Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Come on, man.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

This fight is for everything.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

You cannot shame the shameless.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

T R E 4 5 O N

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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Screwed

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Missed in all the trivial bullshit of the past few days is this really big story:

The broad cutbacks included a 20 percent reduction in payroll for salaried workers, elimination of health care for older white-collar retirees, and suspension of G.M.’s annual stock dividend of $1 a share.

The retirees will receive an additionally $300.00 a month, but as we both know, that will not make up for the loss of their health-care plan. If it did, GM wouldn’t be cutting it in the first place. The $300 is just a cushion. Additionally, how easy is it going to be for 70 year-old retirees to find a new plan other than Medicare? By 65-70, pretty much everyone has a pre-existing condition.

This is a sign of things to come:

General Motors Corp.’s (GM) plan to cut health benefits for certain salaried retirees may make only a small dent in profits at Medco Health Solutions Inc. ( MHS), GM’s pharmacy benefits manager, but it could signal broader, more significant changes to come for the health-benefits industry.

“GM’s decision to cut retiree benefits is likely to have only small impact on (Medco’s) 2009 earnings. Even so, we see the move as a watershed event for the retiree benefits marketplace that is likely to lead other employers to do the same, which will, in turn, cause the issue to grow as an overhang for the stock, ” Morgan Stanley analyst David Veal said.

Probably a good thing the Bush Medicare veto was over-ridden yesterday.

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Equal Time

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Let’s see the reactions to this, with the slipper on the other foot:

*** Update ***

Reading the comments here, it appears the nation at large is filled to the brim with humor critics. My question- how the fuck did Carlos Mencia get a job with all you people and your perfect interpretations of what is and what is not funny? What? You mean people may have differing ideas of what is and what is not funny? You mean some people may not get jokes! OH NOES!

Also, I will point out that there is NOTHING more unfunny than researching humor. I have done it. I will never do it again.

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Time Flies

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Was working out and listening to the Dead, when it dawned on me that in a few weeks, it will be the anniversary of Brent Mydland’s death. I remember when I found out- I was at gunnery in Germany in Grafenwoehr getting ready for Table VIII, and heard it on the radio. A few days later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

I can’t believe it has been 18 years. Where does it go?

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Bananas

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This HuffPo piece seems to not really put things into perspective:

The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”

However, the story really is not that simple, and 60 Minutes had a piece on this in May that I thought was fascinating. Some backstory:

But since the 1980’s, the business of bananas there has been punctuated with gunfire. First, the area was taken over by Marxist guerillas called the “FARC,” whose ruthlessness at killing and kidnapping was exceeded only by the private paramilitary army that rose up to fight them. Chiquita found itself trying to grow bananas in the middle of a war, in which the Colombian government and its army were of no help.

“These lands were lands where there was no law. It was impossible for the government to protect employees,” says Fernando Aguirre, who became Chiquita’s CEO long after all this happened.

Aguirre says the company was forced to pay taxes to the guerillas when they controlled the territory in the late 1980s and early 90s. When the paramilitaries, known as the “AUC,” moved in in 1997 they demanded the same thing.

“Did the paramilitaries state, specifically to you, that if you didn’t make the payments, your people would be killed?” Kroft asks.

“There was a very, very strong signal that if the company would not make payments, that things would happen. And since they had already killed at least 50 people, employees of the company, it was clear to everyone there that these guys meant business,” Aguirre says.

Chiquita only had a couple of options and none of them were particularly good. It could refuse to pay the paramilitaries and run the risk that its employees could be killed or kidnapped, it could pack up and leave the country all together and abandon its most profitable enterprise, or it could stay and pay protection, and in the process, help finance the atrocities that were being committed all across the countryside.

“These were extortion payments,” Aguirre says. “Either you pay or your people get killed.”

“And you decided to pay,” Kroft remarks.

“And the company decided to pay, absolutely,” Aguirre says.

There was no doubt in the company’s mind that the paramilitaries were very bad people, Aguirre says.

Read the whole thing.

Not to go all corporate shill and defend McCain and Chiquita, because I know what would be going on if the shoe were on the other foot (witness this bullshit WaPo piece on Obama’s home loan– also notice that the Red State hacks still have not commented on our appropriating torture methods from the chicoms but sure as hell are lying about Obama’s loan), but the facts are more complicated than “a prominent McCain backer supports terrorism.”

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Vindicated

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This will raise some eyebrows:

The Justice Department announced Friday that it would pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army biodefense researcher intensively investigated as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax letters of 2001.

The settlement, consisting of $2.825 million in cash and an annuity paying Dr. Hatfill $150,000 a year for 20 years, brings to an end a five-year legal battle that had recently threatened a reporter with large fines for declining to name sources she said she did not recall.

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.

I think that counts as a pretty thorough vindication. I don’t even know what category to file this under since I don’t have an “Epic Fail” label.

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