Today's Larry

Gotta work pretty hard to find the funny sometimes, and sometimes, it's just not there to be found.

A Few Late Friday Tunes

Richland Woman Blues --Maria Muldaur

What The Rain Will Bring --Pokey Lafarge

You Don't Know Me (cover) --Michael Grimm

Brain Damage --Roger Waters

Jesus Wept

There's always a dark and ugly side to Populism, and here's a perfect example:

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Gotta give Trump some props though. He's doing one thing really well - he's using a sales tactic called "Isolate And Bypass".  He knows this questioner is a complete fucking moron, but Trump also knows he currently has that guy's vote and he's not gonna get anywhere without it, but he can't afford not to widen out beyond his looney-tunes base if he expects to have any chance at all once he gets past the first coupla Primaries.  So he has to deflect - "we're looking into it".  He doesn't embrace this nutball, but he doesn't alienate him either.

And he uses the Sales-y language that makes it easier for his Spinmeisters to twist it all into whatever shape is needed to continue the illusion that Trump is never ever ever wrong about anything.

Like this (via Crooks & Liars):

You may have noticed Wednesday nite, when Trump and Jeb got into it over the Florida casino thing - Jeb saying he torpedoed Trump, and Trump coming back with the standard blustery blowhard-ery, "If I'd wanted it, I woulda got it, believe me."

So what I think the Press Poodles should ask at the next "debate" is this: 

• "In your career, what have you gotten wrong - what mistakes have you made?" 

--and/or-- 

• "What 2 decisions in your professional life would you like to revisit now, and what would you do differently to improve the outcome?"

(Of course, while the Poodles may actually ask the questions, I'm betting they wouldn't think to follow up and demand a real answer after each candidate tried to make a funny out of it.) 

Anybody willing to spin some kind of Infallibility Bullshit about themselves or any of their mentors, role models or idols should never get anybody's vote for anything.

Fact Checking

FactCheck.org

The Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate on Sept. 16, this one hosted by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California. We found they strayed from the facts on numerous issues, including:

--Donald Trump told a story linking vaccination to autism, but there’s no evidence that recommended vaccines cause autism. 

--And Sen. Rand Paul suggested that it would be safer to spread out recommended vaccines, but there’s no evidence of that, either.

--Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump donated to his gubernatorial campaign to get him to change his mind on casino gambling in Florida. But Trump denied he ever wanted to bring casino gambling to the state. A former lobbyist says he did.

--Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said that Hillary Clinton was “under investigation by the FBI” because she “destroyed government records.” Not true. She had the authority to delete personal emails.

--Trump said that “illegal immigration” cost “more than $200 billion a year.” We couldn’t find any support for that. Actually, it could cost taxpayers $137 billion or more to deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, as Trump proposes.

--Trump again wrongly said that Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy like the United States. It does.

--Carly Fiorina said that the Planned Parenthood videos released by an anti-abortion group showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But that scene isn’t in any of the videos.

--Fiorina repeated familiar boasts about her time at Hewlett-Packard, saying the size of the company “doubled,” without mentioning that was due to a merger with Compaq, and she cherry-picked other statistics.

--Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that U.S. policies to combat climate change would “do absolutely nothing.” The U.S. acting alone would have a small effect on rising temperatures and sea levels, and experts say U.S. leadership on the issue would prompt other nations to act.

--In the “happy hour” debate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham glossed over the accompanying tax increases when he said only that Ronald Reagan and then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill “found a way to save Social Security from bankruptcy by adjusting the age of retirement from 65 to 67.”

Today's Tweet

If you melted a thousand selfie sticks into the shape of a short fat penis it would be Donald trump

— Jessi Klein (@jessirklein) September 17, 2015

A Faint Glimmer

Always looking for the light on the horizon that might suggest we ain't dead yet:

As I outlined a while back, Democrats have their work cut out for them if they want to win back the Senate in 2016. Two of the best bets to flip a seat from Red to Blue are Rep. Tammy Duckworth in Illinois and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. A new poll has both Democrats leading in the early stages of their respective races.

Ew, Carly

Carly Fiorina got in on the outrage act.  Close to being red-faced and hysterical, it seemed she had really occupied the roll of incensed partisan, and she rode that pony right up to the edge.

“As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” -- Carly Fiorina

Unfortunately - Fiorina might have trouble finding the videotape to show Clinton. No video has surfaced showing the scene Fiorina describes taking place inside a Planned Parenthood facility.

So go blow yourself with it, lady.

Today's Best Blog Line

From the guy who should be everybody's blogging hero - Charlie Pierce, writing about Trump:

He's not a myth. He's just a fake. It's the difference between Homer and Clifford Irving.

And from the comments: Benito Trumpolini

If this shit was any less tragic, it wouldn't be funny. 

Today's Wondering

So to start things off, Donald Trump slags the fuck outa the US Hispanic population.

Then he spends a few stump speeches and TV appearances telling us what unbelievably crappy negotiators America's business and government leaders are because they can't get a trade deal without sending everybody's jobs to Mexico and China.

Next, he straight out stomps on Megyn Kelly on national TV in front of god and everybody, which leads pundits all along the political spectrum to say (essentially) that he's acting like a developmentally arrested adolescent with a raging case of something that looks like a cross between Gynophobia, Little Man Syndrome and Late Stage Syphilitic Dementia.

And now, Mr Trump spins the yarn about how he's always felt he was in the military because he spent a coupla years at a prep school that happened to require the bad boy legacy fucks who get sent there to fix their behavioral problems to wear uniforms that were more or less reminiscent of those worn by members of the actual Military Division of USAmerica Inc.  Put that one together with the John McCain is no hero comment, and you're not gonna be the most popular dog at that particular kennel club.

Brown people
Business guys
Women
Military

He's alienated every major slice of the voter demo that everybody knows the GOP has to score big with if they want any chance at all.

So I guess my question is: How much longer will we wait; what else does the guy hafta do before Alex Jones floats the False Flag hypothesis?  And will it be the plain vanilla version of Trump wanting to destroy the GOP, or will it go higher than that, with Trump being nothing less than a cat's paw for the Bilderbergs and blah blah blah?

Maybe it really is just Trump being Trump - it's nothing but Brand Boosting; and he's spouting all this weird shit looking for the exit line that nobody will give him.

But at the same time, I can't stop thinking about Poe's Law - "...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will, to some readers, be indistinguishable from sincere expressions of the parodied views."

It's a wonderment.

Quiz Time

Take the Science quiz at Pew Research Center

How much Americans appear to know about science depends on the kinds of questions asked, of course. Science encompasses a vast array of fields and information, and the questions in the new Pew Research survey represent a small slice of science knowledge. On Pew Research Center’s set of 12 multiple-choice questions – some of which include images as part of the questions or answer options – Americans gave more correct than incorrect answers; the median was eight correct answers out of 12 (mean 7.9). Some 27% answered eight or nine questions correctly, while another 26% answered 10 or 11 items correctly. Just 6% of respondents got a perfect score.

These findings come from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey of 3,278 adults (including 2,923 adults online and 355 respondents by mail) was conducted Aug 11 - Sept 3, 2014.

The test is easy - almost ridiculously so - and not because I'm just that fucking awesome.

And I don't think it's important to know these few things just because they're important things to know in and of themselves.  They are, but - I think we have to widen that out and understand that it's important for us to know these (or other) things as a way of keeping ourselves better-informed in a more general sense.

What did Mr Jefferson say about the health of a democracy being dependent on a well-informed electorate?  

And what's become apparent as far as people being well-informed in the age of Alex Jones and Benny Hinn and DumFux News?

Schools

We "tried" desegregation and integration for about one generation, and just as the "achievement gap" was closing in a very significant way; just as minorities were beginning to manifest the side bennies of education (longer healthier lives, net worth, etc), we bailed.  We gave in to the whiny-butt pussies of the Radical Right and we fucking bailed - on ourselves.

hat tip = Ta-Nehisi Coates via twitter

Today's Maher

Rushdie makes the point that the bigots are always on about how everybody's treating them oh so very badly.  You may notice, btw, that this is the standard play that so many "conservatives" pull all the fucking time.

• Calling them out for being intolerant means you're being intolerant.
• Call them out for some racist shit they say, and it means you're the real racist.
• Tell them to stop using their religious beliefs to rationalize discrimination against LGBT, and you're discriminating against them because of their faith.
• Smack down a bully, and that just means you're bullying the bully.

But the killer point comes (starting at about 2:00) when Linda Chavez demonstrates perfectly that she's way past her freshness date.  She launches into the same old crap about how (paraphrasing) "people need time to be brought along slowly".  Bullshit.  Comfortable white people said exactly the same thing in the 50s and 60s when asked about Segregation and "Black Rights".  Comfortable owners and managers said exactly the same thing when union organizers were demanding fair labor practices.  

US history is chock full of examples of foot-dragging on issues that basically have centered on getting this country to start living up to the promises it made to itself.  You know - "all men are created equal" and that silly old notion of "a more perfect union" thing.  Go back as far as you feel like going, and you'll find another Linda Chavez telling us that "they want too much too soon - it's all moving too fast - people need time to get used to it - it's all so new, these ideas of equality and fairness".

Stay with this Tim Wise thing til about the 4:00 mark:

If I plug in the word "gay" when I hear "black" or "people of color", and substitute "straight" for "white", suddenly it seems as if some of these concepts are in fact kinda universal - oooh, maybe that's what Mr Jefferson meant by "we hold these truths to be self-evident"(?).

Change can be a scary thing, but we're supposed to treat people right - and we can't afford to continue not treating people right just because it's inconvenient; or because we think we need our families and our friends and our neighbors to agree with us first.

Today's Pix

Yellow Jackets are just assholes

Oh, Clever Me

Today's Today

Soothe The Savage Breast

It's been said by wiser men than me that the opposite of anything is whatever keeps you from it.

That means the opposite of love is fear, and the opposite of hate is forgiveness.

One / Let It Be (mashup cover) --Boyce Avenue

Out Of The Blue by Simon Armitage --(as read by) Rufus Sewell

Simon Armitage - 9/11: Out Of The Blue - Rufus... by poetictouch

(the embedded commercials at dailymotion are jarring and spoil the effect, so if you wanna try it a little differently, go to YouTube):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Give Peace A Chance --John & Yoko

Today's Lesson

...in household budgeting and money management - just a reminder about the money we're spending on gasoline.

We'll start with the basics, and say you drive a good medium size car getting about 25 mpg, and your daily commute is a short one at 20 miles per day; plus you go to the gym, and there's daycare/school, and you make groceries, and you go to the dry cleaners, and you run all the other errands in a very well-planned kinda way etc etc etc, which brings your total monthly drive to about 1100 miles.

@ 25 mpg, you're burning 44 gallons of gas, which is gonna cost you about $90 right now because gas is down around $2.05 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.

But hang on a dang minute.  You also get to pay your share of the tax breaks, and the sweetheart loan terms, and all the other subsidies that American oil companies get in various forms in order to help them provide us with all that "cheap" fuel.  

Then you get to add in your share of what it costs for the US Military to protect our (ie: Halliburton's) vital interests, the VA bennies for the vets, the increased healthcare and insurance costs, and the cost of lost productivity for the millions of us who get sick and die every year because of the toxic shit left over from drilling, pumping, storing, shipping, retailing and burning that crap and and and.

This "help" suddenly gets pretty expensive, even tho' it's next to impossible to get anybody who actually knows what the real amount is to say straight up what the real amount is.  Ya gotta figure it's pretty bad when it seems like so many people are going so far outa their way to keep us from getting at the answers.

Estimates on all this help run as low as about $40 Billion (which everybody knows is the PR Consultant Bullshit Number), and as high as $500 Billion to $1 Trillion per year, (which some think is the bullshit radical hippie pinko number).

But even if the low estimate is ridiculously low and the high end is ridiculously high, the ugly truth is that the gallon of gas you bought for $2.05?  That gallon of gas cost you more like 8 bucks.

8 fucking dollars for a gallon of gasoline

But hey - all that other stuff - that renewable stuff - c'mon, man - that's really expensive, and it's new, so it's scary.  And ya know what happens when we get scared?  That 8-dollar gas might have to go up to about 10.  Don't fuck with your betters.

How You Sound

How Climate Change Deniers Sound To Normal People

But Then This

Just wondering if there would be a circumstance under which I'd support religion getting in the way of government employees doing their jobs.

And the answer is actually pretty simple.  Yes, but as with all Civil Disobedience, I can be on your side only as long as you're going to accept full responsibility and you're ready to pay the price in terms of arrest, jail and fines.  

Then we'll work on changing the law - and we'll be doing it right.  We won't flat out disobey, rationalizing it with god-knobbery, and expecting total impunity because we have friends with large weapons and small vocabularies.

Today's Bandwagon

Yeah, I know - it left the barn and is long gone.  Sometimes it takes me a while.