Tag: Politics

Posted on

Dear Mr. Romney

[politics below the break]

Thank you for your application for the position of President of the United States. We looked over your references and materials, and we regret to inform you that we have opted to retain the services of the current holder of that position. We wish you luck in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,
-The American People

PS: You’re kind of a douche.

PPS: Tell your running mate that you’re supposed to read Ayn Rand as a kid, go through a brief delusional phase, and then get over it.

PPPS: Really, dude. Kind of a douche.

Share This Post

Posted on

Scratching my political itch

I’ll get this bile out of my system below the break:

:: Matthew Yglesias today:

Lots of rich-guy pathos on display outside the gates of a big GOP fundraiser in the Hamptons, but I thought this was the most telling remark about the state of things in 2012:

“It’s not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine,” Michael Zambrelli said as the couple waited in their SUV for clearance into the Creeks shortly after the candidate’s motorcade flew by and entered the pine-tree lined estate.

I’m not much of a car guy, but the way I understand this metaphor to work is that if you want to give rich people credit for being “the engine of the economy” then if the economy is performing subpar it follows that something’s wrong with your engine. And yet I suspect Zambrelli wouldn’t take kindly to that diagnosis.

But what’s really galling is the absurd level of self-regard among the winners in the modern American meritocracy. It’s completely true that many wealthy individuals garnered their wealth by developing useful products or devising useful approaches to management. But take a guy like Anthony Scarmucci, one of Mitt Romney’s national finance co-chairs. His stock in trade is ripping off successful-but-not-mega-rich professionals with a “fund of funds” business model in which management fees eat away all your investment gains. Taking advantage of the existence of suckers is a perfectly legal way to make money. In a world where Gilbert Arenas is paid $20 million, why shouldn’t a clever investment manager be able to find ways to skim off people’s hard earned savings? But skill at making money is just that—skill at making money. It’s not evidence that you possess a unique economy-powering genius without which the rest of us would all be paupers.

Exactly right. I’m getting awfully tired of the notion that people who have made lots of money doing various things are somehow people of whom the rest of us should show reverential respect, in hopes of keeping their mojo as ‘job creators’ intact. Frankly, the history of the United States in the last fifty years is, to a great extent, the story of a country making things consistently, almost relentlessly, easier for its richest segment…and yet we still see an economy that is still prone to boom-to-bust-to-boom cycles that seem to happen with no causal relation to whenever the most recent round of big tax cuts handed down happened to transpire.

Screw the rich, and screw the ‘job creators’. All this soaking-of-the-rich and waiting for them to toss it down upon us like manna from heaven is producing some pretty crappy results, so why not try something else?

Share This Post

Posted on

Delusions of Electibility

Seen on Facebook earlier:

AT LAST!!! Newt Gingrich drops out, so now it’s down to Romney versus RON PAUL! Let the Revolution begin!!!!!

Of course, this same fellow is a 9-11 Truther, a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist, and apparently a believer that you can somehow declare yourself a ‘sovereign citizen’ in order to get yourself out of various legal troubles. In short, your typical Ron Paul supporter!

Share This Post

Posted on

A random opinion

I have to admit, folks, that I am entirely simpatico with the things that motivate the “Occupy” folks. I loathe the corporatization of America, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society, the notion that this concentration is a good thing that will one day lead to prosperity for everybody, the notion that increasing taxes on this crowd one penny in the hopes of making certain aspects of life easier for the rest of us somehow represents a deeply immoral encroachment upon some perverted definition of ‘freedom’, and all the Ayn Rand bullshit that has led to this.

What I simply don’t understand is how spending week upon week camping in the middle of a city is going to somehow translate into any kind of societal change or shift in public policy. Can someone connect these dots for me, please?

(And lest anyone misread this, I’m questioning the Occupy movement’s goals and strategies here, and not endorsing the rather terrifying police actions against them. I’m very much disturbed by the idea that municipal police forces are morphing into municipal armed forces.)

Share This Post

Posted on

Who are we?

Political comment below the fold….

This, I am afraid, is what our country now is.

We don’t welcome the world’s oppressed who are seeking freedom; no, we’re all about shutting the borders and denying freedom to those already here. We’re Pepper Spray Nation now, when a cop can just casually walk back and forth pepper spraying peacefully-gathered activists as calmly as if he was walking his dog.

And anyone thinking, as apparently does FOX News idiot Megyn Kelly, that pepper spray is benign stuff because hey, it’s made of pepper, let this article disabuse you of that notion.

This is a chemical designed to repel humans by causing them intense misery and pain and discomfort. Hmmm…the key word there is chemical. I’m pretty sure we took a dim view, ten years or so ago, of governments that used chemicals on their own citizens. I wonder why we’ve decided otherwise now that it’s just those dirty hippies who we’re spraying.

I dunno…I just have zero idea what kind of country we are anymore. We don’t believe in providing healthcare to all citizens, and we instead believe that it’s OK for most people to be one serious health crisis away from utter disaster. We don’t believe that government spending can create jobs and help stave off economic calamity, but we do believe that when the military wants to close a base or two, it’s time to demonstrate because of the jobs. And we don’t believe in governments quashing protests in other countries, but here, it’s just fine.

Just who the hell are we, anyway? I wish I knew.

Share This Post

Posted on

Occupations

Kevin Drum has a great post on Occupy Wall Street. Here’s the money shot:

None of this is easy. But the truth is that it’s increasingly impossible to sell people transparently self-promoting fairy tales that plainly don’t reflect how the real world works. If you want them to believe that hard work and discipline are important, then hard work and discipline have to really be important. Not just modestly helpful. Not mere drops compared to the obviously undeserved piles of so many of the super rich. If we want people to believe, we have to believe too. We have to believe that America should be a country where everyone prospers, not just the cognitive elite and the super lucky. Until we all believe this — until conservatives believe this — the notions of responsibility and discipline that conservatives talk about so much are probably going to continue fading. In recent decades they’ve simply dedicated too much of their lives and too much of their energy to patent unfairness to be surprised any longer that belief in being fairly rewarded is on the wane.

That’s the lesson of Occupy Wall Street.

Read the whole thing.

Share This Post

Posted on

Stop the Scourge!

It’s Election Day all across America, folks, so remember to vote and to also do your best to help prevent the horrors of VOTER FRAUD by staying vigilant at all times! Keep an eye on shifty-looking brown people who may be trying to vote twice. Take it into your own hands to demand that such folks present two (2) forms of photo identification, and if they can’t, well, you just go ahead and intimidate the shit out of ’em! We can’t be too careful, and the threat to Democracy and Life As We Know It is ETERNAL!

On a less facetious note, today in Erie County we hopefully elect a new County Executive, after four years of near-dictatorial government by Chris Collins, a fellow who ran four years ago on that most idiotic of platforms, a promise to “run government like a business”. As I wrote in a comment on Alan Bedenko’s blog:

One question that keeps coming to mind every year around election time, in my mind, is this: when did “running government like a business” become a desirable idea, and on what basis did it become so? When did “running a business” become synonymous with notions of competence, fair play, rewarding merit, and a general notion of a streamlined operation as opposed to a bureaucracy? I’ve seen lots of businesses — successful ones, even, if a business is to be judged successful by the only metric that seems to make sense to Americans anymore, i.e., whether it makes money — that are run in PRECISELY the way that Collins has run his state government. Businesses run by dictatorial fiat, businesses run by favoritism, businesses that are as listlessly bureaucratic in their customer interactions as any DMV office in the country — they’re out there. Chris Collins HAS run the government like a business, and that’s the problem.

I’ve never understood the American fetishizing of “business”, as if to run one is to have done what is Best In Life. Nor have I ever understood the notion that running a business somehow makes one qualified to influence a vast area of public policy.

Bill Altreuter wrote scathingly several days ago about Chris Collins himself:

I find that I have not been particularly critical of Erie County Executive Chris Collins in these pages, (although I was probably critical enough, in some sense). Please allow me to rectify this omission: Chris Collins has been exactly the sort of small-minded creep he promised to be when he ran for the job, and now that he has had four years to prove it only two sorts of people should consider voting for him. Those would be people who are, like Collins, so rich that they are completely disconnected from reality; or people, like Collins, who are narrow-minded bullies who believe that narrow-minded bullying is a valid philosophy of government.

[good graf containing specifics of Collins’s crappy governing snipped, but worth reading…follow the link!]
He’s a bad guy, is what I’m saying. This Tuesday we have a chance to stand up to a bully, and I am looking forward to it, but not just because it is a chance to vote against someone so despicable. In his time as Comptroller Mark Poloncarz has demonstrated time and again that he is an honest, hard working guy who appears to be, in almost every respect, the anti-Collins. It will be a pleasure to vote for him.

That about sums it up.
 
(And as a bonus quote, you can’t get too much more illustrative of the perverse nature of Libertarianism than this, from the same comment thread on Alan’s blog linked above:
 

Perhaps if Greece falls, leading to Italy and France next, the economic meltdown will totally engulf our country, setting up the conditions that appear to be necessary for people to regain their sanity regarding the proper role of government. Yes, that will lead to extreme hardship and pain for many people, but that seems to be the only way we are ever going to set up a decent future for the younger generation.

A worldwide depression? If it makes everybody suddenly decide that we need to trust our fates to the same free markets that have screwed us for years already, Huzzah! Viva la Ayn Rand! Wow.)

Get out and vote, people. For liberals and Democrats, preferrably.

Share This Post

Posted on

The Big Dog speaks

If I could have one hour to spend one-on-one with any single living person, I think I would choose Bill Clinton. This piece, relating a discussion the former President had with British historian Simon Schama, is fascinating. A taste:

“So, Mr President,” I say, “Do you really think America has what it takes to get out of this deep hole?” He shifts his chair closer to me. “I’ll give you an honest answer. I’m absolutely confident we have what it takes. But I’m more worried now than I have been for many many years … because we have both a short-term crisis of horrible unemployment and long-term issues about education, healthcare and tilting the economy a little more to production. But here’s what I know … People have been betting against America for 200 years – it’s a maddening country – and they all wound up losing money. They said Washington was a mediocre surveyor with a set of false teeth; on the way to his inauguration an Illinois newspaper said that Abraham Lincoln was a baboon, he’ll ruin the country … Khrushchev said he’d bury us, the Japanese in the 1980s were going to bury us too.”

But, and something like a sigh escapes the optimist – “this is a different sort of challenge. It’s short-term and long-term, it’s complicated and we need a narrative that allows people to buy into America. The best I can do is tell you that what works in the modern world is different from what works in politics. When I’m asked what’s the one thing I’m proudest of, it was moving a hundred times as many people from poverty into the middle class as in the previous 12 years, because that was clearly the product of economic policy. That’s what this country is all about; the idea that if you work hard and you’re an honourable person you get a chance to live your dream and give your children a chance to chase it.”

God, I wish he was still President.

Share This Post