A Momentary Lapse of Reason...

Today at the back fence we’re taking a break from our usual focus on the misadventures of Satan’s Legion, otherwise known as the radical American right wing, for a feature I’m going to call, “Stories I Don’t Care About – or the confusion of the mainstream media”.   As you might guess, I do a lot of reading and listening to various news outlets and commentary on a daily basis.  From time to time there is a day when I garner absolutely nothing of interest from this practice and am left wondering in the end why the feature stories of the day became so prominent.  Yesterday was one such day.  So in descending order of irrelevance…remember if you dare that the UN estimates that 12 million people are in danger of starvation in the Horn of Africa...12 million...

Libyan rebels move on Tripoli and storm Khadafy’s compound.   The story of the uprising in Libya, while an important part of the larger story of the Arab Spring, has always been far more important to Europe than it has to America, simply because, for all of his bombast and mad-sheik bluster, Khadafy has been small potatoes for years, ever since he pulled the covers over his head after the bombing of the Pan-Am flight over Scotland.  Not to minimize the tragedy of that event, but afterwards he seemed to realize had gone too far and was going to get his ass kicked from one corner of the Med to the other so he decided to make nice and retreat to his luxury tent for some dates and seven-veil dancing.   Now as the Libyan people take the opportunity presented by the uprisings across North Africa to oust this clown once and for all – a foregone conclusion once NATO started bombing his tanks, by the way – the international press has reported breathlessly every day on rebel advances and retreats, progress and defeat while, again, not to devalue human suffering, but the American public has had to stifle a collective yawn.  And while our non-intervention intervention and the beltway clamor about it had a brief moment of prominence on the nightly news, for the most part we don’t care.

Now that happy, albeit, slightly crazed Libyans have set fire to his house, are drinking his 20 year old scotch and madly firing AK-47’s in the air in celebration, the news was dominated yesterday by various international pundits opining on what happens now and the big question; where is the rat bastard.  I say if he has any brains at all he’s in Buenos Aires appearing as Bette Midler in a drag queen review, never to be seen on the African continent again and all the better for it.  Meanwhile the nervous Europeans – especially the French and Italians – are sitting around chain smoking Gauloises and trying to figure out how they’re to deal with a woebegone country of multiple hostile tribes with no tradition of democratic institutions or history of unity aside from snatching the chance to chase Colonel K the hell out.  Good luck with that…The only interesting part of the story was watching the Fox News Fascists stumbling over themselves trying to either blame Obama or down play the fact that his mini-intervention worked out as planned and one of their favorite villains had been kicked to the curb on his watch.

The second story that I really don’t care about is the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal that seems likely to implicate most of British law enforcement and the entire political establishment for either ignoring or being stupid about the slimy tentacles of The News of the World slipping under every door at 10 Downing St.   There is nothing new in the idea that Murdoch is capable of assuming that anyone can be bought and proceeding to prove it over and over again.  Nor is it really shocking that he’s enough of a cold, heartless bastard to hack the voice mail of families of soldiers killed in the war in Iraq or victims of domestic tragedy.   He’s proven to be a craven slut to a dollar over and over again as well, and almost nothing disreputable or callous or illegal or unethical should surprise anyone paying attention.   So the story has itself become a sort of super-tabloid extravaganza – the tabloid story of a tabloid paper doing unthinkably egregious things in the interest of making money, multiplied by the royal family and raised to the nth degree by virtue of the entire bunch of powdered wig-wearing government types clearing their throats and desperately trying to think of excuses for why their number is turning up in Rupert's phone book.  Once again, I think the media is a lot more interested in this than the American public, whose interest in Murdoch begins and ends with replaying the youTube video of him barely dodging the shaving cream pie in the court room because his trophy wife just about ripped the arm off the guy trying to splooge him.  Now that’s entertainment, Rupert old shoe…

Finally, another tawdry drama played out in Southern California, where slut princess and professional celebrity Kim Kardashian married a professional basketball player and a seriously delusional young man with way too much money before 400 or 500 friends and the cameras of E! TV, who subsidized this ridiculous farce to the tune of 2.5 million dollars for exclusive rights to the pictures that a breathless nation demanded.  Kris Humphries – the empty headed tall guy who somehow thinks he has found the woman of his dreams and spent 2 million bucks on a rock for her precious finger – stood nervously in front of the minister, shifting from foot to foot trying to remember his lines and praying for a short reception so he could climb back in the saddle and practice his...uh, footwork.  The strangely macabre Bruce Jenner stood proudly with Kim’s mom by his side trying to remember where his eyebrows were while paparazzi helicopters roared overhead, Kourtney and Khloe, the booty sisters, scanned the crowd for their own tall guys and attendees placed bets on the marriage duration over/under.   The whole scene reeked of a 21^st century American sub- culture run amok and televised to keep the semi-sedated masses amused until the new American Idol starts up.  It was a ripping fine show and as we ponder with anticipation images of the honeymoon – soon to be televised as a follow up series – we can only hope that the morbidly obese cast of The Biggest Loser lives up to standard they’ve set.   The bar is pretty high…

Beating a dead horse...because it will feel so good when I stop.

I hate to keep picking at Rick Perry, especially when the republican field is such a target rich environment, but the guy is in full campaign mode and every time he opens his mouth he reminds me of when that naughty boy turns into a braying jackass in Pinocchio.  He is a fountain of stupid and I am starting to believe that, in the midst of the chance of a lifetime to run for president as a republican hero, he is going to end up so godsmacked, beleaguered and delirious that he ends up going home, pissing in his sock drawer and passing out. 

Not only did Jon Huntsman – in a strangely courageous move – call him out for his idiotic sounding climate change denial, (“Well there’s some folks got questions about that”), and half-hearted endorsement of teaching creationism over evolution, (“Well, there’s some folks say there’s some holes in that theory”), he is clearly flummoxed by having to try to explain that his Texas job-producing miracle is built on the backs of unskilled workers with no benefits and consists of the highest number of minimum wage jobs in the country.  He opposes the Obama health care laws while fully 26% of Texans have no health insurance, the highest percentage in the country.  Why?  Because employers there don’t provide it.   He was quoted today explaining his agenda for producing more jobs if he is elected by saying he’d “cut regulations and cut taxes to get people working again”, a weirdly  familiar and simpleminded  prescription that proved to be such a disaster during George II’s ignominious reign.

George’s unnecessary tax cut greatly amplified the deficit issues and combined with his dick-measuring war in Iraq is the reason that the Clinton surplus disappeared faster that a drunkard’s lottery winnings.  His laissez-faire “oversight” and lax regulation of everything from financial institutions to his pals in the oil patch ended with the country in a never ending nightmare of unemployment, fear, greed and general despair, the Gulf of Mexico permanently stained with a zillion gallons of crude, dead miners in West Virginia and people on the rooftops with rifles in New Orleans, just to mention the highlights of republican de-regulation. 

Now after the prolonged pissing contest that was the fight over raising the debt ceiling and all manner of clamorous hyperbole from republicans about any proposed tax increase being the black death for the economy, this donkey still insists on proposing corporate welfare tax cuts as the handful of magic beans we simply must have while the leaders of his party in congress are already spewing propaganda against Obama’s very modest proposal to extend the payroll tax cuts for the rest of this year and possibly next.  Why does a party that is so staunchly against any tax increase on the wealthy and closing loopholes for corporations oppose a tax cut that benefits moderate and low income people?  Not to encourage class warfare because truth be told, I’d very much like to be rich myself, but this is a scorched earth campaign to oppose Obama at every turn for no other reason than the ruling class doesn’t like him and wants him gone, period.

But I got a little off track there – we were talking about Rick ”I got big ideas” Perry, who looks like nothing so much as a man intent on emptying his trusty six-shooter into his foot even if he has to reload.   The frightening part of watching him blunder towards self destruction is that a certain percentage of the population is so scared and so uninformed that they are susceptible to a high bullshit-content Reaganesque narrative like this because it gives them hope when they don’t have any and makes them feel like maybe they can come out from under the bed and out into the light of a new day and make the car payments again.  Maybe that factory job that went away never to return will be replaced by something better, or least something good.  Maybe their kids can go to college and the rest of their life isn’t going to be a monotonous slog through hell after all. 

That this hypocritical pinhead fixer can have that effect on the very people that he and his clown posse have hurt the most is what makes me sick.  Ron Paul has some good ideas; Huntsman has some good ideas, and neither of them can win; at least that’s the conventional wisdom.   But  I am going to hang onto the notion that even if neither of them can win they are islands of sanity in the vast republican ocean of biblical delusions, proudly anti-science crusaders, thieves and gun nuts and that gives me hope.

There's something happening here...

I was reading Matt Taibi’s excellent article in the new Rolling Stone about how the SEC has been engaged in series of ménage a trois arrangements with the same greed-bag Wall Street firms and slimy criminals they are supposed to be policing and it brought to mind a disturbing thought.   I’m generally not a conspiracy kind of guy, although I do firmly believe that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.  But there are some long term situations that are going essentially unreported in a mainstream media still following Sarah Palin around in salivating packs and that should - at the very least - give one pause to think that perhaps there is grand right wing conspiracy, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton.

The first of these is the aforementioned relationship between an SEC enforcement division turned into a eunuch because of what seem to be standing offers of bags of cash from the dirty dealing firms they’re charged with overseeing.  Every time someone at the SEC follows a trail of bread crumbs leading to a financial crime, some big-daddy power suit guy takes them to lunch and they suddenly lose interest, can’t find the file, deem the charges unsubstantiated by the evidence or just flat out shred the paper trail in madcap all nighters in the basement of the building, fueled by bottles of Cristal and handfuls of amphetamines.  It’s a well known and much remarked on fact that none of the treacherous bastards responsible for the giant sucking wound of the economic debacle have gotten so much as a weekend in the county jail for bringing the world economy to its knees and, in fact, they’re still playing three card monte with other people’s money right under the SEC’s nose.   How these buttoned down assholes were able to avoid all culpability and basically skate away from the train wreck they perpetrated is one of the great mysteries and disappointments of the Obama administration and a sharp needle in the eye of the American public too busy praying for god’s help with their 401k account to give a shit.

In another completely under-reported story, a couple of weeks ago there was a report issued, called Limited Interagency Coordination and Insufficient Controls Over US Funds in Afghanistan Hamper US Efforts to Develop the Afghan Financial Sector and Safeguard US Cash, a sublimely clear and straightforward title to a report that begs to get more attention and which is almost guaranteed to piss you off if you read it.  It essentially says that we have a “process” set up in Afghanistan that has been relentlessly funneling cash to an utterly broken and corrupt Afghan government for 10 years and 70 billion dollars worth and now suddenly some genius in Washington decided they probably should try to do an audit and accounting of where this has been going, just for the record.  And their findings can be summed up with just a couple of sentences from the report:

“However we found that agencies have not instituted sufficient controls over US funds, limiting their oversight over these funds and potentially the ability of the ATFC, (Afghan Threat Finance Cell)to insure that these funds are not diverted to insurgents.  As a result, the US risks inadvertently funding activities that directly oppose its reconstruction goals for Afghanistan.”  

I’d say that’s pretty unambiguous.   The US taxpayer, at a time of profound financial crisis, has been throwing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan and very likely financing flat screen TV’s in insurgent caves all over the god damn country, not to mention paying for RPG’s and all manner of mischief making supplies and equipment our happy Afghan peasants are buying from Iran.  The report goes into some detail about the fact that the various US agencies charged with overseeing the theoretical reconstruction projects in the country don’t communicate with each other, let the Afghan banks run wild and have no systematic accounting of the pallets of $100 bills that have been delivered there for years.   

Either the government hires the most incompetent accountants they can find across the enterprise or they’ve been bought off by a cabal of criminals who don’t have our best interests at heart. 

The Obama administration has had its hands full for the better part of three years but there comes a time when they have to be held accountable for this chaos and the thieves that are running amok in seemingly every building in DC. 

Meanwhile the lunatic republican presidential wannabes wander around spouting extravagant nonsense denying global climate change, challenging the theory of evolution and advocating prayer as the answer to our economic problems, masking the very real culpability of the Wall Street money changers and a defense establishment that stands to profit immeasurably from the endless “war on terror” at the expense of normal, average people who want to have the good life of the American dream and are witnessing it being stolen from under their noses without being able to recognize who the fixers and thieves really are.   Now today it is being reported that house republicans are marshaling their forces to oppose Obama’s extension of the payroll tax cut, a tax cut that actually benefits these average American dreamers, all while continuing to say over and over that they’ll fight to the death against any proposed tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of us because it is a “job killer”, a hilarious example of bald faced hypocrisy that really only a republican could try to get by with a straight face.

I’m not lining my windows with aluminum foil yet, but there’s a foul stench in the air and it’s starting to smell like conspiracy…

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

This quote ran through my mind today as I read story after story of how Rick “Talkin’ bout the Benjamins” Perry ran a combination corporate welfare agency and whore house out of the Texas state capitol.  After being elected by reportedly wandering the state speaking in tongues and flaunting a deeply cynical and hypocritical religiosity, he immediately set to work selling influence and access to whoever brought the biggest bag of cash in a flurry of abject corruption that would make Spiro Agnew and Ed Meese proud. Oil and gas leases  and the anti-environmental policies that enable them, the cockamamie Trans Texas Corridor toll road construction bids, phony “development” slush funds – they all received governmental hand outs and returned the favor with contributions in the millions of dollars – over 100 million dollars since the 2000 election.

How does a “wipe-snot-on-your-sleeve” good old boy Texas republican get away with that kind of cheesy and transparent patronage and still get elected?  Well from here it looks like he does it by wearing old testament street cred on that same sleeve; jabbering on about abortion and gay marriage and overseeing the execution of death row inmates at four times the pace of any other state in the union.  

He recently went on record giving total support for Israel, probably because the damn Ayrabs look a lot like Mexicans, and because of his wrath-of-god inclination towards biblical apocalypse – something which current Israeli policy seems destined to produce.  His modern take on the wild west notion of manifest destiny and “kill all the Indians” leads to a perversion of American exceptionalism – a road we recently traveled with his dumb ass predecessor as governor, and which he seems to want to revisit by getting his foreign policy updates from Donald “It will only take a week” Rumsfeld and a group of his minions, one of whom is Doug Feith.  This is a man once described as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” by Gen. Tommy Frank, for getting completely sucked in by Ahmed Chalabi and his relentless and incomprehensible advocacy for the invasion of Iraq. 

I would have thought that the most prominent example of a modern theocracy – our friendly mullahs in Iran – would put people off the whole idea of a half mad religious sect reading 2,000 year old books and deciding how we all should live.  Memo to Rick, Sarah, Michele, and the rest of you – conquering Arab lands and building a 40,000 seat combination church and Wal-Mart in East Jerusalem is not god’s plan.  An endless war against the Muslim world is also not god’s plan and America is probably not going to re-conquer Europe either. 

Why is it that the politicians most likely to kill something given half a chance are so hung up on the old testament?  It’s like they never read past Leviticus to the part where they talk about loving one another – it’s all a pillar of salt and an eye for an eye.  Oh, and they all do seem unnaturally hung up on the men not laying down together part too.  How can Perry cavort with Cadillac evangelists, neo-nazi preachers and all manner of fringe fanatics and freaks and be taken seriously?  It’s because it’s all an act designed to keep that part about meeting with corporate bag men and cutting deals with dedicated anti-environmental interests on the down low, camouflaged by this aura of righteous, patriotic, pseudo-Reagan, “morning-in-America” bullshit, all the while he’s giving a sleeve job to anyone with enough cash to keep him in ostrich-skin boots, gold nugget cuff links and a colt revolver. 

Now this clown – who insists he’s running because his wife told him it was his god given duty to save his country from that terrible negro, Obama – works a room shaking hands, quoting scripture and trying to sound like he knows what continent Afghanistan is part of, hoping that nobody jerks back the curtain far enough for the public to catch him sitting on the lap of the big money republican elite that got spoiled running the country for eight years and has been pissed off since 2008. I like to think he’s going to wet himself sitting there and they’re going to send him away with his pants around his ankles muttering the 23^rd psalm.

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall...

The inexplicable march of the Texas blowhards continues in earnest now that Rick “Stop printing the damn money” Perry is hitting his stride after a week of campaigning, and the unsettling comparisons to George Bush are becoming hard to avoid.  Like Bush, Rick has fallen ass-backwards into a successful Texas economy built on abundant oil and gas resources at a time the price of oil has gone from 20 bucks a barrell to well over a hundred, combined with the highest percentage of minimum wage workers in the nation – wait; that's not true - they’re tied for last, with Mississippi. 

 Like George, he has remained blissfully free of the ravages of the road kill housing market due to Texas having the most stringent consumer protection laws in the country related to housing.   This, for anyone who isn’t paying attention, is the government intervening successfully in the market place, an idea that would make most card carrying right wing ideologues retch.  Unlike George, however, he has the anti-immigrant racists of the tea party fueling his rise to national notoriety and thus will have some ‘splainin’ to do about the part played by Mexican manufacturing plants, workers and imported parts in the ongoing Texas employment miracle.  

That will put him at odds with his most fervent supporters on several fronts, and put questions about his ideological purity front and center at the very time that Michele Bachman is working her mystical wide-eyed voodoo on salivating ministers from one corner of South Carolina to the other.   Combine that with the very prominent role of the stimulus funds in amping up job growth in education, health care and government and the tea party pin up boy starts to look more and more like he’s all hat and no cattle.   

Rick may also find himself having to explain his ties - though lobbyists his administration hired – to current federal prison hors d’oeuvre Tom Delay and one time republican big shot, Jack Abramhof; professional partisan money grabbers and bag men who made a career out of bringing home the bacon and spreading the lard on Texas toast, setting the stage for Rick’s self-described economic wizardry.

These problems aside, Rick and Stepford simpleton Bachman may have a larger and more fundamental problem in trying to drag all of the tea party baggage along with them on the campaign trail.  There’s no truth to the rumor that Bachman has hired Imelda Marcos’ former cabana boy to travel on the “Which Way’s Heaven?” campaign bus to manage her share and Perry was overheard telling his campaign aides to see if they could go down to the local Home Depot and pick up some Mexicans to sit in the back and be available to help him drag his around.   They may want to re-think this in light of the NY Times poll done recently that suggests that the tea party – for all of its success in creating a clattering rabble and scaring the shit out of the other candidates – is deeply out of favor with most Americans and ranks right down alongside fundamentalist Christians in a ranking of who should be influencing policy and choosing the political and economic direction of the country.  In fact, most Americans would rather have Howie Mandel and Carrot Top running things than anyone so closely identified with the tea party.

As their 15 minutes ticks closer and closer to the end leaders of the tea party movement are having their protective layers of “government out of our lives” and “get rid of all the bums” rhetoric peeled away and what’s revealed is a vile and hateful core smoldering with the toxic fumes of racism and old testament philosophy – having less to do with shrinking government and cutting spending than it does with outlawing abortion and driving imaginary waves of half-crazed and savage immigrants into the sea.   The few tea party inspired republicans that make any sense are almost lost in the incendiary and incoherent mob-mentality and cowed by the fact that any whiff of compromise has become a capitulation and renders them dangerous turncoats and subject to stoning or burning at the political stake.  Or, like Tim Pawlenty, utterly frustrated irrelevance.   Like King Kong escaped from his captors, it is running amok and sensible people across the country are running away screaming in every direction.  Now tea party heroines like Michele “Tip of the Spear” Bachman will end up with her head on a pike carried through the town square if she waivers from genuflecting to the new and poorly conceived orthodoxy that turns the simplest political decision into a knife fight. 

So Bachman and Perry can continue to flaunt their prayerfulness and undeserved state of grace for the halfwits who come out to their combination stump speech/ prayer rally/BBQ's and the cameras and blathering pundits will surely follow them and breathlessly report every word.   Somewhere Mitt “Corporations are people too” Romney is practicing not responding to hecklers by saying something stupid while knocking back a stiff bloody mary and saying his own prayer of thanks that these two morons have the spotlights directed on them.  He couldn’t have planned it any better…

Random thoughts on the Obama bus tour through the corn...

Unless something really weird happens, Perry is going to win the nomination, despite the hours of tedious jabber to which we're doomed between now and then by the professional pundit class.  I really think the end-of-days zealotry will be his undoing though.  It isn't going to get him much of the democratic vote and he is going to turn off independents with it as well.  All Obama needs is just a little bit more of a "fuck you idiots" attitude to prove he's nobody's whipping boy and unemployment at about 7.5% and he's in.  He has to do something to get people back to work so they have money to spend on that robot toaster / GPS unit.  The Chinese are flooding the country with cheap consumer goods so all he has to do is put some money in people's pocket to buy them so they have that warm consumer glow and all the nazi talk about the deficit will be so much background noise.  I'd lay it right out; are you more worried about leaving a debt to your great grandchildren or being able to feed your current children?  Pretty simple really - he needs to take the debt away as an issue.  First he needs to fire the dumb asses who've been advising him and get some fire breathers - he has to get that this isn't a negotiation, since the other side has no interest in negotiating.  Fuck that...and if he proposes solutions that get people employed and increase the debt because the republicans won't tax their hedge fund manager, put that on them and see who the public sides with.  The only way to mess this up is to be a pussy about it - forget about getting re-elected and just tell the truth. 

Yesterday he was able to mix it up with one of the leading tea party clowns in Iowa when the guy jumped up at a small town-hall meeting and sniveled that Joe Biden called him a terrorist and that wasn’t nice.  What a load of crap that is.  Biden only said what many people were thinking; that the tea party was holding the country hostage over the fake issue of raising the debt ceiling and, in their zeal were only too happy to sacrifice innocents in order to get what they want.  Kinda like a terrorist. Obama acknowledged that the name calling and fiery rhetoric was over the top and counterproductive and then, ironically, this goof goes to the media afterwards and insists Obama’s a socialist.  If he’s the founder of the tea party wing in Iowa that comment goes a long way to define who these people are and what they’re about.

Obama also has to stop saying “balanced approach” – he sounds like a weeny.  When all eight of the candidates on stage in Iowa raised their hands saying they would never accept a deficit deal that had ten dollars of cuts for every dollar of revenue, it became clear that trying to make sense of this in any logical way was a waste of time. Polls continue to show that, even if those eight drones think that way, a majority of the country, including republicans, feel differently.  Make them do the math – in order to cut to the extent they are proposing with no increase in revenue what would the federal budget look like?  How many schools would close?  How many people would die from preventable illness or hunger? The republicans were all aghast about the fairy tale “death panels” but their policies would make those seniors not being killed off in the doctors’ offices slowly starve to death in their own homes.  Nice choice…

The constant harrange against Obama and clear intent and hope for him to fail is as close to treason as is possible without actually calling for a coup.  The contest to see who can say the most outrageous and provocative things about him and the government in general while claiming to be inspired by the bible accelerated today, with Rick “dang, this is fun” Perry firing away about Fed Chairman Bernanke committing treason by using monetary policy to goose the economy, never mind that he was appointed by Bush – that’s an Obama conspiracy too.  Meanwhile Ron Paul was spewing some incoherent gibberish about the IRS using armed force to take money from normal god-fearing folks to pay for liberals’ abortions and Bachman was happily courting the lunatic fringe gun nuts like Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America, who seriously thinks that Obama’s health care program will lead to compilation of data bases that will later be used to confiscate guns.  I know – it sounds made up.  WTF doesn’t begin to cover it. 

On a completely unrelated topic; today, in a preposterous and telling lawsuit filing that is a clear indictment of both the ruling class and their lawyers, investors who lost their money in Bernie Madoff’s greed lubricated ponzi extravaganza insisted that they should not only be able to recover the money they invested, but also the fake profits from the fake hedge funds made up of fake companies that Bernie invented.  As evidence of their being deserving of this level of court ordered largess, they offered up the fake statements from the fake accounts showing the incredible 300% fake profits that they now feel is due to them.  The judge in the case reportedly responded by saying, “What the fuck?!?!?” and dismissing the case.  The investors promise to appeal.

The Triumph of the Iowans...or how I spent my Saturday at the fair...

17,000 people with nothing better to do turned out on a warm humid summer day yesterday to vote for their favorite republican candidate for president and 4,800 of them picked Michele Bachman, an Iowa native who has spent months spreading a rich layer of manure and giving sleeve jobs to fellow evangelicals from one corner of this heartland state to another.   With her heady mixture of salt of the earth prairie roots, biblical hallucinations and a crusader’s divine hubris, her drive to rid Washington DC of the heretics who currently occupy it obviously resonated with the state fair folks straight out of American Gothic.    Given the effort she expended it’s no surprise that she finished first, a couple of hundred votes ahead of Ron Paul, a man with an impressive organization and a diligent and focused group of supporters.   Unfortunately for both of them, they can’t win. 

As was the case in 2007, when Mike Huck-a-ster won, the Iowa straw poll is meaningless for all practical purposes and much more apt to start to clear the field of pretenders than pick a winner.  But to hear Bachman leading her mini cheering section after the results were announced you’d think she and her husband, Marcus “no, I’m not gay” Bachman were picking out the White House curtains.  Hey, Norma Desmond; you’re nuts and the 30% of the country that will vote for you are nuts too.  They’re bitter, ignorant, misguided haters sitting around drinking cheap whiskey waiting for Jesus to come back and you and Rick “god finally told me to” Perry can fight over them all the way to the convention. 

In case you missed it, Rick announced he was running, surprising only Sarah Palin, who was quoted as saying something like, “I was surprised because a while ago he said he wasn’t going to run.”  Yeah, the flip-flopper; how dare he change his mind and screw up your cockamamie bus tour.  You ought to know this better than anyone; when god decides to pick you as a candidate, you damn well better hop to and get yer spurs on because he’s not fooling around.  Unfortunately for Palin, her low-rent fifteen minutes of fame are winding down.  This isn’t high school; playing hard to get doesn’t just get you a reputation as a cock tease, it ends up with you standing by your locker while the new girls get all the attention.  The short attention span American voting public – at least the ones who populate republican caucuses and straw polls – is smitten with the new girls.  And since you seem to want attention more than actual elected office, you’re going to end up forgotten and utterly irrelevant by Thanksgiving. 

 Speaking of the new kid in town, Rick got kind of wound up during his speech announcing that he was joining the current field of eight munchkins; he blamed Obama for pretty much everything but the Asian sex slave trade, trans-fat, and spandex bicycle pants on the middle aged.  He might as well have screeched, “Off with his head!!!!!!”  I would love to have one of the half-wit drones “moderating” one of the debates to ask them this simple question: “If you had been elected president in 2008, with the conditions exactly the same as Obama found them, what would you have done?  Would you have continued the TARP program begun under Bush?  Would you have bailed out the auto industry?  Would you have done the stimulus differently?  Not at all?  Explain it to us without resorting to saying, ‘Well I would have cut taxes’”

But Rick standing on the stage with Bachman should make the next debate interesting.  I’m only half kidding when I say it wouldn’t surprise me if someone starting speaking in tongues.

As for Obama, I read today that he and his aides are “considering whether the White House should adopt a more combative stance”  Jesus, Barack; you think?  You’ve got the big stick and all you’ve done for two and a half years is roll over and hope someone rubs your belly.  Of course you need to be more combative!  What the hell have you been thinking ?  This isn’t Chicago’s ninth ward and you’re not trying to work with slum lords or set up a farmers’ market.  You need to get out and get on the stump and tell the god damn truth; set a tone, take control of the debate.  You’ve let these assholes convince the country that reducing the deficit is the answer to all of their problems when it is the last thing anyone should be worried about.   And not only have they hijacked the conversation, you let them do it by advocating cutting, cutting, only cutting.  Playing along with this ridiculous fairy story while 10% of the country can't find a job is the most sackless thing you and your minions could have done.  Until the average Joe realizes that these treacherous fuckers are the ones stealing him blind, he’s going to continue to blame you.   

And you might point out to everyone that Rick Perry’s snake- handling hokum of a “Day of Prayer” is not only a pointless waste of time and a publicity stunt on a grand scale, it is the transparent act of a hypocrite and carnival barker in snakeskin boots.  The last thing this country needs is another empty headed bumpkin trying to prove how big his dick is with a bible in one hand and six-shooter in the other.  Man up, Mr. President…