All Hail The Rich

I can't imagine a bigger jerk off than Bernard Goldberg. Not in a world where whales have neither hands or access to whale porn. This simpering tool quite literally loves the rich like toddlers love mommmy and daddy. His latest hymn to the moneyed is called "Thank God for Rich People". You can imagine where that sh*t goes...

"These “fat-cats” are the ones who do the heavy lifting in this country."

No comment. Except...

I can but dream of an America less lazy, less cowardly, less inert and defeated. I can but dream of guillotines for brown-nosed cocktards like Goldberg and those GOP lick-spittle traitors. I can but dream of a society where the rich worry more about the wrath of the people than those "unfair" 2% "tax hikes". Ah... now that's what I call an American dream!

Obama Failure For The Day (Friday)

Someone gave the idea of wheeling on Bill Clinton to back up Obama on the tax cuts bill a thumbs up. But, man, they really shouldn't have. The miserable "joint" press conference looked uncomfortably like Obama had brought his dad in to help him out because he'd paddled way out of his depth. And then to see Obama walk out mid-session and hand over the whole thing to Bubba felt like another public display of Obama weakness. This guy really ain't hacking it.

The founding fathers had argued about the issue of impeachment. The case for allowing impeachment of a sitting president for "maladministration" (incompetence) was argued but ultimately rejected. Under Constitutional rules, only "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors" can be cited as grounds.

Every time I see some hick sporting an "Impeach Obama" bumper sticker, it always gets me pissed. On what f*cking grounds, idiots? Now if that old "maladministration" thing had made it to the final draft, I might not be so down on the idea. Yes. It's come to this.

Old School!

Damn, so far Bernie Sanders has been filibustering Obama's tax cut bill for six freaking hours. That's six hours of non-stop talking to hold up passage of the bill. It's at once the most exciting thing I've seen in years... and the most boring.

Irony of the first order that it takes an actual living, breathing Socialist to step up for the American people against a president the GOP keeps trying to label a Socialist. This one guy clearly has more concern for working people (that includes you too conservative dweeb) in one pinky than could be wrung from the whole GOP if they were squeezed like lemons. Go Bernie!

Under the circumstances, it would seem only polite to email Sanders and express your thanks.

Will The Poor Save Us?

According to recent figures:

A staggering 42.4 million Americans -- 13.7% of the population -- are receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) program, more commonly known as Food Stamps.

Pretty big, hungry elephant in the room there. But don't worry... there's nothing a little more trickle-down economics won't fix. Just give it time to trickle. It may look like the faucet's been stuck for thirty years... but just keep those tax cuts, just give it two more years to work!

Nope.

The rich will never save this country. But ironically, the poor just might at this rate:

USDA researchers have estimated that an additional $5.00 in food stamp benefits can generate $9.20 in total economic activity.

Wall Street: look at those returns. Why not invest in poverty? Oops... forgot you already tried that. That's kinda how we got here.

Random Picture of The Day

Chinese farmers have taken to fitting their roosters with glasses. Says one:

"Our cocks are very aggressive by nature (classic quote right there). They always fight with each other... But giving them these plastic glasses to wear means they can't see each other so clearly so they are much quieter and much more peaceful."

Wonder if these things would work on other kinds of 'cocks' like Republican electeds? We're talking fairly approximate evolutionary intelligence levels here... might be worth a shot.

Total Non-Surprise Of The Day

So idiocy wins again. DADT repeal fails. Stand-out idiot: Joe Manchin, the lone Dem who voted no. Said Manchin:

"I do not support its repeal at this time."

What's with the "at this time" crap? When will be the right time? Maybe we should all just sit back and wait patiently for Manchin, the great all-seeing oracle, to decide... is it something to do with planetary alignment? Wind direction? The I-freaking-Ching??? Apparently this a**clown knows better than the combined heads of all the armed services, the vast majority of serving troops and most Americans. Oh to be so wise.

Better Late Than Never?

Says the Guardian:

Nearly four decades after his death, Florida's clemency board pardoned the legendary Doors frontman of convictions for indecent exposure and profanity at a Miami concert.

The Guardian also mentions Lenny Bruce's posthumous pardon on obscenity charges (37 years after his death) and Johnny Cash being pardoned for public drunkenness a mere four years after his death. There's also the Vatican finally getting around (November 2010) to forgiving John Lennon for his "bigger than Jesus" quip in 1967.

Given the degree to which these pop culture pioneers were persecuted during their lifetimes -- and the amount of time allowed to elapse before 'The Man' says sorry -- the contrition just seems a little sarcastic now and maybe better left unsaid.

Salvation Army Grinches Out On Harry Potter

The Salvation Army is refusing to pass Harry Potter toys onto needy kids this Christmas because "The Salvation Army is based on Christian principles, so these things are not in line with those". But they have no qualms with war toys -- like the plastic M-16 which was accepted from the same donor who got a 'no thanks' on Harry Potter action figures.

So how far do you go? Should they ban guns too? Should they ban superhero toys for promoting the worship of false idols? How about an embargo on Star Wars toys because aliens are really demons according to some Christians? And don't even go there with Yoga Barbie...

I'm sure you could come up with sound theological reasons to ban almost any toy and just leave rocks for kids to play with. So maybe we should quit with the abstruse theological hoo-ha and just get on with helping those less fortunate than ourselves? That's a much simpler "Christian principle" I'd have thought.

Sanity At Last?

Here's hoping... Now we just have to figure out which damn party the president belongs to.

Sadism v. Dinner

This is just one of the countless ways in which I differ from Sarah Palin. She's calling non sport hunters hypocrites for suggesting she gets off on killing critters:

"Unless you've never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation."

Nope. Bullsh*t. Maybe if I ever appear on TV laughing as some unfortunate cow gets a bolt in the head to make me shoes, we can talk. But until then STFU.

Although I refer to myself as a 'redneck' I've never shot anything (or anyone) for fun. I've killed a couple of things when I was younger. But I ate them. I enjoyed running around in the woods, the hunt itself.  But I didn't relish the actual kill. In fact it made me feel a little sad and introspective... So, unlike Palin, I didn't take photos of myself gloating over the corpses (well, they were rabbits so that would have looked pretty dumb anyway). It was just dinner with exercise thrown in.

I tried watching Palin's Alaska the other day. That show was a full hour of Palin whining about everything. The only time she seemed happy was when she was punching the air after shooting another deer who'd unwisely stumbled into range. But blasting stationary deer to death using a telescopic sight and then congratulating yourself like you've done something more challenging than flicking on light switch? This woman, I thought, must be a straight f*cking sadist.

While sport hunting might be good ol' outdoorsy fun in the country, imagine it transferred to a city environment. We'd be talking shooting cats on fences, maybe shoving M18s up stray dogs' a**es for fun. No-one's getting dinner, no-one's doing anything skillful or challenging. They're just being d*cks to animals for their own enjoyment. Just like Ma Palin.

Nope. Pulling on leather shoes or chowing down on a burger is absolutely not the same as killing animals for no other reason than you enjoy it.

Bryan Fischer: Get Help

Wingnut blogger Bryan Fischer is blaming the whole Wikileaks thing on the gays. Because Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who passed those hot docs onto Wikileaks, is "openly gay". Case closed. With zero evidence, Fischer says:

Manning was, at a minimum, seriously confused about his sexuality, and at worst, launched the WikiLeaks campaign to strike back at the military for its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which he vehemently opposed.

As usual, this conservative is obsessed with homosexuality. He sees gays at partnering with Muslims and Mexicans to destroy the world. He's frigging insane.

So, again with the Freud, is it weird that a 'straight' guy like Fischer would spend so much time obsessing about the gays? I wonder if he'll ever step out of that maximum security closet he's built for himself, come to terms with his own sexuality and quit acting like a giant jerk. Have you heard the guy? He sounds like Mr Ed channeling Liberace. If he ain't gay, hell, I'll suck a d*ck.

Thought For Today

I'm not quite old enough to remember Aretha Franklin in her Muscle Shoals heyday. But age is no obstacle to appreciating her voice and the huge contribution she made to music. So hearing she's now battling pancreatic cancer makes me sad as hell. As one friend says of her:

"She has too many more songs to sing. She's still young yet."

Let's hope.

Conservatives Miss Point. Imagine That..

Says Fox News, defender of the Faith:

A New Hampshire couple has pulled their son out of his local high school after the teen was assigned a book that refers to Jesus Christ as a "wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist."

Sounds terrible don't it? Wow. What kind of school board would insult a good conservative by making their kid read a book -- let alone a book that takes a swipe at JC himself? But don't worry. This being Fox, this story is about as accurate as a busted sun dial...

The book in question, Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed", is a biographical account of a woman trying to make it in America on minimum wage. The part that caused all the fuss? Ehrenreich describes attending church to hear a minister talk about The Sermon On The Mount. She found it perplexing that the minister redacted all Jesus' talk of social justice, fairness, equality, community, etc. (i.e., pretty much the entire theme of The Sermon On The Mount) and presented him only as a 'corpse', stripped of humanity, relevance and meaning:

It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say.

Yup, that's the bit conserva-kid and his parents in New Hampshire objected to. That's the bit that made them "slam down" this "junk" book, take the kid out of school and become Christian refuseniks. Damn, talk about missing the f*cking point.

This really reminds me of when I had that bumper sticker saying "Jesus Save Me From Your Followers" on my car. I always thought the message was pretty clear. But I soon stopped bothering to count the number of purple faced loons, supposed Christians, who'd toot their horns, flip me off and even try to run me off the damn road for expressing that opinion. "Hey buddy, you got a problem with Jesus? Well this is a Christian country so f*ck off out of here if you don't like it!" Errm... nope. I have no beef with Jesus, I got a problem with you though bubba...

It was no surprise that a thing like nuance was entirely lost on people who, I'd assume, were Christians of a conservative persuasion. But, hell, it's not even nuance: that bumper sticker was a straightforward criticism of them not Jesus - and that's what got them mad. Just like Ehrenreich, I was attacking those conservatives who try to jam their own dogmas down Jesus' throat, discard the actual message of the New Testament and then get mad at people who reject their self-serving distortion of Christianity. If anything, that bumper sticker and Ehrenreich's book both try to defend Christianity. But, just as with patriotism, it's always personal for conservatives: Attack conservative "Christians"? You attack Jesus. Attack conservative "Patriots"? You attack America itself. (Man, talk about "hey, it's not always about you...")

So let me risk the wrath of conservative God and say I detest these people and their never-ending, egomaniacal projection. Will they ever realize they're worshipping conservatism as a false idol, elbowing Jesus out the way and setting themselves up as God? Do they realize that they're the ones who are mocking Christianity and making it meaningless? And that, if there's a hell, they're putting themselves on the fast track? I guess not. After all, they don't call it 'blissful' ignorance for nothing.

C*nt of The Day

Meet Robert Stacy McCain (right), wingnut blogger and c*nt of the day. He's all in an uproar about Wikileaks' Julian Assange's "silly" sexual assault charges. And he's losing patience with those uppity feminists who think rape's a bad thing. Sheesh, what next? The women folk'll be wanting shoes... Or maybe setting free from McCain's basement sex dungeon. The nerve.

For most of us, the sordid 'ins and outs' of the Assange's case are confusing. Not stopping when a condom busts and your consensual partner asks you to quit? Could just be written off as ign'ance. But really it is a form of rape - an especially brutal kind in a world where HIV exists. But McCain would beg to differ. Says he:

"Listen up, sweetheart: You buy the ticket, you take the ride."

WTF??? I'm skeptical that sex with McCain could be in any way analogous to a theme park ride aside from the vomiting. But I'm mostly amazed that this misogynistic dweeb could still be talking like this in the 21st century. This is some serious Jurassic era bullsh*t.

Bipartisanship At Last?

You'd think it would be impossible to find anything Bernie Sanders and Jim DeMint could agree on. But they're both on the same page when it comes to the Obama/GOP tax cuts.

OK, when I say 'same page' I really mean opposite pages... Sanders threatens filibuster because he morally opposes tax cuts for the rich. DeMint threatens filibuster because he morally opposes not throwing in a complimentary blow job for every billionaire as tax rates are slashed to zero for the rest of time. But even so, seeing a self-described democratic socialist reach across to a right-wing nutbag to try and derail a truly insane bill is an encouraging sign. Particularly when 'moderate' pols on both sides haven't agreed on a damn thing for at least two years.

Maybe, ironically, we no longer need to look to 'moderates' for moderate policy - we need to look to the fringes for a steadying hand. We need to look to crazy f*cks like Jim DeMint and real progressives like Sanders who've been left behind by the Dem's mass swerve to the right to say "hey, hold on..." As the 'moderates' go full-speed ahead destroying the country, maybe some real governance could be accomplished by bringing in the wide receivers.

I've wondered for a while now if our last hope would be for the Tea Partiers and the progressives to work together - at least tactically. Sounds insane I know... But there's so much obvious sh*t that every American, left or right, could agree on that needs desperately to be addressed. And 'Baggers and liberals really do share some common ground in principle - even if a million other things they don't agree on hold them apart.

Like I got a phone-back recently from a regional Tea Party leader (who shall remain nameless to spare his blushes). I'd emailed him to say good job on opposing Boehner's plan to disband the Congressional Ethics Committee and speaking up for a body that was the brain child of... gulp... Nancy Pelosi. So he called me back and admitted, yes, there's a lot of sh*t we could both agree on - number one being that our country is getting f*cked by cynical politicians and irresponsible big business. We covered a lot of ground and we confessed a few things that our liberal and conservative buddies probably wouldn't want said aloud... He committed conservative heresy by admitting Reagan is overrated and that Carter is unfairly demonized, he expressed frustration that conservatives are forever preoccupied with wedge issues when, in reality, WTF does abortion and gay sex have to do with government? On corporate ethics, on healthcare, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on special interests screwing our democracy, on domestic spying, on freedom of speech, on DADT... hell, even on the legalization of weed, as Tea Bagger and liberal, we both agreed on the problems... if not the solutions.

This talk was encouraging. It actually gave me hope that at least some 'Baggers are rational and perhaps an unholy tactical alliance, a partial synthesis of opposites, could work as a way of getting the country back on track. Think of it as a push from both sides to pop that big, ugly boil of legislative inertia and self-interest in Washington.

Oops...

The feds have 'quarantined' more than $100 billion-worth of newly printed bills after a printing fault was discovered. The new $100 bills were designed to be so complicated forgers would have a hard time making their own. Ironically, they seem to be too hard for even the feds to print. So I guess you could call that a partial success.

Then there's some guy in Missouri who decided to repair his mower in his bedroom (hey, it's cold out) and burned down his whole house after lighting up a cigarette. Some might say that's redneck. I'd disagree. Redneck skills are about unconventional ingenuity. Clearly, this guy's plan wasn't so ingenious.

For a good example of Redneck ingenuity in action, you could pack up the kids and head to Florida for the Chumuckla Redneck Christmas Parade. Yup, it's one big cringe-inducing stereotype fest from start to finish. But it's all for charity so shut up. What most caught my eye was the musical innovation:

For about 25 years, the bluegrass band has entertained area audiences by wringing tunes from tubs, washboards, fiddles, banjos, keyboards and a "potty-tar" — a guitar made out of a toilet.

I wonder if the the acoustic richness of the toilet bowl was noticed while the inventor was sat on one. Or was he kneeling drunk with his head inside? Either way, full marks for innovation.

Bernie Sanders Last (Middle Class) Action Hero

Bernie Sanders on Obama/GOP tax cuts for the rich:

"In my view, it is a moral outrage... I will do everything in my power to stand up for the American middle class and defeat this agreement."

Not sure what Sanders could do now the trap is sprung. Do you filibuster and screw those two million unemployed Americans whose insurance is set to expire? Or do you suck it up and throw the country into the poor house to fluff a few rich guys' pillows? I hate to go all Archie Bunker, but the government of this country - red and blue - is a f*cking disgrace. With the obvious exception of Bernie Sanders.

Dick Cheney Charged

The new skinny on Cheney...

News breaks that Dick Cheney has been charged with bribery and conspiracy in Nigeria. He is officially a wanted man But:

Although Nigerian government officials said they would seek Cheney's extradition to respond to the charges, it's all but guaranteed the US government won't entertain such a request.

Yup. Let's just keep shining that good ol' light of democracy and justice on the world... by harboring a wanted criminal and refusing to comply with international law. We've probably invaded small countries for less. Ain't hypocrisy grand?

Fighting Words From Obama

Yup, he's finally come out swinging. At his own base.

Two years ago, I could never have imagined my blog being so anti-Obama. Jeez, the guy used to talk like a champ and genuinely sold me on hope and change. But that was then and this is now. Now we've crossed the credibility hump and 'hope and change' are just hollow buzzwords... almost as hollow as Fox News' "Fair and Balanced". And I've had it. Majorly.

So to hear Obama rail against us 'progressives' today not so much stung as inspired a big ol' middle finger directed due north at the White House. Asked by the WSJ what he thought of liberals who accuse him of abandoning core principles and refusing to fight:

The president compared current complaints from progressives to sparring over health care reform, saying that "this is the public option debate all over again." Then, Obama said, while he was able to pass reform Democrats had fought for for a century, they instead viewed it as "weakness and compromise" that there was no public option. "Now, if that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it, we will never get anything done."

I don't think I've ever heard such a depressing public admission of weakness from a sitting president. Never such a frantic waving of the white flag when times most demand leadership. OK, Obama, I get it. You're no leader. You can't even whip your own party into line to get a vote going, let alone stand up to the GOP. You have no interest in getting your message out and informing the people so that ignorance doesn't become the default setting for public opinion. Instead you just let the Republicans frame every debate, let their skewed version of reality prevail and then shape your policies to fit. Is there no-one close to you who can quietly and politely point out that you're behaving like a world-class f*cking loser?

True, as you say, "this is a big, diverse country" and "not everyone agrees with us". But you don't even seem to agree with yourself. You won a f*cking landslide and were given a big fat mandate to run as a progressive. And what happened? While Bush famously thought he served only the folks who voted for him,  you have the opposite delusion: you choose to serve only the loudest 20-30% who would never vote for you in a million years while treating those who would support you like so much dog sh*t.

Yes, healthcare reform was a struggle and ended up as an aborted catstrophe. Why? Not because the great American public are somehow philosophically opposed to better healthcare and the mess they ended up with was their preference. It turned into an abortion because you refused to fight. You refused to counter the lies and bullsh*t. You refused to press the case. Basically, you pussied out to the Tea Party and the corporate fascists.

Yes, unemployment insurance might have been blocked by the GOP if you hadn't caved on tax cuts. But you laid the ground work for the GOP taking the unemployed hostage. You led the hostage right into the damn house by caving in advance. Instead of standing up for the middle class and getting this sh*t sorted months ago, you stood up for the f*cking GOP. And now you want to attack me for my unicorn dreams of social justice? F*ck you.

So next time, just be honest. Don't attack me for still clinging to the same principles you sold out for the price of a pat on the back from Mitch McConnell. Don't try and justify your weakness by saying "nothing would get done" if you actually tried. Jeez, that's the definition of the term loser. You're not a loser if you fight and lose, you're only a loser if you never fight at all. So just step the f*ck down and let someone else do the damn job if you can't.

Obama Failure For The Day (Tuesday)

"My job is to do what's right for the American people."

So said Obama at today's ritual public humiliation (you know, those things they used to call presidential press conferences). I'm a stickler for correcting bad copy so...

"My job is to do what's right for the Republican party."

There. Fixed.

Skip The Xanax, It's Conspiracy Theory Time

Let me tell you a story...

After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Lenin became the all-powerful dictator of the new USSR. He was the Nietzschean 'super man' in control of his own (and everyone else's) destiny. But even Lenin, the ultimate 'decider', sometimes doubted whether or not he was really in control. Said he:

"The state does not function as desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes."

So was that just megalomaniacs' paranoia, an occupational hazard for dictators? Or was there really some secret third party of plutocrats controlling and manipulating events to their own advantage? Who knows. But follow the money... what ultimately came of the "Communist" revolution? More than 70 years of big profits for the investor class via Cold War boom sectors like military technology, currency speculation, the space race and all that highly profitable anti-Communist hysteria that kept the free world turning in an ever more right-wing, business-friendly direction.

Just a glance at what's going on in America today makes you wonder that the rich are not-so-secretly in charge. Always have been, always will be. It's nothing to do with anti-Semitism and crazy Nazi bullsh*t, it's nothing to do with David Icke's frigging lizard people, aliens or whatever... the rich, irrespective of race, religion or planetary origin, just happen to be in charge. And whatever "We The People" want, we only get it if it happens to be in line with what they want too.

Just take a look at the Koch brothers financed Tea Party - a movement of popular frustration bought and paid for by the self-same guys Tea Partiers should claim to be fighting. I wonder how many times 'baggers wake up in the middle of the night wondering, just like Lenin, who's really steering their car? Maybe they don't... but they sure as hell should.

So if even blood-spitting 'kill the rich' Bolsheviks could be secretly put in power by the rich for their own ends, set up like pawns in some massive undercover operation, makes you wonder how easy The Tea Party or Obama 2008 would have been to pull off. Are they both just witting or unwitting stooges of the plutocrats lubed up with a bunch of phony-baloney populist talk?

Either way, I'm not the only nut out here. Says Stephen Lendman at the anti-corporate thepeoplesvoice.org:

Believing Obama is progressive is like calling a cat a dog. Only the delusional think so. He's, in fact, hard-right, a neocon, a warrior president, a corporatist pursuing anti-populist policies favoring wealth and privilege, not social justice when more than ever it's needed. He's a fraud, an elitist, chosen years ago, then put on a fast track to power. Big monied interests love him. So do war profiteers and members of America's aristocracy. He's one of them. 

Maybe my disappointment with Obama is just temporarily fogging my brain with conspiracy theories and delusions... maybe this is all nuts. But I'm not sure. Look at it this way, before anti-Communist hysteria took hold, there used to be a powerful labor movement in America. Working people got together, fought for their own interests and won. Do we think the mega-wealthy don't have enough resources and necessary smarts to pull off the exact same thing in reverse? If you just use the term "rich guy union" in place of "international secret conspiracy to rule the world" doesn't it sound more plausible? Definitely more plausible than thinking the rich have been winning the class war for decades by pure dumb luck.

Conspiracy? Whatever...

Random Picture of The Day

Happy Holidays!

Quote Of The Day

Cheap of me to rip off Andrew Sullivan's quote of the day... but it's a doozy:

“In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.” -- Ron Paul on Wikileaks.

Man, I so want to hate Ron Paul all the time. But he just keeps popping out sane thoughts from time to time to put me off my game. Props where props due.

Random Picture of The Day

Some hick d*ckhead in Idaho builds a 10-foot-tall KKK snow man, concerned parents at a nearby elementary school call the cops... but the story is made by the crashingly cheesy USA Today headline:

"KKK snowman gets frosty response from neighbors"

Ah... the newspaper headline pun. So sad yet so funny... the journalistic equivalent of a clown funeral. Jon Stewart was all about this last week.

Let's Play The Race Card...

I like those off-beat surveys that pop up and make you wonder "who wants to know this sh*t and why?" But this one, surely says more than it knows:

Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Beck, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, comprised the list that LifeWay Research presented to Protestant pastors along with the question, “Which, if any, of the following people do you believe are Christians?”

Bush and Palin topped the list with most Protestant pastors checking them off as Christians while Beck's Mormonism put him low with only 27% (Mormon, Shmormon...). But Oprah and Obama? Only 41% thought Obama was a Christian and a staggering 81% thought Oprah wasn't. Hmm... could I play the race card here black folks? I think I might have a flush...

A Protestant pastor would have to be f*cknuts insane to think two American public figures of Oprah and Obama's stature would not self-identify as Christian. The only way they could possibly assume differently is if the words 'white', 'male', 'conservative' and 'Christian' were interchangeable and/or synonymous in Protestant circles. Tell me it ain't so?

Parasites Destroying The Host

I have a lot of respect for Robert Reich. But I'm also kind of a d*ck... so I'll use this picture.

Robert Reich, Munchkin-like economic rocket scientist, poses the following question:

Quiz: What's responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?

A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.

B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.

Of course, Reich is too nuanced and thoughtful to give answer B a resounding "well, duh" as I would. But he does say the answer is mostly B:

In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand - the result of the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle.

Shame then that the standard conservative tune is all about B with blame "big labor" thrown in as a complimentary minor key. But the bigger shame, as Reich points out, is that the Obama admin and large numbers of Democrats are also playing the same tune these days. So how can we ever dig our way out of this damn hole when no-one's willing to acknowledge reality?

The rich in America no longer give a f*ck about social responsibility. They've abandoned any sense of shared prosperity they might have had ten years ago. Now they just sit, Gollum-like, on their own ever-growing piles of 'precious' while the whole country turns into Honduras all around them. There is no trickle down. There is no "redistribution of wealth". Just a massive sucking of wealth upwards where it stays forever like a hamburger in a fat guy's colon. The rich are the parasite that's killing its host. And no-one in politics, GOP'er or Democrat, seems to have balls and perspicuity enough to face what's happening.

But I can't really hate a Republican for siding with the rich. That's all they've ever done. It's those Democrats who stay quiet on naming and blaming, stay quiet on offering non-RNC-approved  reality, and who stay quiet on offering solutions that make me f*cking sick. It's almost as if the two parties have merged and are now working for the same goal: a Republican government in 2012. As Reich concludes, that's what will happen unless the Dems sac up and start truthing against the "blame big government" lie.

Debt & Double Standards

As two million more Americans get their benefits yanked in the name of deficit reduction, the news of just how much money the feds loaned the banks as the financial crisis hit seems a tad schizophrenic by comparison. According to newly revealed data, those same people who are now advising the government to nickle and dime old folks, the unemployed and government employees happily payed out $9 trillion in "overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms" to keep them afloat in September 2008.

So the message is clear: The government's got Wall Street's back. But regular people who drag ass out of bed and go to work every day? You're on your own. If the banks were too big to fail, the American middle class must be too small to succeed.

Obama Failure For The Day (Monday)

So there are some things this president will stand up and fight for. Today President Patty Hearst, GOP Stockholm Syndrome victim, announces a two-year wage freeze on all government workers except for the military.

Hey, what else would you expect from a Democrat champion of the people than tax cuts for the Koch brothers and a pay cut for the mail man? If the GOP was a gang, Obama would be "blood in" at this point.