Mock, Paper, Scissors

Remember when Howard Dean had his 50 State Strategy? Remember when the G.W. Bush administration was stacking courts with their brand of justices? What happens when you combine the two concepts for nefarious reasons matched with massive amounts of anonymous loot?

In Michigan, where three of seven seats on the State Supreme Court were up for election, records were set for both spending and lack of accountability…Of the $15 million or so spent for TV ads in Michigan, 75 percent cannot be attributed to identifiable donors, notes Rich Robinson…

You can thank Judicial Crisis Network for leading this multi-state charge. So, you know, you got that going for you. No one has connected the dots yet why so much money was dumped into a Michigan Supreme Court race. So spin the wheel and guess which high profile case will be coming down the pipeline where someone wants their brand of judge on the bench! Don’t fret, this game will be coming to a state near you soon so you can play at home.

America is a classless society, and the sooner you people accept that, they better off you will be.

(Think Progress)

Remember that time when the financial industry wanted all that government money but didn’t want any outsiders performing stress tests? Me neither! Anyway, if the current LIBOR talk has you confused, here’s a helpful inforgraphic to explain it all. (Spoiler Alert: You lose.)

Think Progress

Leave it to Chicago to fight back against the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

(Think Progress)

Eat the Rich

What do you want to bet that the fat cats on the balcony will write-off the champagne and cigars as a business expense?

Good news: students, you can stop studying now, the colleges want rich kids who can pay full tuition without financial aid.

Bad news: students, you can stop studying now, the colleges want rich kids who can pay full tuition without financial aid.

Welcome to class-based America.

(Inside Higher Ed)

I claim dibs on the roast.

What an assrocket.

That’s about all of that frothy mixture of fecal matter and lube (Rick Santorum) that I can take for a day.

What they said…

What they mean.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have pledged to Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) president Grover Norquist they will not support any deficit reduction package that increases taxes.

(The Hill)

So… just to be clear then, the discussion in DC is not actually about deficit reduction, it is about political policy.

Is there a single Dim who understands this? Why are you letting the debate be framed this way? What about this:

CBSNewsPoll Obama 032211

Only 7% of Americans think the deficit is a concern, while over 50% is scared about the lack of jobs.

(CBS)

How’s that NAFTA doing for ya, Detroit?

Detroit’s population fell to 713,000 in 2010, its lowest level in a century, according to U.S. Census figures released today.

The loss of 238,270 residents since 2000 is a sobering statistical stamp on a decade’s worth of job losses, plant closings and foreclosures in a city that was home to 1.8 million residents in 1950. The numbers follow Census figures released in December that show Michigan was the only state to lose residents since 2000, falling 54,000 to 9,883,640. Michigan is set to lose one of its 15 congressional seats.

If you have never seen the pictures of Detroit at its most glamorous, you should seek them out. It was at one time a jewel in America’s crown. This is really sad news.

“The days of just breaking rocks with sledgehammers” are over, said Michael P. Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group in New York. “At the grossest financial level, it’s just savings. You can cut the government worker, save the salary and still maintain the service, and you’re providing a skill for when they leave.”

Now we can fire public workers and replace them with prisoners. And when the prisoners get paroled, they can be replaced with other prisoners! And as there is and will be an endless supply of prisoners, it is like free workers forever. Bet me the return of the Poorhouse is in the works.

(NYTimes: Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps)

We can’t let the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it foot the bill for the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.

Chinless Mitch, In a speech on the Senate floor argued that Obama’s plan would hurt “the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession.”

…because no one has suffered like Mitch. He’s even stopped tipping at The Club.

Today, Bobo starts off his wretched column with an unusual gambit: he gives us a tautology: Let A = A.

For some strange reason Bobo is comparing Swedes to Swedes, and he marvels at how alike they are. He could compare Irish to Irish or Dutch to Dutch, too, but he is fascinated by the Swedes, and who can blame him?

Now, Bobo having an inquisitive mind and being a man of science who yearns for knowledge, he then twiddles with some of the variables. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap. Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.

Bobo is amazed!!! Amazed that Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection had not increased the life expectancy of Swedes in a single generation or two, from what is essentially an externality. Bobo makes me very glad he was never my lab partner, which is just about the kindest thing I have ever said about Our Miss Brooks.

Bobo stares at his raw Swede data, but suddenly he spots an Asian!

Nationally, 50 percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites, 17 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Hispanics.

Asian-Americans have a life expectancy of 87 years compared with 79 years for whites and 73 years for African-Americans.

Now while I’m sure that all of Bobo’s regular readers finds the Mutual of Omaha’s actuarial tables fascinating, we still wonder what his point is, and why doesn’t Bobo return to the Swedes in Sweden to see what their education status is compared to an American Swede’s education. You know, Let A = A, which in this case might actually tell us something about the effects of policy on the same population.

But instead we get a bowlful of mixed nuts. Asians in New Jersey are contrasted with Native Americans in South Dakota. He mixes and stirs, adds a pinch of this and a soupçon of that, and in the end serves up a word salad that looks a lot like a steaming puddle of vomit on the sidewalk: you have no idea what is in it, but you know not to step in it.

But here is the essential thing to take away from Bobo’s column, disingenuous as it is: Bobo cannot show that the policy of the last thirty years — the policies that Bobo championed with his Party of Visigoths — has resulted in anything positive. From the moment that the senile, shoe-polish haired Saint Ronnie of the GOP stormed the gates with his army of mouth-breating morons, and began the raping and pillaging of the United States, all we have to show for it is an infrastructure that is crumbling, a vivisected middle class, an underclass filled with despair, a destroyed economic engine, and a failed education system. Oh, we also have for all intents and purposes a caste system with nobles at the top. Let’s not forget the real purpose and real results of thirty years of Saint Ronnie’s class warfare.

(The Limits of Policy by David Brooks)

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

As if one of these Wall Street assrockets would know how to mow their own lawns once Arizona sends the Mexicans home!

In the history of dog-whistle politics no one gets close to Texas. Until today. The nuts who are agitating to get an election bounce using Obamacare to ratchet up the crazy in Georgia have sunk to a whole new level: they introduced a law to prevent that Kenyan usurper to the White House from micro-chipping citizens:

Last Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee entertained SB 235, the bill sponsored by Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville) to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings.

OK, strange, but fair enough. But then, the ironically named Chip had to have a hearing on it, and Georgia decided to give Texas a crazy run for the money:

…a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County. “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip,” the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn’t want to take.

Microchips, the woman began, “infringe on issues that are fundamental to our very existence. Our rights to privacy, our rights to bodily integrity, the right to say no to foreign objects being put in our body.”

She spoke of the “right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices.”

She continued. “Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission,” she said.

It was not funny, and no one laughed.

“Ma’am, did you say you have a microchip?” asked state Rep. Tom Weldon (R-Ringgold).

“Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area,” she replied. Setzler, the sponsoring lawmaker, sat next to the witness – his head bowed.

I think right about then is when you withdraw the motion, you apologize to your constituents, and you quietly retire from being a public servant, and you spend the rest of your days cursing the memory of Ronald Reagan for closing all the mental hospitals so that gazillionaires can have a few more bucks.

But instead, the Georgia legislature passed the measure. And that, Scissorheads is how Georgia just took the crazee away from Texas.

Politico

This is the car Rep. Melissa Hart left behind in 2008 when she lost her bid for reelection. It remains in the Longworth House Office building parking garage — which is only for Members of Congress. That means… yes, your Congressman wrote on the dirty car.

Oh, yeah: Hart is now a registered lobbyist.

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better… I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina. You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks. It’s there, period.

– André Bauer, SC Lt. Governor

I think it is safe to say that the sexually ambiguous and politically opportunistic Lt. Governor André Bauer is running for the main event when Mark Sanford hikes into the Appalachian Trail of being termed out.