Floridiots

The problem with idiots is not just that they are idiots, but that they think other idiots are smarter than people who are not idiots. What's true of idiots in general is more true of that special breed -- the Floridiots: the idiots of Florida.  Few states are better at electing crooks and liars and perhaps few have elected as many well intentioned morons as the State of FloriDUH.

Perhaps you remember the Florida State Senator that opposed an "animal husbandry" exception to an idiotic law that made it illegal to watch animals having sex because he thought it allowed men to marry animals?  Floriduh.  Now that Floridiots have closed internet cafes ( mostly in less affluent areas) all over the state following a scandal involving  illegal gambling at some of those places affiliated with bogus charity Allied Veterans of the World, that brought down our Lieutenant Governor and prompted the state to make anything to do with video gambling illegal.  Unfortunately and typically, they also made anything that connects to the internet illegal and possibly any system that allows one to connect, like WiFi in public places. People without computers who use these places to wire money home and connect with family are SOL and Governor Scott was happy to sign off on it.  Governor Scott who told us that hiring thousands to save the everglades and our rivers was bad because hiring people kills jobs.

Did I mention that we are a Red State in Florida?  A state controlled by people who insist government can't do anything right and should be simplified and minimalized.  Leave it to the Floridiots to make it a felony to have a leg humping dog or a smart phone that after all, might be used to play poker. Now most people who have a thing about regulation of  private consensual things tend to oppose them, but that implies some kind of logical consistency not at all common in idiots and less so in Republican Floridiots. (yes I know that's a tautology)  After all we elected a governor who ran a corporation who set a record for stealing from Medicare in order to clean things up and restore fiscal responsibility and who defends the pollution the vast majority of us moved to Florida to avoid.

Oh well, galling as it might be to be associated with nitwits and knuckle draggers, unrepentant confederates and self defeating supporters of their own sad condition, there's always Texas.  We're not as bad as Texas, are we?

Let it snow

It snows in New Jersey, as I guess we all know and yet as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, we're still arguing who has the responsibility to do what and with which and for whom. Some New Jersey people are quite angry with Republican governor Chris Christie who said of the recent heavy blizzard:

“If someone is snowed into their house, that’s not our responsibility.”

I think they have the right to be staggered by such a statement. Earthquake, flood, wildfire, tornadoes, hurricanes; disasters man made and natural: for all these things the government to which New Jersey taxpayers contribute their money has no responsibility. As if to emphasize the point and flaunt the banner of limited government, Christie proudly said:

“I had a great five days with my children. I promised that.”

when the going gets tough, the rich and powerful go to Disney World.

When the Republicans abandon their posts, Partying while New Orleans drowns, for example, is more than simple misprision. Playing Nero when things burn or flood or get buried is an affirmation of core Republican values, amongst which is "every man for himself" when it comes to questioning the need to rescue the elderly, the helpless, the children from being cut off from food and medical care and a needed paycheck.

No, we can't afford it, quacks the gubernatorial duck and can't be bothered with it either, and besides, I need to ride the teacups and get my picture taken with Mickey Mouse.

We expect this. I'm a bit more surprised at the blog comments from the tea suckers and Republican Chia pets who seem to think the inability of a State that gets snow every year to deal with that snow well enough to ensure public safety, is something they can blame on President Obama. After all, the President also takes vacations. That's what we need to be angry about say the trolls.

I know. It's hard to follow such a stroke of stupid with any further comments. It sucks the air out of the room, but that's what we've become in America: a cesspool of non-sequitur and duplicity, vast and deep. A pit full of dogs tearing ourselves apart for the profit of others. We're able to absolve Bush of any criticism in setting an all time record for vacation days, including those care-free parties he attended, playing air guitar while New Orleans drowned, but Obama? That's different, the boy should have been out there with a shovel while Christie did his heckuva job on the water slide in Orlando. Hell it's his duty to keep his government hands out of our lives, isn't it?

Same old, same old Party

What's more disgusting than CNN giving copious air time to Florida Representative Connie Mack this morning so that he can continue to demand the firing or resignation of Tim Geithner for reasons of complicity in a no strings attached, unsupervised AIG bailout under Hank Paulson and the Bush administration? Why, it was natty, nasty and nefarious young Connie Mack himself. Representative Mack, in trying to pin the tail on the donkey, seems to have overlooked the fact that it's an elephant's tail and wants us to buy the notion that the AIG bonuses were not only Geithner's fault, but proof of the incompetance of President Obama in fixing the Republican train wreck. The spectacular smugfest of Republicans acting as though oversight of Wall Street was their idea is just that -- spectacular.

Asked pointedly and repeatedly on CNN this morning however, Mack refused to comment on whether Geithner or the Obama administration should attempt to recover the funds, repeating again and again that they never should have been given and asking what Geithner knew and when he knew it.

"Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster."

said Mack last Wednesday. Once again, CNN missed the opportunity to ask whether the huge disaster of the last 8 years was anyone outside the current administration's responsibility and whether the 8 years of mismanagement could reasonably be expected to have been rectified in a matter of weeks without the waste of a hundredth of a percent. Are we to have forgotten that the kind of oversight that would have prevented the mess was the devil himself to every Republican of the last several decades?

I have to recall however that the Republicans waited two months longer to declare the Obama Administration a failure and disaster than they did when Bill Clinton was elected. Some couldn't wait for him to actually take office to begin the disinformation, investigation and sabotage and what can we call this but sabotage as they offer no practical alternative other than to attack, attack and attack?

One can never hope for contrition from any Republican it seems, nor can anyone expect their cooperation in any attempt to deal with their failures and misdeeds. It's just hte Same Old Party and the Same Old Excuses.

Bobby Jingo

"We oppose the national Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and create jobs"

says Bobby Jindal, the Republicans' attempt to offer an alternative dark complexioned spokesman in an effort to portray the differences between the GOP of the last 30 years with the Democratic Party as a matter of well considered philosophy. Averring that the Republicans simply lost sight of some basic principle rather than having steadfastly and corruptly pursued policies that fail again and again and again in cataclysmic fashion is the deception most plausible of their current defenses, and so in taking virtually every penny of the funds offered to Louisiana while posing as an opposer of government investment, he follows the lead of the Governor of Alaska, sucking up the earmarked funds while bleating about Government excess.

I can't help but remember how the very purchase of Louisiana by Tax and Spend Jefferson was opposed by the conservative element on the same pretended principles, but if I pursued all the ironic elements of Republican posturing, I'd be at it for years.

At a time when even Ayn Rand disciples like Alan Greenspan have come around to the position that no, markets are not self regulating and that regulation is needed to keep free markets free, Bobby J's restatement of the same old unfounded and debunked "principles" are sounding more and more like the 450 pound diet guru lecturing you about healthy eating.

Some of the government spending that made our insignificant nation the most wealthy and powerful of all time, were, like the Louisiana Purchase, howled about in the same way as this stimulus package: the purchase of Alaska, the building of the Erie Canal and the national highway system. Whatever the merits of any individual element of the stimulus package may be, the administration is proposing to spend American money in America, not turning it to smoke and bloody sand in Iraq and those who supported the unprecedented squandering of our fortune have a lot of nerve posing as responsible leaders who simply let the steering wheel slip for a moment.

Going down slow

I have had my fun, if I never get well no more.
All my health is failin on me, oh yes, I'm goin down slow.

Please, write my mama, tell her the shape I'm in.
Please, write my old mother, tell her the shape I'm in.
Tell her to pray for me, forgive me for my sin.


-Howlin' Wolf-


Conservative financier though I may be, I'm always condemned as a Liberal by those whose ignorance, superstition and general malice has been packaged and sold as Conservatism. I'm also told that I'm cheering for America's defeat because I so often seem to be pointing to evidence that our current course will soon take us on the rocks. It wouldn't be at all surprising then if I were indeed gloating over the slow motion shipwreck that is sinking our financial institutions one by one, just as I've been predicting all these years, and for the very reasons I've given. I'm not, of course, gloating over all the suffering Republican preoccupations have been causing and will likely cause much more of. It would, I fear, take a disaster of gigantic proportions to wake them from their idiocies just enough to notice that we're not in prosperity any more. It's the rest of America that needs to know that we're taking on water faster than the pumps can handle and listing ever further to starboard. It's not Palin's daughter, it's not small town values, it's not Gay marriage, it's not selling oil leases off Florida - it's the economy, stupid. It's what the crooks and the gibbering Jeezmongers have done to the economy.

The credit crisis now has Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merril Lynch following on the heels of Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae while the universe of public and private debt expands on a cosmic scale. It's the economy, stupid and if it can be fixed at all after 8 years of Bush's Animal House party weekends, it won't be fixed by people who brag that ""The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should" and tell us he would rely on Greenspan while Greenspan is calling him a bungler. It won't be fixed by some corrupt small town mayor who doesn't actually know what Freddy Mac is or who owns it. and most of all it won't be fixed by candidates cramming freaky-fringe religious rubric down our throats and lying like unholy hell about what their positions were last week.

Flag pins won't save us, nor pledges nor patriotic songs, in fact the nitwit nationalism growing like a cancer in America is a part of the problem, but it's the economy and we are stupid, or preoccupied or afraid to admit just how deluded we have become since Reagan convinced all the idiots to vote Republican. They're still championing the same nonsense that blew the hole in our hull and they're still lying about what they said and did only months ago. The Republicans are still telling us it's all right, that the termite eaten structure of our economy is sound. To me it's a bit like telling the Titanic passengers that land is only three miles away -- straight down.

No, I'm not gloating, but if I'm dreaming that the earth will open up and swallow the people who perpetrated the sell-off of our birthright and our future, I think I can be forgiven.

It's the lies, dummy

It keeps rolling in. The latest was titled I never thought of that and perhaps that was an inadvertently apt title. The central theme, or gravamen of the argument, if you prefer, was that Obama has had only143 days of government experience and is therefore not qualified to be President. Now for my part, I think experience is vastly overrated, particularly when intelligence, education and integrity are balanced against it. After all Nixon was superbly qualified in the experience department and Goerge Bush certainly was the governor of a largish state.

But, of course the recurrent 143 day motif was designed to slip by unnoticed -- that is to say it was designed to be read by people who still haven't decided whether the Harvard review editor, University of Chicago Law instructor with two terms in the Illinois senate and about 3 1/2 years experience in the US senate, is more presidential than the proven liar, failed pilot and class dummy who got into school with political connections and never says the same thing twice. Such people are more likely to find only 143 days in 11 1/2 years or at least to be afraid to ask.

Of course as sheer idiocy it pales in comparison with another one by some "retired Marine" screaming about how Clinton got us into a war in Somalia and was too busy with Monica to retaliate against terrorists. Do I really have to explore this one?

Yes, these things are of dubious origin, but the speechwriters who created Sarah Palin's acceptance speech, entered it onto the teleprompter and coached her in it's delivery aren't any more honest, and the millions who thought it was wonderful aren't any more intelligent than those who pass along these e-mails.

"this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate"

slipped past the lipstick as smoothly as the clear water of an Alaskan stream over polished stones. It's a lie of course.

""Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights"

That's far more than hyperbole, far more than a lie, actually. Not to dwell too much on the fact that she also thinks God is plotting to destroy all life but that which subscribes to her religious belief, but there is a gulf of unsurpassed size between ignoring constitutional rights and civil liberties even for citizens, a gap as wide as the space between galaxies between years of torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial in secret prisons and the kidnapping of people because of rumors or similarity of name and "worry about reading them their rights."

Would this be an administration we could trust to be more honest and open than the Bush/Cheney lunigarchy? They're not off to a good start if they would like us to believe it. Smearing one's opponent with this kind of disregard to moral scruple and common decency makes the crapulous claims to piety and "values" reek all the more. I think we have to conclude that this is simply a would-be administration with no qualms about saying and doing whatever it needed to do to promote the Christian/industrial domination or our waning republic.

McCain's goals are nebulous. Palin's are obvious: no birth control, no abortion, no books sympathetic to homosexuals, no sex education, no paleontology, no geology (except for petroleum exploration) no evolution, no heresy, no social services, no subsidised medical care, no equality for people who don't fit in to her religious utopia. Her personal and official record of feeding at the public trough while posing as a cost-cutter is there for all of us to see.

Is it too much of an extrapolation to see in her cynicism about civil rights an affinity for domestic spying and torture, or contempt for freedom of speech, assembly and religion? It doesn't matter. She has so little qualification in terms of common decency, intelligence or even sanity anyway. In that respect she's a mirror for the Republicans.

Ignorance is strength

That was supposed to be an ironic and humorous warning when Orwell wrote it in his book 1984. Who would imagine that someone on the staff of the most popular news network on American TV actually said it in support of Sarah Palin's qualifications to be Vice President. Her ignorance of foreign policy is so profound that anything she does accomplish will be cheered. Crazy as Fox hardly covers it any more.

One has to wonder what Fox News would say if the Republicans decided to promote Bonzo the chimp as secretary of state. There' s no doubt they'd find a reason to be just overjoyed and dismayed at the farleftliberals who gagged at it.

There's not much difference actually in Steve Doocy's Fox News jaw dropper, which now seems to have been picked up as a standard talking point by Cindy and the Delegates, and talking up a Chimp as a cabinet member; although the chimp is far more likely not to lie to you than Old Straight Talk and his aging beauty queen who have been piling up lies to match the Tower of Babel in height and incomprehensibility.

Yes, Alaska is next door to Russia and that trumps that farleftliberal elitist stuff about intelligence and education and experience as far as these demented, deranged and dimwitted Republicans are concerned. We don't need brains, we don't need knowledge, all we need is fundamentalist doctrine and Jesus will wrap up the loose ends of our disaster when he comes back next week to kill the unbelievers.

Unbelievable -- and I don't want to play poker with anyone who can deliver that line with a straight face. Of course Alaska is right next to Canada too. Don't forget Santa Claus - he's up there too.

What will the story be when he appoints some skateboarder who dropped out of High School to the Supreme Court: he watched a lot of Judge Judy? Suddenly the treasonable partisan appointments of the Bush administration seem almost statesman like. What can I call it but treason? It's a deliberate attempt to destroy American values and constitutional government and as far as I'm concerned, the media morons who keep representing this outrage as a legitimate act by a legitimate candidate with a legitimate interest in the safety and prosperity and commitment to justice of the United States of America.

The answer is blowing in the windmills

What about gasoline at ten bucks a gallon; think that might change your life for the worse? Think again. Of course I'm not talking about a sudden rise from today's prices, I'm talking about what would have happened if the California Cowboy hadn't eviscerated Jimmy Carter's program to make us energy independent and we had used gasoline taxes to pay for new technology.

We should really be fed up with the way Republicans tell us that no example abroad ever applies to America as well as with the insistence that using energy faster and selling it cheaper is the way to ensure our future as a productive and prosperous nation. Let's, just for once, pull our collective heads out of Dick Cheney's rectum and look at some success stories elsewhere. let's look at Denmark.

Back when Carter was taking measures to remove the yoke of OPEC from around out necks, the Danes were getting 99% of their energy from the Middle East. They did something about it - we didn't. Instead we laughed at Carter, elected Reagan, and we're still importing oil and looking for more like there was no tomorrow. The Danes now import none. Their taxes and regulation spurred innovation, our aversion to it produced none. Their new technology produced jobs and profitable exports, we switched to driving big trucks.

Yes they have high energy taxes, but they are thriving which is in no small part the result of their clean-power industry that, according to Roger Friedman writing in the International Herald Tribune, is one of the most competitive in the world today and accounts for well over ten billion in exports -- not bad for a tiny country. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind while the United States derives only about 1 percent. They recycle waste heat from industry and derive electricity from trash and they did it all with strict government regulation and energy taxes. Now before you launch into an eruption of Republican dogma about government interference and the holiness of Tax-free borderline anarchy, it's been a financial bonanza for the Danes. Their unemployment rate is 1.6% and ours is fast approaching 6%

"We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income - so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy."

says Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen. I'm willing to bet he won't have to put up with the kind of minstrel show financed with oil bucks that we have to endure, or with sneering snarling and slithering candidates and Republican-owned news media squealing like pigs about tire gauges either. I'm also willing to bet that when the crumbled remains of the United States finally does attempt to do something about that nasty, festering cut on our Achilles heel we'll be buying the technology from Denmark and China -- if we can afford it.

Singing the blues

Blues fallin' down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin' me

There's a hellhound on my trail

Hellhound on my trail

-Robert Johnson-

You'd think there was nothing going on if all your news came from CNN. Nothing but a rather polite discourse between the presidential candidates being promoted as a gladiatorial combat to the death. There may not be a 400 pound gorilla in the room, but that big thing with the antlers around the corner isn't Bullwinkle, it's Stagflation and the Supply Side prestidigitators are hoping the beast won't go on a rampage before November so they can blame it on "tax and spend" Democrats.

Of course the people who have been preaching the wisdom of the invisible hand have been the first to hop into the maelstrom with rebates and handouts and rate cuts trying to keep it all from going down the drains, but I'm afraid that once the chain is pulled, the toilet will flush and nobody can stop it.

Has nobody noticed that February was the fourth consecutive down month for stock indices? Profit estimates are lower, Losses higher, unemployment creeping upwards. Nine of 10 industries in the S&P 500 declined after reports showed the U.S. economy grew less in the fourth quarter than economists forecast and business activity fell to the lowest since 2001. Reports due next week are expected to show further contraction and higher unemployment. The Fed is likely to cut interest rates further and this has pulled the rug out from under the Dollar while the government spends and spends and borrows from the Chinese to do it. Large tracts of brand new houses sit empty like ghost towns. Homeowners are walking away and leaving their houses to the banks and banks are foreclosing at record rates. Boat builders are closing plants as the debt-ridden middle class has had to forgo such luxuries as boats and recreational vehicles. Consumers aren't confident and the rate cuts aren't helping. There will be bank failures, said Bernanke to Congress on Thursday.

Deja vu? All over again. Are we looking at another decade or so of big league inflation to pay for Bush's war - or longer if McCain keeps us there for the rest of the century? Some are predicting a recovery later this year, but then they always have seen prosperity around the corner. Many however, see inflation rising and a panicked return to high interest rates to counter it while the economy stagnates, bringing back those old stagflation blues to trickle down on us like hail.