Here Come the Teabaggers

Not to mention things like this. As always, don’t read the comment section with anything sharp around. :)

Koch Industries has finally managed to manufacture what looks like a grass-roots uprising to mask its own activities. They couldn’t manage this with the Birch Soc because they didn’t have Fox.

Democrats rail against the abuses of Bush and the Republicans yet we expect Obama to behave the same. We confuse the president with Santa Claus. If we don’t start taking deep breaths and voting for what might at least be tolerable trending to mildly good we will end up with the unthinkable. If they win this time it will be years before we can ever lift the stranglehold the least tiny bit – if ever. I hate a lot of what’s gone on but it still beats the alternative. And that’s not choosing the lesser of two evils, that’s choosing the one which is less evil than the other by orders of magnitude.

We always knew that Obama was a cool, centrist kind of guy. Why should we be surprised when he tries to govern that way? And look what has been accomplished. My union health fund is already folding in some of his reforms ahead of time. Meanwhile, the insurance companies stand on the side salivating at the prospect of rolling back even these first baby steps on the way to reform.

If the Repugs take either or both houses, I expect to spend at least 10% of my time (likely more) responding to insane document demands from Inhofe, Issa and similar life forms.

Your tax dollars at work.

This is why I think a double dip recession is pretty much a guarantee before all is said and done. Expect to see unemployment climb to at least 12% before the 2012 elections (with real unemployment at about 25-30% and adding in underemployment something closer to 40%). In an ironic way this may help Obama gain reelection, but for the rest of us it’s going to suck balls.

@Benedick: Actually, I confuse the president with the candidate.

Large amounts of money poured into unimaginable reserves of stupidity will fuck you over every time.

@nojo: I should think he’s pretty nostalgic for that guy too.

Just saw the Joan Rivers bio A Piece of Work which is well worth going to see. She’s terrifying and hilarious, as is expected. And so desperately driven one wants to make her a cup of cocoa. Good movie.

@Serolf Divad: Jobs are still moving offshore. Real unemployment will probably rise to 50% over the next 10 years and tens of millions of hard-core, second-generation un- and under-employed will be sucked into neonazi movements directed by industrialists like the Kochs and psythopathic opportunists like Beck and Palin. Possibly 40% of Americans will return to a hunter-gather existence in a generation and regional civil wars will keep the US armed forces and UN peacekeeping forces busy for 2-3 generations. The cities will fall into complete chaos when the heat destroys the crops and environmental conditions exceed the specifications required by Monsanto-engineered seeds, leaving farms unable to recover. America will be broken up into regions ruled by neonazi warlords aligned with mega churches and their tyrannical leaders and what’s left of repatriated armed forces and stranded UN peacekeeping troops.

@FlyingChainSaw: But apart from that how do you see things going?

All the talk about how the economy is so profoundly shitty, while true, presupposes that it was a bed of roses before. I mean, it was a massive, multivariate shell game — subprime mortgages, reverse mortgages, rising tuition, rising health care costs, WalMarting of the marketplace and workforce, and so on.

All the people who went Galt in the last two years forgot (or fail to accept) that we were in a Randian paradise for about six years after NEVER FORGET. Corporations ran the show. People gambled their savings for a shot at the big money and fabulous prizes — and often lost. Why should we invade that country over there, which did nothing to us? BECAUSE WE CAN.

And we are supposed to be shocked at a report that teabaggers would subpoena the White House to death. Hardly.

@Benedick: I saw her one-woman show at the Geffen a couple of years ago. I loved it. My wife hated it.

@Walking Still: I think “life forms” is inaccurate.

@chicago bureau: Massive export of jobs started during Reagan and really accelerated in earnest under Clinton. Domestically, Wall Street promoted shell games, trashy Internet companies and M&A gaming of existing industries that all relied on the same scam: export all the jobs to a slave state where unions are illegal and send all the recaptured expenditures to the executive suite. The neonazis who gathered on the mall would have been third generation chromers, machinists or assembly line technicians whose jobs are now done by slaves of the PRC for $1 a week for which they have to profess gratitude or face a firing squad. Instead of being on their boat on the lake for the weekend with their kids, they’re trading their food stamps for marijuana at neonazi gun shows and listening to Koch Bros-funded activists describe the crimes of the Kenyan Usurper and encouraging them to read the Turner Diaries! Ha! Hahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

@FlyingChainSaw: Hmm. You’re motivating me to fill out the “Do You Qualify to Become a Kiwi” form on the New Zealand immigration website…

@SanFranLefty: When I lived there, they were looking for accountants. While ago, though. Check the occupational shares listings with the Labor department and it’ll tell what to fill in.

And unless I am dreaming, The Hill has declined to publish my comment, which I reprint for you here:

Sadly, there will always be that 22-26 percent (the same people who thought Bush was doing a fine job) who can be scared into voting for a Virginia Foxx, a David Vitter, a Louie Gohmert. And you can’t reach them. You can dump a metric ton of facts on a conservative – here’s how the GOP is trashing the country, here’s how the conservatives are taking your rights away – and they won’t hear you. Give them a few catchphrases – “Death Panels! Socialist! Kenyan usurper! – and they will pull the lever against their own interests every time. This is why this country, and probably our species, is finished. If we don’t get going on climate change, worldwide with the U.S. leading the way, it’s over folks. But the GOP will stop sensible reforms even as our farms fail and our citizens bake or drown. Oh well – we had a pretty good run.

@FlyingChainSaw: Yes. It started when Greenspan Became God.

@all — Yeah, Ronnie setting the bullshit in motion was a given. As was Rand’s poolboy, Greenspan.

@FlyingChainSaw: While my OCD-ness borders on Aspie level of detail, I really don’t think I could be an accountant. Nurse? English teacher? I’m sure they don’t need attorneys in NZ…

@FlyingChainSaw: FWIW and for shits and giggles, here’s the list of Essential Skills in Demand in New Zealand.

@Dodgerblue: I thought her Palladium show was dazzling.

@FlyingChainSaw: This is why I hate Clinton, all Clintons, more than I hate Reagan and Bush. Clinton was 100% in on the “globalization” thingy, which term is nothing but a propaganda term, referring to dissolving the trade barriers which allowed the complete shutdown and exportation of US manufacturing. As the real jobs, making real products, producing real value, were all exported overseas, Clinton made fucking embarrassing speaches about retraining the US workforce to work in the “information industry,” which I think means call centers, maybe writing code, but both of those things got exported too, there is nothing left for working people now but flipping burgers for the people who mow the lawns of the people who make their money playing money games (thats the “financial industry”).

I now wish, I now wish so badly, that the insane loon Ross Perot won, hell, he was no loon, he got the reputation for lunacy in one of the most time-honored ways, by speaking truth during a time when the rest of society had gone insane. That huge sucking sound, he said, of our jobs disappearing, yup, he was right.

And the reason Clinton is so awful, so horrible, so horrendous, is, he gave up, gave in, gave over to international finance, screwed, fucked, and destroyed the american working class, and what did he even get for it? Nothing but his own fucking presidency. He set the mode for “democratic compromise,” give up everything, completely capitulate, and then get nothing whatsoever in return. Oh, except for your own presidency, your re-election. He traded the US manufacturing economy and the jobs of every worker in the manufacturing sector, for what? For his own glory, his own political career, he got nothing else, nothing else whatsoever for selling out 100 million people.

Fucking shitstain of a human being.

BTW: if you wondered where the not-GZ-not-mosque opponents got the idea that there are religious wackos running around trying to install their own law, I give you this. I think that’s what Beckerhead and co. want to “restore America” to…

And yet everything keeps getting even more muthereffin’ expensive.

@Promnight: Right and he lit the fuse on the mortgage industry meltdown, signing the Commodities Modernization Act about an hour before he lit out to pestork some interns off the clock in peace. AND, all the credit card and payday loan crap that marks the states as a third-world failed state in terms of setting the balance between big business and individual consumers happened on his watch. The S Dakota decision that Citi engineered should have been answered with a call out to the Congress to legislate more robust usury laws. Mustabeen busy tit-fucking Monica in the bathroom. Be interesting to map the Wall Street money that funded his campaigns.

@¡Andrew!: We’d better hope so. If we get deflation on top of this mess, we’re completely fucked.

@SanFranLefty: Chartered accountants are at the top of the list, still. I met two guys without trying that were playing that card for residency. One Swiss who, last I heard, was dealing with a Girl from Kiribati who harvested asparagus on a farm he was managing out in Pukakohe and was threatening suicide if he did not marry him after he took her to dinner and a guy from Hong Kong who’d been settled into Auckland for years. Upholstery! A perennial fave on the Australian occupational shares listings as well.

@Mistress Cynica: Wait about 18 months. Plant potatoes.

@FlyingChainSaw: Don’t forget exporting our manufacturing-associated pollution to China as part of the plan — and then get them to whisper buy orders for our crappy bonds with their last dying breath. But the Chinese are too smart for that — they exported the pollution right back via cargo ship emissions and are about to eat our lunch in wind and solar power. Y’know those big wind turbines you’re seeing more and more of? Take a wild guess where they are manufactured. Yep. It’s cheaper to make them there and ship them here than to make them here.

@Dodgerblue: Here’s a conspiracy we can feed to Beck to good effect. When the last job is exported to China, the Chinese are going to call the bonds all at the same time and when America defaults, they’re going to all show up and carry off the kids, stronger guys and women as slaves. Wall Street guys can then clean up selling the kidnapped people’s homes at tax foreclosure auctions with some of the families still inside and sell them to European slum tourists who want to torture and humiliate Americans. Yeah, the whole plan is written in those characters hung on walls of Chinese restaurants.

@FlyingChainSaw: They must think we’re the dumbest fucks who ever walked the earth. Especially in Congress.

@FlyingChainSaw: I own an old boat, that means I can do plumbing, mechanical, electrical, carpentry, furniture-making, and even upholstery. Am I in?

@Prommie: Fuck, if you can resolve people’s books at the end of the quarter, they’ll make you prime minister.

@FlyingChainSaw: I tap a little and have a pretty good A flat.

@Benedick:

That gets you Postmaster General, I think.