No big deal — Mitt Romney wins the New Hampshire primary and the GOP whore-wagon grinds on to South Carolina, where the pack gathers for a nit-picking contest there on Jan. 21.
The only applaudable event last night was the bottom finish for a couple of dick-Rick-bottom-feeders — Santorum and Perry — and maybe now them smiles will be slapped off their collective faces.
Good riddance to a pile of bad trash.

Way-rich trash, however: Reportedly, Romney spent $17 million since January a year ago to try and win the White House — no matter how one looks at it, that’s a shitload of cash.
And although the 99 percent work their asses off, the 1 percent has all the cash, and has it here in the good-old-most-equal US of A.

(Illustration found here).

Wealth is way unequal and US peoples, even the lowest of the low, are rich compared to the rest of the spinning globe.
From CNNMoney:

So where do these lucky rich people live? As of 2005 — the most recent data available — about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States, according to calculations by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book “The Haves and the Have-Nots”.
…
“It doesn’t seem right to define as middle class, people who would be on food stamps in the United States,” Milanovic said.
…
The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college.
In fact, people at the world’s true middle — as defined by median income — live on just $1,225 a year. (And, yes, Milanovic’s numbers are adjusted to account for different costs of living across the globe.)
In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.

In the US, though, poverty is way-more closer to home: A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That’s one-third of the nation’s poor.
And the problem will never go away due to the nasty fact the US is one of the most-unequal countries in the world — the rich play at politics: Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We’re on par with some of the world’s most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our income gap is also getting worse, having widened both in absolute and relative terms since the 1980s. It’s not a problem that the “Buffett rule” would solve on its own, but at least the U.S. political system is starting to acknowledge how serious things have become.

And the rich assholes elected to national office, what do they do?
Make life harder for the rest of us dumb-asses: Due to Congressional inaction during last month’s tax deliberations, the new year ushered in a tax increase to public transit riders. Currently, commuters who use public transit, commuter buses and van pools may see their annual commuting costs increase by more than $550 based on a bias in the tax code that benefits driving over taking public transit. In addition, the failure to extend the benefit has resulted in a tax liability increase for companies offering the benefit.

And I’d like to close with this from the comments section of the semi-daily, must-read Drumbeat (@ The Oil Drum) that eloquently displays just how f*cked we all are:

The human brain, encased in bone and thoroughly nourished with blood, is the interpreter between itself and all else.
Images and sensations go in and slowly an analog world is built, and possibly with some effort an intellect is born.
The human system cannot truly be separated from its environment from where it derives its building blocks and returns its waste.
It is a product of the environment, the flow of energy and matter.
We have not evolved a tongue that can taste the cesium, strontium, lead and mercury in the air and water, nor olfaction that can sense the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Instead we have designed and created technological sensors that can extend our perception.
Unfortunately the results these sensors display are not wired into our limbic systems so as to elicit a panicked response.
We have alarming data, but the alarms are not sounding, we do nothing, because we have no motivation.
There is no pain, no primate fear-invoking stimuli like growling predators, snakes, spiders, and so on.
So we sit and slowly euthanize ourselves and our children in front of our faux reality televisions.
As long as there are no shocks that arouse our evolved fear circuits our civilization will slip quietly into a coma, helped along by little dribbles of propagandist’s morphine, just enough to blunt any perception of our near terminal situation.

So whatever happens in South Carolina won’t make much difference.