Friday, March 06, 2009

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) You were very nearly dead on Monday.

2) Republicans might think about logging onto this website.

3) It's nice to see they are as fucking loony as ever, and perhaps more so.

4) Poor iddle boombooms, works 100 hours a week to be rich! And I bet he has a housewife who raises his kids and sees them off to school, and yada yada yada, cuz you know what? That's a 168 hour workweek and you don't get three hours to edit a frikkin' crybaby rant, you lousy scumsucking pencilneck!

5) It's as if the entire state of Nevada lost their jobs. 8.1% unemployment. And to think, this could all have been fixed back in 2007 when I was warning people about this.

6) Wild shrimp really ARE wild!

7) Um, Too Much Information?

8) Hang on...you mean you can find sex on Craigslist? And here I was using it to sell old furniture!

9) If you're able to save money, you're hardly "getting by" and shouldn't bill yourself as such.

10) And to take this full circle, we might all be dead next Friday, too.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

The Rush To Cluelessness

Lord, I rarely pray for anything for myself, but please, PLEASE, let this come to pass:
Limbaugh, clearly enjoying the attention, upped the ante Wednesday by challenging Obama to a debate on his radio show - while conceding that, yes, he is the GOP's "last man standing." The White House declined to comment.

"If you can wipe me out in a debate ... do you realize you will own the United States of America?" Limbaugh said on-air. "You will have no opposition."

The schadenfreude would be so tasty.

Indeed, I endorse Limbaugh's boast, and second his recommendation.

Rush, since I know you read this blog from time to time, I have the following strategy outlined for you. Now, this is off the top of my head so please pardon the napkin.

OK, so, first, announce your candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 2012. This is the only way you'll ever get to debate Barack Obama is if he views you as his equal, because Presidents can't be bothered debating the common private citizen. It might take away from unimportant things like, say, running the country or fixing the mess Bush left behind.

You'll have to resign your radio post, naturally, in order to devote as much time as possible to campaigning, but a rich man like yourself can afford to do this, even if you'll have to cut corners here and there.

Next, it seems your image will require a make-over. Only 11% of Republicans believe you speak for the party and a similar percentage of voters under 30 think you have any relevance in politics.

See, if you don't resign your radio post, other Republican candidates would be entitled to equal air time, plus your radio network would be socked with FEC penalties, since it would be donating to your campaign on a daily basis to the extent of any advertising revenue they share with the stations they give the program to.

That's right: Rush's program is given away to stations, in exchange for a percentage of the ad revenues those stations enjoy. This is common for right wing radions.

So you're not really losing any income, since the radio program per se makes no income on its own merit.

Too, all those advertisers would be forced to stop paying their fees, since those too would be construed as campaign contributions, and while they'll happy pony up ad money to get your listeners' ears, based on that whole "11%" number up there, they sure as heck would run, not walk, away from being seen as endorsing you.

Well, maybe some of the male enhancement products you shill might stick around. After all, three divorces with a fat tub of goo body and a nasty ugly mouth and mind to match, you must have something going on in those trousers.

Like your wallet. I hope you don't think any of your wives actually loved you. Or your mommy, for that matter.

But I digress. Back to campaign advice.

OK, so to make you relevant again, here's what I propose: a sex scandal, preferably one involving illegal drugs. After all, if Barack Obama could win a landslide election after admitting cocaine use in his autobiography, it ought to be a slamdunk for you to abuse, say, Oxycontin with illegal prescriptions.

Or maybe Viagra. Bob Dole uses it, and look what it's done for his political career!

So that takes care of the drug end, but to make doubly sure to make you "hip" we need to get you to put "sexay" back into that swagger. I'm thinking a series of affairs with women young enough to be your grandkids.

Now, I know, in America this would be illegal, and possibly get you married for a fourth time to a kid in a Miley Cyrus T-shirt, so we probably want to import these girls.

Or boys! All the kids experiment with their sexuality, and certainly Larry Craig and Mark Foley weren't tarnished at all by their dalliances in public.

So. Now. Having made you relevant to the kids...we need to find a way to make you stand out from the other candidates. As you've so often pointed out, Barack Obama stood out from the other candidates by the colour of his skin, and I'm thinking that's the way to go here.

I propose we make you the anti-Barack. We paint your skin white...no, I mean even whiter than it is now. Mime white. And to highlight your porcine eyes, so that people won't think you're squinting, we find a good make up artist to put eyeshadow and mascara on you.

Also, blush. There are already rampant rumours after your speech at CPAC that you're dying, and painting you really white will make people think you have lung cancer or something. We need to put some of those rosy cheeks back on you! Also, since pure white tends to flatten and distort contours, I suggest perhaps a fake nose, one that stands out a bit. Maybe round. And red! Yes, that's it!

OK, I see you have the baggy pants thing down. Good. We don't want to frighten women out there with the size of your wallet, or frankly, the dust on it (I hear things). Keep them baggy. In fact, you can go even baggier. There's no such thing as too baggy, you should know.

Your feet, though. Those seem freakishly small and if there's one thing Americans can't stand, it's someone who can't fill the shoes of the man preceding him, and Obama has some big-ass shoes you'd have to fill.

In order to distract people from this, I suggest you wear shoes a few sizes too big. In fact, you could go way over the top here to demonstrate your ability to fill anybody's shoes, and wear like a size thirty.

We'll want to call attention to this outrageous shoe size of yours...you know what they say, big shoes big socks...so the shoes should be really red and make a honking noise or something.

Now, your shirts are usually pretty nice altho I think you want to draw attention away from the fact that your throat usually oozes out of the neckline. I suggest a really broad collar.

I know you have your own line of ties, and I've seen them. I think they are perfect for what we are trying to accomplish here. They attract attention, they are bright, and they really put your torso into perspective. Keep those.

Now, it troubles me to go here, but...your hair.

I think you might have too much for a white man to run for President these days. It reminds people that Bush had hair, and the last person you want to be compared with is George Bush, at least until history has its say.

I think you need to go balder. OK, you don't have to shave. Maybe a bald wig, or at least a balding wig. With fringes of hair around the side. Yea, that ought to do it. And so that people notice you've lost your hair, I suggest a change from the mousy brown to something bold. After all, you're all about bold, so how about neon yellow or bright orange?

Now I think you're ready to run for President. You'll stand out and truly, you will represent that 11% of a 28% minority of this nation that you claim as your followers!


UPDATE: David Frum, of all people, gets it, and compares Limbaugh of the 00s to Jesse Jackson of the 80s. Clever boy!

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Twit-Ters

Twitter is for twits.

I'm not basing this on Jon Stewart's breathtaking analysis of the phenomenon. I'm judging this solely on the seat-of-the-pants reaction I have to a) the concept and b) the fact that the Republicans are treating it as the end-all and be-all of the next wave of politics.



The idiotic concept:
Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept. When he brought the idea up to his colleagues, it was decided that a prototype should be built.

Now, how many people could possibly be so vain that they think the rest of the entire fucking planet gives a rat's ass about what they are doing on a blow-by-blow basis?

People are dying in wars in Africa and Asia. People here at home are hanging onto their homes by their fingernails. We have a budget crisis unlike anything that's ever come before, coupled with an economic disaster the size of the universe and you mean to tell me the most interesting thing you can think of is some friend missed brushing his teeth this morning????

My god, and then you wonder how the hell the Republican party remains relevant to the national dialogue?

The folks at Twitter will tell you this is just another means of "staying connected".

Right. Maybe that's a really bad idea? Maybe the ability of someone to instantly beam that they've just masturbated to your phone or e-mail is invasive, nasty, and just too much information? Maybe the idea that I need to know what my Congresscritter's thoughts on bass fishing is a bad one?

I'm sure, if used properly, Twitter makes sense. Maybe if you are keeping track of some sales agents in the field or something. But here's the thing: we're humans. We don't USE things properly. We alter them, distort them, and customize them to how we see fit.

And so you have enormous amounts of bandwidth wasted on messages that tell the rest of the planet "Hey! I'm eating pasta for dinner!"

My god, how lonely do you have to be to send that? Worse, how lonely do you have to be to read that?

The Republicans have jumped on the Twitter like flies to shit, and here's why: you can soundbite your way to renown. You don't have to explain, you don't have to detail, you can send messages to your followers, errr, such as they are, without saying a whole lot.

In effect, Twittering is the American Idol of communication. Soft, plump, fluffy, and intrusive and ultimately without any merit or value and likely destructive in the long term. Like a marshmallow Rambo.

If there was no other reason available not to Twitter, the fact that the "Know Nothings" have jumped in with both feet should be enough to give you pause.

Now, I know I've just pissed off a bunch of people who I like and even respect, because I see Twits all over the place. They can consider this an intervention, if they like, a shaking at the shoulders and a slap across the face saying, "Good god, where is your humanity???"

Or if they want to continue in denial, then they can consider this the cranky rant of a crackpot. Either way, it makes no difference. I've got it off my chest, and I could do it in more than 140 characters.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Epic Fail

Often, I hear the accusation from right wingers who visit my humble little blog that I use a quotation from a fictitious character at the top of the page to defend my liberalism.

True. It was a line of dialogue from a character, Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits), on the West Wing.

Quoting a fictitious character has one great advantage, however. I don't have to defend his life to anyone:
The conventional strategy in such cases is for the administration in power to avoid talking about a mere radio critic. That would elevate him to the level of the president.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what the Obama team wants.

On Sunday's "Face the Nation," Rahm Emanuel was more than happy to build up Rush: "He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, and he has been up front about what he views, and hasn't stepped back from that, which is he hopes for failure. He said it, and I compliment him on his honesty. But that's their philosophy that's enunciated by Rush Limbaugh and I think that's the wrong philosophy for America."
Rush has this coming, to be sure. He has spent the past thirty years deconstructing, even destroying, good politicians and policies not for the greater good of the nation, but for the greater good of Rush Limbaugh's wallet.

And called himself a "comedian" to boot. Remember, nothing he says should be taken seriously, yet it almost always is by the ignorant rabble that infest this great nation.

I made an observation on another blog yesterday that stupid and evil share a symbiotic relationship. There are sweet spots in this symbiotic relationship which can be and are exploited.

"Wingnut welfare" it's been called: the inability of a certain class of people to get and hold productive jobs has created a class of people whose only job is to mock and tear the rest of us who actually DO produce things of value down.

What do these untermenschen want? To quote from Lance Mannion:
They need an alternative history in which being angry, selfish, resentful, greedy, and defensive of nothing but their own right to be angry, selfish, resentful, and greedy is the definition of patriotism and in which instead of standing in the way of progress it's the way to bring it about.

Hear hear!

The grunt work for this newspeak is done not by the people who most loudly advocate for it, no no! That would be heroic, but it would also mean taking a public stance which would immediately erode their influence!

Instead, the grunt work is done by the commoners, even if those commoners hold fairly respectable positions like Member of Congress, Senator, or even Party Chair. It is they who have to defend him, defend his statements and comments, and ultimately defend his life for him.

These watercarriers genuflect at the altar of the Pronouncers merely because the Pronouncers have a microphone and a network of some sort. Limbaugh has 13.5 million listeners in a single week.

That's not many in a land of 310 million, to be sure, but in a Republican party that has seen its base contract from roughly parity with the Democratic party to being ten percent behind the Democrats after eight years of Bush.

In other words, if I'm Michael Steele, I'm not apologizing, I'm sending Limbaugh packing! But 13.5 million people in a party of less than 28 million, he can't do that easily, without destroying the party itself.

It's hard to believe that less than eight years ago, Karl Rove was talking about a permanent Republican majority.

By putting Limbaugh front and center in the line of fire, Emanuel is doing what a draft board could not do: making Rush pick up a gun and defend himself.

We know from Limbaugh's history that he cannot do this, face to face. Remember the time he was to host the Pat Sajak show in 1990, and when confronted by hecklers for ACT UP, they emptied the studio out and a visibly shaken Rush was forced to kowtow to his guests?

And the clue that he has been married and divorced three times tells us that strength in the face of his rageaholism, ultimately, beats him down, that he would rather fail and give up than fight for something, anything, worth having.

Unless he's going to admit that the women he's "loved" are disposable.

Bring the sad, sadistic little clown out of hiding, and take away his microphone and his little studio, with the thick walls and the lonely little sound board. Put him in front of people and make him answer for his hatred and his terrorism.

It's like popping a big fat pus-filled angry inflamed zit: it will hurt to do, but once it's done, you can bandage up and move on.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Dog Bites Man

And conservatives consume porn faster than liberals:
Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

OK, here's the issue with this.

It's not about moral hypocrisy. People have confessed one faith while worshipping at the altar of others for millennia.

It's about economic hypocrisy. I get the sense that conservatives would like porn to be kept under the covers, errrr, so to speak, in order to monopolize the market on it.

If we lived in a truly free market enterprise society, then porn would likely be the second largest business, right after alcohol and other narcotics (I'm including cigarettes).

Period. Look at, even as tightly regulated as those markets are, how much is spent in America alone.

Porn could be the stimulus package, errrrrrrr, so to speak, that would help America recover its economy.

So what really keeps porn off the free market? Morals?

We send soldiers overseas to kill for us, yet the Bible tells us not to kill, but nothing about looking at naked men or women.

We open shops and businesses seven days a week (mostly) even though the Bible says to keep the Sabbath holy.

Indeed, about the only two outright bans on any sexuality in the Bible are the story of Onan's masturbation and the commandment that states, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and even that was less a moral statement than a statement not to screw around with your neighbor's wife (a social commentary).

So how is it on the one hand, conservatives can claim moral higher ground in preventing the distribution of pornography, and on the other hand, utilize it so dramatically?

Errr, so to speak.

The only logical reason I can come up with, errrr, so to speak, is to monopolize the market on it, to prevent those who might limit the supply conservatives have enjoyed from obtaining it.

You know, teenagers.

Which brings up an entire other can of worms regarding the attitudes of this nation towards horny teenagers and sex.

But that, I'm afraid, is probably best left to another column. Or to Bristol Palin.

March Snowstorm


snow day 003
Originally uploaded by actor212
Yes. We had a significant snowfall for the first time this season.

No, I did not get a snow day.

Rat fucking bastards...

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Buy More Tea

The ridiculous sight of a few dozen assholes corporate sheeple braving the chilly airs off Lake Michigan notwithstanding, it turns out the entire Chicago Tea Party (and the sister movement in DC, as well as others) was a sham, orchestrated and staged by the conservative wing of the Republican party:
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm..,and the proof?
“Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

(hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for making sure this hit the spotlights)

Which now makes Santelli's fifteen minutes of fame extension (e.g. the claim that Obama's White House was now investigating him based on some really crappy evidence that only a real paranoid, a coward, or a Republican (which by definition is a paranoid coward) would dare extrapolate from.

Just in case, you know, you thought the Republicans were done being rat bastards...