The Un-Endorsement

Just like the Non-Denial Denial, and the Un-Apologetic Apology: this is at or near the summit of Bullshit Mountain (Richmond style, and with a hat tip to Jon Stewart).

The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran an Op-Ed today in which they decided to go with (literally) None Of The Above.

Virginia gets whipsawed a lot because of seemingly competing influences - our proximity to DC and the overarching presence of the federal government in Northern Va and The Tidewater, "balanced" against the rural areas of the South Side and the Shenandoah Valley; and then there's Richmond (where all the sharky lawyers, the politically ambitious, and the local Gubmint Grifters hang out together).

RTD has a bit of a rivalry going with The Virginian-Pilot and to a lesser extent with The Roanoke Times, but it really is the newspaper in this joint when it comes to state politics.  And here's the thing:  ever since the Dixiecrat migration to the GOP, they practically never ever fail to figure out some twisted convoluted way to come up with a rationalization for endorsing The Republican candidate for Governor.  So y'know it's bad when RTD thinks you're just too cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and that's what we've got in Ken (Kenny the Kooch) Cuccinelli.

The words that follow should not come as a surprise. During recent months, numerous editorials in The Times-Dispatch have lamented the gubernatorial campaign.

The major-party candidates have earned the citizenry’s derision. The third-party alternative has run a more exemplary race yet does not qualify as a suitable option. We cannot in good conscience endorse a candidate for governor.

This does not gladden us. Circumstance has brought us to this pass. This marks, we believe, the first time in modern Virginia that The Times-Dispatch has not endorsed a gubernatorial nominee.

So are we looking at nothing more than a backhanded endorsement for McAuliffe? Or are we seeing a sly and slippery way to keep people away from the polls by feeding their apathy - which of course helps the Repubs without coming out and saying so?  Or is it just straight-up cowardly?

I think "having to choose between the lesser of two evils"  is a political cliche in desperate need of being crushed into the dust.

I think if you walk away you're leaving the decision to somebody who's more than happy to make your decisions for you, and who is likely to choose the one you think is the greater of the two evils.

I think if you want better choices, you get off your dead brown ass and you work to find better choices.

And I think "deciding not to decide" is fine for a pot-fueled discussion at 3AM on a random Thursday when you're a sophomore in college, but not once you've grown some hair and you begin to understand any-godamned-thing about democratic self-government.

I think you make a fuckin' decision.

The Biased Media

Hannity shits on his own head, and Eric Stern at Salon checks it out:

I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.”  Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.

As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.

“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.

I don't know why debunking this shit doesn't seem to work on some people, but I guess you just hafta stay after it(?)

And then (just for the hell of it and because I don't now where else to put this one), we can just stroll over to Washington Examiner to catch another great view of the Bullshit Parade:

These two pieces ran on the same page, on the same day.  The need to "blame the media" is an addiction for some of these buttheads.  They ran the first one - apparently without checking one goddamned thing - and when somehow they find out it was wrong, they don't retract and they don't explain; they just flip straight over into blame-the-media mode.

The Party Of No Fucking Way Am I Votin' Fer These Pricks

If past is prologue, then there will come a time when a buncha Repubs will start revising the history of these last coupla weeks. I figure it oughta start just about June or July next year once they've safely lied their way around or thru their primaries, and have to start the 2014 campaigns proper.

They will spin all manner of yarn about how they didn't really vote to fuck over hungry children and homeless veterans and anybody trying to eke by on a few bucks invested in T-Bills - and they're going to go to the ends of the Earth trying to tell us we didn't actually watch as they all took a giant shit in each other's hats.

These people voted to go on wasting 12 Billion Dollars of the US economy (per week).

And they voted to make the world's Big Market Players so antsy that a fuckload of investors are looking to put their money in just about anything, just about anywhere but here in USAmerica Incorporated.  So I hafta wonder: if the GOP is really "the party of business", and if they really want the US to be run like a company, then why the fuck are they working so hard to make America unattractive to our investors?

Senate

Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)
John Cornyn (R-Texas)
Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)
Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
Mike Enzi (R-Wy.)
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
Dean Heller (R-Nev.)
Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
Mike Lee (R-Utah)
Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
James Risch (R-Idaho)
Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
Tim Scott (R-S.C.)
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)
David Vitter (R-La.)

House

Find your Critter here: Daily Kos (How every Congresscritter voted on shutdown & default (w/spotlight: Georgia)

The Rollout

Yeah - so far Obamacare pretty much sux.  Which isn't really true at all, because we don't know if Obamacare sux because the means by which we're supposed to be able to access Obamacare ain't workin', so how the fuck are we supposed to make a call on this thing anyway?

But wait - in states where they took the Federal dollars to expand Medicaid and put up their own exchanges, the thing is working pretty well.  In California (eg) it's doing just fine thanks very much.  But in the states where they refused to do anything, they have to rely on the Federal Government's version of the exchange, and that one ain't doin' so good.  Gee - I wonder if there's a correlation there?  I wonder if the states having all the problems are the ones where a certain political party has control of the government.

New products that get launched before they've been adequately tested and tweaked are just always disasters.  Wanna talk Windows8?

But after a coupla weeks (of oops; and uh-oh; and fuck - again!?!) isn't it time for somebody to suggest that the wingnuts are jamming and/or hacking the site just to make it all look worse than it actually is?

I'm not saying it's not fucked up - it looks pretty fucked up from where I'm sittin'.  I'm just saying that if both sides are the same and both sides pull the same shit and both sides are always exactly equally to blame, then where's the leftie version of "those bad ol' conservatives sabotaged our thing"? - followed of course by the counter charge of "those libtards crashed their own system so they could blame the conservatives who are chaste and pure and blameless and would never pull anything underhanded like that. blahblahblah.

Meanwhile, nothing gets fixed and we're right back in the same ol' bucket o' shit.

The KrugMan Speaks

Paul Krugman does a great job explaining the negative effects of the little temper tantrum the Repubs have been throwing for the last 5 years.  And he adds "Expansionary Austerity" to the list of oxymorons - knocking off "Conservative Values" for the top spot.

We should also acknowledge the power of bad ideas. Back in 2011, triumphant Republicans eagerly adopted the concept, already popular in Europe, of “expansionary austerity” — the notion that cutting spending would actually boost the economy by increasing confidence. Experience since then has thoroughly refuted this concept: Across the advanced world, big spending cuts have been associated with deeper slumps. In fact, the International Monetary Fund eventually issued what amounted to a mea culpa, admitting that it greatly underestimated the harm that spending cuts inflict. As you may have noticed, however, today’s Republicans aren’t big on revising their views in the face of contrary evidence.

Hall Pass

This is what makes Elizabeth Warren irresistibly sexy to me:

I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight.

Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end.

According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.

So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry.

We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

It's time for the hostage taking to end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."

She just put that out in an email and my hopeless crush just intensified.

And guess what, kids - unless we get up on our hind legs and put some real pressure on our Congress Critters, we're gonna be right back here to watch this stoopid little dog-n-pony show all over again in January.

Democracy's a do-it-yourself proposition.  Ya want it to work - ya gotta work at it.

Today's Toon

My "Representative"

I suppose most people feel they're not really being heard by their Congress Critter.  Especially when you didn't vote for him, and the reason you didn't vote for him is that you're pretty sure he's got his head up his ass. (can't imagine why he won't talk to me)

Anyway, Robert Hurt (R-VA-05) is a freshman and all, so it's more than probable he voted exactly the way he was told to vote - or at least he begged for permission to vote the way he voted - or whatever.

Makes no difference really, but damn, son; you voted to continue the shutdown and to breach the debt ceiling, which would bring the whole thing down on our heads?

Let's Negotiate

Today's Quote

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Today's Pix

Little Jemmy Tried To Warn Us

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
-- James Madison, Federalist 10, November 22, 1788.

We seem to have an extraordinary surplus of bean-counters who think knowing everything there is to know about slicing and dicing the numbers is all anybody needs to know about anything; and who understand how to make sense of (and how to make money off of) a jillion smaller and smaller segments of demographics inside the larger demographics etc etc etc.  Unfortunately, while minting all these MBA-types, we haven't been teaching them much about the simple fact that those numbers are made up of real live human-type individual flesh-and-bone people.

So it doesn't really matter that a mom and a dad somewhere in god's America have to live in fear that their insurance will "run out" before their 11-year-old can finish up the chemo treatments for leukemia.

It doesn't matter that a grandpa will have to put up with the debilitating pain of an arthritic knee for another 5 years before he qualifies for Medicare because there's just no way he can afford the insurance even if he could get it.

It doesn't matter that a 24-year-old who graduated 18 months ago with an Engineering degree has to wait tables and deliver pizza and sleep on the couch at his step-dad's trailer - praying his asthma doesn't kill him in the middle of the night because there's always a little month left over at the end of his inhaler.

The list of incredibly shitty examples of unnecessary anxiety and suffering stretches out  beyond the horizon - but none of that matters because some politicians think their opposition to ObamaCare is "a winning argument".

They believe a sliver here and a sliver there - slivers that might add up to about 23% of the whole population - means they can then run around pretending that 23% is really "what the American people want".  Because they "polled" their own districts, and wow, it turns out 65% of those rubes think what that other 23% think, and that must surely mean they have the one Congress Critter in the whole joint who really knows what he's talkin' about.

"We've been talking amongst this group for the last four weeks about fairness, about whether or not it's fair to give extensions to people who have political connections and make our families live under a different law," he continued. "That is a winning argument for us. But no one asked that question. ... Somebody asked whether it would be different next time, in January or February, whenever we take this up again. The natural inclination is to say 'No, it will be exactly the same.'"

These people have no soul and no honor.

Today's Eternal Sadness

And BTW - it's the guns, stupid.

From WBIW in Indiana, via Addicting Info:

A Martinsville man with a history of arguments with his son was being held in jail on suspicion of fatally shooting the younger man, the sheriff said.

David Carrender, 49, admitted killing 19-year-old Wyatt Carrender on Sunday evening inside the older man's rural Morgan County home, Sheriff Robert Downey says.

The Carrenders had been out watching football games together when they started arguing over whether to return home, Downey said. Once home, the arguing continued.

"It appears the father retrieved a handgun and shot his son, it appears, six times," Downey says.

Why So Serious?

And now for something that's almost as wacky as the TeaBagger antics of late:



hat tip = Little Green Footballs

October

I don't like the idea that we feel the need to make a particular month "Breast Awareness Month" (eg).  Shit, like I need to be reminded about boobies?

I just don't think we should let ourselves be herded into a comfortable mindset that all we ever have to do is wear a little ribbon of a certain color on our lapels - or put a magnetic ribbon on our cars - and just kinda roll our eyes at how cute it is for all those manly gridiron studmuffins to be rockin' the pink accessories.  For one month.

Seriously - does anybody who's done battle with cancer have to be reminded of it?  Do they think about it for just that 8.5% of the year?

Cancer's about the worst thing that can happen to anybody - and cancer doesn't only happen to cancer patients.  It happens to all of us.  Quick, name five people you know personally who 1) has never had cancer, and 2) doesn't know anybody who's had cancer.  I'll bet my bucks to your boogers you can't do it.

But let's get back to our national allergy to feeling real feelings and facing real facts.  Instead of concentrating on the sanitized make-believe romantically noble bullshit being peddled by profit takers and rent seekers running phony joints like Susan G Komen and the NFL, maybe we could be thinking about this, from The Scar Project:

And maybe we could put some real pressure on policy makers to get off their asses and get something done about something that really matters for a fucking change.