This comment struck the core of the issue: "Really? What is our society, 12 year old boys? Sad."
(Incidentally, as of the first ep of season two we've seen penis some four or five times and we have never seen a single mons veneris. I demand full-frontal nudity equality.)
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Predictably enough, the American left mourns the death of Hugo Chavez, communist dictator, because they never met a communist thug they didn't like.
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Speaking of communists, French workers throw a temper tantrum over the closure of a Goodyear tire plant in France.
Okay: Goodyear has been negotiating with unions etc for six years in order to find a way to keep the plant open and continue to produce tires there, but of course in exchange for continuing to employ people Goodyear would like the chance to do so profitably--and the communists are making it impossible.
So Goodyear's only choice is to pull out; and predictably the communists are outraged, because the job of a corporation is to give people fat paychecks without expecting anything in return. Don't you know anything?
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The economy is still in the shitter and people still need to pay bills, which is why 401ks are being depleted.
Besides, the US government is going to nationalize retirement accounts sometime in the next few years. I'm betting it'll be early in 2015, after the midterm elections are over and the Democrats have a majority in both houses again.
What? You think they won't? With the GOP doing everything it can to make itself look as pusillanimous as possible?
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Karl Denninger correctly identifies Eric Holder's admission as a Constitutional crisis. It really is--his admission that some corporations are too big to jail means that there is no longer equality under the law. If you're big enough, important enough, rich enough, you don't go to jail; you don't even get prosecuted.
This suits Washington, D.C. insiders just fine, because that kind of environment protects them from all kinds of inconvenient laws that the rest of us ignore at our peril.
We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been. But there's a difference between the foibles of mankind -- everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless -- and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.It's not good news, and in fact Eric Holder's admission that this is the case will probably only embolden large corporations to misbehave.
The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.
A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people. When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of "diktat" from which the term "dictatorship" comes.
Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.
This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue. The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law -- by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.
I doubt Eric Holder realizes what happened in that hearing room or how clearly he rang the bell, but there is now a gauntlet before both the Administration and Congress that they have laid at their own feet. Coupled with Rand Paul's filibuster over one simple question -- the murder of non-belligerent Americans on American soil without due process of law, without charge, without trial, we have a truly historical pair of events -- and unfortunately they're not the sort of historical events you wish to witness.
(Emphasis removed, by the way.)
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Also from Denninger, the GOP is 100% complicit in everything that's going on, because they are doing nothing to stop it.
Denninger quotes:
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 267-151 on Wednesday to approve a $982-billion continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through the rest of fiscal 2013 that fully funds the implementation of Obamacare during that period.(Emphasis removed.) They're not trying to stop Obamacare; they're not trying to hold Obama to the Constitutional requirement that the President submit a budget; they're not even passing a budget of their own, again contrary to the requirements of the Constitution. We haven't had an actual budget since Obama took office.
...because "budget" means "accountability" and it would make obvious who has been kiting all those huge checks.
Instead we've got, "Okay, okay, here's another resolution authorizing the continued spending of money we don't have, with automatic increases built in."
They don't want to curb the deficit spending. There are several reasons for that, but the main one is accountability. They don't want to lose their cushy jobs, but they will if they actually try to rein in spending or pass a budget.
The main problem is that we're in an economic depression, and the only thing hiding that fact is that government spending is a component of GDP. If the government stopped spending 125% of revenues--reduced spending to only 100% of revenues--GDP would undergo an immediate and severe contraction, driving economic growth very sharply negative for a couple of years while the economy readjusted to a world without government cheese. Lots of politicians would be voted out of office while that was going on, and you can't keep control of the country if your party loses too many elections. (Let alone build up your personal fortune; remember that legislators can convert their campaign funds to personal fortunes upon retirement, and the longer they're in office the bigger their war chests get. Veteran Congressmen do not retire to lives in trailer parks, eating ramen and McDonald's.)
Besides that, consider all the rioting and civil unrest that would accompany a sudden cessation of handouts. The federal government has spent close to fifty years training the underclass to be utterly helpless without government aid; just look at how helpless low-income people in New Orleans were when Katrina hit. When the money dries up and the welfare offices close, these people will go berserk...exactly the same way a spoiled child does the first time he's told "no". (And for the same reasons.)
And if they pass a new budget now, it's going to be obvious to all and sundry just how big the deficit really is, and it's going to be obvious where all the money is going, and it's going to make a lot of people very angry--possibly angry enough to vote all the bastards out.
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Boortz quotes an excellent quote today:
Always we hear the cry from teenagers, "What can we do, where can we go?"Yep.
My answer is, Go home, mow the lawn, wash the windows, learn to cook, build a raft, get a job, visit the sick, study your lessons, and after you’ve finished, read a book. Your town does not owe you recreational facilities and your parents do not owe you fun. The world does not owe you a living, you owe the world something. You owe it your time, energy and talent so that no one will be at war, in poverty or sick and lonely again. In other words, grow up, stop being a crybaby, get out of your dream world and develop a backbone, not a wishbone. Start behaving like a responsible person. You are important and you are needed. It’s too late to sit around and wait for somebody to do something someday. Someday is now and that somebody is you.
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Then there's this:
Today, my 20-year-old came whining to me, asking why his job interviews keep going so poorly. I had to delicately explain that the "PIMP SLAP" tattoo he had put on his right hand recently may have something to do with it. FMLI have to wonder what that judge in the 1950s would have had to say to a moron with a tattoo like that.
Seriously--if he had a tribal scroll or something around his wrist, it'd be a different story, but having "PIMP SLAP" tattooed on your hand is just f-ing stupid. Remember this handy diagram:
If you're a guy and you want to have both a job and a tattoo, put it in the green area.
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As for me, I've got errands to run today, so I suppose I ought to get my butt in gear.