I Have Found God

... oh - sorry, it's just Charlie Pierce - and that's close enough for me.

It seems that, over at The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now doing business as an adjunct to the home delivery industry, Fred Hiatt's Workshop For Ghastly Writing is getting a little run for this editorial in which Bernie Sanders is posed as the Lord Mayor Of Munchkinland. There's nothing like the scorn of the Church Of The Savvy. To borrow a comparison from the late Molly Ivins, it's like being gummed by a newt. Folks, leave the snark to the professionals, OK? Anyway, it seems that Fred and his minions find Sanders' proposals to be unrealistic, an insight now shared by almost every putatively liberal pundit, as well as every gas station attendant between Des Moines and Ottumwa. Let's look at the argument, shall we?

 

Winning Debate Tweet

Jeb "Goldilocks" Bush: My dad invaded Iraq too little. My brother invaded Iraq too much. I will invade Iraq just right.

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) January 29, 2016

"Ammon" Speaks

Marc Maron's WTF Podcast

You can skip the first 20 or so minutes where Marc gets a little nutty (surprise surprise) trying to get the whole "Amy Schumer controversy" straightened out.  Deep inside baseball stuff.

Anyway Maron gets some really good stuff outa the big dude.

Episode 675 - Michael Moore

Go, Barry Bams, Go

I guess we'll see what we see when we see it, but dang.

Politcus.com:

The President is in the midst of a very serious plan to issue an executive order that requires companies doing business with the federal government to disclose their political contributions. Just think; with a stroke of his pen the President will make “dark money” donors receiving billions of taxpayer money reveal who they contribute to or lose out on those highly-profitable federal government contracts.

Now, of course this does not, in any way, shape or form “overturn” Citizens United. But it is a major step in prompting some companies and corporations doing business with the federal government to rein in some of their dark money efforts to buy influence over the government. The directive, a so-called ‘dark money‘ executive order would mandate that “all government contractors publicly report their contributions to groups that spend money to influence campaigns and elections.”

Yeah yeah - it's Politcus.  But wow - if this is really the plan, and he pulls it off, there's gonna be some folks workin' overtime trying to figure how to love what he's doin' while still hatin' his ass for doin' it. 

 

And BTW - every governor of every state should be doing exactly the same thing.

How Do You Spell "Entitlement"?

... I spell it a-s-s-h-o-l-e-w-i-t-h-a-g-u-n.

via Raw Story:

A Pennsylvania woman was murdered after she rejected the romantic overtures of a man she encountered at a Pittsburgh bar.

Janese Talton-Jackson, the 29 year-old mother of three children, was at Cliff’s Bar as closing time neared on January 22. A man, identified by police as Charles McKinney, approached Talton-Jackson and asked her out on a date, according to CBS Pittsburgh. She rejected the man’s advances and he then followed her outside and eventually shot her in the chest. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

 

Goober Squad Busted

First - I'm sorry Mr Finicum is dead.  I think that's what he wanted - he said as much - but I'm hoping Mrs Finicum and all the little Finicums find good ways to get past it.

Meanwhile, we might have some fun watching as these militia rubes fall to squabbling internally due to the rumors (aka: bullshit) and false reports about how Finicum was killed.

Eyewitnesses knock down conspiracy theories about LaVoy Finicum dying with his hands up https://t.co/Db3dahU4m2 https://t.co/l5Q0dAaEfa

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 27, 2016

These nuts maintain a diet rich in paranoid conspiracy and an awful lot of 'em are absolutely determined to believe anything they're told as long as it fits the framing of "Gubmint always bad - Camo Goobers always good."  

Makes me wonder what happens now that "two of their own", Mark McConnell and Melvin Lee, are saying 'calm down' and 'let's be sensible' and 'what you've heard about the feds murdering Lavoy isn't true', etc. 

 

If their own guys are seen as failing the "purity test" (which of course was never clearly defined, because it can't actually be defined because who the fuck died and made you the fuckin' pope?), factional splits get real big real quick, and they get to runnin' in tighter and tighter circles chasing each other's tails, and before ya know it, they disappear up each other's assholes. (sounds like a certain political party don't it?) 

It's nice to think the rest of these Y'all-Qaeda cells will just disintegrate and reabsorb.  And some of that should happen - there are some people in this "movement" who can think, and generally, when those people are shown that some of the folks in positions of leadership are very obviously bug-fucking crazy, they tend to split.  And if they really can think for themselves, they'll know the fight's over; they lost; and they were on the wrong side anyway. 

There's also some probability that the remaining Goober Leaders are trying to figure how best to use Finicum's death.  

"See?  The Gubmint is big and dangerous. If we're gonna win this thing, we have to fight smart.  Lavoy Finicum didn't fight smart.  Lavoy Finicum is fuckin' dead now."

Lotsa moves left to play out.  This shit ain't over.

Today's Quote

A man's worth is popularly determined by his intellect. And his intellect - unfortunately - is thought to be proportional to the distance between the front and back covers of his autobiography. --me (with a nod to Ambrose Bierce)

Today's Wingnut

Meet Joe Stetsen

Joe seems like a fun date.  I'm sure he'll be the belle o' the ball in the county lockup.

Now, here's Harney County Judge Steve Grasty.

My guess is that Steve is wondering (like a lot of us are wondering) how the fuck we got from the pretty good kinda moderate conservatism of John Lindsay and Nellie Rockefeller in the 60s and 70s to this rabid, slaverin'-dog, kill-'em-all-let-god-sort-'em-out, radical bullshit.

Didn't just happen last night; not gonna un-happen by tomorrow.

For me, the lights came on in 1992, listening to Pat Buchanan at the GOP convention in Houston.  I'd been feeling a little antsy about my preferences for Repubs for a few years, but that speech made a very loud, very uncomfortable noise in my head, and I just kinda knew I'd been wrong for too long, and it was time for a rethink.

Minds can be changed.  Sometimes for the better.

Today's Pix