Today's Pix

Doonesbury

Aircraft Carriers

China recently unveiled its brand new toy - which it bought (as surplus) from Ukraine - and which BTW, has yet to be fitted out to make it capable of launching and landing AIRPLANES.

Correct - China has an aircraft carrier that can't carry aircraft.  I feel so threatened.

Your Civics Homework

We might get around to fixing this one of these days - but I'm not holding my breath.

Oh, Willard

Willard's team decided they'd try to make it look like they had any fuckin' clue on what to do about the problems thrown at us by Superstorm Sandy, so they dressed up a campaign rally to look like they give a rat's ass about anything but themselves.

Too typical.  But it points up (again) the simple fact that the Repubs are always trying to substitute these empty gestures and photo ops for real policy and helpful action.

Balloon Juice takes 'em down.

But Romney is shameless. He wants to use Sandy’s destruction as a media hook, so he re-branded his rally for the stupid and gullible members of the press as a “storm relief’ effort. To underscore the stupid deception, Mitt asked attendees to bring can goods to the rally, as if random truckloads of unsorted can goods flooding a disaster area are useful. The Red Cross is pretty specific that these kinds of efforts produce piles of supplies that cannot be used and cause real problems for relief efforts:

Does the American Red Cross accept donated goods?

Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel.

Something else it points up - Romney is another silver-spoon legacy puke who doesn't know the first fuckin' thing about the lives or the problems of real people, and apparently he knows even less about any of the mechanisms in place that actually work to help real people when they need it.

Unconfirmed

..but of course, we can run with it because of the rule: "Significant If True".

So eat it, Repubs.  You wanna make shit up about Obama, then you can bloody well expect to get it back.

Gettin' It Done - 6

It's not a good idea to celebrate the violent destruction of a fellow human being, and it's not in keeping with the high concept of Due Process just to hunt a guy down and kill him, but if there's ever a good reason to make exceptions, Osama bin Laden was it.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.

Sandy The Keynesian Hurricane

Wanna see straight up Keynesian Economics at work?  Take a good look at what happens when FEMA and other Federal Assistance is administered properly over the next few months.

We had a little peek at it after Irene, but now we're gonna see it all happen center stage.

From Crooks & Liars:

Now, don't get me wrong. There's no way in hell I'm happy about this storm (in fact, I'd like to send an invoice to oil lobbyists and tell them to split the bill) and after it's done, there will be people who died (sixteen on the East Coast, 69 in the Caribbean as of this writing), and countless others left homeless, but there is a small silver lining in all those clouds.

Because the construction industry has been moribund for a while. Now it will explode, and a lot of people who didn't have jobs will have them.

And those people who have those new jobs will spend money, and that will create more jobs. How many? That depends on how much money the feds put into the recovery. (Don't forget, Wall Street brokers live in these affected areas, too.)

And, oh yeah, let's see what we can learn from comparing Obama's FEMA with Jr Bush's FEMA, and then take a good look at what Willard's been saying about how he thinks FEMA should be scrapped so we can privatize those functions and make Halliburton even fatter and richer - which he then Etch-A-Sketched later.

Lyin' sack o' shit.

Wouldn't It Be Nice?

Yeah - they're prob'ly not really able to do it - pretty cool if they could tho'.  And that's how it starts.

During A National Emergency

...what does leadership look like?  Let's see: