Friday Follies: The Royal Wedding Edition

Sorry to disappoint all of my reader, but today I put aside my acerbic and whithering screaming-pinko opinions, put on my Union Jack underpants, put the kettle on for a pot of PG Tips tea, eat a Full English Breakfast and raise a glass of British beer in a salute to the newly married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge...

I wish them all the best...living in a fishbowl can't be too much fun...Good luck!!

Dear Mr. Trump...You're Fired! (part II)

Pay attention birther morons...this is the President's long-form birth certificate...you are now free to remove your white sheets and flaming crosses and crawl back under the rocks from whence you came...and yes Donald...this means YOU!

Hopefully this signals the official end of Trump's alleged 'Presidential bid'...

Blame Obama for the price of gasoline? Might as well get mad at him for the weather too...

The meme being spread hither and yon this morning by the presstitutes in the M$M, is that President Obama's popularity is taking it squarely on the chin due to the high price of the go-go juice that Mr & Mrs America need to put in their vroom-vrooms. This makes as much sense as yelling at the clouds because it's raining. For those unclear on the concept, let me explain. Barack Obama is President of the United States of America, but NOT President of the oil companies that run it. The people that Mr & Mrs America should actually be focusing their ire upon are the gouging motherfuckers that run Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP.

Oh, and just for good measure, whilst gasoline inexorably approaches the $5 gallon mark, Exxon is apparently set to announce that their profits have risen 60% last quarter. Now, I'm not a maths genius by any stretch of the imagination, but if someone's profits have increased it's usually due to one of two factors; either costs have gone down, or prices have gone up. Now, we know that costs can't have gone down as oil hovers around $113 a barrel, which means that prices must have gone up. In point of fact we all know that the latter is true, and we all know that the reasons given for the rise in prices have been bullshit, 'weaker dollar', 'regional uncertainty', 'the dog ate my balance sheet'. It's all bullshit but we put up with it because we HAVE to. What are the alternatives, mass public transit, electric vehicles? Don't make me larf. Big Oil has made damned sure that anything that could possibly threaten their stranglehold on the American consumers wallet has been marginalized, stigmatized or regulated out of existence. This has been done by their well-paid whores in the halls of congress, the very same hyenas that are now baying for the President's blood because of the prices that their benefactors are charging their constituents.To say that the system is bent would be an understatement of epic proportions.

The funny thing I noticed though is that none of the apologists that crawled out from under the rocks to defend Obama's predecessor from these attacks the last time Big Oil decided to rape us at the pumps, are nowhere to be seen this time around.

I wonder why?

Friday Follies: Donald Trump can kiss my ass...

It should go without saying that this self-promoting waste of comb-over hairspray doesn't stand a chance in hell of becoming the President in 2012, but just in case you are one of the 6% of completely fucking stupid morons that think it would be a good idea to have 'The Donald' in the Oval Office, let me remind you that he has filed for bankcruptcy three times in his business career.

THREE TIMES.

Big deal you say? Please remember that he did that whilst OWNING A CASINO. How can ANYONE suck so bad as a business man that they LOSE MONEY running a casino...? That's a really special kind of stupid. But even that isn't the ultimate in his lunacy. Nope, he has decided to grab hold of the 'Birther' cause and gone all-in. Just this week, one of the original birthers, and herself a certified right-wing looney tunes, Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, went on record as saying that even she thinks that Obama was born in the USA. So what this means is that 'The Donald' is even further out on the limb of the Raving Nutcase Tree than one of the craziest members of the Teabaggers. When you find yourself to the right of these nutjobs you are indeed out in the political wilderness and that means only one thing.

Donald Trump, you're fired.

When you finally come to the realisation that we are well and truly screwed..what then?

I recently saw the documentary 'Inside Job'. I knew from the inside that the financial industry is bent, have done for years, and I personally saw the housing bubble coming from a mile off, it's one of the reasons I went all cash in February of 2008, but when you see this film you realise just how deep the rabbit hole goes. And just how complete the infiltration of D.C. by greedy bankers really is when it comes to fiscal policy and governance.

Then I watched the documentary 'Gasland'. I felt a mixture of deep sadness and burning anger as the film wove it's story of industrial greed and total apathy at the human cost of doing business. The fact that the entire freshwater supply of NYC may be soon be rendered completely undrinkable boggles the mind. The fact that no-one seems to give a shit boggles it even further.

The SCrOTUS just took away a $14 million judgement from a man deliberately kept in jail and almost executed for a crime the prosecutors knew he hadn't committed. He sued the prosecutors and won. He was awarded one million dollars for every year he was falsely incarcerated, plus a million for costs. But on appeal the SCrOTUS took it away from him on a legal technicality that defines the very concept of splitting hairs. To top it off the House-Boy-in-Charge, Clarence 'pubic hair' Thomas, wrote the majority opinion basically stating that the victim was shit out of luck and just needed to get over it.

Then comes news that the Attorney General has caved into the squawking and squealing from the flag-waving, chest-thumping, fake-patriots on the right, and decided that even though the courts have said they do have Constitutional rights, those imprisoned at Gitmo will never see the inside of a courtroom. Instead they will be tried, in secret, by secret judges, in secret tribunals against secret evidence. The only thing not being kept a secret will be the inevitable guilty verdict. I thought that's how Russia used to operate before they became our 'friends'?

And then we turn to the young, energetic, intelligent, and thoughtful President in the Whitehouse. The man that inspired the hearts and minds of tens of millions of citizens with soaring rhetoric on the campaign trail, seems to have spent the last two years running away from his campaign promises faster than a jack rabbit on crack. On a side-note he has just launched his re-election campaign. Not sure what the slogan is, maybe "Change: This time I really mean it" but he has seen his last dime from me. I feel stupid enough as it is watching him back away from, reverse or ignore core parts of the platform he ran on in 2008. I won't make that mistake again. And neither will many others, I fear, unless he starts to actually do some of the things he was elected to do.

But my question goes to a deeper level than just being depressed because 'my guy' turned out to be only slightly less bad then the other guy in the last election cycle, and not the Liberal Messiah he had made himself out to be. It's more profound than that. I have come to the realisation that the entire system is fucked from top to bottom. I had suspected as much for quite some time, but it's only just recently become crystallized and come fully into focus, and I am at a loss with how to deal with it.

Look, I have known for a very long time that the 'American Dream' is complete bullshit. I have as much chance of being a multi-millionaire solely due to my hard work as I have at becoming the starting point guard for the Chicago Bulls, but millions, literally millions, of simple-minded idiots in this country think it's still a possibility. They think that if they just work hard enough, or long enough that one day they'll make it to easy street too. That's why these simpletons can be relied on, year in and year out, to vote republican, because they still think that one day they will be rich enough to need those tax breaks too.

The Wisconsin Labour Protests offered a brief glimmer of hope, organising peacefully yet so purposefully that they eventually did get their point out to the apathetic and otherwise disengaged general population that there was a crook in the Wisconsin Statehouse. But, the final chapter in that story hasn't been written yet, and who's to say if similar moves by similarly-minded governors in MI, FL and OH will be successful in getting workers one step closer to slavehood, where the WI governor appears to have failed?

I'm really not trying to be a downer, I'm really not, it's just that I'm at a point where I feel that for the first time I can clearly see just how screwed we all are, and I'm I have no earthly idea how to progress from that. The corporations own the politicians, the courts, and the media, lock, stock and two smoking barrels. How do you overcome that?

It's like having your blinders taken off and instead of seeing the wonders of the world spread out before you, you just sort of go 'meh'...and then wonder if you'd have been better off never having taken the damn things off in the first place...

Time for a drink...

Cheers!!

Republican solution to solving the debt crisis? Let's kill the wolves.

Further proof that republicans are nothing more than walking bags of pigshit comes with the news that the budget deal agreed to this past weekend (if by 'deal' you mean Democrats doing exactly what the republicans tell them to do and then being told to fucking like it), had all sorts of riders attached to it that had sweet fuck-all to do with erasing national financial obligations, and everything to do with fucking Democrats and their voting base squarely in the ass.

A small sample of what those "deficit hawks" in the republican party thought were vital to slash in order to bring down the deficit; the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program is cut $504 million, foreign food assistance by $194 million and assistance to state and local law enforcement by $415 million. The EPA (the government agency tasked to prevent corporations from poisoning our water and laying waste to our public lands) was cut by $1.6 billion dollars. Community healthcare centers lose $600 million while HIV and other disease-prevention funds are cut by $1 billion.

Oh yeah, and the Gray Wolf gets delisted from the Endangered Species Act, you know, because a bunch of congress-critters know more about species recovery and survival than the actual experts that put them on the list in the first place.

Those are just a few examples of the many cuts the reptiles demanded had to be made, despite the fact that the impact on the national debt is almost precisely zero.

This has nothing to do with 'fiscal responsibility'. This has nothing to do with 'controlling the deficit'. This is about spite and greed and nothing else. These cuts make not a bit of difference to the overall financial well-being of the United States, but they will have deep and potentially devastating impacts on the individuals that relied on those services for their health and well-being. And that is why the republicans dug their heels in until they got what they wanted. They don't like you, unless you are rich, white or incorporated.

Someone once said that it isn't a class war until the poor fight back, and by the looks of it, those elected in Congress to do that fighting for them are a bunch of worthless pussies.

If the gop was serious about bringing down the deficit they should move to end the wars we are fighting, slash the Pentagon budget in half and rollback the tax breaks given to the ultra-rich. There is of course not a snowball's chance in hell that those words would ever roll off the porcine lips of a representative of the Angry Rich White Man's party, but it would be nice if at least ONE of the goddamned Democrats said something that even remotely resembled those sentiments.

I wouldn't hold your breath though...

Sometimes I hate being right...

News came out of Japan last night that their Nuclear Regulatory Agency has updated the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi from  level 5 (holy shit) to level 7 (everyone get the fuck outta here).

This officially confirms what I have suspected from the very beginning, namely that the Japanese Govt and TEPCO have been lying through their teeth and had been hoping to be able to contain this situation and minimize the damage control necessary, rather than tell us the truth and immediately ask for help.

This coupled with the number of experts being wheeled out to quell any possible concerns about the amount of radiation being released as 'nothing to worry about', convinces me that the situation is alot more intense and dangerous than we are being told, and that it's not whether the defecation will make contact with the rotary oscillator, but rather how much, and how hard...

Couple this with massive daily aftershocks hitting the area that register high up on the Richter scale (trust me, anything larger than a 6.0 will seriously get your attention) and I have to wonder just how much more the Japanese people can handle.

My thoughts and best wishes to those impacted by this ongoing tragedy.

Friday Follies: Finally a little good news...

The US Senate this week managed to stop a republican effort to gut the EPA and prevent them from measuring greenhouse gasses. Finally some common sense appears to have prevailed in that institution, however briefly that may be.

I'll drink to that!

Cheers!

When is voter fraud really voter fraud? Apparently only when a Democrat wins...

..at least that's the case according to John Fund, family-values wife-beater, and permanent right-wing voter-fraud conspiracy theorist of the WSJ. The election yesterday in Wisconsin (the result of which now turns-out to be somewhat 'ongoing' due to legal maneuverings from the republican loser) shows that a previously secure state supreme court seat for the republicans was up for grabs, due, in no small part, to the anti-worker policies of the new republican state dictator, Scott (I love Koch) Walker.

His logic goes thusly, the Democratic contender appears to have won by roughly 200 votes, ergo, there was voter fraud.

This, of course, completely ignores the massive grass-roots response to the luddite proposals put forth by the new dictator as a possible basis for the election results (the republican was favoured at one point by as much as 20 points) and instead indicates to Fund, one of the toadiest of right-wing toads, that it simply must be voter fraud. If he had squealed as loud or as long about the blatant election thefts that took place in Florida in 2000, and Ohio in 2004, I might be willing to listen to him, but because he only bleats about this when a republican is on the losing end, my bullshit detector immediately goes into overdrive. In the end that means there is only one inevitable conclusion to be had. John Fund is entirely full of shit.

Further proof the M$M is bent...

The Corporate Media in this country have been busy falling all over themselves to heap praise on Eddie Munster Paul Ryan (R- Hates Poor People) and his budget (if by budget you mean republican wish-list to permanently create a poor working under-class) as being "serious" and "courageous". This despite the fact that even the right-wing think tank that came up with the numbers he used have been busy running away from them (and him). It is such a bullshit plan that even some from his own party won't endorse it. His proposals were roundly criticized as being ridiculous, unrealistic and the stuff of  pure fantasy and delusion, and yet the presstitutes in the M$M continue to laud the plan.

It strikes me as strange that the deficit has to be addressed during a Democratic Presidency, but not during a republican one. For a republican it's perfectly fine to start two wars half a world away without a care about how it's going to be paid for, but if a Democrat gets involved in a third one, all of a sudden we have to figure out how to pay for it.

Stranger still is how when a republican suggests screwing the poor and the elderly it's "serious" and "courageous", but if a Democrat suggests  increasing the taxes on the rich it's "socialism"....

The one good thing we can draw from this whole episode is that republicans have officially made their intentions crystal clear; they aim to completely destroy the public safety net that has been built over the years. The question is, who will stand up to defend it?

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Batshit Crazy) is a lying assclown...

The republican's very own Eddie Munster look-alike from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, was making the rounds on the telly today talking about how Medicare is an evil entitlement that needs to be slashed because it is such a large contributor to the deficit. This, of course, is total horseshit.

Now bear in mind that this is the very same Paul Ryan that has voted for every single tax-cut for big business and wealthy individuals on the backs of the poor and middle class. His brilliant idea is that instead of folks getting ordinary Medicare, they should get government vouchers instead, and use those to go and purchase their own insurance. This in spite of the fact that the most recent experiment with that concept actually wound up costing the consumers 14% more than if  Medicare would have handled it themselves. Apparently this evil little munchkin thinks that making poor people pay more for access to health care is a good thing.

He is also one of the right-wing nutjobs that continue to push for the privatization of Social Security by putting Wall Street in charge of our retirement funds. You know, the same bunch of geniuses that drove the US economy off the edge of cliff. What could possibly go wrong there...???

Bottom line is this, Eddie Munster, sorry, Paul Ryan is merely the freshest face being put forth to try and achieve what the republicans have always wanted to do, repeal all of FDR's safety net and return this country to the days of the robber-barons when the rich got richer and everyone else got fucked.

But here's the biggest worry for me. The guy in the Whitehouse has already said he's willing to 'negotiate' with these assclowns about this and other 'entitlement issues' (as though they were free handouts), and the last time he 'negotiated' with them, we went from a top-down overhaul of the health care system that would have revolutionized the way people get access to medical help, and instead wound up with a watered down weak-kneed deal that is nothing more than a gift to the insurance companies on a silver platter.

It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be a line in the sand for the WH and the Dems, or whether they cave (again) like a deck of cards. I am not exactly brimming with confidence that it will be the former..

Friday Follies: Late Edition - File this under "are you fucking kidding me?"

If you wanted further proof that the United States of America is heading directly into the shitter at an ever-increasing pace, then I have it for you with this story.

No, the proof isn't that a major political party thought Sarah Palin was a worthy candidate for the number two job in the country. It also isn't the fact that the spawn of that vacuous, vicious and vindictive grifter is thought to have lead a life so interesting, varied and important as to warrant a memoir at the ripe old age of 20.

Nope. It's worse.

The alleged 'reality tv star' known as 'Snooki' was paid more money to speak to students at Rutgers University than was offered to a NOBEL PRIZE WINNER for her commencement speech planned for May of this year.

You read that right. Someone at Rutgers thought that Snooki, an empty-headed, foul-mouthed, porky, borderline alcoholic imbecile of staggering proportions, was MORE valuable than a Nobel Prize winner.

If my kid was enrolled at that 'educational' institution, they wouldn't be after today.

I am now going to drink heavily...Cheers!

Friday Follies: The shake-your-head edition

You have to love the gun-nuts. Kansas, one of the reddest of red states has found itself in the peculiar situation of having made gun laws so lax that even a blind person can legally carry a concealed weapon....

As you can tell from that link I am not making that shit up. I wish I was.

I am almost at a loss for words...but not quite..

The only thing I can suggest is don't piss off a Kansasian (Kansas-ite, Kansas-er??) that is in possession of dark glasses, a dog, a white cane, or any combination of those three...you have no idea who they might accidentally pop a cap into...

I can see it now... "Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya?..........Wait, hello? Is there anybody there??"

-------------------------

And in other news, apparently gop freshman Tom Marino (R-Can't find his ass with a map) thinks that Africa is a country and not a continent. The fact that this slobbering fucktard sits on the House Foreign Affairs Commitee makes me want to kick kittens...

I'm off for some beer...Cheers!!