Cheap Blogging Crutch 07.29

WWII... exactly as it happened.

When you look at the financial crisis, the BP oil spill, and various problems over the last decade, is the problem you see one of too much government regulations? If so, get checked for a concussion or some other form of massive brain bleeding. On the other hand, you'll be really receptive to the GOP platform. John Boehner is proposing what he calls the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny), which effectively subjects every regulatory action that costs over $100 million to Senate filibuster. I mean a Senate vote. Which effectively means any decent regulatory structure will be tied up in an unending morass of Senatorial hubris. But on the bright side, allowing industry to run unchecked hasn't resulted in a major catastrophe in the last week. That's got to be some sort of a record. Good luck, GOP.

I'm going to have to get up off the fainting couch, but I'm fairly sure our government actually made a semi-progressive and intelligent step forward in the farcical War on Drugs. Finally noting and changing the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine and realizing how that affected sentencing disparities between blacks and whites, poor and rich. It must have been purely accidental on the part of lawmakers and I'm sure they'll get around to correcting it once someone explains to them what they did. Now, if we can just get them to accidentally make progress on marijuana laws and the entirety of the War on Drugs....

So our appointed better, the Pay Czar, has taken a look at the wanton cash grabbing and money fights our corporate masters have been getting into and has deemed their pay practices lacking. So let's see, he finds that 17 financial firms that have been bailed out are also engaging in pay practices that are "ill-advised" and "exhibited bad judgment". So what's he going to do? Nothing, of course. Theorizing that going after such money would have been contrary to the public interest. Of course. So... all you're telling us is big financial giants are fucking around and getting rich off our dime? We already knew that! The point of a Pay Czar was to find out to what extent and do something about it. Oh sorry, he offered up some voluntary guidelines that they may or may not choose to follow. My bad. Everything's fixed now. Sorry to sound like I was complaining.

In the fight over immigration, many have been appalled at some of the tactics that states like Arizona have taken and the lengths to which supporters of Arizona's laws have gone to justify them. But that's before we learned one important fact: the Bible is for busting in the heads of Mexican interlopers. Yea and the Lord said unto Zedekiah "Them fucking' Mexicans are taking our jobs. Roust them the fuck out of here." It's in Paul's Letters to the Thessalonian John Birch Society. Sure, but what does God think about excessive government regulation?

In This is Kind of Interesting News, Chicago Mag has a story by Myra Daniels on her husband, sixties ad man Draper Daniels, the inspiration for Mad Men's Don Draper. While it does provide a good look into how the ad business worked back then, there's no word if Daniel's life and emotional state oddly synced up with the prevailing political and historical changes of the time. I'd like to read about the proto-Sterling, but that man probably drank himself to death in the fifties.

The sham that is Glenn Beck and those phony buy Gold/"Gold coins are the only way to protect yourself from the black President's inflation" companies... in graphic form. This is why I store my money under my mattress. Or I would if I had any money. Or a mattress.

For the child at heart: photoshops of the Pope in a hat.