(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
__
As a fellow Old, I second Doghouse Riley’s lament:
IS there any reason I shouldn’t just imagine that everything in this country not originally constructed of shit has been turned into shit by reverse alchemy, Republican rhetoric, and Democratic cowardice?…
__
We’ve done this shit for thirty years. The greatest acting performance Ronald Reagan ever gave was his histrionic hissy fit at raising the Debt limit to $1.4 trillion, on his way to more than tripling that. We’ve lowered taxes, cut programs, and demonized the poor for three decades, and we’re worse off than ever. This is not a part of the story?…
__
Look, I turned 21 at the tail end of the first Nixon administration. So I lived through two Reagan and three Bush administrations as an adult. These people don’t scare me anymore, because they’ve already done their worst; I’d just like to know why a regular paycheck and some cadged drinks convinces them they don’t need to look any further than their own reflections. A handful of connected financial institutions stole from practically every American in the country, and no one seems to give a fuck so long as he’s got a plasma teevee. House Republicans now object to raising the Debt Ceiling to pay for programs they–minus the eight or ten new ravening ideologues every high-water Republican election brings ’em–voted for, simply because they feel they now have carte blanche to blame all that on the President. As well they should, because he’s the guy who keeps insisting they can be reasoned with. [I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the little Which President Said This About The Deficit (Surprise Answer: Ronald Reagan) moment in his speech the other day, since, 1) I was trying to imagine what audience his speechwriters thought that would work on; and 2) I love the idea that a professed Christian thinks you can shame believers by quoting holy writ.] And some fuck calls this “principled” on the grounds, apparently, that it’s possible to put words together in that order and still have them recognized as English.
__
There are clear, calm, level-headed solutions to our economic problems. Those three adjectives insure that they’re not going to be listened to. And this apparently disturbs no one at Politico, or Slate, or anywhere else all our Iraq War-flogging geniuses hang their shingles these days.
__
Listen: my Social Security taxes went up during the Reagan administration in order to solve the “insolvency” “problem”. Take it away from me now. I’m ready. But at least one of you fucks is dying in the gutter before I go.
Grumble amongst yourselves.
PeakVT
Can we have a thread about something? All these open threads are getting boring.
Cris (without an H)
UNO! Dos! One two tres quatro!
John O
That’s a fine rant, and Doghouse must be about my age.
beltane
I like the last paragraph the best. It exactly describes how I’m feeling right now.
gnomedad
Cartoon misspelled “crap”.
kwAwk
So I was wondering. Exactly how many times to I have to click on the Amazon or other links in order to get the Reply button back?
Everybody click the adds. Send Cole a message.
Linda Featheringill
I think Social Security solvency is easy enough to fix. Just raise the cap on contributions. Or eliminate the cap. Or apply means testing for the benefits. Although I like the raised cap better.
Political activists have always been in the minority in this country. Such activism is hard work and requires LOTS of patience. Who wants to do that? Yeah I know that I do but that’s probably a neurosis on my part.
Homo sapiens sapiens is not naturally a political animal.
Rome Again
Sorry, our household has begun employing austerity measures. Cleek has a reply button for free though. :)
hildebrand
Mind-blowingly wrong. They have barely begun to do their worst. They will chip away at everything we hold dear if we cannot convince our fellow travelers to start being a heck of a lot more engaged and involved.
The crater we are in right now is a direct result of people deciding that ‘these people don’t scare me anymore’ combined with those feeling pissy about Obama not giving them everything they wanted in two years. An evil mix of complacency and side-line carping has given us this train wreck that we are hoping to live through.
Guess what folks – this isn’t the bottom. Not even close. But go ahead, convince yourself that this is not too bad, and won’t get worse. I don’t have that confidence.
MikeBoyScout
RIGHTEOUS!
Southern Beale
We’re watching the movie “Limitless.” Got to get me some of that NZT-48.
sb
JPL
Since this is an open thread.. I need some advice about introducing a 5 pound dog and an eighteen pound cat.
I can keep them separated but since I will be taking care of the dog for ten days, I don’t think it’s fair to the cat.
The cat co-exists with my seventeen pound mutt but it was after the cat set down the ground rules.
Breezeblock
I rally enjoy drinking.
Doh,I have a race on Sunday!
Jewish Steel
@kwAwk: depending on what browser you use, you’re going to have to download this app for starters.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe
Or
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
JPL
hildebrand – IMO, I think you are right. The President is going to have a difficult time winning against someone appears to be sane. Granted that half the republican field doesn’t appear to be sane but….
beltane
@JPL: Don’t worry. Your cat will teach that tiny canine the rules in no time. That dog cannot possibly hurt your cat, and your cat will probably just look upon the dog with disgust and condescension.
Violet
@hildebrand:
Absolutely. It can get a lot worse. Too many middle class people yet. The oligarchs don’t like that. They’ll be working to change things.
I just saw two of these sitting in a tree. I think they were a nesting pair, as one was larger than the other. The larger one was squawking up a storm, which caught my attention. They kind of look like penguins. Very cool.
JPL
beltane – My fear is that the cat will think the dog a rat and kill it. Maybe dogs have special scents..
mellowjohn
speaking as one, isn’t it alter kacker?
Mark S.
Does anyone have a link to the Senate vote that cruelly scuttled Boner’s idiotic proposal? How did Walnuts vote?
JPL
Violet- Herons are beautiful. I put a few goldfish in my small man made pond and a heron did come by for supper.
PK
Honestly, at this point, I don’t think he cares. That’s secondary. If congress doesn’t get a dose of sanity, it just doesn’t matter. The republicans have no shown a path for a relatively small minority to control the path of the U.S. You seriously think that this can be allowed to stand? We go to war and a few congressnuts who don’t like it manage to defund the thing? Possible, we can see that now, and we can see how to do it. The teahadists showed the way. They paved the path. If Obama folds, they’ve legitimized it.
If this action is allowed to stand, this terrorism of the U.S. government by a few right wing fanatics, the very fabric of our government is shredded.
Overly dramatic? Maybe.
We’ll see what happens.
But I rather imagine we may be in for a surprise.
JPL
violet – here is a picture of my visitor link
There is a fairly large pond near me and I’m sure that is where he normally resides but the bird is quite large.
Felanius Kootea
Just watched this for the fiftieth time. Galactic rebellion for dummies indeed.
Elie
JPL:
Neither is “wild” or feral so relax… they will work it out even if there is a hurt feeling or two (from the dog, not the cat)
beltane
@JPL: Cats can certainly distinguish between a lap dog and a rat, by scent, and by the way they move. I would expect to see some puffing and hissing followed by a regal “What is this thing you brought into my house?” kind of resignation.
Violet
@JPL:
Cool. We have a lot of Great Blues around. They’re really gorgeous. But I have never seen one of these Night Herons before. It was way up in a tree and looked like a penguin. But it couldn’t be a penguin. So after watching it for awhile, we determined it must be a type of heron. I looked it up and it had to be a Night Heron. The call recorded on the website I checked sounded just like it. Very squawky. I haven’t ever seen one before.
Mark S.
Why?
JPL
Thanks for the cat, dog advice. My mutt who cowers to the cat is very protective when the little one comes over so maybe it will work out better than I think. I was worried that the cat would think of the dog as a rat though. Mean while Alice is here wanting scritches and scritches and more scritches.
jharp
My social security taxes under Reagan increased 34%, from 11.4% to 15.3%.
Been paying that increase ever since. Roughly 26 years.
Jewish Steel
Did the White Sox just competently move Juan Pierre around the bases with a combination of sacrifices and heads up bass running to tie up the Red Sox?
Nah, couldn’t be.
jeffreyw
We see the little blue herons quite often, and this fellow on occasion.
JPL
So what’s the plan tonight.. The Reid bill gets filibustered and the President has tea and crumpets with McConnell and then they come to some type of agreement that screws us all sufficiently to pass both house and senate.
edit..also, too, maybe the President will have to play golf again with orange man.
darkmatter
@Mark S.: It is one of the signs of the apocalypse, that much is certain.
tofubo
yet another chart that totally vectors off in 1981 when saint ronnie arrived on our shores
http://lamarotte2.blogspot.com/2011/07/federal-debt-and-tax-receipts.html
JPL
Jeffrey and Violet, I bought nine of the eleven cent gold fish at Pet’s Mart last summer and during this past spring the heron fed on five. I finally just covered the pond with a net which confused the bird for awhile but he finally left. He had to be at least three feet tall strutting around my patio.
srv
I predict the debt ceiling will be raised before the reply button returns. It isn’t just physical infrastructure that is ratfucked today.
OzoneR
It’s pretty much widely accepted that if John McCain had picked a sane running mate, he would’ve won or it would’ve been a hell of a lot closer.
The idea that the President is going to have a difficult time winning against someone appearing to be sane has always been and will always be true.
jl
@36 tofubo
Interesting graph, and you can sure see a different trend for national debt beginning in 1981.
I wouldn’t take the text explanation seriously, though. The graph compares the ratio of a stock of accumulated flows (debt) to a flow (gdp) to a ratio of a flow (tax receipts) to a flow ( gdp).
So, you can’t tell anything by the relative magnitude of squiggles of the two lines.
If the blue line had been a ratio of deficts (flow) to gdp (flow), that would be a much better starting point.
Mr Stagger Lee
To save SS, extend the SS tax beyond the first $190,000 income, and include those who get income from investments. Also time to tax Wall Street transactions. Maybe some asset taxes of incomes above $5 million! Arise, you prisoners of starvation!
Arise, you wretched of the earth!
The Internationale,
Unites the human race
Viva CHE!!!! The only thing you need to lose is you chains!
OOOPS I got carried away there, but the first part would go away in solving the SS crisis.
Jewish Steel
@efgoldman: Speaking as an aspirational one, it appears both are correct.
jl
But here is important news
US taxidermist preserves Gaga’s meat dress
not sure I should provide a link…
Well, everyone was warned, so,
http://news.yahoo.com/us-taxidermist-preserves-gagas-meat-dress-011744760.html
JPL
jl… Why?
While at yahoo I clicked to the home page and this was the headline
House approves debt bill; Senate rejects it
The fix is in..
OzoneR
Doesn’t matter, they were still blamed for it in 2010 and they won. The joy of being a Republican is that you can still win even if people don’t like you, because your base will ALWAYS vote for you over stupid wedge issues.
arguingwithsignposts
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Unfortunately, tax law changes won’t solve our more immediate SS problem. /godwin
Crabbo
I’m sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but does anyone here know where the Republicans came up with the idea of shitting on routine debt-ceiling raises?
Dennis SGMM
@OzoneR:
U3 unemployment is gradually trending upwards again. When Obama took office the unemployment rate was 7.8%. You can rightfully argue that there were any number of factors beyond his control and that’s all well and good. The Republicans only need to ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” and Obama will be beaten by nearly anyone with a pulse. Jimmy Carter wound up on the wrong end of a landslide in favor of the originator of that question for factors that were beyond his control. Anyone who promises Fat Baby America that it will again have a limitless supply of ice cream if they just vote for him or her will win.
Shawn in ShowMe
Not that I’m surprised by the “revelations” in the following exchange, but I’d figured I’d share. A bunch of us here figured it out on our own …
PBS News Hour
MARK SHIELDS: Michael and I had a session with him (Harry Reid), what, three weeks ago, and I got to tell you, he was clairvoyant.
JIM LEHRER: You mean you had a — you just sat down and talked to him.
MARK SHIELDS: Just the two of us.
JIM LEHRER: Just the two of you.
MICHAEL GERSON: And he described exactly what would happen.
MARK SHIELDS: What would happen.
JIM LEHRER: Oh, is that right?
MICHAEL GERSON: It was really pretty extraordinary.
MARK SHIELDS: I mean, it was — and this was the time when the president, and the summit, and all these big deals, and Biden and everything else.
And he just understands. So he’s got to get something — not only…
(LAUGHING)
JIM LEHRER: In other words, just to make sure I understand what you are saying, what you guys are saying…
MARK SHIELDS: Sure.
JIM LEHRER: … he told you all that it’s going to come down to something like this?
MARK SHIELDS: He said there will be no — he said there would be no — nobody will touch a single gray hair on the beautiful head of Medicare or Social Security and there will be no revenues, because the Republicans won’t vote for revenues.
MICHAEL GERSON: That’s the way it worked out.
Corner Stone
@Dennis SGMM: I don’t think a lot of the people doing the Snoopy Dance here actually get this.
With U3 above 8% the R’s can nominate a garbage pail and make this a heart stopper.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. And honestly, all signs point to a 9% U3 ramping up to the 2012 elections.
hamletta
Shawn, that’s not clarivoyance, that’s political savvy.
Reid knows the Senate inside and out. That’s how he got Bill Frist to step on his dick once a week as Minority Leader.
Mr Stagger Lee
Did anybody see that last clip on Bill Maher, LOLMAO!!!
OzoneR
I’m well aware, but even if unemployment was at 5 percent, they’d ask the same question about something else (deficit, debt, taxes) and still win, because for 46 percent of the country, if they were rolling in diamonds in 2012, they’d still answer “I was better off under Bush”
All they need is a few more million votes, which is easy to get with wedge issues.
jinxtigr
It depends on how obvious it is that the Republicans have treasonously attacked the country (and indeed the world economy) to intentionally wreck everyone’s lives in order to ask that little question, “Are you better off?”
People aren’t used to a major political party actively trying to wreck and ruin them, but they’re starting to figure it out. It’s not like it’s sudden.
The reason things like the dotcoms, the tulip bulb craze, the myth of Republican popularity, ENRON… crash, is because everyone invariably assumes all OTHER people are complete idiots, but everyone breaks from the lemming herd eventually… and once critical mass is reached, boom. Suddenly you can’t find the ‘idiots’ anymore.
Suddenly, tea party rallies are ghost towns.
It’s really about whether the Republicans are prepared to continue trying to destroy the country as hard as they can in order to reclaim the ashes.
karen marie
JPL: Half? I think you’re being way too generous. I’m not even sure I would count Romney as “sane” at this point. He is a Republican after all.
If the cat already has a dog, I wouldn’t worry about it. If the guest dog makes a pest of itself, it will only take one intervention by the cat to get it to to calm the fuck down. Unless, of course, the little guy stands 10 feet away and barks at the cat like a maniac. Then you and the cat may have a problem retaining your sanity.
OzoneR
Both Sides Do It, remember?
Shawn in ShowMe
@hamletta
Like I said, a bunch of us BJers had reached the same conclusion, using a similar line of reasoning, a week ago. I wouldn’t consider myself all that politically savvy.
fuckwit
Anyone remember that 1950s utopianism where we would have robots and machines do all our work so that we wouldn’t have to work?
Um, we’re there. Huge chunks our jobs over the past 60 years have been outsourced to computers, and machines, and oil-burning machines, and what’s left has been sent overseas (via technology like the internet and JIT shipping logistics) to be done by slaves working for a bowl of rice a day. We’ve tried to keep ourselves getting paid by making up bullshit non-jobs to pay ourselves and bubbles, but those too get eaten up by globalized competition. So whadda we got?
Oh yeah, also, the giant sucking sound is the noise made by the very few Galtian elite Hoovering up all the cash freed up by such “innovation” and downsizing– like, our wages, for example.
The whole “work for a living” thing is outdated. There isn’t enough work to be done for everyone to have a living. All the vital stuff like farming is done by machine, manufacturing is done by machine, everything is fucking done by machine. Where are the jobs? They’re gone, AND THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PARADISE.
Of course there is still work to be done, but the people who need the work done don’t have money to pay people to get the work done, so it doesn’t get done. Loop that around a while and it’s a classic depression spiral.
Capitalism is done. Over. Finished. It’s fallen, and it can’t get up. The model is broken, and it no longer works. It doesn’t scale to the level of global corporations that, combined, are more powerful than the biggest governments available. It fails. It’s toast.
We might want to start thinking about a more humane, workable system to replace it.
Chad N Freude
@efgoldman: No pedantry on BJ threads? You’re new here, aren’t you. Maybe that should be you’re here, nu? Aren’t you?
Quiddity
I think this pretty much says it all:
OzoneR
Yep, says my base are Democrats, and Democrats favor compromise.
Kathy in St. Louis
I am a lot older than this guy, but I can tell you that I, very reluctantly, agree with every word. This is no way to not run a country. I hate these g.d. Republican aholes, but my overwhelming disappointment with the way that the Dems have rolled over for the Republicans since even BEFORE Obama’s victory cannot be overstated. I guess I should have known this wasn’t going to turn out well when they all sang Kumbaya (sp?) and let Lieberman continue to caucus with them. There have been so few people representing us that have any courage in so long that we’ve gotten used to it. Blue Dogs, whiners, self-important weasels, shifters, grifters, and backtrackers. I certainly never thought that I would live to see the country held hostage by a pack of snotty libertarians who have never read a civics book. Jeez, I need a drink and a cigarette, and I don’t smoke or drink.
Kathy in St. Louis
[email protected] Yes, I saw the same headline and wrote to ask Yahoo if they have an inhouse person who writes their headlines, or if they just let the Republicans write their own. I’ve been noticing their slant for a long time.
Elie
So Kathy, if the Dems had been more confrontational and in your face to the Republicans, we could have avoided all this? The reason that the republicans are as insane as they are, using your logic, is a result of the Democrats not being too scary for them to contemplate opposing. In other words, louder, meaner words and perhaps violent actions would have kept this all from happening?
Sometimes there is nothing a person does or doesnt do that results in the bad behavior of others. The righ winger sociopath in Norway could not have been prevented by having more aggressive policies against their right wing.
Here, our whole culture has become indocrinated with ‘winner take all” psychological states everywhere from our entertainment to everyday school politics. Take a look around.
It is essential that we reverse this but I don’t think that meeting this with the same thing is the answer, although there are lots of people, maybe even a majority who would disagree with me. Fighting hate and anger with more hate and anger is not really going to result in peacefulness and community again.
It aint easy… I will give you that. I frequently want to wring necks, but I know that is just not going to work…
If you want to make a system of values stronger, you don’t make it stronger by abandoning it to the opposite values.
We are progressives and liberals. We believe and must sdvocate for fairness, equity, caring about the wellbeing of others, inclusivess and the value of shared community. You are either in or out cause once you are into coercion or aggression to achieve that, you are playing their game.
We liberals just have to suffer that reality and stop wanting to be them.
S. cerevisiae
“Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure playing with you tonight.”
(cue sad hymn as water rolls up the boat deck.)
Kathy in St. Louis
I am not advocating “winner take all” or ” I can scream louder than you”. I just expected that after the endless, foolish war, the games about abortion and gay marriage that really aren’t about those things at all….I just expected that we’d stop just going along to get along and get the focus back on the real issues that are confronting our country for the next generation. I was hoping we’d get people back to works, pass some regulations on Wall Street and the other thieves who are stealing the country’s future, improve education and health care and, perhaps, my children and grandchildren would have a slightly better world than I’ve been looking at since 2000. Instead we’ve let a minority sit down in the middle of the street and refuse to move, the Party of NO. Instead of it firming up a few backbones, all we’ve getting is capitulation and others driving the discussion that we should at least be participating in, if not driving.
I had a son-in-law who always told me that the trouble with Liberals like me is that we don’t know what we believe…that we can be persuaded look at all sides of issues, whereas he, a Libertarian, knew what he believed and I’d never change his mind. I always thought of my liberal outlook as a virtue and his mindset as a vice. Well, I am now living the consequences of that fatal liberal flaw of trying to see all sides and reason with people who can’t be reasoned with. While we’ve been reasoning with these guys, they have despised us for it and considered us weak. Now they are killing the country because of their perception of us as weak sisters, and also, just because they can.
Greyjoy
Personally, I’ve thought for a while now that liberals would do well to start end-running around conservatives from the grass-roots level. Why are we not starting liberal schools? Liberal universities? Liberal mega-churches that barely qualify for their tax-exempt status, where we preach about liberal candidates and browbeat members into voting for liberals? Why aren’t we stacking school boards with liberals who unilaterally decide to teach nothing BUT evolution in science class, and insist that everyone HAS to take a comprehensive sex education class or they don’t graduate? Why aren’t we papering the landscape with billboards that say things like “ABORTION KEEPS FAMILIES OUT OF POVERTY” and “The Right to Choose is An American Value”? Seriously. Why are we letting the right-wing religious nutjobs get all the air time?
OzoneR
Because liberals DO NOT WANT TO FUCKING WIN.
Corner Stone
@OzoneR:
And you think you’re just gonna spew this nonsense bullshit across BJ and no one is going to challenge it because you’ve told them to stop doing so?
Fuck you, you fucking punk.
OzoneR
just you. only you can’t respond.
(another) Josh
efg, “Yidish is largely a spoken language”? What century are we talking about here? Seems to me in 2011, Yiddish is nearly a dead language that people study in order to understand the literature & songs, and the conversation of their ancestors. Is there a big population of native speakers that I don’t know about?
And isn’t Anne Laurie an alter kackerke, by virtue of her gender?
Kirbster
Destroying things is much cheaper and easier than building things, and corporate America has trained us for generations to buy cheap products and short-term simplistic solutions. So when it comes to remodeling our American home, voters hire the lowest bidder, Conservative Design and Remodeling, and only later come to regret that the only tools CD&R plan to use for the job are a chainsaw and a sledgehammer
Kathy in St. Louis
[email protected] Great analogy. These people build nothing but walls of hate.
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Fuckwit:
Damn, boy. You’ve stolen my lines.
It’s gonna get worse when Peak Oil and Global Warming both start to hit big-time. Peak Oil will jack up the cost of everything that depends on oil for transportation, which means pretty much all consumer goods in America. So you’ll have massive inflation combined with declining wages.
Global Warming is a problem you deal with by reducing carbon emissions. You know the biggest source of carbon emissions? People.
There’s a very simple solution to Global Warming — genocide. Stalin stated that solution 70 years ago: “No people, no problems.” When Global Warming reaches a crisis stage and temperatures in download Los Angeles hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit, look for Americans to implement the simplest possible solution — line up the poorest American on their knees in front of slit trenches and walk down the line shooting ’em in the head.
Marginalized for stating documented facts
Corner Stone: Preach it, brother. The guy’s clueless.
OzoneR gibbers “Because liberals DO NOT WANT TO FUCKING WIN” in response to the absurd question
Look at the graphs. It’s right there in the numbers. The more education a person gets, the more liberal that person’s outlook and the less they self-identify as conservative. Take a look at PhDs — how many
of ’em vote Republican?
“[In universities] only 19.7 percent of respondents identify themselves as any type of conservative, compared to 62.2 percent who say they are any type of liberal. At elite, Ph.D-granting schools in general, 60.4 percent of faculty members are Democrats, 30.1 percent are independents and 9.5 percent are Republicans.”
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, 2004.
Liberals don’t have to start “liberal” colleges. The stats show unmistakably that the more education a person gets, the more liberal their outlook and voting patterns become.
As for starting “liberal mega-churches,” once again the stats show that people who self-identify as “religious” tend to be conservative, while the less religious a person is, the more liberal their voting patterns.
Moreover, the kind of fundamentalist extremist religious beliefs you typically find at mega-churches are wholly incompatible with liberalism. So mega-churches (which are hotbeds of religious fundamentalism in America) and liberalism are just plain incompatible.
Then OzoneR smugly quotes the foolish question:
Because education in America is no longer a path to higher income, let alone a living wage. As globalism cranks up to fever pitch, getting a masters or doctorate in America, let alone graduating from college with a four-year degree, merely heaps a crushing pile of debt on you. Corporations have no interest in hiring most American college graduates: they cost too much. The corporations prefer to offshore the jobs and pay some Chinese PhD who graduated from MIT with a 4.0 GPA 3 dollars an hour.
Really, you people need to get a clue. Listen to Corner Stone. If you start studying what he posts, you may begin to get a vague inkling of the economic reality that’s rushing toward the American middle class like a ten-mile-tall tsunami.