Middle-of-the-week and time just keeps on keeping on.

Opposite asshole bit of the week — US kids are too fat to kill other people.
In a new report called, “Still Too Fat to Fight,” some retired military 1 per-centers whine young obese Americans are endangering national security: “It’s clear to us that our military readiness could be put in jeopardy given the fact that nearly 75 percent of young Americans are unable to serve in uniform.”
Not for health reasons, mind you, but for the sake of some phantom menace in far off places.
Would you rather have them dead than fat?

(Illustration found here).

Shitheads lie, can’t be helped, just as one thinks while listening to some pontification or another and the only thing comes to mind in reply: “BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS, BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS, BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS, BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!” (via George Carlin).
No, but seriously, the problem we are encountering in this rapid declining civilization is the lying bullshit fostered upon the unwashed masses, who the brains of these high-echeleon outfits think have no sense at all, or are just plain stupid.
Dumb, maybe, but stupid?

The real huge, humongous, deeply-divided problem here is inequality .
Matt Taibbi yesterday at Rolling Stone took a look at why half-assed, nit-twit Mitt Romney is so close to President Obama in presidential polls this election cycle — the reality is rich.
After reviewing some published reasons for this craziness (h/t Balloon Juice):

All of these points of view have merit, I guess, but to me they’re mostly irrelevant.
The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.
Think about it.
Four years ago, we had an economic crash that wiped out somewhere between a quarter to 40 percent of the world’s wealth, depending on whom you believe.
The crash was caused by an utterly disgusting and irresponsible class of Wall Street paper-pushers who loaded the world up with deadly leverage in pursuit of their own bonuses, then ran screaming to the government for a handout (and got it) the instant it all went south.
…
For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people.
Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life — he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague’s missing daughter (“It was a shocker,” Mitt said. “The number of lost souls was astounding”).
He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive.
He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.
The point is, Mitt Romney’s natural constituency should be about 1 percent of the population.
If you restrict that pool to “likely voters,” he might naturally appeal to 2 percent. Maybe 3 percent.
…
If this race had even one guy running in it who didn’t take money from all the usual quarters and actually represented the economic interests of ordinary people, it wouldn’t be close.
It shouldn’t be close.
If one percent of the country controls forty percent of the country’s wealth — and that trend is moving rapidly in the direction of more inequality with each successive year — what kind of split should we have, given that at least one of the candidates enthusiastically and unapologetically represents the interests of that one percent?
To me the biggest reason the split isn’t bigger is the news media, which wants a close race mainly for selfish commercial reasons — it’s better theater and sells more ads.
Most people in the news business have been conditioned to believe that national elections should be close.

And what’s even worse, the GOP knows this whole shebang is bullshit.
If it smells like poop, it’s most-likely shit (hey, thanks ABL!):

“I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday.
…
Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited.
Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”

Occupy to me is one of the most-original yet at the same time a movement that should have been employed years and years ago — too bad it’s been pepper-sprayed off the mainstream radar.
This country is divided, but it’s way lopped-sided.
The voting booth can alter that.