Debtors Prison

It's hard to express how infuriating the whole "debt ceiling" nonsense is.

Partially because it's even a thing, like there's an option to just decide to not pay your bills (which is what this is - it's not about spending, it's about paying off what's been allocated and spent) for you or me or Sears Roebuck. The whole idea is idiotic and should have been taken out behind the shed and shot decades ago.

But mostly because it's just another (stop me if you've heard this before...) way for fucking wingnuts to fuck around without finding out.

The stuff they're demanding or they'll shoot the hostage - things like cutting poor people off welfare and cutting vet's benefits - are massively unpopular. If they tried that shit in Congress the usual way they'd get crucified - even in the popular press where idiotic trashfires like the NYT and CNN will usually just vomit up Republican talking points - before they got out the committee room door.

So they're pulling this shit.

As I keep saying; they're cultist loons. They don't care. If they can't have it their way, they'll burn it down.

You'll note what's NOT on the table, right?

Reversing decades of plutocrat-fluffing "tax cuts"?

Yeah.

Because damn near everybody in US politics - outside the Bernie and AOC "looney left" - loves handing cash to billionaires the way Empty-G loves some CrossFit stud groping for trout in her peculiar river.

(Look that one up..!)

But the same idiotic press is pimping this as "negotiations" and bothsidsing the hell out of it. The Biden Administration looks like they're too scared to tell the wingnut terrorists to fuck off and die in a hole. They'll cave, the idiot public will blame them and elect MORE wingnuts...so we're going to end up right where the wingnuts want us. Poorer. Smaller. Weaker. Stupider. Closer to the plutocratic Christopathy they crave.

All because We the People have been sitting on our hands while these people beaver away rolling back everything our parents and grandparents fought for since the First Gilded Age.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

Update 6/1/23: So the Wolves of Wall Street got nervous that their Congressional sock-puppets were going to do something stupid and called them off. As Charlie Pierce noted,

"As soon as Wall Street and the financial elite started getting publicly nervous about the possibility of a default, both Kevin McCarthy and, to a lesser extent, Joe Biden, were painted into a corner. All bluffs were not just called, but they were effectively dispatched into an alternate reality, a kind of political phantom zone. The money power was the only thing in this particular reality that was, well, real."

So we're not going to have to find out how to catch and eat starlings before midsummer, so I suppose that's fine.

That said, there's little respite in knowing that the lives and fortunes and sacred honor of countless millions of citizens of this country mean nothing to the vandals.

But their plutocratic masters whims?

To finish with Pierce again:

"In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise."

Cold comfort if comfort it is.

 

 

Die Braunen Battalionen

 

One year on, a reminder.

These people, and millions more like them, were not joking and were not playing. They intended to seize power by force. If you got in their way they were perfectly willing to kill you.

They are still there. They still want the same things.

And their "leaders" - the suit-and-tie-or-power-pumps sockpuppets like Greene and Cawthorne and Cotton and, or course, Trump himself - are happy to use the levers of power to please them while ruling the rest of us with as much of an iron hand as they can.

I have absolutely no idea 1) how you deal with these people - they don't want to play nice or compromise or "govern" with us; they want us silent and, if not silent, dead - or 2) how, in fact, you "govern" a democratic republic with them there.

I wish I had more optimism about this. I wish I thought that the wingnut right was just posturing.

I don't think that. I think that in less than a year they will pull all the levers they tried in 2020, and I think they'll succeed, and I think that, just as it worked in Germany in 1933, it will work again. 

And once these new "conservatives" take power they will not let it go.

So those of us who are not of their faction and who are their enemies will be presented with a horrible choice; fight them as they deploy all the power of the State, or let them have their will with us.

And that, frankly, is simply a choice between dying on our feet, or on our knees.

Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

An Open Letter to the 45th President of the United States

Look, I know you have the attention span of a housefly, but try to follow along, K? I'll keep it as simple as you are.

Here's what Americans do to Nazis:

That's pretty clear, isn't it?

It used to be a bar that you had to clear to get elected here in this goddamn country; don't be a Nazi, don't be a commie. Sadly, you could be racist, sexist, and xenophobic as all hell, but you at least had to clear that low bar.

So.

As the fucking President of the United States, here's what it's your job to do.

You put your ginormous orange gob in front of the teevee cameras and say this:

"Don't be a Nazi. Fuck "alt-right" and "white pride"; that shit's being a Nazi. Don't be a Nazi. Don't talk like a Nazi. Don't act like a Nazi. Don't hang out with Nazis. Nazis are evil. We killed shitloads of Nazis, there was a whole war and everything. If you talk like and act like and hang out with Nazis you are fucking evil. As your President, I hate Nazi scum and everything they stand for and I recommend you do, too."

See? Wasn't that easy?

But you won't say that.

Ever.

Because you can't. Because you know these Nazi shitpokes are your shitpokes, the ones who elected you, the only ones who still have your back after eight months of solid derp, the ones think you're doing such a great job, the very best job. Because you're a worthless goddamn orange oxygen-thief who should never have been trusted with anything more important than the menu choices at the Trump Tower grill.

But I'm leaving this here in hopes that somehow the Wizard figures out how to give you a heart, a brain, and some courage enough for you to act like a president of, y'know, the United Fucking States...

Lemme know when that happens.

I won't be holding my breath.

The Law in its Impartial Majesty

Way back in January of this year I wrote:

"I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

It was a good idea at the time that looks even better now.

And I also said at the time:

"I will make two predictions now, and remember them;

These people will pay no price for their treason, and

We, the rest of us, will rue that we did not crush this seditious villainy when it was but small and could be crushed.

The law should have been pressed on the Bundys and was not. The law will not be brought to bear on these swine. Instead they will walk away, boasting, and the poison they bear will spread."

And so it will.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm fucking right.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

It appears tonight that at least part of the armed seditionists and traitors in arms are dead or in federal custody.

Good.

Hopefully the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the remainder will follow swiftly.

Because these people are not simply traitors. They are madmen and idiots who would invoke their insane concept of "common law" to destroy our republic for their own benefit. It is also worth noting that the shootout and arrests occurred as the traitors-in-arms were on the road to spread their treason to neighboring Grant County, Oregon, where the county sheriff is another whackadoodle seditionist and wanna-be sovereign-fucking-citizen.

My only regret is that they will not, as they should be, as their predecessor traitors typically were, speedily and publicly hung as a warning to those who are tempted to follow in their path; thus perish all traitors.

Because in order to not lose the Whiskey Rebellion, as Bill Sherman said; fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Joo keep using dat word...

From Sunday's edition of the World's Worst Newspaper:

So. Let's see. "Free federal lands" is Oregonianspeak for these douchenozzles' expressed intention; "take what public land we want, pay nothing for it, and we have guns, so, freedom!"

What a shock!

It turns out that a group of armed traitors to their government believes that their "...government has no constitutional authority to hold vast land tracts" and, instead, think that "freeing" these lands means that they should be able to take them for themselves and do with them what they want.

Free the lands!

Well, okay, free them until I can take them, fence them, and run my cattle all over them.

But oh, you whacky Oregonian editors and your "free"! Are you joshing me, you pranksters, or do you really think that "free" means what these goddamn traitors say it means? Next thing you know you'll be expecting me to believe that "free" means what the North American Man-Boy Love Association says it means; that men should be free to poke young lads up the backside!

Free!

What's infuriating about this - beyond confirming the overall spinelessness of the response to this fucking armed insurrection - is the World's Worst Newspaper being a willing accomplice to these traitors' vomiting their nonsense all over the public record.

The only remotely-nice thing about Oregon's Paper of Record bending over for the Bundy Bandidos like a debutante at a NAMBLA key-drop party is that it allowed my own personal favorite Oregonian Ursula LeGuin to come out swinging her Big Battle Axe of Fuck Your Stupid Bullshit and lop off the empty gourd that this idiot Payne uses to keep his cowboy hat off his shoulders:

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren't trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can't go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That's what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn't belong to and who don't belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens. Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They're suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders. Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn't The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?

Get some, Ursula!

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns & Money has some more on this, but for Oregon's only daily newspaper to act as the butt-trumpet for these fetid droppings of the Right Wing fever swamps is unacceptable and beyond a mockery of journalism. But that's why it's the World's Worst Newspaper, after all.

Meanwhile, we're still fucking losing the fucking Whiskey Fucking Rebellion.

Dare call it treason

I was genuinely surprised yesterday at the incandescence of my anger when I read about the rebel militia seizing the Malheur NWR headquarters building.

Partly, I suspect, because that lonely stone structure has many fond memories associated with it. It is a "desert oasis", disproportionately attractive to the passerine migrant through the deserts of Malheur County. The notion of a passel of gunlicking Tenther rebels lolling about the place where I whiled many happy hours birding was infuriating, to be sure.

But the most part is the degree to which none seem to dare call these treasonous bastards what they are.

Traitors.

Worse; traitors in arms. They fulfill perfectly the definition of the enemies I swore to defend the Constitution of my nation from, foreign and domestic; defying the laws and regulations of the duly-elected government of the United States and bearing arms against the officers of the same.

For a mad moment I wanted - wanted so badly that it made my throat tighten - to take up my old rifle and rise on my bad leg and hobble down to the federal courthouse in Portland city and volunteer to follow the colors out to the sagebrush wastes south of Burns to shoot down the traitorous enemies of my country. Suddenly I understood how so many other men stood up in 1861 to do the same. The hatred and loathing of these rebel traitors burns within me still, banked but glowing like a balefire in the night.

The news agencies, the current crop of candidates, Oregon politicians...they need to call this what it is. It is black, dirty treason; rebellion in arms against our nation, and I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

Losing the Whisky Rebellion

One of the more irritating ammosexual traits is their man-crush on fucking Tenthers and "sovereign citizens" and the other assorted douchenozzles that populate the far-right wing of the anti-government crowd.

The last time we saw this was when welfare rancher Cliven Bundy got all rampant about not paying his fucking debts and a crowd of Second Amendment jihadis showed up at his moochateria to face down the Feds.

The really fucking irking part about that was that it worked. Bundy's young welfare-buck ass stayed out of the sneezer and the Federal claws stayed out of his wallet and the guntards walked away with a swagger and the win.

And now they're at it again, out in the lesser-paved part of my own state.

Largely because, in my biased opinion, the Feds punked out at the Bundy crib. Here's one of the fucking rebels in arms talking about how their jihad would have succeeded had the Feds tried to enforce the law:

"We had counter-sniper positions on their sniper positions. We had at least one guy—sometimes two guys—per BLM agent in there," Payne told a Montana weekly, the Independent. "If they made one wrong move, every single BLM agent in that camp would've died."

Nice. You do that in a black ski mask, Abdul, and Donald Trump is gonna carpet bomb your and your whole family's asses. But do it with a "Don't Tread On Me" flag and you're a GOP Congressman.

What a goddamn mess.

Anyway, the point is that, while irritating, this is nothing new. It's happened before, back in the early days of the Republic. And the then-leader of the Federal government knew precisely how to deal with this sort of fucking idiot:

"Washington organized a militia force of 12,950 men and led them towards Western Pennsylvania, warning locals "not to abet, aid, or comfort the Insurgents aforesaid, as they will answer the contrary at their peril."

Now THAT's the way you deal with fucking Bundys.

That's how the Feds should have dealt with the last one. And how they should deal with these newest Oregon ones, too.

So far no Federal agencies have done anything about the Oregon rebels, and I have no idea whether, or how, they plan to deal with them. But I can at the very least give them one little bit of helpful advice.

The First Rule of Keeping a Republic: Don't Lose the Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

The Second Rule?

If You Want To Be A Good Citizen, Don't Start The Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Honestly. These fucking people...

Climate Change for Dummies

One thing that makes me despair for my species is the appallingly chasm-like abyss of derp that you encounter whenever you say the words "climate change".

I mean, yes, it's a science. But it's not fucking rocket science.

What's the one single thing that we hairless monkeys have been doing more than anything else since the end of the Neolithic?

No, not screwing. We've been doing that forever and will continue so long as we have teensy tinsy little stupid-brains in our genitals, sort of like the ones that the big therapods had in their butts to help control their back ends. Except the genital tillermen and -women are usually busy driving us into a freaking tree in pursuit of each other instead of doing anything helpful. But that's beside the point.

No. We've been making stuff. Bronze axeheads. Iron plowshares. Steam engines. Cotton gins. Battleships. Nuclear power plants.

All this making means burning dead things. Wood. Coal. Petroleum. All that burning shoves gases and particulates into the air.

And we know what that does. We've seen it on Venus, where the gas blanket is so thick that it traps solar heating like a big ol' duvet.

So it's not some sort of wild speculation or conspiracy theory to draw the line from A to B to C; more industry = more gases = more insulation = more heat.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this extra heat could be a bad thing. Hell, even my old boss the Green Machine is worried. In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the authors said:

"Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.

These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Note the verb. "Poses". Not "might pose" or "could pose" or "fuck NOAA, this climate change stuff is a bunch of libtard hooey..." "Poses"; pose pōz/verb
3rd person present: poses

1. present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).
"the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area"
synonyms: constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be
"pollution poses a threat to health".

So. I go to my Facebook page and I find a post from a friend of mine. Great gal, Olympic athlete, mom, artist...and a pretty smart person. And she's got a link from "PragerU" talking about how climate change isn't a real - not a REALLY real - problem and, besides, "doing something" would be SOOOO expensive. "Will the enormous cost justify the gain?" is their tagline.

That's pretty much where I facepalmed. PragerFuckingU. Gah. Have you ever encountered those idiots?

SweetFuckingBabyJesusonaStick you've never seen drool-puddle-stupid until you've seen one of the videos these drooling stupids produce. They're supposed to present topics from a "conservative" point of view, "conservative" meaning, apparently, "the condition the human brain assumes when all the little brain cells have been herded onto cattle trucks and transported to extermination camps where they are dosed with ZyklonB in the brain showers..." but all they manage to do is make "conservatives" look "fucking stupid" by reducing complex topics to a word salad of conservative talking points, bad arguments, and outright lies.

Here's an article from something called The Blaze which is, so far as I can tell, some sort of wingnut website that luurves them some PragerU (Prager, BTW, is one Dennis Prager, a wingnut radio shouter before branching out into dubious "educational" schemes).

The article tries to make this "PragerU" sound full of awesomesauce but, instead, ends up making the wingut radio-shouter moron sound like...well, a wingnut radio-shouter moron. Here's the article citing the wingnut radio-shouter moron on foreign affairs;

“The people who try to make the Middle Eastern conflict complex have an agenda,” he said, giving just one example (see the condensed Middle Eastern lesson, below)."

Complex? Pshaw! Saddle up, l'il buckaroo, and let's ride through hundreds of years of migration, religious coexistence and conflict, resource allocation, consuption, and disputation, Mongol invasions, Ottoman rule, European colonial highjinks, and four Israeli-Arab wars - in just five minutes!

Yes. Somebody has an agenda here...but more'n likely it's the wingnut radio-shouter moron who thinks that you can "teach" the Middle East in five minutes.

That's "PragerU" and that's what my smart, dynamic, engaged friend thinks is a valid "take" on climate change. I've tried to expose Prager to her, I've tried to show her the science...and she won't go there. "I'm not convinced." she says. "What about "Climategate"? What about this? What about that?", throwing every wingnut talking point smokescreen out at me. She just. Won't. Budge.

And that's reeeeally depressing. Because she's a relatively "high-information" Republican sort of voter. She reflexively hates Clinton but is smart enough to recognize the passengers in the Republican clown car as three rings full of liars, fools, charlatans, and whackaloons. She's very religious but not self-righteous about it. She's usually pretty good people...but she's buying this and - I can't imagine any other reason other than - its because the wingnuts and Christopaths are yammering about it.

So this strikes me as pure tribalism. And if the Clown Clan can pull my friend into their Clubhouse of Bottomless Derp...what the hell can the rest of us do? There's enough of these people to jam things up enough, long enough, until we're all dog-paddling around Manhattan.

And then what..?