Thank You

For everything.
Just wanted y'all to know.

You may now resume dancing.

The Dolt-Stoss ™

When Mr. Pot dabs on the black face paint...

Snuggles into some sassy black ninja camo...

Slips on the black Arlos and black silk socks...

Sneaks across no-man's-land at midnight during the dark of the moon...

To shoot Mr. Kettle in the face with Black Talon ammo...

on Black Friday...

...it looks hilariously like this.

From Andrew Sullivan today:

Friday, November 28, 2008

28 Nov 2008 10:14 am
The Logic Of Bushism

People who don't see a connection between Bush's fundamentalist psyche and his refusal or inability to see reality in front of him would do well to read this post from "Flopping Aces," a far right Christianist trying to absorb the facts of our time. He cannot:

It may be that right now all the powers that be, the media, the educational system, etc. seem to be arrayed in favor of things that we, the minority, can see are not good. Much of what we have seen has seemed ‘rigged’ against us, and we have been ‘defeated’ like the inner and outer enemies of Joan defeated her. In this time, we should remember we cannot possibly see with an infinite eye. We should leave that for the One who is competent to do so. It can’t be our goal to only ‘win’ arguments or technical victories.

Yes, Bush 'won' all of them.

And now watch as I once again use the magic of word replacement to pierce the chintz drapery of delirium that Conservatives use to keep the agonizing, eye-bleeding light of realitude from busting up the eternal midnight of their ideological crackhouse.

Friday, November 28, 2008

28 Nov 2008 10:14 am
The Logic Of Bushism Conservatism

People who don't see a connection between Bush's fundamentalist authoritarian psyche and his refusal or inability to see reality in front of him would do well to read this post from "Flopping Aces," a far right Christianist apologist trying to absorb the facts of our time. He cannot:

Yadda yadda ignorant goose-steppers yammering about the being betrayed

Yes, Bush 'won' all of them.

Both Andrew Sullivan and the whelping box full of squirrely wingtards he mocks share a common delusion: that Conservatism is essentially the whore with the heart of gold.

That it is a fundamentally sound and noble enterprise which was brutally savaged and sold out by a skeezy minority.

For the “Flopping Aces” fucknozzles, the Dolchstoss was done by evil Jewish bankers and intellectuals

“the powers that be, the media” and the rest of the paranoid fringe’s usual suspects, and for Sullivan, the betrayal came from the “Flopping Aces”-types.

How neatly – like Russian puzzle dolls – their delusions nest one inside the other.

Of course they are both equally and laughably wrong, but of the two, Sullivan’s transgression is the greater because he damned well should have known better, and because even after it has all gone horribly up in flames right before his eyes he still doesn't even have the pen-and-ink courage to admit the truth: that Bush was not an some aberration of Conservatism, but its apotheosis.

That before Bush and Rove, there was DeLay.

Before DeLay, Gingrich.

Before Gingrich, Atwater.

Before Atwater, Nixon.

Before Nixon, Strom Thurmond.

Before Thurmond, hell, there was Jefferson Davis.

That going back as far as 1964, anyone with eyes open and mind ungunked-up with Right Wing hoo-ha could see this clearly:

From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:

…
What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.
…

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

Modern Conservatism was born steeped in original, bigoted sin ever since Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act --

In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.

-- and the rise of the Southern Strategy --

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

-- and has been sliding deeper into the septic tank ever since.

And according to Wikipedia, Andrew Sullivan was born in 1963.

Which means that Andrew Sullivan has been wrong, about everything, his entire life.

His. Entire. Life.

It means that he has spent his productive years being a dupe; being to the Fascist Right what George Bernard Shaw was the Stalinist Left.

Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the State Political Directorate (OGPU). In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he dismisses stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and calls reports of its exploited workers falsehoods.[59] Asked why he did not stay permanently in the Soviet 'earthly paradise', Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of Stalin's espousal of Lysenkoism in a letter to Labour Monthly.

A “useful idiot”.

Sullivan has cheerfully poured his time and talent into the work of advancing the fortunes of a Movement that despises him and everything he stands for, and has since the day he was born.

And that, my friends, is a very special, self-loathing kind of stupid indeed.

Call Him Meier

Arthur Laffer shown here in happier days, wearing his full dress Reaganomics uniform, sporting both his "Grand Order of Jesusland Economics -- Trickle Down First Class" medal, and the prestigious "Culture War Merit Cross with Laffer-Curve Clusters".

So why dress this debunked fraud up like Fat Hermann?

Well, read on and see if you notice any similarities...

Hermann Göring, 9 August 1939:

"The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring: you can call me Meier!"

Arthur Laffer, 28 August 2006:

"The U.S. economy has never been in better shape. There is no tax increase coming in the next couple of years. Monetary policy is spectacular."

and

"I’ll bet you a penny on this one, If you’ll sign a letter saying that you were wrong to me on this. But, you’re way off base, there’s nothing out there that tells us this - we’re going to have a nice slowdown but it’s not going to be a crash.

The video of Laffer and other Conservative skin-flutes making the mocking, sneering, declarative economic predictions that have now all blown up so spec-tac-ularly in their collective faces has already been all over the web and back

several times, so I wouldn't bring it up again but for this little bit of digital jetsam from three days ago featured on former New Yorker editor Tina Brown's latest throw-a-bucket-o-cash-at-it bid for Media Empire, The Daily Beast :

A Warning from Reagan's Economist

Why the proposed $700 billion stimulus plan could drive the country to economic ruin.

As you read this, our government is committing enormous sums of money above and beyond normal spending, solely to stimulate the economy and prop up failing companies and markets. These additional sums are huge by any reasonable measure, with estimates as high as $3 trillion in an economy with a GDP of about $15 trillion.

Here’s the bottom line: Instead of making things better, increased spending will only drive our economy further into the ground.
...

There is no tooth fairy. Every dollar given to someone comes from someone else.

Written by none other than Arty "Meier" Laffer.

Because among the Wingnut Welfare Kings and Queens, merely being fatally wrong a fucktillion times in a row has never been a barrier to cutting right to the front of the line for one more helping of Big Media Gravy.

Two Blind Men. One Elephant.

No Waiting.

In the midst of blocking out my devastating and future-award-winning 17-part deconstruction of the works of Andrew Sullivan (tentatively entitled “Because Reigning in Hell Pays Waaaay Better than Serving in Heaven, That's Why.”) -- I noticed this quote from him today:

“…Why does the world owe us a soft landing after the insanity of the last decade? Haven't the excesses of the past shown that it is only through such market discipline that we will ever avoid the easy path of borrowing out of greed? Yes, innocents will suffer terribly, and many of the guilty will escape. But that is life: we can and should try to help the poorest, but avoiding our collective responsibility for this insanity seems a very bad signal to send to ourselves.

The truth is: we had this coming. We deserve it. And we deserve leaders who are able to tell us that.”

And as I read it, two terribly unworthy thoughts simultaneously occurred to me.

First, it is absolutely 10-on-the-irony-scale-of-10 priceless that when the most famous gay Conservative in Christendom talks about the implosion of the Great Conservative Ponzi Scheme, in both the tone of his remarks (Big, Biblical Language) and in their substance (collective-punishment-for-collective-guilt), the person Sullivan most epistemologically resembles is

Jerry Falwell talking about 9/11:

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve" ... America's "secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord's [decision] not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture . . . the result is not good."

Jerry Falwell talking about AIDS:

“AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

And Jerry Falwell talking about Teh Gay:

"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America."

And, second, WTF do you mean “we”?

And then I thought no more about it until, while scampering though my reading, I tripped over this, from Lil’ Tommy Friedman, from the same day and on the same topic:

“…That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem.”

Thus is the wisdom the Moustache of Understanding has handed down from Mount Centrism; that the con man and the nice old lady he fleeced are somehow equally guilty, and certain New York Time writers who have made vast fortunes spinning happy tales of a Flat Earth running nekkid and free and unfettered by “regulations” and “worker protection” are no more at fault than the cab driver who believed his drivel and invested accordingly.

And then I thought how funny it is that Conservatives and their Centrism Uber Alles enablers are only able to shape their mouths to form the words "We" and "Our" after their foreign, domestic and economic policies blow up in their faces.

Before it all went horribly wrong, I believe the technical term for the people who were desperately waving the warning flags was "dirty America-hating Liberal".

But after it all goes bad, suddenly the “we’re all in this together” talk comes popping out of their pie-holes like it were spring-loaded.

Well, I for one am not in any way inclined to work together.

To be clear, in the great and ancient tradition of Fifth Beatitude of Christ – “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” – I am powerfully disposed towards mercy and compassion to those who have acted mercifully and counseled compassion during good times and bad.

On the other hand, I am steeply inclined in the direction of meting out the swiftest, most merciless, Old Testament-caliber judgments possible on people who, when they were riding high, mocked or shrugged off as too-fucking-bad the plight of those who had fallen on hard times as the unfortunate-but-inevitable fate of the weak or the stupid or the otherwise unfit-to-survive in their bracing, brutal Randite Capitalist Utopia.

Steeply inclined towards using the stabby ends of very, very sharp sticks to hold people to their own rules and their own words.

Towards addressing the whole "many of the guilty will escape" problem by dropping a few hundred pikes off on Wall Street, at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal headquarters and at other suchlike locations with a note saying:

"We have made up a list of the journalists, politicians, lobbyists and money men most responsible for the financial meltdown. You will not be told who is or is not on the list, but your bailout checks will not start arriving until we see every one of their heads on public display.

So figure it out.

signed,

The American Taxpayer"

Of course, this will not happen because my President-Elect is not so inclined.

Because he is a better person than me.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Bulldog Edition

So today was Axelrod Day. He was everywhere; on almost all the national talks, the local Fox affiliate, and on local NBC, in an apron making omelets or something.

100%-drama-free omelets.

Every programs except “Face the Nation” where Austan Goolsbee (Obama economic adviser) announced “The era of dithering is over.”

About all of which more later, but I wanted to run off this early edition of SMCD to flag something really quite extraordinary that I saw over on Fox News Sunday.

After John “Lil' Weepy” Boehner went on to pitch his same, tired, failed agenda of capital gains tax cuts and deregulation as the solution to all problems, came this;

Wallace: Apropos of nothing whatsoever, aren’t unions evil? And shouldn’t the Evil Union Card Check program be opposed by all right thinking people who don’t want the destroy the economy? I mean, after all you get secret ballots in Congress. Why is it OK for Congress to have secret ballots and not for workers.

And after thinking “Well maybe because Congresspersons can’t be thugged out of a job by management?” I thought no more of it.

Until, one minute later, they went to commercial, I got the shock of the week when the first paid commercial was from an outfit called “Americans For Job Security” repeating VERBATIM the Boehner/Fox Party line “question” that Wallace had awkwardly wedged into the middle of a “news” broadcast not sixty second prior.

You get secret ballots in Congress.
Why is it OK for Congress to have secret ballots and not for workers

Wow.

“Americans For Job Security” is, of course, a well-funded wingnut front organization that operates as a hand-in-glove/cash-in-bag advocate for the Conservative’s radical, anti-labor agenda. Here’s the background:

Americans for Job Security (AJS) is a Republican "sham front group that would be better called Corporations Influencing Elections ... masquerading as a non-profit to conceal its funders and the scope of its electioneering activities,"[1] the Center for Responsive Politics wrote in April 2007.[2] Incorporated October 1997 in Virginia, AJS was described by the Center as "pro-Republican", "pro-business", and "established to directly counter labor's influence".[3][4]

The Center also reported that, in 1998, AJS "pledged to raise and spend $100 million on issue ads over the next five years."[5]

It is alleged that AJS was founded by Marc F. Racicot "with a $1 million donation" from the American Insurance Association. Racicot headed George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign and is a former Republican National Committee chairman.[6] In June 2005, Racicot coincidentally became the new head of the American Insurance Association, which "represents 435 major property and casualty insurance companies."[7]

I mean, Fox is and always has been something of a hybrid between a panty liner and a puke bucket for the GOP, but I honestly can’t remember seeing an example of teevee this openly, nakedly sponsors-writing-dialogue whorey since the days when Rob Petrie pimped for Kent.

And even at that apex of overt advertiser control over programming, “Dick Van Dyke” was a fucking comedy show. It wasn’t spending vast sums of money every day desperately trying to pretend it was a legitimate news organization, and it never openly flogged product in the middle of the script.

Also it was better written, and its actors didn’t scare small children.

Afterward, during Bill Kristol’s litany of the Awful Things that may precipitate another Great Depression was…wait for it…card check.

Of course Fox has always been a nest of fifth columnists working to advance the wingnut agenda, and of course the lockstep Right has always obediently repeated marching orders faxed to them from the Murdoch White House, but to see it happen in real-time right in front of me -- to see the exposed sausage-grinding gears of a regime grown so lazy, sloppy and desperate that they have, at last, completely dropped the final, skimpy shred of fig leaf covering the oozing, syphilitic reality that is Fox News -- was really rather amazing.

UPDATE: The video is up on Teh YooTubes now and, no, I didn't imagine it. It is one of those glorious occasions where you can actually see the clammy tentacles of Fox's corporate wingnut masters up Chris Wallace's ass, working him like the sock puppet that he is.



(And a big thank-you to Heather and the C&L Video Cafe -- your One Stop Shoppe for the Kobe beef tenderloin cuts of timely video -- for the great work of getting this up and out so fast)

Kneel Cavuto Conservatives

When I see something like this (h/t to the irreplaceable Crooks & Liars) I have to ask myself...


...why do Kneel Cavuto Conservatives want to wave the white flag of economic surrender?

...why do Kneel Cavuto Conservatives want to cut and run?

...why do Kneel Cavuto Conservatives want to cut funding to support our brave middle class?

...why don't Kneel Cavuto Conservatives realize that any sort of bailout limits or time-tables would be interpreted by the Depression as a sign of weakness?

...why don't Kneel Cavuto Conservatives understand that if we don't fight the Depression over there, it will follow us over here?

...why can't Kneel Cavuto Conservatives comprehend that the Depression hates us for our freedoms?

And ultimately, do Kneel Cavuto Conservatives hate America because they're evil,
or because they're stupid?

Dear Conservatives

You bought us this ticket.

You put us on this road.

You threw us down this hole.

You were warned where this was headed, very loudly and very clearly. And you chose to giggle and sneer as you went ahead and turned our children's tomorrows over to monsters, murderers and madmen.

Everything you believe is toxic shit, sold to you by con men.

Your vision of God is a sickening, hateporn abomination.

And while your President busies himself spending his final days doing exactly what he has spent every other day doing -- raping the environment, endangering and impoverishing American workers, enriching his cronies,

Just How Destructive Will Bush's Last-Minute Deregulations Be?

Posted by Staff, Democracy Now! at 7:12 PM on November 20, 2008.

Bush admin pushing "midnight regulations"

As the media focuses on President-elect Obama and the transition of power here in Washington, the Bush administration is quietly trying to push through a wide array of federal regulations before President Bush leaves office in January.

Up to ninety proposed regulations could be finalized by the outgoing administration, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment. According to the Washington Post, the new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era. They include rules that could weaken workplace safety protections, allow local police to spy in the so-called “war on terror” and make it easier for federal agencies to ignore the Endangered Species Act.
...

depriving women of their rights, and pushing along his radical religious agenda --

Last-minute Bush abortion ruling causes furor
By Robert Pear

WASHINGTON: A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job-discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their "religious beliefs or moral convictions."

It would also prevent hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices and drugstores from requiring employees with religious or moral objections to "assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity" financed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

But three officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including its legal counsel, whom President George W. Bush appointed, said the proposal would overturn 40 years of civil rights law prohibiting job discrimination based on religion.
...

-- bear in mind that no paid defector, cave-skulking fanatic or saber-waving despot has ever done more short- and long-term damage to the United States of America than has George W. Bush doing nothing but working diligently year after year to implement the Conservative agenda.

That you -- personally and specifically -- are to blame for the ruin and tragedy you now see around you.

And we will never, ever forgive you for it.

The Day The Icicle Works Closed

File under: "Escapist literature my ass" (and crossposted from my other digs)

Written almost exactly 50 years ago, “The Day The Icicle Works Closed” is the story of the complete collapse of the economy of Altair Nine: a world sustained almost entirely by the production and export of rare and valuable pharmaceuticals.

“The Icicle Works was the most profitable corporation in the Galaxy,” our hero explains during the climactic courtroom scene.

Until…

[SPOILER ALERT (although honestly, if you haven't managed to track this obscure book down and read it in the last half century, odds are fuck-all that you're going to do it now...)]

…the people of Altair Nine start hearing through their only link to the outside world – the media, which is controlled by the Tourism Bureau – that nobody wants what they make anymore. That their markets had vanished and the good years were over.

From my own dog-eared copy:

“Worse, the jobs vanished. Pulcher [our hero] had been on the corporation’s legal staff, with an office of his own and a faint hint of a vice-presidency someday. He was out. The stenos in the pool, all but two or three of the five hundred who one had got out the correspondence and the bills, they were out. The shipping clerks in the warehouse were out, the pumphands at the settling tanks were out, the freezer attendants were out. Everyone was out. The plant was closed.”

And yet somehow, the committeemen still had money. The politicians. The heads of the chamber of commerce. People whose fortunes one would have thought were most directly tied to the implosion of the industry and the sudden worthlessness of their stocks were the very ones who always seemed to have a fat wad of cash on hand.

So with the economy in the tank, our hero goes from corporate lawyer to public defender, picking up the case of a gang of young people who, not being pretty, strong and agile enough to make ends meet turn tricks, turn to kidnapping.

And how did they do it?

“…what it all adds up to, ladies and gentlemen, is that Charley Dickon, and a handful of his friends in high places – most of them right here in this room – have cut off communication between Altair Nine and the rest of the galaxy.”

It is, in other words, the story of a plot hatched between local plutocrats and media moguls to deliberately crash a thriving middle class manufacturing economy and induce a Depression in order to turn a prosperous world into a feudal state divided between the super-rich and horde of desperate and permanently poor peons; people so broke in an economy so bad that they must now “rent” their bodies out to make a living, or turn and criminals.

So without being overly paranoid, I find it impossible to ruminate on this forgotten story from the golden days of pulp without also noting that, since the early days of Ronald Reagan, there has been abroad in the America a concerted and sustained effort to hard-sell the public the message that “Manufacturing is dead”.

From TPM Cafe “Missing Manufacturing Boom”:

As I have tried to point out in America Since Reagan, the 38 year trajectory of Republican political economics has hollowed out our manufacturing prowess, reduced our competitiveness, put us deeply in debt to the Chinese and the Russians and eviscerated parts of the Bill of Rights.
…

We have all been told for 40 years that manufacturing jobs are all going, going, gone… That whatever crappy work is still left here is dirty and dangerous. That a Real Murrican should consider it an insult to suggest their son or daughter might have a bright future working in a f-a-c-t-o-r-y.

Except that message is mostly bullshit.

The ubiquitous propaganda – which I have heard everywhere from Hate Radio to NPR – was accompanied by suicidal trade, industrial and tax policies – pursued by both Republicans and DINO Democrats.

Policies that actually reward companies for shipping jobs overseas (Senator Byron Dorgan from the “Congressional Record” (PDF):

…
I have mentioned previously Huffy bicycles. They have gone to China. Do you know that little red wagon, the Radio Flyer? This one has gone to China.

The perversity of all of this is, whether it is Fig Newtons, Levis, Radio Flyers, Huffy bicycles, or Fruit of the Loom underwear, they were all rewarded for moving their jobs overseas because our Tax Code has embedded in it a special little deal: Move your jobs overseas and we will give you a special deal.
…

And dole out lavish tax breaks to people for buying gas-swilling SUVs:

“A qualifying buyer can now deduct $106,000 of the suggested $110,000 price of a Hummer H1 SUV ($100,000 direct deduction plus $5,000, or 50 percent of the $10,000 balance, and $1,000, which is the first year of depreciation for the $5,000 balance). That would translate into a $37,100 savings on the purchase price if the taxpayer were in the 35 percent income-tax bracket.(2) Not all states have adopted the new caps, but those that have are still losing valuable tax dollars through the loophole.”

Finally, under this relentless media/policy/talking-head “everyone knows” assault, all over the country, trade schools began to shut down.

Shop classes started to evaporate.

The old guy who made faucets stopped being invited to “Career Day” at the high school.

Until, at last, having been methodically stripped of our means to sustain a middle-class economy by people who have hated and feared the middle class since FDR stopped them from wiping it out once and for all 80 years ago, we find ourselves staring down the barrel of another Depression.

So where does it all end?

Well, it either ends when we take our beloved country back from the degenerates and liars in industry, politics and media who have brought us to the edge of the abyss.

Or it ends like this: (sorry, video died long ago...)

History Cat

is appalled.

Rare "Republicanis Rationalis" Spotted

From Reuters:

Tiny, long-lost primate rediscovered in Indonesia

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet's smallest and rarest primates.

Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers -- two males and one female -- on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.

They spotted a fourth one that got away.
...

The one that got away was later seen on "Charlie Rose" squeaking out "You know...it is just possible that tax cuts aren't the solution to every problem."

After which Rush Limbaugh beat it to death with his shoe.

And then there were three.

In Cars

Following up on the overwhelmingly popular success of the driftglass plan to save the country from being Eated by Toxic Mortgages comes the sequel: How to save the U.S. Auto Industry.

In our last exciting episode we learned that trying to fix anything before you figure out exactly how and why it’s broken is, well, stupid.

So, what’s broken about Big Auto?

Well, from inertia to cost-bloat to short-sightedness, there are so many open, visible and suppurating sores available to the Monday morning industrial planner that anyone could pick their favorite poisons, mix them up like ingredients at a do-it-yourself Bloody Mary bar, and probably write a pretty vivid description of what the corpse looks like.

But for all of that, the fundamental cause of the failure of U.S. auto industry is simple: Most of the people who run the Big Three gave up making cars years ago.

Or, as an acquaintance of mine in the business once put it: “There isn’t one cocksucker left at GM who can read a motherfucking blueprint anymore.”

Think about it.

Other companies have shown over and over again that whatever the problems with Big Auto may be, they have nothing to do with the price of steel or plastic, or the position of the moon or stars. There is no absence of innovative ideas for how to build safe, efficient cars people actually want to drive. And awesome, spark-throwing robots

are widely available.

Not that many years ago, the Big Three still had had two incredible advantages going for them: they controlled powerful brand names and they were sitting on oceans of cash and talent. But instead of using those tools to build better/faster/cleaner/cheaper, the dirty open secret that every supplier knows is that the Big Three chose instead to slouch down that long, low road to WalMartylvania.

They became, in effect, the mutant kissing-cousins of hedge funds, run not by car guys, but by the same species of people who crashed the financial markets.

Like WalMart, they used their dominant market positions to force their first and second tier suppliers to take on more and more of the hard stuff – research, development, design, etc. – while the people in the home office got more and more obsessed with abusing the tools and techniques of industrial efficiency to wring every cent out of the manufacturing process without ever bothering to notice that the product coming off the assembly linen at the end of that process kinda sucked.

And then, like WalMart, they squeezed those same suppliers for every fucking nickel, threatening them with financial extinction unless they met the corporation’s increasingly rapacious terms, until the whole idea of “profit” became more a function of manipulating those asymmetrical extorter/extortee relationships, and less about building better cars.

There is still a lot of talent locked up inside those behemoths, but if you want to fix Big Auto, first you have to get rid of upper management, and the bigger axe you use the better.

Start with the Chief Executives. Then a few thousand Vice Presidents. Machete the goo all the way down to GM Apologist and spokesdouche, Sean Fucking Hannity.

Second, to step in and straighten the industry out in a hurry you’re going to need a whole lot of competent professionals who love – not like, but love – building cars, and who are capable of getting the nearly-impossible done hurry-up-quick. Which would be kind of a worrisomely tall order were it not for the serendipitous fact that 20 brutal years of Big Three corporate Darwinism have already weeded the weak and slow out from the ranks of their first and second tier suppliers, leaving behind an army of incredibly hardy, agile survivors who are already used to working miracles and pulling the auto industry’s collective ass out of the fire on time and under budget.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

This was John Kyl in October talking about using 80 skajillion dollars of my munnies to bail out



Lenders and Brokers and Baers, Oh My!

This was John Kyl yesterday morning on Faux News talking about using a scant 3% of that 80 skajillion to help backstop the American automobile industry.

Kyl: The business model of Big Auto is a failure. And when I say “business model”, I mean that the fucking unions are to blame. For everything.

Wallace: Well then what about a second economic stimulus?

Kyl: Where does the money come from? From the American people. You can borrow it and saddle future generations, or print more money and inflate the currency.

driftglass: Or you could roll back some more of those huge Republican tax breaks for billionaires…

Kyl: Stimulus packages never work.

Alright, pour yourself some cocoa and put your feet up, because we have to have a little talk about how the economy actually works. Starting with why people like Kyl who are getting their Milton Friedman Memorial Underoos in a bunch over the idea of lending money to Big Auto (from the NYT) --

Top Republican senators said Sunday they will oppose a Democratic plan to bail out Detroit automakers, calling the U.S. industry a “dinosaur” whose “day of reckoning” is coming. Their opposition raises serious doubts about whether the plan will pass in this week’s postelection session.

Democratic leaders want to use $25 billion of the $700 billion financial industry bailout to help General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler.
...

Mr. Kyl, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, added, “Just giving them $25 billion doesn’t change anything. It just puts off for six months or so the day of reckoning.”

-- are at the same time so sanguine about lending 30 times that much to companies like AIG.

It's simple: Republicans love White Collar men who smell of freshly printed currency, and loathe Blue Collar folks who have to shower after their shift is over.

In both sectors, large numbers of upper manager were and are criminally incompetent and deserved to be perp-walked to the top of the national debt and defenestrated therefrom.

In both sectors, some of the compensation packages are out of line, but when you compare union deals across the board -- whose work rules and legacy contracts have been on a renegotiated-downward arc for the last 20 years – with, for example, AIG using half a billion dollars of my munnies money to wipe their asses?

"The $500 million plan would benefit the very AIG executives who led the firm to the brink of collapse. To reward executives with exorbitant paydays after poor performance, and to do so even indirectly with taxpayer dollars, strikes most Americans as fundamentally unfair and a misuse of their money."

Or banks using my munnies to pay out dividends and bonuses

“Instead of increasing lending to thaw out frozen credit markets, for example, some banks have bought other banks. Instead of using the capital infusion to modify home mortgages and prevent foreclosures, many lenders continue to pay out dividends. In some cases, banks participating in the bailout program have given large bonuses to some employees.”

It would be hard to understand why the same people bailing out Big Finance (with oversight and reform string attached) would freak out over bailing out Big Auto, until you remember the Republican's inbred, bone-deep contempt for working people, which reach a full-throated peak under the Reagan Administration and hasn’t abated one decibel since.

Which is why when Byron Dorgan replies to Kyl with:

It was no-holds-barred in shoving money at the fucking bankers, but how about a fraction of that money to help save American jobs. Take 3% of the 700 billion dollars. What about workers?

And

It’s about jobs; 350,000 directly and 3-5 million working on the industry indirectly.

He is making exactly the right points and asking exactly the right questions, but even he is undershooting the impact of manufacturing on the economy.

For your own future reference, these are the numbers Dorgan is referring to, compiled not by wild, Hippy anarchists but by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

“Directly and indirectly, the economic breadth and contribution of the U.S. automotive industry is deep and far reaching across the country. U.S. automakers directly employ approximately 355,000 American workers and indirectly employ nearly 5 million additional jobs through related industries that are dependent on auto manufacturing, sales, and related activities. Over the last two decades, the automotive industry has invested nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in the U.S. and is among this country’s top industries for R&D spending. Automakers also are among the largest purchasers of U.S.-manufactured steel, aluminum, iron, copper, plastics, rubber, electronics, and computer chips.”

Bad enough, but pause for a moment to consider the secondary ripple-effect that all of those manufacturing jobs – from plant managers to suppliers to dealers – have, in turn, on their local economies:

Manufacturing directly employs 14 million America and supports 8 million more.

Each manufacturing job supports as many as four other jobs, providing a boost to local economies. For example, every 100 steel or every 100 auto jobs create between 400 and 500 new jobs in the rest of the economy. This contrasts with the retail sector, where every 100 jobs generate 94 new jobs elsewhere, and the personal and service sectors, where 100 jobs create 147 new jobs.

Yes, around 350,000 are directly affected, and 3-5 million people work supporting manufacturing indirectly, but you also have to factor in the effect on your local dry cleaner when the finishing plant shuts down. And what happens to the corner grocer or restaurant owner when their regulars -- the sixty people down the block who make gear-ratio widgets for windshield wiper assemblies -- are all out of a job?

You cannot build a healthy economy on hotel sheet folding and paper-hat gigs. On moving money around on spreadsheets. People can’t buy homes, send kids to college or retire in an America where the only employment left is working for WalMart and selling each other haircuts, manicures and chicken dinners.

There is nothing at all wrong with those jobs: they’re honest, and the labor of those who work in the service sector is at least as honorable as that of any banker or broker. But pretending the endgame for an economy based on enriching a few billionaires and pauperizing everyone else into a permanent wasteland of nothing but low wage, WalMart work is anything other than a blueprint for the coming Corporate Feudal State is delusional.

To sustain a vital Middle Class that can afford to travel, buy presents for their kids, eat out and get their nails done, first:

You.

Have.

To.

Make.

Things.

If you have been awake and aware for the last 20 years you know there has been a relentless barrage of bad news about manufacturing; some of it true and justified, and some of it just fucking ridiculous. So while it is true that a lot of old-time, low-skilled, repetitive jobs got shipped abroad, it is also true that

1. The survivors in American manufacturing have gotten lean, efficient and technologically advanced.
2. These days more companies are likely to die out for the lack of a succession plan than from competition from across the Rio Grande or Pacific Ocean,
3. The industry suffers at least as much from 20-years-out-of-date bad press as bad management.

So if I hear Good Liberals like Thom Hartmann ranting one more time on Air America that “We don’t make anything in America anymore!” I’m afraid I’m gonna to have gather up some of those 1.7 million people whose jobs are made possible by the over 11,000 manufacturing companies right here in my own back yard and go’ splain some things to him.

Chicago-style.

Now take it one step further.

Ever wonder why the President Elect is so adamant that we have to do health care, education and green energy all at once?

Well, there are a lot of good, compassionate reasons for picking those three, but if your goal is to save the Middle Class from extinction, then you…

Enact health care reform…to take the burden of wildly-overpriced employer-based health-care off the backs of American business, in order to make them more competitive in the global marketplace.

Enact education reform…because the days of a million high-school drop outs making a Middle Class living pounding anvils and running lathes is over; because the new good jobs (and the prosperity of the nation) depends entirely on a skilled and adaptable labor force.

Pour real money into a green energy portfolio…first, because tethering your manufacturing and distribution systems to a variable like oil which is controlled by hostile foreign powers is suicidal. Second, because somebody’s gonna have to actually man-u-fac-ture the solar cells, fuels cells, windmills and so forth.

To pull us back from the feudal abyss, all these pistons (and more) need to be firing harmoniously in a 21st industrial engine powered by manufacturing.

Yes, the Big Three automakers have been run by short-sighted dolts with ridiculous business models.

So has the financial sector.

So shut up and fix them already. This is a country that turned our mind and muscle to the job of cranking out millions of jeeps and tanks and ships and blotted out the sun with fleets of aircraft when the world needed them to defeat fascism. So hire the best, fire the worst, hold people to account for realistic goals, and move on.

Or as Paul Krugman said (more or less) on “This Week” :

If these were normal times, I’d day let them [the Big Three auto companies] go bankrupt. I very reluctantly, screaming, agree with bailout. Because of the frozen credit markets Chapter 11 becomes Chapter 7, which means liquidation. Which means it all goes “boom”.

And

If this were 1999 and we had 4% unemployment, I’d agree with you. But it’s not.
This is a really bad time to be doing long-run, virtuous things.

Back on Fox News, John Kyl does magnanimously offer to save at least one man’s job:

We Republicans wuuuuv Holy Joe Lieberman. He was so helpful as a 5th columnist, character assassin and McCain testicle cozy. And we’re gonna need a new footstool now that Liddy Dole is gone.

On “Face the Nation” Republican Bobby Jindal makes some sense

Jindal: We need to stop defending corruption that we would never tolerate in the other Party. Stop defending out of control spending that we would never tolerate in the other Party. Offer real solution to real problems.

While Human Irritable Bowel Syndrome Gingrich opines that Sarah Palin was awesomeness incarnate who got unfairly slammed by the dirty Commies.

Back on “This Week” Cokie Roberts worries that “The Netroots could be mad” about Obama offering Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State position, while The Shrill One “can’t get excited about the Treasury. There’s not a hair’s-breadth of difference between the people on the list.”

Will: But you also have to agree that the Gummint that runs Amtrak is incompetent to do anything ever. Congress is designing cars! No one wants one ‘a them new-fangled electo-motive horseless carriages called the “Chevy Volt” anyway, which is why there is a $7,500 bribe written into the tax policy to get people to buy the consarn thing

Donaldson: Now how the fuck do you nobody will want a car that isn’t even hitting the market until 2010?

Shorter Will:

I miss my 

Stanley Steamer.


And

Sally Rand.

And debtor’s prisons.

Then Krugman absolutely flays poor George Will to ribbons when Will tries to revise Depression-era history to conform to his clenched-sphincter, laissez-faire Conservative dogma.

Will: The reason things got so very bad in the Depression was that the Gummint made things so unpredictable that no one wanted to invest anything.

Krugman: Uh….no (says the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics). That’s not how I read history and that’s not what happened. What happened was that when you had 20% unemployment and factories standing idle, no one wanted to build new ones. Dumbass.

Will then sat in the corner for the rest of the show, muttering angrily about Coolidge.

Among The Things I Heard Today

was Captain Obvious on "Meet The Press" solemnly intoning "You're gonna need a bigger boat" when referring to the bailout.

And I thought,

"Wow, that sure is sage and insightful."



Among the things I saw today was Chris Matthews talking about Time Magazine's cleverness in coming up with the idea of photoshopping the President Elect's face into

FDR's body for this week's cover.

And I thought,

"Wow, that sure is sage and insightful."

Hehehe.

A Mouse Circus rundown of sorts will come later.

Right now I'm going to go find a bar :-)

The Rabbit Hole

down which I fell.

Some few days ago I got it into my head to post an ad for a fellow blogger (which I have never done before), while at the same time changing my header graphic to something like the rough draft you see at the top of this post.

Now on my best of days it’s usually a bad idea for me to dive headfirst into codeplay if I’m trying to resolve more than one problem with more than one variable apiece. Sure its fun, intellectually satisfying and all, but as one who obsesses over his various arts and crafts, it also means suddenly noticing that dawn has long broken, my desktop is littered with code fragments, safety backup versions and HTML translation options, and the Pilus Fairies have come and gone and sketched a two-foot beard on my chin.

That’s my norm and I proudly embrace it.

However I also violated the blogger rule equivalent of never going grocery shopping when you’re hungry: Never go all frottagy with your template when your life is in massive flux, as mine currently is.

I am one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who has been or will shortly be tossed out of a job and into the teeth of a brutal economy (Thanks, Conservatives!), which could have a fairly unhappy cascade effect on hearth and home. And since I am neither bank nor car company, ain’t no cavalry coming for me.

At the same time, being sacked also formally releases me from certain ethical and topic-related restrictions andn obligations, which may open up some very interesting options.

In the meantime, as I muse how to best combine many wildly different skill sets into lucrative alternatives and how to balance celebrating public victories with mourning private fears and setbacks, don’t be too surprised if you find that I am taking a little solace by fiddling with the things I can control.

Like background color options :-)

Best,

dg

Barack Obama and Harry Reid

discuss Holy Joe Lieberman’s long-term future.

I love this scene: the gunsel holding two massive guns is the actually the least powerful one in the room, while the smart, fast-on-his-feet Sam Spade effortlessly exercises real power even while surrounded by mortal enemies, because he understands exactly how the real world works.

Which is why when I read something like this --

Obama Supports Keeping Lieberman in Democratic Caucus

By Paul Kane
President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed keeping Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) in the Democratic caucus, suggesting to leadership that the two sides reach a compromise in the conflict over the former Democratic vice presidential nominee's future, sources said today.

In a phone conversation last week with Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), Obama said that expulsion of Lieberman for his support of the Republican presidential ticket would send the wrong signal after Obama's promises to set partisanship aside, according to a Senate Democratic aide familiar with the conversation.
...

Aides to Obama and Reid declined comment on the specifics of the conversation between the two party leaders. Obama's camp insisted the president-elect did not make any specific suggestions about how to resolve the situation, but did say that Obama wants Lieberman to remain with the Democrats.

"President-elect Obama looks forward to working with anyone to move the country forward," Obama transition spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said in a statement issued today. "We'd be happy to have Sen. Lieberman caucus with the Democrats. We don't hold any grudges."

-- I shake my head and smile.

Of course I believe

Lieberman Must Go.

But I also know, as Hunter S. Thompson once said, "Politics is the art of controlling your environment" and to this Chicagoan’s eyes, it sure looks like my President Elect is getting ready extend his control over his environment by gelding The Last Honest Man and fitting him with a collar.

Shorn of the sound and fury, the fact is Lieberman will be in the Senate for four more years (Thanks again, Connecticut!), and during the next two of those years the Senate is going to be Wingnut Central Command.

Right now, Joe is a joke, a disgrace and a failure. But he also has no conscience, an ego the size of Mount Sinai, no capacity for self-reflection, and has been drunk on his own ersatz piety since forever. And after 2-3 months angrily rebreathing his own sanctimony farts, I can easily imagine the corrupt Connecticut Manqué in King Dubya’s Court -- now a Joementum in Exile -- completely convincing himself that he needs to lead the charge against anything and everything the Marxist, Hamas-loving Obama Administration puts forward.

For the good of the country, of course.

And the children.

And stuff.

Before a President is sworn in, his influence is necessarily indirect. His available political capital can rise or fall only by proxy; by whom he appoints, whom he exiles, by the issues on which he stands firm, and on which he stands mute.

In Big Time Politics, every move has a price and a value, and the winners know how to buy low and sell high. And while driving Holy Joe into the political wilderness would certainly slake some of my thirst for righteous fucking payback, I also recognize it’s a poor bargain. It would perhaps gain the President Elect the further admiration of people who are already with him, but it wouldn't increase his stock of political capital one dime, and would come at the cost of potentially turning a derelict into a fanatic and creating an enemy who will be the tip of the spear used to poke him in the eye for the next two years.

It is also be a definitive act, one that can’t be undone and would necessarily foreclose the possibility that Joe Lieberman’s political carcass would be available as a flotation device in the future.

On the other hand, keeping Lieberman inside the tent and on double-secret probation opens up the possibility of running a subtler, reverse-Sister Souljah bit of jujitsu: in a move that would cost him essentially nothing, President Elect Obama would get to show the world his maverick independence from the Dirty Fucking Hippies, and while he demonstrated public magnanimity, he can also privately put Lieberman’s balls in a vice for the rest of his term.

If Lieberman shuts the fuck up, geeks on command and shits Tiffany cuff links, it's a win.

If Lieberman sets one foot off the reservation, the Obama crew can quietly make things so fucking awful that he bolts the Party, at which point the Party has its fall guy, and President Obama's Press Secretary can announce in his or her best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice that although the President gave Holy Joe every chance to redeem himself for his many, many betrayals, it is obvious now that Joe is incorrigibly bent and can never be trusted.

We in Chicago remember another smart, articulate, Progressive African-American leader. One who defied the predestinational impulses of the City Machine Political Womb from whence he came, rose to power on the promise of reform during very turbulent times, only to have his legs cut out from under him during much of his first term by a united front of proudly intransigent, racist thugs.

The chief executive was

Mayor Harold Washington.

The opposition was the led by Ed Burke and the recently-convicted

“Fast” Eddie Vrdolyak.

And the period – from 1983 to 1986 – was known as Council Wars:

After the election of Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, in 1983, a group of 29 of the city's 50 aldermen led by "the Eddies"—Ed Vrdolyak and Ed Burke—fought the mayor at every turn. The block of 29, known as the Vrdolyak 29, consisted of 28 white councilmen and the body's only Hispanic member.

The Vrdolyak 29 would not only block the mayor's proposals, but would even block his appointments, a purely symbolic move as they were able to take places running city departments on an interim basis anyway. In their first session under the Washington administration, they voted themselves in charge of every single council committee. Some members even admitted that they blocked the mayor's proposals when they thought they had merit, because they claimed a good measure by Washington would be bad in the long run for the city because it would help prolong his mayorship.

Many believe the opposition was racially motivated. There certainly was grounds for believing that as the 1983 mayoral election which Washington won gained national headlines for its ugly and racially divisive nature.

The Vrdolyak 29 had a majority of votes, but not enough to override a mayoral veto, thus creating legislative gridlock. Chicago became known as "Beirut by the Lake."
…

Exactly the same elements -- an intractable opposition who believe blocking every fucking thing proposed by the Progressive African-American executive will accrue to their narrow, political advantage -- are now in play in the nation’s capitol, and some version of “Council Wars” on FoxNews and Hate Radio steroids is what the next two years could very well resemble.

Giving Lieberman an opening to leave in a self-righteous huff and storm dramatically into the waiting arms of Mitch McConnell hands your enemy another weapon.

Whereas making him your dancing monkey

takes that weapon off the table and keeps it available for your own future purposes.

Not saying that’s what should happen.

Not saying that’s what will happen.

Just saying that when big time politics is played by smart people, it looks a lot like this.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The “If your gonna be running a buncha programs all at once, you’re gonna need a Rahm upgrade” edition.

Since arm-breaker Rahm Emanuel was spotted this weekend at the Mouse Circus more often than Cialis and Exxon commercials combined, here’s the skinny on the selection of the Congressman from Illinois’ 5th district as President-Elect Barack Obama's Chief of Staff.

See, years ago when the Christopaths kicked reason and compromise out of the Party of God , some of us came to the conclusion that trying to reason with Bush Regime Dead-Enders and the 48 million throwbacks who voted on November 4th to put them back into power is ridiculous.

That trying to enlist these cultural arsonists in fixing what they’ve spent 25 years burning to the ground is laughable.

Hope is great. Collegiality is great. I’m all for them.

But should the wretched whelplings of Jefferson Davis decide to get uppity, you're gonna need a sonofabitch standing ready

with Plan B (Not work safe).

Over on “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace asked:

"Liberal Economist Paul Krugman says the Progressive Agenda won. Do you agree?"

driftglass: You mean "Nobel Prize winning" economist, right?

Then came the long and painful "Whither Wingnttia?" section, in which Reps. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and Eric Cantor, R-Va played Republican Buck Buck; packing their pockets with lies and jumping desperately onto Reality's back, trying to make it collapse.

Wallace: Wasn't this a realigning election?

Buck Buck number one coming!

Cantor: This was not some kind of shift towards some European-style Socialist stinky-cheese faggy gummint. It was a massive distrust of gummint, which fucks up everything. Its not about left versus right; its about right versus wrong. And the only make Jebus happy is to cut gummint, cut taxes and suck harder on Reagan's dick.

Buck Buck number two coming!

Pence: This was not a progressive or liberal victory.

Wallace: Yeah, but Obama actually stood for some things.

Buck Buck number three coming!

Pence: This was not victory for liberalism. This was a victory for Barack Obama. Besides, Rich Lowry said that most people don’t embrace a European-style Socialist stinky-cheese faggy gummint.

driftglass: And who could doubt a sober and levelheaded assessment of what Murrica wants by Rich "Lil' Starbursts" Lowry?

Wallace: You said your job is to oppose, dismantle and defeat the Liberal agenda. Doesn’t sound very bipartisan to me?

Pence: Our job is to oppose. Mindlessly and reflexively oppose anything Democrats ever try to do until the end of time.

Wallace: OK, but look at these numbers. You are having your ass handed to you everywhere.

Buck Buck number four coming!

Cantor: Yes, the numbers are startling. We have to have a vision. Barack Obama hip-mo-tized the Murrican people! Also he used Teh Internets. We will have to use computers more and start using cooler words.

Wallace: But John McSame ran on exactly those issues. And he got beaten with a hammer. People ain’t buying what you're selling. I don't this was all about the charm of Barack Obama.

Buck Buck number five coming!

Pence: The people voted for change, but change must be built on the time-honored traditions of Reaganism and scaring the crap out of white trash gas-sippers.

Later, Brit Hume explained that now is not the time for the Republican Party to re-invent itself. If Obama tries to drag the country too far to the Left it will be unpopular and it will fail. Liberals don’t call themselves “Liberals”. They call themselves Progressives. Liberalism is still a political philosophy that dare not speak its name.

This is a center-right country.

Wallace to Kristol: So, your friend, Sarah Palin. Stupid or brain-damaged?

Kristol: Reporters shouldn’t print stuff that hasn’t been attributed or verified.

Says the Clown Prince of the “Some People Say…”

network.

Shorter Republican self-diagnosis:

If we dress up our Prime Directive with better gerunds and CGI so it sounds more changey--

-- everything will work out fine.

Good luck with that.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show”, Matthews explained that:

"Bush and Clinton both had “name” problems. Clinton had “Monica” and Bush had “Katrina”.

and in doing so, offhandedly encapsulates why having an utterly, amoral, horse race-driven trivia machine instead of an actual, y'know, media, is a bad idea.

Here we see the core moral-idiot-savant nature of the pundit classes; that they cannot comprehend the difference between the climactic faux crisis at the end of years of wingnut-ginned-up scandals, and a real, national catastrophe at the hands of bandits and monsters.

Later, David Fucking Brooks explains that: "Bush is a lot smarter than people think he is."

Shorter David Fucking Brooks: "Buck Buck number six coming!"

Meanwhile Rightard Trolls Queue Up

to redeem their valuable McSame Points for irregular pants, surplus "Palin!Power!" nut logs.

From the MyDD archives:

McCain wants YOU to copy and paste his way to an internet victory!

by upstate girl, Tue May 20, 2008 at 07:06:26 PM EST

From Will Thomas at the Huffington Post, McCain is looking for brave volunteers to help him ctrl-v his way into the White House:

Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog sites. Your efforts to help get the message out about John McCain's policies and plan for the future is one of the most valuable things you can do for this campaign. You know why John McCain should be the next President of the United States and we need you to tell others why.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you've commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

While I'm intrigued by the mental image of a McCain Online Action Center (two out of those four words don't traditionally evoke thoughts of McCain), I'm a little more curious about the guidelines - or lack thereof - that McCain's campaign is offering to the Fighting 101st Keyboard Brigade.

The page offers today's "Talking Points" - a grand total of 2 - that offer strong, issue-based heartfelt support such as:

John McCain will put the national interest ahead of partisanship, he will work with anyone who sincerely wants to get this country moving again. If John McCain is elected President, the era of the permanent campaign will end. The era of problem solving will begin.

Between May and October 2008, the McSame online daily talking points didn't change one iota.

Which makes sense when you consider that he was running as the leader of a mob that still hasn't gotten over Appomattox, 1865.

A big "Thank You"

for the very kind thought to melina, cheyanne and Anonymous for dropping my rolled up socks into the Great Barrel of Consideration over at the Weblog Awards



and my continuous, ongoing and too-infrequently mentioned thanks to the wonderful blasphemers and sweet-smelling fellow America-haters who read, comment so insightfully, and say altogether too-nice things about the words I string together over here at my pie wagon.

I am deeply agnostic about awards in general -- realizing at once how important it is to shine a big light on those who till the digital soil so tirelessly, beautifully and usually uncompensatedly, how simply and greedily cool it feels to win stuff, and how easily contests of any kind can intrude as a source of unwanted and unasked for competition among people who should think of themselves as peers -- but I recognize and deeply appreciate the sentiments behind them.

Thank you.

What Do You Mean

I'm on


The



No


Fly

List?!


Don't you realize who I am?

Yes.

Yes we do.

Hehehe.

Your Gonna Need

A bigger bailout.

Americans awoke today to discover that the Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks who destroyed the world's banking and credit systems continue to go right on behaving like Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks even after Congress wrote them a stern-but-polite note with a $700 billion dollar check inside asking them very nicely to stop behaving like Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks.

From AlterNet:

Wall Street Fat Cats Are Trying to Pocket Billions in Bailout Cash
By Nomi Prins, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008

The election results pretty much confirmed the extent to which Main Street is rightly livid about the Wall Street mentality that led to our financial crisis. During his historic victory speech, President-elect Barack Obama told supporters, and the rest of the world, "If this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers."

But, it seems that Wall Street didn't get that memo. It turns out that the nine banks about to be getting a total equity capital injection of $125 billion, courtesy of Phase I of The Bailout Plan, had reserved $108 billion during the first nine months of 2008 in order to pay for compensation and bonuses (PDF).

Paying Wall Street bonuses was not supposed to be part of the plan. At least that's how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson explained it to Congress and the American people. So, on Oct. 1, when the Senate, including Obama, approved the $700 billion bailout package, the illusion was that this would magically loosen the credit markets, and with taxpayer-funded relief, banks would first start lending to each other again, and then, to citizens and small businesses. And all would be well.

That didn't happen. Which is why it's particularly offensive that the no-strings-attached money is going to line the pockets of Wall Street execs. The country's top investment bank (which since Sept. 21 calls itself a bank holding company), Goldman Sachs, set aside $11.4 billion during the first nine months of this year -- slightly more than the firm's $10 billion U.S. government gift -- to cover bonus payments for its 443 senior partners, who are set to make about $5 million each, and other employees.

Whereas Wall Street may not believe in higher taxes for the richest citizens, it does believe in higher bonuses for the head honchos. No matter what the market conditions are on the outside, steadfast feelings of entitlement tend to prevail.
...

In other words...


These people don't need another dime of our money.

These people need to be hunted from helicopters.