DCap is usually the one who puts bobbing heads of contemporary wingnuts on video from old sitcoms, so if you're reading this, DCap, and you want to run with this, be my guest.

When I was a kid, there were a lot of dumb sitcoms that revolved around Aren't Those Yokels Funny. Whether it was Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, or The Andy Griffith Show, there were always people who were the TeeVee Industry's idea of hicks doing goofy things.

We wrote the other day about how Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller believes that unemployment compensation is unconstitutional for everyone but his own family. Blue Girl is reporting on the Great Game of Biggest Dickus being played out in Alaska between the patriarch of the Wasilla Hillbillies and The Hypocrite Who Would Be Senator. Now there's more on said Hypocrite, as it turns out that like another Senate candidate who can't manage money and is basically a Jim Bakker-type huckster while talking fiscal conservatism for everyone else, Joe Miller is sitting on a fair amount of credit card debt:

Republican Joe Miller has filed his financial disclosure forms with the Senate. The documents, which detail the finances and potential conflicts of all senators and Senate candidates and are a requirement of both, were turned into the Senate public records office Thursday afternoon.

Miller was supposed to turn his form in sometime in April, when he had more than $5,000 in campaign donations in his campaign account. He never turned one in, though – an omission that the campaign said was unintentional. However, both Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Scott McAdams filed their forms. There's more information here about what's in their disclosures.

He could face fines for turning the disclosure form in late; no one with the Senate Ethics office was available for comment Thursday. However, there's a $200 penalty for filing even one month past the due date and failing to file the disclosure forms entirely can result in a fine of up to $50,000.

Miller also has a substantial amount of credit card debt, including between $35,003 and $80,000 on three separate charge accounts: two cards charging 10.24 percent interest with Bank of America and one zero percent interest loan with USAA Federal Savings Bank.

Anyone see a pattern here with these people? The majority of teabaggers running for office seem to have financial problems, and while they decry government spending and government size, they seem awfully anxious to get their hands on a government paycheck to pay off their own debts -- while campaigning on platforms of fiscal responsibility.

(h/t)

Labels: Alaska, hypocrisy, idiocy, lunacy, Teabaggers

"Serr8d has left a new comment on your post "If You're a Woman...":

You dumbass dirty socialist asshole, you have no clue how market economies and capitalism works. If you cock sucking leftists get your way, you will likely rue the day you did, because there still won't be any such thing as a free lunch, and you'll likely be the among the first victims who whine and cry yourself right into an American leftist version of the Gulag, and join the piles of skulls and bones it'll generate.

You've got it good, because of people who are you betters. These firefighters, and Glenn Beck, are your superiors and betters; the asshole who didn't pay his dues and expected a free lunch got exactly what he deserved and paid for: nothing at all.

TANSTAAFL, bitch."

Your friendly neighborhood blogger Jill Hussein passed along the above comment and, to those of you who know that I counterpunch like a bionic Alan Grayson, it was guaranteed to start my day off with a chuckle. Jill said she refused to publish it but she just thought I'd be entertained by it.

If it was up to me, I would've published this amazing screed even if only in the interests of context but that was Jill's call. I can only post here, not moderate comments. After all, if I had responded to it, even the most cynical of us would shake our heads and declaim this as a fabrication of an over heated liberal imagination, a blot of mustard or an underdone potato. Bah humbug!

But the understandably anonymous crank who goes by the handle Serr8d makes the unreformed Scrooge look like the reformed Scrooge by conspicuous relief.

The first problem one has with this post, of course, is in trying to assign a word for the letter "A" in his acronym. Well, that would have to be "ain't" which, while it's been included in our finest lexicons for decades, is nonetheless the bastard of contractions and therefore no one who uses it in serious conversation can be seriously entertained.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once used the phrase "No more free lunches!" as a way of describing graft and that seems to be a good jumping off point because the free market system in our mutated capitalist Hell is so corrupt and predicated on personal and collective greed that one marvels at how it can function at all.

If history, usually our best guide, is any indicator, it will inform individuals more informed than our resident crackpot that the free market has historically been far inferior to government-funded entities such as the military, our prison system and so forth. The free market has been an abject and almost unrelieved, miserable failure, especially of late. It has been rife with corruption and when billions in taxpayer dollars are poured into private industry to replace jobs that had been hitherto held down by government employees, the potential for fraud is boundless. We need look no further than Iraq for this and we haven't even begun hearing the stories of contractor fraud and waste in Afghanistan.

The free market and the Republican fascists who love it have given us scores of half-built hospitals in Iraq at a cost of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars plus millions more in incentive bonuses paid out to these same corporations that have long since been kicked out of Iraq (the Parsons Group). Halliburton, we've known for years, double billed us on fuel costs and is guilty of electrocuting our troops. Its former subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root, had raped and imprisoned its female employees, gave the troops contaminated drinking water and poisoned our troops with bacteria-laden food and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Feeding the troops and several other functions were once the purview of the pre-Rumsfeld military. When one looks at the Republican record, one sees an unmistakable pattern of supporting private industry (ideologically and monetarily) moreso than the troops. For instance...

The outsourcing to private industry of the care of our wounded soldiers at Walter Reed resulted in shocking and appalling living conditions and one Halliburton-affiliated company was so lazy in its duties that the troops' mail wouldn't even get delivered for months at a time.

Our security contractor, Blackwater, had been found guilty several times of murdering innocent Iraqi civilians, gun running and illegally taking point while engaging the enemy. The security they'd once provided to the State Dept. used to be done by State Dept. security people.

Private for-profit prisons such as the medieval criminal mills run by CCA generally lose their accredidation for giving a lower than standard level of care to their inmates.

Three private companies are collecting taxes for the IRS, including one Texas-based entity under federal investigation, and they're focusing their energies not on private corporations that generally don't pay their billions in taxes but easy targets like us.

Private industry is now doing the work of blue badges, actual intelligence operatives. They're called green badges and, when their contracts are up, they take the national security secrets spoonfed to them back into the private sector, with their security clearances still intact, thereby making them coveted in the intelligence-gathering private sector.

Private contractors are partly the ones guilty of abuse of innocent detainees in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, to name just a few more notorious examples.

And only a raving fool such as yourself would claim that private HMOs do a better job than Medicare, which has a 3% operational budget as opposed to 50% with some insurers. These are the same entities that make billions each year by denying health care, kicking people off for "pre-existing conditions", charging deductibles up to $5000 or more for slightly better premiums and essentially doing their damnedest to not pay for even routine procedures.

And now private industry in the form of Infragard, a cabal of Fortune 500 companies, is gunning for you. They've been deputized by the Dept. of Justice and are legally authorized to kill any of us on the dodgy supposition of us endangering the infrastructure. Often, they know about terrorist threats even before public officials and they'd already decided years ago that martial law is not a matter of if but when.

This is just a partial laundry list of some of the most colossal failures of private industry when it's contracted to fulfill functions once done by government agencies with greater economy and a much higher level of competence.

But let's just suppose, my dear Serr8d, that there was a reasonable, free market alternative to a county fire department for our poor dear friend Mr. Cranick. Who would do it? Who would have the training, the equipment, the ubiquity to undertake the dangerous task of running into a burning house and saving lives? Once again, and I hate to reiterate, we'd gone that route before in the 19th century and produced instead of a professional fire department thugs who were very little more than street gangs and looters, mercenaries whose only motivation for getting to a fire quickly was insurance money.

Yet, sadly, even that is unavailable to our poor friend in Tennessee.

And let's ask ourselves another question: Suppose, in their panicked escape, the Cranicks left a member of their family in the house? Suppose a child was trapped in the home and that child died because of the fire department's inaction. Would you still be trumpeting the triumph of a free market system and denigrating someone who until a few days days was a homeowner if a child was allowed to burn to death over a $75 fee that had innocently gone unpaid?

Considering that you're obviously a spittle-flecked teabagger, my guess is yes and not only that, you would've doubled down and hurled even more abuse at me.

But the fact remains that today's outsourcing-happy Republicans are penny wise and pound foolish. While bleating about balancing the budget and cutting taxes that coincidentally benefits them personally, they'd nonetheless have no problem taking those uncollected tax dollars, multiplying it by a factor of 10, 50 or 100 and throwing it into the money pit of private enterprise.

Therefore, instead of simply assessing an additional $75 a year to be automatically collected in their property taxes, their voting record will simply say they lowered taxes like good Republicans do and pass the onus of paying onto the homeowner and to blame them for the consequences of the severance of services traditionally rendered to civilized people in industrialized nations.

A man's house burned to the ground and everything within it over $75 and you're screaming that this is somehow justice, divine will as only Milton Friedman can provide. You are a sick, sad, delusional little man, my dear Serr8d.

And you are championing a sick, sad, delusional little man by the name of Glenn Beck, a man who by all rights, in a slightly more perfect world, would have a red hot 24 karat microphone shoved and twisted up his fat ass for all eternity. You, my dear little friend, are tap dancing in the wrong end zone.

"A free lunch" is defined as expecting the local fire department to put out your flaming house? You fool, this is a man who paid his taxes and was left with a smoking foundation where his house used to be. God damn you and Glenn Beck and Pat Gray and every other libertarian/Republican fuckwad who would even think of throwing a working man an anchor in place of a life preserver. I only hope and pray that you and Beck and co. one day find yourselves at the mercy of private industry.

I am just enough of a pathetic geek that I wish I had been able to see this:

Yes, that really IS Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong in one of eight performances of American Idiot, in which he stood in for Tony Vincent as "St. Jimmy".


Thoughts about this development here, here.

Labels: Broadway, Green Day

...I wouldn't recommend sticking Glenn Beck's bristly, addled head between your legs, no matter how big of a sweaty douchebag he is, no matter how much his head might remind you of an ambitious French tickler. Use a real douchebag and accept no substitutes. Yes, yes, it's true that Glenn Beck is at the end of virtually every day a bag o' douche but it's never advisable to literally interpret ad hominems like the kind I am about to aim at Beck and the enormous, unpopped zit on his fat ass that goes by the name of Pat Gray.

What I'm talking about is the Obion County Fire Department refusing to put out Gene Cranick's house because he forgot to pay a $75 fee that should've been guaranteed through his property and income taxes. Cranick lost his house and everything in it, including three dogs and a cat, while the fire department watched it burn (it didn't stop them from bringing out the men and engines, however and one is left to wonder why they didn't bring hot dogs and marshmallows).

Cranick offered to pay the fee on the spot to save his house, which is pathetic enough as it is, but the fire chief, who could've but didn't grant a dispensation, basically told him, "It's not our department."


Well, Glenn Beck and his cackling, unpopped zit think this is funny.

Josh Holland had this covered and unpacked pretty well on Alternet two and a half days ago but I think a few things ought to be mentioned. Holland is absolutely correct in widening the gyre so to speak by macrosizing this synecdochal incident into a damning and blistering indictment on the inherent evils of Randian dystopianism.

He also gives a few examples culled from all over the country of social services such as police, student aid and Medicare being pulled out from under the feet of hard-working people because of Republican buttfuckery. The most stunning example is the case of Ashtabula County, Ohio, which thanks to Republican budget cuts, reduced the number of county Sheriff's deputies by more than 50%, thereby allowing convicted violent offenders to loiter on the streets while awaiting their turn to be imprisoned. Simply put, that means there are more bad guys and less police officers on the streets there and judges are now warning county residents to "arm themselves."

This is Ayn Rand's and the GOP's vision: all governments on all levels shrunk and underfunded to the point of irrelevance and providing in return for taxes less in the way of goods and services. It has now gotten to the point where, if you live in Obion County, TN, the county fire department will watch your house burn down if you didn't pay your $75 bribe. Not only that, there's a very real chance if you live next door, your house will burn down, too, even if you paid your $75, as was the case with Cranick's next door neighbor.

And the likes of Glenn Beck think that's funny.

Hardly a word had been raised about the state and county deliberately underfunding the fire dept. even though they cut off their noses to spite their face. Says Holland,

But last December, a county commission on which every member is a Republican voted to rescind a resolution passed years earlier that would have established a countywide fire department. Their rationale was, of course, the need to keep taxes low, but according to the county commission report, that decision was penny wise but pound foolish. “Because there is no operational county fire department,” the officials noted, “Obion County has missed the opportunity to actively pursue receipt of FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grants (AFG) and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding.”

Paying the $75 is euphemistically called a "subscription." A subscription is getting the NY Times or The Nation sent to your home. What this essentially comes out to is a bribe that takes us all the way back to the stupendously corrupt and mercenary fire departments of Boss Tweed's New York City of the 1860's.

Last year in July, when writing about health care, Tina Dupuy set the record straight on the Huff Po when she gave us one (now prescient) example that had already occurred to me: The evils of private enterprise and how it rarely if ever reaches the level of proficiency as a government-funded entity. I'd already thought of the 19th century NYC fire department:

Let's look at this reasonably: Firefighting used to be a private for-profit industry. In the 1800's, the early days of urbanization, in cities like New York and Baltimore, there were private "clubs" or "gangs" who were in charge of putting out fires. The infamous Boss Tweed started his illustrious political career at a volunteer fire company. The way it functioned was the first club at the scene got money from the insurance company. So, they had an incentive to get there fast. They also had an incentive to sabotage competition. They also often ended up getting in fights over territory and many times buildings would burn down before the issue was resolved. They were glorified looters. It was corrupt, bloated and expensive -- but at least it wasn't the much maligned "government controlled."

The police department under Tweed and the corrupt mayors of New York was hardly any better. If one must aspire to any intellectual muscularity and fitness, then one must then ask the inevitable question no matter how fearful the probable answer: What next? Where will it end?

Will the same thing happen to local police departments and county Sheriff's offices? Will they or or will not take a statement and investigate your assault, loved one's murder, your mother's or sister's rape, your child's abduction based on whether or not you paid your "police subscription" (your more uncharitable liberals may call it "protection money")?

We're halfway there already.

Every year, many of you, I'm sure, get calls from your local PD or Benevolent Association asking for a donation. In reward for your donation, they'll send to your house a shiny decal to put on your rear windshield. No cop will ever admit to it but here's the way it works in Ayn Rand's dystopian Amerika: It's always the second thing they notice, after your license plate. If you have the shiny silver sticker conspicuously glinting from your rear window that proves you already paid above your fair share of taxes that funds the PD, your chances of getting off with a warning dramatically increase. And it may even determine the energy level behind the investigation when you're the victim. And don't think the local constabulary doesn't make note of who pays and doesn't pay. They're the police: It's their job to kick ass and take names and not necessarily in that order.

But according to douchebags like Glenn Beck and that unpopped anyl cyst of his that was affectionately named Pat Gray, guys like Gene Cranick and not the Republican douchebags who blocked the formation of a countywide fire department are the real bad guys, the ones who "hurt the fire department" by not paying their "subscription" in a timely fashion. A $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 house and the memories, possessions and living creatures lost forever within are suddenly worth less than a $75 "subscription" that no one in America should ever have to pay.

And you will be subject to ridicule just to champion a morally and intellectually bankrupt Randian ideology that has been proven time and again over the centuries to be ruinous and guaranteed of failure.

And this is what the Republican Party will bring about if they take back even one chamber of Congress next month. And with the Tea Baggers calling the shots and giving the establishment GOP their marching orders, you'll see and hear about a lot more homes burning down and people getting killed and thrown off Medicare and children dying because their CHIP funding got taken from them.


Then, you really will be missing the palmier, more humane days of George W. Bush.

Just think....if we could all agree on this, how much effort would be saved. After all, time and time again, we see so-called conservatives and their religious nutball friends not practicing what they preach. Whether it's George Rekers running gay "cures" while paying rentboys, or Republicans in Congress railing against pork while bringing the bacon home to their own states, or women who have had abortions who want to take that choice away from others, it seems to be at the very heart of what passes for contemporary conservate "thought" to feel that you are entitled to do the very things for which you excoriate others.

The latest example of this is none other than Alaska teabagger Senate candidate Joe Miller, who feels that unemployment compensation is unconstitutional -- unless it's being paid to a member of his own family:

U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller confirmed Monday night that his wife -- once hired to work as a part-time clerk for the same Alaska court in which he was serving as a U.S. magistrate judge -- went on unemployment after she left the job.

Miller is running on a self-described constitutional conservative platform, arguing that the nation must return to the principles and powers penned by the founding fathers to save it from bankruptcy. Putting an end to entitlements on a national level and empowering states has been a key message in his campaign.

In the weeks leading up to the admission about his wife's unemployment history, Miller has finessed his message on unemployment benefits, saying he's not opposed to them but that they should be managed by the states -- not the feds.

On Monday, in response to a blogger's post and questions from reporters, the Miller campaign issued a statement detailing how his wife -- Kathleen Miller -- worked for him while he was serving as a part-time U.S. magistrate judge in Fairbanks. Prior to moving to Fairbanks, the couple lived 200 miles away in the rural Alaska town of Tok where Miller worked as magistrate for the state court system. (Clarification: A prior version of this story incorrectly stated that the Millers' federal court service took place in Tok.)

Miller held the magistrate position for the District Court out of Fairbanks from June 21, 2002 through June 1, 2004, earning a total of $71,418. Kathleen Miller worked as a part-time clerk for him from June 2002 to December 2002, according to a resume she submitted to the state last year when she pursued an appointment to the Alaska Judicial Council.

After she left her clerk job, she briefly went on state unemployment, Miller acknowledged in a statement:

My wife, Kathleen, did work for me as a magistrate judge clerk/secretary while I was a part-time Federal Magistrate judge from 2002 to 2004. Before 2004 there was a long-standing practice, both in Fairbanks as well as other areas in the United States, that due to the time commitments of being a lawyer and a part-time Federal Magistrate judge the same individuals that worked in your private law offices also worked in your federal magistrate office - many of those being family members. Before even applying for the Fairbanks Magistrate judgeship I spoke with members of the federal court concerning the employment of Kathleen. It was confirmed that she could work for me in my office. After leaving my office Kathleen did receive unemployment benefits for a short period of time.

In Joe Miller's world, it's a bad thing for someone who's been working consistently for 34 years to collect unemployment, but it's OK for his own wife to game the system by working FOR HER OWN HUSBAND for six months and then collect.

Again -- hardly a surprise, but nonetheless -- why is anyone actually planning to vote for these people?

Labels: assholes, Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy, Teabaggers

Just one year after Barack Obama improbably won the Nobel Peace prize after just six weeks in office, the Prize Committee has just announced that Glenn Beck will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Beck’s highly-praised book, The Overton Window, is considered to be largely instrumental to the conservative Fox News pundit winning literature’s richest and most prestigious prize. But the panel, hastily assembled after all the former judges met with grisly but accidental deaths, cited Beck’s other works, including, A Man, a Blackboard and a Liberal Conspiracy, Why I Cry Like a Colicy Baby for America and Goldfinger 2.

"Mr. Beck's ouvre ton coeur," said judge Tim LaHaye of the Left Behind series, "contains more than a liberal, if you'll pardon the expression, admixture of conservatism, paranoia and hypervigilance of reverse racism. But perhaps I'm being tautological."

The Overton Window was co-written by young, up-and-coming authors Kevin Balfe, Emily Bestler, and Jack Henderson who'd received no more mention from the judging panel than they did on the cover of the Simon & Schuster blockbuster. It's hard to see why, since all three authors combined have published four books of their own, including The Murderer Who Killed, Do Me Again, You Nasty Sailor Boy and Barack Obama and the Koran: How the 44th President Was Predicted in the Muslim Heathen Holy Book.

"The Overton Window," said Sean Hannity, also on the Nobel judging panel, "is a heart-rending but unflinching look at the liberal agenda that is nonetheless defeated time and again by a shrinking, ideologically malnourished Republican minority in Congress." But not all the reviews to the book have been kind. Kirkus Reviews wrote last June, "Glenn Beck's ghostwritten book, The Overton Window, is a ghastly, adolescent primordial ooze of letters and punctuation marks intermittently shot through with literacy."

"If the judging panel had given it to anyone else, I would've killed them with a baseball bat," said fellow New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter.


Beck joins a long list of other American literary legends who have won the prize, including Ernest Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck and John Steinbeck. Beck will be the first American Nobel literature laureate who still cannot spell the word "oligarch" and writes all his books on mp3 wireless recorders and colored chalk.

Beck will receive his prize not in Stockholm as per tradition but in Goldline's corporate headquarters in Santa Monica, California. When reached at his glassed-in, bulletproof office at Fox News, Beck was asked if he would sink his new fortune into Goldline gold coins.

Beck still has not stopped laughing.

Stiller and Meara take on Jersey Shore:


(h/t: Elayne)

Labels: comedy

Grab the popcorn, kids, because the GOP, that party that professes to worship the military, has to decide whether its first loyalty is to the military or to the petroleum companies that are part-owners, along with Rupert Murdoch, or their party:

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.

“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.

“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”

He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.

Gee, ya think? For nearly a decade since the 9/11 attacks, Republicans have been touting the greedy consumption of fossil fuels as some kind of national virtue. Solar is for hippies. Hybrid cars are for wusses. Renewable energy is bunk, drill baby drill -- that's what we hear from Republicans, even after the BP oil spill's befouling of the Gulf of Mexico. The military is not calling for increased domestic drilling, it's calling for renewable energy so that it doesn't have to lose soldiers to IEDs while transporting gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels across dangerous areas. But military leaders also seem to recognize what Republicans refuse to -- that oil meand dependence on an increasingly hostile part of the world, and that anyone who doesn't advocate weaning ourselves off of oil is simply asking for more young American dead.

Labels: military readiness, renewable energy

"Oh, shit, JP's going." "There goes the neighborhood..."

Mrs. JP and I decided that, while it would have been cheaper to take one of Arianna's buses all the way to Assclown Central (aka Washington, DC) to the Stewart/Colbert rallies, ultimately we'd prefer to take our new car and to drive back at our leisure. We'd briefly thought about inviting people to go down with us but we'll be spending the 29th and 30th at a friend's house in Arlington then head back up on Halloween, stopping in Mrs. JP's old haunts in Cranston, Rhode Island. Shame. It would've been cool if someone came along to help with the driving and gas money. However, if anyone in the Massachusetts/Connecticut/Jersey area (Jill?) wanted to hook up en route and form a little caravan, we'd certainly be open to the idea.

So if anyone reading this is going to the Sanity/Fear rallies on October 30th, leave a comment or email us at crawman2@yahoo.com and let us know where you want to meet. We can even exchange cell phone numbers and meet on the mall if not on the road. Seize yaaaaaaaa!

Krugman on how News Corp. wants to have complete dominion over the executive branch by hiring as many 2012 hopefuls as possible onto the Fox News payroll:

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Read on to find out.

Fox News viewers like to fancy themselves as independent thinkers, intellectual giants who look at Glenn Beck's blackboard and his references to philosophers and the Founding Fathers that make absolutely no sense, historical or otherwise. Fox News' demographic skews older, which means many people who rely on Social Security (which Republicans want to get rid of), Medicare (which Republicans want to get rid of), traditional pensions (which Republicans and businesses have already gotten rid of), and other accommodations. How any American who claims to value "freedom" and "liberty" can advocate a government that is 100% bought and paid for by a corporation, well, I'd love to hear the arguments for that.

Labels: Fox News, government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards

And she goes by the handle of Blue Girl.

Labels: bloggers, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, gay rights

These people truly ARE delusional:

This morning, on Fox News Sunday, Paul said that his focus in the Senate would be reducing the “mountains and mountains of debt.” But when asked to square that with his desire to spend trillions of dollars on tax cuts, he replied that, when it comes to extending Bush’s tax cuts, “I’m not seeing it as a cost to government”:

Q: You said at the very beginning, the first issue you mention was the national debt. If you’re so concerned about the national debt, how are you going to pay for a $4 trillion loss of revenue from the tax cuts.

PAUL: I think, first of all you look at whose money it is. It’s the people’s money, who earned the money; we give up some to pay taxes, so I’m not seeing it as a cost to government.

Watch it:


Paul later promised to “introduce legislation that will reduce spending,” but when Fox News’ Chris Wallace noted “there’s no way you’re going to get $4 trillion by spending cuts,” Paul simply reiterated that he would cut spending without laying out any specifics.

Of course not. Because if he laid out any specifics, no one in his/her right mind would vote for this clown. Those who want to know what the magical candyland envisioned by teabaggers would look like need look no further than Ernie Scott Garrett, who represents New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District, which is alas the one in which I live. Garrett in just one week voted AGAINST a fund to benefit those workers who risked their health in the Ground Zero cleanup; voted AGAINST imposing import tariffs on nations that deliberately devalue their currency to increase sales in the US; and voted AGAINST funding NASA's space shuttle and International Space Station programs. That's just last week. Here's his record for all of 2010, and he's been at this since January of 2003. Appropriations for HUD and the Department of Transportation? No dice. Amending the IRS Code of 1986 to create jobs through increased investment in infrastructure and eliminate loopholes which encourage companies to move operations offshore? No dice. Unemployment compensation extension for the unemployed in his district? Uh-uh. Flood insurance reform? Nope -- not even when a good chunk of his district got deluged last week. No on supplemental appropriations for disaster relief. No on the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.

No and no and no and no and no.

But when it comes to lobbyists, even those from governments known to be sponsors of international terrorism, being barred from donating to political campaigns (including his)? He refused to make a commitment on that one and didn't even show up.

Soctt Garrett was teabag before tea was the flavor of the moment. We here in NJ-5 have already seen what Rand Paul's America looks like, we've been looking at it for nearly a decade. And what's tragic is that most people in this district aren't even paying attention.

Labels: Scott Garrett, Teabaggers

How is it that Meg Whitman can afford to spend over $100 million out of her own funds for a political campaign, but she can't afford to hire a housekeeper whom she'd have to pay a living wage?

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy, immigration

That was so cute my head exploded. And I don't even LIKE children. But I have to wonder: Why Betty White? I know she has fantastic comic timing, and she's replaced Ruth Gordon as my Who I Want To Be When I Grow Up role model, but I wonder what is so enchanting about Betty White to a baby?

Labels: heavy mysteries, pop culture

I predict he'll be on the Today show by midweek:

OK, not all of his accents are spot on. His German seems a bit off, his Japanese is too fast, his "southern redneck" is TOO broad, and Johnny Weir does a far better Russian accent. But that he can do all these even halfway credibly is pretty impressive.

Labels: pop culture

Bill Maher and others have excoriated Alan Grayson for taking Daniel Webster out of context in a recent campaign ad with remarks about a wife submitting to her husband. The clip WAS taken out of context in that particular instance, but the moniker "Taliban Dan" used to describe a religious fanatic who believes in an extreme religious canon that he would take with him into public service and which shapes his views on policy is not in the least bit an exaggeration, as this Alternet piece (which you should click through and read in its entirety) on Webster's ties to the Christian Reconstruction movement demonstrates:

Daniel Webster’s association with Bill Gothard’s Institute For Basic Life Training has continued into the present, and a speech Webster made at a Nashville IBLP conference in 2009 has now become a source of controversy due to a new Alan Grayson campaign ad. Grayson is currently taking a media drubbing because of an ad campaign ad that calls Grayson’s political opponent, Republican Daniel Webster, “Taliban Dan.”

An assessment from Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has charged that a new Grayson campaign ad attacking Grayson’s political opponent, Republican Daniel Webster, takes out of context statements Webster made in a speech at a 2009 conference of a religious organization called the “Institute of Basic Life Principles.”

But die-hard religious right researchers at ReligionDispatches.org are raising questions about Factcheck.org’s charge, and Religion Dispatches editor Sarah Posner calls out Factcheck.org in turn for its benign depiction of Bill Gothard’s IBLP, noting that “Factcheck.org fails… to describe what the IBLP is really about, describing it as a “non-denominational Christian organization that runs programs and training sessions.”

Many across the political spectrum appear appalled by the Grayson campaign’s “Taliban” label but Daniel Webster’s nearly three-decade long, intimate involvement with the Bill Gothard and the Institute For Basic Life Principles suggests that the label may be less than hyperbolic.

More on Bill Gothard and Gothardism

As described in a February 18, 1999 story in the Broward/Palm Beach New Times, by Bob Norman, Bill Gothard’s Character First! curriculum, now being taught in public school systems across the United States, teaches an extreme form of submission to authority. As Norman’s story begins,

One of the lessons for today is obedience, and the first graders at the school inside the First Christian Church building in Fort Lauderdale sing about it quite obediently.

While the students at the Charter School of Excellence are divided fairly evenly between blacks and whites, they dress alike, with the boys in dark blue pants and green buttoned-up golf shirts and the girls wearing white blouses under plaid jumpers. All eyes are focused on their young and attractive teacher, Mrs. Blocker, who leads them in song:

Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I’ll answer right away!
I’ll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say “Yes, sir!” “Yes ma’am!”
Hup, two, three!

A July 20, 1995 story in the Dallas Observer, by Julie Lyons, underscores the authoritarian nature of Gothard’s programs and also corroborates Alan Grayson’s charge that Daniel Webster indeed referred to a Gothardite doctrine of female submission in his 2009 Nashville speech. As Lyons writes,

“It is one of the stranger sights in South Dallas: each day, when the weather is fair, 125 teenage girls stream out of the Ambassador hotel and cross the street into Old City Park. The girls are dressed almost identically, in navy blue smocks and skirts and crisp, lace-collared blouses, their long hair cinched with bows or bands. All but a few of the teens are white.

[...]

No, these teens aren’t part of the exhibits at Old City Park, or some lost tribe of Girl Scouts. But they are vestiges of values past, students in an eight-week religious finishing school–works in progress at a factory seeking to build pure and perfect teens. The program is called EXCEL, which stands for “Excellence in Character, Education, and Leadership.” It costs $900 per teen.

The girls, who range in age from 15 to the early 20s, come to Dallas from all over the country for the year-old residential program at the Ambassador. Though they hail from a variety of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, they’ve all been nurtured in the “basic life principles” of well-known Bible teacher Bill Gothard–principles that include unquestioning obedience to their parents, future submission to their husbands, eschewing rock music and television, and remaining chaste.

A January 9, 2006 In These Times report from Silja J.A. Talvi suggested that Bill Gothard’s approach  has changed little if at all since then, and other news reports have  also underscored the same authoritarian, anti-feminist streak in Gothard’s teachings.

Dan Webster's affiliation with Bill Gothard IS a legitimate campaign issue, and Webster owes it to the citizens of his district to make clear just what his intentions are in terms of bringing Christian Reconstruction to Washington and work to enact its tenets as policy for all to follow.

Labels: Alan Grayson, Christian Dominionism

Wow...Maron must have really been hitting the WTF Roast before going on Craig Ferguson last night:

It's surprising to hear a man talk about the nonstop dialogue in one's head. I always tell Mr. Brilliant that if he's ever away and puts listening devices in the house, he'll think I had someone move in while he's away, because I carry on entire conversations with myself. I don't even direct them at the cats. When I need to rant, the walls are as good an audience as anyone.

My brain is always talking. Always. I dream in color, with large casts of characters, sometimes in exotic locales, and there's always talking. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's a challenge to get to the bathroom and back without thinking "Now what do I have to do today? You know, this room really needs painting. Do you think I can get around to those closet organizers this weekend? Shit -- I forgot to call the exterminator again. When is that meeting? God, [annoying person] is a pain in the ass. I wonder if I'll get out of work on time today. I'd really like to blog about what Rachel said last night. Is the car due for an oil change? Jim DeMint is a fucking idiot." Because once this kicks in, it's all over. Wanda Sykes did a bit on this once, and unfortunately I can't find it on YouTube. Every woman I've asked says the same thing -- that the mind is always going. I can be in Savasana, and I'll be making shopping lists. It just never stops.

I once read someplace that when a woman asks a man "What are you thinking" and he replies "Nothing", he's telling the truth. I asked Mr. Brilliant about this and he concurred that yes, sometimes he just doesn't think about anything. I simply cannot fathom how this can happen. So when Marc Maron talks about his inner dialogue looking at someone's new ice cream maker on the subway, I know exactly what he's talking about. Except mine will continue at around 2:30 AM. There might even be recipes.

Labels: Marc Maron, personal musings

This just came in Mrs. JP's inbox, which she then passed onto me. How the fuck she got on their radar screen is beyond me but in cases like this the usual suspects are right wing Red State relatives who mean well.

Considering other peoples' experiences with Sarah Palin at other events such as her book signings, I can tell you exactly what you'll get for your $950 (which, since last March, is a real bargain and an even bigger bargain considering what it cost to have your picture taken next to her cardboard cutout two years ago, proving that Palin's depreciating in value faster than a 15 year-old Toyota with bad brakes and a leaky training):

From: Peter Terpeluk, Chairman, RNC Victory 2010
To: signgrrl56@comcast.net
Subject: Sarah Palin Wants to Meet You
Dear ,

Sarah Palin wants to meet you.

You are invited to join Sarah Palin and our conservative candidates running at all levels at a rally to kickoff our Party's final push to victory in Anaheim, CA, on Saturday, October 16th or Orlando, FL, on Saturday, October 23rd.

As a grassroots activist, I hope you will be able to attend one of these special campaign events because you understand more than most exactly what is at stake for our country just 32 days from now.

We must elect commonsense, Reagan-Republican majorities to the U.S. House and Senate and add to the number of Governors if we are to slam the brakes on the Obama Democrats' destructive socialist schemes. Your participation at the victory rally and your continuing generous financial support is vital if we are to pull our candidates across the finish line.

, tickets to these events are only $20.10 for general admission or $90 for the reserved section -- but space is limited and tickets are going fast. (Children under 15 are free.)

You also have the unique opportunity to attend a special reception with Sarah Palin at either location for a gift of $950.

Benefits for those who are able to attend this reception with the Governor include a photo and the unique opportunity to discuss the critical issues facing our country with other grassroots leaders.

To reserve your tickets today, simply go here. After you place your ticket order, you will receive a separate email to print your tickets.

If you can't make it to either of these events, I hope you will take this opportunity to keep our Party moving forward to an historic victory by making an investment of 25 cents for every one of the 435 House, 37 Senate and 37 Governors' races for a total of $127.25. Your gift will ensure that RNC Victory's vital get-out-the-vote effort is fully funded and that our Republican candidates have the down-to-the-wire support they need to win.

Sarah Palin looks forward to meeting you at one of these great events. Working together, I know we will win the battle to save our country.

Sincerely,


Chairman, RNC Victory 2010

P.S. , I hope you can make it to Anaheim, CA, on Saturday, October 16th or Orlando, FL, on Saturday, October 23rd for these exciting RNC Victory 2010 campaign events. Tickets are available for $20.10 apiece for general admission, $90 for the reserved section and $950 for a special reception and photo op. You can get yours right now by going here. Even if you cannot attend, please take this opportunity to make a campaign gift of 25 cents for every major race being contested this fall for a total of $127.25. Thank you.

P.P.S. With your minimum gift of $127.25, you will receive a commemorative copy of Sarah Palin's new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag.

It's gonna be something like this, if history is any indicator:

You'll stand on a long line of people, so many innocent, impressionable Ralphies dreaming of shooting wolves from helicopters with the governor. Hopefully, you'll get to the head of the line before Sarah Barracuda's red-shod feet start getting sore or before her bendy-strawed bottle runs out of water. You'll be picked up and turned around like a widget on an assembly line by her Republican elves, you won't be permitted to talk to her or ask her questions and you'll then be kicked down the big red plastic chute.


You'll stop your humiliating descent, painfully climb back up, and say,

"No! No, Governor! I want an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle and shoot wolves from helicopters with you!"

She'll imperiously look down at you and say,

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid! Vote Tea Party next month." Then she'll kick you in the face with her red-shod foot and you'll continue your humiliating slide into obscurity as you'll have to hear her say, "Ho, ho, ho, ya betcha!" above you.

That's what you'll get for your $950, kiddies. So, I think Mrs. JP and I will pass.

Today's honoree: our very own Tata, for pointing out what Chris Christie's jihad against teachers and public service unions, which is being adopted by Republicans everywhere, is really all about.

Money quote:

Every Sunday morning on the political talk shows you can hear politicians positively crowing about how they manipulate Americans of all stripes into voting and protesting against their own interests. If you do not have the sense to realize middle class people have more in common with the poor than the rich you are being manipulated by the rich, who own the media and simultaneously sweet-talk and slander the rest of us constantly.

[snip]

Your fellow worker has too much health care. Your fellow worker doesn’t deserve vacation time. Your fellow worker should retire later. Your fellow worker is a greedy slacker for joining a collective bargaining unit to bargain for better wages and a safer workplace. These are not problems. These messages should make men and women stand up and shout, “Good for my fellow worker! I will forge a collective bargaining unit and negotiate for better wages and benefits.” I don’t have to tell you all the old truisms you’ve known all your life but seem to have forgotten:

“There is strength in numbers.”
“The army makes a brave general.”
“Many hands make light work.”
“Two heads are better than one.”
Even “United we stand, divided we fall.”

All the same truth your grandparents knew: alone, we may survive, but working together, we can thrive. And yet, whenever some group of politicians or church group or think tank demonizes a group of our neighbors, friends and relatives, Americans fall for it. Right after 9/11, when the American flags went up everywhere and the flag-waving began, I knew because it has been true all my life that when Americans have waved flags bombs fell on the heads of brown people. Sure enough, that is what happened. There was never any reason to set anyone on fire, except that that’s what an angry mob does.

You can see the demands for groupthink and group behavior regularly on Facebook, if only for example. A few of my friends have recently re-posted statuses demanding supposed patriotic statements or gestures. That’s not patriotism. It’s a demand for conformity. Fuck that noise. My dissent is patriotic, and those demands are bullshit. Once again, if you don’t get that, you have been manipulated by someone who gains by your misunderstanding.

Word. Rock on, sistah.

Labels: bloggers, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

I'm sure you can imagine that the Tyler Clementi story is getting a fair amount of press over here in suburban New Jersey. Any Rutgers story is of local interest, for all that Rutgers is a fair distance southwest of here. And since Tyler Clementi had just graduated from Ridgewood High School this year (which makes the story even more horrifying), it truly is a local story.

Clementi isn't the first suicide of a gay teen this year, or even this quarter, but for some reason, like the suicide of Phoebe Prince, it haunts me, as I'm sure it does everyone who has vivid memories of being bullied for being gay, or fat, or weird, or just plain different.

And so I have to give kudos to Dan Savage for the It Gets Better project. I don't know if kids watching Dan and his partner Terry talk about how they endured bullying too, but that once you leave high school, it gets better, will believe it any more than kids like I was believed their parents when they told us that someday the campus queens would be old and mean and ugly but a good heart and a flair for comedy lasts forever. But I have to give him props for at least trying (even if Tyler Clementi found that sometimes it takes longer than graduating high school for it to get better):

Labels: gay rights