Category: Wanker

Dick Durbin Wants to F%$3 Us Like a Steubinville Football Player Would

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He is proposing a Social Security to “fix” the program:

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin announced Wednesday morning that he will introduce a bipartisan bill to create a Social Security commission tasked with making the program solvent for the next 75 years.

………

Durbin says the bill would require votes in the House and Senate on whatever the commission proposes.

With no possibility of filibuster, or amendment.

It’s another way to accommodate Obama’s, and the other Washington, DC “very serious people’s”, burning need to gut security.

The solution is straightforward. If you lift the cap. It’s solvent for at least 75 years.

If you extend the tax to things like capital gains, or at least carried interest, it’s solvent basically forever.

I am sick to death of people trying to create yet another cat food commission.*

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

Still Looking for Senator Menendez’ Birth Certificate

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Yes, the folks at the clown show known as The Daily Caller have decided, notwithstanding sworn statements from prostitutes that they were paid to lie, their fearless journamalists, they are still looking for the real killer:

Responding to reports that Dominican Republic police have concluded that three women were paid to make false claims that they had sex with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) for money, The Daily Caller, which published a report in November 2012 detailing similar allegations, says it is still investigating the story.

Seriously, the first rule here is that when you are in a hole, stop digging.

Wanker of the Day

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Graham Hill, a man who became a fabulously wealthy by milking the dotcom boom at the end of the last century, and now sees fit to lecture us all on how we should live with less.

Yous see, all you have to do is to sell your company to some rube for a few million dollars, fall in love with, “an Andorran beauty,” and spend 15 years bouncing around to all the nice places in the world:

I don’t know that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an aberrant or antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo. But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.

I followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.

A compulsive entrepreneur, I worked all the time and started new companies from an office that fit in my solar backpack. I created some do-gooder companies like We Are Happy to Serve You, which makes a reusable, ceramic version of the iconic New York City Anthora coffee cup and TreeHugger.com, an environmental design blog that I later sold to Discovery Communications. My life was full of love and adventure and work I cared about. I felt free and I didn’t miss the car and gadgets and house; instead I felt as if I had quit a dead-end job.

The relationship with Olga eventually ended, but my life never looked the same. I live smaller and travel lighter. I have more time and money. Aside from my travel habit — which I try to keep in check by minimizing trips, combining trips and purchasing carbon offsets — I feel better that my carbon footprint is significantly smaller than in my previous supersized life.

Intuitively, we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.

Mr. Hill, Madame La Guillotine is calling on line 2.

So Not Surprised

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Joe Lieberman has taken a job with the Koch suckers at the American Enterprise Institute.

Digby nails the analysis:

This is a common project of the Right these days. They know that no one likes their ideas. Scarred by the experience in Iraq, few want to do it again in Iran. Few want to eliminate Social Security, give tax breaks to rich, loosen gun laws, or do any of the other things on the Right’s agenda.

So one of the Right’s strategies is to go trolling for morally deficient, easily corrupted neoliberal “Democrats” to assist their efforts at creating a “bipartisan consensus” to override popular will and common sense in the service of the conservative agenda.

I don’t know how much he’s being paid for this, but my guess is that it will be a lot more than he made as a Senator, because that’s how back loaded bribery works.

No promises, but if you toe the line, you know that you get a payoff when you retire.

Normally, He’d be Wanker of the Day………

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But today, after Pamela Sampson, Niall Ferguson suggesting that Paul Krugman is the victim of an abusive childhood:

In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is–though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman’s response is to the point:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can’t handle professional criticism — which is all that I have ever offered — he should go find another profession.

Krugman is right.

There is a qualitative difference between the two arguments.  Krugman is blunt.  He has no problems telling people that he disagrees with that they are full of sh%$.

He’s blunt, but he does not pull the kind of crap that Ferguson tried to pull.

H/t Atrios.

This Must Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Written

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There are any things that can be said about the death of Hugo Chavez, but this takes the cake:

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

To be fair, AP business reporter Pamela Sampson may not be a complete moron, she might simply be a sociopath ……… or it could be both.

You choose.

H/t Atrios.

We Have A New Best Definition for Chutzpah

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For those of you who are not aware of the classic definition, “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan,”

Well, Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford has come up with a new and improved definition:

But Mark wanted more than just his ex-wife’s disavowal of interest. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, he installed Jenny as his campaign manager. He did this for reasons of economy—“You’re free,” he told her at the time—but she proved a natural at the job. She blossomed into a shrewd political strategist, running Mark’s subsequent campaigns and becoming his top adviser. Will Folks, a former Sanford press secretary, says, “There’s absolutely no way he would have ever won the congressional seat or been governor without her.”

According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,” he said. “We could put the team back together.”

Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.

“I could pay you this time,” he said.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

You leave her, you publicly humiliate her, and you want her to run her campaign?

If I were Mark Sanford’s parents, I’d worry.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

Oh, Now I Get It!

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Suddenly, I Understand

There has always been something about Antonin Scalia that seemed familiar, and now Rachel Maddow has his essence nailed, she was in the Supreme Court for the voting rights act, and she realized that Antonin Scalia is basically a garden variety troll (At about 2:40 in the vid):

It’s a racial entitlement now, voting is a racial entitlement — something that you are entitled to on the basis of your race. Wait a second, do you know how that sounds? But I think he does know how that sounds and that’s the neat thing about being there in person is you can see, actually he’s a troll. He’s saying this for effect. He knows it’s offensive and he knows he’s going to get a gasp from the courtroom, which he got, and he loves it. He’s like the guy on your blog comment thread who is using the n-word. ‘Oh, it made you mad? How about if I say this? Does it make you mad? Did it make you mad? Did it make you mad?’ He’s that guy! He’s that kind of guy! When we’re all shocked that he said something so blatantly racially offensive while talking about the cornerstone of the federal Civil Rights Act, he’s thinking, ‘Oh yeah!’

He’s Lauren “Uncle Meat” Bandler in judicial robes. 

I’m kind of surprised that Scalia doesn’t show up to court in his underwear with a bag of Cheetos.

Why am I not surprised that she revealed this to Jon Stewart?

That concentration of truth telling on one stage is a stunning level of awesome.

My Flight Left Over 4 Hours Late

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I also spent about 2 hours on the tarmac waiting for a gate to open up to deplane.

Of course, this means that I missed my connecting flight.

I’m booked on a flight that leaves in 5 hours, and wait listed for one that leaves in 2 hours.

If I were stupid, this would be where I would make an angry, but not serious, statement about what should happen to the good folks at USAir, and their lackadaisically maintained fleet of  aircraft.

Of course, this would pique the interest of the good folds in Fort Meade, and I would end up getting to know FBI special agent Body Cavity Search.

So I will leave our at, “Their mother was a hamster, and their father smelled of elderberries.”

Posted via mobile.

When Charles F%$#ing Krauthammer is the Voice of Reason, You Have Jumped the Shark

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Jumping C. Megalodon*


This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

The White House press corps(e) is mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

They have been stonewalled by the Obama administration for the last time?

What was it? The secret kill list? The use of the CIA and the NSA to spy on US citizens? The secret negotiations for the the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Nope. The press is livid that they did not get a press availability when Obama played a round of golf with Tiger Woods:

The White House pushed back Tuesday against complaints from the press corps that the administration was too restrictive last weekend in denying reporters and photographers a glimpse of President Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods during his vacation in Florida.

 Press secretary Jay Carney said he sympathizes with the press corps’ bid for greater access, but he disputed suggestions that Obama has been more off-limits than his recent predecessors.

 Carney said Obama has held 35 news conferences in which reporters were permitted to ask questions, compared to 19 by George W. Bush to this point in his presidency. And Obama has granted 591 interviews, including 104 with television networks, Carney added.

 ………

 Later that afternoon, the White House confirmed that Woods was among Obama’s foursome after a reporter for Golf World Magazine and the Golf Channel had published the news on his Twitter feed hours earlier.

 After several reporters, including Fox News correspondent Ed Henry, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, complained about the lack of access, Obama spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening on the way back to Washington. But that conversation was off the record.

Do you know how stupid this is?

It’s so stupid and over the top that lunatic and long distance psychotherapist Charles Krauthammer thinks that this is whiny inconsequential bullsh%$:

Charles Krauthammer is blasting the media for complaining about a lack of access to President Barack Obama over the weekend while he golfed with Tiger Woods, calling it “the biggest non-story” since the Kardashian weddings.

 “If the guy wants to play golf, the guy deserves a couple of days off. He wants privacy — big deal. This is the biggest non-story that the media have created since the Kardashian weddings,” Krauthammer said on Fox News on Monday. “I don’t understand what the story is and what the outrage is.”

Seriously, Charles Krauthammer is correct.

I cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just f%$#ing said f%$#ing that.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Stay Classy, Teabaggers

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Yes, the fine folks at Freedomworks, produced a video with two female staffers playing Hillary Clinton and a Panda having sex:

An internal investigation of FreedomWorks—the prominent conservative advocacy group and super-PAC—has focused on president Matt Kibbe’s management of the organization, his use of its resources, and a controversial book deal he signed, according to former FreedomWorks officials who have met with the private lawyers conducting the probe. One potential topic for the inquiry is a promotional video produced last year under the supervision of Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the group and a Kibbe loyalist. The video included a scene in which a female intern wearing a panda suit simulates performing oral sex on Hillary Clinton. [Author’s note: The previous sentence contains no typos.]

………

 In one segment of the film, according to a former official who saw it, Brandon is seen waking from a nap at his desk. In what appears to be a dream or a nightmare, he wanders down a hallway and spots a giant panda on its knees with its head in the lap of a seated Hillary Clinton and apparently performing oral sex on the then-secretary of state. Two female interns at FreedomWorks were recruited to play the panda and Clinton. One intern wore a Hillary Clinton mask. The other wore a giant panda suit that FreedomWorks had used at protests to denounce progressives as panderers. (See here, here, and here.) Placing the panda in the video, a former FreedomWorks staffer says, was “an inside joke.”

Another FreedomWorks staffer who worked there at the time confirms that “Yes, this video was created.”

Seriously, these guys are showing less maturity than your average 13 year old boys in a locker room in a farting contest.

WE NED MOAR GUNS CUZ OV TEH BLAHS*

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I am of course referring to National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s OP/ED on the right wing cesspool known as The Daily Caller, where he said that we all need more guns because of scary dark people:

Following President Obama’s call for a vote on proposed gun safety legislation in his State of the Union speech, Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, on Wednesday issued a call-to-action for gun owners to prepare for post-apocolyptic-style scenarios and rally against the gun control movement.

 ………

“Latin American drug gangs”:

Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.

(Emphasis Original)

Seriously, does the radical right do anything but find exciting new ways to scream the “N-Word”.

*This refers to an iundident with Rick Santorum said that, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.,” and then claimed that he had said “blah people.”

Facepalm

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In its infinite wisdom, the International Olympic Committee has dropped wrestling from its sports:

For wrestling, this may have been the ultimate body slam: getting tossed out of the Olympic rings.

The vote Tuesday by the IOC’s executive board stunned the world’s wrestlers, who see their sport as popular in many countries and steeped in history as old as the Olympics themselves.

While wrestling will be included at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, it was cut from the games in 2020, which have yet to be awarded to a host city.

Wrestling has been a part of the Olympics since the Greeks held the original ones starting in 776 BCE.

So, they will keep Dressage (horse dancing) and beach volleyball but they will dump wrestling.

George F%$# ing Will??!?!?!!?

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George Will is not just a partisan hack. He’s the guy who prepped Ronald Reagan for the 1980s debate while knowingly using Jimmy Carter’s stolen briefing books.

So, it is with some surprise that I note that he is calling for a breakup of the big banks:

With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of “Les Miserables,” hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades. Today, Ohio’s senior senator has a project worthy of Victor Hugo — and of conservatives’ support. He wants to break up the biggest banks.

 He would advocate this even if he thought such banks would never have a crisis sufficient to threaten the financial system. He believes they are unhealthy for the financial system even when they are healthy. This is because there is a silent subsidy — an unfair competitive advantage relative to community banks — inherent in being deemed by the government, implicitly but clearly, too big to fail.

 The Senate has unanimously passed a bill offered by Brown and Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, directing the Government Accountability Office to study whether banks with more than $500 billion in assets acquire an “economic benefit” because of their dangerous scale. Is their debt priced favorably because, being TBTF, they are considered especially creditworthy? Brown believes the 20 largest banks pay less when borrowing — 50 to 80 basis points less — than community banks must pay.

 In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

 ………

 By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!

(Emphasis original)

This is not what I expect from Will, and there is a part of me that is wondering whether this is more of a political tactic than a recognition of reality.

If the Republicans want an effective line of attack, they could do a lot worse than saying that Obama is determined to protect and defend the too big to fail banks.

It is something that would undermine any populist cred that Obama might seek to achieve, and as a bonus, it’s true.

So, either Will is late to this game, or he’s the the first volley in a Republican attack.

If I were a betting man, I’d call it even money.

Stupidest Idea in Maryland

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While Maryland is not generally considered a good government state, witness the regular indictments of Maryland politicos, but the Prince George’s County Board of Education takes the cake:

There are some absolutely ridiculous situations created by the fact that all creative works are automatically granted a copyright on being put into a fixed form. Mostly, we just ignore these situations, because the vast majority of them never matter. But, as copyright has become more and more ridiculous, some people are beginning to start to make use of the stupid fact that all kinds of things can be “owned” that probably shouldn’t be “ownable.” Take, for example, school work. If a student creates something, it is covered by copyright, though most people never really consider or care about that. However, the board of education for Prince George [sic] County in Maryland is apparently considering a new “copyright policy” in which all students and staff would have to assign all of those copyrights over to the school system itself.

(emphasis original)

I don’t see how they have a leg to stand on with the children, who are not employees, and so could not be seen as producing work for hire.

This is nucking futs.

It’s a Petri Dish for Narcissistic Sociopaths

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The filibuster stands largely unchanged:

The Senate enacted modest reforms to its filibuster rules with votes that kept bipartisan relations intact but left disappointed liberal groups fuming.

The reforms are the biggest changes to the Senate’s filibuster rules in decades but fell well short of drastic reforms demanded by labor unions and liberal-leaning advocacy groups.

The deal negotiated between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) provoked an outcry from liberal groups.

Passage of the deal sets to rest Reid’s threat, which he had wielded for months, to use the so-called “nuclear option” to change the Senate’s filibuster rules through a simple majority vote.

The enacted reforms do not include the implementation of the talking filibuster, which would require senators seeking to block legislation to actively hold the floor and debate. If debate stops, the pending matter moves to a simple majority vote, under this proposal.

Nor does it shift the burden of sustaining a filibuster onto the minority party by requiring senators to muster 41 votes to continue blocking legislation. Now the burden is on the majority to round up 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

It’s streamlined a bit, but only a bit.

I’m depressed.