Category: Stupid

No, This is Not The Onion…

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John Ashcroft is Blackwater’s Xe’s new ethics chief:

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private-security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement. The subcommittee is designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private-security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in war zones, no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry, and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

Ashcroft’s arrival at Xe is yet another clear signal it’s not giving up the quest for lucrative government security contracts now that it’s no longer owned by founder Erik Prince, even as it emphasizes the side of its business that trains law enforcement officers. In September, it won part of a $10 billion State Department contract to protect diplomats, starting with the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.

 I don’t know which is more revolting, Ashcroft as ethics chief, or the fact that these incompetent corrupt f%$#s still get government contracts.

Obama Releases “Long Form” Birth Certificate

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I guess this will make the birthers shut up………Not!!!

My thoughts on this are perhaps best expressed by Cthulhu*:

He f%$#ing caved to the GOP thugs, AGAIN. His BC is sufficient for him to get a license, a passport, and for every god-damned govt function we can think of.

I wanted to see Obama do the same as inn the movie “The American President“, where he calls the phonies out, and declares he is the president, and he’s off to take care of business, f%$# you microbrained idiots.

Of course, that was just a movie, reality is a lot more depressing.

*No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
†OK, I’ve never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans‡ would seem to mitigate against this.
‡Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.

And the Escalation into an Attempt at Regime Change Continues

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Both the French and the British intend to send troops in to, “Protect aid deliveries,” despite the fact that Valerie Amos, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, has said that this is not necessary, and may risk conflating the aid program with military action.

The problem here is that there have been explicit calls for regime change since the UN resolution had passed, and because the Qaddafi regime has refused to collapse like a bunch of wet broccoli, the French and the British have felt the need to escalate in order to save face.

Not like Vietnam at all.

Sarkosy is trying to save his ass in the next elections, and Cameron is trying to distract the British public from the failure of his full throated embrace of Hoovernomics, and they thought that a “Private Little War” would be good for politics, and it allowed them to get their colonialist rocks off as a bonus.

Unfortunately, wars are never a certainty.

I Still Don’t Buy the Idea that Obama is Playng “Eleventy Dimensional Chess,” but …

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That rumble here is stark raving terror!

But John Boehner has gotten himself completely pwn36 (OWNED) this week.

First, the CBO scored the budget cuts, and it turns out that that the $38 billion in budget cuts are actually only $352 million in budget cuts, and then Boehner loses ¼ of his caucus on the budget deal and has to rely on Democrats to put it over the top, and finally, the Democrats abstain on an amendment proposed by the even-more-right-wing-than-Paul-Ryan Republican Study Committee, which had the amendment passing until Boehner whipped Republicans to change their votes at the last minute:

Normally something like that would fail by a large bipartisan margin in either the House or the Senate. Conservative Republicans would vote for it, but it would be defeated by a coalition of Democrats and more moderate Republicans. But today that formula didn’t hold. In an attempt to highlight deep divides in the Republican caucus. Dems switched their votes — from “no” to “present.”

Panic ensued. In the House, legislation passes by a simple majority of members voting. The Dems took themselves out of the equation, leaving Republicans to decide whether the House should adopt the more-conservative RSC budget instead of the one authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. As Dems flipped to present, Republicans realized that a majority of their members had indeed gone on the record in support of the RSC plan — and if the vote closed, it would pass. That would be a slap in the face to Ryan, and a politically toxic outcome for the Republican party.

I do believe that Boehner is a rum and nicotine soaked incompetent, but I see this as more of a residue of luck than any sudden outbreak of competence by the Obama administration.

What a Pathetic Excuse for an Advocacy Group

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I was watching Maddow, and she had Terry O’Neill, the President of NOW on to discuss the spate of anti-abortion laws coming out of the wingnut legislatures, and O’Neill basically said that she would not challenge these laws, despite their being illegal under existing precedent, because they are afraid that the currents supreme court will simply overrule Roe V. Wade.

So, because victory is not certain, she, and her organization, will win a court challenge, they have decided not to fight for abortion rights at all.

Conceding defeat is not an alternative to losing.  If you never contest the issue, you lose.

In conceding the battle in this way, not only do you allow states to criminalize abortions, but you prevent any meaningful political dialogue from anyone but the women hating nut jobs.

They are conceding defeat in the face of a possible defeat, and anyone who sends them money is an idiot.

F%$# No!!!!!

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Well, the good folks at Google™ Adsense™ have done it again.

The put up an ad from right wing lunatic asylum Newsmax, redirecting to a poll asking what the reader thinks about the concept Donald Trump as president.

Somehow or other, I do not think that my blog is fertile ground for the brain damaged hackery that is Newsmax, but to the degree that I get paid (a fraction of a penny) for someone seeing the ad, better my pocket than Joseph Farah’s.

Of course, if they did something better suited to my rantings, I might get a few more click throughs, and hence a bit more filthy capitalist lucre.

In any case, my apology to my reader(s) for your having to see “The Donald” and his hair.

My standard Google™ Adsense™ disclaimers below:

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

The Ongoing Libyan Clusterf%$#

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First, it appears that since the US has dropped its lead position, NATO does not have enough attack aircraft, and now the British are talking about sending in trainers and advisers to help the rebels:

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.

The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.

So, we are talking about a major escalation of involvement, one, by the way, which is not called for in the UN Security Council resolution, including the use of mercenaries.

This is not going to end well.

Alan Greenspan, STFU!

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Ayn Rand’s most successful apostle* is back at it again saying that regulations are causing all of our financial problems, and gives us this bon mot:

The problem is that regulators, and for that matter everyone else, can never get more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern financial systems. Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

With notably rare exceptions, Abraham Lincoln enjoyed the play Our American Cousin.

As Paul Krugman observes, the level out outright cluelessness shown here is mind boggling, though the best response comes from Henry Farrell, who holds a “With notably rare exceptions,” contest that is hysterically funny.

*No, really, he actually hung out with her and was a part of regular meetings in her apartment.

Quote of the Day

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Immelt is thus an odd choice to head up such a council. It would be like Obama appointing Wall Street insiders like Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner to head up his economic advisory team, or guys from Goldman Sachs to head up the financial regulatory agencies. Oh, wait…

Urantian Sojourn in response to Barack Obama’s appointment of GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, as head of the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

I’m beginning to wonder whether Barack Obama sits in the situation room of the White House basement, stroking a white Persian cat, and wondering how to f%$# with all of us.

What a Whiny Bitch

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Truly pathetic, but at least


We get a kick ass poster

Wisconsin Republican Congressman, and former Real World reality TV star, Sean Duffy, is caught on tape complaining how tough it is to make ends meet making only $174,000 a year, about 3 x that of the average citizen of the Badger State.

What’s more, once people started seeing the tape, the Republican Party of Polk County, where he gave the talk, started demanding that the recording be removed, claiming copyright infringement.

Not only is he a whiny bitch, he’s a stupid whiny bitch, because they just insured that every half-assed hack with a keyboard and a spell check, like yours truly, will go and reproduce the tape, and the story, until the heat death of the universe.

The Obama Doctrine…

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Courtesy of Dan Nexon:

Humanitarian-intervention-against-militarily-weak-fossil-fuel-producing-countries-in-strategically-important-regions-that-are-also-located-near-many-large-NATO-military-bases-and-are-run-by-dictators-who-kind-of-piss-us-off-and-have-no-powerful-allies Doctrine

And he is right: This is not the stuff of grand strategy.

So The New York Times Has Added a Paywall

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I’m not sure exactly how it works, so I am unsure how the paywall, which limits you to 20 page views a month, would work off a link to this blog, but, at least for now, it works off of Twitter, so I have created a Twitter account, The Sh%$ I Read on the New York Times, and I will link to that tweet, which will allow one to see the article without having to deal with their paywall.

It appears to me that this is in accordance with both the spirit and the letter of their paywall, since I am manually tweeting the articles.

There are a number of alternatives, most notably the NYTClean applet, and while I might use that myself, I’m not going to put that on my link page, I figure that someone might go all TOS on my flabby white ass and finding a human at Google/Blogger in that case is well nigh impossible.

As to how the paywall will work, the Times had a paywall for a number of years for their opinion pieces, and the net result was that they got a lot less buzz, which is probably why Frank Rich and Bob Herbert both decided to leave the paper in the past few weeks.

The problem with the NYT is too fold, first, and uniquely to them, is the fact that they built, and paid cash for a ruinously expensive new office building in Manhattan, and second, and this is not unique to them, Craigslist is completely eating their lunches in the tremendously profitable classified ads section.

Not sure as to the solution, though any solution should involve cutting Tom Friedman’s travel budget.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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When Peggy “Dolphins Saved Elian Gonzalez” Noonan says that she thinks that an American war is stupid:

The biggest takeaway, the biggest foreign-policy fact, of the past decade is this: America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there — the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint — there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.

So we wind up in long, drawn-out struggles when we didn’t mean to, when it wasn’t the plan, or the hope, or the expectation.

We have to keep this phenomenon in mind as we chart our path in the future. It’s easy to start a war but hard to end one. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to get in but hard to get out. Even today, in Baghdad, you hear that America can’t leave Iraq because the government isn’t sturdy enough, the army and police aren’t strong enough to withstand the winds that will follow America’s full departure, that all that has been achieved — a fragile, incomplete, relative peace — will be lost. America cannot leave because Iraq will be vulnerable to civil war, not between Sunnis and Shiites, they tell you now, but between Arabs and Kurds, in the north, near the oil fields.

She is, of course, writing about the war du jour, Libya, and she is correct.  It’s a bad idea.

What’s more, when this operation is well within the capabilities of other countries, either the UK or France could likely do this on their own, and certainly can do this together, so say nothing of the contributions of Italy and Canada (!?!?!?!), there is no need for any contribution to the kinetic portion of the war by the US, though satellite and signals intelligence could certainly make a difference.

A reader of Americablog nailed what is driving the American involvement in this:

The main reason the US seems to want to be involved seems to be to avoid being left out. If the UK and France could take out Libya on their own, people might start asking if the US really needs to have a military an order of magnitude larger than the UK and French forces combined.

Our bloated giant Pentagon cannot allow our allies to engage in a kinetic war (i.e. shooting) without a major involvement, because if they do, it casts doubt on the raison d’être for us to spend more on our defense than the rest of the world combined.

So, not only does the fact that we are a military behemoth make us stay in places that we have never gone, it makes us go places we should never go, because to stay home when others go would put its continued support at risk.

Obama Pulls Another Deepwater Horizon

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S%$# Heads!

Yes, in response to the Japanese nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, they are doubkling down on more loan guarantees for US nuclear power:

The Obama administration will press ahead with efforts to expand loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors while investigating the failure of Japan’s power plants after an earthquake, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

The U.S. Energy Department is seeking to add $36 billion in loan-guarantee authority to the program’s existing $18.5 billion, Chu said today at a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel hearing. President Barack Obama asked lawmakers to expand the program in his February budget request.

An earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11 crippled Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with explosions, fires and radiation leaks. As Japan tries to avert a meltdown at the plant, Obama and his energy advisers have said U.S. nuclear reactors are safe.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

These guys never miss a chance to miss a chance.

No, 11 Year Old Girls Are Not Asking for It!

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The New York Times times reported on a horrific rape of an 11 year old girl in Texas, and saw fit to blame the victim for the crime.

Some selected quotes:

The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.

………

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Drawn into the act?

The alleged Rapists have to live with this for the rest of their life?

But it gets even better:

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

You see, she hung out with the wrong crowd, and she wore slutty clothes, so she deserves to be raped.

By comparison, the Houston Chronicle doesn’t go out of their way to portray an 11 year old girl as something akin to Jezebel.

Why reporter James C. McKinley Jr. and whoever his editor is are still employed at the Times is completely beyond me.

When Are These F%$#s Going to Stop Listening to James O’Keefe

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This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven.

Right wing videographer hack James O’Keefe* has secured yet another scalp, the president of NPR has resigned.

This guy has been proven to be a serial liar, but he releases his crap, Fox News picks it up, and suddenly, people are freaking out.

This just makes it worse for NPR, because they just capitulated to a terrorist.

*Who is not to be confused with my former classmate, founder of the Massachusetts Pirate Party, former Green Party candidate for Massachusetts Treasure, and all around good guy, James “Jamie” O’Keefe.