About That Christmas Story

So everybody's holiday favorite is the story of how a kid is growing up in Ohio, and he has a toy gun, and how everybody warns him about not getting hurt because of it and his dad buys a weird lamp and some kid gets his tongue froze to the flag pole and it all turns out OK because Ralphie's a white kid and the local cops don't murder him for no fucking reason.

A Tweet And A Quote

Racism doesn't usually look like someone shouting slurs, it's looks like people eagerly looking for a reason why a black kid deserved to die

— Lou Schumaker (@LouSchu) December 24, 2014

Today's Tweet

Ohio is an open carry state, and the cops say they thought Rice was an adult, so what law, exactly, was he breaking?

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 28, 2015

Chris Hayes has fallen way off - along with practically all of MSNBC - but hey, even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

Show A Little Love

A nice profile from Daily KOS

The only podcast combining politics, humor, outrage, kittens, science fiction and marital bliss is The Professional Left with the husband-wife team of Driftgass and Blue Gal. A new edition comes out every Friday (including Christmas and New Year’s!) and I never miss it, usually listening on bike rides around the park.

They just won a coveted Swifty for Episode 295 (July 31, 2015): "Is Cecil the Lion a Proxy War?"

The Professional Left Podcast 

Teach The World To Sing

The Message Manipulators seem to be bent on stripping away the soul from all of us by reducing everything to a transaction and creating a world of de-humanizing commercialism.

I've been part of that.  I was with them for a long time.  No more.  And never again.

But there are times when my eternally insistent skepticism (which always teeters on the brink of The Cynical Abyss) is tested.  

Wouldn't it be nice if this was more than just another attempt to co-opt something that should be a lot more meaningful than making us smell less like humans. (not that there's anything wrong with smelling better - just sayin')

hat tip = Facebook friend MH

Today's Pix

Today's Tweets

Actually, this is a screen cap of the tweet that showed up on Facebook (hat tip = DR), but hey - social media is social media, and it's only there to serve us up to the advertisers and propagandeers anyway.  But, I digress.

If something good happens because of it, that's just a lucky coincidence.  

And if something bad happens because of it, well - shit happens; whaddaya gonna do?

My favorite thing - when you post a pic, you can 'tag' the faces in the pictures, and somebody tagged this guy "Asshole'.  

Poe's Law states that sometimes, it's not possible to differentiate between an actual statement of an extreme and a parody of the extreme.  So the guy could easily be a 'Poe'.  But seeing how weird USAmerica Inc has gotten over the last few decades, and looking thru the guy's Twitter feed, I'll go with the obvious and say he really is the jackwad freak he's trying so hard to convince us he is.

Late Breaking: Online scuttlebutt is that the guy lost his job because that tweet just went a little too far (hard to believe that's the one that did it, considering practically everything on his feed is "White Genocide" and "Hitler-Was-Right" etc).  His feed has nothing posted after Dec 24th, so I guess he took everything else down or his account was frozen or whatever.

The winning response so far:

@14Resistance @BillBurgin_VA pic.twitter.com/3gaciq86Z9

— conan the librarian (@jamesdupuis2) December 27, 2015

Torching

Moonbeam  --Sinne Eeg

Fragile  --Nils Landgran

My One And Only Love  --Sinne Eeg

With Every Breath I Take  --Janis Mann

Kissing A Fool - George Michael

Today's Bumper Sticker

A Podcast For Christmas

It's just what I asked Santa to bring me!

And be sure to listen for the part where driftglass explains the new positioning effort that puts the Teabillies way out to the right, and The Democrats way out to the left, and "The Newly-Moderate GOP" smack in the middle.  Now, what was it I've been saying about Jeb this whole time?



Say whatever ya wanna say, but ya can't say these guys haven't been trying to warn us about all this shit for a good long time. 

Click here for the website where you can shop Amazon, or subscribe directly:

The Professional Left

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(make checks payable to):

The Professional Left Podcast
PO Box 9133
Springfield, IL 62791

What Day?

Yale Not Jail

As much as I hate to agree with Jesse Jackson, he was right about one thing.  We spend way more money on keeping people in jail than we spend on the schooling that everybody knows makes it a lot less likely that any given kid will end up in prison. 

And here's a tiny peek at just how stoopid we are in that particular regard:

20.2 Million = College Students in USAmerica Inc
$21 Billion = What we spend on College every year (Avg Cost, Public 2- or 4-year schools)

2.2 Million = Prison Inmates 
$74 Billion = What we spend on Prisons in USAmerica Inc every year 

Arithmetic please: We have almost 10 times as many students as we have inmates, but we spend more than 3 times as much on the inmates as we spend on the students.

Why does that make sense to anybody?

Read up at smartasset.com

The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill, and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. Combined both companies generated over $2.53 billion in revenue in 2012, and represent more than half of the private prison business. So what exactly makes the business of incarcerating Americans so lucrative?

 

Gitcher Swag On

RedBubble.com

What Jeb Said

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Bless his pea-pickin' little ol' heart - he's trying so hard to lead some of these dolts away from the extremes, while trying so hard to step in the right places thru the minefield, which generally ends up meaning he's trying hard not to lead too much.  And that's pretty much exactly what electoral politics is all about.  You have to calculate; you say things that bring some voters over to your side while not alienating too many others.

I think Jeb is the GOP's only chance to pull that off, and I think Jeb is probably just not really up to the challenge.

He's half right, hoping to parlay it into enough of a message that's acceptable to enough of everybody wearing the Red Badge to stitch together a wobbly little coalition to get close to maybe being in contention for a shot at making a run for what may or may not be his big chance at the nomination - god willin' and the crick don't rise.  

Seriously, I just don't think he's up to it even tho' I think the GOP mover/shakers are working feverishly to prop him up, and I'm still not convinced he won't be the GOP's guy next fall.  Or is it that he'll be the GOP's next fall guy? This is all very confusing.

But anyway - half right.  He just got it kinda upside down and backwards.  He says the controversy over the Confederate Battle Flag isn't about the Confederacy so much as it's about what the flag came to represent in the 20th century.  That's the half-right part.

The upside-down-and-backwards part is that there was a long and concerted effort to change our perception, and to get people to believe that that flag represented Heritage and Commitment and Honor on the part of the glorious warriors who fought under it, instead of maintaining the truth about it, and making sure that it remained the symbol of Greed and Inhumanity and Bigotry and all the things this country has always said it doesn't want to be. It became the rallying point for people who need desperately to be lied into a political catatonia so they can go on pretending they don't have to do anything but wish their troubles away - or to kill their way outa the mess they're forever getting us all into.

But here's the thing, kids - that flag is the flag of quitters and losers and racist assholes. It is, it always was, and it always will be.

A Special Holiday Message