Goodbye to All That

While I never actually admitted it, when I'd do my erstwhile long column on Sunday morning/afternoon, I'd poach from Frank Rich's column for ideas on where to go. Actually, "poach" perhaps is a too-larcenous word: Perhaps I should say I took cues from Rich's weekly Op-Ed and zig-zag off on my own lonely tangent ("The road less traveled"? I usually need a machete to go where I'm going.). And today, I'm about to do it again.

I was a relatively late newcomer to Frank Rich's genius. I didn't begin to read the Op-Eds until I became a political blogger over six years ago (rivaling Rich's 17 year-long tenure at the Times in blogger years). Later, when that venerable institution made the colossal blunder of trying to put their Op-Ed columnists behind the velvet rope of Times Select, thereby making them available only to paying subscribers, my interest in the Op-Ed, and Rich's canon, really took off. Back then we bloggers would vie to see who could poach Rich's byline first and get the coveted link (and maybe, Oh God, the Big Headline) on Buzzflash when it was still Buzzflash.

Rich didn't have the brutal elegance or write the perfumed poison pen belles letters of a James Wolcott nor did he turn into some tiresome nickname-slinging insider like Maureen Dowd. Somehow, over the course of nearly 20 years, he'd avoided espousing controversial, and bigoted, opinions that would end his career. It's to his enduring legacy that he never suffered the same fate as Helen Thomas.

Any newspaper is bigger than the sum of its parts but that hasn't been the case of the NY Times. They are no bigger than the sum of its parts, especially since Frank Rich has now passed into its hallowed Halls of Posterity. Rich, as one could expect, made a graceful exit, taking only one potshot at his former employer when he wrote in his swan song Op-Ed, "Neither it nor any other institution is infallible, as was illustrated most recently during the run-up to the Iraq invasion."

Indeed, not only had the NY Times dropped the ball on that, as it had during Vietnam, but also on 9/11, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina (.pdf of the original article, not the silently-amended one in the Times' archives), etc. Judith Miller, in fact, was so embedded with the weapons inspectors and the Screaming Eagles that she was practically writing policy and was squarely in the middle of the Valerie Plame outing. And who that follows the Times can forget the fake articles of Jason Blair?

Not only that, to this day they're still censoring the late Molly Ivins because of a PG-13 joke about "chicken pluckers," hardly the grudge that one would expect for a newspaper branded for decades by conservative mouth breathers as being a bastion of liberal propaganda. Like Rich, Ivins, the ultimate liberal pundit, felt the Times was too claustrophobic and creatively stifling.

For 17 years virtually every Sunday, Rich produced hundreds of articles skewering Bush, the right wing and outrages that helplessly swam into his eagle-eyed ken. Making relevant connections between seemingly unrelated news items, Rich forced us to expand our outlook and to acknowledge the deeper connective tissue that drives our country and its policies. Rich was often at his best when he'd briefly slip into theater/movie critic mode and make some spot-on cultural reference such as the article almost exactly a year ago about Wall St. crooks running roughshod on Main Street and the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Four and a half years ago, when Obama still hadn't served out his third year in the US Senate, Rich had warned us that the junior senator from Illinois was "not a miracle elixir." Obama's two plus years in the White House has proven Rich to be a prophet in a par with Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce.

With Rich's departure after today's column, the NY Times has gotten a lot poorer. Maureen Dowd's never been the same since winning a Pulitzer for helping to almost take down the Clinton administration over a blow job. Bob Herbert's just tiresome. Paul Krugman's good for economic viewpoints but his acumen has been noticeably absent since the start of the Obama administration. And not too many of us are sufficiently intrigued with Middle Eastern/Asian affairs to much care what Nick Kristoff says about anything.

As the Times' Opinion Editorialist-at-Large, Rich spanned this great nation, its policies, its prejudices, its triumphs and its stupidities with sartorical humor and always controlled outrage. With a last tongue-in-cheek observation, Rich wrote, "That’s one reason America is so thrilling to write about." In other words, as the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times."

The problem is, The Times isn't nearly as interesting now that Frank Rich has fled to New York Magazine.

Dog Walker

...and keep dogging that cross-eyed cunt before he does any more damage. If California can recall a guy like Gray Davis and replace him with a flabby, egotistical, gap-toothed baboon like Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Wisconsin can 86 this clown.

What seems to be elided over by the always reliable mainstream media < /snark > is this little-known provision of the union-busting bill that was rammed through the state assembly with all the industry and gusto of a 12" dildo at a lesbian orgy:

SECTION 2704. 174.13 (2) of the statutes is amended to read:

174.13 (2) Any officer or pound which has custody of an unclaimed dog may release the dog to the University of Wisconsin System, the University of Wisconsin–­Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin, Inc., or to any other educationa­l institutio­n of higher learning chartered under the laws of the state and accredited to the University of Wisconsin System or University of Wisconsin–­Madison, upon requisitio­n by the institutio­n. The requisitio­n shall be in writing, shall bear the signature of an authorized agent, and shall state that the dog is requisitio­ned for scientific or educationa­l purposes. If a requisitio­n is made for a greater number of dogs than is available at a given time, the officer or pound may supply those immediatel­y available and may withhold from other dispositio­n all unclaimed dogs coming into the officer’s or pound’s custody until the requisitio­n is fully discharged­, excluding impounded dogs as to which ownership is establishe­d within a reasonable period. A dog left by its owner for dispositio­n is not considered an unclaimed dog under this section. If operated by a county, city, village or town, the officer or pound is entitled to the payment of $1 for each dog requisitio­ned. An institutio­n making a requisitio­n shall provide for the transporta­tion of the dog.”

No, this is not from The Onion or Andy Borowitz. This is how evil the Republican Party truly is. They want to use your puppies for scientific experimentation to benefit corporate R&D. The "scientific or educationa­l purposes"? That's vivisection, or performing surgery on a live subject. So if you let little Spot get loose in Appleton or Madison and the Animal Control Officer gets his hands on him, he could easily be sold to scientific research for a $1.

There must be a shitload of stray dogs in Wisconsin if this is seen as a source of much-needed revenue.

So, all the jokes we've been making about Republicans torturing puppies and kittens? They're literally coming true. And I don't know if it's some zombie virus in the air that affects only Republicans but we've seen more screaming assholes from that party coming out of the woodwork in the last year than at any time in human history. This is the Rumsfeldian worst of the worst, the bigots, the homophobes, the Islamophobes, the antiUnionists, the pro-corporate tools. Only they're now calling the shots. These lunatics are in the mainstream. Way to go, poor and middle class Republican voters. Be careful what you wish for because...

And speaking of pro-corporate tools, if you didn't catch Maddow the other night, she mentioned that Republicans, just seconds after their blitzkrieg tactic of dividing the bill and conquering those evil, bloated public unions (without even grazing any of the state budget issues), literally ran to a Republican fundraiser in Washington, DC that was held by a scumbag corporate lobbying firm named BGR that also buys votes for other scumbag consortiums made up of home lenders and companies seeking health care "reform." (Fun factoid: BGR was cofounded exactly 20 years ago by racist shitbag Haley Barbour, another Republican Governor and one who's still to this day drawing a steady income from BGR through a blind trust valued at almost $3.5 million.)

That's not to be confused with the $2500-a-plate fundraiser they had back in January the night before they took the House. God only knows why they're seeking bribes graft, kickbacks, payola campaign contributions since there's already a massive Act Blue campaign to recall these Kochsuckers like so many defective Toyotas.

As Maddow says, this power play that's greased by corporate and lobbyist payola has nothing to do with balancing Wisconsin's or any state's budget. If Walker was really sincere about that, he wouldn't have split the bill in half and passed the half that doesn't even address the budgetary shortfall. The state GOP gave massive amounts of cash to the wealthy in the form of tax rebates and cuts and now they have to put the money back.

It's redistribution of wealth, plain and simple.

Redistribution of wealth?

Remember when Republicans, Libertarians and their indentured online porch monkeys were screaming about redistribution of wealth when the black Socialist was running for president?

Apparently, wealth redistribution is Socialist only when it goes from rich to poor. It's only a good idea that's immune to criticism when it flows from poor to rich, which is what we're seeing in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey and every other state that's being run into the ground by a right wing corporate dildo governor.

Jesus Christ, you have to give the Republican Party credit for one thing: Just when you think these demented, vicious pricks have hit the bottom of the barrel in terms of human moral turpitude, they then grab a pickaxe, bust through the bottom and tunnel all the way to China. With the latter-day, post-Democracy Republican Party, there's always room to sink lower.

They're now literally, literally running away from the people they supposedly represent to GOP campaign fundraisers held by corporate lobbyists just moments after putting the shaft to working class people.

Now they're after our fucking puppies and are selling them to be torn apart alive for a buck.

And they're not even trying to hide it, anymore, because they found a way to shit on the people with impunity. Public opinion, in theory, no longer matters.

They have finally completed the transition from mere scum to actual, living, breathing caricatures.

"Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk!"

This was exactly my reaction when Mrs. JP was trolling on the HuffPo earlier tonight and told me the result of the Fed's "investigation" of lenders fraudulently foreclosing on 3,000,000 homeowners last year. Here's the incredible finding (emphasis mine):

During a public meeting attended by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other regulators, consumer advocates on the panel criticized federal bank regulators for narrowly defining what constitutes a "wrongful foreclosure." At least one member of the panel voiced concerns that the public would not take the Fed's findings of improper practices seriously, since the wide-ranging review did not find a single homeowner who was wrongfully foreclosed upon.

I guess that would include those homeowners who'd been foreclosed on despite not having a mortgage, and owning their homes lock, stock and barrel, seizing the wrong homes. That would also include those who were told they were in default in excess of what they actually owed or even those who never missed a payment.

Here's the best part, in case you're wondering how Big Ben's Fed was able to investigate all 3,000,000 cases of foreclosure: They only did a sample of 500 cases. Using a sampling plan when dealing with large numbers of widgets works in a quality control lab but not when you're dealing with real people who've been thrown out of real homes. One has to wonder if these 500 case files were really drawn at random or subject to some pre-screening process to guarantee a 100% "See No Evil" verdict.

So, tell me how ethical it is for the Federal Reserve, an entity that bailed out these same lenders to the tune of billions, to investigate these same lenders for foreclosure fraud, especially when it involves a simple narrowing of the definition of "wrongful foreclosure"?

The Bushies got away with torture because ass monkeys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo simply narrowed the definition of torture to mean simply something that results in organ failure without once taking into account the psychological effects of a person's dehumanization.

And, in the bait and switch scam of the year, Republicans in Wisconsin just yesterday passed the union-busting bill without the necessary quorum of 20 people by resorting to sleazy, pseudo-legal parliamentary tricks that cannot possibly be legal and will surely fall once it's up for judicial review.

Forget the fact that stripping collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin will not do jack shit for "repairing" the state budget that was partly made all but irreparable because of tax cuts for the super wealthy. And let's just forget that with a simple narrowing of the definition of the phrase "wrongful foreclosure" not one person was illegally tossed from their home last year.

The crooks are now running the asylum and they're not even making an effort at plausible deniability.

Voting For the D...

...not the ARRRRR!

It seems we here in Massachusetts officially have a Pirate Party. I swear, this is no joke, even though there's a James O'Keefe quoted. This Pirate Party movement is bigger than you might think, stretching as far as the recently rebooted government of Tunisia.

So if you're a Bay Stater, register as a pirate, me hearties (You still have to pay taxes on your booty, though)!

You're Blowing it, Mr. President.

I'm still waiting for someone to say to Barack Obama, "If you want to earn your Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. President, now's the time."

Indeed, President Obama could be taking advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities handed to him both domestically and abroad by the always dysfunctional Republican Party and the rioters in the Middle East and northern Africa. Yet it seems the Constitutional Law Professor President's grasp of history is as rusty as his equally dysfunctional grasp of the US Constitution.

Let's look at the Republican Party's recent attempts to shut down the government until a stopgap bill was passed by the Republican House. The Republican "Young Guns", apparently led by an already fractious Tea Party caucus, were setting up a showdown on Main Street, USA, the bait and switch of this generation, in claiming, "We really don't want to shut down government but we will if we have to to teach them evil lib'rals Dutch Uncle lessons in fiscal responsibility."

As Frank Rich said in his last article for the New York Times, Republicans weren't so much blind to history as taking a jaundiced squint at their other failed revolution of 1995, when they actually had shut down government with major political fallout, and tried to engineer it as a tail to be pinned on the Democrat donkey if it ever did come to pass.

After the stopgap bill passed, it worked to some degree: The MSM were eager to declare the averting of a crippling government shutdown as "a stunning victory" for the Republican Party with the Democrats portrayed as losers gasping in the dust of Republican fiscal brilliance and heroism.

But nothing could've been further from the truth. The Republicans still have not even begun drawing up a plan to create jobs (the unemployment rate being lowered from 9.6 to 9% last month was merely incidental and, as always, misleading), still have not come up with a plan to reduce runaway spending that's adding to our nightmarish deficit and national debt, still have no workable alternative to the Obama health care overhaul and still have not addressed the root causes of our budgetary shortfalls (***coughtaxcutsfortherichcough*** ***cough gaspIraqAfghanistancoughahem***).

Obama could be taking full advantage of this just as Slick Willie had done in the wake of the Republican shutdown of government over 15 years ago. Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich proved to be a foil worthy of Clinton just as Tip O'Neill was to Ronald Reagan a decade before that and President Clinton, a masterful political infighter if ever there was one, climbed through the ropes with alacrity.

Yet it seems the president's reserve of special venom is reserved for liberals and those of "the professional left" who criticize him and his dysfunctional, pro Wall Street policies far less effectively and viciously than Republicans and Tea Baggers who keep screaming for the birth certificate and tell one outright lie after another about him.

If Obama was worth his weight in Koolaid powder, he'd call out these Republican hustlers and grifters and ask them for solutions to our budget woes other than cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, PBS and Medicare. Then again, the president preemptively cut himself off at the knees last year when he once again caved to still-minority House Republican demands to extend the crippling tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% for another two years. Obama hardly even addressed the fact that the GOP was shamelessly holding a critical unemployment extension hostage to these reckless and greedy demands.

Another issue, this one foreign policy-based, is one on which our Nobel Peace Prize president has no authority. After saturninely clucking his tongue and serenely observing the carnage in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama is now calling for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's resignation and publicly deploring the violence in Libya and directly insinuating his way into pro-democracy Arab unrest for the first time since the riots in Tunis.

But then again, if whiteboarded history is any guide, perhaps Obama is hoping that he'll be retroactively hailed as a law-giver by future generations for merely stepping in only after the spoils have been seized and the dead buried. Such a useful fiction worked for Reagan and the inevitable fall of Communism and still does.

But hanging back in the wings and waiting to address Libya almost exclusively is not stemming the tide of human blood that ran down the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen and certainly not to this day in Libya. And you'd think the Libyan strongman ought to make this a nobrainer. If his bizarre umbrella speech and conspiracy rhetoric of the unrest being plotted by Osama bin Laden and hallucination pills didn't reveal Gaddafi to be the Michael Jackson of dictators, nothing will. The only thing Gaddafi knows how to do effectively these days is to kill his own people.

Obama could be seizing the unrest and thirst for democracy in the Arab/Muslim world as a mandate for the end of dictatorial and/or monarchical tyrannies, to have his State Department lead the way toward diplomatic rather than military solutions like Carter did with Begin and Sadat at Camp David.

But Obama is living up to Maureen Dowd's caricature of him as statecraft's answer to Mr. Spock and seems loathe to take on even unworthy straw men like the Republican Party and clearly insane and clueless dictators who have clung to power for far too many decades. And Obama, aside from the soaring but empty rhetoric that inexplicably earned him a Nobel Prize nomination a week and a half in office, has shown himself to be an even less forceful and effectual leader than Jimmy Carter and that's saying something.

Obama has proven to be a miserable failure on every front. He is a disgrace in the ring, overhyped, and over powered by inferior opponents, the political version of the 1990 Mike Tyson versus the GOP's Buster Douglas, a man who only snarls and counterpunches against his own backers in his corner.

Fox News At Its Finest, Part XI: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Madison World edition

Oh. Yeah. Bet on it, Madison.


Ignorant rednecks protesting ObamaCare on corporately-sponsored Freedom Works' tit: Good.
Wisconsin union workers protesting loss of collective bargaining: Bad, bad, bad.


"Republicans and Tea Baggers: Can America afford them?"


"Everybody's gone serfiiiiing, serfing USA!"


"Teacher, teacher, Bud's playing hooky!"


Brian Kilmeade on the welfare state of public unions, who are not to be confused with right proper taxpayers that Republicans fight tooth and nail against becoming.


As is only natural for a half wit, Steve the Douche is half right. The Wisconsin protests are similar to the Egyptian protests but not the way he's projecting it.


Actually, it was a tap. Plus, Fox reporters are the ones doing the assaulting.


Forget Comrade Walker and his idiotic bumper sticker. Look at the chyron that says, "The enemy in Afghanistan is losing." Too bad the NY Times and the federal government disagree.


How about that? Two thirds of the country don't support the unions. Too bad the results were inverted.


Looks like Fox can't quite get the hang of polls.


Why not? The Wisconsin state government's already been privatized by Koch Industries.


"Oh, our Greta Van Susteren debunked it? Fuck it, run with it, anyway."


Way to stay "in focus", Rupert.


Not if Diebold is unionized.


And no doubt France looks at us like we’re American Dad.


Just to remind you crackers that we’re still looking out for you.

Finally, the funniest lie of all:

Really? I didn't know Barbizon was a school of journalism.

My Own Private Wisconsin

or Why Glenn Beck Ought to be Anally Raped With Edward R. Murrow's Microphone.

Yesterday on his bile delivery system, Glenn Beck called the protesting teachers "useful idiots" and accused the police of having "thrown in with the Socialists."

Wisconsin was spared from this lunacy on WTDY. But setting aside the fact that this is obviously a lot of axe grinding against Wisconsin for dropping Beck for insulting Wisconsin and his shameless plugs for Fox "News", let's concentrate on the phrase "useful idiot."

Everyone who works at Fox "News" is a useful idiot of some sort at some time. For years, Alan Colmes, the token "liberal" on Hannity and Colmes was a mere foil a la Charlie McCarthy. Five nights a week, Hannity's lips moved while conservative America drank the Koolaid as Colmes sat on his lap. Megyn Kelly and the other bubble-headed bleach blonde bimbos in Rupert Murdoch's stable of libertarian lovelies is there merely to fill the horny conservative male 25-55 demographic.

But Glenn Beck's time has come and gone. He's been jettisoned from four states, including Madison, Wisconsin because he's just getting too, well, "out there" even for him. In short, he's been living in his own private Wisconsin.

Now, Glenn Beck makes $33,000,000 a year as a picked scab of the McCarthy era. Like Ann Coulter and that ilk, his job is to stoke fear and panic in people over Obama's Socialism and the impending economic crash, over George Soros, over the Tide Foundation, over the ACLU, over anything more viable than a wet firecracker that can possibly be yeasted up into a conspiracy that will unravel the fabric of this great Republic.

Here's Beck's take on his own private Wisconsin:

We talked today about the police in Seattle. We haven’t talked yet about the police in Wisconsin who are now throwing in with the socialists and the teachers. I mean some of the people who are there are just useful idiots. They don’t know what’s really going on. They don’t know that this is a coordinated effort, and the police, unfortunately in Wisconsin have now thrown in with the protesters in the capitol, and they are not forcing them to leave, which they have to leave. They’re calling this now social justice. No, that is the problem. It is justice for all. Equal justice for all, not special justice. If the Tea Parties were there and they were camped out in the rotunda, they should leave if they’re supposed to, and I’d be the first to say it, obey the law, period, but now the police aren’t forcing them out.

Now, there's about a whole jumbo jet hangar full of bullshit in that one paragraph but what sticks out the most to me is Beck claiming in a way that would make Winston Smith proud that smashing collective bargaining for public unions is "justice for all" seems even more beyond the pale than we're used to from Beck.

Apparently, to Beck and his odious ilk, "justice for all" means justice for the Tea Baggers whose presence was merely theoretical, justice for the Koch Brothers, justice for the Republican Party who wants to butt-fuck public unions and the entire middle class back into the days of Stonehenge.

No, Glenn, if the Tea Baggers were there, they wouldn't have left until they realized they were outgunned. If there was a Democratic Governor in office and he wanted to raise the pay of union workers and actually strengthen collective bargaining rights for the unions, they would've been throwing bricks through his window, they would've been holding up their own misspelled, badly Photoshopped Nazi signs and they would've been screaming like a horde of zombies on fire at the end of a George Romero movie.

We got more than a taste of that in the summer '09 during the health care town halls. What Beck seems to miss is the fact that if the Madison teacher's union and the other protesters acted like typical Tea Baggers, the police wouldn't be siding with them and would've had no choice but to eject them regardless of their private sympathies. But police and civilians are literally lying side by side in the state house every night.

Beck is obviously the useful idiot here. There's a great need for social justice in Wisconsin, as well as in Indiana, Ohio and other states now in the clutches of radical right wing Governors who are engaged, with the Koch Brothers, in their own "coordinated effort" to undermine unions and union support for Democrats in 2012. If there's any "special justice" being screamed for, it's that for union workers, not the right wing industrialists and politicians who want to strip them of their half century-long rights.

Billionaires, Tea Party-backed union busters like Scott Walker and actual useful idiots like Glenn Beck don't need justice. They thrive in the absence of justice with every union they bust, every lie they tell and every time they pollute the air, sea, sky and airwaves.

Now, I say we all march into Beck's office, bend him over his desk and shove Edward R. Murrow's microphone up his blubbery, pasty ass and ram home an unlubed message from Eddie from beyond the grave. Because Murrow wouldn't have had any patience with this fear-stoking, fat fascist any more than have, to date, four radio stations and over 300 of Beck's sponsors.