The Invisible Library

Amanda Marcott has a great little post at Pandagon regarding the looming economic downturn. She makes a solid point that I had yet to consider:

I hear that our economy is on a downturn and the government is going to give us money to make it right. What I say is that the economy has been on a downturn, and it wasn’t until the very wealthy saw their extreme wealth threatened that we saw any action on it.

The irony is this: The fix for our problems is actually pretty simple. Capitalism per se is not the problem. In its place, it’s a good thing. But we need the basics to be made into public property—access to nutritious food, housing, health care, day care—and we need to get our capitalist system out of short-term thinking. We need to make it unreasonable and unprofitable to gamble on third world debt and the way it can be used to manipulate foreign currency. We need to make capitalism capitalistic again, i.e. return the risk to it, instead of offering huge government bailouts to save its failures. And we need high marginal tax rates to encourage capitalists to make long term investments instead of the short term investments that rule our culture.

While I disagree that Capitalism isn’t the problem (as someone in the comments at Pandagon pointed out, forcing working class and lower middle class people into subsistence living with no social safety net is a feature of Capitalism, not a bug) I do agree that the Economic Downturn* has been underway for a while and it’s only now that we’re hearing about it because it’s suddenly affecting the wealthy, who thought that their wildly inflated housing prices would somehow insulate them form the cruel realities of Alan Greenspan’s Invisible Hand job.

(more…)

Sorry but Impeachment for illegal wars started by bad or negligent Intel has a minimum lie requirement of 1000. Lieing about blowjobs? One will do nicely, thanks. If only he had lied 65 more times, then maybe we could do something about it but since George W. Bush and his gang only told 935 lies that led us into war, it doesn’t really count. Missed that magic threshold by this much (holds thumb and finger just barely apart).

I had a dream last night: November 2nd came around and by a landslide decision, None of the Above won the Presidential election.

The way it happened was this:

With the writer’s strike on, there was nothing good on Television. In an effort to fill the void left by their unfulfilled dreams, strangled ambitions and the general ennui of 21st century American life, the Television Viewing Public turned to Politics in search of something to watch. Everyone was horrified. Who were these slack jawed yokels, belligerent Jesus freaks and spineless sympathizers of the overfed and mentally malnourished? This is what we had to choose form for President of these here United States?

So a movement began. It was simple: Come November 2nd, vote for None of the Above. When None won the majority, we were forced to throw out this gang of bozos and find some real humans to elect, and fast. While the Parties That Be scrambled to slap a new coat of paint on the same old turd that they had been trying to sell us before, a handful of dedicated citizens stepped forward and decided to take one for the team. They weren’t rich or famous or known for being known. one was a school teacher from Baltimore and another a plumber form Queens. A small businessman who ran a corner grocery store in Cincinnati and an artist from San Fransisco raised their hands and said they’d give it a try.

With only two weeks to throw together an election, the New Candidates met in public squares and on the Internet to debate in a real life, substantial way and figure out what the American People wanted done and how to do it. They disagreed on a few ways and means but it soon became clear, whichever of these candidates eventually won, we would all be better of fhaving someone who was there to do a job in four or eight years and then go about their lives, rather than turn the country over once again to the professional class of chowder heads and Machiavellian dingbats with fake smiles and plastic hair.

The School Teacher won president and the Artist, Vice President. As a concession to some of his good ideas, the Grocer from Cincinnati was made secretary of the Interior and the plumber became Secretary of state. They didn’t have any experience doing anything but living. But that was enough.

and so, the New Candidates took their turn at running the country. Win or loose, everyone was confident that at least they wouldn’t be as bad as those idiots we almost elected.

Slate:

THE SKY, Dec. 20—We’re hovering 1,500 feet above Baltimore in a 200-foot blimp with Ron Paul’s name on it, and I’ve lost feeling in my hands. Elijah Lynn, vice president of the Ron Paul Blimp, passes around heat packets, the kind made for skiers. “Shake it,” he says. Over the past week, temperatures in the blimp have dropped to as low as 28 degrees. As the crew has learned, it’s hard out here for a blimp.

The Ron Paul Blimp launched last week in Elizabeth City, N.C,. and has since moved through Columbia, S.C., Richmond, Va., and now Baltimore, taking days off for bad weather. (You can track the blimp’s path via GPS here.) Anyone craning their neck blimpward sees one of two messages: “Who Is Ron Paul?” (an homage to Ayn Rand’s ” Who is John Galt?”) or “Ron Paul Revolution,” with the “evol” highlighted as a backwards “love.”

[…] There’s something perfectly Paulian about the blimp. It’s a stunt, in the best sense of the term—big, memorable, and utterly silly—a lot like Ron Paul’s candidacy itself, at least in the eyes of outsiders.

I have to quibble over this last assertion. Thanks to Ron Paul, scientists now have enough data to quantify nonsense, making the Ron Paul blimp objectively silly. No one in their right mind says,” Hay yeah, lets advertise our man for president with a blimp!” and then, not only puts forth enough effort to raise the money from like-minded idiots to put the damn thing in the air but then plasters it with allusions to Ayn Rand. The surviving members of Monty Python were preparing for a reunion, took one look at the Ron Paul Blimp and then Michael Palin turned to John Cleese and said, “Why bother?” Will Farrel, when contacted to play the part of Paul in an upcoming biopic said, “I’m sorry, I simply have too much dignity to act that ridiculous.” This is industrial strength silly, hardened in the hard heart of the most nonsensical blast furnace and constructed by mimes huffing ether.

It’s the perfect symbol for America in the 21st Century: a giant bag of hot air, drifting lazily overhead, threatening to fall on anyone and everyone for no good reason other than that it simply can. All that would make it better is if it were a nuclear powered blimp covered in depleted uranium spikes, built to substandard specs by a blimp design firm who outsourced the job to Bangalore and then had it constructed in China by eight year old sweatshop laborers, painted with toxic lead paint and imported by Wal-Mart.

Ben Franklin famously suggested that our national emblem should be, not the Bald Eagle, but the Wild Turkey. It only took 223 years but he finally got his wish.

Link via Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.

So, today the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring Christmas and Christians important. Now, one would think, in a nation that is 70% Christian, where there’s a church on every other fucking street corner, this would be superfluous. Guess not. If the 12% of us Agnostics and Atheists scare American Christians that much, simply by our desire to sleep in on Sunday mornings, than your religion isn’t worth shit. Apparently, the very knowledge that some people, maybe living next door or down the street (or in your own house, even!) don’t believe in the same imaginary friend really spooks True Believers. But it’s not persecution. I live in a state that still has Blue Laws. I can’t buy a bottle of wine on Sundays to go with my dinner, like any civilized European or Northerner, yet you’re the one whose oppressed?
(more…)

Is it really any surprise that Ron Paul’s favorite superhero is Batman? Every politician thinks of themselves as a crusading billionaire, out to save the world by any means necessary. But it’s especially telling that Paul, no big fan of consensual reality, would picture himself as Batman, the dark brooding, disturbed and obsessive Shadow in a world full of lunatics with crazy plots and half baked schemes. That he picked specifically Paul Pope’s Berlin Batman is even more telling, as the plot revolves around the papers of Libertarian grand dingbat, Ludvig von Mises. I seem to remember a Zeppelin in that issue as well.

How do the other candidates match up to comic book characters?

So, Mitt Romney gave a speech, did you hear? In it, he blathered on, as politicos are want to do, about the importance of religion, and our shared spiritual values and how, so long as we all believe in Jesus, at least a little, than Freedom! Cake! Puppies and kitties! Vote for Romney!

(more…)

In a recent post I characterized all the Republican candidates as evil, belligerent Jesus freaks. I realized that this is a wide category and surely has some nuance to it. So, I’ve decided to clarify as to exactly why all of these people would be not just bad presidents but are in fact loathsome human beings in general. Here is why I won’t be voting for…
(more…)

It’s Official.  There’s absolutely no one running for president who has my vote.  The Republicans are all evil, belligerent Jesus freaks. Hillary is way too Hawkish (and hasn’t met a principle she wouldn’t sell to the highest bidder for a handful of votes), Edwards can’t seem to say anything coherent and Obama becomes less appealing every damn time he opens his mouth. For a while, I had a slim hope in Kucinich, who aside form some silly, off the cuff remark about UFOs, was pretty damn sensible. But then he went and said that, if nominated, he’d pick Ron Paul as his running mate. While either him or Ron Paul winning the nomination is a slim peg to hang your hat on, I’m seriously disappointed that, out of over a dozen candidates, not one of them is sane, sensible or smart enough to not be a total fuckwit.

So, here we are, a year left until the election and I’m already sick of every single one of these circus freaks we have to choose from. Way to go, Democracy.

The latest stunt by Ron Paul’s cultish followers comes to us from Greg Saunders at The Talent Show (and This Modern World). In the form of a blimp:

What planet are these guys from? In 2007, do people descend into a state of reverent awe whenever they see a large gray cylinder flying in the sky? Call my a cynic, I really doubt that the entire nation would collectively pause with wonder to follow the journey of a rented blimp.

Come on Greg, this is fucking genius! It’s big, ponderously slow and full of hot air! It screams “I am so out of touch with reality that I can float around aimlessly propelled by my own hot air!”

Look, I have fond dreams of a New Zeppelin Age, just like any sci-fi geek. Flying around the world on a cruise ship in the clouds… But come on! In the real world, people have better things to do with their time than watch balloons drift slowly by.

This highlights how retrograde Ron Paul’s ideas really are. He and his supporters want to recreate the 1930’s, Zeppelins and all because that was the last time White Male Christians had unchallenged control of the political scene. After World War II,  it wasn’t cool anymore to be antisemitic. By the sixties, you couldn’t be racist and by the seventies, you couldn’t be sexist. But, if we turn the clock back to those good old days when zeppelins roamed the sky, well, anything goes, so long as you’re in possession of a Bible, an X chromosome and enough gold sway back a mule.

But the fun doesn’t end there, no sir. The ad on the Official Ron Paul Blimp site (because every bad idea needs its very own website) compares donating to the Ron Paul Blimp with the Boston Tea Party. That’s right, supporting Ron Paul is just like throwing your money into the harbor.