Florida Gets Another One

Guns don't kill people - gun nuts kill people; with guns; because they're fuckin' nuts.

via Wonkette:

The shooting occurred last Friday after Michael Dunn, 45, stopped at a convenience store; his girlfirend went into the store to buy some wine, and Dunn found himself oppressed by the very loud stereo in the car he’d parked next to, according to the Orlando Sentinel:

Jordan Russell Davis, 17, and several other teenagers were sitting in a sport utility vehicle in the parking lot when Dunn pulled up next to them in a car and asked them to turn down their music, [Jacksonville sheriff's Lt. Rob] Schoonover said.

Jordan and Dunn exchanged words, and Dunn pulled a gun and shot eight or nine times, striking Jordan twice, Schoonover said. Jordan was sitting in the back seat. No one else was hurt.

After the shooting, Dunn and his girlfriend drove away to a motel, and Dunn only turned himself in to police the next day, after hearing on the news that someone had died. Because really, you don’t want to get all tangled up with the law after firing a bunch of shots in a public place; if he hadn’t hit anyone, no need to make a fuss.

Today's Pix

Changing Their Tune

The rubes are showing what a bunch of credulous bozos they are.  And having been misled and cajoled and bullied into believing the weirdest bullshit any of these charlatans could dream up for the last 40 years, suddenly Ol' Gran-pappy Robertson wants to pretend he hasn't been punkin' the poor saps all along, and that (contrary to what he's insisted on in the past), the Young Earth thing is "interpretation" and not to be taken literally.  

Fuckin' phony.

So it all goes down The Memory Hole.  They wipe out the version of their own history that's now inconvenient, and they start fresh with, "No, no - I never said that.  Anyone who thought I would say that would have to be a foolish child, and you're not a foolish child are you?"

And so it goes - reset, reboot, repeat as needed.  

As driftglass says, "Always wrong but never in doubt."

It's An Ambush

So, is this maybe some kind of trial balloon?  Is somebody at DumFux News trying to move them off of their mission to promote GOP interests?  Or is it just another example of what happens when a Segment Producer (or an Anchor Poodle) decides to leave the joint anyway, so he might as well come clean about a coupla things?

This shit (almost) never happens by accident - it's a wonderment.



(hat tip = Addicting Info)

Say What?

Here's Rand Paul, "pleading the case" for Personhood Legislation (actually, it's obvious he's just reading a script over the fucking phone - probably because he's getting lots of large donations from American Taliban organizations).



I have an idea, Mr Paul - how 'bout you guys stick to your "philosophy" and just leave people the fuck alone?  Isn't that kinda your whole "Libertarian" thing?

It's Broken

"The BS under the hood" - Andrea Seabrook at her new gig DecodeDC



We're losing something important here.

Why What Happened Happened

...and what needs to happen now; and what to watch for.

From Rachel Maddow the day after 11-6-12.  She may have delivered this a little too soon after the election to make it stick in the collective consciousness - especially for the Repubs.  So here it is again.



And it's not exactly something nobody else is saying.  Here's Bruce Bartlett from a piece (that's a bit too long and way too poor-pitiful-me) in The American Conservative:

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.

--snip--

So here we are, post-election 2012. All the stupidity and closed-mindedness that right-wingers have displayed over the last 10 years has come back to haunt them. It is now widely understood that the nation may be center-left after all, not center-right as conservatives thought. Overwhelming losses by Republicans to all the nation’s nonwhite voters have created a Democratic coalition that will govern the nation for the foreseeable future.

Tellingly, a key reason for Obama’s victory, according to exit polls, is none other than George W. Bush, whom 60 percent of voters primarily blame for the nation’s economic woes—an extraordinary fact when he has been out of office for four years. Even though they didn’t read myImpostor book, voters still absorbed its message.

The Krugman Speaks

I lifted the whole thing from from Paul Krugman's blog at NYT:

The Fake Skills Shortage

Kudos to Adam Davidson for some much-needed mythbusting about the supposed skills shortage holding the US economy back. Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering. Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.

And this dovetails perfectly with one of the key arguments against the claim that much of our unemployment is “structural”, due to a mismatch between skills and labor demand. If that were true, you should see soaring wages for those workers who do have the right skills; in fact, with rare exceptions you don’t.

So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.

It's always something phony - whenever you ask anybody about what's up with the economy, they're ready with some crapola like "my business can't do anything until we see some certainty restored to the system", or this malarkey about "structural problems of skills-matching".

I make no claims about knowing the whole answer, but I know it has nothing to do with the Politically Correct blather we get from Plutocrats, and everything to do with Demand - the kind of demand you get when people are working in positions where they can feel relatively confident their jobs won't simply disappear; and when they can have some reassurance that their efforts will be rewarded fairly.

Whatever happened to the guys who knew enough to understand "you gotta spend money to make money"?

Be sure to read the Adam Davidson piece too:

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.

Today's Pix

The Un-War On Christmas

Do you see it?  There on the side of the wagon and again on the banner under the picture of the wagon?  It says "White House Christmas Tree".

I'm serious - if you bring any of the usual shit about "anti-Christian this" or "holiday that", I can't guarantee I won't get all medieval on your dumb ass.

Here's the video:


Yeah - it's just that boring.  It's always just that boring.   Why is it ALWAYS the Little Stoopid that DumFux News and the wingnuts choose to make into a Big Stoopid?

Here's a tho't - what if DumFux News is actually helping Obama and all those Big Gubmint rascals by distracting our attention away from Torture and Murder-by-Drone and Domestic Spying and a hundred other bigger things by getting us to concentrate on a bunch of fanciful junk that isn't true and wouldn't fucking matter even if it was true?

Today's Toon

From Democratic Underground:

And I'll Say It Again

No Dynasties.

No more Bushes, no more Clintons, No more Kennedys, no more Rockefellers - no more legacy candidates for anything anywhere anytime ever (unless of course, I change my mind because somebody comes along who's completely awesome).

Cleveland Leader linking to NYT

President Barack Obama's second term hasn't even officially begun, but already speculation is beginning to mount for the next presidential race in 2016. It is now rumored that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the son of former president George H.W. Bush and brother of former president George W. Bush, is looking to throw his hat in the ring for the Republican ticket in 2016.

Jeb Bush is not that completely awesome guy.  And neither is Hillary Clinton.  Look at who serves in any level of government, and you'll find way too many people whose number one item on the resumé is "born into a family of wealth and power".

Knock that shit off.

The Krugman

I don't like feeling I'm becoming kinda captured by a slanted narrative (just sayin' that one straight out), but I'll try to contain my discomfort (for a while anyway) because Paul Krugman seems always to be trying to talk some sense into us.

And he keeps coming up with real info about real events that we need to weigh against all the fantastic predictions of doom coming from the Austerity Freaks.

But what about the brief but nasty slump in 1927? That wasn’t caused by spiking interest rates; it was, instead, caused by fiscal austerity, by the measures taken to stabilize the franc.

So even when we look at the closest thing I can find to the scenario the deficit scolds want us to fear, it doesn’t play out at all as described.

It’s quite remarkable: our policy discourse remains largely dominated by fears of an event that the fear-mongers can’t explain in theory, and for which they can offer no historical examples in practice.

Music In Advertising

Banishment

This one - from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative - is really fun.  And it's easily the most honest of what I've read since the Great GOP Meltdown.

(Fun Fact:  Laura Ingraham was heard recently saying she's convinced the GOP, in its current wingnut configuration - and in spite of being pretty well drubbed - is still a major-league thing because "conservative radio" is still so very popular.  Hang by a thread much, Laura?)

Anyway, Dreher starts with slamming Dick Morris:

Got that? Dick Morris believed it was his “duty” to go on TV and say that Romney was going to win this thing, because everybody on Team Romney at the time was depressed. It’s hard to know whether Morris really believed what he was saying, as he claims to, but there can be no doubt that he saw his role as cheerleading for the Republican candidate, not offering straightforward analysis.

Dick Morris is a conservative figure who really ought to never be heard from again. He’s a hack. I say give him a Dubya Award for Meritorious Service To The Conservative Movement, and push him off the stage. (“Meritorious” in the sense that, say, a boss who is firing an employee for screwing up makes an insincere but face-saving statement about how much the company has benefited from the employee’s service, and wishes him the best of luck in his future endeavors).

...then Dreher asks his readers to suggest others who should just fade away, and that's when it really starts to roll.

EarlyBird says:

It’s been a while since she’s really been on the public stage – perhaps she actually has the capacity for shame – but Sarah Palin needs to go far, far away and never come back, never “write” another book.

She is not stupid, she’s something worse: proudly ignorant. There has probably never been as vapid, empty of a “conservative” as Palin who’s gone as far in her career as she has.

She doesn’t know the first thing about governance, and her record as governor of Alaska shows she has no interest in actually implementing ideas and policies and doing the hard work of governing, but she instinctively knows how to throw red meat out to the base, rallying the worst instincts among the right with crypto-racist and fully reactionary nonsense about “real Americans.”

These are the people that make the electorate think, “the Republicans aren’t able to govern.”

She’s a disgrace to American politics, and an indictment of how off the rails the GOP has become in recent years. That she was such a darling for so long is jaw dropping.

But there's a good dose of the same ol' shit too:

Louis says:

The only ignorant people are the ones who overlook the damage done by Republicans in Washington, D.C. What was Sarah Palin’s big crime? There isn’t one. I would prefer her as president to any of the Bushes any day of the week.