The Big Bamboozle

Devoted to separating rubes from their money.



I won't say there's absolutely nothing "on the left" designed to make money off of a daily dose of "Oh my god - those bastard Republicans are at it again" (I get those emails every day, plus like Maher says, there's Whole Foods), but there's seriously nothing that compares with the straight up scam being played by "conservatives" of all stripes on so many otherwise good-hearted and well-meaning people.

Hillary

I'm not committing on this either way yet, but I'll say this:  I don't like dynasties, so I'll be hard pressed to support Hillary for president in 2016.  I'm not saying there's no way - I think she's done a pretty great job at State - but I really really don't like the idea of electing people from the same family as any previous office-holder.

I tho't it was a little weird, starting with Benigno Aquino in the Philippines in the 80s - he was assassinated, and so his wife Cory Aquino was elected.  I didn't like it then and I've grown less fond of it since - up to and including Clair McCaskill, and anybody else out there I'm not aware of.

No more Bushes
No more Rockefellers
No more Roosevelts
No more Kennedys
No more Clintons

If it wasn't for her daddy's name and her mommy's money, would Meghan McCain be any kind of 'leading light' in the GOP?

Does Luke Russert really deserve a national slot at NBC News?

What about Chris Wallace?

What - exactly - do Paris Hilton's credentials look like?

What makes Caroline Kennedy worthy of any consideration to be named Ambassador to Japan?

No legacies.  No inherited entitlements.

If we have to tax the fuck outa certain people's estates to kill off the Aristocracy, then that's what we should do - cuz the alternative is what's been the main tool of prevention of Aristocracy for about 40 centuries; and that is simply to fucking kill the aristocrats.

Questions?

If There Was A Class War

...my class won. --Warren Buffet

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Today's Re-Definition

GOP: Guardians Of Privilege

Let It Roll

My crush on Elizabeth Warren just won't quit.

It's been said that if you want loyalty and friendship in Washington, get a dog.  Warren is very busy not making friends in DC, which is generally a solid indicator that she's doing the hard work of representing regular citizens in the best way possible - even though an awful lot of those regular citizens are openly hostile to the help an Elizabeth Warren can make our government provide for them.

After 30 years of conditioning (gubmint sucks), I have to make an effort to remember that people aren't just gonna turn their attitudes around overnight.

We're in a pretty weird place right now.

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:

Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.

Face It

This clip is embedded so it fast forwards to where the really bad shit starts (at about 28:30). Kinda like the really bad shit doesn't actually start til after the war is "over".

And don't you dare look away.  This is what we did.  This is on us.



Gosh - it seems Iraq is all fucked up.  Just like some of us said it would be.

And some of the people we turned into the tools we used to fuck up Iraq are all fucked up too.



But we just walk away.

Connor And Kermit's Epic Fail

Some of the worst aspects of humanity are chronicled in the story of one Dr Kermit Gosnell - who must forever be known as the Butcher of Lancaster Avenue.

Here's the beginning of Connor Friedersdorf's mostly excellent article:

The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I've read. "This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," it states. "The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths."

Friedersdorf is fairly careful not to allow himself to project the savagery of Gosnell's actions onto the larger Abortion Issue - I gotta give him some props for that part, even tho' he made sure to include lots and lots of the gory details so the Dead-Fetus-Porn crowd gets a chance to do as much of that projecting thing for him as he could ever hope for (which he's smart enough to understand in the first place), so ol' Connor kinda restricts himself to some harsh criticism of "The Media" for not picking the story up and running with it.

OK - but if anybody's gonna see this god-awful mess as an opportunity to make some political hay on the "Pro-Life" side, then here's the turnaround:

What Gosnell ending up doing is almost exactly what we can expect in any sector of a totally Unfettered Free Market, unencumbered by Intrusive Gubmint Regulation.

Argue against Government, and insist on letting the Invisible Hand work it's magic.  All well and good.  Just don't act surprised and start to piss and moan about it when you get what you've been wishing for.

It's All In Your Head

(click the picture to advance to the next slide)

hat tip = All In with Chris Hayes

Making Way Too Much Sense

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) co-founder Peter Christ talks sense about "The War On Drugs".



The main problem is the one that (as usual) is all about the cash.  There are people who've spent their entire careers riding the swirling torrents of money and power that surge through another Industrial Complex here in God's America - this one involving a very lucrative marriage of Corporatized Prisons, Illegal Drug Cartels, and a Justice System Consortium of courts and cops who can sometimes fund themselves just thru the goodies they legally confiscate under the protection of Zero-Tolerance Policies (and the hyper-macho politicians who use the Drug War to scare us into keeping them in power).

The billions we piss down the rat hole every year would do wonders if we spent the money treating our drug problem as the Healthcare issue it actually is.

Of course, just like all the other really stoopid "conservative" ideas we fell into bed with over the last 40 years, The War On Drugs isn't going away easy.

(hat tip = facebook buddy Bill Davison)