A year ago today, we switched cars in the parking lot. 2008 had been a long, strange trip, and we were due for a final turn before finally reaching the Interstate. 1,500 posts and almost 50,000 comments later, the ride has been so smooth you could trim a baby’s dick.

We’re sticking with January 19 as the official anniversary of Our Collective Adventure, so no need to buy gifts. Although if you insist on running up a tab using our Amazon Kickback Link, we won’t stop you.

Dead Guy Video

The era of complete and total disregulation of the financial violence industry has created a new class of predator, the debt collector, often a third party speculator who buys blocks of debt at a discount and sends bounty hunters out to collect on it, using tactics that would make Ghenghis Khan vomit blood.

The collectors are soulless , cackling jackals who will say and do anything short of pistol whipping a debtor to get them to disgorge payment.  Got more than one vowel in your name and an accent?  They’ll ask if you papers are in order and if you’ve ever been kicked to death by ICE agents.  Got a wife?   They’ll ask if you’ve ever imagined what she would look like without arms.  Got a debilitating disease?  They’ll taunt, threaten and jeer at you until it fucking kills you.

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Cornyn – what a schmuck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOjU-PTBfrc

I had to add this teabagger photo:

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Kent Conrad:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), the Senate Budget Committee chairman and a member of the unsuccessful Gang of Six effort, raised a few eyebrows this week with a message for his “progressive friends.”

Conrad, a consistent opponent of the public option, wanted liberals to know “government-run programs” aren’t necessary to lower costs and expand access. He explained that he’d finished reading T.R. Reid’s “The Healing of America” over the weekend, and learned Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, and Belgium are doing just fine. “[A]ll of them contain costs, have universal coverage, have very high quality care and yet are not government-run systems,” Conrad said.

Wrong.

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See, we actually liked the Muppets on SNL. It’s not that they were funny — that would be a stretch — but that they were weird. So much of SNL was like that, until they built up a tolerance for the drugs. And then it became an institution.

All of which means it’s another slow news day, so have a link dump.

• Frontal Lobotomy. Health insurers are like beer companies, says Karl Rove. True — both give you hangovers.
• The Road to Idiocracy. Steve King (R-Cornhole) says gay marriage leads to socialism.
• Out Standing In Their Field. Fairbanks newspaper apologizes to Talibunny for “A broad in Asia”.
• Lunartown. Water discovered on Moon; Southern California immediately acts to divert it.

Folks of a literary bent are familiar with the story of how Max Perkins took Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts to a rendering plant and walked away with Look Homeward, Angel. Or how Gordon Lish trimmed Raymond Carver’s work to the bone and invented minimalism with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Perkins and Lish were editors, not ghostwriters, and their work is (or used to be) considered part of the publishing game. So we’re mildly amused by recurring rumors that Barack Obama had a Little Helper with Dreams From My Father.

Name of Bill Ayers.

As conspiracy theories go, this one’s definitely a letdown after our recent multiple Orlygasms. But since WorldNetDaily is running with it, what the heck.

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Jim “Waterloo” DeMint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Eo9HJdMBEQ