Diaper Bomber
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Beyond the gay rights issue and Mitt Romney’s memory problems about being a bullying-asshole, the preposterous-incompetence of the war on terror is near blinding.
Hard to fathom, but the frightful state of mind is enormous: Eighteen-month-old Riyanna has been called a lot of things: cute, adorable and now … a suspected terrorist.
The US TSA is one piece of hot-wired shit.
(Illustration found here).
Riyanna’s mother explains:
She was called that (a suspected terrorist) on Tuesday night at the Ft Lauderdale Airport.
She and her parents had just boarded a JetBlue flight when an airline employee approached them and asked them to get off the plane, saying representatives from the Transportation Security Administration wanted to speak to them.
“And I said, ‘For what?’” Riyanna’s mother told only WPBF 25 News on Wednesday.
“And he said, ‘Well, it’s not you or your husband.
Your daughter was flagged as no fly.’
I said, ‘Excuse me?’”
Riyanna’s father was flabbergasted.
“It’s absurd,” he said.
“It made no sense.
Why would an 18-month-old child be on a no-fly list?”
Yes, way-indeed.
The problem lies in the dumb-ass war on terror.
From HuffPost on the TSA being dismantled:
For many TSA critics, this is the only acceptable solution.
The TSA represents a shameful chapter in this nation’s history that must be put behind us, they say.
For them, TSA will be always be associated with paranoid secrecy, crime, institutional arrogance and unnecessarily violent screening methods they’ve described as “gate rape.”
They would end the TSA for the same reason a unified Germany pulled the plug on the Stasi, the feared government security service — because it simply can’t be redeemed.
Naomi Wolf in the UK’s Guardian notes:
Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash — because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so.
In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people — including Americans — are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren’t manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush.
Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out “lone wolves”.
The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies.
The parents of diaper-bomber Riyanna way-more than understands:
They believe they were profiled because they are both of Middle Eastern descent.
Riyanna’s mother wears a hijab, a traditional head scarf.
That’s why they have asked to remain anonymous.
They said they’re concerned about repurcussions.
That said, they are both Americans, born and raised in New Jersey, just like their daughter.
Riyanna’s parents said once they were taken off the plane, they were met by TSA agents and made to stand in the terminal for about 30 minutes.
US peoples are scared of everybody — from gay people to babies.
Dreamless Falling
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
Creatures of the future in the hardcore words from the dangerous mind of Dick Mourdock, who whipped Dick Lugar in Indiana on Tuesday:
“What I’ve said about compromise and bipartisanship is I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so that bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, lower taxes and get American moving again.”
In that the reality of the US government’s dysfunction.
(Illustration found here).
The so-called Tea Party movement, which began a scant three years ago, is most-likely the most-destructive force in US governing — Matt Taibbi wrote about it best two years ago: Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.
The problem, though, is that these people are the real ‘shock and awe‘ on the lives of the mass of US peoples, leaving no doubt there’s no compassion there in terms of every-day Americans, even if they unwittingly cut their own ignorant throats.
In a few years, maybe less, the Republican Party will be no more — even if George Jr. was an asshole, at least he stayed within the bounds of a somewhat concern for a common human decency, but the Tea Party doesn’t at all.
Former Senator John Danforth, a Republican, on Lugar’s defeat: An effort by some, and apparently a large number, 60% in Indiana, to purge the Republican Party and to create something that’s ideologically pure and intolerant of anybody who does not agree with them — not just on general principles, but right across the board.
The Tea Party is indeed full of delusional shit.
History created the deep-poo the US is wading around in nowadays, from President Obama’s election in 2008 (and the rise of the public lie via Sarah Palin) and the Republican party itself only after Obama’s defeat, not governing — all that after effects of a country held in a nasty, incompetent grip for nearly a decade by George Jr. and his boys.
Obama’s win was indeed a change, which swept the country but not like none of us had ever figured.
The country was already experiencing a divide before the 2008 election, but it’s really shown itself the last three years.
One of the better overviews of our modern times came from George Packer writing in the New Yorker in a piece posted last September, aptly titled ‘Coming Apart‘ — US peoples never had the chance for internal digestion of the future.
A few snips:
The events of September 11th, as grim as they were, offered the prospect of employment to a generation of working-class Americans who were born too late for good factory jobs.
If the Bush Administration’s “global war on terror” had gone the way of the Second World War, mass mobilization in the armed forces, combined with mass production in the factories, would have revitalized a stagnant national economy and produced a postwar boom.
This didn’t happen.
Without a draft, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by less than one per cent of the population.
The Pentagon, which wanted to keep those wars limited and short, avoided planning for large-scale manufacturing, even after its necessity became obvious.
In 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was questioned by a scout from the Tennessee National Guard about the lack of quality armor for his unit’s trucks.
“You go to war with the army you have,” Rumsfeld replied.
Even after this remark became infamous, the production of armor proceeded slowly, almost grudgingly, and troops and vehicles remained dangerously exposed for years.
Most new defense jobs at home turned out to be in data collection and intelligence, which required college degrees and specialized knowledge, or in the low-paying realm of airport and building security.
…
In a two-year period, the House’s impeachment of Bill Clinton and the Florida recount that was stopped by a similarly divided Supreme Court, handing the Presidency to Bush, had suddenly made America’s great democratic institutions seem flimsy and entirely partisan.
During the 2000 election campaign, the news media came up with a new, color-coded way of dividing the country—into red and blue.
On the economic front, America was in a recession, the dot-com bubble having already burst.
A culture of speculation and debt on Wall Street was beginning to suffer from its own lopsidedness, with unprecedented fortunes in technology and finance accumulating at the top, and incomes in the middle flattening out, as blue-collar jobs moved offshore.
The problem of income inequality was worsening, thanks to enormous tax cuts that had been passed into law that spring.
The budget surplus of the Clinton years was vanishing.
…
The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven’t stopped being surprised.
The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it’s almost impossible to define victory.
You can’t document the war’s progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense.
A country used to a feeling of command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, at a high cost to its self-confidence.
Each new episode has been hard, if not impossible, to predict: from the first instant of the attacks to the collapse of the towers; from the decision to invade Iraq to the failure to find a single weapon of mass destruction; from the insurgency to the surge; from the return of the Taliban to the Arab Spring to the point-blank killing of bin Laden; from the financial crisis to the landslide election of Barack Obama and his nearly immediate repudiation.
…
The Bush Administration collapsed in the late summer of 2005 — not in Falluja or Kandahar but in the submerged neighborhoods of New Orleans.
The response to Hurricane Katrina gave Americans such a devastating picture of official failure that it suggested something fatally wrong with an entire approach to governing.
Iraq, of course, had provided evidence of high-level arrogance, incompetence, and neglect for two years, and Afghanistan for even longer than that, but, because these places were far away and American troops were risking their lives to serve the nation, the public wasn’t ready to withdraw its support.
When the footage came out of the Gulf Coast — when, for the second time in four years, a great American city looked like Kabul or Kinshasa — it was Iraq in fast motion, and right around the corner.
Government at all levels, but especially in Washington, had failed to plan for the worst outcome, even when the entire country saw it coming.
Read the entire piece, it’s long, but well worth the time — the US has near-about folded into itself since Sept. 11, 2001, a time seemingly so far, far away, and so way-long ago.
An American Dream that never was has become a wide-awake nightmare.
Job One
Filed Under Bullshit, Work | Leave a Comment
One of the bedrocks of being alive and being anywhere near ‘successful,’ is having a job — working a wage.
And although job openings in the U.S. rose in March to the highest level in more than three years, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker noted yesterday unemployment remains at “a very elevated rate“ and the whole process will take time — a long time.
Numbers involving employment can be way-deceiving, creating a picture that’s more Pablo Picasso than Norman Rockwell.
(Illustration found here).
Arithmetic is nowhere near my strong suit.
Bloomberg explains:
The Labor Department reported that as of April, 58.4 percent of the U.S. population was gainfully employed.
That’s down from 58.6 percent in February, and exactly where the employment-to-population ratio stood a year ago.
The decline reflects the fact that job gains aren’t keeping up with population growth.
It also demonstrates the illusory nature of April’s reduction in the unemployment rate, to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent in March.
The Labor Department, in its monthly household survey, counts people as unemployed only if they’re in the labor force, meaning they’re actively looking for work.
In April, the estimated number of people in the labor force fell by 342,000.
So the unemployment rate fell, too, even though the survey counted 169,000 fewer people with jobs.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s about 12.5 million US peoples unemployed right now with about 5.1 million of those on what’s called ‘long-term unemployment’ (27 weeks or more) and those guys are the in the pits.
Despite all that, US employers added 3.74 million job openings in March, the highest in nearly four years, to create a sense of a kind of sunshine: That means an average of 3.4 people competed for each open job. While that’s far better than the nearly 7-to-1 ratio when the recession ended. In a healthy job market, the ratio is usually around 2 to 1.
Jobs are still hard to come by and customers at the liquor store I manage are always waxing sad about finding a job — the unemployment rate up here in northern California is way above the average at about 11.3 percent, pretty heady.
Along with the precarious job market, there’s the assholes working to strip what’s left off the bones.
In the defeat yesterday of Indiana’s Dick Lugar to a Tea Party nit-twit is just another sampling of what’s in store for the job market.
GOP peoples blame the jobless for being without a job.
One asshole Tea-Bagger is Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, who blubbered that to get these shiftless people off their asses is to gut unemployment benefits.
(Via Think Progress):
There is such thing as a free lunch, but you’re picking up the tab.
Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government.
I am compassionate and committed to our children, our elderly, and our disabled.
But to all you able-bodied people out there, get off the couch and get yourself a job.
What a liar — compassionate?
Paul Krugman in his new book — “End This Depression Now!” — discusses the job market and how being employed is part and parcel of the so-called American Dream.
In an excerpt found at HuffPost, Krugman talks about working and how the GOP/Tea Party looks at the jobless, as in ‘involuntary unemployment’ and how to gaze back at them:
The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
Quite.
Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings.
Roughly a million people applied.
Later, he offers up this insight between the 1930s and the nowadays:
Nor is America immune.
Can anyone deny that the Republican Party has become far more extreme over the past few years?
And it has a reasonable chance of taking both Congress and the White House later this year, despite its radicalism, because extremism flourishes in an environment in which respectable voices offer no solutions as the population suffers.
Krugman paints a picture worse than we think it is, and although he claims the problems can be lessened with more cash flowing into US peoples pockets, this country is still a Tea Party world, and those with the biggest mouth, whether lying or not, still gets the most attention.
A full-time job just listening to the shit.
Frightful
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
In a most-personal and open manner, Rick Santorum endorsed Mitt Romney for president — the broadcast via e-mail at about 11 o’clock last night.
Who’s the wiser?
Reportedly, last Friday Romney visited Pittsburgh where he and Santorum clinched together for “an over-hour long one-on-one meeting,” and three days later, the endorsement came in the middle of the night.
These Republicans sure love their presidential nominee.
Why — Romney is scared of everybody.
(Illustration found here).
Yesterday, during a town hall meeting in Ohio, a women in the audience commented that President Obama “should be tried for treason.” She didn’t explain why Obama had committed treason — which is punishable by death. Her comments received a big round of applause from the audience.
Romney, however, didn’t say a thing about right or wrong, in fact, asked the lady to again pose her question.
Afterwards, away from the crowd and their crazed faces, Romney told reporters, “No, of course not,” when asked whether Obama should be tried for treason — scared of everybody.
In the true words of an asshole on the flap last week about Romney’s gay foreign policy adviser:
“How is he going to stand up to Putin?
How is he going to stand up to North Korea if he can be pushed around by a yokel like me?” asked the man who led the charge against Grennell, American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer.
Yes, indeed.
And why would Fischer even make such a statement if he had any real regard for Romney.
If US peoples go to the polls in November and put Romney in the White House, talk about a shit-storm, but it’s a storm of shit we all gotta eat.
Apparently, US peoples are not really wide awake yet, or they’re maybe just dumb.
From a CNN/ORC International poll:
According to the survey, 44 percent of people questioned said they have a favorable view of Romney, up 10 points from February, while 43 percent said they have an unfavorable opinion, down 11 points, and 13 percent were unsure.
According to the poll, 53 percent of Americans plan to give Romney a second look when the primaries are officially over, with 45 percent saying they already know enough about Romney to decide whether he would be a good president.
The survey indicates Romney’s popularity still lags well behind Obama’s: 56 percent have a favorable view of the president, with 42 percent saying they see Obama in a negative light.
“The Republican Party’s favorable rating has also rebounded now that the nomination fight is all but over, from 35 percent in March to 41 percent,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“That still puts the GOP several points behind the Democratic party’s 46 percent rating, but it is an indication that the wounds have started to heal from the primary season.”
Wounds?
If the American electorate can’t figure it out, we’re f*ucked.
Although the Obama presidency has pretty-much cratered since 2009 — he’s going to end up probably being considered the way-most disappointing president in US history — but he’s still a trillion times better than anyone/anything the GOP has to offer and at least with Obama there won’t be any bat-shit crazy stuff, even if it hurts to watch.
The US voter is fickle — it’s gonna be frightful and pure scary until all this is behind us.
In the sage words of Mr. Carlin: “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”
Indeed.
‘Perfectly Ridiculous’
Filed Under Bullshit, Politics | Leave a Comment
“Whenever anyone talks to me about mad cow, I just pull out a picture of my ex-wife.”
– Interview, Wall Street’s market animal, The Bull, Esquire, January, 2009
European voters knocked the soup bowl over yesterday, creating a change in the air for the financial chaos that’s got the whole region in a choke hold — a Socialist took the big chair in France, while Greece took the route of throwing the bums out, or at least trying.
The head of the right-leaning New Democracy party: “I asked for a strong mandate, but people chose differently. I respect their message.”
A whole motley crew of political parties — some not existent just a year or so ago — must come up with a new coalition government before May 17, or another round of elections must be held.
A mess, but that’s just how austerity sometimes works.
(Illustration found here).
And near-about so here in the good olde US of A.
Yesterday another plot in the plot of the narrative of the political point — Liz Cheney, The Dick‘s daughter, claimed she will/won’t run for the Senate from Wyoming.
Off Fox News — of course — via Crooks and Liars:
“I love Wyoming,” she explained.
“Wyoming is my home.
And what I have been hearing from people all across Wyoming is how important it is that we defeat Barack Obama in 2012.
And they’re very afraid about — you ask people in Wyoming, ‘Are you better off now than you were $5 trillion ago?’
They’ll say, absolutely not.”
“There was a report yesterday that you’re traveling around the state, and that you’re thinking of running for Senate from Wyoming in 2014,” Wallace pressed.
“Look, I have been honored to have been asked to help support the Republican Party in Wyoming,” Cheney replied.
“As I said, it’s my home.
It’s a very special place, but I’m really focused on defeating Barack Obama.
We don’t have the luxury, frankly, of looking beyond this election because this election is so important.”
“And let me tell you, folks: to be continued,” Wallace concluded.
Oh, the joy she would bring — the entire US is bat-shit crazy.
And speaking of which — Michele Bachmann will not go away.
Yesterday on CBS’ Face the Nation (why the shit do these Sunday TV shows have nothing but GOP assholes) Bachmann said women will flock to the Republican standard in November because the GOP’s war on women is just a big ole fairy tale.
Via Raw Story:
“First of all, that’s a myth and it’s not true,” Bachmann insisted. “There’s not a Republican war on women. That’s coming from the Obama re-election team because everything they do right now is — any word that you hear will go through the grid of Obama’s re-election.”
…
“I think this time again what women want, Bob, is they want competence, and, unfortunately, with all due respect to the president, he’s not competent to deal with the economy. Mitt Romney is competent in spades. That’s what women are going to be looking for.”
Most-likely women are looking for someone who’s not a creepy liar.
Howard Dean stepped into the fray a bit later and lambasted Bachmann for being, ah, well, for being Bachmann:
“Michele Bachmann has never had much command of the facts and that shows us exactly why,” the former Vermont governor declared.
“Women are terrified of what the Republicans are talking about.
They’re talking about basically stripping away their ability to have insurance pay for their birth control pills.
Latinos are terrified of the Republicans because they seem to have a total tin ear when it comes to the basic needs of treating people with dignity.”
…
“This candidacy is a shipwreck, and for Michele Bachmann to go out there and claim that women are going to vote for Mitt Romney is perfectly ridiculous.”
And more wisdom from The Bull: “Its and advantage, really. I’m thinking about reclining in a meadow, but I look like I want to kill a man.”
Have a perfectly ridiculous Monday…