Guys, I know you're all sick and tired of me and my constant problems and who the fuck can blame you? Keeping a roof over our heads, our bills paid and food in our stomachs is my job. But since I lost my unemployment last March, even these modest goals are impossible when we have nothing but Barb's $135 in UI benefits to cover even some of our bills.

But the luck I've had since 2009 is something even Job would envy. I've shelled out $1300 in car repair bills in the last year now I have a $100-150 muffler job to look forward to. I need to renew my auto policy before the end of the month. I need to renew and convert Barb's license a couple of weeks later and AAA will want a renewal the month after that. That's another $250+.

My Dell shit the bed again last night hours after I got it out of the shop at a cost of $80. The other laptop is in the same shop and will cost us another $100. So we have no computer and we're reduced to spending even more money we don't have to use the local cafe's computer.

And that's not even the worst of it. My card got declined this morning even though yesterday I had about $100 over what I needed to cover our $650 rent check. So I raced to the nearest computer and discovered that the Massachusetts Department of Revenue grabbed over $728 out of my checking account for money they claim I owe them. Then they helped themselves to another $20 for a "fee" and that's where we stand now: A minus balance of $20.

The ironic thing is the DOR owes me something like 20 grand for taking money out of my pocket without a valid court order for nearly 8 1/2 years and when I write them to tell them this, they completely ignore me. But that's not going to get resolved until I can somehow hire a lawyer.

I still don't know if the last rent check cleared but whether or not it did, we're looking at a massive overdraft with no way of covering it. Without a computer and with gas at $4 a gallon, this skein of bad luck puts a severe crimp on our job search.

All this time I've somehow managed to keep our heads above water but this time we're looking at the very real prospect of eviction sometime this month. My landlord lost his own job and the company folded so he desperately needs all his rent or he'll lose this house along with us. Please, Please, PLEASE help in any way you can (Pottersville has a Paypal button on the top right). I swear to God, I am not making any of this up. I really am this unlucky.

Larry Craig, seeker of men in airport rest rooms, served out his term.

Just wanted to point that out.

There's a saying that I had once heard was attributable to Oscar Wilde, but it turns out it wasn't. Then I had read that it is a line from José Ferrer's 1952 film Moulin Rouge but I've never since been able to find the source. It's "Never meet an artist whose work you admire, for the art is always greater than the man." If you've ever met a famous person who turned out to be an asshole in person, you should remember that saying.

And so it turns out to be true, that Anthony Weiner, a guy who's gone through life with the most unfortunate last name this side of "Lipschitz", has the sexual proclivities of an adolescent. Yes, this guy on the cusp of middle age behaves like a teenager when it comes to social networking. It seems ironic that at a time when we're able to accept the dichotomy of the creators of South Park being able to put together a musical that for all its poop and clitoris jokes and four-letter words also has one of the most moving songs about spirituality ever to hit any kind of stage, but we're unable to wrap our heads around the idea that a politician is an asshole.

Gee. A town like Washington, that's steeped in sex, attracts guys who have trouble making good judgments about appropriate behavior. I'm shocked....SHOCKED, I tell ya.

I still wonder....why is this news? Has Anthony Weiner been a tireless crusader for sexual restraint? Hardly. Weiner's province has been trying to salvage what few breaks there are left in our society for the people who aren't "the haves and the have-mores." Yes, Weiner is an asshole. And yes, he cheats on his wife (and it doesn't have to be the old in-out, in-out to be cheating). One wonders why he even got married in the first place after decades as a freewheeling bachelor. But can we please have some perspective? We still have record-high unemployment and a corporate environment in which CEOs are demanding more and more and more and more tax cuts with NO promise that it will make them hire. We have a Republican Party that is hell-bent on making sure that the next generation of elderly ends up as Soylent Green. And let's not forget this little catastrophe that the Villagers seem to have forgotten about in their need to stand in the corner and snicker.

There's more. Do I really need to go on, posting link after link after link to actually important things that are going on in our country and our world while the Village takes such delight in covering what they do best -- flogging the trivial?

So let's get down to How Is This Different, shall we? First let's briefly discuss the Twin Peaks of Sexual Sleaze, the Johns (sorry) Ensign and Edwards. Both cases seem to involve campaign finance abuses. John Ensign was fucking his best friend's wife, then set up a situation where the couple was completely financially dependent on him so they couldn't spill the beans, then at the age of 51, asked his parents for hugh money to give them -- while all the while painting himself as a "sanctity of marriage" zealot. John Edwards at seems to have used his much-talked-about charm to wrangle money out of a centenarian heiress to keep his own affair (and child) quiet. Edwards qualifies as a hypocrite because of using the very same cancer-stricken wife he was always either bringing with him, sending out on her own, or invoking the name of, to try to demonstrate his own "swell guy" bona fides and try to counteract his image as a slick huckster.

Then there are the "Do As I Say Not As I Do" twins. Larry Craig, a man who cruised for sex in an airport men's room, crusaded against gay rights. Craig decided not to run for re-election, but served out his term. David Vitter, a "family values" Republican has a 100% rating by the Christian Coalition. Vitter said back in 2006 that there was "no issue more important" than banning gay marriage. He was supporting cutting funding for family planning in 2009 -- before it became cool. Vitter is still in the Senate, which is the only thing for which I admire the man -- his ability to tough out the media frenzy and get back to work. I even have to have a grudging respect for Newt Gingrich, a hypocrite so massive that he completely redefines the word, who wants us to believe that he was Fucking for Patriotism -- because he's out there saying, "It's behind me. Let's move on." I may not agree that you can just "move on" from a pattern like Gingrich's, but he's never just slunk away.

So why the frenzy over Anthony Weiner, aside from the obvious jokes, which are only proving to show that the media working itself into a lather over this are every bit as adolescent in their sexuality as Weiner himself is? Does anyone actually believe that Weiner is going to be able to survive this? Hardly. Let's not forget that the Republicans rallied around David Vitter after his obligatory confession with the pained wife standing next to him. But like the sniveling, frightened little weasels that they are, who sacrifice burnt offerings to Andrew Breitbart every time he goes digging for dirt one one of theirs (for all that this Krusader for Korruption never seems to go after anyone on the right), the Democrats in Washington are already wrapping Weiner in a shroud (NYT link) in preparation for throwing him overboard, just as they did with Eliot Spitzer, who it now appears was targeted because he was getting too close to finding out just what was happening on Wall Street.

So Weiner is an asshole, and a bit skeevy. So? Did he do anything illegal? Was he targeting underage girls? If so, then by all means kick him out of Congress. So I am not defending him. But I'm not so much angry with him for having the kind of sexual proclivities that most men in this country would have if they thought they could get away with it. I'm angry for the same reason I was, and remain, angry with John Edwards -- for being so fucking stupid as to not recognize that we live in a country in which any misbehavior, no matter how heinous, is perfectly OK if you are a Republican, but Democrats are REQUIRED to live on the straight and narrow all the time. As a woman, I do not understand what Thinking With the Little Head is like, so perhaps it's easy for me to wonder how any man in Washington could still behave at this level of Teh Stoopid. But this is the environment in which we live. And I would have expected that a scrapper like Weiner would have stood up and said "Yes, I did it. It was really stupid, I was thinking with my dick, yes, you got me. I'm a bad boy and I won't do it again. Now can we please go back to doing the people's work?" But the reason I'm done with Weiner isn't even that he's a creep. I expect that from anyone who goes to Washington. I'm done because instead of showing the balls of even a hypocritical asshole like David Vitter, he decided to go the tearful "sorry I got hurt my family" route after denying it for a week. I'm done because like John Edwards before him, Anthony Weiner has lived up to his name after all.

Labels: Anthony Weiner, manufactured scandals

There's still this delusion in this country that the people who have populated the Sunday gasbag shows are somehow "smart" or "informed" or "knowledgeable." The week-long flogging (sorry) of the recent Weiner weiner "controversy" shows you that the Washington press corps has a lot more in common with TMZ and Perez Hilton than with any kind of policy analysis. And yet the Usual Suspects who populate Morning Schmoe continue to insist that the Paul Ryan If You Still Can't Afford Or Get Private Insurance Then Fuck Off And Die Plan is a "serious" plan for "reforming" Medicare.

Paul Krugman once again explains today in the New York Times what a government check to buy health insurance from companies that can reject you for any reason, charge you exorbitant premiums if they take you, and drop you at any time for any reason (because "take all comers" is part of the Affordable Care Act that Ryan wants to repeal) will mean in real life for real people:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.

So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

Mr. Brilliant and I have insurance through my employer, which has just made available a full wages and benefits statement so that we know at any time just what the company pays for the various benefits we have. The health plan we have, which pays 90% of "usual and customary" (read: ridiculously low) to in-network providers with a $500 per person deductible every year but covers preventive procedures such as mammograms and colonoscopies and routine physical exams at 100% to in-network providers, costs about $13,000/year. I pay about $3600 of this premium.

An individual policy at this level would cost far more. Perhaps some of you who DO purchase individual policies might want to weigh in with what your coverage is and at what cost. I'm guessing that right now, at my age, a similar policy would probably cost upwards of $20,000/year -- if we could even get one. Now imagine me in ten years, at age 66, trying to buy an individual policy from an industry that has been cherry-picking for years.

Republicans are painting the Ryan plan like an all-you-can-eat buffet, in which America's senior will have a vast array of health insurance "products" from which to choose, offered by a wide variety of providers who are just salivating at the thought of getting hold of all those people who are going to need actual payouts for health care. In what kind of universe does anyone actually believe this to be true?

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Medicare, Republican men

Things are at a sorry pass indeed when news media whose missions are supposed to be to inform become so enslaved to tabloid culture that they take their marching orders from guys like this (from The Smoking Gun):

JUNE 3--The Twitter user who first floated the rumor that a lewd photo scandal was brewing for Representative Anthony Weiner is not your typical conservative avenger, an investigation by The Smoking Gun has determined.

Mike Stack, a 39-year-old New Jersey resident, is known as “goatsred” in the Twitterverse, where he has helped lead a months-long assault on the New York City politician. Stack was joined at the hip in this pursuit by “patriotusa76,” who gave his name as “Dan Wolfe” and was the online avenger who happened last Friday night to discover the notorious tweet emanating from Weiner’s account.

As TSG reported yesterday, “Dan Wolfe” has conveniently evaporated in the wake of “Weinergate.” In fact, today Wolfe's entire Twitter page was deleted.

But Stack, the other Twitter Twin, remains online. An examination of his background has discovered:

* Stack, who aggressively pushed the story about Weiner’s underpants shot, has worked as a moderator on a pornography web site, and been a regular commenter on several other X-rated sites. Stack describes himself as a “Pervert” on one site, where his avatar, captioned “Antichrist,” is a drawing of President Barack Obama as Jesus Christ.

* New Jersey court records show that Stack was convicted of drunk driving in February 2008. He was previously arrested for domestic assault in July 2004 following a drunken fight that left his girlfriend with bruises on her arm (that case, though, ended with a dismissal in April 2005). Stack is pictured above in a mug shot taken by the Readington Township Police Department following his 2004 collar.

* Stack has twice declared bankruptcy during the past 14 years. His most recent Chapter 7 case ended in July 2008, around the time Stack lost his Hunterdon County home to foreclosure. At the time of that filing, Stack reported working as a warehouseman for Johnson & Johnson.

* The Internal Revenue Service last year filed a $5907 federal tax lien against Stack.

“The past is the past,” Stack said in an interview today. Describing himself as a “private person,” he added, “there’s no reason my records need to be public.”

Stack also contended that while he sent out the May 5 tweet first hinting that a “big time” Congressman was about to be ensnared in a sex scandal, he claimed that Wolfe actually provided him that information. Wolfe, Stack said, told him that he had heard the rumor from a source who worked for a well-known conservative web site.

After Stack sent out the initial tweet, Wolfe quickly ran with the rumor, attributing it--“via@goatsred”--to his online buddy. In retweets, Wolfe immediately attached Weiner’s name to the rumor, wondering “@RepWeiner are you this Congressman?” Stack did not have an explanation as to why Wolfe sought to launder the rumor through him. He also vehemently denied that he was Wolfe.

While Stack’s rap sheet and financial calamities may be of interest to “Weinergate” followers, his affiliation with porn sites might raise the eyebrows of the conservative coterie with which he is affiliated.

Probably not. We already know that hypocrisy is the currency of Republican and conservative politics. How else to explain the presence of potential GOP candidates at a conclave put together by a so-called "Christian leader" who, as Dennis G. points out, was exposed in the Jack Abramoff probe as "a money grubbing, hypocrite who had no problem scamming Christians into support gambling, human trafficking, sex slavery and forced abortions just to make a fast buck." John Edwards deserves everything that can be thrown at him for the same kind of hypocrisy that we usually see among Republicans -- passing himself off as a devoted husband to political supporters while fucking a grifter on the side. But it's becoming ever more clear with every scam that the Breitbart/O'Keefe axis comes up with, or that guys like Mike Stack (not to be confused with Mike Stark, whose modus operandi is only to make Rush Limbaugh look stupid on Limbaugh's own radio show) come up with, that conservatives will do anything...anything...and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

And by the way, what the hell are we growing in New Jersey, that both this guy Stack AND James O'Keefe were raised here?

Labels: faux moral outrage, manufactured scandals, Republican lies

The Republican meme on Medicare seems to be that the Ryan plan won't eliminate Medicare because no one CURRENTLY IN THE PROGRAM will be affected. Of course, if you are NOT currently on Medicare, then all bets are off. "But the Ryan plan keeps everyone over 55 on the current program!", you might say, or might have heard. But here's the problem: Do you honestly think that Gen-X voters are going to allow the current Medicare program to stay intact when the late-year boomers and themselves will not be able to obtain benefits? As I've written before, I have FRIENDS who are Gen-Xers who blame us for everything, and it's only a short path from "All boomers voted for Reagan" to "Why should you get something I don't" to "Why don't you all just fucking die already?"

It's only a matter of time.

The evil genius of the Ryan plan is that it gets those pesky elderly voters -- those currently in the existing program -- off their backs and hopefully away from the polls in the immediate future, under the assumption that "greedy geezers" won't care about whether their children and grandchildren are able to rely on obtaining medical care in their old age. It remains to be seen whether this is a valid assumption, but 57% of those polled in a recent Kaiser Health survey favor keeping Medicare as a guaranteed plan.

What we don't know is how that number would be affected if people understood that the "vouchers" in the Ryan plan would cover less than 1/3 of the cost of the average health insurance plan, that their value would NEVER be increased, and that the Ryan plan contains NO requirement that insurance companies from which the elderly would now be trying to buy policies "take all comers." Because the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that is also part of the Republican agenda, current safeguards against cherry-picking would disappear, meaning that the nation's elderly would now receive vouchers that don't cover anywhere near the cost of premiums, let alone care itself, to buy insurance from private for-profit companies that don't want CHILDREN with health problems, let alone the elderly.

The Ryan plan is relying on "I Got Mine And Fuck You" for support. The question is whether voters are going to take their attention away from Anthony Weiner's penis long enough to understand how Paul Ryan essentially wants the nation's citizens, once they become elderly, to do as former Rep. Alan Grayson so succinctly put the Republican health care plan, "die quickly."

And if you think you are off the hook because you are 55, remember: Gen-X is right behind us, and all to many of that cohort would be perfectly happy to have us dead NOW.

Labels: generational conflict, Medicare

Last Friday, Randi Rhodes had a hysterically funny opening to her show about how much the incoherent babblings of Sarah Palin are reminiscent of the infamous Miss Teen South Carolina Map Fracas of 2007.

You decide:

Labels: revisionist history, Sarah Palin, That Woman Is An Idiot

We keep hearing, even admidst the debt hysteria, that we have to cut taxes even further so that business will "create jobs." But when the largest companies are paying an effective tax rate of NEGATIVE 1.5%, how much more do we have to shovel into their pockets before they hire?

Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.

The companies were chosen by the CTJ to represent a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation and high tech and include – in alphabetical order – American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.

Here are the bullet points presented by the report:

• From 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion.

• All but two of the dozen companies enjoyed at least one no-tax year over the 2008-10 period, despite reporting substantial pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years.

• Eight of the twelve companies reported net tax benefits over the full three-year period.

According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate.

In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% – a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion.

And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.

Here is my favorite part – had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes.

We sure could use that money.

This morning, another in the parade of GOP idiots in Congress, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, was spouting the GOP talking point about "small businesses" being the engine of hiring. John McCain was spouting this nonsense in 2008, and was debunked by Factcheck.org, which noted that when the U.S. Small Business Administration refers to about 26.8 million small businesses, it includes about 20 million "non-employer" firms -- which includes people who sell their stuff on e-bay, the couple in the town next to me who have an errand-running service, the catsitter I use when we go away for a weekend, or Mr. Brilliant charging someone fifty bucks to de-virus their PC. These "small businesses" don't hire people, and the file at personal tax rates -- which means that corporate tax cuts do NOTHING to foster hiring.

So I repeat: The tax cuts originally advocated and signed by George W. Bush have been in place for a decade. The biggest companies not only pay no taxes, but got money back.

So...where are the jobs?

Labels: corporatism, greed, Republican lies, utter horseshit

No, I'm not talking about Chris Christie, who is being nominated for sainthood on Morning Schmoe even as I speak for writing a check to reimburse the state of New Jersey, a state in which everyone is being called upon to sacrifice, for taking a state police chopper to his son's baseball game and then having a limo waiting to drive him 100 yards to his seat.

No, I'm talking about Rick Scott of Florida, for whom questions are finally being raised in the mainstream press (thank you, Rachel Maddow, for embarrassing them into covering this) about his penchant for drug testing the immediate world -- and his own financial interest in such drug testing:

One of the more popular services at Solantic, the urgent care chain co-founded by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, is drug testing, according to Solantic CEO Karen Bowling.

Given Solantic's role in that marketplace, critics are again asking whether Scott's policy initiatives - this time, requiring drug testing of state employees and welfare recipients - are designed to benefit Scott's bottom line.

The Palm Beach Post reported in an exclusive story two weeks ago that while Scott divested his interest in Solantic in January, the controlling shares went to a trust in his wife's name.

This raised a groundswell of concern and questions about his health policy initiatives, especially his push to move Medicaid into private HMOs. Solantic does not take Medicaid but does business with private Medicaid HMOs. The questions are growing louder with Scott's executive order on drug testing.

Gee, ya think?

This is today's Republican governance -- populated by greedy rich bastard/crooks like Rick Scott, and I-Got-Mine-And-Fuck-You grifter/suckers at the public teat like Chris Christie.

And you want to give power back to these people? Are you f***ing kidding me?

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, Greedy Republican Bastards, grifters

The web site is up. The show hits Current TV on June 20.

DVRs are going to be busy, because once Olbermann left MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell cast caution to the winds and keeps getting better.

Labels: Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell

Angry Black Lady explains it all for you.

Labels: Anthony Weiner, Clarence Thomas, Republican brownshirts

Harry Camping's very believable and credible threat that the world would begin to end and the Rapture would occur on May 21st didn't materialize, to the surprise and even disappointment of millions of evangelicals. Bewildered and eager to save face, the Family Radio Network's Camping and his $18,400,000 in donations last year disappeared and reemerged days later to say that he'd, once again, made a miscalculation. Now Camping is saying that May 21st was the day God completed his list of who's naughty or nice and the world will indeed end on October 21st. So how are evangelicals preparing for the second Rapture of the year?

10) If second Rapture fails, to nervously laugh to ex-bosses, psychiatrists and creditors that they were in on the hoax all along and were satirizing Camping.

9) Giving Camping perhaps only half of life savings and kids' college funds as an initial down payment next time around.

8) Job creators will no longer tell employees they will be on their own so they can have sex orgies in the break room.

7) To maybe not boast next time to their HMO, "Go fuck yourselves. I got a better health care plan!"

6) To keep tending their gardens and yards because dandelions get so out of control so quickly.

5) Vetting Camping by actually reading the Bible this time and noting there's no mention of a fucking Rapture in the Revelations of St. John the Divine.

4) Change the litter box. Seriously. Just trust us on this one.

3) Getting a second opinion from other senile non-ministers or theological amateurs who've already lived 15 years past the average life expectancy.

2) Investing in anti-gravity boots to help speed things along.

1) As a backup plan, donating campaign contributions with last of savings to the Republican Party to finish the job in case Camping's wrong about Armageddon again.

"Just another five feet to the limo, Governor." "(Puff, wheeeeeeeze.) I don't think I can (huff) make it, Cory!"

I've been waiting for Jill Hussein, New Jersey blogger extraordinaire, to mention the latest antics of her noxious blimp of a Governor Chris Christie. But, as she's gotten my back on countless occasions, I guess I'll have to return the favor.

As is usual with stories of Republican fuckuppery and hypoChristie, it starts out outrageous then by paragraph two it just gets worse.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie--who has made government reform a major talking point of his administration--is coming under fire for his decision to travel in a state-owned helicopter to his son's high school baseball game Monday.

Then the money shot:

According to the Newark Star-Ledger, Christie landed in the state's $12.5 million helicopter just before the game began, buzzing over the trees in left field and distracting spectators. The GOP governor then got into a black sedan with tinted windows, which drove him about 100 yards to the baseball diamond.

You read that right. The fat fuck couldn't be bothered to waddle the 100 yards between the illicitly-appropriated chopper and the ball field.

Then, they stayed for just five innings, drove back to the chopper and somehow, the poor machine achieved takeoff and stayed aloft long enough to get Christie's fat ass back to the state house.

They're making lot of hay over this in the Jersey press but what every one seems to ignore is that there were two vehicles involved because where ever the helicopter went, the sedan had to follow. All told, with gas at $4 a gallon and helicopter fuel (for turbine engines, that translates to "very clean kerosene") going for more than that... Well, let's break it down:

A five seat turbine helicopter, according to this expert, burns about "25 to 30 gallons an hour."

According to this website, the price of clean kerosene in New York statewide reached 434.6 per gallon as of April, which is actually $4.34, or more than gasoline. We don't know where Christie came from because his Reichstagg won't reveal that but say he flew the 70 miles from Princeton each way, that's 140 miles. At a modest speed of, say, 70 mph (or about as fast as a military transport helicopter can carry Christie's bulk), that means the state chopper burned 50-60 gallons of kerosene jet fuel. At, say, $4.34 a gallon, that means it cost the New Jersey taxpayer about $217-260.40, not including the cost of a full-size sedan to follow that same helicopter both ways, just to haul Christie's fat ass a grand total of 200 yards.

I'll leave it you to calculate the cost of gasoline for that limo.

I guess when Christie was in high school and college, he was dreaming about tap-dancing Twinkies singing, "Eat me, eat me!" during math and economics classes. And only a Republican criminal oligarch would call for sacrifices to be made by working-class people when this corrupt piece of shit is pretending that he's the president taking Marine One chopper rides that cost hundreds in taxpayer funds just to catch a few innings of a high school baseball game.

Personal security? Please. Show me the last New Jersey governor who ever got assassinated while in office. This was privileged laziness, nothing more.

One of the things I had to do as part of the mountainous learning curves of my current job is to become versed in the jargon of oncology. Terms like RECIST, CTCAE grading, various forms of cancer classification, are now part of my daily vocabulary. I don't like having to look at the data from oncology trials, because the minute you look at the data, the 40 or 50 patients in an early trial become actual people -- people with cancer, usually advanced cancer, looking for any hope at all.

And so it was with a particular form of dread that I processed the news that former Mets catcher Gary Carter has been diagnosed with an inoperable, aggressive, stage 4 glioblastoma.

If you weren't a Mets fan in 1985, it's hard to relate to the excitement that fans had at the news that Gary Carter was coming to "our team." Frank Cashen, one of the smartest baseball guys ever to serve as general manager of a ball team, had hit upon the right formula for building a winning franchise -- grow talent from within, and anchor that young talent with solid veterans who still had a few good years ahead of them. Keith Hernandez was the first of those solid veterans, who came to the Mets in 1983 in the Great Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey Swindle. Carter was the second.

Carter was the yin to Hernandez' yang. Hernandez was smart, intense, aggressive. Carter was just as smart, just as intense, just as aggressive, but he covered it all with a smile that made you feel as if the sun had just come out on a rainy day. There isn't a player active today who plays with the same sheer joy that Gary Carter did. There was a reason they called him "Kid." You always had the sense that he'd play even if they didn't pay him.

Mike Lupica, on Carter in a play in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that is now all but forgotten in the drama of the Bill Buckner debacle:

Carter was the first one up with two outs and nobody on and the Mets about to lose the World Series to the Red Sox. This was Gary Carter, who helped make the Mets legit the way Keith Hernandez did before him, who had to keep Game 6 and that Saturday night and the World Series alive. Tough out.

This was Gary Carter, the catcher that year, already on his way to the Hall of Fame but now having gotten the stage in New York after all his years with the Montreal Expos, who was down to his last strike against Calvin Schiraldi, the Red Sox closer.

And in the quiet of the Mets clubhouse later that night, long after Saturday night had become Sunday morning, Carter repeated something he had been saying since one of the most famous baseball games ever played in the city of New York had ended.

One last reporter asked Carter what he was thinking when he stepped to the plate and he said, "I was thinking that I wasn't going to make the last out of the World Series."

It was the same thing he had said to first base coach Bill Robinson after Carter singled to left off Schiraldi and started the greatest half-inning the Mets have ever played. And in the excitement of the moment, Gary Carter might have used the kind of language we never used to hear from him in the clubhouse.

"I wasn't making the last out of the ----ing World Series," is the way Bill Robinson used to tell it.

Gary Carter has always been the nice guy, the affable guy, but that affability masked a will of steel. I hope that will of steel, and the outpouring of love, prayers, and support that have come from all quarters in the wake of this terrible news, serve him well as he deals with a therapy that is still all about burn-and-poison, because there just isn't anything else to do.

We'll be here in the stands rooting for him. Because when you're a Mets fan, you're used to having your heart broken, and our hearts are broken today. But just when you think all is lost, they pull off a miracle.

Gary Carter has already been part of one miracle when his team in 1986 managed to pull out a win no one expected them to, in the bottom of the 10th. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, The Kid can pull off another one.

Labels: cancer, New York Mets, sports