Back To “Reality”

After a long vacation – some might call it a minor meltdown – I’m back to my old tricks. The last two months had so much bad news, so much sensationalism, so little corrective journalism, that my head literally exploded. Luckily I’m on COBRA, so they were able to put it back together. I’ve come to realize that our health-care is great! It’s the System that’s fucked…

Anyway, this whole December 25th foiled attack – don’t know if you’ve heard about it? – pointed out a truth that every media outlet has ignored. Al Quaida can’t really do anything. In eight years all they’ve managed to do is move where the non-working explosives were located. It is – rather – how we respond that makes Al Quaida successful. They send one miserable bastard to set his nuts on fire and we’ll spend a trillion dollars not finding the person who sent him to do it. If you met an Al Quaida operative without knowing who they were, your first instinct would be to get him to eat something and see a dentist. I’m not talking about the millions of people who now relate to them as a result of our colossal overseas fuckery this last decade – or the two or three master criminals who were taught by the CIA and educated in American schools who spend their days in the lap of luxury downloading iphone apps. I’m talking about the knuckle dragging hayseeds who are called upon to blow themselves up.

Cheney came out of his cave to criticize Obama – a man who gave a speech about war while receiving a prize for peace – for not mentioning war enough. Clearly his cave doesn’t get cable. Which reminds me, Cheney is sort of like Bin Laden (or Puxatony Phil) – you only see him when he comes out to make a false statement. But you can’t blame Obama for the outrageous intelligence failures that allowed a Nigerian with no luggage to buy a one-way ticket to Detroit with cash and try to blow up an airplane. Intelligence failures are the norm. If they weren’t “classified” we would be able to see that our intelligence agencies are collectively the greatest group of hapless dumbasses in the history of the world. Their failures are so consistent and so resoundingly incomprehensible that it would be ruinous to ever bring them to light. No matter who is in office. Whether it be a timid bleeding heart tree hugging environment caring liberal or a war mongering subnormal non-linguist nose-picking conservative – that guy still gets on the plane and still tries to incinerate his junk.

But enough about how our media has morphed into a corporately run collection of salacious ratings obsessed truth slanting helmet headed liars. Let’s talk about our culture and how messed up it is. I was coming home from holiday (I said holiday instead of vacation to make you wonder where I’m from! Ha!) and a five year old told his brother to “step back from my johnson yo!” His father told him “not to be so rated x; keep it rated r.” to which his kindergarden aged son replied, as if his father was the toddler, “dad, rated x is so much worse than rated r; it’s like 20 times worse.”  Next we find Gilbert Arenas suspended from the NBA for keeping a collection of firearms in his locker in the Wizards locker-room. It’s rare to find a place outside of Texas that would look fondly at an employee stowing firearms in his office. Arenas though, made the incomprehensibly stupid even worse by jokingly shooting off his fingers at fellow Wizards – a.k.a. Bullets – during warmups before a game. Haha! Get it! And last year we saw a couple of culture whores try to drag our highest office into the “reality” mire that our country has become by crashing a state dinner.

Our country is teetering over a mighty chasm of debt and all we want to do is get on television or do something stupid so we can Twit about it. We might want to take a long look at the messages we’re giving ourselves before we cross over into the grim dimness from which there is no going back. Once we’re too dumb to know we’re dumb we’re doomed.

Happy New Year!

Dick Cheney Tortures Still…

Not since Torquemada has a hunchbacked evil bastard caused so many so much pain so consistently. Forget stabbing friends in the back; he’ll just up and shoot them in the face. (There have been plenty of evil bastards, of course; but they all had better posture.) Anyway, today a court in Italy found 23 CIA agents guilty of kidnapping stemming from their practice of Extraordinary Rendition of people the United States were suspicious of. They were sentenced to prison. Not that they will actually go to prison, as they have asylum here in the United States – which is THE place to live these days for those who answered the demands of the Bush Junta. Kidnapping was the least of their crimes. That was just the first step. Next these people who simply vanished from the sovereign countries in which they lived would find themselves in various “sites” around the world, where a whole host of nefarious deeds would be done to them in an effort to extract information from them. Sort of like the infamous scene in Marathon Man, where Dick Cheney is drilling holes in Dustin Hoffman’s teeth. He played a Nazi in that movie – and the parallels between that Dick Cheney and the real one are striking. But I digress. Mark Twain knew a hundred years ago what I know and what any sentient being knows: torture doesn’t work. Unless your goal is to thoroughly break someone’s psyche and ruin them as people, that is; if your goal is to actually get information from someone, it’s not remotely effective. Unless you want a whole bunch of made up bullshit. I know myself. And I know I wouldn’t even have to be tortured to make up all sorts of ill deeds if I thought it would make the pain go away. It’s no wonder that there was such a rash of false warnings about shopping malls being targeted. Either it was based off false information extracted from innocent people or it was ginned up fear from an administration that ran on lies and bullying.

Dick Cheney likes to go on and on about how torturing people is great and a wonderful way to foil plots and catch bad guys. When pressed for any sort of evidence, he instantly retreats to the tired old theory that to divulge such a thing would make us weaker or some nonsense. What I’m sure it does is make our soldiers – not prisoners of war – but targets of revenge. If we can’t honor our own propaganda, how can we expect others to? Exactly.

The most frustrating aspects of the behavior of the Bush administration is that they did all of the things they did even despite the fact that it defied any sort of logic or reason or research or knowledge of human behavior. We make the same mistakes over and over again expecting a different outcome: which is the definition of  - well, so much for that. Each new generation does something that has been done before – and failed before – but like Mickey Rooney – they try again anyway – because they’re better! Or different! And then: whoops! I married my mom again!!!

I can’t help but think that if Al Gore had been just a little less boring, this country wouldn’t be trillions of dollars in the hole funding quagmires oceans away in a desert among groups and fiefdoms and cultures we seem hopeless to understand. We wouldn’t be apologizing for torture while denying we ever did it; and we wouldn’t be closing a prison that isn’t closing anytime soon. Instead, 0ur money would be safely ensconced with treasury secretary Bernie Madoff on Capitol Hill near the Green House.

Where The Innocent Are Tortured and The Guilty Write Memoirs

Welcome to Dick Cheney’s America. Where you’re innocent until brutally beaten into guilt. Where, if you won’t admit the crime you haven’t committed, you will when we Rendition you to a country that will get it out of you one way or another. If, despite all of that, you are still found innocent, there will be no recourse for you. No way to make those that caused you great body and psychic harm pay for their mistake. Because, heck, if every innocent person the United States tortured sued for damages, it would fill up our courts from coast to coast! It would take up lots of paper and time that the government simply can’t afford.

Sorry innocent tortured people. But the closest you can come to justice is shooting out your television screen when you see my (Dick Cheney! I’m selling a book!) ugly twisted soul on television lying up a storm about anything and everything and shitting in everyone’s coffee during my book tour. Or shooting out your television screen whenever you see George Bush is headlining – of all things – a seminar on motivation! (George and I both highly recommend shooting out your televisions. That way you’ll have to buy a new one – which will stimulate the economy!)

(For your daily dose of seriously depressing doom, go here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/11/03/arar)

You don’t think I didn’t have this all figured out, did you? Did you really think I would order all these innocent people tortured if I wasn’t sure there was no way I could ever be punished for it? I may be a lot of things, but one thing I definitely am is one hell of a good war criminal. So good in fact that I’m still a fine and upstanding citizen, immune from prosecution, and allowed to practice my free speech on anyone and everyone. Instead of being locked up for all the bad things I like to do, I go on Meet The Press so I can call the President a fairy. That Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme? My idea. I met that guy at a cocktail party and told him I would torture him if he didn’t become a criminal. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely; and, in my case, although I have always been corrupt, it’s so gloriously true! Unless you’re a Canadian. Those fools admit their wrongdoing and make reparations! What a laugh those guys are! If I could I’d extremely rendition that whole country to Syria!

Have you heard about the Arar case? It’s a case study in my lack of any moral bearings whatsoever. And the power I wielded in the White House and the Justice Department – and what I could do with it. Some Canadian software engineer named Arar had the misfortune to go through New York on his way home to Canada from vacation. And that’s when we nabbed him. But he wouldn’t confess to his evil-doing: he kept going on about being innocent and whatnot, so – realizing if we sent him to Syria they would torture him – we put a bag over his head and – next thing he knows – he’s in a Syrian prison along with a whole bunch of questions for them to ask! Where he is repeatedly tortured. He confessed of course. Finally. To something he didn’t do, just so they would stop beating him with cables. On and on and on it went. Various painful forms of torture. Day in and day out – for over a year.  Finally, the Syrians concluded that he was actually innocent. Oh well. Omelettes and broken eggs and all that. Now he’s all pissy about the whole thing. He even sued John Ashcroft – which is fine with me: that guy is a dithering pansy anyway. But, unlike Canada, which actually admitted to their wrongdoing, looked into the matter and published a weighty document detailing how wrong they – and the United States – were, groveled for his forgiveness and gave him 11.5 million Canadian dollars.

As Arar could tell you, the United States doesn’t play like that. Nope. I made sure of that, you see. I’m untouchable, frankly. The way it works is, we just deny it ever happened. After all, the United States doesn’t torture! Ha! Ask me a question and “I don’t recall” the answer. Pretty simple really. You’ve got evidence you say? Well, what is the definition of evidence anyway? You see, when you have a lot of power you can do tricky things like decide what evidence is; and the very meaning of words themselves. If it’s something we don’t want it to be, we’ll just change it. And, if you want to testify in front of a grand jury about all of the punishments the Syrians conducted on you at the request of the United States, well, good luck getting into the country!

Okay, enough about how great my power is. I have a memoir to make up and some paper shredding to do. I also have to celebrate how timid and cowardly this administration is when it comes to my rampant criminality. They protect me at every turn!

Cheers!

Dick

 

The Right – Doubling Down On Denial

In New York right now, the GOP is engaging in some public internecine warfare. The vote comes tomorrow and the GOP is urging its base to choose the more “conservative” of the two. In the automated phone calls that voters are subjected to, the following snippet can be heard:

Blah Blah Blah. Liberals suck – or something like that; and then: “Or do you believe in Republican conservative values, like thrift, personal responsibility, and family? Let’s tell the liberals, enough is enough.” – these calls went out in order to talk Republicans into not voting for the moderate one – i.e. not a dipshit – in favor of the hard-liner – i.e. demagogue fool.

You might not know this, and I didn’t either, but apparently one of the conservative values is Thrift. Who knew the Republicans were so concerned about saving money? They quadrupled the size of government; they spent a trillion dollars in Iraq; and they seem to be made up almost entirely of extremely rich bigots. And it’s been a long long time since an elected Republican showed much concern for thrift. I doubt there are too many Republicans eating Ramen soup to save money. Another conservative value? Personal Responsibility. This doesn’t seem to hold water either. In fact, right now the two individuals personally responsible for the current state of this country are in deeper denial than Pete Rose. Neither Dick Cheney nor George Bush have taken responsibility for a single misstep on anything. Not torture. Not the economy. Or making a huge leap towards socialism by buying into our country’s largest – and most incompetent – banks. Instead of taking responsibility, they choose to “not recall” what they did. Family. The conservatives claim this value to be firmly within their grasp. Yet it’s the Obamas who seem to be actually living this value conservatives hold so dear. We’ve seen a parade of Republicans fall on their family-value faces over the last year: whether it’s a governor hiking the Appalachian Trail in South America or a Senator going out of his way to find employment for his mistress’ boyfriend.

There comes a time when people wake up and realize that actions really do speak louder than words. You can claim something great in your mission statement  (you can bet Bernie Madoff didn’t have Ponzi Scheme anywhere in his mission statement); but if you can’t back it up, it’s time to change your tune. It’s time to rebrand yourself and start anew. For the Republicans, they can go one of two ways. They can either double-down on their current tactics of hypocrisy and latent racism – “Or do you believe in Republican conservative values, like largesse, cronyism and white supremacy?” – or they can come up with an actual viable alternative to what the democrats are doing. This is a two-party system we have. Republicans might want to at least try and make a play for being the second one.

The only way they are going to do that is communicate honestly on a platform that people can actually believe. Personally, I’m not holding my breath.

Should We Give Taxes A New Name?

You say the word “tax” these days, you end up in a dark alley with a letter opener sticking out of your belly. It’s un-American to use such a word. In this year – 2009 for those keeping count… – the highest tax rate is 35%, which is for anyone who earns more than $372,950. Let’s contrast that with 1945: I’m not suggesting the earning power is the same – but for the sake of this argument it doesn’t matter – as there is no tax rate over 35% in 2009 – but in 1945, if you made 0ver $200,000, your tax rate was 94%. Which meant that you could keep a whopping 6% of your income! Granted, at the time we had a war to pay for – but still…that’s a decent chunk of change.

(for those of you who are into numbers, you can find what I referenced here: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/federalindividualratehistory-200901021.pdf

Now, we’ll just work our way forward in time:

The history books tell us that the 50’s were booming. The war was over. Soldiers were home after kicking some real Axis of evil ass. And one of the most popular songs of the era was about a lollipop. In 1955, those who made over $200,000 paid 91% taxes – but that wasn’t the highest tax bracket; ,moving forward to 1970, anyone earning more than $100,000 paid 70%. Not bad! In 1980 – ditto. —-Then things started changing as a greasy haired simpleton was now at the helm; a former California governor who once acted opposite a monkey named Bonzo. In 1982, the highest tax rate goes down to 50%; but you only had to make $42,5o0 to be in the highest tax bracket. It was the beginning of the deterioration of the middle-class. But let’s keep going. By 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, the highest tax rate was merely 28% for anyone earning more than 113,300. Reagan was the inventor and greatest proponent of Voodoo Economics, the theory of which seems to be that the less you pay in taxes, the more taxes the government gets. Or something like that. Something that is simply not possible. The government spends more and takes in less was at the very heart of the Reagan way. No wonder then that in 1989 people were so fed up with taxes, and barely having to pay them, that George Bush the 1st had to go on record as promising “no new taxes.” A promise he couldn’t keep. As, well, what kind of government can spend money without having any? By 1991, the tax rate had to go back up to 31% for those making more than $41,075 to help make up for all the money the government wasn’t taking in the previous six years. It cost him re-election: despite a quick and relatively painless Gulf War 1, the tanking economy cost him his job. Clinton – because he was a liberal and not at all conservative – raised taxes back up to 39.6% for those making more than $140,000, paying down the deficit and balancing the budget – an act that the Republicans admired so much they shut down congress. It stayed at that rate for both of his terms. George Bush the 2nd, who is closer in both spirit and stupidity to Ronald Reagan than his father, managed to get it back down to 35% – which is where it stands today.

To even imply a tax on anything is to risk being drawn and quartered by a mad band of Glenn Beck supporters with muppets and pick axes. But we’ve got a stimulus package to pay for, two wars to fund, a health-care overhaul that could turn out to be many things – free not being one of them – as well as a host of other problems finally catching up us. We’re paying for the last 27 years of irresponsible tax policy. While it’s nice not to have to pay as much in taxes as The Greatest Generation did (just one more thing they did better than the Baby Boomers. They paid 90% in taxes and sang about lollipops!), there’s something to be said for paying for what we take. We want better education, better health-care, better infrastructure, social security, Medicare – and a whole host of other things, we just don’t want to pay for it. The Republicans would have us cut taxes even further. They seem to believe that the less you pay in taxes, the more that money trickles down. (Actually I don’t think they believe this at all; I think it’s just a faux theory they came up with to explain the reckless hacking they planned to do to the national treasury. That money – as they well knew – didn’t trickle down: it trickled into fuck pads and silicone breasts and three hundred foot yachts and stomach staples and anything else they felt like spending their money on.)

It’s clearly time for us to raise taxes. We’ve got an almost two trillion dollar deficit for this year alone. That 4.6% difference in taxes at the highest level is nothing to sneeze at: in 2000, after all, we had a budget surplus. Maybe the problem  is the word itself. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. It hurts saying that word. What if the word was changed to – and we’ll take a page from Bush for this one (he’s not using it) – Freedom Surcharge. We could call taxes taxes and then add a Freedom Surcharge of, let’s say, 4.6 percent. It would be a lot harder for the crooks at the highest ranks of the corporate latter to complain about paying for our Freedom.

If you love America, you should be willing to keep it in business. Even if you’re Republican. Even if it means paying what you owe.

Old Man Hiding In Bunker Slings Accusations At President

Dick Cheney, the former vice-President, who spent an eight year period hidden away in a bunker, ordering tortures from a safe distance, only going out rarely, most notably to shoot someone in the face, is now accusing Obama of being “afraid” – to send 40,000 men and women to an untamed Middle East hinterland filled to overflowing with AK-47 wielding citizens who don’t appreciate being their fiefdoms being occupied by foreigners. What he sees as “dithering” might be – gasp! – thinking something through! Imagine that! A President who values human life! Had George Bush been a ditherer and not hopelessly handicapped by ignorance, we might not find ourselves in two ongoing wars…against…something or someone that has cost us trillions of dollars that could have paid for healthcare or gone towards the creation of an island off the coast of New York – let’s call it Fat Cat Island – where Wall Street derivative traders could be allowed to consume one another on live television – like Survivor, only with bankers. There are all sorts of things that money could have been better utilized for.

Afghanistan isn’t the hopeless quagmire Iraq was and is. It’s worse. It’s been breaking empires for centuries. It broke the British and the Soviet Union – and it’s slowly breaking us as well. Obama is merely trying to make some sort of sense out of it. All this talk of “victory” coming from the military is nothing more than a group of people at the very top of a corporation suggesting something that will help their bottom line. Bombing things is good business. It’s one of the few evergreen industries we have these days.

Obama – hopefully – is looking to find strategies that actually make sense. Sending weapons to Pakistan and hoping they use them to bomb the right people isn’t a good one: they’ll just hoard them and wait for an opportunity to use them against India or something. Better to help them build infrastructure and improve security in exchange for them taking action against a group of people that have worn out their welcome even in the country that created them.

But I don’t know anything. Unfortunately neither do the people who are supposed to. I don’t know what Dick Cheney’s problem is – but he’s absolutely completely wrong about everything. In fact, he’s going to write a memoir filled with all sorts of wrong things he’s done that he thinks were correct. I’m just glad the guy doesn’t like me the way he does his country – because he almost single-handedly wrecked it. He was no doubt the kind of kid you wouldn’t allow to borrow your toys. He’d almost certainly break them and then shoot you in the face if you complained about it. He needs therapy; not a book tour. This is the guy who assured the nation that the Taliban “was finished” – eight years ago. Which makes you wonder why they’re surging right now and why the same one eyed mystery man is still strolling the caves of the Khyber Pass safe and sound. This is the guy who turned war into a for-profit industry; this is the guy who is on the board of a for-profit prison that tortured its prisoners. He oozes corruption out of every pore. And you can bet his breath smells like a dead skunk stuck in a chimney for six months. He stands for everything loathsome and deplorable about the potential of man; the fact that he has been successful in his life is an ugly insult to all that is inspiring and just.

BOOGIE MAN

He is the great Boogie Man;

He is why kids keep their lights on;

He is the reason people

aren’t always nice

to their neighbors -

(that guy could be like Dick Cheney!)

He is a muse for the misformed -

and a beacon

to all who hope one day to grow up

and destroy everything.

His presence is usually presaged by a cold front.

Trees blow on windless days.

Thunder rumbles under a clear blue sky.

He is the boogie man;

the dark cancerous pimple

on the ass of the American Dream.

And he should shut up.

 

 

The Worst Defense Lawyer In The World (One Hopes)

Normally I like to unleash my bile and vitriol at the stupidities I see in today’s media and political discourse. But not today. No. Today is about the person who simply HAS to be the worst actual real defense lawyer in the world. And I wouldn’t have known a thing about him if I hadn’t stopped channel surfing because I thought I saw Randy Quaid…

It looked like Anderson Cooper was interviewing Randy Quaid. And Randy Quaid was wearing a cowboy hat. I thought maybe it might have something to do with that bizarre hotel story in Marfa where he skipped out on his bill and got arrested. But no. This wasn’t a character actor playing up some goofy Texas stereotype. It was a real person more than living up to it. He was, specifically a defense attorney in Texas named David Martin. And, if you’ve retained his services you are in all likelihood either in prison or dead. The interview begins with him apologizing “for checking cows.” He is wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat. It only gets worse from there.

He was being interviewed about the innocent man executed in Texas for setting his house on fire and killing his children. It’s a story that has been in the news lately because the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has gotten involved – going so far as to stall any investigation into the possibility of Texas being the first state to openly be able to claim the murder of an innocent man – by kicking person after person off the commission created to investigate the case.

The executed man was Cameron Todd Willingham. He was no role model. But neither are lots of people. He might not have been guilty either. His “lawyer” was David Martin. And he was not on television to defend his client – but to attack him. Relentlessly. And he declared even the possibility of his innocence to be “hogwash”  and “absurd.” Absurd seems to be a big word for him – as he used it frequently as a rejoinder for everything. David Martin – worst defense lawyer in the world – is quoted in the New Yorker as saying that “98% of the time my clients are guilty as sin.” Which is all fine and good. This is America and I am a fan of freedom of speech and personal opinion. But I’m also a fan of justice. And, as expert after expert after expert have come forward and made abundantly clear – an innocent man, who tragically lost his three children in a fire, lost his freedom and his life – thanks, in part, to the WORLD’S WORST DEFENSE LAWYER and a crap sandwich of “evidence” bordering on the criminally ignorant. (For example, two details that led to Cameron Todd Willingham’s demise: he had an Iron Maiden poster in his house (he was 20 years old at the time the house burned), which the prosecution drummed up to mean that – rather than being a fan of heavy metal –  he was obsessed with violence; Also, he had a tattoo of a skull on his arm. Bad taste perhaps; but not indication of mass murder…

At one point in what is an entertaining (Nobody can stereotype the Texan like a Texan) and bizarre interview, the defense lawyer claimed that he knew his client was guilty because he and another lawyer got some lighter fluid and burned a piece of carpet and…it looked just like the burned carpet in the house! (My guess is it was black and charred and burned looking.) My next guess is that this guy is a stone cold idiot – a supreme embodiment of both inexcusable confidence and willful ignorance. (sort of like a certain ex-President who liked to wear cowboy boots and bomb stuff.) Now, I love Texas; my family is from there. But Texans are so full of their own propaganda that it’s flat out dangerous. They strut and amble the world over, causing all manner of havoc and mayhem everywhere they go. (I was once in Rome and asked my tour guide which tourists drove him the craziest. I was sure it would be America. But he said, no, he loved Americans. In fact he loved all of the people he has met; everyone, that is, but people from the “country” of Texas. He said they were loud and abusive and acted superior even though they dressed like fools with giant hair and were always drunk.)

I could go on and on about what a high-class boob this guy is – but no amount of words can do the guy justice – and there’s no point in satirizing that which is already a satire and a tragedy. So, without further ado:

watch the interview here:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE

read the story here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann/

I was glad to discover that I am not alone when it comes to thinking this guy is a jackass and an assessory to murder. And, of course, terrible at his job. Going on national television, as the clients’ defense attorney, to attest to his own clients’ guilt seems to go against the whole confidentiality and attorney-client privelege thing. I didn’t even know he was the defense attorney until half-way through when Anderson named him as such; the way he was talking and acting defensive I figured he was a prosecuting attorney. But I was wrong. Also, if you think 98% of your clients are “guilty as sin,” wouldn’t that limit your ability and motivation to prove otherwise? I mean, if you think about it, that sort of mentality grants you the ability to throw in the towel, not try at all, and only screw up 2% of the time. (Statistics actually show that in reality only about half of defendants are guilty of their crime (according to the New Yorker article) – which, now that I think about it, totally sucks.) You get what you pay for – and in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham – who had no money, he got a know nothing. In this country you are only as innocent as what you can afford. Which means half the people in jail are stuck there until they are rich enough to get out.

The gist of the articles below is that David Martin hurt his client by trashing him on national television. I don’t know about anyone else who watched the interview, but it seems to me he mainly trashed himself. And only gave more ammunition to the growing belief that a great injustice was done in this case. And a man is dead as a result.

Here’s what people who actually know what they’re talking about say:

An actual defense attorney defends his profession and stomps David Martin here: http://gamso-forthedefense.blogspot.com/2009/10/selling-out-client-part-iii.html

and here: http://bennettandbennett.com/blog/2009/10/david-martin-willinghams-trial-lawyer-speaks-up.html

and here: http://rantsofapublicdefender.blogspot.com/2009/10/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice.html

and here: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/10/17/never-smear-your-own-client-not-even-in-death.aspx

and here: http://brownandlittlelaw.com/blog1/2009/10/17/shameful/

and here (this was the lawyer who had the misfortune of trying to fix all the crap this moron got wrong): http://www.wacocriminallawblog.com/

Anything You Can Do I Can Root Against

The Republicans are so upset with being out of power – having lost their toy – that they cheer anything that goes against Obama. Even if it goes against their own country. To see Republicans jumping up and down with glee that the U.S. didn’t get the 2016 Olympics was – to take a phrase out of their playbook – somewhat un-American. It’s one thing to disagree on policy – which they would do if they understood it; it’s one thing to disagree on their philosophy – which they would do if they had one; it’s something else altogether to simply cheer against something that would have benefitted a country starved for income – simply because someone from the other side worked to make it happen.

No, Chicago didn’t get the Olympics; Rio did. Yes, Obama flew to Denmark to lobby on behalf of his country. No, it didn’t work; and no, it’s not something to celebrate. It is – in fact really dumb – especially from a party who has eyes on the White House in 2016. What if a Republican were in office in 2016? Why, he or she would host an Olympics! Horrors!

Perhaps, underneath it all, the giddiness that greeted America’s most recent setback revealed an underlying insecurity: perhaps the GOP knows they don’t have a shot at 2016…maybe they look to their left and right and see someone like themselves – a complete fool – and they think, fuck it – might as well boo.

Yet Another Dick Post

It’s been awhile since I’ve had anything negative to say about Dick Cheney. Like a week or something. But the recently released findings from the EU on the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, reminds me all over again just how shit-ass terrible the Bush administration was when it came to foreign policy. (Which brings up – yet again – the question of just what is it they were good at? The answer to which is: misinformation and wedge issues and transparent corruption; other than that – nothing.) Dick Cheney – like torture and lying and fearmongering and face-shooting- has always been a fan of Georgia. It was one of his pet projects to get them into NATO – so that they could check the Red Menace from marching! Not that there is much menace these days. No. In fact, back before we up and squandered it, the only power even capable of any marching was the United States. But so much for that. Russia is more interested in no longer being in an economic hell-hole.

“We are all Georgians now” – John McCain

The findings show that it was the Georgians who started the war with Russia. With weapons and training we gave them. Then turned to the West looking for help – playing the victim. The Russian response was overwhelming and uncalled for. But – it must be said – they did not start it. You would be hard-pressed to find a western publication that didn’t side itself on the side of Georgia.

“For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable…”  - Sarah Palin

It’s not for nothing that the Right (wrong) was so quick to come to the aid (verbally) of Georgia. They had no choice. Their hands were just as dirty. The attack couldn’t have occurred if we weren’t plying them with weapons. And now we’ve got one more reminder of just how inept the 8 year Bush junta really was on just about everything.

“After your nation won its freedom in the Rose Revolution, America came to the aid of this courageous young democracy. We are doing so again as you work to overcome an invasion of your sovereign territory, and an illegitimate, unilateral attempt to change your country’s borders by force that has been universally condemned by the free world. America is fully committed to Georgia’s membership action plan for NATO and to its eventual membership in the alliance. Now it is the responsibility of the free world to rally to the side of Georgia,” – Dick Cheney

Vintage Cheney. Full of certainty. And dead wrong as usual. His words ring hollow now. They rang hollow then, of course; but now they’re downright embarrassing. It’s hard to think of a single thing – other than keeping us safe from attack, which isn’t nothing and probably had more to do with Homeland Security than anything coming out of the Cheney lair- and combatting AIDS in Africa, which was George Bush’s doing and for which he must be given some credit – that the Bush administration didn’t bungle, distort, break, ruin, ignore, destroy, or otherwise make in some way worse. The media may be having a field day with Obama and all the stuff on his plate – and wonder whether or not he’s tough enough to play politics globally – but perhaps it’s time to step back and gain some perspective. Compared to the Bush administration, this is a President that people actually respect. Compared to The Decider, this is a guy who can tie his own shoes. Compared to an administration working actively against the nation’s interest, we’ve got an imperfect one that has made great strides in picking us up off the ground.

It’s good to remember how much worse things were when Bush was President – especially when you see the mass of hysteria tossed up on television on a daily basis. It’s hard to keep a hold on some sort of reality in such circumstances. When you have people like Glenn Beck announcing that Vancouver lost a billion dollars hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics – an event that has yet to even transpire – you know that reality is not only beside the point, but not even an afterthought. It takes diligence and curiosity to try and unravel the threads of truth when those entrusted with that job aren’t even trying.

Okay…

Addendum:

Now, to be fair, right or left, we still seem to have Georgia’s back. We’re still helping their army. And we might still be arming them. Once these things get rolling, it’s hard to stop them. But perhaps the EU report might make them rethink whether or not Georgia has the right temperament to be an ongoing pet project moving forward.

Both Sides Play Race Card; Jinx Each Other

In a sight rarely seen among adults, two talking heads pulled out the Race Card at the same time on a CNN panel last night and were struck silent, according to the childhood games rules. It all started with Jimmy Carter’s all too obvious reading of the recent tone of Obama protests – (but because it came from a former President it was seen as highly controversial. Honesty from a politician is almost always seen as a breech of protocol.) – when a Republican talking head, an African American ironically – from Mississippi (in other words a trained actor hired specifically to prove Republicans have such people) – accused Jimmy Carter of using the Race Card. Which struck many as an easy thing to accuse him of. It’s not like he was subtle about it. The former President straight up accused many of the protestors 0f having racist feelings; it wasn’t something he was trying to hide.

Anyway – then the Democrat accused the Republican of playing the Race Card for accusing the former President of using the Race Card. It was a highly confusing segment of the show and it was very hard to follow the back and forth between who said what when and what who said and what they meant when they said what they said and then some yelling and talking over each other and – wow, is this really news?

The only part I got out of it was when the Republican guy blatantly showed his strategic cards when he said, “This whole race thing is a distraction. What we in the GOP want is serious discussion about policy!” Which, of course, is supreme low-quality bullshit. The LAST thing they have wanted is any sort of discussion about anything substantive at all. They have brought nothing to the table but whoopie cushions, air horns and hand-shake buzzers. They have grasped, desperately, to change the subject to anything other than policy. So when the hired actor  playing a Mississippi Republican pundit said, dramatically, “Enough with the distractions!” it was greeted with a befuddled silence of: who the fuck are you trying to fool? Had the Democrat not been rendered mute, he could have said something like, “Fine. Great. Let’s shake on it. No more distracting bullshit. You said it and now shake on it.” But then the buzzer would go off and the circus would start all over again…

So, in essence, the GOP playbook is this:

1: Say something outrageously: evil, wrong, outlandish, absurd, and easily proven false.

2: Watch Democrats flounder in outrage

3: Check watch for how much time is off the clock

4: Demand that the time for distractions is over

5: Create another distraction

6: Repeat as necessary for four to eight years

They did it for eight years with Bill Clinton and they’re doing it with Obama. Spray the field with inanity. Keep the Democrats from focussing on accomplishing anything. Wait until it’s your turn to bat and then: lower taxes, plunder the treasury, start some “wars” and attack some weddings.

They are all a bunch of dipshits, of course. But their plan seems to be working…

Joe Wilson Issues Non-Apology And The Wheels Of Power Continue On

Joe Wilson yesterday apologized for screaming out “You Lie” during President Obama’s speech to congress – while reiterating that he thinks the President is a liar. In other words, he didn’t apologize. Rahm demanded the apology and Obama accepted it and Wilson never really gave it. 

Today he’s playing the victim and asking for money. I think what he did was horrible. But I would give him money if he would promise to use it for barbituates or some sort of medicine that paralyzes the vocal cords. But he won’t. He’ll use it for secret blowjobs and blow.

Just another day in Washington. 

But it did serve as yet another wake up call to the old hands in the Republican party: they can see the present of their party, and it isn’t pretty: it’s a who’s who of loonies: Sarah Palin, Joe The Plumber, and now Joe the Spontaneous Outburst. Bob Dole is rolling over in his grave – and he’s not even dead. 

The democrats don’t have all the answers, and they make plenty of mistakes; unfortunately their opposition sniffs glue and revels in nihilism and White Lightning. When Republicans rumble about the new administration, I remind them who they offered up on their end – and they hang their heads in shame. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Old Man Crank Pot and Sexy Librarian Syntax Murderess.

We used to have a two-party system. Now we have a one-party system balanced by a collection of hyper-active ether sucking raccoons: they make lots of noise and upend things and eat the stuffing out of their chairs, but that’s all they seem capable of.

What is annoying is the fact that Obama seems to believe that he has to deal with these people as actual grown ups. He asks for mature political discourse – but the other side is too busy following Kid Rock or being rushed to the hospital to have a grape removed from their nostril or their stomach pumped from eating too much paste.

It’s got to be exhausting relentlessly pretending the other side isn’t a farce.

Health-Care Reform: Behind The Scenes On Capital Hill

The following document is deep background. Very sensitive material. Getting it took a lot of work, several brown bags of unmarked bills and threats of immediate violence to small men in cheap suits. It was all worth it. It is nothing less than the real-time negotiations on health-care reform that are taking place in Washington as we speak…

(Conversation in progress)

Unknown Democrat: well, what if we went ahead and took that off the table too…

Unknown Republican: Yeah…no. That’s not going to do it.

Unknown Democrat: Okay, so speaking hypothetically, what if we took the public option away, took the co-ops away, increased the costs of medicine, increased insurance rates and lowered the capital gains tax again as a freebie? Would that bring some of your people to the table.

Unknown Republican: I doubt it. We hate you. We think you all smell like a vomit filled New York City subway. 

Unknown Democrat (whining): But, but…we promised we could do this…

Unknown Republican: And you can you cowardly dipshit. You don’t need our help. Use your almighty super-majority. You could outlaw religion if you wanted to.

Unknown Democrat: We’re scared. And it’s not that super of a supermajority. Those Blue dog democrats are just Republicans with gay friends. They’re worse than you guys.

Unknown Republican: Here’s a Kleenex. Pull yourself together. 

Unknown Democrat: Obama wants to get this thing through. He now says that it’s not essential that there be a public option. Except when asked on television. So that’s dead. He doesn’t care all that much about co-ops either. He wants to sign something. Anything. It could be a huge pile of blank pages…

Unknown Republican: Yeah, we won’t do that. We aren’t signing a damn thing.

Unknown Democrat: What if we vacated ten of our senate seats and let you rape us every night for a month?

Unknown Republican: Well…hmmm…could we fill those seats with lobbyists from the oil industry?

Unknown Democrat: Sure!

Unknown Republican: Nope.

Unknown Democrat: Well, what do you want?

Unknown Republican: For starters, you can announce that Wall Street banks need another round of bailouts. Then you send that money to us. Nobody will know. It worked before. Then, eliminate taxes in their entirety. Pardon Manuel Noriega. Bomb Russia and North Korea. Sell Vermont to Iran. Make Rush Limbaugh speaker of the house. He can take Kennedy’s seat. And arrest T. Boone Pickens, that miserable traitor, and shove a wind turbine up his ass. Then, maybe, we’ll at least consider negotiating with you elitist bastards. 

Unknown Democrat: Okay. If we do all of that – and I’ve written it all down – then we can see if we can come to some sort of consensus on health-care reform?

Unknown Republican: Who said anything about health-care reform? No. That’s just what it will cost you if you don’t want us to make you look like a party of effete wimpy pencil pushing fairies for the next three years before Chuck Norris becomes President.

Unknown Democrat: Well, that doesn’t sound too bad…no more wedgies?

Unknown Republican: We’ll see. You’ve got a nice mouth…

(transmission abruptly ends…)

How To Repair Media Bias And 5 Things For The Crazies

Media bias exists. No doubt about it. But fixing it will not be that hard. All that has to happen is for people in power to stop being shitheels. Right now there are so many people in positions of power lying and cheating and giving people the fuckaround and accepting bribes and embezzling money and all manner of other depravities and unethical acts, that any decent observer could not help but be affected by it. If we want to return to fact-based objective journalism, then we will have to start hearing facts. And donkeys can see through lead. No think tank, study or commission need be established to reform media. Media is merely a reflection of the deformity it is exposed to. On both sides. So fuck it. Let’s move on:

Here are five things it’s technically legal to do – like, say, walking around with a loaded machine gun at a Presidential event – or accusing a Jewish congressman of being a Nazi -but you probably shouldn’t. In other words, some good ideas for the nabobs of hate and the perveyors of crazy to add to their growing arsenal…

1. It is not illegal to fuck badgers while driving your car. You do it at home. A car is just an extension of that. It’s your personal property and what you do in it is your business. Once you crash though…

2. Public Testicle Painting: this is not specifically illegal in any state. It is, in fact, as some might argue, a form of artistic expression.

3. Discussing the erotic appeal of Mr. T’s mohawk. This is not illegal, though – oddly enough – you never see or hear a thing about it.

4. Humming during church. Worshipping rattlesnakes is legal. And so is humming. 

5. Competitive eating your Thanksgiving dinner. Why not? Be sure you have plenty of water on hand to dunk your food into. 

These are all free and legal and fun things you can do to both horrify and stun. Do so with my blessing.

Neo-Nazis Don’t Get The Obama-Hitler Connection

The Aryan Nation is confused. They’re watching the news and seeing all the townhalls, in which Obama is being compared to Hitler, and they just aren’t seeing it. 

“Hitler and Obama ain’t got nothin’ in common,” says Bubba Portnoy, Chief Executive Officer of the Aryan Nation of Bayou Teche, Louisiana. “Why, they ain’t even the same color! It’s an outrage!” What is even more purplexing and unacceptable was the townhall yesterday, where an outraged voter compared a Jewish congressman to a Nazi. “How in hell can a Jew be a Nazi?” Portnoy asks, as he absentmindedly carves a swastika onto his forearm. “That don’t make no damn sense at all if you ask me.” At 450 pounds, with an IQ that is “off the charts” at “almost 9o,” Bubba Portnoy is the foremost expert in all things neo-nazi. At least he is here, at Angola penitentiary. “If I weren’t locked up, I’d probably have my own show on Fox. I’d be a Nazi pundit. Don’t nobody know as much as me. I’ve even written a book about it.” He hands me his book, which is written on a roll of toilet paper in blood. “It’s my only copy,” he says warily. I ask him if Obama could be a secret nazi. He screams and tries to bite into my deck, but a prison guard calmly tazers him. 

“How dare you!” he finally says. “Obama is the enemy of all things everything! I hate him. Just as I hate…” – here he lists off an impressive number of ethnicities and religions and – for some reason – animal species. “Hating is my job. I don’t know what kind of tw0-bit bigot would dare compare Obama to one of the greatest haters ever. Let me out of here and I’ll set those extremists straight!”

Its tempting.

Favre To Step Down As White House Health Care Communications Czar And Return To The NFL

After weeks of waffling on what exactly is in the health care plan, Brett Favre is resigning his communication duties and returning to the NFL. Or so it seems. “Yes, I am. No…Maybe,” Favre said, looking confused, in response to his own statement on the matter at his press conference that he called and then cancelled and then called and then cancelled and then called and then cancelled. His time with the White House was marred by many flips and flops and reversals of course. Interns and staffers learned early on to stop listening whenever Favre made any decisions about health care reform, knowing he would inevitably turn around and say the exact opposite in a matter of minutes.

“What I like to do is, I like to just float contradictory statements out into the air and just sort of see how they are being received. If people don’t like something I say I can always retract it and blame the media for jumping to conclusions.”

“Will there be a public option in the health care bill,” an irate journalist from the Atlanta Journal asks. He shows no sign of bothering to record the answer. The response is typical Favre: ”Yes? Or no. It’s possible. But we will make that decision. Or we won’t…”

It has gotten so bad that Favre is no longer even believed by his own family, including the dog. His wife explains. “If Brett is asked if he plans on being home for dinner, the answer is almost invariably a five minute long extremely tortured back and forth self monologue spoken aloud. Should I? I will! No…I mean… It gets old. I’m glad he’s returning to the NFL. He was bringing the entire country to its knees. His tenure as a civil servant was a colossal failure. And it might cost Obama his job.”

Rumors that Obama offered him the use of Airforce One if he would just get the fuck out of Washington already can neither be confirmed or denied. But to those that know Favre, it would make all the sense in the world.

You Don’t Negotiate With Terrorists

This healthcare thing is a mess. And worse, it’s looking like Obama is going to cave in to the Republicans. He seems to have this consensus thing. This whole bringing people together thing. But it’s not going to work. You can’t negotiate with a group of people willing to lie and torture and murder for profit and expect them to have empathy for the health of people they can’t even begin to relate to.

No. The only thing Obama is doing by letting the public option fall by the wayside – if it happens – is lose respect in the eyes of the people who have no intention of coming to the table anyway – and piss off all the people that voted for him. In his desire to work with Republicans he’s driving away his own party. Who, it should be noted, have the votes and the power to affect change for the next year and a half without one vote from the GOP. 

The democrats should just say fuck it and do what they want. They are going to be criticized no matter what they do, so they might as well do something. There’s more to this debate than left vs. wrong: the fact of the matter is, as it has been for a long time now, this country is flat out owned by corporations. Someone from Big Pharma probably called Obama and told him he had to drop the public option or be evicted. No change is possible through mere politicians, because the system is such that politicians can’t even become politicians without being on the hook to somebody. Every last one of the 435 fat bastards in congress owe their careers to someone pulling their strings behind the scenes. The money to buy the advertising. The money to send out pamphlets full of lies – it all comes from people who have money to throw around: and we all know the only people in our present economy who have money to throw away are criminals. Thus, if we follow the trail, it looks like this: Big rich criminals fund the careers of greedy fat congressional criminals who pretend to run the country as proxies. They talk about reform and change and bright shining beacons of freedom – then, behind closed doors, they call up their benefactors to make sure they understand exactly how they are supposed to vote on what. 

And, if the phone call doesn’t work, the master corporate criminals resort to Plan B: Public Relations Scullduggery. This is where the corporations wrangle up a bunch of their pawns, dress them up, tell them what to say, and drop them in front of some cameras (the cameras are there because they own the cameras and can put them wherever they want) and tell them to act like a regular angry mob of middle America dumbasses. Which they do. Screaming and drooling and calling attention to themselves and drawing attention away from the thing their controllers want left alone. 

This isn’t Big Brother. This is Brave New World. A world in which we’ve sold ourselves to a group of master white collar criminals voluntarily. Animals don’t act very smart when they’re scared. Humans are animals. And we’ve given away our rights in exchange for chronic corporate buggering.

Republicans Are Not Conservative

The Grand Old Party like to call themselves conservatives. It’s testament to the theory that, if you say something enough times, enough idiots will start to believe it. Every time a Republican finds himself in office, the economy falls to pieces. Nixon. Reagan. Bush. Bush Jr . They expand government, blow up countries, start secret wars, and fuck all manner of things up constantly. 

But they have one hell of a propaganda machine. They’ve managed to convince people that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a bumbling fool hell bent on war. He broke California and out-Nixoned Nixon. He cut taxes and ignored everything in favor of having a sunny disposition. His entire Presidency was about lying to our faces and saying everything was hunky dory. People love to be lied to; especially if it’s good news. 

Right now we’re dealing with the legacy left behind by a worldview in which the people who created the worldview got ridiculously rich and everyone else was out of luck. 

People have really short attention spans. Or they don’t pay attention. Because, in a mere six months, it’s as if this entire mess was created the minute Obama was in office. Both sides bear blame on this crisis. And guess what: so do we. We were the ones who believed the incredible crap that came out of the mouths of congress and politicians. And now we’re blaming the current collection of losers and greedheads for the thirty year long delusion we freely chose to take part in. 

But now the blinders are off. Everything is fucked. And we’re all acting out our anxieties and fears in different ways. Just like we always have. In the 70’s – after Watergate – an entire generation threw up its arms and went inside their shag-carpeted apartments to have orgies and ingest as many downers as possible. In the 80’s, the stupor was over. Everyone woke up out of their hibernation and decided, well, fuck it, join the fray. Cocaine. Money. And mullets. Everyone had fun. Taxes were down. And our President was an actor. 

It was a twelve year long ponzi scheme. The economy fell apart. So a democrat was brought in to fix the mess. And he did fix it, paying down the deficit. Then he got a blowjob and was impeached. 

And so it goes, back and forth, on and off the wagon. With the democrats we get practicality and empathy. With the Republicans we get an all you can eat buffet in which nobody pays the tab. 

The democrats inherited a government three times the size of the one they left to George Bush the Mentally Impaired. Along with a massive deficit and a greatest hits collection of all things immoral and wrong. 

It’s the democrats who are the conservatives. And they aren’t even that conservative. Better yet, there are no conservatives. Well, maybe in Canada. I say Republicans can no longer use this word. It’s obscene when they do. The only word I can think of that suits them is racist or criminal. They’re looking unwieldy and confused these days. It’s time for them to change things up. Maybe try some honesty. Call themselves the Grand Criminal Party. Just own outright sin and make it their own. It’s worth a shot.

New Poll Shows 58% Of Republicans To Be Morons.

In a rare piece of good news for the Republican party, only 58% of Republicans are dumb enough to believe Obama wasn’t born in the United States. It’s a much lower percentage than they could have hoped for. The poll was considered by more than a few top Republicans, who will say, over drinks and off the record, that the entire party has become festooned with the bottom of the intellectual barrel, to be a small glimmer of hope for a party in retreat. They would have been happy to learn that only 80% of the party were knuckle dragging glue sniffers. This was very welcome news and sent several Washington insiders to area brothels for well-deserved celebratory handjobs. 

The poll also showed a decidedly regional bent as well. The dumber the part of America was, the more likely it was to be both Republican and delusional. 93% of Republicans in the Northeast and Northwest believe that Obama was born in Hawaii. In the South, however the number shrank considerably. Even among democrats and independents, only 47% of those polled believed the President to be an American citizen. A surprising number, considering how vast and considerable is the evidence proving them all decisively wrong. 

The North-South division of delusion is further proof that the whole Birther phenomenon has nothing to do with citizenship. The Birther conspiracy is nothing more than an outlet for racism. Show me a Birther who isn’t a fat dumb white person and you can prove me wrong…

I couldn’t be President. Not now. It’s too much hassle, number one. And number two, my birth certificate – from Arkansas – is only a credit card looking thing I keep in my wallet. Lou Dobbs would not be pleased with me. That fat boob would yap about it through both terms of my administration. Unless he took me up on my offer of making him ambassador to the Aleutian Islands. I think he would be perfect for it. I’d even let the government build him a highly overpriced three billion dollar shack to live in using tax payer money. He could make sure that the island chain only got its allotted eight days of sun a year. Then I’d switch things up on him and open up the area for aerial bombing practice. 

If I were a Republican today I would turn my card in. I’d look at all the stuff I’d bought with my money that didn’t trickle anywhere but into toys for myself, and count my blessings. Because the immediate past, the present, and the future is bleak for a group that began transforming itself with Nixon’s southern strategy from fans of small government and civil liberty into an angry pulsing wound of civil rights stomping jesus freak inbred porcine nihilists. A dim highly guilty collection of fat white globe raping hillbillies. They spent eight years in power slaughtering horses, turning the ocean into a sewer, exporting fear worldwide, swindling the treasury, torturing anyone with a tan or a strange name, unleashing a virus of loopholes into any policy they touched, listening to our phone calls, going through our mail, peering into colons, and disappearing anyone they didn’t like. Then, desperate to hold onto power, they cynically tried to get us to vote for an old crank-case and a sexy but illiterate librarian fantasy. 

It didn’t work though. They lost. They don’t like it. And they’re trying to blame their mess on those who are trying to clean it up and make sense of it. While their strategy of publicly embarrassing themselves isn’t working, it is still highly annoying. Like a boxer who dances around the whole time talking trash but never throws a punch. It’s all a big charade. We know the cards they hold yet they continue to bluff anyway. 

The good news is that, while this is distracting and amusing to the media – and confusing to the rest of the civilized world – the majority of people still think the Republicans are a group of sub-normals. So it won’t win them any votes. And that’s one problem they will have to come to terms with, before Nixon’s southern legacy devours the GOP in an orgy of assault weapons, crystal meth and sweet tea.

Abandon All Hope

Hope makes us stupid. Every time we get hopeful we create some new unholy mess. I think it might be better to just assume the absolute worst at all times. That way you can’t be disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Every day something “unexpected” happens on Wall Street. Consumer confidence, which is lousy, somehow manages to be “lower than expected.” A lot of this hope comes from greed, of course. People want to make money. But they can’t make money if they can’t convince other people to spend it. So they toss some hope around. Now is the perfect time to get into the market! Or buy that house! Or turn in your clunker for some cash! Or send in your parents gold heirlooms to be melted down for a check!

Wall Street will take some of their bailout money and pay some assweed economist to say that the economy has finally “turned a corner.” They will say these things because they want you to buy something stupid again so that they can speculate on it and make some money. I say screw that. Forget letting them talk us out of our stupor. I would rather never buy another piece of stupid crap again if it meant some fat ass greedhead in New York has to go out looking for work instead of profiting from mine.

Make no mistake: I love to consume. I have all manner of crap lying around my apartment that I neither need nor use. If it has no redeeming value, I want it. But not if that money is just going to get pilfered from the economy and disappear into the solid gold wine cellar of some investment banker in the Hamptons. I went nuts after the dot-com bubble burst when George Bush told me it was patriotic to go shopping. But that money just up and disappeared into the ether; into the bank accounts of a herd of surprisingly similar looking fat bald guys in suits. My money went into the system so that the banks could loan it to investors in order for them to buy up toxic crap. It it caused cancer or killed people on contact or had no value to anyone at all ever, the banks would scoop it up, divide it into tranches, and sell it to investors as a can’t lose opportunity. 

Like an out of control adolescent who can’t stop gambling online, the entirety of the banking system had to go to dad and ask to be bailed out. And, like any 21st century pushover parent, dad agreed, once he got permission from China, handing them billions of dollars of theoretical money, printed up just for them. And what did they do? What any good junkie, they took the money and squirreled it away to spend on their next fix. They certainly aren’t lending it out. And they certainly aren’t willing or can’t explain where it went. The banking system, in short, the entirety of it, is the bad guy in a Die Hard movie. Maybe that’s why they all shave their heads. It’s all a big swindle, bilking the country of almost a third of its wealth. The other third is giving soldiers and civilians cancer in the form of exploded ordinance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yet despite it all, they’re all still neck deep in denial. They still manage to muster up hope that they can do it again. Don’t let them. Keep your money in your pillow. Or make them sign a non-fucking idiot agreement, in which they agree in writing not to loan your money to a Wall Street algorithm. But whatever you do, don’t give them hope.

Why Is George Bush So Concerned With His Legacy?

It seems odd that George Bush would be worried about his legacy. For one thing, he doesn’t have one. And what he does have isn’t worth protecting. Torture. War. Inaction. Lies. Coverups. Illegal wiretapping. Leaks. Secret prisons. Hurricane response apathy. An outsourced military. Economic Sabotage. None of these are things a person should want to protect or justify. Yet…when George Bush does show up in the press, it’s usually through a third person making some statement or another about the President “working on his legacy.” As if the guy is just like any other ex-President. Why? What for? You don’t see Charles Taylor waxing on and on about his legacy. What is there to protect? 

Maybe he doesn’t know what he never had. Maybe he sees himself in a way that only he can. Because the guy doesn’t seem to have a care in the world. Of course that could be the drugs. A lot of guys, criminals, they end up spending their days hopped up on anti-anxiety medications. Guys like O.J. Simpson, who, while alive, seem to be inhabitants of some far off planet located behind their eyeballs. George Bush could be popping valium like tic tacs. But I doubt it. Sociopaths and fanatics have some missing things in their brains that allow them to not suffer a shred of remorse. The “civilized” world is sliding ever downward into the red by the day; the world that Bush administration policies worked so hard to break. What little legacy the man has is all bad. The best thing that could be said of him is he could ride a mean mountain bike. 

What could be, and this is certainly possible, is he just wanted to get all of the bad ideas our nation could hope to come up with, and get them out of the way in an eight year span. “Here’s a terrible idea. Let’s implement it at once so that future generations will know just what a truly horrible idea it is.” Maybe the guy was just doing us all a favor.

And now I am going to flip upside down and argue against myself…

George Bush wasn’t that bad a guy. He’s just a simple good old boy with a heart of ash. Dumb as a post, sure; but not evil. He just trusted the smart people around him and “decided” on their ideas. And it’s not like Iraq is the first country we’ve illegally occupied. There’s quite a long list (in no particular order and not counting repeats). Haiti. Cuba. Chile. Argentina. Nicaragua. Honduras. Dominican Republic. China. El Salvador. Korea. Laos. Libya. The Philippines. Somalia. Vietnam. Cambodia. Colombia. Liberia. Pakistan. Lebanon. Yugoslavia. Bosnia. Mexico. Panama. Granada. Some others. And, well, this country too. We’ve tortured and lied and murdered massively before. Just not at such a technologically savvy time. Had James K. Polk been President now, his legacy would be a pile of rubble too. No. George Bush isn’t all that bad. He’s way up there, of course; but he’s not the boogie man we like to think he is.

Yeah. No. Can’t do it. The guy’s a hateful dim-witted human pile of excrement. He should be dropped into a hole somewhere along with his shameful legacy.

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Secret President Scorned

Dick Cheney is not happy with George Bush for not pardoning Scooter. He commuted his sentence, but didn’t give him a full pardon. And now, here we are, two years later, and Cheney, who ran the show until he no longer did, can no longer hold his tongue. 

At least that’s how it seems. But with Dick Cheney, anytime something looks straightforward, it probably isn’t. Every time Cheney defends some repugnant policy or decision, Bush looks better. Silently holed up in Dallas, trying to raise money to put together a “library,” he’s letting Cheney put his foot in his mouth every week. Cheney is acting like he is the ex-President defending his legacy. Or the loyal vice-President standing up and taking the hits so W. can avoid them. Either way the guy just needs to shut up and go away. Unless his conscience won’t let him. Unless he has a lot to hide. Unless he knows what can be dug up and wants to do all he can to make sure it stays buried. Which makes you wonder what W. really did know. Because he is acting like an ex-President without a worry in the world. Or is he? The guy is so incredibly dim it’s all a big guess as to how in charge and how much of a “decider” he ever really was. He was surrounded by guys fully entrenched in intrigue and how power works in Washington, having been tutored under Nixon and Reagan; under Watergate and Iran-Contra. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rove. And Poppy Bush. Just how much of a puppet was Bush? And how long will it take us to forget what a ridiculous travesty his Presidency was? It will happen, of course. Like Reagan, the Republicans will find a way to canonize all of his subnormal fumblings and turn him into some kind of reactionary genius. And maybe Cheney’s public fight with Bush is just the first step in the process. Only time will tell. If, in 8 years, we’ve got a guy named Jeb walking around Washington we will know they succeeded.

Some Secrets Should Stay Secrets

I’m all for transparency. But lately there has been a lot of leftovers from the previous administration that the Obama administration has decided should just as well stay buried. And a lot of people are crying foul. Which is silly. There’s no reason to ever yell such a thing unless you are an umpire and are working a game. Yet some people – grown men and women – will actually yell such a thing.

Anyway, let’s just take a moment to think about what we do know about the assbags who set fire to this country: They tortured people in secret jails around the world. They killed people. They lied to congress, the American people, and the entire world. They sold the country to China. Dick Cheney went so far as to shoot some guy in the face. They listened to our conversations. They rounded up people and stuck them in jails without cause. 

These are facts. So if this administration saw things that they would just as soon people not know about, I’m willing to agree with them. Because, let’s face, it’s got to be grim awful terrible stuff… Idi Amin isn’t dead and is living in the basement of the White House setting suspicious people on fire. Osama Bin Laden is on the CIA payroll. Dick Cheney collects fingers and eats them at dinner. Whatever it is, it’s something that would set us back even further in our goal of proving to the world that we aren’t a nations of dim gizmo toting psychopaths. Lurking beneath the slime of the previous administration is something uglier still. And I personally have no desire to know what it is.

I DIDN’T MEAN WHAT I MEANT…

Politicians have become such vulgar hacks these days that they routinely say horrible things, knowing that it’s expected of them and they can just apologize. Politicians are talking back things that they truly believe and meant to say whenever the heat is on them. “Yesterday when I said that Obama wasn’t born in this country, what I meant to say was that I don’t agree with his policies.” “The other day I used the N word. It was an accident and was never designed to be taken in a derogatory way…” Politicians let their insides out every day, usually in front of a camera or a hot microphone, and then compound the problem by telling an obvious lie. Michelle Bachman does it almost hourly. She’s so absurd and outrageous that she’s mostly treated like a congressional mascot. Someone to listen to and watch for the show. Minnesota has the right idea when it comes to politics. You know the people are crooks and liars, so they might as well be entertaining. A wrester. A comedian. A right wing lunatic. Whatever. Makes no difference so long as its fun. The rest of the country could learn from them. Then we could end the whole charade that these people are actual civil servants trying to do the right thing. It’s a PR spin that no longer works. They’re bought and paid for. They’re like athletes. Besuited entertainers with bad hair and belt buckles that point to the floor. 435 people paid to keep the foundation of our country from obvious collapse – pointing fingers at shadows; shaking their fists in mock outrage; working hard not to mess up their hair or make-up.

Ramble ramble reeble flue.

Palin Could Go Full Charles Bronson On Us All

This is an unstable politician on the best of days. Even though she has decided to quit her job in the midst of a horribly depressing recession – not a good move say most accountants – the ethics complaints keep piling up, one after another, like unpaid bills on a kitchen counter. Nineteen so far. She has a couple of ways she can deal with this. Well, three actually. One, she can write a book and get paid a ton of money for it which she can use to pay off her legal fees from all of the violations she committed while in office. This is a long-shot. The book will be overlong by three or four thousand pages, devoid of all syntax, and make no sense to anyone anywhere at all. She’s no Jenna Jameson. Two, she can go into a back room somewhere and do some talking with some people – see Senator Stevens – and just wait for the whole thing to blow over. This probably won’t happen, because she has no political capital in Alaska, despite what Joe Francis may think. Then there’s three. And this is the one I’m in favor of, as it would be quite a show. She can go full Charles Bronson on us. She can take to the woods, all decked out in beaver pelts and wolf hides, loaded to the gills with assault rifles, and pick off anonymous cowardly bloggers, would-be son in laws, democrats, lawyers, talk show hosts, members of the liberal media elite, and anyone who lives in the lower 48 – one at a time – for years. I believe her fully capable of this. I think she is an Alaskan at heart and has had her fill of the United States of America, which she thinks of as a different country. I have no doubt she belonged to a secessionist group before McCain picked her name out of a hat during his weekly Xanax poker night. When she vowed, in her resignation wordstorm on July 3rd, that she would “continue to battle from outside the government” I think she meant it. Literally. She’s coming after each and every one of us. Taking us out frontier style. Locked doors and unloaded handguns locked away in safes won’t do any good. It takes a frontier mentality to deal with a frontier mentality. We’re going to need a ton of bear traps and helicopter snipers. And we might as well recruit wolves; they don’t like her at all.

Palin’s latest insult – her 19th ethics complaint, could be what finally pushes her over the edge. The latest complaint, in a piece of delicious irony, is that the fund she created to pay off the legal fees she was accruing to fight off the 18 other ethics complaints, is, in itself, a breach of ethics. This woman can’t get up in the morning these days without stomping all over one ethical boundary or another. 

It’s a good idea, if you are going to be a constant ethics abuser, not to run for the second biggest office in the land as a complete unknown, and to do it appallingly. You’re guaranteed to get some unwanted attention in the process.

Cheney Knows: Lots Of People Don’t Like Dick

So does Obama. Normally, Vice Presidents disappear the minute they leave office. Unless they make a documentary or something. Unlike Presidents, they don’t get Secret Service details following them around the rest of their days. They get six months and that’s it… 

Not this time. Because Dick Cheney knows more about what he’s responsible than anyone else. He looks in the mirror and it’s probably not hard for him to picture just how much satisfaction it would bring to someone to wring his neck or force fire ants down his throat. So he asked Obama for an extension on his security. And Obama, being the nice guy, and knowing himself how much fun it would be to clobber the old geezer, granted the request. It’s an irony that the rules of secret service are changing. It used to be a fact that ex Presidents got security for the rest of their lives. Unless something changes, George Bush won’t get that perk. Which is too bad, because he’s way up there on the list of the world’s most hated. My guess is Obama will have to grant an extension to him as well. The last thing you want is to have open season on previous heads of state. Even dickheads of state. Even face shooting assbags need protection these days. More than most. Because there are a lot of out of work vigilantes out there who’d like nothing more than to take hammer and tongs to King George the Terrible and the Dark Lord of the Undisclosed Location. And who could fault the person who did? And that’s the problem. Better to keep these two safe from having to deal with the possibility of punishing someone for meting out a just punishment on a couple of clueless sadists. Like keeping Madoff in his own padded room. It’s a mess better avoided…

Congress gets more and more like the WWF every day. Screaming epithets into microphones. Hurling abuse. Spit flying. It’s only a matter of time before things turn South Korean and the fists fly… Or maybe not. In fact, my guess is, once the cameras are off, and there are no constituents within earshot, both sides of the aisle start square dancing and snorting crack. It’s in both parties best interest, at least in the minds of the people in Washington, to joust back and forth in a tightly orchestrated dance of ineptitude. To do anything at all is to garner too much attention, resulting in a backlash from the other side. Better to lay low in an out of the way beach resort with lobbyists until things calm down a bit.

Health-Care Made Easy And Other Gibberish.

Health-care is expensive. That’s something you see in the news. And I believe it to be true. Not much that you read is true. Most of it is trumped up editorial brainswill. But I know that if it costs four hundred dollars to go to the doctor, fill out some forms and shake some dude’s hand, with no actual doctoring going on, then something is wrong. Baby boomers – a notoriously unhealthy swath of decadent bastards who never met a bad idea they couldn’t adopt and make their own are getting older. Despite the facelifts and bypass surgeries and liposuction, they are aging nevertheless. And they are notoriously unhealthy people, in both heart and soul. A lot of them are in congress now complaining about the cost of healthcare. They scream on cable news shows, their faces beet red from an ill-advised combination of gin, high-blood pressure and viagra, about the terrifying expense that health-care reform will cost the “tax payer.” And, by “tax payer”, they mean the out of shape fat cat who pays for them to go skiing every Christmas, not the recently furloughed factory worker who has spent his whole life breathing in cancerous air to build shitty American cars.

One way to cut down on the cost of health-care is simple. Get healthy. In Mississippi, as it is widely known, the average weight has ballooned up so six hundred pounds. Ticking time bombs of racist lard waiting to explode. Deep fried lethargy. And now these people – who to be fair can be found throughout the country drinking PBR’s for breakfast – can no longer stand up without a live-in nurse to forklift them up. I say they’re screwed. There should be an Asshole Clause that excludes deliberate hedonists from weighing down the system. If you don’t have a condition and you can’t see your feet, tax payers – even super rich ones – shouldn’t have to foot the tab for your life of gluttony. That should cut out a few hundred billion a year right there. 

Republicans, or the G.O.P. – that shrinking party of bigots and criminals – a party that has strayed so far from their roots they might as well be on diprivan – are shrieking about how much money the democrats are spending. But they’re faking it. It’s all a show for the cameras. Because they surely know it happened on their watch. And they also know the money we’re spending is all theoretical. We’ve been broke for years. We’re all Chinese. Bush sold us out years ago, but nevermind. States are out of money. Cities are falling apart. And entire generations only know how to send text messages and pirate things off the Internet. So it’s all a big joke really. When economists say we’re almost out of this recession don’t believe them. How can we be? We don’t do anything. Sure we twitter cool articles to each other. We can take a picture of a cat and make it look like he’s breakdancing. But what will that get us? It’ll turn us into South Canada is what. A country that people think about as a case study in self-destruction.

Our Tortured Media

It should come as no shock that, once again, the media is making a mountain out of a mountain now that they are allowed to. In other words, six years after the entire world knew America was in the torture business, it is now front page news. Usually the articles are editorials talking about how “it should be investigated!” (it already has – by lawyers worldwide and for years) and quotes about how “we don’t do that!” and just all around shock and outrage. Even though we’ve known about it for years. The media just didn’t want to get in the doghouse with the Bush administration. So they skirted the edges of the topic and dropped ominous hints on the periphery, but – with few exceptions – left the subject alone.

Alas, it’s a new day. And a new administration. The rules have changed and editors are taking advantage of the fact. Along with the steroid scandal we all knew about and the shitty cars we’ve knowingly driven for years, torture has been known, then ignored. The next outrage will no doubt also be something well known and obvious: prime time television sucks! Sarah Palin is a moron! Our kids are stupid! 

The media- and by media I am referring to broadcast and newspapers – the traditional stomping grounds of what was once “journalism.” I’m not talking about tweeting or sidewalk chalk writing or any other confounding fad of useless time consumption. These grey headed dinosaurs are losing their shirts, which is to say billions of dollars, and they are doing anything and everything to right their ships. But the problem is, they all grabbed money from companies that never had any and are no longer able to give them any. Advertising has disappeared because the products that were advertising in newspapers either don’t exist anymore, suck, or offer something nobody is buying. (Like penis enlargement powder. It was a gamble when the stock market was soaring. In a recession it’s not something the desperate feel they can currently afford.) And the corporations that bought up all the newspapers as investments no longer feel like funding them now that they’re deeply in the red. Even though it was there short-term profit mindset that drove them into the red in the first place. Like any bad company that deserves to fail, these corporations forced the hand of newspapers, giving them budgets that forced papers to let go the people who make sure things are spelled right, aren’t pure fabrications, and have some bearing on some fact at some point somewhere. Instead they used spellcheck and hired interns and porn bloggers. 

Desperation fuels insanity. Like huge forty foot font headlines screaming that the Bush administration was a pit of criminal dickwads. No! It can’t be! If newspapers and television news want to remain relevant, or aspire to actually become relevant once again, they would do well to hire investigative reporters, pay them in actual money, and have them run around looking for actual news. Actual news is not a nut job with eight tiny little babies. That’s a sociological effect of a culture that worships pure inanity. Actual news is digging up proof Dick Cheney had a torture chamber under the vice presidential lair. Not that we’ve water-boarded countless innocent people in various secret prisons around the world and that many of them had no relevant information and quite a few languished and died once this knowledge was finally realized. It’s horrible. It’s wrong. And highly ineffective. But, sadly, it’s nothing we didn’t already know. It’s time for the media to tell us something we don’t.

What I Think About Everything! by Dick Cheney

Hey folks! As you might have noticed, I have all sorts of opinions these days. You may be wondering if I am off my medications. The truth is I’ve always had plenty of opinions on just about everything…only I’ve always had someone who was paid by the government to care what I had to say. No matter what I said, they would invariably say “That’s a great idea, Dick!” Or something like that. Nowadays, dang it, I don’t have such people hovering about. So I do the next best thing. I call up some editor and give them an earful. But even that is beginning to change. So that’s why I decided to write a book. Not a memoir, but a book of my opinions. Opinions about anything and everything. Here is a random sampling:

Pet frogs that ignore you should be stomped to death.

If you live in a cold climate, just wait!

Wild Mustangs aren’t so wild once they’re turned into soap.

Fuck Mexico.

Fuck France.

If you criticize me, do me a favor and raise your hand so I know whose car to blow up.

Fuck Obama.

You should be allowed to charge as much as you want on a credit card.

The Daily Show should come on less than daily.

Fox News blows. Especially if you’re in the GOP and play hard to get.

War. It’s good for lots of things!

I’ve got more opinions than just these. This is just a small sample. These opinions take up pages and pages and pages and pages. And they’re such good opinions that they are what I like to believe are facts. You need to buy my book. Because I have lots and lots to say and I need an outlet!

AIG Execs Save Economy By Returning Bonuses

There is something so simplistic by all the attention being paid these unwarranted bonuses. Do they deserve the money? No. They’re really greedy and stupid people. They probably can’t tie their own shoes. Nevertheless, the 165 million dollars their bonuses added up to, minus the thirty million returned due to death threats, are but a pittance compared to the trillion dollars in bailout funds floating around. 

Yet these bonuses are taking up days and days and days in congress, as one congressman after another gets on the microphone and yells at some guy who has only been on the job four months. You have to ask yourself why. And the answer that your brain comes up with is alarming. They’re doing it because they don’t know what else to do. They don’t want to go on record trying to help. They don’t want to attack each other. So they latch onto this lint hair of a problem and don’t let go. 

Meanwhile the economy is tanking. Banks are holding onto their money tighter than Ty Cobb. Nobody’s lending. Nobody’s spending. And people are getting laid off by the hundreds of thousands. Right now, both sides of congress are doing all they can to wage a populist battle against greedheads and making it all but impossible that any actions Obama might make trying to get us out of this mess are either made impossible or turned into an epic slog. 

And when it all goes further south, they will all turn and look at Obama as if the whole thing was his fault. He’s a socialist with a wife who refuses to wear shirts with sleeves! He’s more interested in March Madness than doing anything about the economy! He’s too cool for Washington’s sewer level fighting style!

The media and congress all have us looking at the little bitty things while the big things go undone…

Taking AIG’S Lead, Bernie Madoff Changes Name

Bernie Madoff, in an effort to avoid prison, is taking AIG’s lead, and is starting proceedings to change his name. “It’s this Bernie Madoff guy that’s in all the trouble. Me? I’m Frank Ludoff…” In jail for money laundering and massive fraud, the chances of his ruse working or slim. But then so are the chances of running a 65 billion dollar ponzi scheme for thirteen years…developing…

AIG Playing With Fire

There are greedheads. And there are buffoons. And there are criminal sociopaths. But what AIG has done, considering their history and all they have done before and all that has happened since last September, defies any logical explanation. First they come begging for help after helping unleash a cancer on the global economy. So we gave them billions of taxpayer dollars. Which they used to go on a junket and got facials. They were hauled in front of congress and publicly lambasted for it. Then the CEO of Merrill Lynch comes under fire for using taxpayer money to give out bonuses. Much was written about how colossally dumb it was for him to do it. You would think AIG would have seen the writing on the wall and chose a wiser course for themselves. But no. They take 165 million dollars of tax payer money and give it out as a reward to its executives for being absolutely lousy at their jobs. Sort of like finding out you are paying money to the inventor of the Ebola virus…

It says something about how corrupted our culture is at the very top that they simply have absolutely no way of acting like normal rational human beings. They have done things – with our money – their way for so long that they can’t bring themselves to show a lick of remorse or act the slightest bit humbled by the destruction that their greed unleashed. Like someone breaking a vase and then getting mad when you ask them to clean it up.

What I don’t understand is this: we have infused countless billions in capital in AIG to keep them from falling apart. You would think that they would want to do everything they could – passing out checks at golf tournaments don’t count – to repair their reputation and work their way back towards solvency. Instead, they are doing all they can and more to assure themselves that nobody will ever trust them or want to do business with them or ever give one penny to them again. (You know you’re doing bad when a republican senator suggests you commit suicide)

AIG claims that the bonuses – which are being given to the very ass clowns in the very division that is at the very epicenter of Wall Street’s demise – are “necessary” in order to “retain talent.” This makes no sense to me. These are clearly people who lack talent, unless one considers bankrupting your company talent. 170 billion dollars has been given to this company. The most ever. And, to repay the favor, they have decided to send bags of excrement to their benefactors. Thanks for the help, now sit down and watch helplessly as I burn your house down.

Technically I own 80% of this company. So do you. But I don’t feel like I’ve made such a good investment. In fact, I want my money back.

Stimulating Nothing

If you listen to Republicans, all this spending Obama is proposing is outrageous. He is a socialist and the harbinger of the end of free enterprise. The democrats promote their package as a massive, but necessary, boost to the economy. Neither is correct. The truth is, our situation is such a mess that tripling the amount of the stimulus would barely fix what we’ve done to ourselves and the rest of the world. It’s ugly. It’s an economic virus that we’ve unleashed throughout the world. Other countries have already stepped to the plate and stimulated their economy. We will dither and grandstand and flail about in order to pour a cup of water in the ocean. 

We know this. Our leaders think we don’t. And I think that’s why there’s not a lot of confidence in the market right now. Washington -on both sides-isn’t showing any signs of knowing what to do. Our system of checks and balances – combined with 24/7 news coverage-make us not the most nimble of countries in times of crisis. Six months after this thing- and by thing, I mean the bedrock from whence the entire global economy relies-started to go, we’re still waiting for the starter gun to go off. Politicians go on television and make speeches for one viewpoint or another, accomplishing nothing and getting us nowhere. 

This stimulus bill will make it through congress over the protesting bodies of lots of brainwashed Republicans. But it’s not enough. It won’t do enough. And that’s the pathetic sad truth nobody wants to acknowledge.

So what if we spend a little money?

I don’t care how big this stimulus thing ends up being. For one thing, it appears to be more than merely a handout. When George Bush inherited a surplus – before 9/11 – he did what all Republicans do. He immediately squandered it. He gave everyone 300 bucks. Then, in September of this year, long after he had spent more deficit money than any President since such things have been recorded – he gave 700 billion dollars to three bald guys in New York, who then promptly disappeared. 

Our economy is a mess. Bush went on television and assured the nation that the best thing we could do, given the situation, is shit our pants. Talk about not being able to inspire. The man was a walking panic button. So people locked themselves in their homes and curled up into fetal balls and rocked back and forth…

Enter Obama. He’s been in office a month. He’s inherited the biggest pile of decaying stink in over 70 years. So he decided that he needed to stimulate the economy. But, rather than simply give money away to pigfuckers on Wall Street, he decided to create a pro-active stimulus package. Sure he’s spending money. Lots of it. Oodles of it. Millions and millions of zeros are involved. But it’s actually going towards something. And it is for this that the Republicans are pissed. In their world, a stimulus package means that they pay less taxes and have more money to spend on whores and colonoscopies. Obama wants the money to go into things that create things and add jobs and make things easier and more efficient. This is unacceptable to the right. It goes against the formula that they have relied on for decades. Cut people’s taxes and who gives a shit if you know what your doing. That’s their game plan and they’ve been working off of it forever. Well, guess what? That has come to a screeching halt. Those days are over. We all have our eyes open now. And we can see what’s going on. And it’s pissing them off. They need to either come up with an alternative solution (talk radio shows are not solutions; just noise.) or shut up and go home and count all the money they’ve stolen over the years.

Baby Boomers Faced With Prospect Of Having To Finally Grow Up

Much like the cartoon character that can float in space so long as he doesn’t look down, the generation that came after The Greatest Generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, along with the rest of us, have just looked down. And now gravity is exerting its laws on all of us. The days of doing and getting and behaving however we want are over. Luxuries like fat injected into lips and removed from hips are over. It’s time to spend money on things that have some sort of value aside from self-esteem. Gizmos and doodads and ski chalets are nice – so long as you can afford them. And this generation has long known that it has been driving the country into debt. Yet they chose to ignore it and drive the car further into the mud. Generation X and Y and Millenials and Echo Boomers and whatever other term we apply to a grouping of people of similar ages in the future, will have to look at the many many many zeros on the national debt that it has been saddled with. 

This is nothing new. This is nothing to pretend to be shocked by. It just is. Unfortunately for baby boomers, the reckoning is coming a dozen years earlier than expected. The American Dream, as it has been called, has always had the word Dream in it. Dreams are things that happen to you until you wake up and see where you really are. And right now we are in a huge mess!

So how did it come to this? Everyone has a theory. And their theory usually involves pointing the finger somewhere else. But I think it comes from the current American Soul. It comes from that desire instilled in us all to matter. To succeed. To drive the nice car. To wear the nice watch. To have the deluxe apartment in the sky. To move on up. To keep up. No matter what. Even if it means lying and making money from it. Our very nature has been corrupted. Wall Street bankers knowingly misled investors so they could reline their pool in the back of their castles in Germany. Mortgage lenders knowingly lent to people unprepared to pay back their loans. And average Americans raised to finally get the house of their dreams signed on the dotted line. 

Unfortunately, people around the world are paying for our consumptive culture. Our very foundation is built on consumption. Shopping is in our DNA. The big TV. The boat. The beach house. We consume 25% of the world’s resources. We use the most gas. We make the most waste. We buy the most crap. And we get the most boob jobs. 

So how do we fix it?

Well, for one thing, we’re going to have to raise taxes. The uber rich may not like it. But they’re the ones who profited off this world-wide mess, fuck ‘em. We have trillions of dollars in debt. And we will soon have trillions and trillions more with Medicaid and Social Security. Someone will have to pay for it. And it might as well be the fucking bozos who are behind every travesty of the last fifty years. Those rascally baby boomers who sold their free spirited 60’s soul and joined the squares with a vengeance. The ones who invented and made Viagra the biggest sponsor of Major League Baseball and Nascar. The ones who spent the seventies lying on their shag carpets downing barbituates and having orgies. The ones who invented cocaine fueled modern-day greed in the 80’s. The ones who made Walker, Texas Ranger a hit television show in the 90’s, and the ones who created and profited off reality television in the ’00’s. 

It’s time for them to be humbled a bit. The rest of us have long known we’d eventually have to tighten our belts and get to work. That time has come. Now we just have to figure out how the fuck to do it.

This is no way to bailout anything

I like Obama. I think he’s very smart. But, because of the way politics works, he is surrounded by a bunch of extremely smart ass eating greedheads. They have been lining their pockets for years on end from the very people who have chased so much risk to line their pockets with cash bonuses for basically buying up crap and selling it as gold while knowing it was crap. Wall Street culture is as corrupt as a culture can be. They are a breed incapable of behaving in a manner the rest of the planet can understand. They go to the dentist in a rented jet. They get their haircuts in Florence, Italy. They don’t know how to get us out of this mess because their brains are no longer capable of behaving rationally. They want all the money they had back. All the imaginary money that only existed on paper. They want their shallow fuckball lives back. And if that means they use our hard-earned money to do it, so be it. If they have to break the very back of the country to keep their Hamptons house, they will do it. It’s in their nature. They can’t help it.

The problem is worldwide and huge. Congress is grandstanding over a massive stimulus package that is roughly nine hundred trillion dollars less than the amount of toxic waste banks have been using our money to buy up with such gusto. No amount of money – even nonexistent money! – can fix this mess. Banks aren’t lending because they don’t have any money. People aren’t paying their mortgages, because they no longer have jobs and couldn’t afford the houses they were talked into buying. 

This is a reckoning. Over-bloated home prices are going down rapidly. Who knows? One day they might make it all the way down to what they are actually worth. Washington and Wall Street and banks and corporations are now frantically shaking down the entire population looking for loose change. 

Building a bridge here and there won’t make up for the oceans of people who are wandering the streets in confusion, unable to pay their rent, keep their insurance, pay for their kids to go to school, and wondering where all those decades of hard earned savings went. It’s better than a kick in the head, but it won’t come close to fixing the damage that a long entrenched culture of excess and greed has wrought on each and every one of us. Not by a country mile.

This whole bailout thing is just theatre.

I Don’t Care What Some Greedhead Makes

The media wants to create a class war. You can’t turn on the television or read the newspaper without some new fat cat’s face on the front page for one thing or another: CEO gets seaweed facial! Executive takes family skiing! It’s all designed to piss people off. Like all the people that have lost their jobs.

Let me just say that I don’t give a crap what some New York pasty faced fat ass gets paid. I just don’t want him or her to be a moron. That’s all. You can pilot a three hundred foot yacht around the man-made lake in your backyard for all I care. Just don’t be lousy at your job. It’s not too much to ask. Or it shouldn’t be. But it is. These people at the top – they aren’t all that smart. That’s the big secret that’s recently been unveiled. It was probably there to see all along. We just didn’t want to look. (Sort of like professional baseball. Everyone knew the players were juiced. Everyone. Every ass last one of us. But now that there is more and more proof to the fact, we’re all up in arms. Fuck us. We’re hypocrites. We can put up with all sorts of ass-baggery until it’s rubbed in our face. Then we turn around and attack…) 

The media isn’t remotely innocent in any of this. Of the 800,000,000,000,000,000 jobs lost every hour, a good quarter of them can be directly blamed on the media’s habit of blowing everything to such a high pitched sensational whine that rational people have no choice but to run around screaming, kicking their pets, and stocking up on weapons. We are collectively talking ourselves into a massive depression. We are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom. Companies lay off people so they can have a “better than expected quarterly return” so that there stock will rise. Then all those laid off people go home and lay on their floor and cry for months. Or they do something else. What they don’t do is run out and by a 61″ plasma television. So sales plummet. And the people in the suits in New York release more human ballast to stay afloat. They “restructure” and “reorganize” and “seal their fate if they don’t get tax payer relief.” The reason for all this, of course, is The Shareholders. Who are the shareholders, you ask? They are a group of extremely sweaty fat people with bad hair and zipper scars on their chests, who sit around a big table in a conference room in Manhattan and demand the same profits they get when the economy is singing. So what if sales are down – I want my money! The leader of this group – and this is just a guess on my part – is Tommy Chong. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only plausible conclusion based on the choices that have been made by major corporations throughout the country these last three or four months. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it.

Don’t blame some greedhead for being rich. Don’t blame that guy who makes polo shirts for selling them for four hundred times more than they are worth. That’s the American Way. Blame the rat eating lunatic who ignores his company’s health because he’s chasing silicone down Hollywood Boulevard instead of paying attention. And the desperate editors who refuse to publish anything that won’t start a riot of fear.

Change You Can Hide From The IRS

This is a hell of a way to start. After campaigning as the Elliott Ness of Presidents – vowing to clean up Washington and change the way they’ve been going about doing business for decades – Obama can’t seem to find people who can pay what they owe. It’s embarrassing. Much has been written and spoken about the level of scrutiny Obama’s job application went into. It was “unparalleled!” It was “invasive!” It was “overly thorough!” It was, apparently, “not used!” Obama, unlike his predecessor, George the Terrible, is at ease with apologizing. He likes to say, “I screwed up.” This is nice. This is a welcome change. But it will only take him so far. We are trying to get away from leaders who screw up all the time, even if they openly admit it. Obama has opened up his flank to attacks from a vicious criminal enterprise filled with venomous overfed rats. The degree of moral superiority Obama exudes, combined with the hero worship he has been receiving from a mass of people terrified that the country is falling to pieces, means Obama doesn’t have a long leash. He has a narrow ledge on which to walk. He’s orated himself into a corner.

And if he’s not careful, he’ll find himself trapped there.

Hypocrisy. Live On C-SPAN

Washington is demanding a plan from the auto industry before they give them any money. I think that’s a good idea. Such a good idea that I think Washington should also create a plan for the economy. They agree to 700 billion dollars for Wall Street – to fix something that they clearly caused with their out of control greed – with no oversight, and a make things up as they go mentality. Yet they refuse to give 25 billion – which, like being in Las Vegas, is a number lacking any real significance when the numbers get this large – to the auto industry. I’m no fan of mismanagement. And I also don’t like greedy dumb people. But it seems hypocritical to demand something of one industry but not another. Especially when it’s something they themselves are incapable of. I’m beginning to feel insulted at how Washington spouts from a place of self righteousness, when we all know that they are clearly only feigning their outrage. They themselves helped create this spot the auto industry is in. The auto industry has been making crap cars for decades now. Just like the airline industry has had shitty service for decades now. Just like our internet service is worse than some third world countries. Just like our cell phone service drags behind the Sudan and Burkina Faso. Just like our best actors come from Australia and Europe. We pretty much suck at everything these days. Except sports marketing. Only now, thinks to technology, our enemies, hiding away in caves along the border of Pakistan, can see it for themselves on Youtube. We are the fat bully on the playground who push other kids around right up until the other kids push back. Rather than trying to humiliate the very people they play golf with when the cameras are off, they should work to help them restructure themselves. This is where Henry Ford invented the assembly line. We can’t afford to be unable to field automobiles in our own country. We need to take a cold shower and get to work. Forget the executive pay issue. Give them money with some very public strings attached. Make them accountable to create products worth purchasing. This isn’t rocket science…

Crisis Created From Lack Of Oversight Leads To Bailout That Lacks Oversight

Today it was acknowledged that the people that got us into this financial hellbroth can’t get us out. They seem to spurn oversight; even when they are the ones doing the overseeing. The exact quote was inspiring: “The Bailout is a mess.” Never-mind that they forgot they were supposed to call it a “financial rescue package.” Apparently, the government is “divided” about how to proceed as well. Of course the government is divided! That’s the way the government was designed! To disagree on anything and everything. The Republicans want to bailout the financial industry by raising taxes on people making less than thirty thousand dollars a year and demanding that detroit make cars that average “no more than three miles a gallon.” The Democrats want the bailout money to pay for homeless people to move into trendy but empty condo-hotels in Miami. AIG is asking for a third bailout after a seventeen day “viagra and red bull fuck party” ran over-budget. The line of people asking for non-existent money from the government is long and varied: the auto industry, city and state governments, retired game show hosts, Dabney Colemen, Broadway shows, meteorologists, pundits, bankers, action stars, Jose Canseco, newspapers, insult comics, trained parrots, and that pregnant guy who is pregnant again… They all want government green. But it looks like China might be getting tired of funding our unparalleled ineptitude. 

It’s gotten so bad that George Bush went on television today to defend capitalism. He has clearly been watching too much Fox News. Or listening to fringe boob congressmen from Georgia. Capitalism doesn’t need to be defended. It’s the people who are practicing it in our financial institutions that need defending. They’re the ones that took our money. The money we earned creating their blackberry’s and ipods and bluetooth ear pieces and expensive suits; money earned writing the newspapers they try to make sense of; money earned building the cars they crash; money earned renting them the apartments they use for trysts with their tranny mistresses. The money we worked tirelessly to earn which they have worked so tirelessly to lose. And now they want more of our money to fix the banks they broke. So it’s not really surprising they can’t seem to figure out how to fix their own mess. Let’s see George Bush defend those dumb bastards.

It’s not all bad though. Clothes were over-ordered and are now under-sold. They’re now deeply discounted. Gas has gone down because demand has gone down because gas was too high and everybody stopped driving. Housing is cheap if you can afford it. American cars are cheap if you are can both get a loan and are dumb enough to want one. (anyone who wants an American car right now should be automatically disqualified from getting a loan.)

Detroit should not be bailed out. The bailout should go to the employees who will lose their jobs when the entire American auto industry goes belly up. And the car-related businesses that employ millions. But not the mismanagement at the top. The ones who had a choice between impractical gas guzzling toaster looking cars over low-emission high mileage ones and chose the former. They have seen the writing on the wall; and they have been ignoring it for over 36 years. They have now run smack dab into reality and they now want help from the very government they have paid so much to lobby for policies that helped them avoid it. Detroit has long been a corrupt city full of hard working mechanics and engineers run by fat useless greedy ass bags whose time should have come long ago. I say don’t let the malfunctioning car doors you create hit you in your big fat asses on the way out of the town and industry you have managed to kill. You deserve not our money, but our scorn.

No More Dicks In The White House

Sometimes I buy things just to punish myself. And this is what I did when I bought a new book about Dick Cheney called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman. Because naming the book Dickhead would have been too controversial. I’m only on page 73, but I can already claim unequivocally that it’s always bad when people named Dick are in the White House. He has held the strings of power, along with his cronies Rumsfeld and David Addington, during what many – like me! – consider to be the worst President in our history. As I write this Republicans are dropping in the polls all across the nation. This bailout and nationalization of banks combined with skyrocketing unemployment, Republicans are battling for their political lives. At this rate, Republicans will lose a ton of seats in three weeks. (One day George Bush’s gut will go on display in the Smithsonian and an aging population will line up just to look at it in awe; for surely there has never been a more destructive gut in history.)

The man who rose through the ranks as the black sheep son of a somewhat timid one term President named George Herbert Walker Bush has managed take the helm and steer the country into one rocky cliff after another. Torture. Debt. Socialism. Hyperpartisanship. War. Lies. Secrecy. Plunder. He’s done it all: a one-man greatest hits of failure. The man who worked tirelessly to assure that he could do so was Dick Cheney. After helping to steal the election, nominating himself for vice-president, chairing the Presidential transition team, he immediately let everyone know that the administration had no plans to follow through on any of the campaign’s promises of working in a bipartisan way. Despite the narrowest of victories – if you consider losing victory – and a divided congress, Dick Cheney, at the first post administration mixer, immediately took a crap in the punch bowl. It was in the beginning, just as it has continued to be to this day, his way or the highway. They got their way on every horrible and irresponsible decision they made. Unilateral war. Trillion dollar tax cuts. Outing any who got in his way…why did I buy this book! The guy is a complete crook! He should be pilloried in the Washington Monument mall so we can all toss tomatoes at him!