Karma

Dear rest of the country: What the hell did we ever do to... um, well, yeah, there was that lil' kerfluffle back in 1860, but jeezus is that justification for doing this to us?

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, businessman Herman Cain of Atlanta, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Texas Gov. Rick Perry will appear at U.S. Jim DeMint’s Labor Day forum in Columbia for GOP presidential candidates.

Also invited were U.S. House Newt Gingrich, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. They have until 5 p.m. Wednesday to accept.

Wow. I just... wow. It's going to be like a goddamn black hole of stupid here week-after-next, an intellectual singularity which the light of reason will be unable to escape, a bottomless cup of "duh", a boundless anti-intellectual festival...

In short, HELP ME!

BTW, could this be where Falin' Palin will declare her candidacy? Why, yes, electing the first woman as Preznit (or President, even) would be SO worth having a Dominionist Teabagger loon in the Oval Office, I don't think.

She continues to be awesome

God, I love Kathy Griffin:

Perhaps mistaking Griffin for someone else, one of Bachmann's staffers pulled out a video camera to capture their interaction for her website. First, Griffin says she asked the Congresswoman if she'd support an effort to repeal the law that banned homosexuals from the military. When Bachmann declined, Griffin got personal.

"Congresswoman Bachmann, were you born a bigot or did you, like, grow into it?" she asked -- on tape.

As for Bachmann's answer?

"That's a good question. I'm gonna have to get back to ya," she said, perhaps not creating the best of campaign slogans.

Woot.

"First" responders get treated second-rate

Oh, isn't this fucking adorable, really a sign of what we've become as a nation and how we've elected to remember one of the biggest tragedies we've faced in over 230 years: the people who ran TOWARDS the Twin Towers on 9/11 when everyone else was running away are going to get shafted:

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

We're gonna hear now, why the police, firefighters, and others who rushed to the scene at Ground Zero will not be invited to the tenth anniversary memorial ceremony of the 9-11 attacks in New York.

That announcement from the mayor's office has fueled anger and frustration among many first responders.

NPR's Margot Adler reports.

MARGOT ADLER: Andrew Brent as spokesperson for Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a statement that the first priority was accommodating the family members of victims, and that the new smaller site on Memorial Plaza poses new space constraints.

Adorable! Mike "Bought myself this nice mayorship" Bloomberg would have the families at Ground Zero rather than the first responders, presumably so he can feed off their loss like so many other Republican ghouls. No, he certainly couldn't spend some of his wealth to allow them space; he needs it to buy Gracie Mansion again.

It stinks the stinky stink of offense that these people actually lived, regardless of the fact that they, unlike the victims, chose to risk their lives for others. But you survived and these people didn't so, thank you, we'll figure out something else for you guys, while all the media attention will be at Ground Zero.

What a nice way to commemorate heroism.

ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod

ohmigod

are the markets up or down?

By how much?

*panic panic*

ohmigod

how many points?

what about tomorrow?

What about Europe and Japan?

ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod

. . .

Remind me again why I should give a good rat's ass about this? Something that benefits the already-goddamn-too-rich-for-their-own-good while contributing nothing to the actual economy?

I mean, yeah, I noticed that the Dow's been tanking pretty much ever since the Teabaggers had their lil' snit-fit over the deficit. Which indicates to me that Wall Street at the very least didn't appreciate their efforts. But this obsessive following of every twitch of the market - puh-leeze!

Fuck 'em. We should have just defaulted.

The Shrill One Is Shrill

But after all, who's crazy enough to listen to economists these days?

Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2.

These may sound like dry statistics, but they reflect a truly terrible reality. Not only are vast numbers of Americans unemployed or underemployed, for the first time since the Great Depression many American workers are facing the prospect of very-long-term — maybe permanent — unemployment. Among other things, the rise in long-term unemployment will reduce future government revenues, so we’re not even acting sensibly in purely fiscal terms. But, more important, it’s a human catastrophe.

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back.

So we're facing a jobs crisis as well as a economic crisis, and it's looking more and more like private employers can't/won't pick up the slack.

So why the hell not another WPA program?

I know, I know, the Teabaggers would have it be nothing but digging holes and filling them in again so they could complain about the uselessness of it while humiliating the people doing the work, but there's no reason it'd HAVE to be like that. The original WPA supported creative works as well - art, music, theater, poetry even. The WPA even, god forbid, built libraries:

South Carolina had one of the larger state-wide library service demonstration projects. At the end of the project in 1943, South Carolina had twelve publicly funded county libraries, one regional library, and a funded state library agency.[22

But I suppose that's just too radical an idea for now. I mean, there's nothing like that we could do at present - except maybe for hiring heath care workers from doctors to nurses to pharmacists to home health aides to med techs, hiring people to work on infrastructure repair and maintenance, having people set up public wi-fi systems, expanding the library system even further, working on ensuring affordable housing, helping with recycling of everything from paper to plastics to electronics, doing actual research journalism, supporting small publishers, independent filmmakers, and independent music labels, working as outreach to the elderly (who after all will be increasing in number as the Boomers continue to gray), working to reclaim areas scarred by mountaintop-removal mining, working on small-tech projects like A Liter Of Light, organizing public archives for libraries and museums, working with seeing-eye dogs and other assistance animals, helping to rescue dogs and cats and spay/neuter them and find 'em homes, repairing flood/hurricane/tornado damage, building levees that don't leak, helping to ensure coastal communities can deal with erosion and rising water levels, acting as tutors/home school teachers/counselors, helping to put public records and old books/newspapers/magazines into accessible digital form, proofreading manuscripts and OCR scans, working with cities to promote and create green spaces and public parks...

and that's all just off the top of my head.

But that's just crazy talk, I know.

Dear Washington DC

Hey, fuck you very much, too.

I suppose you guys have had a great couple weeks, pretending that GUMMIN SPENDIN'is suddenly some great fucking crisis (as it only seems to be during Democratic presidencies) and that if we owe one dollar, NAY ONE MERE PENNY to anyone we are all DOOMED.

Yes, drag out your idiot analogies with "even the average American households must adhere to a balanced budget every month" (which is less and less the case with the proliferation of private credit). Go ahead, ignore the fact that the government ISN'T a private household and needs to be the spender of last resort in an economic downturn, even if it means running a deficit. There is NO ready parallel between the Federal economy and household economies, any more than there's a direct ready parallel between human brains and IBM-PCs, and you people fucking know it and yet keep repeating this line of bullshit.

This "crisis" was, after all, totally fucking artificial and could have been stopped long before this - that is, if we had a President who was more concerned with the welfare of the people who elected him than this "bipartisan" bullshit. Protip to Obama - they DO NOT WANT to "work with" you. They HATE you. Being nice to the GOP is like ceding bits of Austria to that moustached freako back in 1939 - they always want more.

Oh, and the GOP, makers of this "crisis", which of course isn't Obama's fault so much as attributable to the massive spending deficit created by The War On Whatever The Hell We Want It To Be On and the Bush tax giveaways to the ultra-ultra-wealthy (who are doing just fine, thank you, suckers). Thank god you successfully avoided giving that bad ol' government more money. I mean, beyond blowin' shit up in the Middle East and handing it out to the poor (OBVIOUSLY) what the hell do they need it for?

THIS IS THE KIND OF THING THEY NEED IT FOR, YOU MORONS:

Federal officials are recalling 36 million pounds of ground turkey produced by Cargill Inc. linked to a California death and at least 76 other salmonella illnesses nationwide.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the move late Wednesday. All of the recalled products were reportedly produced at the company's Springdale, Ark., plant.

The recall follows the death of a Sacramento, Calif., resident tied to an outbreak of salmonella food poisoning that has sickened people in 26 states since March. At the family's request, no details about the death have been released.

Oh, I'm sure these companies, absent government regulation and oversight, could just be trusted to police themselves. After all, what's more important to a corporation - safety or profits?

Ha, ha, that's a joke; it's profits, of course. It's certainly a challenge to sell your product when it kills people, but, hey, there's always that lucrative Chinese market available and god knows they have more people than they know what to do with and can certainly spare a few thousand or so in the name of corporate profit.

And plus we get to listen to the GOP whine and snuffle about being called terrorists. AW POOR BABIES. Jeebus, we're supposed to take you people seriously when you called Democrats "traitors" and "communists" for years and years, to the point where you actually goddamn thought seriously about calling them "The Democrat Socialist Party", and now you're all "OH BIDEN CALLED US NAMES *SNIF*"? (Not that many of us take you seriously anymore, to begin with. As I've said, keep acting like a clown and sooner or later people will start laughing at you.) If you don't want to be called "terrorists" and "hostage-takers", stop fucking acting that way.

And speaking of clowns - ! The Teabaggers, squatting in the House of Representatives, dragging their knuckles up and down the aisles and emitting a fetid stream of crap that puts the hog farming industry to shame. It's a wonder the Potomac hasn't had a Pfisteria bloom, really. Oh, the Teabaggers. These lovely examples of retrograde evolution who hated the government so badly they did eveything they could to become a part of it, and then proceeded to ignore everything but trashing every Federal program they could get their stinky mitts on. They even took time out from their fretting over the (entirely bullshit) deficit "crisis" to worry about the (entirely bullshit) incandescent light bulb "ban" because, let's face it, for all the powdered wigs and Founding Father cosplay, that's what the Teabaggers consider freedom - lightbulbs.

That's right up there with advocacy of "freedom" in the "right" to own a Hummer H2, and we see how well THAT's worked out.

So, yay, we can enjoy our incandescent lightbulbs in the comfort of our home, until the nice bank comes and forecloses it out from under us, and once we're out on the street we can expect nothing at all except to be rousted by police, since, after all, the nation can't afford economic security but sure as hell can afford plenty security personnel. And if we're lucky there'll be a spare cardboard box under the overpass for us, 'cause in the most powerful nation on Earth this is The Best That We Can Do.