Pick 'Em

When it comes to policy regarding the US Economy, what we hear over and over from "conservatives" is that the Gubmint shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers.  And yet, here's a nearly unanimous GOP saying they'll continue subsidizing fossil fuels at a rate of 6-1 over alternative fuels.  And they'll do it in spite of what their pets over at DoD ask for every time they get a chance.

From Wonkette:

We remember a time when if “the generals” wanted solid-gold ballwashers, they got solid-gold ballwashers! But now, it seems, the Republican members of the House are a little more frugal. Oh, not for the important stuff, like building East Coast Star Wars installations that the Pentagon doesn’t want — no, that they will get. But for stupid stuff, like biofuels to power their infernal machines, and this:

The Conaway amendment included in the fiscal year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 4310) was meant to limit the Defense Department’s participation in an interagency agreement with the departments of Energy and Agriculture to spend $510 million to construct biorefineries capable of producing “drop-in” biofuels for the use by the Navy in its ships and jets, according to a summary.

Seems like the whole world is waiting for us lead on this shit, and it looks like we're just standing around with our dicks in our hands, wishing it was 1965 again so we didn't have to worry so much about all this complicated stuff.

More from The Burrill Report.

And Now This Other

The Fail Parade continues.  This time, "conservatives" are using the power of the gubmint to block the construction of a house of worship.

Construction of a suburban Nashville, Tenn., mosque that was supposed to have been completed in 2010 has been halted and could be stopped for good after Chancellor Robert Corlew ruled Tuesday that the public wasn't given the proper notice two years ago at a meeting to approve the site plan.

Technically, it means the Rutherford County Planning Commission could still approve the site near the city of Murfreesboro, but its chances of completion are diminished.

I guess freedom of religion is important as long as the religion in question is Politically Correct.

Lyin' sacks of shit.

And Now This

You know without thinking that motherhood is one of the absolutes when it comes to what "conservatives" are always yammerin' about - but of course they absolutely refuse to give any new mom any kind of break or some small thing to help her and the baby and the rest of her family handle the disruption.

One more example of how "conservatives" are a bunch of lying sacks of shit.

Support The Troops

Gosh - when you send people to fight 2 wars over 10 or 12 years, and they have to go thru 2 or 3 or 5 or 8 deployments of 15 - 30 months at a time, some of them will need healthcare for a very long time after they get back, and some of them will need an ever-increasing level of care because their injuries turn out to be progressive or occult or degenerative in nature.

USA Today - A staggering 45% of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now seeking compensation for injuries they say are service-related. That is more than double the estimate of 21% who filed such claims after the Gulf War in the early 1990s, top government officials told the Associated Press.

What's more, these new veterans are claiming eight to nine ailments on average, and the most recent ones over the last year are claiming 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are currently receiving compensation for fewer than four, on average, and those from World War II and Korea just two.

This seems to come as no big surprise to lot of us - you know, the ones who actually think about shit.

But one of the things I probably should've seen coming and didn't was that now the Anti-Entitlements crowd is pissin' and moanin' about "veterans gaming the system".  Well, I'm gonna go with my first reaction on this one: Fuck you. OK, so yeah - some of that's gonna happen.  Big fuckin' deal.  You're the bunch of posturing chickenhawks who wanted all this war shit in the first place; you guys are always screechin' about fallen heroes; and you're the pricks who're always posting all that maudlin shit about what we all owe to the soldiers - well now it's time to pony up, cupcake.  And where are you?  You're nowhere.  You're hiding behind the cutesy little magnetic ribbons on your SUV.  You're pretending to care about what happens to these men and women by spending a good 15 seconds every few days posting some stupidly drippy bumper-sticker sentiment on your facebook page.  But you're out now - it's just too obvious that by balking at the real cost of your war-mongering, you reveal for all to see that you care more about your ideology than you do about the people you claim make this country great.

I'll say it again in case you missed it:  fuck you.

Rightspeak

A good short piece from Krugman at NYT - lifted in its entirety.

May 26, 2012, 12:11 PMThe New Political Correctness

Remember the furor over liberal political correctness? Yes, some of it was over the top — but it was mainly silly, not something that actually warped our national discussion.

Today, however, the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which — unlike the liberal version — has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order.

Thus, even talking about “the wealthy” brings angry denunciations; we’re supposed to call them “job creators”. Even talking about inequality is “class warfare”.

And then there’s the teaching of history. Eric Rauchway has a great post about attacks on the history curriculum, in which even talking about “immigration and ethnicity” or “environmental history” becomes part of a left-wing conspiracy. As he says, he’ll name his new course “US History: The Awesomeness of Awesome Americans.” That, after all, seems to be the only safe kind of thing to say.
Actually, this reminds me of an essay I read a long time ago about Soviet science fiction. The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: “if only”, or “if this goes on”. Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied that things could be better, the second that there was something wrong with the way things are. So stories had to be written about “if only this goes on”, extolling the wonders of being wonderful Soviets.

And now that’s happening in America.

A Cost Of Freedom

The rubes love chanting "freedom ain't free".  It's one of those useful and catchy phrases that can make it sound like they have the high ground - that they have some deeper understanding of a complex issue, when in fact simply by uttering the words and then claiming to win the argument because it takes the other side a lot longer to articulate a coherent position shows a level of ignorance that depresses the shit outa me.

That kind of opening paragraph is usually instigated by something having to do with National Security, but this time it's all about a little kid in Ohio.

Ohio boy, 3, shoots self in head
Tuesday May 29, 2012 12:30 AM

MOUNT VERNON, Ohio (AP) — A 3-year-old boy is in critical condition after shooting himself in the head.

WBNS-TV reports (http://bit.ly/KBZKiC ) that the shooting happened shortly before 6:30 p.m. Monday at a house northwest of Mount Vernon. The boy's grandfather, parents and two younger siblings were at home when it happened.

The station says that family members say the gun was sitting on top of a television.

Knox County Sheriff's Capt. David Shaffer says a firearm was recovered from the house. He says the shooting is an "unfortunate accident."

The incident is being investigated.

Enjoy your little slice of freedom at the expense of your kids, you stupid fucking rednecks.

Maybe Someday

...they'll make something useful out of me.

(Father John Misty, with a hat tip to Balloon Juice)


I guess it's all part of what I see as our evolution.

Periods of transition are always dangerous and exciting and interesting and confusing and frightening and and and.

Parade Of Stoopid

The reason we get incredibly radical nonsense from our "leaders" is simply that we are willing constituents.



I am responsible for everything I think, say and do.  Me.  I'm not under the spell of some cosmic mesmerizer.  And I'm not going to follow blindly along behind anybody who claims to possess some kind of special magic;  or needs me to believe that his particular decoder ring is the only one that works when it comes to figuring out what Gondorff The Magnificent really meant by whatever it was that some half-literate guy wearing a goat skin singlet scratched into a clay tablet 1700 years ago.

I can be persuaded or inspired or cajoled and manipulated - but if I decide to act, the decision is mine.

Today's Pix

Today's Bumper Sticker

If you wanna live like a Republican

Vote like a Democrat

Well, I'm Shocked

Listening to smart people talking about shit that matters is one of the great joys in life.  And one of the truly great things about The Marketplace of Ideas is that when an outlet like MSNBC wises up and realizes it can let good stuff fill a partial content vacuum  - well, it don't get a lot better'n that.

This bit starts with Jamie Dimon and the giant fuck up that Wall Street continues to be.

Bias Confirmed

This is why I never call it anything but DumFux News.

It's a comparison of results on a basic factual-knowledge test for consumers of different news organizations.

hat tip = James Fallows

A Step At A Time

Just inching our way closer to Robocop II.



What could possibly go wrong?

The Man Factor

I posted a while back about some stupid dust up or another (wait a minute - this is a blog. All my posts are about some stupid dust up or another).

Anyway, one of the big Non-Troversies yesterday was that the White House had sent out "an obviously Photo Shopped" pic of Obama throwing a football.

(to wit:)

So actually, not bad - guy's got decent form blah blah blah.  Why are we attacking it?

Because The Kenyan Usurper must never be seen to possess actual Americanizing characteristics.

Because football good - Obama bad.  If Obama's good at football, then Repub Physics doesn't work anymore, and the pretend universe implodes.

Because part of that pretend universe is totally dependent on the DumAss Dems never thinking to ask, "OK - so what's your guy got?"

Where are all the pix of Romney doing manly things?  Go ahead - Google that one, and get back to me.

More About That IPO Thingie

From SFGate:

"Facebook left nothing for the common investor," Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard wrote. "The insider pig pile of (private equity) firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all. This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact, and it should make Americans very, very angry."

This new Uber-Investor model is set up to make sure that the value of any new company being offered has already been stripped out before it "goes public".  At this point, facebook may have achieved that weird critical mass that makes some companies float along like a massive planetoid falling thru space, but anybody on the outside who buys shares from here on out is really just paying a voluntary tax that keeps the Hedge Funders and Sarbanes-Oxley lawyers healthy.

We're arguing over the possession of the corpse, and I think this is what Kleptocracy looks like.

About That IPO Thingie (updated)

We might be able to call it Sean Parker's Revenge by Proxy - can't wait for the movie.  I hope Oliver Stone is ready.

Anyway, facebook is the greatest thing since perforated toilet paper, and when you can't make a big messy splash with facebook's IPO, well, there's something not quite right.

The thing went public at about $38 a share, "spiked" all the way up around $40; and when it looked like it could seriously flop, the big underwriters had to jump in and take huge Price-Support Positions to keep the thing from going so deep in the tank you'd need a wormhole generator to find it.

So, whaddup widdat?  One thing for sure is that now a few very big investments houses own significant holdings in facebook.  I don't know any of the rules where these things are concerned, but you're talkin' JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs - so recent history would indicate "rules are for somebody else" and none of that crap about market-driven morality matters anyway.  Just let your imagination wander.

Maybe we're seeing more evidence of how people just don't relate to the structures of the economy.  I'll bet lots of people are in the standard default mode of "facebook's pretty cool - why are they always trying to fuck it up?"

For myself, I'll stay with "I don't trust those guys on WallStreet any farther than I could spit one of 'em".

All we really need to figure out now is: How do they make sure American Tax Payers keep having to eat the losses, and how do they turn that into a political liability for Obama, in order to hide the fact that tax payers are getting fucked with their pants on?

update:
oh yeah - when was the last time Wall Street launched something really good? And really, if you're a smart guy with great ideas, and you've spent the last 15 years or so bustin' your hump to make your cool little business work - why the fuck would you turn to any of these pricks for help when you know they're just gonna steal as much as they can carry and move on to the next sucker?  I don't get it.

Hiatus Alert

I'll be out for a few days.

Mike's New Hip - The Sequel

debuts tomorrow!

Meanwhile, In Malaysia

It's pretty sad, but it seems Justice has escaped and is trying to set up shop in SE Asia.  Hooda thunk it?

hat tip = Democratic Underground

via CultureMap Austin:

How is it possible that the unanimous conviction of a former U.S. President as a war criminal does not immediately register as the most important news of the day? Today's endorsement of Romney by the newly minted war criminal is getting far more traction in the news. (Though, as Politicker notes, the Romney camp has yet to comment on the news.)

Chase

Why is Jamie Dimon not being dragged thru the streets by his heels?  And when will any of these fuckin' crooks be held to account?

Crooks and Liars

The JPMorgan Chase story is also the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that.

Today's Pix

Shouldn't every "anti-gubmint conservative" be tickled silly about this?

Here - lemme get that for ya