Last night after I turned my laptop off at 9 PM, I realized that there was one more critical e-mail I had to send, so I turned it back on, connected to the VPN, composed the e-mail, attached the file, and only then could I turn in, accompanied by what used to be my plump little cat Maggie, who in the last six months has been diagnosed as hyperthyroid and medicated in various ways for it, and in the last month has largely stopped eating entirely. I love this kitteh with all my heart and soul, and $1000 into various tests and diagnostics and ultrasounds, we have found that Maggie, who has lost about a third of her body weight in the last month, has either Inflammatory Bowel Disease or cancer -- and the only way to find out definitively is via a surgical biopsy, which requires general anesthesia. We decided this was far too risky for a hyper-T kitty with a heart murmur and a generally diminished condition, so we are treating it as IBD with prednisolone, and hoping that tis particular crapshoot comes out double-sixes, or whatever is a good throw in craps. We regard our pets as our children, particularly those of us who decided a long time ago that the world would be a much better place if our famiy neuroses ended with this generation, thank you very much -- and yet, they are different. We know in our minds when we excitedly bring home a new pet that this is a relationship with an expiration date, one that will come far sooner than we want. And yet we do it again, and again, and again, because of the hole in our lives that they leave when they depart. It still doesn't make it any easier. So I continue to buy the fine canned foods (and now even Bravo raw diet, which she hasn't touched either) purveyed by the nice man at the locally-owned Pet Stuff, trying valiantly to find something that will tempt a formerly-gluttonous cat who yesterday threw up the only thing she ate. And then when I get home from a thirteen-hour workday (including the driving), and I crawl into bed exhausted, and pet her and see exactly what she has become, I then have to get up and go down to the basement and cry my guts out for a half-hour until I'm even more exhausted, because Maggie is very bonded to me and gets very upset if I'm upset. This is on top of the Project That Has Utterly Consumed My Life Since Early July, which if all goes well will finally, miraculously, be released today, after which I will have to catch up on all my OTHER work, so the idea that I can exhale now is a foolish one. I was working on the Project remotely for two weeks from my sister's house in Chapel Hill, NC; after my mother had a brief sojourn with the Grim Reaper before bodyslamming him, beating the crap out of him, and then sending him back to the Ingmar Bergman movie where he belongs. She has made as astounding a recovery as someone with advanced COPD and emphysema can, and I am now back home, where I have every intention to get up tomorrow morning, go get my hair cut and colored, because I am starting to bear an alarming resemblance to Willard Rmoney, and then collapse in a fetal position in the corner. So if you want to know why I haven't been around, that's why. I want to thank my stalwart compatriots, especially jurassicpork, for picking up the slack without even asking if I needed help. I'll be back soon, as soon as I can work an eight hour day and get through it without crying over Maggie.

Labels: cats, personal musings

(A Brilliant at Breakfast exclusive.)

At the second presidential debate at Hofstra University on October 16th, Think Progress reported that Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney told 31 lies in the 41 minutes in which he spoke. This would seem to shatter Romney's short-lived record of telling 27 lies in 38 minutes in the first debate and far surpasses the mark of a mere 24 lies in 40 minutes set by his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan at the Vice Presidential debate. But of these 82 falsehoods in just under two combined hours, what were the top 10 told by Mr. Romney during the last presidential debate in Hempstead?

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10) The president was siphoning $716 billion from Medicare coverage to turn the Lincoln Bedroom into a bachelor's pad.

9) That Bain Capital didn't send American jobs to China but that we shouldn't feel too bad even if they had because their Chinese replacements "don't have rights, a union, a break room or even breaks."

8) That his running mate Paul Ryan invites himself into soup kitchens on his way to the airport and washes clean pots and pans all the time but there's no truth to the rumor that he'd once barged his way into a hospice center and cleaned a bedpan after a patient had already died.

7) Claimed that on September 12th the president waved a gigantic red, white and blue foam finger and cheered on the Benghazi terrorists from the Rose Garden.

6) He felt truly sorry for the Sensata employee who could no longer afford dance lessons for her daughter but added, "Do you have any idea what it costs for ballet lessons for a horse?!"

5) Denied ever privately saying that moderator Candy Crowley, "wouldn't fit into the biggest binder."

4) That Obama bought a Muslim prayer rug embossed with a hammer and sickle on eBay on Sen. Lindsey Graham's American Express card.

3) Sasha and Malia are bigger party animals than the Bush twins.

2) His wife Ann's personal hero is not Annie Palmer of Rose Hall infamy.

1) That his son Tagg wouldn't take it too hard after the President refused to call him a liar.

You can practically drink the flop sweat in the air, it's so thick. And leave it to the Republican Party to pull the ultimate card, employee intimidation, to try to pull off a November surprise that a five year-old can tell them ain't gonna happen. Yes, during the year when we've bullied bullying in the classroom and the schoolyard, the GOP actually thinks bullying your employees into voting Republican is a good tactic.

Check out this clip of Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh on the 13th talking to, predictably, old white people. He tells his constituents that if they run a business, now would be a great time to "energize" their employees and tell them to vote Republican... or else. Joe's about to become the first guy in political history to get his ass kicked by a woman with no legs.

And it seems right around the same time some asshole named David Siegel basically threatened to fire all his employees if Obama got re-elected, and right around the same time the Koch brothers did the same thing, Romney was caught on a recently-leaked tape telling business leaders to tell their employees who to vote for.

That's because the Republican Party knows flat-out that their ideas suck and do not resonate with the concerns and priorities of the working class, the mooching 47%, and have to resort to fear and intimidation tactics. How else are you supposed to get the proletariat on board for what's a nakedly pro-business agenda engineered to benefit the 1%? Frankly, I'm amazed they think their employees are stupid enough to fall for the old line of, "Well, if the nigger gets re-elected, I may not be able to cover your health care costs this year!"

Which would, of course, if it were true, throw them to the tender mercies of their much-vaunted free market system that they're telling us we can trust to regulate itself and that prices and premiums will spiral downward as they compete with each other.

Except that history tells us the only way a largely unregulated market place will compete with itself is to see who can jack up their rates the highest and fastest. We saw that about six years ago when that abomination known as RomneyCare took effect just before Willard traipsed off on the campaign trail to resume his political losing streak.

So look for the Soviet-style intimidation to ramp up between now and election day, tovarisch.

I didn't watch last night's debate.

I could be disingenuous and fake it by, in Romney-style, retroactively watching video, read the summaries in the media, on Twitter and elsewhere and pretend I was there the whole time as if I was an NBC sportscaster doing canned commentary during the Olympics. But I've tried to be honest with my readers even if it embarrasses me. After all, with no journalistic credentials, my word and my reader's sense of trust in me is all I have. So I'll just start this post right now with an admission that I wasn't interested in last night's debate and didn't watch it, not even on video.

So what was this otherwise politically-engaged wonk doing while Obama was doing the Hulk-Against-Loki thing in Hempstead, NY, my old stomping grounds? On Youtube watching videos of Bob Dean, former Command Master Sergeant, talk about a world that we don't even know exists, a world in which each year a trillion and a half dollars of our treasure is going into a black budget to fund reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technologies, programs and organizations that Obama's government won't even hint at, they despise our opinion, and us, so much.

But that's grist for another mill.

I didn't watch the debate last night because #1 a blind man could see that Romney was going to come prepared with another pack of lies and #2, Obama, knowing he'd fucked up the first time, was going to come out swinging against Romney and make it personal.

In other words, it promised a long time ago to be a stereotypical political debate complete with the mud-slinging and dead-catting that Ambrose Bierce wrote about a century ago in The Devil's Dictionary. And, as with so many other people, I'm sick and tired of it.

But today I've been getting a slight bulge in traffic from people from all over the world looking for information on Romney and Google and other search engines are sending them here. And all they have to read are now non-topical posts I'd previously written. Plus, I'm sure a few of my readers, maybe more, are curious about what my take is on last night's debate. So here they are.

My choice for President, the person I'll still likely vote for, Dr. Jill Stein, got arrested along with her running mate last night in Hempstead for having the temerity for trying to crash the party and the Powers That Be just couldn't have that. So, my pick for President was sitting in a jail cell last night while the two assholes going at each like the two rats in Winston Smith's face cage deserved to be in prison.

Because Romney's a tax dodger who took full advantage of that tax amnesty from three years ago and Obama is a war criminal. That's all there is to know. That's all there is to see. You can talk until your face is a right proper shade of Democrat blue about Obama's endless tepid reforms and it still doesn't justify murdering scores, if not hundreds, of innocent women and children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and God knows where else. If you vote for Obama, you're doing so with blinders on. You'll be supporting a current war criminal over a future war criminal. Blinders vs binders.

However, it's important enough to know, and one needn't have seen the Pier 6 brawl in Hempstead last night in real time to know that Mitt Romney is a lying piece of shit who'd actually referred to women being in binders. If there's a corporate gene in the human genome that makes carbon-based humanoid life forms heartlessly corporate and with all the sociopathy that goes with it, then Willard Romney is a guy who'd gotten a double dose. I've been saying for four years now that if Romney ever gets elected, he'll be the first chief executive to deliver his inaugural address as a Powerpoint presentation and fax his State of the Union Addresses to Congress.

He lied about his tax plan, he lied about the president's remarks on Libya on September 12th (after he himself had fucked up everything in his bumbling attempt to capitalize on the deaths of four Americans), and, with the sense of emperious entitlement that, from his birth, has been part and parcel to what passes for his character, he interrupted the moderator Candy Crowley on many, many occasions because no one who's worth less than a quarter of a billion dollars should interrupt someone who is.

Obama had every right to attack Romney for his vulture capital past and for shipping jobs to China. But Obama was merely telling us things we either know or should know about Romney. And he dead-catted Romney without once mentioning Bainport or the Sensata workers who are even as I write this getting arrested by the Freeport police just as Jill Stein got arrested last night in Hempstead. Sensata is a third rail for both parties and both candidates and, as usual, the working man gets the shaft.

I didn't watch the debate last night and opted for truth, forbidden fruit that either man would deny us, forbidden knowledge that even a temporary leader in office for 4-8 years would be denied by captains of industry and the Joint Chiefs. I'm tired of this election cycle, tired of how they've extended it so that the incumbent has to spend the last two years of his first term running for office again, tired of the endless debates, pushed-up primaries and caucuses of the challenging party and tired of listening to corporately-owned MSM talking heads telling us about body language and what Romney had for dinner before each debate.

The important takeaway from this is that Bainport is radioactive and neither man has the stomach nor the heart to fight for these people because the populist surge they'd get even just for mentioning them isn't worth enough to risk going after.

I'll create 12,000,000 jobs but can't save 170 #Sensata worker's jobs. It's one of the vicissitudes of politics & business. #RWNJs #tcot #p2
— Willard Romney (@ShitWillardSez) October 15, 2012

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)


47%, 53%, 99%, 1%, 170. Reading the news these days is like reading an old fashioned ticker that rich fucks used to have in their offices in the 20's and 30's. But the number 170 is what I'd like to address today. I'll shelve my trademark snarky cynicism and not rhetorically ask whether 170 Sensata jobs being outsourced to China so the Bain-owned company can have the same work done for .99¢ an hour would be so important to liberals if Mitt Romney, Bain's "former" CEO, wasn't the Republican presidential nominee. Instead, I'll just assume it would be just as deserving of the ink and pixels it's been getting even if Romney didn't get the nod in Tampa.

Indeed, Sensata Technologies, formerly of Freeport, Illinois, has become the poster child for Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's entire campaign and vulture capitalism in general. It's become a moral touchstone for bottomless, heartless and soulless corporate avarice. Rub Mitt Romney's tax returns against it and you'll see a smudge of slime.

The jobs will be permanently gone, ironically, by November 5th, the day before Election Day. After taking down the American flag for a week, many of the workers at Sensata were forced to train the Chinese workers who will replace them so Sensata, Bain Capital and Mitt Romney can enjoy even fatter paydays. If the Freeport workers had refused, the Bain-owned company would've denied them the means for government assistance.

Romney's dealings past, present and future with Bain and its dealings with corporate Chinese entities is a seemingly bottomless financial rabbit hole that includes Romney owning $2,250,000 in a trio of Bain funds involving at least eight Chinese companies, some of which had been sued for copyright and patent infringement. In the meantime, Romney cynically strikes a populist pose on a campaign trial by shadowboxing with China and how they're stealing American jobs. In practice, however, Romney and his scumbag heirs at Bain Capital are helping to load the truck in the back alley.

Not only that, Romney gets to feign blissful ignorance about this because all these investments are in "blind trusts" that are now public knowledge. If Joe Blow now knows the outline of Romney's Chinese investments, then how can Romney, a man whose weekly $450,000 income automatically puts him in the top 2%, plausibly claim ignorance?

The question of why Mitt won't go to Freeport and/or intercede on their behalf by making a single call to Bain to put the skids to a transition in which they've already invested millions is increasingly academic. As the election is now three weeks away, reasonably asking Romney to do such a thing, which would be a cynically-motivated PR triumph but a PR triumph nonetheless, would be like the chickens asking the fox for help rebuilding their coop. And perhaps it's best if Romney keeps his distance. It would be perfectly in keeping with a guy who temporarily suspends claiming tax deductions only to retroactively reclaim them and get the balance of the return to temporarily stop the Sensata outsourcing only until after the election. As Mason Verger said in Hannibal, "When the fox hears the rabbit scream he comes a-runnin'... but not to help."

But not acknowledging the Bainport crisis, in which 170 people, scores of families and many local business will be adversely impacted just a few weeks before the holiday shopping season, is turning into a bigger balloon that the Romney campaign can no longer afford to ignore. This increasingly no-win situation is threatening to turn international as a delegation of French Samsonite workers who were also victims of Bain Capital have visited Bainport to lend their support.

... and are furiously scrubbing from the internet, as if we can't reproduce photographs. Like Mrs. JP said this morning, anyone that clueless about technology isn't qualified to run for the presidency. More on Sensata later today.

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

The late, great Hunter S. Thompson once described Vice President Joe Biden as "a rabid weasel on speed." At several times during last night's debate in Mitch McConnell land (henceforth referred to as the place where "No!" went to thrive), the good gonzo journalist arose literally from his own ashes and reminded us why his wisdom and spot-on caricatures are still so relevant and necessary.

Hosted by ABC's Martha Raddatz, the woman to whom Dick Cheney once said, "So?" when she'd told him 2/3's of the American people thought invading Iraq was no longer worth it, the debate essentially came down to the same strategy that the presidential debate in Denver came down to: The Republican lying and the Democrat sticking to the facts. Here's the difference:

Unlike President Obama, Vice President Biden actually pushed back against the lies with the courage and fortitude of Hercules pushing back against the tidal wave of horseshit from the Augean stables.

And, typically, the mainstream media that's never capable of recognizing a landslide and a doomed campaign when it sees it, is playing up the debate as if it was an evenly-matched battle of two stupendously accomplished and pragmatic men each advancing a legitimate-sounding strategy for getting our great nation back on track.

That's only possible, of course, if the American public at large went into last night's debate without knowing the relevant and salient facts and completely and utterly incapable of distinguishing truth from the threadbare fictions that have been the hallmarks of the Romney campaign from the start.

A classic example was Paul Ryan sticking to Romney's long-discredited meme of the Obama administration taking $716 billion from Medicare's coverage, which the president, Vice President and many other experts who've actually read the White House proposal has proven to be a bald-faced lie and doesn't even deserve to be discussed on the stage. The $716 billion in savings is not a subtraction of coverage that the Republican ticket is audaciously pretending to care about while proposing the eradication of Medicare but a measure intended to stop waste and fraud in a system with a 3% operating cost.

If anything, Joe Biden, legendary body-puncher and infighter, proved that the Gish Gallop is not the infallible offensive technique as hitherto believed after the first presidential debate. The Gish Gallop is essentially when one party in a debate spews out so many falsehoods that the opponent is incapable of refuting these lies within the time frame of the debate and one is left with no time to advance their own argument. Romney made it look like an invincible strategy because the president was clearly off his game on October 3rd.

Biden came into last night's debate looking very much like HST's rabid weasel on speed, as if he'd prepared for the debate by doing the intellectual version of Ryan's workout regimen. If anything, Biden has gotten better as a debater since the lackluster Sarah Palin matchup four years ago. Since it was the first, last and only Vice Presidential debate, the 90 minutes had to be divided up between domestic and foreign policy issues. Obviously, not every important topic could be brought up during the hour and a half. Not a word was breathed about gun control, gay rights and women's rights and abortion was given relatively little attention.

But whatever Ryan talked about he lied about. From calling Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs that needed reform before they surely go bankrupt to calling Mitt "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" Romney "a car guy" to claiming his faith would not play a part in his political agenda to outright saying Mitt Romney was more bipartisan than the president, Ryan couldn't even tell the truth about his title. With a Congressional approval rating of 11%, it was no wonder Ryan insisted on not being called "Congressman".

Biden smiled, smirked and outright laughed at Ryan, seemingly incapable of believing that he was actually sharing the same stage with a guy who said his family was on the same Medicare that Ryan essentially wants to replace with a glorified coupon program for those of us whose sons haven't accumulated a large fortune by sucking up to the 1% in Congress. It was like the political version of watching Goober Pyle getting cheerfully sodomized by the Cheshire Cat.

But just because Biden energetically swatted away Ryan's nonstop avalanche of lies with superior political gamesmanship doesn't mean the Obama-Biden ticket has all the answers, either. The fact remains that little has changed on Main Street since Obama took over nearly four years ago. It's an inescapable fact that Wall Street has profited handsomely off the initiatives and agendas of the Obama administration while over 12 million Americans are still struggling to find work. Populist rhetoric then and now about billionaires needing to pay more taxes still falls far short of actual reality and this is largely because of Republicans holding the expiration of middle class tax cuts hostage until they get another round of cuts for their 1% employers on Wall Street. It's like the hostage crisis over unemployment benefits two years ago, only a different victim.

But Bill Clinton also faced a hostile Congress in six of the eight years he ran the executive branch plus was facing what would've been for anyone else a career-ending sex scandal from 1998 on and still left office with $230,000,000,000 in the bank that the Bush administration then detonated like frat boys lighting their own farts in their parents' darkened basement. Over the last three and a half plus years, Obama has been treated by the GOP like an overworked janitor brought in to clean up the crash of the Hindenburg and cursed for not doing the job in record time.

Both candidates piously expressed concern for a middle class that Mitt Romney largely had written off as moochers during a $50,000 a plate fundraiser. But we'd do well to remember that Barack Obama had done much the same thing at a $30,000 a plate shingdig of his own at the gated Connecticut mansion of a man named Rich Richman. The middle class, and the poor below them, find themselves in the same position every two, four or six years: Treated like a well-worn rawhide chew protected by an old dog that's no longer interested in it. And, as always, the American poor and middle class are left with the choice of the same old two monolithic parties, a choice that pathetically involves choosing the men who tell the least number of lies and half truths.

Damn. We miss YOU, big fella: Yeah, he's a grinning, glad-handing sack of shit who gave us NAFTA and the end of Glass-Steagall. But he's OUR grinning, glad-handing sack of shit.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Democrats with balls

Sorry I've been AWOL, and thanks to all my intrepid colleagues for filling in during my absence. I'm still on killer deadline at work, and my mother became quite ill two weeks ago and I have been in lovely Chapel Hill, NC, working remotely on The Project That Ate My Life and helping my sister with the logistics of getting Mom into an assisted living facility. Mom is making what looks like a miraculous recovery after scaring us all half to death, and I'll be headed home Saturday. Mr. Brilliant continues to hold down the home fort, dealing with Maggie the hyperthyroid kitty and her once-again-nonexistent appetite, so what with one thing and another, these are Anxious Times among the B@B set. The one good thing about all this is that I haven't been paying much attention to Things Political. I could get used to this, except I do it at my peril. Talk to y'all soon.