What a joke. No, really, what a joke.  Tagg Romney wants to whomp the Prez up side the head? Despite the faux outrage over his “threat”,  I’m pretty sure the Taggster meant a metaphorical whomp. I’m equally sure the Secret Service saw it that way too. After all, Tagg isn’t spread eagle on the ground at the business end of a drunken Secret Service agent’s Glock. Besides, brother Josh apologized for him. Apparently, Tagg has the same aversion to embarrassing questions as Dad has to Evil Empress Whoopi Goldberg and the ladies of the View.

Please, don’t hit me Tagg! It’s a joke!

‘I’m Hankerin’ for a Shot of Milk in a Dirty Glass’

But let’s pretend, shall we? What if Tagg actually meant it? What if he is secretly a swaggering Mormon who’s handy with his fists, has a quick temper, and thirsts for a swig of milk…in a dirty glass? What if Obama had said to you, “Young ‘un. Your Pa is a dirty, low down liar!” I suspect you’d be pissed and spit back, “Meet me on Main Street at high noon you piss pot little varmint. We’ll duke it out mano-a-man.”

Hell, even Malia and Sasha would kick holy hell out of your knees if you said that about their Dad – as Tagg’s Dad occasionally does. Circling the wagons is what families do. Most of us don’t cotton to familial insults even if we suspect, deep inside, they might be more than a little true. It is the way of wagon trains – and families. Blood is thicker than water. It’s thicker than cold, hard facts too.

Empirically, Obama is right. Mitt’s pants catch fire more often than an unregulated oil refinery. In fact, he lies more often than his famously lying running mate, Paul Ryan (Romney’s robust 9% vs. Ryan’s wimpish 7%). In fairness, Willard had been lying longer, so the spread is understandable. (On a personal note, I think Mitt’s lies are more artfully crafted than Paul’s. His 47%  “mistake” that was merely inartfully put is comedy gold. Kudos, really. It put’s Paul “Ayn” Ryan’s “Balanced Budget Plan” to shame.

Props on Romney’s Wide White Belt and Straw Shoes

But Tagg does have a point that Obama calling Daddy a liar is disingenuous, even if the Prez only does it 2% of the time. Mitt has always been a quantity-over-quality man. However, Obama gets a lot of style points. His lies are to Mitt’s lies as a pair of finely tailored wool pants are to Mitt’s window pane check, polyester capris circa 1982. Props on Mitt’s wide white belt and straw shoes though.

Tagg, the point here isn’t Obama calling your Dad a liar. That is demonstrably true. The point isn’t you wanting to stomp the O-Man into a Chicago pizza grease spot. Even if your desire was just an inartfully stated joke. That’s your DNA’s fault. It isn’t even that Obama lies too so Dad is justified in calling him out on it – even though the political calculus suggests Malia and Sasha would be justified in coming to beat you like a 9th Century Persian tapestry from your Dad’s bathroom.

The point is that your Dad is a liar. And Malia and Sasha’s Dad is a liar. Worse yet, they both hire surrogates to lie so they don’t have to do the dirty work of politics themselves – though I suppose that does create  jobs for professional surrogates. There is no need to get all huffy about someone telling the truth about your Dad’s lies or for your opponents to chuckle in the corner…until they get caught in lies – even fashionable ones. Everyone knows everyone else is lying. Everyone enables the lies with applause, contributions, and votes. Lying is one of the traits that separates humans from apes – if you believe that sort of science. But that doesn’t make it right.

Damn! Now I want to take a swing at somebody!

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.

Oh brother, that’s rich! Suddenly, George W. Bush is no longer the crazy uncle no one wants to talk about. Some key Republicans have stopped running away from him like Usain Bolt with a rocket up his ass to turn and tell the world what a magnificent ass cake the Texas Tugjob really was. With apologies to Sally Field, “They hate him, they really hate him!”

Until now if you brought up George the Lesser in Republican quarters you’d likely get an, “Um, I think I left my lights on,” with a quick exit. Sure they knew he was a carbuncle on the ass of society, but how do you cop to supporting an incompetent boob for eight years and spend the next four blaming all the steaming turds he left on someone else?

It turns out you do it cravenly.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Wherehtehellhaveyoubeenfor12years) thinks Obama’s handling of Al Qaeda is Iraq War III. He told Face the Nation, “I have seen this movie before.  I went to Iraq in 2004 and everybody told me things are going fine, this is just a few dead-enders. Iraq was falling apart, and you couldn’t get the truth from the Bush administration.”

I have to agree with him there, but no one got the truth from him either.

Crazy Amir’s Carpets, Home of the $5 Deal

After his famous 2004 trip with John McTheusela, he said, “We went to the market and were just really warmly welcomed. I bought five rugs for five bucks. And people were engaging.” Of course they were, the cracker and the old man traveled through the Green Zone with a scad of soldiers, in heavily armored Humvees (that real soldiers couldn’t get), with helicopter gunships flying top cover. It was the safest everyday Iraqis in the market had felt in years, especially since 88 people died there not long before our fearless twosome stared down Osama himself. Those rugs from Crazy Amir’s Carpet and AK-47 Emporium were the most expensive $5 rugs in history…but good for lying on apparently.

Now Lindsey and his cohorts think, “The Middle East is falling apart, and they’re (the Obama administration) trying to spin what happened in Libya because the truth of the matter is, al Qaeda is alive and well, and counter-attacking.”

True enough. They are alive and well and bombing, but then so is just about every other jackhole in the world – Americans included. But as we learned since then, al Qaeda weren’t even IN Iraq until George the Lesser Texas 2-Stepped in.

We should’ve gotten the hell out of there long before we started to, but with Condi W. George, “victory” was always just around the corner. If there is fault with Obama’s handling of an intractable Iraq mess, it is not coming up with a better solution for a problem that cannot be “solved”. He unwisely followed the plan the previous court jester plan left tucked in the top drawer of the Resolute Desk.

Oh, and two more points. First, Obama has never said al Qaeda is dead. He is acutely aware of their liveliness. In fact, they’re probably responsible for the Benghazi bombing. Second, your boy lost interest in Osama bin Laden while Obama squelched the skeevy bastard with extreme prejudice. So in one swoop, he did more to rid the world of the dangerous knotheads than George did in 8 years. However, there is no way to rid the world of knotheads. If there were, Graham wouldn’t be bloviating now.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Disneyland) is criticizing Obama for a lack of embassy security, that he – “Oops, I forgot to mention that” -  voted against. He compares Obama’s Middle East policies to “Mission Accomplished” George’s. “…when President George W. Bush went aboard an aircraft carrier and said, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ I listened, rightfully so, to people saying, look, but there are still problems, and they’re still dying,” Issa said. “And quite frankly, things got worse in many ways after that famous statement.”

Duh. Ya think? Of course things weren’t bad enough to vote against Bush’s mission, accomplished or otherwise, now were they?

Mission Accomplished Moment?  Um…No

“We’re going through a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment,” Issa now says with no sense of irony. “Eleven years after September 11, Americans were attacked on September 11 by terrorists who pre-planned to kill Americans. That happened. And we can’t be in denial, particularly when there are compounds all over the Middle East that need to be legitimately protected at a level that security professionals ask for.”

Darrel, you’re completely right of course. The Obama administration didn’t protect the Benghazi embassy and they should have. We do need to know what happened. The story is in knots and the Administration must be honest, admit mistakes, present plans to fix them, and move on. Whether Obama and Biden personally knew about requests is beside the point. Whether it was al Qaeda or not is beside the point. Whether you and the rest of the Boehner Boys voted against funding is beside the point. The cock-up came on their watch and it is their responsibility.  But a “Mission Accomplished moment”?  Um…no.

Go ahead and investigate, but don’t be too pious about it and keep it fair. Remember, you were investigated for financial irregularities, grand theft auto, and illegal gun charges? You got a fair hearing. You might want to keep that in mind as an example of how to get problems solved.

Speaking of fairness, let’s not heap all this on the Republicans. Bush-era Dems voted like people sans vertebrae for 8 years. They aren’t so happy to trot that out today because they are afraid to and don’t have the morals to admit they screwed Barney during the Bush years. But then, the Republicans always were the ballsy ones.

Let’s not forget, Iraq and Afghanistan ain’t over and they never will be. People are still dying. We’re still paying off the huge off-budget bill for George’s nearly decade-long drunken spree. And, other hot spots crop up faster than the Great Ursine God Smokey can stomp them out. The problems, many of which were there long before George the Lesser was a twinkle in George the Ancient’s eye, are still problems with no solutions. It is not because people haven’t tried, but because you can’t solve terror or win a war that is no such thing. That is precisely why the candidates would rather walk over a broken glass, weenie roast bonfire than talk about the bedamned places.

Nope, there was plenty of blame to spread then and there is plenty of it to go around now. I’d recommend any politician who drives the Lindsey-Issa Craven Expressway to check their tires before they start the trip.

They’re bound to have a blowout.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.

In America, almost every issue offers irrefutable biblical “proof” that God sides with whoever is making a point. Some stories, like the parable of the money changers, have become so standard they’re clichés. But Rev. Morgan Guyton of Virginia’s Burke United Methodist Church breaks the cliché with a fresh idea – capitalism has its own theology. The eternal struggle between good and evil becomes the struggle between capitalists and anti-capitalists.

But first, some review for those decades-removed from Sunday school or, like me, secularists.

In this corner, the capitalists – Matthew 25:14-30 tells the story of a master who gives his three servants money to invest on his behalf. Two of them get a ROI roughly equal to a possibly illegal hedge fund – 100%.  The conservative servant/investor buries the money for fear of  being over-leveraged. He makes zero for the boss, which is probably much more likely than a 100% return. The master gives the two “entrepreneurs” a hefty quarterly bonus for taking a big risk with someone else’s money and punishes the “victim” by closing the sandal factory the other two bought and outsourcing his job to the Romans. Everyone lives happily ever after…except the poor sot who feared exactly what eventually happened – he’d lose the boss’s money and end up begging alms.

Money Laundering Down at the Temple

In this corner, the anti-capitalists – According to Matthew 21:12, Jesus goes all biblical on the money changers’ asses and tosses them out of the temple. Their sin was money laundering – changing one more-valuable currency for one with less silver, but the same face value. They split the profit between themselves and a high priest (the dude in the Popemobile knows of whom I speak) at the expense of religious pilgrims. The good folk from Main St., if you will. Ironically, they did this to allow the pilgrims to pay a church tax. With a sweet deal like that, today’s capitalists would convert from anti-tax zealots into prophets singing the praises of higher taxes overnight.

Matthew meant the parables as a comparison between Old Testament Grouchy God and New Testament Chillaxin’ Jesus. The problem is that it’s a long time between 2012 and the year to 1 AD. Why, Earth was only 4,000 years old back then.

In Matthew’s day, capital was a mushy concept. You didn’t trade a camel for a goat because you intended to develop a bitchin’ new goat roping app for an iPhone made by Chinese prison labor. You traded because goats taste better than camels and a goat sandwich sounds pretty tasty when your stomach is growling like, well, a camel. Today, capitalists brunch on money and all the goats and camels they can stuff in their mouths. Unfortunately, the money, goats, and camels usually come from those who can least afford it. It’s a bit like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi telling a hungry customer, “No goat sandwich for you”.

Today’s capitalists aren’t much like Grouchy God either. He may have been a mean SOB, but at least he was consistent and had a certain brutal honesty and fairness to his tantrums. The same story today would show the same meanness, but from a different source. The hedge fund managers would’ve skipped town for the Caymans with the master’s money and mugged the third servant on the way out of Dodge.

The Bible Proves Evolution is True

Of course, the ancient hedge fund managers didn’t break any laws. They were totally unregulated. Today’s hedge fund managers conveniently forget that our regulations came from two centuries of hedge fund managers and their bosses acting just like the guys in 1 AD. Of course that doesn’t stop them from complaining. They can make 1000% ROI and float everyone’s arks if we just let them run rampant and rapacious. We know this because the ethical standards in today’s Economic Bible are a bit loose. If you don’t like the law, just ignore it, pay a money changer to rewrite it, or buy the vote of a politician even more craven that yourself.

Matthew, a devotee of Chillaxin’ Jesus, would be appalled. He supported Jesus in a big way. He even worked for Jesus’s campaign. But, Jesus just wasn’t delivering the goods. In fact, Matt heard rumors Judas and Jesus had thrown in their lot with a band of grifters running a Ponzi scheme. Their honcho was a Jewish guy, Matt thought his name was Bernie Madoff or something.

So here’s my proof of a much-debated biblical construct – evolution (or at least reverse evolution) – and I use these two Bible chapters to bolster my case.

The ancient capitalists, the ones with disposable income to invest, honestly promoted entrepreneurial risk-taking by little guys. They came out on top and got a share of the wealth. True, the third servant got his ass kicked, but that’s how the literal “free market” at the heart of the Sumerian Dream worked.

However, capitalists began to consume Main St. while offering other organisms nothing in return. In the end, they evolved a “free market” ecosystem that resembled, “If I make manna, I’m rewarded. If I ruin the manna, I’m still rewarded,” construct. They developed an astonishing virulence and line the pockets of their Brooks Bros. exoskeletons with huge quantities of manna. They’ll lie, cheat, steal, or fence their Mother’s KitchenAid Automatic Manna Maker to do it. Today, they are a huge organism that takes over all it can touch to eat every scrap of manna.

Their scientific name, if I actually believed in science, is Pondus Scuminus.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.

GE Housatonic Superfund project site (Photo: CorpsNewEngland/flickr)

I worked for GE during the “halcyon” days of Jack Welch.  There were many things to recommend GE in those days, but Jack Welch was not one of them. Today, many people remember Jack Welch as a virtual business messiah.

The guy turned massive profits and was (and is) the darling of Wall Street, but it seems a lot of people have forgotten a lot of things about Jack…one of them being he could also be the most flamboyantly dumb man ever. He returns to that glory with his birther-like charges of Obama fiddling jobs numbers a month from the election.

His baseless charges are his Harry Reid, “Romney never paid taxes” moment – all huff with no puff. At their heart, the charges are more of an attack on Obama’s integrity than anything to do with the jobs numbers and they contain not a smidge of proof. It’s laughable that a man with less integrity than Donald Trump would make such claims. Let’s review some of Jack’s suspect history of integrity:

• Jack Welch sold the electronics division, but waited until the next morning to call the division president in to let him know.
• At a time when the company was stressing loyalty to GE employees, Welch said loyalty to a company was an outmoded concept. He denied saying it, despite dozens of witnesses.
• His nickname was “Neutron” Jack because of his penchant for “killing” employees by offshoring their jobs but leaving the factory buildings intact – much like a neutron bomb would. In fact, forget Bain. He was one of the pioneers in offshoring while touting the superior abilities of American workers.
• Under his “leadership”, GE created several new Superfund sites and refused to clean up old ones. One requires dredging the entire Hudson river downstream of a GE plant to remove contaminated river bottom. The work still isn’t done.
• The company regularly faced fines for financial “irregularities” like teaming with diamond company DeBeers to fix prices and corner the industrial diamond market using GE’s artificial diamond business. They sewed up 90% between them.
• Jack fell “victim” to what was then the world’s largest divorce settlement. His wife found an affair with a mistress he kept in a very expensive Manhattan apartment to take “Little Jack” for a few sprints around the bedpost.

The list goes on. He has a long history of stretching or downright lying in his past – many of them with solid proof.

Although it too often comes from both sides of the aisle, these charges, without proof, about something so critical to the nation doesn’t speak well for his integrity. Just ask his boys Mitt and Paul, both of whom rarely meet a truth they could tell. I don’t know whether Jack is right or wrong on this count, but I doubt it. I certainly wouldn’t admit I had no proof and then refuse to take my charges back the next day and I’m not doing that here. It’s a long-shot, but Jack may be right – I don’t know and neither does he. But if Obama truly fudged the numbers, why stop at a few tenths of a percent? Why not lop off a lot? Why make the charges if you can’t back them up?

If you choose to listen to a messiah, listen with some context. Messiahs don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes they don’t even know the truth. Here’s another provable fact. Jack Welch was once named one of the Top 10 CEOs in the nation not worth the money paid to them.

Some messiah.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.

When Mitt Romney insulted half of America he said he was, “inelegant”. Anyone with an IQ higher than a jelly donut could see Paul Ryan believed the same, but was just too elegant to say it. Yet, lo and behold, it turns out Mr. Ayn Rand is as inelegant as his erstwhile boss. The only difference is he only insulted a third of America.

I fear Ryan may have gone all pinko on us.

The men argue 47% or 30%, depending on the crapweasel you believe is the lesser liar, are takers and not givers. Both men believe people on the public dole choose it as a lifestyle in much the same way the homeless choose to live in filth and piss in doorways. Or as Willard puts it, “…they believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.”

THOSE GREEDY BASTARDS!

Mitt, a world-renown expert on poverty, went on to say the takers, “…believe that, that they are victims.” Then, he simply wrote them off as goldbricking ingrates who couldn’t change if they wanted.

Apparently, not victimizing them is too radical an idea.

Since Romneyan are only brave enough to say these things before sympathetic groups, they are preaching to the choir.  The choir, 2400 of whom are millionaires collecting unemployment, believe that crap. I’d wager that more than 47+30% of them believe it because their only up close and personal experience of poverty is sipping champers in a darkened limo while driving on the safe, faraway edge of a favela on the way to Carnival.

A mind that sees medicine, food, and housing as optional entitlements is psychopathic. A mind that sees people choosing to work three jobs, skip meals, and live in their cars is profoundly ill. By contrast, whining about paying less tax than your average upper middle class family or refusing to discuss your economic recovery plan because it is too time consuming to explain is mere hubris of Rumsfeldian proportions.

Last year, the United Farm Workers hosted a program to place interested parties in the fields alongside migrant farm workers doing stoop labor in the 100 degree sun. The idea was to give folks the chance to see the rigors of that work in person. Shockingly, there were few takers – only one so far as I know, Stephen Colbert. Still, it was a good program. When your head is as hard as the reinforced concrete in Cheyenne Mountain, having the essence of a clue is a good thing.

I’d like to offer Mitt and Paul a similar learning moment. Perhaps they would like to “choose” to live like a “victim” for a day or two to see what it is like. Maybe eat in a meal kitchen or live in a car, and not the Expedition either. Mitt, you can even wear your permapress mom jeans that are as authentic as Obama’s “black” accent.

If you can stand the heat and don’t leave the kitchen where your third job is a Denny’s short order cook, I’ll be happy to listen to your advice on the poor.

Until then, shut your caviar and champagne holes.

Cross posted at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks! More than politics, more than pop culture & humor.