Rim job regret

Floridians voted for Rick Scott (R-nasty) because he's an asshole. Now they've awakened to the new enormity of their hemorrhoid problem:

"The first-time governor -- less than a year into his term, typically a honeymoon period for newly electeds -- now has an approval rating of 27 percent," Maxwell writes. "That makes him one of the least popular politicians in the United States and only slightly more popular than a hemorrhoid."

I have no sympathy for Scott's regretful voters. Under the assault of greedhead political ads, they turned off their bullshit detectors at exactly the wrong time.

From tough shit to fuck you

Memo from Republican Eric Cantor to Americans:

Your suffering and need is leverage that conservatives can use to make life even more insecure and bitter.

And if you've been saving the little people without demanding payment for services, well, screw you. You're probably the type would would run into a burning building without regard for your own safety. You don't need radios that work in an office tower; you're obviously a soft-headed schmuck.

These people are completely immoral assholes. Why is it that we don't make them ride the stang out of Washington?

Update: Note to Barack Obama: When hostage-takers get a good deal out of it, they take more hostages. Duh. When the hell are you going to act as if you've figured out the fundamental fact about Republicans: They'll do whatever is necessary to win. They don't give a crap what a sweet, reserved personality you have. In fact, that will only encourage them to think you're a pushover. I only wish you would bring Chicago rules from "The Untouchables" to bear here. Time to start putting their political careers into the morgue.

Cow chip on his shoulder

Because there's no place in the modern world for a talentless hack who's had a succession of high-paying jobs with zero accountability. Because there's never been any lasting accountability for all the times his view of the future has turned out to be - predictably - total unalloyed bullshit. Because he can say anything that comes to mind and not be fired.

That's why Pat Buchanan has such a massive inconsolable grievance - because he's white and male, and that's no longer a complete guarantee that every blithering moron can find a sinecure just because he's melanin challenged and the proud owner of a Y chromosome, even if he needs pharmaceuticals to get it up.

Debasing the brand

It's an inevitable result of capitalism that every quality brand is doomed eventually to debasement. (In Boston, Filene's De-Basement.) The reputation one entrepreneur has built will, in the depth of some business downturn, become the easy asset that some lazy bastard can exploit. This B-school grad will work the numbers and think he's an entrepreneur.

Fox owns National Geographic TV, which for no apparent reason from its origins is reporting on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, exploring the execrable Duhbya's memories of that day and time. The teasers for their show bear all the marks of soft propaganda.

I knew from the day I learned that Fox had bought Nat Geo that it too would become a propaganda vehicle. We'll see for sure tomorrow whether that has indeed happened.

Freedom to starve

America's favorite face of Ayn Rand libertarian bullshit:

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

Sane people notice when their slavish adherence to ideology leads them into insane positions. Ron Paul is not one of those sane people. He doubles down on bullshit and calls it principle.

Insane, batshit insane? Sociopathic? Or just a fucking moron? Ron Paul...

The single common thread of radical Republican conservatism is that you're on your own.

Update: Paul is not alone as a batshit insane sociopathic moron. Fox gives space to laissez-faire dipshits from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to argue that we don't need publicly funded weather data. They report as an article of faith that private reports are better. What they omit, relying on the steady ignorance of Fox readers, is that all private forecasts, other than your finger in the wind and their fingers up their asses, are based on free data they receive from the National Weather Service.

"You're on your own" is far too mild a summary of Republicanism. Really, their guiding principle is, "Fuck you."

And it totally beggars belief that these assholes are so willing, over and over and over again, to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, just as long as the penny goes to the wealthy in corporate profit and the pound of costs comes out of the hide of everyone else.

Kills at HuffPo conventions

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Class warfare - the winners

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Right-wing bunkosphere

Global warming is real and well-correlated with the dramatic increase in atmospheric CO₂ caused by the Industrial Revolution.

But information cannot argue with a closed mind. And that's what the teabaggers have.

Idiocracy, the sequel

If enough idiot voters once again form a majority in 2012 and elect this weak echo of Duhbya, I'm seriously going to get to work on that exit strategy. Belize, I think, or Costa Rica. I had a little Spanish in high school decades ago.

(h/t mistermix on Balloon Juice)

Glimmer of hope?

Nate Silver gives reason for hope in the Democratic lead on the generic House ballot.

Last year, Republicans won the popular vote for the U.S. House — essentially what the generic ballot is trying to measure — by 7 percentage points. So a poll showing Democrats 7 points ahead instead is a pretty significant swing.

Of course it's waaay too early to count on, but we need hope to gird up for the arduous campaign ahead. Imagine the difference:

• President Perry, Vice President Bachmann, Senate Majority Leader DeMint, House Speaker Cantor
• President Obama, VP Biden, Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Warren, House Speaker Pelosi

Imagine even further that Majority Leader Warren reforms the filibuster (to death).

Of course, this is total fantasy. No freshman Senator is ever going to be elected Majority Leader.

But I have to say that meeting Warren yesterday has me daring again to dream.

Warren Buffett, Fox's most hated socialist

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Why does the mere phrase class warfare end all debate?

Time to say, "Class warfare? You fat cats don't want the middle class to defend itself in a war that you've been winning unopposed for thirty years."

If the wealthy continue to get their way on everything, the time will come when class warfare won't be a metaphor. That's when liberals yield to radicals and there's bloody revolution.

Of course the idiot conservatives can't see that coming, just as they can't see that liberals in the 1930s saved them from the communist tide. Ungrateful bastards! Yet I still want to save their hides again - because America is a better country as a liberal country than it would be as a tyranny of either extreme of the political spectrum.

Could Rick Perry do for America what he did for Texas?

Total effing boatloads of government jobs:

Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.

I'm for it.

Less popular than atheists

Less popular than Muslims!

 [T]he Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Of course, those of us who were not performing daily self-service colonoscopies also knew this:

Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born.

Care to revise your statement? Want to change your bullshit story?

Wonder if anyone on Fox will claim that it's not the phone hacking, it's the cover-up that matters.

In Mr. Goodman’s letter, dated March 2, 2007, Mr. Goodman challenged his dismissal, saying that his actions “were carried out with the full knowledge and support” of other senior journalists. He also said another senior journalist arranged for payments to a private investigator who carried out the hacking.

Mr. Goodman also asserted in his letter that the practice of phone hacking was “widely discussed in the daily editorial conference” at the newspaper until “explicit reference to it was banned by the editor.”

Mr. Watson said the committee had seen two versions of the letter, one more heavily redacted than the other. One version sent to the committee by News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the Murdoch family’s News Corporation, had been redacted to black out references to “editorial conference” and “the editor.”

The News of the World had long insisted that the phone hacking was restricted to Mr. Goodman, a single rogue reporter.

Look, News Corp. and all its properties lie early and often. I wonder just how Clintonesque they'll become in their denials that they've perjured themselves before Parliament.

“We have written to Andy Coulson to ask him whether he would like to amend his previous evidence,” Mr. Watson said. “Clearly if Clive Goodman’s account is accurate, it shows the evidence he gave us was at best misleading and probably deceptive.”

What's really odd: no investigative follow-through on this side of the Atlantic.

Lying without consequence

"Obama inherited unemployment of 5.6%."

This is of course a lie, only one among many.

Conservatives...

• You can't trust their facts.
• You can't trust their analysis.
• You can't trust their good faith.

Our culture has been debased by bullshit. There are no longer any consequences for publicly and repeatedly lying. At least not if you're a conservative.

In past eras, even those dominated by assholes, Americans were able to see what was true and act on it. We no longer are - because an industry that is Constitutionally charged with showing the truth is dominated and steered by bought and paid for by right-wing corporatists.

This ain't Israel in 4 B.C.

No time for fundamentalist imperryalism:

God said He would not be present at Perry’s much-talked-about Christian day of prayer on Aug. 6, calling the governor’s use of his public office to endorse a religion both “irresponsible” and a violation of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who claim god talks to them hear their own desires as the voice of god.

House advantage

Click image for full Mike Smith/Las Vegas Sun cartoon.


Also available here.

But conservatives deserve help

At least that's what they think. The rest of us - y'know, Americans? Just a bunch of sponging weasely freeloaders who can't make it on our own without taxing success to death...

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The George Carlin clip starts at 2:12 or so here.

Stand-up on the Titanic

If there aren't enough lifeboats again this time around to save the entertainment, instead of small string ensembles, maybe we'll get to swim in the bracing North Atlantic to gallows humor:

Calling the results of today’s Iowa straw poll “alarming,” Standard and Poor’s took the unprecedented action of downgrading Iowa’s IQ.

We've already hit the iceberg. How long till we go down by the head? Carpathia, are you out there?

Ask not what the teabaggers can do for you

... ask what you can do for your teabagger's sponsor.

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.