Go Greeks

Y'know, some people just really know how to do that protest thing better than others.

Prostesters in Greece managed to get into the studio and pelted a TV Anchor Guy with eggs and yogurt (this is Greece after all).

Unofficially translated, they're chanting, "Cops, TV, neo-nazis, all the scoundrels are working together."

One Example

Government as Business can be even more of a nightmare than what "conservatives" are always creamin' their jeans over.

A teenager in a For-Profit Prison in Mississippi turned up missing, and it took his dad more than a month to find him - in a local hospital, after suffering irreparable brain damage in a riot that was possibly instigated by at least one of the guards.  That's pretty fucked up right there.

From AlterNet via Democratic Underground:

On March 26, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves issued a blistering court order approving the settlement of the lawsuit. He wrote that the GEO Group Inc., the company that runs Walnut Grove, “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.”

Violence by youths and guards wasn’t the only problem. Neither were the gang affiliations of some guards. Or the grossly inadequate medical and mental health care. Or the proliferation of drugs and other contraband. Or the lack of educational and rehabilitative programs. Or the wild overuse of pepper spray on passive youths.

Indeed, the DOJ found that sexual abuse – including brutal youth-on-youth rapes and “brazen” sexual misconduct by prison staffers who coerced youths – was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”
What’s more, both the prison staff and the Mississippi Department of Corrections, which pays GEO $14 million each year to run the prison, showed “deliberate indifference” to these problems.

This hyper-macho, get-tough bullshit just ain't workin', guys.  We gotta figure out something else.

Back In The Black

Not that it's gonna last, but the US Gov't reported a budget surplus of $58 Billion for April 2012.

CBO estimated that receipts were $30 billion higher in April than the same month a year ago, due to declining refunds that month and higher corporate income tax receipts. Spending fell by $69 billion compared to April 2011, marked by lower outlays on defense, Medicaid and the Postal Service.  --Market Watch

How this happened is anybody's guess, but the real question is how long will it take for the Repubs to turn it around, and get the failure they've been pushing for?

Making Government run like a business is great as long as it's never ever allowed to turn a profit.  Which kinda shows how fucked up the GOP's premise actually is.  Because if Gubmint works like a business, then Gubmint is - in fact - working.  And that just can't be because we all know that Gubmint doesn't work at all, so we have to work a lot harder to make it work better, but...  

If your premise is false, your conclusion can't be true.  So, like I've said before - they run in tighter and tighter circles until they disappear up their own assholes.

As Austerity Fails

...the Romney campaign discusses US Domestic Economic Policy.

GOP And The Lady Parts

Found this days ago and forgot all about getting it posted.

hat tip = Crooks and Liars

Republicans, Get In My Vagina! from Kate Beckinsale      

Today's Pix

Political Judo

You take your own negative and project it onto your opponent.  It's worked for a long time because most people have short memories where this kinda shit is concerned - which is actually what Willard's campaign guy was talking about when he made that Etch-A-Sketch remark.

Well, Obama kicked off his 2012 campaign at Ohio State's basketball venue (I think), where, according to the wingnuts, "he was preaching to an empty room", or he "failed to fill the seats" or some such hokum.

Here's one view of what that empty room looked like:

Here's one more:

And here's a look at the adoring throngs that showed up for Romney's major economics address in Detroit earlier this year - this is the one the Repubs need us to forget about:

Well, That Sucks

86% of us (per recent polling) think that unlimited donations to SuperPACs has a corrupting influence on our democracy.

Which means there're more than twice as many Americans who don't understand how fucked up Campaign Financing is in this joint than there are who believe the moon landings were faked.

And Jesus wept.

hat tip = Republic Report

To Be Clear

If somebody tells you they think you're sounding a little racist, it doesn't have to mean they're just "playing the race card" and that you should ignore them and go right on being a cheap imitation of a normal human.

Sometimes it means you need to stop for a minute and recheck your assumptions.

France

Lil Nik Sarkozy has lost the French presidency to a Socialist named Francois Hollande, who is expected (by some folks anyway) to ease up on the austerity choker.  So OK, I guess we're about to see something more of a Keynesian approach to the economic side of the house (france is the # 2 economy in the EU - right behind Germany), and that can only mean that the Right Radicals in the US are about to freak the fuck out.

Won't that be fun.

BTW Broad Observation:
The political world is cratering in on the Repubs, so that's why they're doing everything they can to pass legislation that's mostly just plain stupid, and will take a long time to sort thru once they're gone.  I think the strategy is to make it look like it's the Dems who're implementing the "radical agenda" as they work to unravel all this crap, and the GOP can sit on the sidelines complaining about how the Dems aren't doing the things they said they'd do to make things better.

Ya heard it here first.