bin Deaden, bin Shark Bait, bin Shot in the Eye.

You were looking for a theme for our foreign policy. While I think that
of course is a media driven contrivance, bumper-stickers work. Bookend
this with the Cairo speech, and use the Arab Spring as the meat of the
sandwich ... then repeat this slogan: "America, FUCK YEAH!"



W. got a call from POTUS before the announcement. Thanked Barry for the
heads-up, congratulated all involved, and pronounced "Bong Hits for
Everyone" from an undisclosed location.  Other than that, he still doesn't care. Just like nobody gives a damn what Dick Cheney has  to say, so just go away.

Ghadaffi has run out of pants he's shit himself so much in the last 24 hours.

May Day...Anniversary of "Mission Accomplished" speech... and while Barack was waiting to hear
results from Pakistan he pointed out Trump's difficult decision making
expertise in deciding Gary Busy had to be fired because he failed to
give Meatloaf proper supervision at Taco Bell. Nice that he waited
until after The Apprentice showed to interrupt network programming
though. Showed class.

In an utter corruption of the words of Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan, she praised, "the Return of Competence." (Okay, that's actually a fairly direct quote.) How's that for your Bumper Sticker.  Right now, does it really matter that he's a secret Muslim/Commie/Kenyan when you can retort ... Yeah, but HE got Osama bin Laden.  Dropped a house on him, shot him in the eye and dumped the fucker's body in the ocean.  You're going to have to get wet to find the Long-Form Death Certificate.

Fox Noise had it's own slant on the story, but Osama with a B instead of an S was small ball compared with al Jazeera insisting in it's chyron that drones carried out the attack after they carried the President's speech live, which spelled out how this was a manned operation.  Another interesting juxtaposition was their "experts" insisting that the American people (who they were showing celebrating in front of the White House) would insist on DNA evidence and a picture of an American soldier standing next to Osama's corpse.  That was 180 degrees from CNN's "experts" saying the Arab World would insist on strong evidence of the same. 

Lament there wasn't a trial before the World Court, accuse us of Beowulf Ethics all you want my lefty friends, the Freeperati can out-crazy any hippie and is still bummed a terrorist is living in the White House.  These tea-baggers no doubt will feel even more marginalized in a coffee caffeinated nation when they hear the resounding chant: "America, FUCK YEAH!"

Bernie Sanders' Guide To corporate Freeloaders

Spread This Chart

Dudes! (Shout out to Wisconsin)

I do mind, the Dude minds.
This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.

Yeah, it's been a while.  Glad to see you're still alive too.  I said (well, tweeted actually) "I'm out" if the Bush welfare program for millionaires continued, and it did, and I am ... or at least was ... out.  Can't get fired up defending the status quo that is masquerading as change.  Wasn't surprised, only mildly disappointed that the corporate kleptocracy continues it's hold, but encouraged that there still is some backbone to what used to be considered middle-class values and now is labeled liberal/progressive/leftist.

What can I say? I'm a Dude.  Not in a guy way, a Dude way:

A dude is an individual, typically male, particularly somebody
well dressed or who has never lived outside a big city. The female
equivalent, which is used less often, is "dudette" or "dudess". However,
"dude" has evolved to become more unisex to encompass all genders,^[3] and this was true even in the 1950s.^[4]

So yeah. Chicks can be Dudes.  They do it better sometimes. Think of it as an honorific, like when a female Midshipman graduates from Annapolis.  They still salute her and call her "sir."

Mind you, there are dudes that give other Dudes a bad name.  Surfer/Stoner dudes with generally no clue usually achieve full Dude-dom when enlightenment hits and they awaken from their slumber.  (It's in all the movies, that's why we love Dudes.  They ain't as stupid as they'd like to be. They even manage to save the universe while finding their ride, man.) It's Dude Time in America, or at least Madison, Wisconsin.

No, Wisconsin ain't Egypt - and the Midwest ain't the Middle East.  But after these pricks are done union-busting and ruling by decree in Madison, they're going to set their sights on Ohio.  And I think we might as well get ready.

WSJ: For a second straight day, thousands of Wisconsin public employees converged on the state capitol in Madison to protest Gov. Scott Walker's plan to close the state's projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall by increasing the cost of their pensions and health benefits and taking away their collective bargaining rights.

If they get away with this there in Wisconsin, they'll try it everywhere. For the honor of becoming a public employee you are no longer merely a public servant, but now are a public serf.

Now we don't dream of letting the military go on strike, of putting benefits, pay, sick leave and work hours up to a vote of the soldiers. Vital security stuff, right.  So their theory is that should also go for safety services like fire fighters and police.  Essential services shouldn't be allowed to even collectively bargain so goes the slippery slope -- just ask the Air Traffic Controllers who were the very first target of the ongoing Reagan Revolution.

Aren't all government services, "vital" in one way or another?  Where does one draw the line?  Newsflash: All Politics is about drawing lines.  All laws are subject to that imaginary line where a "reasonable man" believes the whole thing could fall off a cliff - and doesn't think we should cross that barrier.

"We're at a point of crisis," Mr. Walker told reporters.

You bet your sweet ass we are, Governor.  There are rules to this game, physical laws of the universe that the Wingnuts have forgotten along the way.  Rule one is don't piss off the vast apathetic hoards enough to put down their remote controls and put on their marching shoes.  The only thing that keeps the wall street types in enough caviar, cash and campaign donations to buy capital buildings throughout the land is the overwhelming numbers of people that simply don't give a crap.

As long as there's a couple of layers of flim-flam between "what they do" and"how does it affect me," these guy can get away with murder.  Sometimes literally. (Illegal wars, rendition and torture anyone?)

The bait-n-switch game continues indefinitely as long as there's an ample scoop of deniability.  But when they rub it in our faces, actually start doing the things proposed on their bumper-sticker slogans and focus group tested sound-bytes - those simpleton fixes for complicated policy considerations masked as  middle-class panaceas funded by the Fortune 500 (who didn't get that way by looking out for the little guy) - the sleepers will awaken. 

"Oh no, really. All those things that are good for Big Oil, Big Telecom, and Halliburton are good for you too." We've always knew that was crap, just like we all know TV wrestling is fake, faith healers and magicians stage their "miracles" with smoke, mirrors and plants in the audience, and that snake oil claiming to make you bigger and last longer really is oil of snake. 

Dudes will be dudes, and will look the other way when it suits them. Sometimes they get caught looking the wrong way, cuz dudes can be, and often are distracted. But they know what they want. Simple creatures with simple desires.

Sure, there's always going to be that 20% of the idiot-cracy that buys into the crap, where belief is stronger than any factually based argument.  There will always be birthers and flat-earthers, those rubes born every minute who paid full price for Sarah Palin's second book.  But just because they got motivated enough to take advantage of an exhausted, laurel-resting majority that just wanted to get back to not caring anymore and win some power back in an off-year election marred by low-turnout and hyperventilating wackos, that doesn't mean they can get away with screwing us over. 

We all had teachers we liked. If we didn't, we're stupid dumbfucks who can't get enough of Limbaugh and Beck, which explains a lot.  You don't screw with teachers, or the guys who collect the trash, fill the potholes, build the bridges, keep our water clean and our street safe.  You don't do that, even if you think unions aren't just a collection of working men and women, but some evil cabal sent from Stalin's grave.  You don't do that without pissing enough of us off to start marching and protesting and ... voting.

So, to all you dudes out there who never erased me from your RSS feeds, or still pick this thing up via Twitter and the dreaded Facebook.  What Up?  Where do we sign up?  When do we stand up?

Who do we follow?

Interesting Game Of Who Does The Least

This bugs me.

The GOP/T-Baggers have been crying about the "radical" agenda of the evil Obama/Pelosi Kommunist Kabal, and have been doing everything in their power to stop it, ie. filibustering everything in sight.

The Dems, for their part, have made their frustration with the obstructionist Repubican'ts palpable, yet at the same time boast how much they've accomplished.  Truly, by historic terms this current Congress and the first half of the first term of the Obama administration must qualify as "transformational."  Although we're still in trouble economically, blame for which has not (yet) stuck to this president, the new direction we are heading cements his place in history.

Health care.  That alone would do the trick.  But we also have a student loan overhaul and a boost to Pell Grants, a flawed but first in a generation restructuring of financial regulation, much needed infrastructure investment, shoring up of Medicare, and a new nuclear arms agreement with Russia that would have had Ronald Reagan fans swooning. 

And tax cuts!  Don't forget tax cuts.  $288 Billion in tax cuts! For the middle class this time.  The Economic Recovery Act (fondly known in Blogtopistan as Stimzilla) really did have something for everyone - except 99% of the Republicans in Congress even though roughly half of the thing was right in line with their supply-side agenda.

So just what are the Republicans running against this year in the midterms?  (They have yet to articulate anything they are "for" in a coherent manner, but they've been bitching up a storm about both the status quo and the what the Dems want - what those commies are "for.") 

Dems: "Can't get nothing done cuz those damn Republicans won't let us - but ... but ... but ... Lookie all the crap we got done! Please send cash and reward our accomplishments even though we can't get anything done cuz we did so much!"

Reps: "Those damn Democrats are screwing everything up and we can't stop them - even though we've filibustered everything we are ... FAIL. Please send cash to reward us for doing nothing except trying to stop the Obama/Pelosi agenda, which we can totally do and completely reverse if we gain more seats in the Senate than are up for grabs and get a supermajority to impeach the President which we totally can't do!"

Progressives: "You guys totally sold us out!"

T-Baggers: "You guys are total sell-outs!"

Media: "If you look closely, you can totally see that the fuzz in my belly-button is more blue than gray, even though my shirt was mauve and .... Look! Shiny!"

Average voter: "Yawn."

ECON for the Simple

It's time to invest in jobs.

It's really not that hard.  Paul and Brad and their assorted brethren try to dumb it down for the masses, but too often eyes glaze over at even the mention of marginal rates and unemployment extensions, austerity versus stimulus, deficits and debt, stocks, bonds, markets and credit-default-swaps.

The basics are always the same, whether you're a Wall Street baron or contemplating a change in your IRA or 401k.  Buy low, sell high.  That goes for investments in real estate, a stamp collection or baseball cards.

My economics professors tried their damnest to confuse and befuddle me with their charts and graphs and technical jargon bordering on a foreign language, but even a child has an instinctive understanding of the basic principle that scarcity leads to an increase in price.  Sandy Koufax baseball jerseys are a rarity and thus you can expect to auction one off for a mint.  However, he only pitched one perfect game, and if you're planning on bidding on that unique item - the very uniform he wore on September 9, 1965, plan on outbidding the Sultan of Dubai.

The converse is naturally true.  Surplus equals a lower price. It there's a glut on the market, like what happens when you can poke a hole any old place in the ground and black gold gushers up to the surface (and you manage to collect it instead of just pouring it into the sea), the price goes down. 

A lot of factors go into deflating prices from surplus.  Competition among sellers tends to bid a price lower.  Cost savings from mass production permits an increase in profit, which can be cut without hurting owners/shareholders in order to gain greater market share. (Okay, this is starting to sound like the jargon I used to hate, but bear with me.) 

Economies of Scale also affect prices, where you can afford to buy in bulk at a reduced wholesale cost, divvy the goods up into smaller portions and sell them for more than it cost you per unit originally.  Wall Mart does this on a mammoth scale, but so does your local pot dealer who buys two pound bricks and sells you a couple of joints for the Bon Jovi concert.

In fact, economies of scale, as well as the notion that a surplus won't last forever leading to price inflation in the market over time, compels an investor to buy items that can be had at surplus pricing before the market reacts.  Some deals won't last forever.

Grumbling that that things just won't stay the way they are, Alan Greenspan misses the point, not surpirsingly since from his pampered ivory tower his self-denial and whacked-out priorities always ignore the actual lives in the balance when he ticks off unemployment statistics.  He's right, though.  Interest rates will not stay as low as they are, and credit capacity (Wall Street Speak for cash available to loan but sitting in a vault instead) will not be as great as it is forever.  But neither will there be a perpetual labor force glut with one in ten of your neighbors looking for work.  At least I hope not.

Right now we have a unique opportunity, a one of a kind, Sandy Koufax jersey moment when it comes to launching this nation into the future or flushing it all down the toilet -- missing a once a generation opportunity.  Despite the massive debt rolled up over the post-Reagan era, our government still - miraculously - has excess money it can borrow cheap. 

We can invest in people.  We can invest in jobs.  We can invest in clean energy and infrastructure.  We have a beat up labor force willing and able to work for less, and we can borrow now to pay them knowing they'll pay back the debt their employment creates with interests if we put them to work in things that will make this nation more efficient, more competitive, more self-sufficient in the future.

Build the Supertrains, the center lane for I-95 all the way from Maine to Miami, the giant windmill and solar farms, hell, even the nuke plants as long as we spend the gazzillion dollars needed to make 'em safe.  They promised us flying cars, lets build 'em, and places to park them too.  Tired of your smart phone cutting out as you travel through dead zones in the net?  We can wire the whole nation for high speed internet access, wirelessly.  It won't be done unless AT&T can figure out how to do it at a profit, or We The People decide it's worth the investment.  It'll never be cheaper to do than right now.

Lincoln built the transcontinental railways during the Civil Frickin' War people -- so don't talk to me about this not being the right time for thinking big.  It was downright bleak during World War I, but we emerged as an economic powerhouse after massive investments in mining and factories, bringing women and African Americans out of the kitchens and farms and creating a modern workforce. FDR pushed through the Alaska Highway during WWII.  Ike built the Interstate Highway system during the hottest part of the Cold War and we paid for it by borrowing and taxing millionaires 80%.

We made this country great through deficits that invested in infrastructure and people, not hand-outs to corporate moguls who we taxed, taxed, taxed instead.

We are, again, a sleeping giant that has been napping for decades.  We CAN do this.  We can if we get off our fat, pampered asses and get to work, insisting our leaders find something for us to do and pay us decently for doing it, ironically, with our own money.

See, economics is simple.  There's a lot of people who can do a lot of stuff it would have cost too much to do before Bush wreaked the country and put so many workers on the streets.  Right now, you can be bought cheap, cuz there's a lot of you who'll do those jobs Americans didn't want to do.  We need your government to invest in you while you're cheap.

If You Can't Convince Them, We Can Still Force Them

"You've convinced me - now go out and force me to do it." ~FDR

Bubba has certainly been in the news a bunch lately between his go-between role in the Sestak non-job offer nonsense and stumping for Blanche Lincoln, insulting her progressive opposition just for sport.

I was reminded of his excuse to the Netroots Nation crowd in Pittsburgh back in '09 when he was interrupted/heckled by a LGBT activist about DADT:

"You want to talk about 'don't ask, don't tell'?" Clinton said. "I'll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn't deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military."

I know I'm not alone, not by a long shot -- but I have to tell you I'm more than a bit weary of Bill Clinton wagging his finger at me as he throws bullshit my way.  We're trying to make Congress more progressive, just like he suggested.  So why is he working so hard to keep right wing Democrats in power?

As with all politicians, it's what they do, not what the say that counts.  Here we have Bill working to get one the of most notorious obstacles to health care reform reelected, a woman whose opposition to the public option nearly sank the whole effort. 

That and the Sestak thing.  Admiral Sestak was running against a guy who was a Republican a year ago for Pete's sake, and Bubba was trying to maneuver him out of the race.  At least Arlen Specter hasn't decided to pull a Lieberman.

The mind reels thinking about what things would be like -- and how far along impeachment proceedings would be by now -- had Bill Clinton been living in the White House as First Dude (no matter how extremely competent Hillary was at managing the country).  Of course, if it was John McCain there with Evita Mooselini living down the street in the Naval Observatory I've no doubt we'd be in the middle of a full blown civil insurrection caused by a complete meltdown of what was left of the world's economic systems, living in a diplomatically quarantined United States after officially being deemed a rogue nation by any decent governments left intact.  So fanciful concerns like who Slick Willie would be playing hide-the-cigar with in the Executive Mansion seem quaint by comparison.

The good news is the David Broder/Brooks bipartisan fetishists and some of the other original Clinton Derangement Syndrome victims are finally seeing Bill Clinton's support among the Democratic base dissolve.  There will be fancy dress parties and celebratory feasts in The Village toasting his political downfall ... again ... just like the last six times they thought he was through.  What happens if we ever see a real liberal in charge instead of the homogenized centrist who get painted as commie-fascists anyway?

Sure Cleveland Sux, but so does Michigan

Never Gets Old

Civil, good-natured harassment of a conservative blogger as she plays Poke-the-Liberal is more fun than a barrel of oil dumped in your swimming pool.

Rosey's back.

Reagan Sucked. Deal With It.

...and another thing, the Berlin Wall didn't fall until a full year after Bush The Elder was elected... thanks in no small part to Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, Lech Wałęsa's Solidarity, The Pope's moral focus and the people of Easter Europe desire to make a better world for their children ... well after Ronny Ray Gun had been fitted for a drool cup.

(Click for larger image)

One more point. The disintegration of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, already weakened by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact alliance, was inevitable once Russia followed the Baltic States lead and threatened to secede from the union.

Stick that in your teacup.

Newt Twit

Not only is one of the heroes of the teabagger right racially insensitive (as evident by the quote below) but he's just plain wrong on the history -- a subject The Editors point out he got paid to teach.

Krugman:  

[H]ere’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

While the Poorman went to Google to debunk Mitt RomneyCare's greatest threat beyond the Wassilla Hillbilly, I took a gander at Wikipedia and noted the Democratic Party held on to it's 60+ super-majority in the Senate well past the Johnson years, right up until 1979. They didn't lose the majority until 1981, gaining it back in '87.  The House remained safely Democratic until 1995 when Clinton lost both Houses.  Bush (43) gave them both right back to the Democrats of course in 2007.

So yeah, if by saying, "Johnson shattered
the Democratic Party for 40 years" Gingrich meant the Republicans were able to stall progress and prevent the completion of the Great Society for 40 years by gaining the White House for all but 12 of those years and it taking 30 years after the Civil Rights Act before the GOP won control of both houses of Congress, completely failing to roll-back a single tenant of the Great Society or the New Deal even when they won the White House five years later -- then sure Newt, LBJ shattered the Democratic Party. 

What. Ev. Er.