More Shooz

OK, time to wade in hip deep. We all saw this:



and this is what The Editors had to say about it. I happen to agree whole-heartedly:

George W. Bush has spent most of his life fucking things up horribly, and then escaping any consequences for his incompetence and indifference. This is who he is. What you have seen is not a moment of quick thinking, it was the man’s essence.

So may this shoe-throwing moment come to represent his entire presidency, in fact it can and likely will become the very symbol of his whole miserable life.

Though I was rooting for the pretzel.

9/11Ru9/11dy G9/11iul9/11iani9/11

I'm of two minds about this.

One, I don't think a bunch of elected officials (with a HUGE conflict of interest in deciding the issue) have any right to overturn a decision made by a public vote about whether or not they are able to continue in their jobs. If the public installed term-limits, only the public can rescind term-limits. You can't just decide that the law which doesn't operate to your advantage simply no longer applies. It smacks of cronyism and the kind of corruption for which New York politics is famous. After eight years of gleeful, cackling, sociopathic GOP law-breaking, though, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even a mild-mannered billionaire with a Napoleon complex figured he'd just vote himself an extension.

Two, however, I think Bloomberg has done a fine job overall. Were this law not already in place I wouldn't think twice about re-electing him for a third term - I just don't like the precedent this will set vis a vis other laws the city council doesn't like. In fact, he will likely be re-elected and that will mostly be OK, despite the fact that I am one of those bitter partisans. As another hizzoner, the late great Fiorello LaGuardia, once said of being a mayor: "There's no Democratic or Republican way to pick up garbage."

But, if Bloomberg gets a third term, I mostly just love the fact that it will be a huge FUCK YOU to Rudy Ghouliani who couldn't get the law overturned and thus himself a third term as "America's Mayor" - EVEN in the wake of September 11th.

Hey, guess what, you miserable little fuck? We just didn't want you. Now go crawl back into that coffin you sleep in and quit walking among the living.

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab

What else to say?

How else to characterize it?

The bailout, which is SOOOO last week I know, is (as Mr. Sideshow wrote a couple of weeks ago), long before Hank "The Donald Rumsfeld of Economics" Paulson's "Give-Me-All-The-Money-And-Don't-Fucking-Ask-Me-Any-Questions-Or-The-Economy-Gets-It" three-page plan was scuttled in The House - the People's Chamber - by the "Tru-Believers" in the Rethugli-bot coalition (before being rescued by The Senate - The Plutocrat's Chamber) because - weaned on the poison milk of the Reagan Revolution as they are - they never understood that all that free-market rhetoric was just so much malarky spread by the Ruling Class to get their signature pet policies package-dealt with all those the Culture War rostrums that get the shrieking wingnut brigades nice and agitated for the end result of election victories that translate via Abramoff and Delay and the like into more money in the pockets of the Monied Class. The poor dears, those useful tools, willing pawns in a game they are too stupid or stubborn to understand (h/t to Lance Mannion):

One final, monstrous smash-and-grab raid on the treasury before they leave office

That about sums up the entire Bush Administration, don't it? W has been the very culmination of that vaunted "Reagan Revolution." He is the distilled essence of all that is ugly, greedy, simplistic, violent and mendacious in the entire intellectual (if that's even an appropriate word for this willfully ignorant bunch of hate-spewing know-nothings) underpinnings of the modern GOP.

We can all see that now as Grandpa McSimpson gets snarling and ugly at the uppity n*gger who dares challenge his white priviledge, as he sics Ms. Spunky McBeauty-Queen on him like some racist Alabama cop in a black & white newsreel from 1965 would sic a German Shephard on a black man who didn't know his place, but this time with lipstick. Sarah Palin is a racist. And the crowds who attend her speeches are, too.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Because McCain was never radical enough for the fruitloops who run the GOP, he has been kept away from the heavy machinery. Only now, after the entire Rethugli-goon ascendancy of the last 30 years has been revealed to be the massive power and money grab that it was way back when Nixon Went A-Courtin' the racists in Old Dixieland, when the press let Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's senile brain just make shit up and they smiled and called it cute, when all our Defenders of the First Amendment marched lockstep into the panty-sniffing abyss to tsk-tsk about dalliances as the cackling wingnut gremlins of the rightwing impeached a lawfully elected and popular president of the opposing party just for spite and then pivoted 180º to poo-poo the so-called howling moonbat liberals and other assorted Dirty Fucking Hippies who didn't think that maybe launcing headlong into a land war in the Heart of Arabia for the sake of cheap oil - while lead by a shifltless moron the shitkickers in fly-over country wanted to have a beer with - was necessarily the wisest and (as that shiftless moron's corrupt daddy would sputter) "prudent" action to take in the wake of an attack by men who had arisen from the educated middle class of a different country who was ostensibly one of our allies and whose iron-fisted ruling family is a well-known and well-documented friend to the entire clan of that aforementioned shiftless moron who would lead that kamikaze charge.

Only now, after Junior has wrecked the whole machine, run it aground, burned up the pistons and ripped out the radio (in case he can hock it on his way back to Crawford), have they let McSnarl have the keys.

Do what you can with it, Grumpy. Vroom, vroom.

Pauper's Prisons

Now, granted, I am a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak, but if the bailout for all these financial firms is going to total in the trillions, why not get the bulk of that money from the people who were so well compensated for being at the helm when the place failed? I like the idea of a bailout being predicated on the people who got rich(er) running a company into the ground giving back all the money. And I do mean all the money. Or the government gets to seize and auction off their assets until the bill is covered, just like we get to do to the drug lords and mafia goons who are their moral and ethical fellow-travellers.

I know most of that money is sunk into yachts and seaside homes in the French Riviera, or hidden in numbered accounts from Switzerland to the Caymans, but if we told them that if they don't pay it back we'll throw them in prison, I'm pretty sure they'd find a way to cough up some of the dough. Pauper's prisons for the plutocratic class. A little global class war to usher in the new century.

I know our overlords will never allow that to happen and we the average taxpayer will be required to cover the bills these fucking self-designed Master of the Universe have racked up. I hate them and think the iron bars of their precious gated communities should be overrun and their silk drapes burned, a'la Russia circa 1917.

Fight the Power!

Schadenfreude

Watch this video (via Wonkette):



Then read this news story:
GOP delegate's hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing


Say it with me now: Schadenfreude.