Good Times at Pottersville, 5-17-13

Obama's Bulworth Moment

#DoYourJobGOP & stop acting like the legislative arm of the NRA, NOM and the Koch brothers. #Warren2016 #p2 #p21 #tlot #UniteBlue #Libcrib
— Robert Crawford (@jurassicpork59) May 17, 2013

     The New York Times yesterday published a piece quoting Obama aides as saying the president often fantasizes about having a Bulworth moment. Obviously, that will never happen because while Obama would be shooting from the hip, he'd also be shooting himself in the foot because he's also the cause or at least the owner of many of the problems facing us today.
     However, to liberals who have longed to hear Obama speak his mind about Republicans, it's just as tempting as it is to the president to speculate on what he'd say. George Washington delivered a memorable farewell address loaded with advice we've, tragically, ignored. Dwight Eisenhower, just a few days before he made way for Kennedy, warned us about the "rise of the military-industrial complex", another lesson we've, even more tragically, ignored.
     Yet, while Obama has done absolutely nothing to significantly change the country he'd inherited from a walking brain stem (and in some ways, he's made it worse), it can't be said the Republican Party has been going out of its stumble-footed way to help him achieve some lasting and meaningful legacy. The Republicans yesterday voted for the 37th time to repeal ObamaCare without once during this 113th Congress passed or even proposed a jobs bill. They screamed about birth certificates, gay marriage, about a fictional national registry for gun owners (which isn't a bad idea, btw), death panels, everything but the one thing Americans are most concerned about: Jobs. Solid gun control measures (As of this writing, 4154 Americans have died from gun-related violence just since Sandy Hook last December.).
     The idea of Obama going all Bulworth at the end of his presidency is to a writer like me like a slow hanging curve ball or a fat, batting practice fastball to a slugger. So let's just pretend Obama isn't the worst president in American history and blithely pretend, as all too many of us do, as if drones, the NDAA, a perpetually high unemployment rate and caving to the GOP's every whim never happened. Let's all pretend that Obama is a legitimate victim, a statesman who really just tried but failed to do the right thing purely because of Republican obstructionism. This is what I imagine he'd say in his farewell address in January 2017:

---

     "My fellow Americans:
     "For these past eight years, it has been my distinct honor and privilege to serve as your president. As my career in public service winds down, I have taken this opportunity to deliver this farewell address.
     "This administration had achieved several great things in the time allotted to me but so many more great things could have been achieved were it not for the pin-headed meat puppets of the Koch brothers, Wall Street, NOM and other evangelical nutjob organizations, Goldman Sachs and the National Rifle Association. And by pin-headed meat puppets, I mean the Republican Party.
     "Now, the racist cock goblins of the Republican Party have been throwing every stumbling block and conspiracy theory out there and hoping they'd make at least one stick regardless of how detrimentally this would affect the nation. During my first term, I had to endure charges of being Muslim, being born in Kenya and et cetera. In my second term, I had to hear conspiracy theories about Benghazi, about the IRS in Cincinnati, about my Justice Department seizing the AP's phone records.
     "None of them stuck even while they tried to undermine my initiatives for sensible immigration reform, job creation and modest gun control measures. Instead, they gave us sequestration then voted for exceptions to sequestration so they could make their flights in time while unemployment benefits got cut by 11% and children in Head Start couldn't go to class.
     "Fucking doofuses like Paul Ryan voted to cut well over a quarter of a billion dollars from the embassy security budget then when Benghazi got attacked, suddenly it was my fault. Like Jackie Robinson his first two years in the majors, I had endure this bullshit with good grace and act presidential so the aforementioned racist cock goblins of the GOP wouldn't string me up on the nearest elm like it was 1800 Alabama instead of 1600 Pennsylvania. But now, in the waning hours of the presidency, I give this farewell address to say first and foremost that the Republicans can suck my black 10-inch cock.
     "Yes, suck on that big black puppy, for helping to keep America in the Dark Ages, for trying to deny women reproductive health care and contraception, for trying to deny same sex couples the right to marry, for trying to repeal even the watered-down Affordable Care Act, child labor laws, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and for outsourcing so many American jobs that they've practically turned this once-great nation into one of minimum wage-earning drones selling beef jerky at 7-11. Buff my black bishop and take it easy on the back stroke.
     "The 111th, 112th and 113th Congresses will go down in history as the three worst in American history thanks in large measure to the Grand Old Party. Thanks to upholstered fossils like John McCain, this country that used to lead the planet in science, medicine, mathematics and a whole spectrum of scientific and technical disciplines has become a mockery. As with the previous administration led by a dry drunk, wet-brained freak, they've waged war on all the sciences including but not limited to meteorology, medicine, astronomy, anthropology to the point where I was amazed every day of my administration the Republican-led House didn't try to make official an Act proclaiming the fucking earth is flat. Really, kudos for recognizing it isn't and for accepting gravity.
     "And instead of working with this administration on a jobs bill that would put Americans back to work and off unemployment and welfare and food stamps, instead of actually acting on the jobs platform they'd run on in 2010 and 2012, all we heard were 'Tax cuts!' and 'Benghazi!' and a whole raft of hood ornament issues designed to obfuscate the truth from being known and to supplant real legislation that could've pulled this country out of the mess that my special needs predecessor got us into.
     "So every Republican from John Boehner on down can suck on my Alabama blacksnake until it spits all over the Capitol for doing their level-headed best for trying to take down my administration over trifles and Tea Bagger conspiracy theories oozing from Alex Jones' sweat glands. The right wing portion of the Supreme Court can polish my big black newel post for Citizen's United, erroneously redefining the 2nd Amendment and for wiping their fat asses with the Constitution. Justice Clarence Thomas can swallow my Dannon cannon in complete silence. He makes me ashamed I'm half black.
     "My fellow Americans, we still have many different tough roads to travel and they're made rockier and darker than ever by the highwaymen of the Republican Party who will not be satisfied until they've filched and pocketed every last penny from your pockets and off the eyes of your dead relatives. These ventriloquist dummies of the Koch brothers, white shoe Wall Street firms and virtually every billionaire on the planet have held this nation back for so long it's a miracle we still have the capacity to make fire. They should all go down on the 99% one at a time so we can all cum together in righteous rage and indignation at what these prehistoric peckerheads have done to you.
     "In conclusion, my fellow Americans, it has been my honor to serve you as your president these past eight years. Good night and God bless."

We Are Fat and Happy and Can Suckle Some More

     When I think of a certain line in Gladiator, one spoken by the late Oliver Reed, I think of the US government and the countless war profiteers it employs: "And the great whore will suckle us until we are fat and happy and can suckle no more." That line could've been spoken by any of the contract procurement specialists whose job it is to dispense multi-billion cost-plus, no-bid contracts like alms to the already rich and bloated.
      And then when I hear this line, I think of those who've been entrusted with the lives and welfare of our troops overseas and this could've been uttered by any chickenhawk Republican about to send troops into hopeless, needless war: "Thrust this into another man's flesh, and they will applaud and love you for that. You? You may begin to love them -- for that. Ultimately, we're all dead men. Sadly, we cannot choose how."
     And then there's this one, one that could've been spoken by any indifferent Halliburton/KBR executive: "I shall be closer to you for the next few days, which will be the last of your miserable lives, than that bitch of a mother who first brought you screaming into this world! I did not pay good money for your company. I paid it so that I might profit from your death. And just as your mother was there at your beginning, I shall be there at your end. And when you die - and die you shall - your transition will be to the sound of... [claps his hands.]"
     Therefore, with that introduction, I offer you a blast from the past: Remember the old acronym LOGCAP from the good old Bush/Iraq War days? In case you've forgotten it, it stands for Logistical Civil Augmentation Program, a nice little euphemism that seems to suggest only a friendly helping hand from the private sector and not the $38,000,000,000 boondoggle and clusterfuck it actually is. Apparently, the "civil augmentation" war profiteering, far from being a mere augmentation, essentially replaced virtually all functions formerly fulfilled by the military, including feeding the troops, setting up showers and providing potable drinking water.
     That resulted in the US taxpayer subsidizing troops getting served bacteria-riddled food, bacteria-riddled drinking water and shower stalls that were essentially electrocuting, with impunity, those who'd used it. And, oh yeah, let us not forget paying them handsomely to rape and detain Jamie Leigh Jones with, as usual, complete and utter impunity. Despite constant scandals and ample evidence of fraud and a lax attitude toward the welfare of our armed forces, KBR was given a $150,000,000,000 contract to continue defrauding the government, including several no-bid contracts in Iraq in 2011 (two years after Obama took over).
     You would think, at some point, like all conscientious parasites, Kellogg, Brown and Root would finally let loose with a bay window-cracking belch and push themselves away from the trough but you would be wrong, comrade. Today comes the news that despite having $100,000,000 in double billed expenses not honored by the Pentagon, despite the missing $1.8 billion in missing meal money, the $12,000,000 worth of missing meals, the pending litigation and all that... 
     Kellogg, Brown and Root is now telling the Pentagon that they will need another half a billion dollars and 13 years to wrap up operations in Iraq. That would be same Iraq we'd left back in December of 2011. You know, the country with hardly any American troops left to feed and do stuff for.
     Yeah, I thought you'd love hearing that.
     So explain to me again why there's no major push, or even so much as a single petition, demanding the Obama administration fire KBR immediately and to have them fork over the billions they've fraudulently bilked from the American taxpayer?
     Suckle no more, my withered teats.

Good Times at Pottersville, 5-15-13

Stop ‘n’ Starve

     

             A Stop-n-Shop worker just told me a few minutes ago at his other parttime job at the corner Shell station that he pays over $8 a week in union dues... for the privilege of making minimum wage that's guaranteed to him by the state Congress, not a union. The union pulls down well over $115,000,000 a year in union dues in southern New England alone for the privilege of their members earning minimum wage, shitty health care benefits and live with the additional danger of being put out of work after being denied the most basic union perk, which is the right to collectively bargain. So, if this bedroom union, as I call it since they're in bed with corporate senior management, can't or won't do better than get you minimum wage with no serious benefits, what the fuck's the sense of paying union dues?

I shop at this store, even though it never runs out of ways to disappoint me (The only reason I shop there at all is because of the gas reward points it offers. You get a whopping .10¢ off a gallon for every $100 you spend there, which is still a damned sight better than Hannaford’s, a competing supermarket in town. But, unlike Stop'n'Starve, they don't artificially bloat their prices to coerce you into signing up for a card that they then use to creepily track your spending habits and spit out of the register targeted coupons for the items you'd just purchased.) and have more or less shopped here since it first opened around 1990. Both my stepsons worked at the local Stop’n’Shop when they were young (the older one got terminated when his trick knee gave out on him and he informed management he’d have to have corrective surgery on it, a standard practice Stop’n’Shop has used for many, many years on teenaged employees once they’re up for the piddling raises they offer but more on that later.).

About 12 or more years ago, possibly before Bush got in the White House, Stop’n’Shop’s starting wages, which were always about a buck or two an hour higher than the prevailing minimum wage, began stagnating. Jobs that used to pay $7-8 an hour, within a year, were going at a full buck an hour less. And this was long, long before the serious economic downturn that began under Bush and has miserably continued unabated under Obama. Pretty soon, it was obvious that these jobs the corporation would post on its store windows were going for the prevailing minimum wage and it’s a practice the store has continued for over a decade since.

I don’t know when the United Food and Commercial Workers Union got in there or if they’ve always been there but I’ve long wondered if these minimum wage-earning workers ever had to pay union dues. Today, I’ve received confirmation from one (who also makes minimum wage working for an even huger corporation, the Royal Dutch Shell oil company) that they do. Obviously, this is a closed union shop, meaning if you don’t join, you get fired on the spot (or perhaps, I even more suspect, their union dues are automatically siphoned out by the company like child support garnishments.). Otherwise, if you’re making minimum wage with crappy to nonexistent health care bennies, what’s your incentive for joining and paying union dues out of your minimum wage paycheck?

Glassdoor.com has a list of 149 job titles and a range of wages for each specific title at Stop’n’Shop. Among the titles listed on page two, and I wish I was making this up, is one that's the lowest on an already rock-bottom scale, and it's actually called a “minion”. I’m sure we all know the definition of the word “minion” but in case you want a more detailed definition, here are several. If you look at all 149 jobs, you’ll note that approximately half or more of the jobs are within a dollar an hour within the state-mandated minimum wage of $8 per hour (I wonder if they have job titles such as "peon", "shit-shoveler", "flunky", "serf" and "sharecropper.").

As recently as last February, the corporation began shadow-boxing with its bedroom union and there was a threat of a massive strike that made the Stop’n’Shop corporation set up hiring centers to hire scabs that offered more money than their long-term, parttime employees. This means that, if Stop’n’Shop couldn’t successfully negotiate a contract that was agreed-upon to not push the corporation too hard, the union would’ve voted via a small panel to put those 40,000 people out of work without giving them the slightest chance to collectively bargain, which is the very most basic right that ought to be given to union workers. The workers would’ve gotten a few bucks an hour to shoulder a protest sign for a few hours a week (which is the only discernible way I can see of the workers getting back even so much as a penny they paid to this worthless union that can’t seem to negotiate for them even a penny an hour over the state-mandated minimum wage) while watching customers and scabs cross their picket lines and both executive management and the union would’ve been quite happy to see that happen.

I utterly fail to see why this union is allowed to remain in business. Granted, not all its constituents make $8 per hour but the vast majority of them do. Even assuming all 40,000 of its members in three New England states kick in just $8 a week (and I’m sure those working at skilled positions and making more than minimum wage pay higher dues), that still comes out to a cool $116,800,000 a year (and that’s just from their New England members, not New York state or other states in which it’s wormed itself), which is a lot of cake for a union that won’t or can’t bargain for better than a minimum wage that’d already been mandated years ago by Beacon Hill. That means a lot of union fat cats at the top are raking in a lot of moolah for shit they’re not even doing.

My eyes got wider when my friend informed me that he was informed on his hire that he could expect a pay raise of no more than .30¢ an hour after 6 months on the job. Even if he was working 40 hours a week (and I guarantee he is not), that would come out to an extra $12 a week, which isn’t even enough for two packs of cigarettes or four gallons of gas.).

The Stop’n’Shop corporation keeps the union around like Napoleon and Snowball kept the crow around in Animal Farm: To coo niceties in the ears of the proletariat about the virtues and rewards of hard labor for little in return. With this useless union, the corporation can continue to project the image of acting in good faith with their employees for the dubious benefit of those stupid enough to believe it. This bedroom union that is so incredibly between the sheets with the corporation’s executive management serves as a useful fig leaf, plausible deniability that they’re anti-union.

And I have never in all my years in the work force ever seen a union that was comfortable with its workers making minimum wage for years and years on end and cannot (or will not through some collusive deal) even negotiate better health care coverage (they nearly went on strike years ago over that very same issue).

When the next-to-last contract was hashed out after the usual shadowboxing between the corporation and the “union”, the store audaciously said in a press release that the contract gave “very competitive wage packages and retirement benefits as well as access to quality, affordable health care.”

It’s utterly impossible to see how minimum wage for most of its store-level positions and prohibitively high health care premiums that are expected to be paid for out of paychecks in which most if not all workers are held well below 40 hours a week can in any way, shape or form be construed as “very competitive.” (Unless a race to the bottom can be construed as "competition.") And, with a chain and an industry with such a revolving door policy in which workers are actually discouraged in one way or another from making a career working for the corporation, it’s just as impossible to see where retirement benefits for non-management workers even plays a part.

The bottom of the article to which I’d linked regarding their pathetic excuse for a contract goes on to state, perhaps acerbically or not, “Stop & Shop is owned by Ahold USA. In its last earnings release, the company reported that net sales at Stop & Shop and Giant-Landover had increased 10.5 percent to $4.4 billion.” That’s a lot of pie the corporation could be sharing with its employees but shares, instead, with its utterly corrupt bedroom union.

Oops, We Did it Again!

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

     “It is an immutable law of the universe that if you give government power, it uses it.”- Former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA)

      If, after 2016, we take away any real revelations and insights from the Obama administration, it will be Republican-Libertarian Bob Barr's maxim of government always using power if it has it given to it. Perhaps, in a recycling of the Bush era cynicism of the overreach of government power, we may also trot out Ben Franklin's bromide about those who surrender liberty for a little security and deserving and receiving neither. More often than not, though, we may recall for the umpteenth time George Santayana's warning about those not heeding the lessons of history being doomed to repeat it.

     Journalists and kitchen table pundits on both sides of the political spectrum and all those in between will no doubt dutifully trot out pertinent or potentially pertinent quotes from men and women long dead and gone but the most abstract takeaway from this AP phone record seizure business that just broke yesterday (Suspiciously, at the very beginning of the Monday-Friday news cycle) is that you simply cannot trust your own government.

     If the history of the last 10 or 12 administrations teaches us anything, it's that Presidents, Senators, Congressmen and Cabinet officials will construe being elected or reelected as a Constitutional mandate to perpetrate, perpetuate and propagate any and all manner of evil and perfidy on the American people and its most cherished institutions. After all, we elect these men and women to represent us and our interests, or so we're told. And the very act of reelecting Barack Obama to a second term essentially gave him carte blanche, in his mind and those of his legal team, to spy on and kill American citizens whether here or abroad. In other words, if the president does it, it isn't illegal.
     And that chilling and infamous quote from Nixon's interview with David Frost may certainly prove to be very relevant as a gleeful Republican Party that just wrapped up its Benghazi hearings begins to unearth more and more dirt on this phone records seizure scandal (And, if government teaches us one thing, it's that one or two human bones that fall out of the closet only leads to an entire graveyard of such bones. There's never such thing as one roach or mouse).
     It's come out that Attorney General Eric Holder, almost surely acting on orders from the Obama administration, signed off on what is obviously an illegal seizure of the phone records of 20 AP offices which right now involves at least 100 journalists, although the number of those violated will expand as surely as the rising death toll of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. This came about after a May 7, 2012 report from the AP on our conduct in Yemen, by far the quietest front in the perpetually foggy and vague War on Terror, and, most tellingly, the administration's possible lack of honesty and transparency with the American people. And the fourth amendment's latest violation seemed to devolve on this paragraph:

The operation unfolded even as the White House and Department of Homeland Security assured the American public that they knew of no al-Qaeda plots against the U.S. around the anniversary of bin Laden's death. The operation was carried out over the past few weeks, officials said.

     In true Big Brother form, the Obama administration then quietly responded in the only way presidential administrations know how: To prove how nontransparent it is by secretly seizing phone records of the same news cooperative that had raised a mild question about that same administration's transparency, or the seeming lack thereof, with the American people.
     Gleeful and giddy Republicans completely bereft of a sense of irony will dive headfirst into this like so many piranhas into a water buffalo carcass as they finally have a legitimate scandal in which to wade with complete abandon. This is a spiteful and venal Republican Party, let's not forget, that hadn't the slightest problem with, and viciously defended, leaks against Bush's torture prisons in Eastern Europe and his now-infamous circumvention of the secret FISA courts. This is the same Republican Party that went after Bill Clinton, if we're to believe the late Congressman Henry Hyde, in retribution for Nixon's near-impeachment over Watergate (despite the fact the GOP was almost as dedicated to pursuing Nixon as the Democrats. Nixon quit soon after Senator Barry Goldwater informed Nixon in the Oval Office that enough Republicans were on board in the Senate to impeach Tricky Dick unless he skedaddled.).

"Those Who Do Not Heed the Lessons of History Are Doomed to Repeat It and This Quote."

     And the Republican Party and its spittle-flecked apologists can be given some leeway in resurrecting Watergate, the scandal that doomed countless faux scandals and tempests in teapots to have the suffix "-gate" Velcroed to it. First, however, we need to differentiate Watergate from the current scandal:

     Watergate came about when then President Richard M. Nixon dispatched various "plumbers" to break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to dig up incriminating evidence on the former Rand war analyst after he'd leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NY Times and other mainstream media outlets proving the Nixon and Johnson administrations were saying one thing about their strategy in Vietnam and doing another. This later expanded to Nixon ordering the FBI and CIA to wiretap Democratic National HQ, blah, blah, blah.

     Barack Obama surely signed off on the seizure of the AP phone records, which are not the same as actual wiretaps. But that distinction is cold comfort, indeed, as it automatically and with one fell swoop reversed the roles of the media and government. As children, we were raised with the idea that the media is supposed to be the watchdog of the government in a free democratic society, not vice versa. As yet, there's no smoking gun directly implicating Obama as the one found during the Watergate hearings in Nixon's hand after the fact. Obama did not spy on the opposition party as did Nixon but that's not the point.

     The point is that the Obama administration viciously persecutes and prosecutes whistleblowers as did the Bush administration and Nixon's. At least in Nixon's case, Watergate came about because of his personal sense of Learesque paranoia. With the Obama administration, this latest circumvention and violation of the fourth amendment was coldly impersonal and carried out as if it's an established way of doing things.

     And that's the problem: It is.

     Ellsberg, while he was persecuted by Nixon and his countless flaks, at least never saw the inside of a jail cell, although he nearly did. Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning will have been in prison for three years this May 26th and has been treated like a drunken, passed out coed at a frat party. Having released incriminating video evidence and much more of our true actions in Iraq after being fed a completely different and much more benign narrative by the Bush administration, the Obama junta then had Manning arrested and detained in dehumanizing conditions while the case against him drags on toward its fourth year. Considering the Obama administration's overt covering up for the preceding administration, this persecution and prosecution of Manning and other whistleblowers in the glorious Age of Obama shouldn't come as a surprise.

     And if the last several administrations have taught us anything it's that whatever government currently in power will always more ruthlessly and efficiently guarantee its own safety than that of the American people. The underwear bomber arrested a little over a year ago embarrassed the administration because after repeated assurances there was no credible threat of an al Qaeda plot to avenge bin Laden's alleged killing, the CIA days later thwarted just such a plot for just such a reason.

     Of course, it would work far better in the interests of the Obama or any other administration if it more often admitted it was wrong but that it's constantly taking steps to assure the safety of all Americans. I'm sure I speak for many when I say we can better live with a government that's not infallible and upfront about it than one that viciously seeks retribution when its fallibility is uncovered. But of course that's not how government operates. As Bob Barr once famously said, if you give power to government, it will use it and the only way they can respond to embarrassment is to childishly seek retribution whatever the cost to the Constitution they'd sworn to uphold.

     If a direct connection to Obama and the seizure of the AP's phone records can be established, then the President certainly needs to be impeached and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for violating the Constitution he'd sworn, twice, to uphold. But I would also ask Republicans to search what ludicrously passes for their souls and realize that, after Watergate and the countless war crimes of the Bush administration, they are certainly no better than the war criminals of the Obama administration. Because they are part of that government that will unthinkingly use the power invested to it by the American people.

Good Times at Pottersville 5-14-13

Good Times at Pottersville, 5-13-13

Good Times at Pottersville #6

Open Thread: Popeye Caturday edition

Minez.

     All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. Now give me something. Anything. And get me something while I'm waiting.

     It's coming up on four years since the bipedaled occupying force has encroached on my universe that's been shrunk to four rooms in a podunk town in central Massachusetts with three Dunkin Donuts and not a single fucking book store.

     48 months of staring out the window looking at those tender birds who taunt me daily knowing I can't reach them because the male and female occupiers are afraid I'll get hit by a car. Please.

     Nearly 50 months I've had to endure half-empty bowls and spring water without a constant supply of ice cubes, litter boxes that go for hours without being cleaned. I fear for my well-being so much I can't even get 21 hours of sleep a day, anymore.

     Four years and the male occupier still gets upset when he tries to type something on this laptop that, considering how his writing "career" is going, would be better put to use providing me with another warm spot to sleep on.

     I find myself abusing the catnip more and more. It is my only escape. What I wouldn't give for a pack of Zig Zags right about now.

     And what's this shit of keeping the toilet lid down? Do they not know we need at least five or six sources of water or we'll die of dehydration? Oh great, look at this. Now there's a small circular bare patch at the bottom of my dry food dish. Will the horror never cease? O, death, where thy sting?

     Next thing you know they'll dry to drown me with warm water and some reeking substance known as shampoo. This is why we sleep with one eye open and both ears pricked up. Their depravity knows no bounds.

     Oh and the fake dead mice masquerading as cat toys? Is that some sick fucking excuse for humor? God, how I hate my life.

     I would've jumped out a window long ago were it not for Pounce and catnip.

     So, how's your miserable excuse of a life going?

State of the Union

     To the two or three people who still come here looking for actual political content, I apologize for not commenting on the latest political news of late. Time constrictions, getting sucked up in my son's new job and having to take him to work four or five days a week, my never-ending job hunt, various and sundry errands and literary matters have sucked up what little spare time I have. Well, that plus listening to the Red Sox on the radio five nights a week will drain whatever remaining spare time I have.
     I've been phoning it in with little cartoons and the occasional .jpegs rather than more volubly commenting on what's been going on of late politically, economically and socially. The more news items I read about, the more I'm convinced that our venality, evil, stupidity and proud ignorance will surely be the death of us in this country. And I just don't see a way out of it.
     We could vote out every single one of the bums and welfare queens in Congress, all 535 of them, start fresh with a brand new administration and it still wouldn't do a Goddamned thing because the apparatus that corrupts our government, Wall and K Streets, will still be lurking in the shadows waiting for the next crop of self-interested sociopaths to get sworn in.
     That's not to say we're not taking great strides in this nation. One of the best things to come about in the last ten years is a zero tolerance policy regarding misogynism and homophobia. People, some of them pretty high up on the food chain, can now be immediately terminated for uttering one single slur against women or gays. And, hot on the heels of Rhode Island, Delaware became the 11th state to adopt gay marriage, with other states such as Minnesota almost sure to follow.
     However, it seems for every step we take forward, we always find a way to take two backward. These homophobes who are obsessed with gay sex and with what gay people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, the ones who piously preach about "states rights" and state sovereignty, are also the first ones who immediately lay the groundwork to reverse a gay marriage decision on the state level whether it's ratified by the courts (as in MA), by popular referendum (as in Maine) or the state legislatures of the other nine states. Then they don't care so much about state's rights, anymore. In fact, these miserable bigots are so delusional, they even refuse to admit the floodgates coming down like dominoes constitutes a trend (despite the fact that just 2 1/2 years ago, only five states had same sex marriage.).
     Billionaire slave driver Penny Pritzker being nominated by Obama for Commerce Secretary (which is a little like nominating Dick Cheney as Energy Secretary) gave us another reason to impeach that corrupt cocksucker who heads up an administration so corporate it makes the Bush administration look like the Buffaloheads of the 70's Red Sox.
     And, oh yeah, now that they don't have Aaron Swartz to kick them around, anymore, Congress is letting CISPA rear its ugly head like a Nazi Cerberus before getting knocked down in the Senate. And with the millions of lobbyist dollars cable companies and ISPs are pouring into this piece of shit, you just know it isn't going away for long. Think of the bankruptcy bill that finally passed in 2005 after nearly nine years of ceaseless hammering by the banksters and other lenders.
     And speaking of those jiggling fucks, remember the quaint notion of an Occupy movement? Like all occupy movements of the past (I'm thinking of the one in Trafalgar Sq. in London in 1887), it was doomed to failure long before it gasped its last a year and a half ago. 18 months later, Wall Street's Dow Jones topped 15,000 for the first time and how do stupid-ass limousine liberals greet the news? By sneering sarcastically at right wing trolls about what a failure at Communism Obama is without once being alarmed how how little the burgeoning fortunes of Wall Street are trickling down on Main Street.
     And, can you believe it? Philanderer and cat burglar Mark fucking Sanford is back in Congress. I still can't wrap my mind around that one.
     This country is more fucked than a twink in the showers at Riker's Island, plain and simple. We as a nation do not have it in us to seriously rise up as did the 18th century French that executed its monarchy or even the modern day people of other nations who clog their streets by the millions whenever their democracy or retirement is threatened. We're Americans, people who sheepishly allow themselves to be bullied and sodomized by a small fistful of right wingers and their surrogates, people who are dedicated to the proposition that everyone has the right to the pursuit of misery.
     Now, if you'll excuse me, Jack the Ripper's just claimed his second victim on September 30, 1888 and Buffalo Bill and crew is hot on his trail in my novel, Tatterdemalion. At least that promises a happy ending.

Open Thread: 4 Dead in Ohio Benghazi edition

     No, really, there are some who do. This was seen outside our local cafe just yesterday:

     He then set up shop inside the cafe, taking up a table with another handwritten sign in front of his laptop that read, "Ask me about the Constitution."
     You can't make this shit up. That's why we have conspiracy theorist Teabaggers.
     There are plenty of things for which we could, and should impeach Obama. Benghazi's not among them.

Don't Cry For Him, Argentina

South Carolina: Proudly embarrassing the United States abroad since 1861. #Sanford
— Robert Crawford (@jurassicpork59) May 8, 2013

     So, this is what passes for "family values" in South Carolina's 1st district:
     They decided to elect over a smart lady and successful businesswoman a guy who politically was three years ago like Eva Perón: Still in the public eye but deader than a doornail.
     The man, for want of a better word, they elected to warm his old seat:
     Lied to staff and his constituents that he was hiking the Appalachian trail when in reality he was fucking his mistress in Argentina, on the taxpayer dole... during Father's Day weekend.
     While admitting he made a mistake, he nonetheless brings his mistress onstage with him along with the kids he abandoned on Father's Day weekend.
     Because of this, the NRCC cut Sanford adrift.
     Sanford, while doing absolutely nothing to rehabilitate himself, then violates his ex wife's wishes, for which he has to appear in court tomorrow on trespassing charges, by breaking into her house to watch the second half of the Super Bowl with a son that he suddenly remembered having, saying he did it, "because as a father I didn't think he should watch it alone."
     He was nearly impeached and saved, inexplicably, by the Democrats, after his own party initially drew up 37 articles of impeachment against him in 2009. He was, however, censured.

     Channeling Clint Eastwood, Sanford then had a debate, which he lost, with a cardboard cutout of Nancy Pelosi.
     Last night, South Carolina's 1st congressional district showed the caliber of its family values by electing Sanford back to Congress by nearly ten percentage points, simply because he was the one that had the "R" after his name, making SC-1's voters the very stupidest in planetary history. And they reelected this assclown after it had been established that his own ex wife couldn't trust him and his own party had abandoned him.
     Well played, South Carolina, well played.
     Fuck accepting the will and listening to the voice of the people: They elected Mark Sanford back into Congress. That is all you need to know about the mental and moral decay on the part of Sanford and SC-1's constituents. They sold out their so-called Christian family values for petty partisanship.
     Wow. Just... wow.

Good Times at Pottersville, 5-7-13

Good Times at Pottersville, 5-6-13

Good Times at Pottersville #5