For Jesus

Because He's the reason for the Season, Jesus is getting a lot of press recently. He's also getting his name dropped a lot by our elected betters in order to justify whatever it is they want at the moment. Like Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) who has read the bible at least twice and knows for certain that Jesus would be opposed to the permanent extension of the estate tax the House just passed.

Now, after someone dies and someone comes in and steals from them, we consider that in most society reprehensible. … But when the government comes in, because we have the power to pass laws and legalize theft that otherwise would be considered reprehensible, it’s okay. But it is not okay. … Jesus never advocated the government go steal. He said ‘you do it. Do it with your own money, don’t steal it from somebody else.’ And that is why this should not pass.

I believe it was in the Gospel of Paul where Jesus said "And lo my Father was set to let me inherit the earth. But I said to Him 'Father, this is a valuable thing and thus Rome will tax it at a rate of 45%, crippling my small carpentry business. Let the meek inherit it, for they are stupid and will not understand the immense personal freedoms of theirs that are being crushed.'"

Then I believe he said to Luke "Listen man, why does the fuckin' government gotta be so hostile to small business? No, shut up Saul, this isn't about me bitching 'cause I'm not gonna inherit as much as I thought I was. Fuck off with that 'It doesn't affect 99.8% of estates' shit, you fucking bookworm. I'm talking about freedom man. Fuck it's hot out, this climate change shit is also a scam."

So now you know: Jesus was opposed to the estate tax. He probably hated the fuck out of capital gains taxes as well, but I haven't been able to find the passages.

11k

Good news everyone, the job losses last month were so low that they were able to print all their names in the paper. So we would like to offer our condolences to Freddie Wallace of Dubuke, Harriet Sanderson of Portland, and Dick Jauron of Buffalo.

Just kidding, 11,000 people lost their jobs, which puts us into another one of those 'bad news is good news' type situations where a decrease in losses is a positive. But it is nice to see our economy move from shedding jobs at a "10 NFL stadiums full of people" clip to a "1 minor league hockey arena" area. Also, in a development that shows me how I don't understand how the unemployment numbers work, that 11k job loss actually resulted in the unemployment rate dropping to 10%. We're inching towards the employment levels of a 1st world country again!

In the strongest jobs report since the recession began, the government reported Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a jobs creation program.
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The government also significantly revised September and October numbers. September was adjusted to show a loss of 139,000 jobs instead of 219,000, and October 111,000 instead of 190,000.
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“We’re moving toward stability in the labor market and the end of the tremendous firing that has plagued America,” said Allen L. Sinai, the founder of Decision Economics, a research firm. “But it’s going to be bleak for years. While it is going to be better than what we’ve seen, it’s still going to be terrible.”

Allan Sinai everyone! That was an exquisite hope crushing. Still, I'm going to have to disagree with the article's observation that merely moving our employment numbers to "civil war torn eastern European/former Soviet satellite" levels probably isn't going to cause Barry to wipe the sweat off his brow and start plowing through that book off crossword puzzles he's been putting off. But, the news is slightly improving, with even the "I got my hours cut/I'm too discouraged to even look for work" epic misery numbers dropping from 17.5% to 17.2%.

So the possibility lies that in the next few months this economy might actually produce a job. It'll probably be a job as a human shield for Goldman-Sachs executives as they try to get to their luxury sedan without being hit by garbage or as a member of the Gruesome Suicide Clean-up Squad in one of our many economically depressed Midwestern cities, but it'll still be a job. So stay positive, in a month or so you could be that guy who takes a cabbage to the sternum to protect a well heeled Goldman executive from the indignity of contact with peasants and their peasant food. You'll be able to take that cabbage home to eat and you'll probably get to meet Matt Taibbi. Things are looking up for you.

Pictures of the day

From a new book from National Geographic entitled "National Geographic: The Image Collection", which takes 450 photos, many never before released, and puts them together for your enlightenment. Among the many great things about the book are the the early century looks at some of the exotic locales of the world, as shown below. You can take a gander at the website they've put together here.

Antarctica 1922. The ship Terra Nova framed by an ice grotto by Herbert Ponting

Peru 1913. Macchu Picchu by Hiram Bingham

France 1890's. Early mountaineering in the Alps

Afghanistan 1931...or is it 2009? You can't tell the difference. by Maynard Owen Williams

Fake quote of the day

One of the runners up from Slate's write like Sarah Palin contest, which was looking for the best combination of Palin's "pastoral lyricism" and "unlikely metaphors". I guess they'll have to have another contest for quotes that sum up the childish blame shirking and petty grudge holding.

"The snow machine pummeled through the white-dusted plain like a jubilant beaver; snow spewing out from both sides, building its dam of snow like a beaver builds one of wood as Todd rode gallantly upon it."

My God, it's a plausible outtake. Slate has 12 examples, including the phrase "harvest our meat-bearing animals" that I now want to work into every conversation. Read them, laugh, and then imagine 400+ pages of shit like that, then weep, then laugh, then weep again while laughing.

Broken News: Responding to Health Care Reform, Senator Coburn Threatens Further Disaster, Mythical Creatures

WASHINGTON--Emboldened by the media attention surrounding his assertion that senior citizens "are going to die soon" if health care reform passes, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has elected to press the issue even further.

At a hastily-convened press conference earlier today, Senator Coburn announced several other nightmare scenarios that would inevitably occur if various legislative changes on the Democratic Party's wish list came to pass.

"My fellow Americans, I come before you today to warn of grave dangers facing our nation," Said Coburn. "I refer not to the threat of terrorism or the crippled economy, though those are surely legitimate concerns. No, I am here to cast light on unforeseen perils that, should the Democrats accomplish anything at all, will surely bring doom to our great land. Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to talk to you about dragons."

Coburn maintains that, apart from mowing down senior citizens by the dozen, health care reform would unleash, "a winged, fire-breathing medieval menace whose wrath would reduce the world as we know it to a smoldering pile of ruins inhabited only by a mutated race of subterranean cannibals."

When informed that this threatening vision was merely a hybrid of the plots from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and the 2002 box office disappointment, Reign of Fire, Coburn coldly stated, "the facts are the facts" before moving on.

"What do you think will happen if the liberals in Congress institute an automatic weapons ban? Or perhaps repeal portions of the PATRIOT Act?" Continued the junior senator from Oklahoma. "I'll tell you what. Not only will the Yankees take the next seven World Series titles, but a great fire serpent will rise from the ocean and the citizens of this great republic will immediately begin bleeding simultaneously from both the eyes and anus."

Coburn then went on to claim a federal recognition of same-sex marriage would result in roving bands of impeccably dressed, well-groomed dog rapists ravaging the countryside. He then stated that unencumbered stem cell research would bring about the, "death of all kittens and bunnies, everywhere, possibly as a result of wyverns" before asserting that ratification of the Kyoto Protocol would ensure that none of the Black Eyed Peas will be forced to return to their spawning grounds in the Eighth Circle of Hell.

While some alarmist reactionaries and several health reform groups were quick to decry what they saw as Coburn's, "reactionary, fearmongering nonsense", several scholars and historians were more reserved.

Noting the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused by angry mole people furious over lax Chinese immigration policies, increased minotaur attacks after the passage of Medicare, and the previous dragon assault that occurred when Woodrow Wilson proposed joining the League of Nations, experts were quick to urge caution on passage of many of these new laws.

"Look, we all remember when a gryphon gored President McKinley on the steps of the Capitol for his wavering support for the Philippine-American War. I don't think we want to go through that kind of thing again," observed Dr. Franck Haber, Professor of Mythological Horrors and Political Science at Columbia University.

"If Senator Coburn is intimating that the mystical protections erected during the Ford Administration to prevent us from facing the wrath of vengeful mythical beings enraged over liberal policies have weakened or, I shudder to think, been completely removed, then we can't risk moving forward with any of these so-called reforms without suffering horrifying terrors from dragons, evil spirits, Brobdingnagian giants, frost monsters, cyclopes, and other monsterous enemies of socialism. I think we should trust the Senator on this one. After all, he is a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Mythological and Legendary Creatures."

Calmly noting that he alone could not protect them from dragons, Coburn urged that those who did not wish to live a dystopian nightmare of underground flesh reaving and sky attacks from monstrous fire lizards should do whatever they feel is necessary to prevent the passage of health reform.

"We're on the precipice of catastrophe here, citizens," Coburn gravely intoned. "If you wish to be fire roasted as a giant iguana with wings eats you alive, be my guest. But don't say I didn't warn you. This is the only future that an America with 'health care reform' can look forward to."

'Tis the season

With Christmas only a few short weeks away, Santa Claus has a few messages for you. First, as always, is to be good to each other. Secondly, 9/11 was an inside job!



St. Nick is a truther.

No foreigners

The Sarah Palin "I wroted a word book" tour goes ever on. This time stopping at America's own monument to consumer culture: the Mall of America. If you'd like to see Sarah in person and maybe even report on it, they just have one request: no foreigners.

But the mall also was banning foreign reporters, permtting "only English speaking press." That's not a common requirement.

Mall officials, calling the proposed guidelines a mistake, apologized to Palin today for "an internal miscommunication" that was "inadvertently distributed."
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"That should never have been in any kind of press release," said Tina Andreadis, a publicist for HarperCollins, publisher of Palin's hot-selling memoir. "That's not the message the governor wants to send out.''

Actually, judging from her various speeches on immigration and foreign policy, "no foreigners" is exactly the message she wants to get out. But the apology for accidentally exposing her expressed wishes was nice.

It's just a shame that they're banning the only people that could possibly appreciate the Palin signing and come away mentally unscathed: those who experience it through a nearly intractable language barrier, secure in the knowledge that she can't do anything to ruin the country they're actually from.

Brilliant ideas

Over the last few weeks, as the escalation in Afghanistan become a unavoidable reality, some of our elected betters, David Obey being one of them, decided to challenge the conventional wisdom that war is free by arguing that we should actually submit our happytime bombing adventures to the same budgetary principles we make everything else fit into. Even though Obey's "war tax" proposal, which only actually covered spending for 6% of the war, was laughed out of the room by the "serious people" who know that military spending doesn't count as spending, it has given others ideas on war spending. People like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told his colleagues during a closed-door GOP lunch Tuesday that the best way to fund the war would be to use unspent stimulus funds, according to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the third-ranking Republican.
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"We know the stimulus failed. It was sold to the Congress and to the American people with the suggestion that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent. We know unemployment is over 10 percent," said McConnell. "If we're looking for a way to fund several years of the war I would suggest unexpended stimulus funds would be a good place to start."

Brilliant. I mean even though there's a litany of information showing things like, I don't know, how the stimulus actually averted a much larger crisis and how there's still a lot of good it can do, seeing as only a quarter of it has been spent, we need to stop undertaking measures to fix the economy and job markets and plow all of our remaining money into a largely pointless, unwinnable war.

Thanks Mitch, with Susan Collins actually contributing substantively to health care earlier, I had filled my head with childish notions of rational behavior in the Senate and GOP caucus. Thank you for reminding me that the vast majority of your party is a childish group of pro-war halfwits who want to pull the economy down on top of themselves because they see political benefit in doing so. Short circuiting the economy to pay for more war.....priceless Mitch, just priceless.

What the hell is happening?

I don't want to alarm you, but the natural order of things has been uprooted. In a realization that people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are rotten fuckers who should be left on a hill to be tormented by vultures, Harry Reid has been negotiating with the last two moderately sane Republicans, the ones from Maine, in order to get them on board for health care. I know you just grimaced right now, thinking about what further concessions will be made. But that's where it gets weird. Not only is Susan Collins offering up proposed changes to the bill in order to get her support, most of the changes....make the bill better. You're fucking with the natural order of things, Collins!

Collins met Monday with White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle and Health and Human Services health reform director Jeanne Lambrew. The senator said she put several amendment requests on the table: raising the penalty on hospitals with high rates of hospital-acquired infections, changing the small business tax credit to prevent it from discouraging hiring and increasing wages and boosting the affordability of insurance.

My God, all of these things are largely good ideas on the merits that would expand the reach of reform. Does she not understand how "getting support" works? It's by making the bill worse. Hello? Plus, both Collins and Snowe are quite the pro-choice advocates and Ben Nelson's recent pledge to out-Stupak the House bill might further bring them aboard in a bid to, you know, protect things they actually believe in.

My world is spinning and I feel dizzy. I have to go sit down. It's just....using swing vote power to improve health care access for Americans and protect women's rights? In the Senate? I think the sun is going to explode any second now.

Get a job

Today the much heralded Jobs Summit is taking place in Washington, in which our economic, business, financial, and academic elite all trudge to the White House to submit some resumes to Rahm Emanuel in the hope that someone, anyone, will hire them in this terrible, terrible job market. Also, maybe they'll discuss some ways to get the rest of the country employed. Maybe.

But there is one problem to doing any jobs-centric stimulus bill. One, of course, is that it has to get past the Senate. Secondly, is that it will actually cost money to do. This is not surprising to those of us who realize that wishes don't create jobs, but is apparently a big stumbling block for the White House. They're a little too concerned about phony deficit debates. As such, they're wringing their hands over the fact that they might actually have to spend money on *shudder* people.

Obama has summoned 130 corporate executives, economists, small-business owners and union leaders to the White House to sound out ideas for accelerating job growth during the worst labor market in a generation.
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But Obama's options are limited, as the administration already has signaled that it is unwilling to make any investments that would add significantly to the nation's ballooning deficit.
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It is far from clear that Obama will embrace all the ideas being promoted by his supporters in organized labor, who are making calls for direct funding of federal public works jobs, another round of aid to cash-strapped states and cities, and funding for infrastructure projects.

Taken together, those initiatives could cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- a tab Obama seems unwilling to shoulder. The White House has been warmer to ideas to use federal money to leverage private investments.

Let's recap. When Wall Street and banks are in trouble: "Dear God man, this is a catastrophe of epic proportions! Get out the checkbook and start handing out blank checks. No cost is too high, no expense will be spared!"

When unemployment rates are over 10% and showing no signs of improving: "Riiiiiiiight. Are you sure there's not some job creating machine that we already built, that we just can't turn on now? No? Yeah....I think it's time we had a little talk about fiscal responsibility and potential increases in theoretical debt payments decades down the line. I'd inside-out my pockets to mime being broke, but these pants are pretty expensive and you aren't supposed to do that to them. Go away now."

Finally, nearly two years into this collapse, someone finally gets around to saying "Oh shit, what about the people who actually have to live in this country" and you all magically get concerned about deficits, and start spreading bullshit about debt and spending too much. What is the goal? Inaction on unemployment. But of course. Enjoy your jobs summit, I'm sure the theater of it will be lovely. You can pretend you're soliciting opinions from all these various new sources and then you'll just go back to listening to the same old ones that get tight when helping humans is mentioned. Ahh Washington, you never disappoint.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 12.02

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill really wants to write about something other than all the shady shit Blackwater, nee Xe Services, does, but it's just they're given so many opportunities to do shady shit and it is so utterly shady that he's just forced to write about it. More or less, Blackwater is running a secret assassination/kidnapping ring at the behest of the CIA in a program so secret that the White House might not even know about it. Well at least the CIA is getting a handle on this "plausible deniability" stuff, you just kind of wish they wouldn't use the only American organization in the area with a worse reputation than themselves.

Sarah Palin, Israel and Armageddon
Hey, wouldn't it be great if Sarah Palin just started getting really crazy and started spouting off weird Israel related rapture buzzwords, started hanging out with evangelicals who openly promote pro-Israel policies in service of the second Exodus/second coming of Christ/Armageddon, and generally became more dangerous, Jesusy, and crazy? Well...good news then; you got your wish.

UK Iraq War Inquiry: Blair Was Told Iraq War Was Illegal, Decided On War In 2002
Ahh, the United Kingdom, you poor hopeless bastards. Let me see if I have this right: you not only investigated your involvement in the Iraq war, but you did so in a serious manner, and are releasing finding as the investigation goes on? Rookie mistake. The correct way to do things is to admit "mistakes were made", never authorize investigating those mistakes because "they were in the past and we're focused on the future", and then set about whitewashing everything and making the same mistakes, either on a whole new war or and golden oldie.

Capital in the Capitol: Total House Wealth Exceeds $1 Billion
Yup, humble servants of the people all. Plus, as a bonus, their actual net worth is probably more that twice that figure. It's probably even higher, on average, in the Senate. So now you don't have to wonder why no one in government ever seems to be concerned with the plight of regular "non-top 5% Americans". It's because none of them are one, and if they ever were one they've long since forgotten it. Perhaps we need to organize expeditions into America for our elected betters, so that they may study us "normals" much like Jane Goodall studied chimps. Perhaps then they can learn to understand us and learn that we aren't all that thrilled with massive corporate handouts, endless wars, and getting bent over various barrels of their choice.

The Bank Job
This time, it's Vanity Fair and Bethany McLean who decide to take the baton from Matt Taibbi and get in a good couple of shots at our money overlords at Goldman-Sachs. Did you know that ole GS pretty much never loses on the financial bets it makes, essentially has a license to print money because of securities "spreads", and ripped off it's own customers to the tune of $40 billion by selling them shoddy mortgage securities? Probably not, but I bet you could have guessed something equally shady and ethically questionable and been pretty close. I just hope when they're allowed to rewrite our regulatory laws, they throw some of all that excess cash on the nightstand and tell us they'll call us. We could use the ego boost.

Stay classy, Family Research Council

As many of you know, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is going through our various legislative bodies in an attempt to add "sexual orientation" to the list of things employers cannot discriminate against. Namely race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Now to most of us, we would simply think that meant you couldn't fire someone because they were gay. Oh no, dear readers, the Family Research Council is here to tell you that it means something much, much more sinister.

Earlier this month, the far-right Family Research Council (FRC) sent a fundraising action alert fearmongering about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which has been introduced in both the House and Senate and President Obama says he is “pushing hard to pass.” “This law would punish anyone in the workplace who dares oppose homosexual behavior, cross-dressing and other unhealthy behaviors,” said the FRC alert.

In a four-page solicitation letter mailed to supporters this month, which was obtained by ThinkProgress, the conservative organization went even further in its rhetoric, claiming that President Obama wants to “impose homosexuality and silence Christianity in workplaces”

Everyone is compulsorily ordered to be gay and Christianity is outlawed? I though that would have been harder to pass than health care but apparently not. I guess the only question is, soon to be gay readers, is if the Democrats will bundle this with the proposed legislation that forces mandatory abortions and conversion to Islam, or do you think they'll pass them separately so that we can have two ceremonies heralding the death of freedom, religion, and America?

I hoping for two. I already bought a cake shaped like George Washington kissing the feet of Osama bin Laden and we can cook an eagle on the grill for the second party. Ah, it doesn't matter, this is just something we'll have to hash out after Obama forces us to be gay.

Broken In Brief: Obama offers up population surge to win hearts, minds in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON—Of the myriad reactions reverberating throughout the political world following President Obama’s Afghan War speech last evening, most are centered around the plan to immediately send an additional 30,000 troops to the region. But seemingly missing from this debate is any sort of reaction to the second tier of Obama’s new strategy, one in which upwards of 30 million Americans are permanently relocated to Afghanistan in an effort to conjure a more accommodating indigenous population.

The program, dubbed the Two Birds Project, would seek to alleviate two main problems facing the Obama Administration: first, the hostility of an Afghan population wary of more foreign soldiers and increased violence, and second, the double-digit American unemployment rate.

"Frankly it’s a win-win,” observed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “By flooding and doubling the Afghan population with American citizens, we will finally have popular support of a people that is welcoming to American interests. Plus, knocking 30 million off the jobless rolls will help America’s economic situation. Hell, considering most of those people can no longer afford health care, this program will drastically decrease the number of uninsured in the country to boot.”

Added Gates, “I fail to see how this could go wrong.”

For those that feel the culture shock would be too great in moving from America to Afghanistan, architects of the policy note that most of the unemployed come from the more economically and industrially shattered areas of the Midwest and, as such, will hardly notice the difference between Afghanistan’s sparsely populated areas, underdeveloped industry, poverty, and religious extremism from the types with which they are already familiar.

On a more psychological level, these "Amerafghanians" will no longer be forced to endure the horrendous torment of seeing vacant mills or shuttered factories dotting the landscape, as seeing as Afghanistan has virtually no manufacturing or industrial capacity in the first place.

As an added relocation bonus, those helpless individuals who have turned to drugs are bound to appreciate their newfound proximity to the world’s foremost narcotics pipeline, able to partake in that fresh-off-the-poppy heroin traditionally available only to the most affluent westerners.

Barring any complications, America hopes to have fobbed off 30 million of its dregs onto Afghanistan by the end of the 1st quarter next year.

Picture of the day

"What's this?" you say. "Another picture of space?" Well, yes. Except that doesn't quite get at it. The picture above is one tiny, small, infinitesimally minuscule portion of a 2.5 billion pixel 800,000 picture mosaic of the entire galaxy, as done by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

This will give you sort of the idea of what it'll look like when chained together:

It is being unveiled at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago today. So if you like mosaics of the universe so large that it is "almost too big for astronomers to probe in detail", head on down. Otherwise you can just download 16 jpeg files that are about 35 MB a piece and get a gander at the home galaxy. If you're interested, there's also a video about how they made it.

One more compromise

Good news for those of you who thought that the battle over the public option was going to result in a version that was too strong and too helpful to millions of Americans. It seems we aren't going to have that problem. First, there was a bit of analysis that said the public option as presently constructed by the Senate won't actually cut costs all that much, then there was the new revelation that they were scrapping what they had in exchange for something even weaker that would lure both Maine Republican Senators. What exactly is that plan? I'd like to tell you Flounder, but the new plan is on double secret probation.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who has been tapped by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to come up with a Plan B approach to the public option controversy that has divided Democrats, has been working closely with liberal and conservative Democrats, as well as Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine).
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Carper, a junior member of the Finance Committee, was tight-lipped on the details of his plan, but noted that he has been talking extensively with Snowe. He pointed out that he served with Snowe, and her husband, former Maine Gov. John McKernan (R), in the House.

Snowe favors a trigger proposal, where a public option would go into effect if the private health insurance market falters. The trigger has been soundly rejected by some liberals in Congress.

Whew! I was worried there for a second that a public option might get passed. Now we get the best of both worlds: those who get support a public option get to claim they passed one and those who oppose it get to be secure in the notion that one will never come about because the trigger to enact one will never be reached. Of course, that is, if the super duper new plan is even as "good" as a triggered public option. Hell, the compromise might just be to write "the public option" on a post-it note, put in under a glass case and allow us to view it from afar. It'll do about as much good as current designs of the public option will do.

So there you are: one more compromise that degrades your faith in government and the ability to pass meaningful reform. Actually, I should amend that; it's one more compromise...before a bunch of other compromises. Yeah, we don't even know what those will be yet. I bet Democrats are going to be surprised when they find their base isn't as thrilled with our elected betters as much as our elected betters seem to be thrilled with our elected betters. Ah well, at least we were spared the scourge of a mechanism that might slightly reduce health care costs. It's better that way, we just would have used the savings on another war.

Awwwwwwww

Citizens, several GOP Senators are steaming mad about something. No, it's not that we didn't escalate the war in Afghanistan enough or the fact that our health care system is about become socialist, far from it. It's that they're mad at Sen. Al Franken, because they voted against his little "rape is bad, people should be allowed to file charges over it" bill and some nasty people have used that to imply that they don't have sufficient consciences or functioning human souls. Also: that they love rape. So they've pushed back as best they can, crying as hard they can that mean Mr. Franken is hurting their feelings with his rape legislation.

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.
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In a chamber where relationship-building is seen as critical, some GOP senators question whether Franken’s handling of the amendment could damage his ability to work across the aisle.

Yeah, John, I know how it is. I feel for you. I mean I would feel pretty bent out of shape if people thought I was for rape just because I voted against a law that made it so that people who were raped while serving for a government contractor could sue to prosecute it in civil court. I mean rape is bad, but we can't go around allowing people to attempt to receive legal justice for it just because it happened. How anyone could try to turn your opposition into a view that you're somehow callous and uncaring towards rape victims is beyond me. It's like Franken took that bill and violated you with it against your will. There should be a law against something like that.

Really though, I just want to chastise all of you who think that this is just a bunch of petty, crybaby whining from the GOP. Clearly Franken is responsible for the court of public opinion deeming them scumbags just because they're trying to defend the indefensible. He should do what they want: apologize for trying to further criminalize rape and come out vigorously defending the 30 Senators who think prosecuting rape is a bridge too far. It's really the only logical solution.

Speechishness

So last night, President Obama took time out of his schedule to talk to the nation about Afghanistan. Given the nature and timing of the speech, I'm not sure what made the public madder: escalating a war they aren't confident about or delaying both NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles. But throughout his speech the President laid out the goals, perils, pitfalls, and plans for his new Afghanistan strategy in one of the most serious and adult ways that any sitting Commander has ever done to the American people. It's just a shame it was in the service of a bad idea.

But that was just one of his audiences, what of his message to our elected betters who will be called upon to ratify this plan after he's already sent the troops over and started this strategy? Were their war boners mega-huge or just nominally huge?

On Capitol Hill, they will face a major fight over funding the war. In the House, as many as half of Democrats may oppose the administration's request for money to support the surge, forcing Obama to rely on a big block of Republican votes to get the legislation through the House and Senate.

Reactions Tuesday night illustrated the challenging environment for the president. Liberal Democrats expressed opposition to any escalation, while Democratic leaders signaled their reservations by saying they will take time to study the plan. Republicans applauded the troop increase but almost uniformly warned about sending mixed messages with talk of leaving.

Ahh Republicans, you filibuster everything but war. But it's nice to see our debate so clearly lined out: Democrats who are wary of adding troops and Republicans who are wary of ever letting them leave. But we all know where this will be headed: the "centrist" Democrats who fuck up any good legislation and cry about "fiscal responsibility" when it looks like money is going to be spent on actual humans, will help grease the skids for this escalation. It is their way.

So there we are, this is already a foregone conclusion, and the default consensus of our media and political elite is "if the President wants to bomb it or invade it, then he must have a good reason. Let's all shut up now". The troops are going, escalation is happening, and all that's left is a showpiece "debate" two months from now where funding is passed and the debate over the worthiness or intelligence of this plan is reduced to "do you want to win against the terrorists or are you still a pussy?" Ain't America grand? Onward ho! More war forever.

Broken News: High School Reunion Completely Disappoints

MADISON, WI -- Last Friday night, 193 West Haven High School graduates from the class of 1999 convened at Finkle's Bar & Grill, a mere stone's throw from their alma mater, filled with hope for long-simmering drunken confrontations, unwise sexual congress, and transparent exaggerations of lives that would best be described as abject failures.

Instead, the West Haven alumni managed to stage perhaps the least-interesting reunion on record in the western hemisphere. Apart from a single vomit-filled ficus outside of the women's bathroom and a pair of D.U.I.'s, the event ran its course with a sadly remarkable lack of horrible behavior.

"Fuck me!" said Gregory Zemelman, former Math Club president who is now a civil engineer living in Chicago. "I'd been waiting years. Years! I got through grad school on the promise of heaping derision on some morbidly obese ex-cheerleader types who laughed at me for almost half a decade. All they did was plump up a little after they had kids. Not a single meth addiction amongst the entire goddamn squad."

"One of those cheerleaders even apologized for being mean to me 'Way back then'! What the fuck?"

Much of the disappointment with the reunion seemed to come from those who might have been considered less-than-popular in their high school years, but wound up finding no small measure of success later on in life.

"I'd have to say my biggest let-down was seeing Tyler," explained Lauren Adams, a criminal defense attorney in Manhattan, in reference to former all-city quarterback and student council president, Tyler Murphy.

"Seriously, my face cleared up, I dropped seven dress sizes, and I make more money than any five of those mouth breathers combined. During that time, not only did Tyler refuse to drink himself into oblivion or go to jail, the bastard went off and started a reasonably successful landscaping company. I hope one of his kids gets caught in a fucking wood chipper."

When asked to comment on Ms. Adams' statement, Mr. Murphy replied, "Who? Oh, her... yeah, I hope she's doing well and stuff."

For some, the realization that a decade mentally fueled by petty high school sleights resulted in little more than terminally misplaced anger was too much to bear.

"Ten goddamn years of that 'I'll show them I'm not a clarinet playing dweeb' and 'What'll those bitches and assholes think now that I'm doing all this big, important shit', and for what?" West Haven graduate Josh Harriot said, throwing his hands in the air.

"Not only do I find out these people have mostly changed for the better and that we've all grown up emotionally, but I realized that all the shit I was doing to 'show everybody' isn't all that important, or even good, and that no one really cares. Unfuckingbelievable!"

"The middle! We're all average people standing in the fucking middle!" Harriot yelled out. "I'm not lording over shit!"

In fact, 'People growing up and changing for the better' was cited as the number one reason for disappointment, beating out 'No porn stars in the class' and the fact that everyone was generally pleasant to be around. Still, some had other complaints.

"Nah, I'm gonna have to go with 'Hot girls not as hot as you remember them' as my biggest complaint," observed Ethan Wallace, a former member of the track team and current marketing analyst.

"The way I remember it, Chelsea Garrett was, like, the hottest woman in the world. Supermodel level, easy. Now I look at her and she looks pretty much the same, but she only seems nominally attractive. It feels like someone is messing with my mind."

In the end, after the crushing realization that they were all average people with average jobs who had gone through a typical, average high school experience and typical, average reunion, some placed their hopes in the future.

"The 20 year reunion, man, that's where the shit will go down," hoped Harriot. "By then we should have separated out a little more career and wage-wise, our children will have had time to grow into unmentionable fuckups or stunning successes, there will probably be a few divorces and bad plastic surgeries, and we'll really be able to do some nose-to-shit rubbing."

He paused and sighed a bit, "At least I hope so. I can't deal with another one of these mildly pleasant evenings."

Confusion

So.....Barry's a Brit now? I'm finding it hard to find the wellspring of xenophobic fear that an ethnicity like "Indonesian" can gin up.

He's still Black and Muslim, right? I can still be afraid of those two things, right? Good.

Kudos on the monkey usage. There's racist dog whistling and then there's classy racist dog whistling. Gentlemen, you are walking that fine line.

Quote of the Day

It seems we all owe everyone in the Bush Administration a big apology. We've made sport of the poor sons of bitches for years now and it seems we've done so unfairly. See I was operating under the misapprehension that they were running the country from January 2001 to January 2009, as I'm sure you were as well, which caused me to believe that they were the cause of everything the government touched turning to some form of exceptionally noxious pig excrement. It turns out they weren't even in office at all. I know it sounds confusing, but perhaps I'm not explaining it right. Let Dick Cheney explain.

But Cheney rejected any suggestion that Obama had to decide on a new strategy for Afghanistan because the one employed by the previous administration failed.

Cheney was asked if he thinks the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the disintegration of Afghanistan because of the attention and resources that were diverted to Iraq. “I basically don’t,” he replied without elaborating.

See! The only other logical explanation is that someone else was in charge, otherwise it would simply be ludicrous to claim that you were in no way responsible for the results of a war you presided over for eight fucking years.

As for who is at fault for things like letting bin Laden waltz away? I don't know, as per tradition we'll have to find the nearest available goat to blame it on. But it definately wasn't the Bush Administration.

Pictures of the day

From Wired Science comes the work of the head of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre, Dutch photographer Wim van Egmond, and his Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms.

Our financial betters gird themselves for the peasant uprising

A class war uprising is coming, according to those who work at Goldman-Sachs. I'd trust them, their balance sheets show they have a fairly good predictive record. Hell, just like most times, they've even manipulated this economic crisis too. And not the good kind of class war either, like when rich people fuck over poor people, no, the bad kind. The poors rising up en masse to overthrow the their social and financial betters just because people in the financial and banking industries may or may not have set all the peasants money on fire, tanked the economy and job markets, gotten reimbursed for their losses off the backs of the proles, and have shown no remorse for doing so.

Well, just fucking try it you blue collar shits. YOU WILL NOT TAKE THE HAMPTONS!! YOU WILL NOT TAKE THE UPPER EAST SIDE!! FREEEEEEDOOOOOOOM!!!

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

Ahh Wall Street, you really don't know us. We all have bigger and better guns, more of them, and we reload our own ammo. Saves on costs. Still, this does perfectly sum up your mindset. Instead of showing an ounce of humility, a shred of remorse, or one nanoparticle of regret, you start arming yourself in anticipation of the class war you know is coming.

Come now, if the poor were really going to rise up and start guillotining the rich, wouldn't we have done it, like, decades ago? Wouldn't it be sort of an annual thing? You know: rich people fuck up economy, poor people take the brunt of it, mass beheadings, lessons learned, things go back to normal, wash, rinse, repeat. Please, no; we're forgiving like that. Plus, with the economy the way it is, none of us can afford a plane ticket to New York. Plus your doormen are really good; it's impossible to get into one of those highrises carrying a high powered rifle.

So no, the unwashed masses won't be kicking it the door of your board meeting, setting fire to your estate, garroting your Yorkiepoo, before finally marching you into the public square to be tarred and feathered. No, we're just going to wait until you finally, completely collapse society. Then we'll eat you as food. Have Tim Geithner bail you out of that.

Sky War

You know, sometimes we look at this country and our leaders and focus too much on all the bad wars they start or escalate. We tend to forget the good ones they start, like Moon War: the War Against Lunar Aggression. But, as in all things, the world is catching up to us and our ability to start conflicts with orbiting space bodies, nature, and concepts. Take Venezuelan President Hugo "Crackers from Caracas" Chavez, who is not only declaring war against drought, but is taking to the front lines himself to lead the onslaught in his newly declared war against clouds.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to "bomb clouds" to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.
...
"I'm going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I'll zap it so that it rains," Chavez said at a ceremony late on Saturday with family members of five Cubans convicted of spying in the United States.

"Any cloud that crosses me." That's right, Hugo, you don't take any shit from those goddamn clouds. Won't rain? Maybe a Cuban missile right between its cumulo and nimbus ought to make things a little more clear to those wispy bastards.

I'd advise going heavy. Show them the full might of the Venezuelan air force and bomb them into rainy compliance. But whatever you do don't get into a situation where you have to train stratus clouds to police nimbus clouds to make them keep raining. It just doesn't work. Overwhelming force is the only thing these visible masses of droplets understand. Soon, you'll have Earth-based sky water again.

Us? Oh we've already moved on to moon water. You just keep on drinking that sky stuff. It's cute.

Es-ca-late good times, come on!

Well, the news is in and much to everyone's surprise, America is escalating the war in Afghanistan. And because it was a hard decision and stuff and President Obama isn't, like, totally beholden to the military and junk, he's only sending 30,000 troops. Hell, only adding 30k? That's practically like bringing all the troops home. Anyway, he'll explain it all tonight in his speech from West Point. Here's the main thrust.

In bringing the total American force to nearly 100,000 troops by the end of May, the administration will move far faster than it had originally planned. Until recently, discussions focused on a deployment that would take a year, but Mr. Obama concluded that the situation required “more, sooner,” as one official said, explaining the some of the central conclusions Mr. Obama reached at the end of a nearly three-month review of American war strategy.
...
The strategy aims to prevent Al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan, whose territory it used to prepare for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and to keep Taliban insurgents from toppling the government there. The 30,000 new American troops will focus on securing a number of population centers in Afghanistan where the Taliban are strongest, including Kandahar in the south and Khost in the east, the officials said. The American forces, they said, will pair up with specific Afghan units in an effort to end eight years of frustrating attempts to build them into an independent fighting force.

The point, besides the President burnishing his "not a pussy" credentials, is for take less committed Taliban members and try to reintegrate them into society and give them paying jobs while at the same time holding major population centers in an attempt to give Afghans a chance to build up their infrastructure, economy, and government without bomby/shooty interference. At the very least it'll give the Taliban nicer shit to shoot at and bomb after this "don't call it a surge" surge ends. Ideally the Taliban will be weakened and the Afghans will have an easier enemy to deal with that they can fight on their own. You know, usually I'd laugh at that, but after hearing that joke so many times over so many wars and military actions on so many continents over so many decades, it stops being funny.

On the plus side, President Obama will be giving us a time table. Ultimately it'll be a time table for him telling us why we can never leave Afghanistan, but for the moment we can all pretend we'll be out of there sometime before our grandkids are old enough to fight there. So it's basically another round of "No, see, this time our plan is even better" sprinkled with a liberal dose of "No, we're totally going to be able to train Afghans into a fighting force that is sufficient enough to completely take over fighting an enemy that the most technologically superior army in the world has been baffled by", some "this blank check I'm handing them isn't a blank check", with a little "While it may look like I'm doing all the same stupid stuff that Bush did, I'm totally doing it in a smart way", finally finishing up with "It's all going to work out, baby. You can trust me."

I'm sure this is all a great idea and will work out fine. You really need a full decade to really understand the ins and outs of a war.

Good morning, all our problems are solved

It's a shame, two years ago and this woman would have been a prime candidate for a cabinet position.