Iran a-Twitter

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SOS (same-old-shit) — blame outside influences, but this time with a twist.

Instead of the standard Great Satan of the US, it’s the UK:

In his speech during Friday prayers, Khamenei played on the historic suspicions many Iranians have of Britain by hinting at its involvement in the demonstrations and describing it as “the most evil” of foreign powers.
…
Western countries were “hungry wolves ambushing us and removing the diplomatic cover from their faces. Do not neglect these people,” he warned.

(Illustration found here).

Iran’s head honcho had to divert attention away from the Twittering green — and silent — revolution in his own backyard as tons of Iranians have poured in that country’s city streets this past week.

Best two sites to keep up with the Iranian situation: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Nico Pitney at HuffPost.
And with Khamenei’s turn-about-speech this morning, the situation with all those people in the streets will be very interesting and most-likely very deadly.

Only time will tell.

Beyond There Lies Their Lies

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Still more grim news, but today’s particular sack of shit is more ethics and morals than anything else.
Three stories that reflect our times — strange/bad and getting worse — and how lopsided situations have become as if a giant screw is being tightened down.

The first item concerns a near-invisible US horror — coal ash dump-ponds, of which there are 1,300 nationwide, some up to 1,500 acres, holding tons of toxic mush full of arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium.
Last December, one such ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville,TN, busted and spilled “5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep” of toxic sludge.

So the more-interesting this found at HuffPost:

Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States?
So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can’t publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.
The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States — or a storm or some other disrupting event — could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.
There are 44 sites deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency to be high hazard, but Boxer said she isn’t allowed to talk about them other than to senators in the states affected.
“There is a huge muzzle on me and my staff,” she said.
“Homeland Security and the Army Corps [of Engineers] have decided in the interests of national security they can’t make these sites known,” she said.

Odd, huh?

And this a view on the validity/reality of those US government stats concerning the current financial/economic meltdown — a look at that set of principles known as the Pollyanna Creep.
From SmartMoney:

If the theory has a chief architect, it is John Williams, a semi-retired grandfather of five living in Oakland, Calif.
The son of a chainsaw importer, Williams sold the family business in the 1970s and began consulting for corporations, recalculating government economic data to arrive at what he says were more reliable measures, and with them, truer forecasts.
Today Williams runs Shadow Government Statistics from his home.
For $175 a year subscribers get economic data and analysis adjusted to back out the accumulated effects of what Williams has dubbed the Pollyanna Creep — Pollyanna being the orphan protagonist of the 1913 children’s book who learns to play the “glad game” to find cheery perspectives on life’s sorrows.
In other words, he provides figures he feels are properly miserable, to offset government ones he says are too prettied-up.
If Williams is right, unemployment is over 20%, gross domestic product is shrinking by 8% and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7%.
His forecasts border on apocalyptic.
The government is creating so much new money, he says, that the all but inevitable result is hyperinflation, where “your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.”
Buy physical gold, he advises.

And finally, a bit on the double standard imposed by the US on the “rest of the world” in times of trouble.
A post from BoingBoing:

Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz contrasts the American response to its economic crisis with the measures it shoved down the throats of poor countries during their crises, and discusses why rich-world double-standards (“Buy American/European” provisions in bailouts that only discriminate against poor countries) contribute to a global disillusionment in the values that the rich world nominally espouses: democracy, transparency, and so on.

“Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw.
During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures — even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving.
America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks — and demanded that the government not bail them out.
What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed.
To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero.
Banks are being bailed out right and left.
Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis.
Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises.
Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it.
America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word.
In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics.
American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.

Shit.
Toxic waste, assets and ethics.

Oil-A-Goner

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Just as I get my Jeep Commache finally running right and back on the road — a near-two-year traumatic odyssey — fuel prices at the pump are starting to go up again, rising 20 cents in less than a month.
Here in northern California, we’re now paying $3.25 a gallon, well above the national upwardly-mobile US average of $2.63 a gallon.

This particular increase, however, has reportedly started to act oddly beyond the summer supply/demand bullshit, and gas-pump prices might be finally reflecting the affects of what’s termed “Peak Oil.”
Crude oil closed at near $73 a barrel today, its highest point since last October.
The planet’s biggest oil fields are past peak production, declining 6 to 7 percent a year, and the end of easy, cheap fuel is near-about finished.
And the end has been a-coming awhile.
US oil production peaked in 1970, has dropped ever since and now imports about 60 percent of its oil.
The UK gushed with oil from the North Sea in the 1970s, but the field started to bust flat without warning in 1999, knocking the Brits from global oil producer to importer.

A most-excellent observation on this quickly-approaching energy disaster is from Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The Geopolitics of Energy, proclaiming the official end of cheap oil in a piece today at tomdispatch.
Klare says word comes from the US Department of Engery’s annual International Energy Outlook (IEO) report — bad moon rising.
A few snippets from Klare’s post:

Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands.
For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level — a peak — and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos.
Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil’s actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.
Until recently, Energy Information Administration officials scoffed at the notion that a peak in global oil output was imminent or that we should anticipate a contraction in the future availability of petroleum any time soon.
“[We] expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century,” the 2004 IEO report stated emphatically.
…
For example, any significant increase in biofuels use — assuming such fuels were produced by chemical means rather than, as now, by cooking — could substantially reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, actually slowing the tempo of future climate change.
On the other hand, any increase in the production of Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, and Rocky Mountain shale oil will entail energy-intensive activities at staggering levels, sure to emit vast amounts of CO2, which might more than cancel out any gains from the biofuels.
In addition, increased biofuels production risks the diversion of vast tracts of arable land from the crucial cultivation of basic food staples to the manufacture of transportation fuel.
If, as is likely, oil prices continue to rise, expect it to be ever more attractive for farmers to grow more corn and other crops for eventual conversion to transportation fuels, which means rises in food costs that could price basics out of the range of the very poor, while stretching working families to the limit.
As in May and June of 2008, when food riots spread across the planet in response to high food prices — caused, in part, by the diversion of vast amounts of corn acreage to biofuel production — this could well lead to mass unrest and mass starvation.

Read Klare’s entire post here.

‘Climate Refugees’

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Still more bad news from the war on weather.
Changes in climate the next few years will create a disaster scenario beyond even the old chesnut of “biblical proportions” as all kinds of bad shit will force the mass movement of many peoples.
From Agence France-Presse today (via Raw Story):

Tens of millions of people will be displaced by climate change in coming years, posing social, political and security problems of an unprecedented dimension, a new study said on Wednesday.
Estimates of the likely numbers range from 25 to 50 million people by 2010, while the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has pitched a figure of 200 million by 2050.
…
“Unless aggressive measures are taken to halt global warming, the consequences for human migration and displacement could reach a scope and scale that vastly exceed anything that has occurred before,” its authors warned.
“Climate change is already contributing to migration and displacement.
“All major estimates project that the trend will rise to tens of millions of migrants in coming years. Within the next few decades, the consequences of climate change for human security efforts could be devastating.”
The report, “In Search of Shelter,” was compiled by specialists from Columbia University in New York and the United Nations University, and from a non-governmental organisation, CARE International.
…
In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels will rise by up to 59 centimeters (23 inches) before 2100 due the expansion of warmer waters.
But this figure does not factor in a partial melting of massive ice sheets in western Antarctica and Greenland, a scenario now identified by more recent research.
The new report urged policymakers to develop tools to identify regions and populations at risk of being displaced by climate change.
…
The report admits that the definition of a climate migrant is complex, as poverty, a run of bad harvests or civil strife are usually the immediate, and thus most visible, triggers for displacement.
The term “climate refugee” is shunned by UN organisations, as “refugee” is a term with legal connotations under the 1851 Geneva Convention.

And why can’t humans get their shit together and do something?
In the US, this is one reason.

See the Sea

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Apparently, this global-warming scenario seems to be getting worse.
This morning from the Washington Post:

Sea levels could rise faster along the U.S. East Coast than in any other densely populated part of the world, new research shows, as changes in ice caps and ocean currents push water toward a shoreline inlaid with cities, resort boardwalks and gem-rare habitats.
Three studies this year, including one out last month, have made newly worrisome forecasts about life along the Atlantic over the next century.
While the rest of the world might see seven to 23 inches of sea-level rise by 2100, the studies show this region might get that and more — 17 to 25 inches more — for a total increase that would submerge a beach chair.
…
Researchers say rising seas are one of the most tangible consequences of a changing climate.
They rise because they are warming, expanding in volume like a highway bridge on a summer day.
And they rise because they are filling up, fed by melting ice.
In the 20th century, global seas rose about 0.07 inches per year — a steady climb up tide gauges, even as the world debated the existence and the science of climate change.
“It doesn’t matter who’s causing global warming. Sea-level rise is something we can measure,” said Rob Young, a geosciences professor at Western Carolina University.
“You can’t argue that sea level isn’t rising.”
And it has been rising faster in the mid-Atlantic because the land here is sinking.
Understanding this phenomenon requires thinking of the Earth as an enormous balloon.
Push down in one spot on the ball’s surface and surrounding areas are raised up.
Glaciers did this to Earth’s surface during the last ice age: they pressed down on northern North America and areas to the south tilted up, like the other end of a seesaw.
Today, thousands of years after the glaciers retreated, the seesaw is tipping back the other way, and the region from New York to North Carolina is falling about six inches per century.

And from ABC News:

In the history of Earth, there have been five mass extinctions in which at least half the species on the planet disappeared.
Scientists believe the extinctions were brought on by natural disasters — massive volcanic eruptions, rapid climate changes and meteors hitting Earth.
Today, scientists say we are in the middle of a “sixth extinction” — and for the first time, it’s being caused by one species — us.
It seems inconceivable that we could do so much damage to our planet that we actually cause society as we know it to collapse. But historical precedent shows that it is, in fact, a very real possibility.
“Every society that collapsed thought it couldn’t happen to them,” says Joseph Tainter, an expert in anthropology and societal collapse.
“The Roman Empire thought it couldn’t happen. The Maya civilization thought it couldn’t happen.
Everyone thought it couldn’t happen to them. But it did.”
These populations grew too much and exhausted their resources — and their climate suddenly changed. People were forced to fight each other for what little was left or face starvation. Entire societies broke down.
“Civilizations in the past have lost the fight,” says climatologist Heidi Cullen. “They have collapsed as a result of the inability to deal with several different events going on at once. I think the takeaway is that honestly, we are not that special.”
…
But just how bad could things get?
In one scenario, scientists imagine that by the year 2100, immense storms irreparably damage major metropolises.
Streets, subway tunnels, and buildings would flood and begin to rot. The stagnant water would breed filth and displace residents, forcing them into homelessness.
Poverty levels and death rates could skyrocket.
A new and virulent strain of disease might develop — then mutate and spread around the globe, potentially claiming tens of thousands of lives.
In this scenario, as the crisis explodes, looting grows rampant, major world powers go to war over water, and millions of people die from famine.
Civilization literally collapses under its own weight.

A bit of something to ponder.
(h/t to Raw Story).

D-Day Perspective

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Here on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion comes an odd historical look at the Normandy landings from an altogether different perspective: The civilian inhabitants along that particular French Coast.
And according to history, the Allies acted like barbarians — high saturation bombing of cities, villages and even blowing the shit out of a town where there were no Germans.
And rape.
A bit of history that’s been swept under the rug of time.

From the BBC yesterday (via antiwar.com):

Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
In some areas — like the Falaise pocket where the Germans were pounded into oblivion at the end of the campaign — barely a building was left standing and soldiers had to walk over banks of human corpses.
As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.
The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched.
Twenty-five years ago, in his book Overlord, Max Hastings had already described it as “one of the most futile air attacks of the war.”
…
“It was profoundly traumatic for the people of Normandy,” said Christophe Prime, a historian at the Peace Memorial in Caen.
“Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image — that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms.”

And the Allied forces apparently appeared to run amok:

One woman — from the town of Colombieres — is quoted as saying that “the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting… everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans.”
Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape — and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.
According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.

Do the math: that many in less than a year? VE (Victory in Europe) Day was May 8, 1945.

And this from a timesonline review last January of US college professor/historian William Hitchcock’s book, Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945:

Hitchcock, whose study of military behaviour focuses chiefly on the US Army, notes that while only 15 white American soldiers were executed for crimes in Europe during 1944-45, 55 black Americans were hanged for rape or murder.
This almost certainly represented the harsher attitude adopted by the American high command towards black offenders. Many men guilty of grievous mistreatment of civilians were lightly treated.
The author writes: “The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.” With the American entry into Germany, the situation seems to have have become even worse, with the army’s Judge Advocate General reporting “an avalanche” of new cases.
When a Stars and Stripes reporter tried to file a story in March 1945 about the widespread prevalence of rape in the Rhineland, it was suppressed by army censors.

Weird.
A subject not much discussed, especially today with President Obama in Normandy.

Cultural Chassis

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In 1956, there were less than 170 million US peoples, unemployment was at less than 5 percent, a first-class postage stamp cost less than a nickel.
And Dinah Shore was hawking the Chevy brand.

In the illustration at left (found here), she is seen with her national, prime-time TV pitch-line, “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” in a promotion for a chance at winning one of three corvettes, America’s only true sports car.

Four years later, the ‘vette would become a cultural prop for the popular TV show, Route 66, in which a couple of wankers/drifters traveled around “in a Corvette on an existential odyssey in which they encountered a myriad of loners, dreamers and outcasts in the small towns and big cities along U.S. Highway 66 and beyond.”
America in them days of ‘small towns and big cities‘ was crawling with optimism — most likely the height of the US experience occurred between the early-1950s to the late-1960s — fuled by the multi-faceted drumbeat of General Motors, then the biggest company in the whole-wide world:

Entering the 1950s, no corporation even came close to General Motors in its size, the scope of its enterprise or its profits.
GM was twice the size of the second biggest company in the world — Standard Oil of New Jersey (forefather of today’s ExxonMobil) — and had a vast conglomeration of businesses ranging from home appliances to providing insurance and building Chevrolets, GMCs, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Cadillacs and locomotives.
It was so big that it made more than half the cars sold in the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division was threatening to break it up.

The year 1956 was also GM’s real beginning of the end — the retirement of Alfred P. Sloan, who had led the company for 30 years.
Even in the midst of the Great Depression, GM increased car sales (1936) and by 1955 profits had reached $1.2 billion ($8 billion in today’s dollars).

By the end of the ’60s, however, and into the early 1070s, GM started to tank under the weight  of its own greed: As GM goes, so goes the country:

The decline of GM is a testament to how poor strategic decisions over the course of decades will ultimately lead to collapse.
The United States has followed the GM model of failure for the last three decades.
The U.S. has too much debt, too much bureaucracy, too many government supported industries, too many agencies, too many employees, and $53 trillion of unfunded future liabilities.
See any similarities to GM?
Can the U.S. avoid the fate of GM, or is it too late?
If we can learn the important lessons of the GM decline, it may not be too late to reverse our course.
Or, we can continue on the current path and follow the advice of Will Rogers: “If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?”

And GM’s nefarious bankruptcy filing this week was just another up-chuck of the Great American Dream, that continual fantastical principle both inherited and highly-fueled by Baby-Boomers, which includes me.
So on a personal level, I’d somewhat culturally-foreseen GM’s demise long, long ago in switching part my success=automobile/woman aspirations (triad foundation of my own well-researched version of America’s great hope and dream) from America’s macho-iconic corvette to sleek and lean foreign machines — the success and women stuff remained intact until I got older and realized a lot of such things are not worth the trouble.
In the late 1960s, the neatest cars started to carry names like Jaguar and Porsche.
And later, Honda and Toyota.

Developed through GM’s Chevrolet marque since 1953 (work started on the project in ‘51), the corvette has gone through at least six generational revisions — cheesy cool to neat cool to not-so-cool to You Suck!

In the primitive cheesy cool, a good many ‘vette people believe the 1956 corvette, shown at left (illustration found here), is the best of the lot.

Although the original 1953 model was basically a 1952 Chevrolet under a radical fiberglass body, by ‘56 the ‘vette had morphed into a true sports car with the introduction of a 265 cubic inch, 195 hp V-8 engine and 3-speed manual transmission.
Even as a dumb-ass kid in the late ’50s, I felt the ‘vette then looked bulbous and a bit pretentious, a car for older people — parents of today’s Republicans, maybe.
Only with the introduction of the “sting ray” version in 1963 did I become emotionally involved with the car.

(Illustration found here).

The “sting ray” configuration lasted just four years — 1963 to 1967 — and the car captured my mental image of the man’s manly car, neat-cool and quick.
Slick little blisters on the fenders created a sense of even more clean, clear speed.
The ultimate Sting Ray was the 1967 — the year I graduated from high school — and it not only looked the neat-cool, but it could haul ass, listing a L-36 427-390 engine and carried a sophisticated sense even with all the muscle, keeping somehow that spartan, independent notion.
I spied one on a sales lot in the fall of ‘67 and although I could not afford it, the image stayed burned in my fantasy life for years and years.
And like a lot of other shit, GM couldn’t leave well enough alone and the following year, 1968, redesigned the ‘vette into the beginning of You Suck!

In many ways, 1968 was indeed a watershed year — the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago riots, Nixon elected US president etc., etc. — and GM’s introduction of the “Shark” version of the corvette, as seen at left (Illustration found here).
Life started to suck.

The corvette’s life was all but finished — the style looked awkward, and carried that not-so-cool finish.
Instead of nimble, the ‘vette also began a move into a kind of mutant luxury/sports car category.
GM’s Chevrolet encountered such problems the debut was delayed a year.
The 1968 was also the year I eloped — an idiot 19-year-old — which swiftly-launched the end of childhood.
The ‘68 ‘vette was in similar circumstances, tossing aside cool for cold-hard cash, or just get bigger and bigger.

(Illustration found here).

By the mid 1980s, the corvette had fattened down into a two-seat Ford Thunderbird — like that big, ugly piece of shit shown above — and began to reshape itself into a high-ticket, exotic automobile geared for people loaded down with disposable income.
From Consumer Guide on the 2007 model:

Our Best Buys are the BMW Z4 and Chevrolet Corvette. Our Recommended picks are the Jaguar XK Series and Porsche Boxster, and Porsche Cayman.

Unfortunately for GM, however, people chose the BMW.

And what of the ‘vette with the GM bankruptcy?
The brand will live on, but the value is in the past.
A co-owner of The Corvette Center in Newington, Connecticut, on the future of the ‘vette:

“They’re a great car. They’re built really well. They last a long time. We’ve got cars here from the 50’s and 60’s that are still on the road, still running. Value tends to be a big part of it. Some of these old cars that were a couple-thousand dollars way, way back right now could be a-hundred-thousand dollars right now. So there’s that mystique about it. The car’s fast, its fun, its efficient. It’s a good car to own.”

The original concept.

Figs Newton

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Villager #1: We have found a witch. May we burn her?
Crowd: Burn her! Burn! Burn her! Burn her!
Bedevere: How do you know she is a witch?
Villager #2: She looks like one.

Crowd: Right! Yeah! Yeah!
Bedevere: Bring her forward.
Witch: I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch.
Bedevere: Uh, but you are dressed as one.
Witch: They dressed me up like this.
Crowd: Augh, we didn’t! We didn’t…
Witch: And this isn’t my nose. It’s a false one.
Bedevere: Well?
Villager #1: Well, we did do the nose.

Villager #1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
Villager #2: Yeah!
Crowd: We burn her! Right! Yeaaah! Yeaah!
…
Bedevere: What makes you think she is a witch?
Villager #3: Well, she turned me into a newt.
Bedevere: A newt?
Villager #3: I got better.
– Monty Python and The Holy Grail

 When President Obama nominated last week the first Hispanic to the US Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, the gush of vile, twisted oratory which flushed forth from what’s left of the Grand Old Party would make a maggot blow chunks.

Despite the obvious, this political bullshit taints even Time magazine’s current cover as examined by the photo site BagnewsNotes – and all this biased, racist outbursts have been considered genuine news.

Leading this obnoxious charge is one Newton Leroy McPherson, otherwise known as Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the US House of Representatives and all-around big mouth lout. 
Why this guy is still even allowed a forum is beyond me, the man’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Newt Gingrich does not seem to be deterred by the new message of the Republican leadership, such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), that he and Rush Limbaugh should stop calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist.
Gingrich has now sent out a fundraising e-mail, asking for help to send blast faxes to every member of the Senate demanding that the Sotomayor nomination be defeated.
He even says that she shouldn’t even get a vote in the Senate, but should just have to withdraw
Gingrich warns that all of American civilization is at stake here.
“If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything, we cannot accept that conclusion,” he writes. “It is simply un-American. There is no room on the bench of the United States Supreme Court for this worldview.”

Newt should ride/dash off into the sunset.
Right now he’s 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag:

But it seems safe to say that New Gingrich has nothing left to add to the discussion.
The truth is that Gingrich may have been finished a long time ago.
Forced to resign the speakership of the House in the late 1990s after steering both his party and his personal life on disastrous courses, he has struggled to renew his franchise as the Grand Old Party’s big thinker.
…
But Gingrich tweeted off the deep end Wednesday when he jumped over the cliff of responsible Republicanism and into the chasm of right-wing talk-radio delusion.
Responding via Twitter to the nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the vacancy that will be created by the retirement of Justice David Souter, Gingrich did not think.
He took his talking points from Limbaugh, who has been trying to foster the fantasy that the nominee is some kind of “reverse racist.”
…
Instead of calling for Judge Sotomayor to withdraw her nomination, the former speaker might want to consider whether it time for him to withdraw from the public debate he disminishes and dishonors by repeating the crude fantasies of a talk-radio ranter.

The ugly discourse on the Sotomayor nomination shows just where the GOP stands: No!

(Illustration of Monty Python found here and Gingrich’s mug found here).