since Obamacare.
There are no Badger/Unicorn hybrids playing in the NBA since Obamacare.

We're not seriously thinking about putting a douche canoe like this guy in charge of anything are we?

A Star Died That You Should Live

"The universe is huge and old, and rare things happen all the time." --Lawrence Krauss

The Strategy

...or: Politics In The Age Of Clutter-Busting Viral Messaging

(Maybe we should talk in terms like "blinding the radar with chaff in order to penetrate the victims' defenses and bomb the fuck out of 'em before they even knew what was happening", but that seems a little too bleak even for me.  So...)

1) Make wild predictions of gloom and doom - be sure to slag Obama at every opportunity, and tell everybody that he's "in over his head", and he's paralyzed with indecision, and that he's unable to provide the right kind of leadership etc etc etc.

2) Once you're fairly sure the bad shit you knew wasn't going to happen - but said loudly and repeatedly that it was going to happen - is actually not going to happen, step forward and take credit for saving all of us, once again, from Da Gubmint's incompetence.

This shit goes on all the time, and this ebola shit is a really good example.  Repubs have been savaging Obama for weeks.  They're pretty sure nothing all that bad was gonna happen anyway, so it's the perfect political tool.  They get to bash the prez for not doing something (which they already knew he didn't need to do), and then they can pop right back up afterwards and claim they were the ones who warned us about the terrible thing, and that they took decisive action blah blah blah, and then they slag Obama some more on how awful he's been.

It's all a stoopid game, and it's taken on a very obvious wrinkle that I'll call Entrepreneurial Politics.  It goes hand-in-hand with Entrepreneurial Religion, Entrepreneurial Medicine, Entrepreneurial Education, Entrepreneurial Policing, Entrepreneurial Incarceration - whatever you care to name; it can be turned into a great way to shear the sheep if you just follow the simple formula.

Find an "issue" that sounds big and scary, but one that doesn't really present any great risk.  (Remember: reducing risk to something as close to zero as possible is a big part of this scam. And BTW, what we used to call Capitalism had lots of risk, but now what we call Capitalism is more like owning the local casino and then buying enough Coin-Operated Politicians to pass laws requiring everybody to come in and "gamble" at least part of every day).

Wanna peddle some "harmless quackery"?  Let's try Reiki - we know the patient is under a real doctor's care, which puts us in the "no harm no foul zone", so we can wave our hands over the afflicted areas in an ookie-spookie way and chant a buncha mystical nonsense and really bring the low-key-but-nonetheless-intense drama of ritualistic hoodoo bullshit and make the show worth the money, while knowing it's going to be the real science and knowledge and skill of the medical arts practitioners doing the real work while we get a chance to take some of the credit and make some of the money for doing nothing more than providing a little distracting amusement.  So it doesn't matter that the patient really does have something at least potentially serious wrong him, cuz that's not your problem - you're just trying to make your mortgage payment this month yada yada yada.

Anyway, you flack the shit out of whatever Disaster du Jour you've come up with in order to raise possibly huge amounts of money that you can then turn around and spend on Advertising aimed at making sure that the "facts" are muddied to the point of incomprehension, knowing the rubes are gonna turn out and vote exactly the way you tell 'em to vote, and that a huge slice of the big squishy middle will stay home on election day because you've made sure they're pretty disgusted with the whole sorry mess.

And guess who stays in power.

The US Congress has an approval rating in the single digits, but the individual Critters get re-elected along the lines of 95% of the time.

In Soviet Russia, the Communists were the only ones allowed to run for office, and you couldn't vote if you weren't a member of the Communist Party.  It was a closed-loop system, and under that system, members of the Duma (their version of Congress) were re-elected 91% of the time.

Shouldn't that be some indication that maybe we've got a fucking problem here?

Parting thought:  Pessimism is the only sensible default position because you're gonna be proved right or pleasantly surprised every time.

This Is What We're Up Against

God established slavery in the Old Testament in order to show us that slavery is wrong.  That's pretty much the mindset of "God's Sheep", and it's why we are so fucked.  

The world's problems have practically nothing to do with people "getting further away from religious teachings", and everything to do with people being taught to accept this ridiculous shit as The-One-And-Only-Truly-True-Truthy-Truth-Of-Truthiness™.

Like the man said: If you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get 'em to commit atrocities.

Moody Richard

Harry Shearer et al took the transcripts of some of the Nixon Tapes and turned them into a YouTube show - just in time for Halloween cuz they're scary as fuck, especially because there's a weird "more things change, the more they stay the same" kinda thing going on.

Social Eugenics

A New Favorite

Web Of Evil

Shut Up & Take Your First Cousins As Your Second Wives Already, Whining Saints
by M. Bouffant at 21:25

Garmies:
[T]he LDS church released a video on its website explaining the ritual purpose of temple garments, requesting that non-Mormons and members of the media to treat "Latter-day Saint temple garments as they would religious vestments of other faiths. Ridiculing or making light of sacred clothing* is highly offensive to Latter-day Saints.  

Fuck you, self-styled Saints & all the other shitheads who swallow that they must dress in a special way to please their sky fairy & distinguish themselves from mere mortals but then complain when laughed at. You don't want to be ridiculed, don't be ridiculous. (I think it's called the Golden Rule; isn't it in your book of fairy tales & silly stories?)

And yes yes we understand that making their cultists look idiotic to the rest of the world is only one of many ways the shepherds of the flocks reinforce group identity to keep their marks alienated & separate from the awful-in-its-way outside world of shit & pain.

Previously in underwear.

*They aren't sacred to me, whatever that means. And for heaven's sake, no matter what's under discussion, don't remind this reporter or anyone else how offended you'll be if someone dares to mock you. We'll start to think you're asking to be "made light of".

Call Bullshit

We're stuck in a Supply-Side nightmare.  We know these nutball "conservatives" have failed to deliver on any of the promised awesomeness.  We know their policies of Austerity and Free Market Magic and everybody's-a-millionaire-in-waiting are just sun-shiny-happy-talk bullshit designed to get you to help them make their big money contributors a little richer while blaming you for their failure when you find out you're not quite able to make the thing  work for you when it's not supposed to work for you in the first fuckin' place - and somehow we're still looking at another possible Repub win next month in the mid-terms.

That word, "experiment," has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his "pro-growth tax policy" would act "like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy," but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas' neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he'd enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.

Brownback hardly stands alone among the class of Republican governors who managed to get themselves elected four years ago as part of the anti-Obama Tea Party wave by peddling musty supply-side fallacies. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich – whose press releases claim he's wrought an "Ohio Miracle" – has presided over a shrinking economy, this past July being the 21st consecutive month in which the state's job growth has lagged behind the national average. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, whose union-busting inadvertently helped kick off the Occupy movement, cut taxes by roughly $2 billion – yet his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during his first term has fallen about 150,000 jobs short, and forecasters expect the state to face a $1.8 billion budgetary shortfall by mid-2017. A recent analysis by the Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, laid out how the tax policies of Gov. Rick Snyder, a wealthy entrepreneur who campaigned in Michigan as a nerdy technocrat, have resulted in businesses paying less ($1.7 billion less per year, to be exact), individuals paying more ($900 million per year) and – here's the kicker – job growth slowing every year since Snyder's cuts have been enacted.

C'mon, Dems.  Up on your hind legs.  Stop pretending this is fight between Red and Blue; Liberal and Conservative; or whatever your Marketing Team comes up with next.  This is between the millions of reasonable Americans who just want a fair shake, and a bunch of radical phonies dressed up to look like "patriots" trying to take us back to the glories of the late 18th century.

Supply Side is failed policy.  Stand up and say it.

So Close

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Anybody worth knowing (ie: anybody who's ever actually done anything of note or has ever thought or said anything interesting) has a skeleton to two in his closet.

That said - holy fuck - you think The Biden Bunch pulls some embarrassing shit?

hat tip = Web Of Evil