The chaotic mess of the GOP primary is finally over and Newt Gingrich urinated on everything.
In shame of Republicans, half-crazed Steven Colbert humiliated the entire process by shoving the way-ugly of current US politics back in every straight-face that chimes democracy.

(Illustration found here).

In a land where up is really down, US peoples are laced up the asshole and remain income-challenged, wealth-challenged, and debt-constrained with nowhere to go — and no one to lead them there.
The GOP has no face and no real policies, and they’re tracking nobody — even across the aisle, President Obama is not leading, but just continuing to follow.

A bit of 2012 insight from the LA Times:

The pertinent question raised by Colbert’s attention grab on the day before South Carolina’s primary vote is why the four remaining Republican candidates are not drawing crowds as big and adoring as Colbert’s.
Yes, Colbert is a celebrity.
He’s an expert entertainer.
And it’s not too hard to get a few thousand college kids to skip class on any day of the week.
But four years ago at this point in the campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were pulling in crowds as big or bigger.
John McCain was packing the gymnasiums pretty well too.
And, later in the campaign, Sarah Palin proved she could rock an arena.
This year’s candidates are avoiding big events because they do not want to be photographed in half-empty halls.
Gingrich actually refused to speak to the GOP leadership conference because so few Republicans showed up.
Instead, voters have most often been invited to meet the candidates in the cramped confines of restaurants where a few hundred or even a few dozen people can look like a lot on TV.
An example of this small-scale café campaign is Newt Gingrich’s schedule for voting day: 8 a.m. at the Grapevine Restaurant in Spartanburg, 10:45 at Tommy’s Ham House in Greenville, 3:30 at the Chik-Fil-A in Anderson and 5:45 at Whiteford’s Restaurant in Laurens.

One wishes Colbert/Stewart would actually be on the ballot in November — Obama would then have to actually lead, really talk the talk, or get punk’d.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a new high — 84 percent of Americans — disapproving of the job Congress is doing, with almost two-thirds saying they “disapprove strongly.”
Just 13 percent of Americans approve of how things are going after the 112th Congress’s first year of action, solidifying an unprecedented level of public disgust that has both sides worried about their positions less than 10 months before voters decide their fates.

(Illustration found here).

And what has President Obama now have somewhat/maybe in common with Dick Nixon?
From ABC News:

Congress’ rating is a broad 35 points below Obama’s 48 percent approval, the biggest gap between approval of the president and Congress since 1990.
Obama, though, still has plenty of challenges of his own: In polling since 1940, just four previous presidents have started their re-election year with less than 50 percent approval.
Only one of them won, Richard Nixon in 1972.

This year is going to be really interesting, but so full of bullshit.

All this is a normal attitude for US peoples who have been ass-kicked by the assholes in Congress — and the White House — and ended 2011 with low wages in a losing job market, a bad housing operation and an economy that just won’t pick-up any kind of steam.
Not helping is the ugly, approaching fact the US market is shrinking — valuations are so low that executives would rather buy back shares than spend the cash to expand — and this will only bleed down to the guy on main street.

Hence, a change, an occupation is coming.
Instead of Wall Street, maybe Congress, and today is the day when a huge protest is expected in DC to highlight the bullshit on Capital Hill.

“Often the complaint that I hear is that, ‘you guys are targeting the wrong people.’ And so we have that discussion about you know whether or not Wall Street is the source of the problem or really Congress is,” said Aaron Bornstein, a 31-year-old neuroscientist and member of the Occupy Wall Street Think Tank, which will hold discussions at the event.
“They’re really two sides of the same coin,” he continued.
“You can’t have the corruptive influence without both the people who are doing the corrupting and the people who are corrupted.”

And never the twain…

Yesterday, Mitt Romney blubbered so boldly: “We’re going to win this thing with all of our passion and strength…”

Is he another Newt Gingrich?

Newt early last month: “They’re not going to be the nominee…I’m going to be the nominee. It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls, and think, odds are very high, I’m going to be the nominee.”
And yesterday: “I don’t think I’m going to win. I think if you look at the numbers, I think that volume of negativity has done enough damage.”
Maybe he’s talking about all those nabobs of negativity culled from his own antics.

And through the last few months, each of these clowns had their time in the prime — Michele Bachmann, the early obvious nominee; then Rick Perry, but oops; then Herman Cain and his wonderful way with females; then Newt with intellectual history punching the airwaves and odds so high it’s way-hard to see the ground; and now the guy nobody wants — Romney.

However, they have attempted with much success to ignore a huge, nasty-faced elephant in the room — the last Republican in the White House.
In all the mindless squawk on taxes, war, and President Obama during all the ludicrous campaigning, the entire GOP apparatus has maintained a blissful silence on the guy who near-single-handily put the planet in the shitty spot it is now — George Jr.

One thing Republicans are hoping for is a giant, collective memory loss by US peoples.
Under George Jr.’s tenure, the whole show went to shit in a wire basket and the GOP seeks to put that whole episode in the way-background and focus on Obama, but will the trick play out among the 99 percent who saw their lives shattered by eight years of arrogant incompetence.

The problem, though, is what George Jr. did created such a enormous gap in any kind of GOP reasoning that one could easily drive an entire herd of elephants through with room to spare.

(Illustration found here).

Just take the money and run.
From the New York Times:

In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies.
But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit.
In January 2009, just before President Obama took office, the budget office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 and deficits in subsequent years, based on continuing Mr. Bush’s policies and the effects of recession.
Mr. Obama’s policies in 2009 and 2010, including the stimulus package, added to the deficits in those years but are largely temporary.
…
First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect.
If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.

And those mangled, horrible wars?
Bob Gates said it all: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Hundreds of thousands dead, at least two counties — Afghanistan and Iraq — have been for all purposes destroyed and literally trillions of dollars flushed down the graveyard drain.
As this political season starts to heat up, all Obama has to do is point to George Jr. and say, ‘Remember and Beware.’

Never has so, so few caused so much damage.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Republicans talk a lot about losing their way during the last decade, and when they do they’re talking about the Bush years,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont-McKenna College.
“For Republicans, the Bush administration has become the `yadda yadda yadda’ period of American history.”
…
The former president himself has been all but invisible since leaving office in 2009 with a Gallup approval rating of just 34 percent.
His predecessor, Democrat Bill Clinton, had a 66 percent approval rating in early 2001 when he stepped down after two terms marred by a sex scandal and impeachment.
In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the weak economy, government spending and the $15 trillion federal debt, the Republican candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Bush administration policies contributed to those problems.
Republicans also controlled Congress for six of the eight years Bush was in the White House, clearing the way for many of his policies to be enacted.
…
Bush still has loyal supporters who believe his legacy will be vindicated by history.
But even they say the GOP field won’t be embracing him anytime soon.
“Sad to say, they’re looking at polling data that indicates they’re better off not bringing him into the campaign,” former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
“I think President Bush has made America a safer nation and better nation and I’m proud of it.
But politics isn’t about what’s fair, it’s about winning.”

In other words, little Ari, it’s okay to cheat, lie and don’t speak ill of even a criminal.

With the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses serving as the kickoff of voting in the 2012 presidential election campaign, Americans would likely prefer to fast-forward to the end of the campaign than watch it unfold.
Given a choice, 70 percent of Americans say they can’t wait for the campaign to be over, while 26 percent can’t wait for it to begin.
…
Nationally, there is little difference by party in feelings about the upcoming campaign — 67 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans can’t wait for the campaign to be over.
…
Importantly, despite their generally negative feelings toward the campaign, Americans are not necessarily going to tune it out completely, or decline to participate.
The same poll finds that 57 percent of Americans have already given “quite a lot” of thought to the upcoming election, and 72 percent are at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting in next year’s election.

Ah,  the passion of somewhat enthusiastic…

Now, it’s the enthusiasm and optimism on future oil and gas supplies from the Department of Energy, painting a rosy picture that’s not only untrue, but a dangerous lie.

(Illustration found here).

In a kind of preview of next week’s meeting of the the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA to be held in Washington, DC, a group of distinguished energy experts representing academia, industry, think tanks, and non-profit organizations held a press conference on Wednesday in front of the DOE to highlight misleading data that supposedly shows resources “could make the United States self-sufficient in oil and gas.“
The group also dispatched a letter to DOE Secretary Steven Chu to make matters more clear.
From Jim Baldauf, President and Co-Founder of ASPO-USA:

“The risk/benefit ratio is out of balance.
If these exuberant predictions are wrong, the consequences could be catastrophic.
We need to be conservative and prudent in planning for the future.
We can’t bet America’s economy and national security on Pollyanna predictions.
Exuberance about cheap energy may serve the short-term interests of Wall Street, but it threatens the future of our country.”

Not surprising, the DOE seems under the influence: Such rosy forecasts are typical of industry sources.
Duh!

Furthermore, Tom Whipple, a former CIA analyst and chief editor of ASPO-USA’s Peak Oil Review:

“There are literally dozens of reports and analyses appearing every week around the world pointing to the fact that the world is facing major challenges in maintaining, much less growing, the global supply of oil in next few years.”
He added, “Our concern here today is the growing disconnect between the solid evidence of serious troubles ahead and the Department of Energy’s benign projections concerning the availability of fossil fuels in the next 30 years.”

The DOE’s bullshit flies in the face of a pile of reports to the contrary, even last year from the US Department of Defense, saying shortages could start appearing by as early as 2015.
From the DOD report:

“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds.
Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”

Also last year, a report was leaked from the German army that concluded peak oil is not bullshit and things could get a bit dicey as time wears on — and the report didn’t pull punches, according to spiegelonline: It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.

So one wonders why President Obama’s administration is so tongue-tied and dumb-ass about energy.
Of course, Obama’s been the same way with climate change, and he’s noodling around with some dangerous shit in attempts to get his ass re-elected.
Yesterday, at an University of Colorado rally talking to the young people who flocked to his name four years ago, but now recognize…
He continued to put off making a decision about the upcoming Keystone XL pipeline: “We’re looking at it right now,” Obama told the crowd. “No decision has been made. And I know your deep concern about it, so we will address it.”

‘Deep concern?’
Obama has always had a kind of Pollyanna quality to him, a notion from the old days of “yes, we can.”
Now, we all know it’s just political bullshit.

Indeed: Al-Assad should be way-thinking about his nasty, long and skinny neck.

(Illustration found here).

Gadhafi is only the latest in a long, long line of rulers who’ve met their fate via the hands of his own countrymen — and in this techno-crazed era, a terrible end can be frozen for all time by a smart phone, i.e., Saddam’s ‘public‘ hanging.
In a so-far non-violent Occupy Wall Street, that 1 percent plastered on a million signs should reflect heavily on at least one small chapter of human history — the French Revolution.
This whole thing could get bat-shitcrazy, and, yeah, I’m talking to you, Koch brothers!

However, Gadhafi and the Arab Spring aside, the news item that popped my eyeballs this morning is a most-terrible blowback for US troops — and reveals whether America is still an animal civilization.
And it’s also shitty that this information comes first from the foreign press and not our own oafish MSM.
From Aljazeera English:

As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study.
This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving.
This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST).
Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.

A civil lawsuit has been filed against Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, charging that under their watch the military failed to adequately and effectively investigate rapes and sexual assaults within the ranks.

However, like Rummy once blubbered: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
One cold-ass fish.

The big nut in the story is prosecution rates of sexual assault in the military remains at eight per cent vs a 40 per cent prosecution rate for sexual assault charges in civilian courts — which is a sorry record in itself.
And as one female officer says: “No one right now is holding commanders accountable.”
Which could include a shitload of wrongdoings that nobody has been held accountable — hear me again, Koch brothers!

And Gadhafi’s demise reflects the real-true US blowback on armed conflict where young men and women are killed, maimed or raped without a tear being shed from the exact people who put these Americans in harms way.
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:

In the ultimate reflection of the Obama Administration’s carefree attitude toward entering wars, a chuckling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on television today mocking the death of long-time Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi, barely restraining her delight while declaring “we came, we saw, he died.”

Hahahahaha!

Nowadays, don’t US politics — and politics in general — make you sick to your bowels?
In the midst of most-likely the biggest, nastiest, piece-of-shit economic condition since I-don’t-know-when (common term, ‘not since the Great Depression‘), the political systems on this entire, whacked-out planet has gone way-bonkers.

This morning, for instance, there’s a general strike beginning in Greece, a suck-hole of all things financial, in protest to the latest round of government austerity measures that’s already known to be creating higher taxes, pay cuts and job losses.
The sight to behold:

One striker, university lecturer Yannis Zabetakis, told the BBC: “We are now living in a taxation Armageddon and the economy is dying.
Along with the economy, we are dying.
The austerity measures are not working and our best people are being forced to go abroad.”

The words, ‘austerity measures,’ has become the catch-phrase, linchpin for how Europe is handling the spreading financial crisis, an approach scorned by almost all economists worth their salt — from a couple of Nobel-prize winners.
Paul Krugman echoes the sensibility: Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Austerity is an experiment that has been tried before with the same results,” Stiglitz said today in a speech in Copenhagen. Cutting budgets in low-growth cycles leads to higher unemployment and hampers recovery, he said.
Thus, Europe is f*cked.

So far, in the US the cuts haven’t reached European size, but it’s not that the GOP ain’t trying.
Last night, another Republican blow-hard debate, and once again, these clowns showcased the cruel reality they really don’t have a portent of a clue about how to handle the American economy.
Hot Herman Cain’s infamous ’999′ tax program would make it that 84% of U.S. households would pay more than they do under current tax policies, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonpartisan research group. And the impact would be felt most heavily by the lowest income groups.
And Mitt Romney’s proposal to increase US Navy ships would would add $35 to $40 million to an already dangerous national bottom line, plus Romney doesn’t explain where he’d get the money.
Out of the ass of we-the-people, that’s where.
And if I hear these frackin’ assholes call the rich/wealthy/the 1 percent “job creators” I might just holler, slobber, pound the floor and rend my garments — makes one go crazy.

The horrible part is that President Obama ain’t much better.
From the Washington Post:

By mid-2011, it was clear that Obama had done little to address the nation’s fundamental economic problems.
As had not been the case during previous recoveries, America’s major corporations and banks were investing abroad rather than at home.
Unemployment still exceeded 9 percent.
Almost all the growth the nation had experienced since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009 had gone to profits; wages during that time actually declined.
Their incomes diminished and mired in debt, Americans were unable to purchase enough to get the economy going.
Even if their purchases had increased, a lot of their funds would simply have flowed to the nations that made the things they purchased.

No wonder the US economy is floating down the financial river.
And no wonder the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained so much traction in the last few weeks — US peoples really know what is happening, despite what’s coming out of Obama’s White House.
He’s off campaigning, but it won’t do much good, for him, or this country.

Once again, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture pretty much summed it:

Today’s NYT notes the gloom that has descended over consumers, and they suggest it may be home prices.
I think they are wrong — in my experience, the sort of generalized rage and frustration comes about when people realize the institutions they have trusted have betrayed them.
Humans deal with financial losses in a very specific way — and its not fury.
This is about a fundamental breakdown of the role of government, courts, and leadership in the nation.
And it all traces back to the bailouts of reckless bankers, and the refusal to hold then in any way accountable.
There will not be a fundamental economic recovery until that is recognized.

Hence, it might get even more ugly.

(Illustration found here).

I hope the graph is readable — if not, it originates from Spiegel Online at the link just above.
One can readily see George Jr. did more than his fair share, but to all those big-yapped GOPers, the real shit didn’t start until Saint Ronnie opened the floodgates — compared to the nowadays, the debt before Ronnie was pocket change.
Barry Ritholtz rightfully adds: Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.
Maybe…you’d be a lying asshole.

And the mass-popular appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement is reflected in all that debt that no one but the guys/gals marching in the streets will end up paying — US peoples live in a financial climate that’s worse than Ghana.
To make it worse, income in the last few years has become even more way-one-sided.
The bottom 99 percent income level registered a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, but then those incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007.
However, in those same boom years, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.
Pissed off a lot of peoples, huh?

Not only that, the housing bubble bust struck the average American way-more than it did the wealthy: In 2007, the bottom 60 percent of Americans had 65 percent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 percent, in contrast, had just 10 percent.
And home ownership, the bedrock of the Great American Dream (Fantasy) is busted bad — home ownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year, and measured by race, the homeownership gap between whites and blacks is now at its widest since 1960, wiping out more than 40 years of gains.

And this from War in Context and the last near-60 years:

Wall Street has cannibalized itself.
Still hungry, feeling the pangs of their greed, they’ve now come to the government for their daily meal.
And still, without a hint of irony, a spokesman for this ravenous tribe, mounts a soapbox and has the temerity to rail against the evils of socialism.
Turns out, the socialism is for them, the capitalism is for us.
Abbie Hoffman once baited these banksters by throwing cash onto the floor of the NYSE.
To no one’s astonishment, they demonstrated their insatiable greed.
The gluttons couldn’t help themselves, they stopped trading and got on their knees and swept up the free loot.

Title of the post?
“The Dirty Fucking Hippies…Were Right!”

Oh yeah!

As the entire world gears itself into the mesh of the Occupy Wall Street movement today — marching on Broadway en route to police headquarters last month, the photo above depicts the singular, unique wonder of an ageless, non-political protest — and there are events scheduled from London, Cologne and Zurich to Johannesburg, Taipei, Seoul and Hong Kong, including sites in between, in total solidarity with those folks still gathered in New York’s Zuccotti Park.

The crusade gained points on Friday when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg blinked on getting the park cleaned via the NYPD — Stephen Levin, city council member from the 33rd District in Brooklyn: “This park has become a symbol of this movement,” Levin said. “The fact that it’s a block from Wall Street with thousands of people here, you can’t ignore it.”
And you can’t neglect the political power contained therein.
Therefore, lies the problem.

Origins of the OWS has been somewhat long in the making.
David DeGraw, at AmpedStatus, explains the movement at Washington’s Blog and how the nefarious financial sector ruined the planet.
The details are in DeGraw’s “The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States.”
Read the whole thing — makes a great deal of sense and presents the entire, whole, ugly bucket of shit.
Money bit:

As a result of the Economic Elite’s attack on us, the inequality of wealth between the economic top one percent and the remaining 99% of the population is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history.
The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age have now been overtaken as America’s most depraved and despotic class.

And there’s no political bullshit involved, and it should remain that way.
But…

So this e-mail from DeGraw to Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture:

Top MoveOn leaders/executives are all over national television speaking for the movement.
fully appreciate the help and support of MoveOn, but the MSM is clearly using them as the spokespeople for OWS.
This is an blatant attempt to fracture the 99% into a Democratic Party organization.
The leadership of MoveON are Democratic Party operatives.
they are divide and conquer pawns.
For years they ignored Wall Street protests to keep complete focus on the Republicans, in favor of Goldman’s Obama and Wall Street’s Democratic leadership.
If anyone at Move On or Daily Kos would like to have a public debate about these comments, we invite it.
Please help us stop this divide and conquer attempt.

Ritholtz adds:

Everyone’s trying to cash in on the courage and conviction of the Wall Street protesters.
People are trying to associate Occupy Wall Street with their pet projects, in the same way that advertisers try to associate the goodwill of the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, World Series or Olympics with their product.
The protesters themselves are having none of it, tweeting today: We don’t want to be the democratic tea party or liberal tea party. We want to be our own movement separate of any political affiliation.
Update: Another tweet from the protesters: We don’t represent liberal interests nor are we the liberal tea party. We represent the interest of the 99%

One way to kill a wonderful, honest movement is to let mainstream assholes take over, then it’s back to business as usual.
Which is 100 percent bullshit

In August, during some nasty fallout over the horrifying debt-ceiling spectacle, even the Chinese heaped scorn and disgust at the US: “The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone…” and scolded Americans to “cure its addiction to debts,” stop being hogs and “live within its means…”
Ouch!

Obesity is an US problem, of course, and in gaining all that fat, US peoples have allowed its system of existence to be hijacked by pure-and-simple greed, and a clear example is politics nowadays — incompetence compounded by incertitude on one side, and across the aisle, nastiness and cruel ignorance.
What a choice for the fat-ass US voter, huh?

In Massachusetts, however, voters there will at least get a chance to put some backbone back in government with Elizabeth Warren’s run for the senate seat now occupied by GOPer Scott Brown.
And Brown’s already spooked — after a Public Policy Polling survey last week gave Warren a slight 46-44 percent edge among likely voters, Brown didn’t want to hear it: “There’s going to be plenty of polls. I don’t think about polls. Never been a big poll guy,” he said.
Good, heard that it could make you go blind.

And Warren’s surging popularity just within days of an announced run, has already jarred the GOP into the attack mode of desperately seeking dirt on Warren, anything true/untrue to sling out into the airwaves, but is finding not much soiled-soil there.

(Illustration found here).

And as a political novice, Warren still talks real.
A hard charge before the starting gate.
During a pre-campaign tour in August, Warren discussed tax increases for the wealthy as being “class warfare:”

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said.
“No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.
Nobody.”
“You built a factor out there?
Good for you.
But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
She concluded, “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless.
Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

And supposedly that’s what’s been generally considered the American way — nothing really new for generations.
Except for nowadays.
The little speech above has become a “kick-ass” video across the Internet, giving Dems a boost and further pissing off the right — but there’s not much to play with when you’re dumb.

Along with being a Harvard law professor, Warren came to the limelight, of due course, as chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP back in the day (2008!) and helped put together the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The director of the new bureau seemed like the job Warren was born for — but nooo!
President Obama showed waffling, and more back-bone-less-ness under GOP nasty looks when he passed her over in favor of this other guy, Richard Cordray.
A move that Scott Brown must now wish didn’t happen, and which now means he has to face reality and become a big poll guy.

And the only decent face on the right side of the street for more than a decade has been near-pure absent from any political discourse this year — former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel.

I’ve always liked Hagel — seemed to be the only GOPer who had sense, had any sort of heart, and usually talked straight.
(Illustration found here).

Hagel is a different Republican bird, and he strongly opposed George Jr.’s venture into Iraq.
From a New York Times profile in February 2006:

Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that’s nearly as rare in the Republican aviary.
He became an internationalist, someone who’s capable of feeling intensely about alliances, multilateral endeavors, the value of global institutions; a fellow traveler of the Council on Foreign Relations, a politician who actually reads Foreign Affairs.
A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don’t begin and end with agricultural exports.
Tellingly, when he was elected to the Senate in 1996, he was the one new Republican whose first choice for a committee assignment was the Foreign Relations Committee, which had declined steadily in prestige since the Vietnam-era days of a Democratic chairman he sometimes mentions as a role model, J. William Fulbright.

Hagal was no follower.

And with Iraq it was no-go from the git-go: ”Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse,” said Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. ”The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.”
The big problem, though, is we don’t believe George Jr. was ever connected to reality.

Hagel has been mostly quiet after announcing in 2007 he wouldn’t seek a third term.
He did give an interview with the UK’s Financial Times in August, and once again let loose some blunt talk about the state of the GOP, especially over the debt-ceiling fiasco and the influence of the Tea Party.
Via The Hill:

“The irresponsible actions of my party, the Republican Party over this were astounding.
I’d never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” said Hagel.
“I was very disappointed, I was very disgusted in how this played out in Washington, this debt ceiling debate.
It was an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican Party, and I say that as a Republican.”
…
“I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow.
I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics,” he said.

Again, well spoken.
And due to the most ugly of political scenes, I can understand Hagel’s reluctance to get involved — and due to the GOP being as it is today, Hagel couldn’t get elected dog catcher.
He’s just a footnote — a loss for US peoples.