Never get out-f******ed again

Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.

Miserable tatter of background checks

The shooting death of Charles Albert Poland Jr. and the kidnapping of a young boy named Ethan were completely preventable. There is no way Jimmy Lee Dykes should have been permitted to possess firearms:

Mr. Dykes, who has lived in a travel trailer here for about two years, has a troubled past, including arrests on charges connected to drugs, drunken driving and, in Florida in 1995, unlawful display of a firearm. On Wednesday he was due in court in this county, accused of shooting at a neighbor in a dispute over driving on his property.

Everyone who knew Dykes knew he was bad news.

Neighbors of Mr. Dykes generally kept their distance, which he made easy. He frequently made violent threats to anyone who wandered onto his property, once even beating a neighbors’ dog to death with a lead pipe. He would sometimes sit watching and holding a rifle when young children played in a nearby yard. Late into the night he would dig in the backyard of his travel trailer or patrol his property with a flashlight and a long gun.

Now Poland is heroically dead, Dykes has been justifiably killed by the FBI, and Ethan has been rescued.

But Alabama won't rethink its gun laws, and the NRA won't rethink its crazy, extremist position against closing the gun show and private sale loopholes in the miserable tatter of current background check law.

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Don't do stupid shit

We can't afford this now, and we never should have afforded it.

Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads.

Yet time and again, checks from Washington have allowed the town to put itself back together.

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas.

As the New York Times discovered, Dauphin Island, Alabama, is a spit of sand with real estate under water in the fine tradition of land speculators and fraud:

Dauphin Island is not stable enough to sustain much plant growth, much less homes that aren't houseboats moored to the sand. American taxpayers should not subsidize rebuilding this as if we were King Canute and, worse, unable to learn anything from experience.

Pretty simple: Don't build on barrier beaches unless you can afford to have your property washed away.

And we should learn that Zillow fabulously overstates property values.

Update (11/24): A path less travelled...

[A]t 3 a.m. the next morning, the idea of moving the town woke me up from a sound sleep. I got dressed, went to my office and hammered out a counter-proposal to the Corps: Let us spend the $3.5 million to move the town’s flood prone buildings to higher ground. We’d never ask for federal disaster assistance again.

The Village Board endorsed the idea, but the Corps declined. It was not in the business of moving people; it was in the business of building things and naming them after members of Congress.

A calculus like this also pertains to New York City, which will either need vast billions of dollars to create a polder or relocation of low-lying assets or the profligate waste of clean-up and repair funds again and again.

Never give up a lie

The bullshit continues, this time in Georgia, where an administrative judge believes he has the power to compel the President to appear and prove the birthers wrong. Even though he has done this over and over and over again.

It's time to start fucking these people up, by which I mean ruining their fucking lives, not injuring their bodies. The judge, the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney (Orly Taitz, the Fred Phelps of birtherism, rebuffed at every turn and even sanctioned for it but still insane enough to continue her abuse of the legal system), and anyone who funded this nullificationism. It's time to find out what they've done wrong and make it known - to their wives, to their creditors, to the press.

It's long past time to stop being nice, to start taking no prisoners. Figuratively.

Start with Orly Taitz. Find the lies in her naturalization record - maybe she's a planted late Soviet era sleeper - revoke her citizenship, and deport her worthless insane ass back to Russia.

Yeah, it's going on in Alabama too. Neo-confederate assholes.

Republicans can only win in the long run if they lie and cheat.

What they show us

Lazing on the sofa, idly watching a third rate college football bowl game that I don't care a whit about and never heard of before - the BBVA Compass Bowl. After a Pitt kick-off return, as ESPN went to commercial, I noticed the long shot of the Birmingham skyline had an area of soft focus, obscuring lettering on the parapets of two office buildings.

Here's what ESPN was hiding on behalf of their sponsor:

Competitors. As expected.

Moral of the story: Don't outsource your bullshit detection. Know when the content you see and hear is advertising.

College bowl games are and have always been about brand-building. This one? Same reason Toronto Dominion Bank bought naming rights to the Boston Garden - to fit in with the locals. Both have also disguised their nation of origin by using their initials. Toronto might not have been so bad, but Dominion, well, na ga happen. Can you imagine Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Birmingham!? Every deputy sheriff would be asking for their papers.

In fact, nearly all TV is captured by its sponsorship. Media is a product, and it carefully shows us just what its sponsors want us to see.

Missouri loves company

Alabama would rather be poor than brown. Again.

Alabama’s competitors certainly won’t waste any time. After the Tuscaloosa incident, the editorial page of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited Mercedes to Missouri. “We are the Show-Me State,” it said, “not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

Of course, the people who suffer from this sort of draconian response (to a real problem) are those who are already marginal, those for whom this exhausts their margin. Republican political consultants? They have life tenure, assuming they never think outside their ideological constraints.

The New York Times is off-base on one thing. Americans will fill jobs that pay a fair wage. If an economic habit - cheap food - requires penury of its workers, there's something wrong with the habit, not with the potential workers. A previous highly economical agricultural system - holding cotton-pickers in human bondage - didn't argue for the status quo.

Pay the workers better, and they'll show up for this back-breaking work.

Why Jim Crow was necessary

Race-blind democracy in the vanquished South after the end of the Civil War would have completely changed the last century and a half. Mississippi and South Carolina were majority black.


Can you imagine those two states leading the civil rights movement! Louisiana and Alabama weren't far behind, either.

Jim Crow - and the Ku Klux Klan for that matter - were necessary to prevent the permanent loss of political power by the landed white aristocracy that had wanted and lost the war. Enfranchised black folks would not have voted for the bullshit that white folks voted for.

Nowadays, disenfranchisement is done by dipshits attacking ACORN and by voter intimidation efforts. These are mainstream Republican activities.

The aristocrats and oligarchs never stop fighting to own everything.

Big W for Auburn

Could it be that Auburn has hired a white guy who's out of his depth to pave the way for a competent black guy? Could it be that Chizik, like Duhbya, will be the unwitting midwife of a new day?

Come on, we're talking about Ala-fucking-bama.

Still, if the black guy could beat the Crimson Tide, maybe...

(h/t Lawyers, Guns, and Money, not to mention Vincent LaGuardia Gambini.)

Neo-confederates, part 2

Really, it has to be an accident that the Alabama Republican Party is so fond of the jack flag. Sure.

Chickenhawk

On Crooks and Liars:

The truth about required ages of enlistment: 17 to 41. Chris Vucovich is eligible and a damn chickenhawk.

Don’t believe me? Try the Army.