If you have nothing nice to say, come sit next to me.

Andrew Breitbart is dead at the age of 43.  That is stunningly young.  From what I have seen of his life, he earned it.

There is a custom that you are not supposed to speak ill of the dead.  This is not a custom I follow.  One of my first stops on the very old World Wide Web was a newsgroup called alt.obituaries, where people from all English speaking nations shared the stories of the recently dead, some you knew and some you didn't. Sometimes we praised, sometimes we buried.  Sometimes we dug the corpse up and pissed on it for a while, then re-buried it.

All this was permitted.  It was not permitted to harp on the living, unless there was solid evidence that they might not be living for long.

Several stories about Breitbart written today say he was fearless.  This is an obvious fucking lie.  He was shameless and there is a world of difference.  When you lie about someone and that person loses their job and the lie is proven a dozen times over to be a lie, holding to your version of events is not brave, it is obscene. Shirley Sherrod still has a court suit against him.  Whether she pursues it now that he is dead and she is taking money from his heirs is completely up to her in my book.  I will not think less of her one way or the other.

Breitbart lived on booze and vitriol.  I rather like the former but I am doing my best to cut back on the latter. In some ways, I look at the modern conservative movement and the Republican Party/Tea Party as I would look on an infectious disease, interested in its progress (or lack of same) but doing my best not to turn to anger as I watch it eat everything in its path, including its own fellow travelers.

For me, Breitbart is like Christopher Hitchens without the talent. I won't miss either of them very much. I am much heartened by how many people assumed that the first reports were a hoax, some attempt to goad his political opponents into action his political allies could find objectionable.

If one ally of the happily now dead scumbag Breitbart shows up here, I challenge them to find an untrue sentence in what I wrote.  It may not be true for his immediate family, but for the vast majority of humanity, it is a blessing he was erased so quickly.

Here endeth the lesson.

In the words of Shane McGowan...

There's an ice-cold beer for Father McGreer
And a short one for Father Loyola
Father John's got the clap again
So he's drinking Coca-Cola.

Rain Street, The Pogues

These worthies, of course, are the witnesses asked to speak about birth control by a Republican house committee chaired by Darrel Issa. I believe they want their country back.  They did not specify what year would work best, but I'm guessing any time in the 19th Century would suit them just fine.

 

And then the Republicans lost their damn minds.

Gallup tracking poll for January 2012

 

Last month, the opinion polls showed a surge for Newt Gingrich after Herman Cain suspended his campaign.  Gingrich celebrated by doing what he does best, spouting half-baked ideas whose flaws are apparent to any sensible person inside of ten seconds or so.  The most egregious was his idea about arresting "radical" judges, completely oblivious to the obvious fact that Democrats might consider some conservative decisions like Citizens United "radical" and decide to arrest a few Supreme Court members.  Moreover, arresting the people at the top of the judicial system means their fate will be decided by people... in the judicial system.

Seriously, it takes about ten seconds to think of these things.

So, running his mouth, Gingrich fell back.  The people of Iowa fell in love with Rick Santorum and anointed him the Not Romney, but New Hampshire put the two Not Romneys at the back of the pack, well behind Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, who both trailed Romney by over 20 percentage points.

Then came South Carolina.  Much bigger than Iowa or New Hampshire, but a whole lot redder.  A super PAC favoring Gingrich nailed Romney's Bain Capital as a job killer and the Republican echo chamber went mad with cries of class warfare.  Gingrich had to walk back the attack, though technically it didn't come from him.  Still, it was enough to wound Romney big time and the bleeding hasn't stopped.

As of today, January 24, the polls now put Gingrich back as the front runner.  Republican voters are not interested in hearing about his many flaws, though the number of people on the right who hate Gingrich are legion.

 

Rasmussen asked voters across the spectrum about Obama vs. Romney and Obama vs. Gingrich.  Obama leads Romney 46% to 43%, while Obama creams Gingrich 49% to 40%. During January, there have been a couple polls where Romney was ahead of Obama and another where they tied.  Gingrich's best showing is losing by 7%.

Republican voters have lost their damn minds.  It's not all their fault.  Given such a weak field, the questions about electability become academic.  They want someone as angry as they are and in this field, Newt Gingrich is the closest they are going to get. They think Gingrich will win the debates against Obama the way he's been beating the Republicans at the debates.  Little do they know that when the audience isn't all "mouth breathing paste eaters" as my blog buddy Tengrain puts it, many of the big applause lines Newt has are going to be booed.

I honestly think that if the people of the United States get a steady diet of Newton Leroy Gingrich for a year, there is a significant chance he will lose in Georgia.

I'm sure if any right-winger stumbles upon this, he or she will think I'm just some Communist who's been drinking the Kool-Aid and dismiss my argument.

I can't stop them.  There's not much you can do to dissuade crazy people.

The first three weeks of December for Gallup tracking.

This is a graph of how the Republican candidates for president have fared for the first three weeks of December, according to Gallup tracking. (Note: Gallup tracking polls run over many days and I have picked the opening day of the poll to be the date where the numbers are marked.  You can click for a larger version.)  This is a national poll, so it can be argued that it is meaningless, but I think the trends are meaningful.

The blue line at the top, sliding downward, is Newt Gingrich's popularity. The (relatively) steady red line in second is Mitt Romney.  The slowly rising black line in third is None of the Above, now over 20% and just one small surge away from overtaking the leaders.  Ron Paul in green dominates the also rans, while Perry has overtaken Bachmann and Santorum still leads Huntsman by a few percentage points at the bottom.

The first two races where delegates are chosen will look nothing like this.  In the Iowa caucuses, it's assumed to be Paul and Romney in the lead with Gingrich in third. Romney will lap the field in New Hampshire barring a miracle.  Gingrich is hoping to hold onto his quickly fading momentum and make a good showing when the race goes south to South Carolina and Florida, but those races are many 24 hour news cycles away.

The interesting twists and turns will come when lesser candidates drop out and their support moves around.  You would think that all people not supporting Romney would move their support to another Not Romney, but there have are polls showing second choices indicating he will pick up some support when the time comes. The fascinating thing to me is the strength of None of the Above at this late date and how many candidates are saying they could not possibly support some rival or another, though most of it is anti-Ron Paul sentiment.

Bill Clinton has the quote "Democratic primary voters fall in love and Republican primary voters fall in line." The establishment has been in favor of Romney for awhile, but he's having a hell of a time getting more than one in four Republican voters to join his bandwagon. With all the bitter recrimination, it a distinct possibility we will see a third party candidate from the pool of Republican also rans.  Whether that candidate will be the standard third party no-hoper pulling in single digit percentages around the country or someone like Ross Perot or George Wallace who really throws a monkey wrench into the works, only time will tell.

The Anyone But Mitt Primary.

It was two weeks ago, back when the Heisman Trophy was topical and Newt Gingrich was the hot new front runner, that J.D. Crowe of the Mobile Register drew this political cartoon and NPR put it up on their website.

For those of you who don't pay attention to college football, Robert Griffin III of Baylor won the Heisman last weekend.  For those of you who don't pay attention to politics, Newt Gingrich is doing a Donald Trump impression.  When Trump was ahead in the national polls, most state polls had him in second or worse. The same is true for Newt in the early contests.  Romney is polling well in Iowa and some polls say Ron Paul will be second and Gingrich third.  New Hampshire looks like a landslide for Romney and again, some polls are showing Ron Paul surging and Gingrich fading.

For those of you wondering why Gingrich has pointy ears and curly pointy shoes in this cartoon, I was kind of wondering about that myself.

Can Ron Paul be the next Anyone But Mitt? He is showing the largest surge over the past week or two. Paul's biggest obstacle is that the "no foreign aid" plank in his platform really translates in today's political landscape into "screw Israel", a position that makes more enemies than it does friends all over the political spectrum.

I can't bring myself to say that Mitt is inevitable.  Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have been beating him up a lot.  Let's recall that John McCain was not the number one choice of the social conservatives in 2008, but instead he was the pragmatic choice who the rank and file thought could win.  He ran a truly awful campaign and lost in a landslide.  Mitt can do better against Obama than McCain did if it's a two man race, but if the social conservatives get their panties in a twist and put up a third party candidate, Obama gets a second term in a walk.

Does watching a mean dog get tortured count as wholesome entertainment?

I don't have my TV hooked up to cable or an antenna, so I only hear about the GOP debates after the fact.  From what I understand, they are getting ratings that would do reality TV shows proud. After all, if it's fun to watch stupid young women make bad life choices, it might be fun (if less sexy) to watch middle aged (and older) men do the same thing.

And, oh yeah, they have one woman in the crowd and she's batshit crazy. Every reality show needs its own Nene Leakes or Amber Portwood.

If you have paid even the smallest amount of attention, you know the primaries are boiling down to Mitt Romney vs. PleaseDearGodNotMittRomney.  Several people in the second category had their moments in the sun - Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain - but all of them were weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Now the top ranked PleaseDearGodNotMittRomney is Newt Gingrich.

Why wasn't he first in line?  He has more experience and knowledge than Trump, Bachmann, Perry and Cain combined.

For the truly grumpy wing of the Republican party, that is almost his biggest flaw.

His other big flaw for the ideologically pure is what he has done since he left office.  He lobbied for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which for many conservatives replaced the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.  He made a mint lobbying for health care reform. He supported government action to combat climate change.

As George Will has put it, he is the perfect rental politician.

Will is not the only conservative voice speaking against Gingrich.  Will is "old establishment", but Gingrich also has an enemy in Glenn Beck, a frothing ideologue who wants purity above all.  (Beck loves Rick Santorum, comparing him to George Washington, an analogy that completely escapes me.) Among other conservative voices speaking against him are Ann Coulter and Karl Rove.

Newt has a real talent for making enemies.

He does have two large allies, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.  Limbaugh has made it clear he doesn't accept Romney as a conservative, so he has to pick someone from the rest of the kennel, and Newt is the one with the least fleas. Fox News is more fickle, and if the tide turns against Newt they might well throw him under the bus, even though he worked for them earlier this year. (Sarah Palin still works for them, but she is mocked by other on-air Fox News personalities with impunity now.)

In many ways, conservative "ideology" is a list of people and things you have to hate.  It could be said that conservatives love Israel, but that morphs into hating Palestinians very easily.  On this point Gingrich is scoring points.  As a new convert to Catholicism, Gingrich hates abortion enough, but it is unclear whether the red meat wing of the party will believe he hates immigrants (both legal and illegal), global warming and Washington deal-making with sufficient fervor.

So far, the four previous PleaseDearGodNotMittRomneys had their rises and falls and the established wisdom is that each lasts about six weeks.  If that holds, Gingrich has an advantage. His six weeks coincide with the start of the primary season and actual delegates being distributed.  Wins in early primaries and caucuses could give him momentum that will make his front runner status last longer, perhaps even become permanent.

I mentioned two Gingrich allies, Limbaugh and Fox News, but I forgot to mention another non-conservative, Bill Clinton.  He has kind words for his former competitor and sometimes collaborator.  There is talk that there is bad blood between Clinton and Obama, but I think this is just Clinton going back to his Southern roots, not to support a fellow white Southerner, but instead to invoke a Brer Rabbitt moment, begging the Republicans not to throw his party into the briar patch.

In the general election, Newt Gingrich, mean, petty, condescending, vain, venal with a history of unfaithfulness, both personal and political, will get sliced up worse than John McCain did.  Currently, the polls put him slightly ahead right now in Georgia against Obama. If he's nominated, I'm convinced he will be an underdog to win his home state next November and take a hammering that throws his already shattered party into even greater turmoil.

The aggrieved party.

The modern Republican Party is more a list of complaints than an actual ideology.  The deepest feelings of the typical Republican voter are his hatreds.  Conventional wisdom says the complaints are a rejection of modernity, but I'd like to point out that Charles Darwin's 203th birthday is next year.  His views on natural selection and the origin of species, the underlying principles of all biology today, are a little long in the tooth to be called "modern".

Modern Republicans hate a lot of stuff. They hate people who worship differently than they do, from a deep hatred of Muslims to a contempt for atheists to a dislike for Mormons.  They hate science and fancy learning of all kinds and they hate being called ignorant.  They hate government and taxes and career politicians.  They hate abortion and they hate women who need help once their babies arrive. They hate people who look different from them or speak different languages, and they hate being called racists.

Enter Herman Cain.  Cain is clever enough to understand that white guilt isn't just for quiche eating liberals anymore and he is currently riding high in the polls, with no major drop-off yet in spite of his current scandal for sexual harassment allegations and the probably more serious problems about his fledgling campaign ignoring some major campaign finance laws.

Herman Cain's skin may be several shades darker than that of the typical Republican voter, but deep down where it counts, they are much the same.  Their hearts are as black as onyx.  He hates almost all the right people and things.  Unlike Rick Perry, he's not soft on illegal immigrants.  Having Mexicans die on an electrocuted fence was allegedly a joke, he now says, but he still wants the electric fence.  He does not give a shit who the leader of "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" is, regardless of the fact that Uzbekistan is currently on our side in the not yet completed Global War or Terror. He doesn't care that "9-9-9" is a burden on the poor and won't come close to paying our bills.

That kind of stuff is for eggheads, and Herman is proudly not one of those.

His only weakness so far is that he didn't realize his position on abortion skates very close to being pro-choice.  That's a course correction he can easily make.

More importantly for the modern Republican party, Herman Cain is not a career politician. The disdain for politicians runs across the political spectrum, as evidenced by Al Franken, Jesse Ventura and Michael Bloomberg, but the feeling is deeper in the right wing base, as we saw in 2008 when California Republicans nominated the no-hope candidates Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. It used to be a person had to have a serious resume to be a candidate, but that's no longer the case.  Bloomberg is certainly a success, but Fiorina left a string of disasters in her wake, and Cain took a fifth rate pizza chain and turned it into a fifth rate pizza chain.

As usual, I am fascinated by the numbers.  The early polls tell us very little about what will happen a year from now, but about a month ago, the votes for all the Republican candidates combined in the opinion polls added up to about 70%.  A lot of people who weren't in the race made it clear they weren't getting in, the two most publicized being Chris Christie and Sarah Palin.  The total percentages for all candidates shot up over the 90% range and Herman Cain replaced Rick Perry as the main challenger to Romney. Cain is still either in first or second place both in national polls and likewise in state polls, but now the total percentages are slipping backwards to about 85%. The malaise returns to the Republican base, though of course they hate the word "malaise", both for sounding too French and its association with Jimmy Carter, who never used the word in his famous speech.

No matter how hard they try, the Republican Party can't seem to find that perfect candidate, both mean enough and stupid enough to truly satisfy their new core voter. Herman Cain is just the best they can do right now.  I'm sure stupider and meaner is coming, but probably not in time for the 2012 presidential election.

An enemy of the United States is dead. Where are the cheers from the loyal opposition?

So Qadhafi is dead. At the end of the Reagan administration, a PanAm plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland and Libyan intelligence was linked to the act. A lot of people treated him like a buffoon or clown, but as I recall, many people saw Mussolini that way during his lifetime, but no one was confused about him being on the side of the bad guys.

But the Republicans today are the gang who can't shoot straight, and one of the least straight shooters is old Straight Talk Express himself, John McCain, aka Grumpy Grandpa Walnuts, who was sucking up to Mickey Rourke's slightly uglier twin barely more than two years ago. What could have possessed him?

And who showed him how to use Twitter?

I don't see how patriots can support these clowns.

"Don't be the weird one!" Good advice, but hard to follow.

The Value Voters Summit is this weekend. All the Republican presidential candidates are there, sucking up to the shallow end of the Christian gene pool, who are doomed by evolutionary forces to see their power dry up as the years roll by.

Sarah Palin didn't show up. I think she correctly sensed that the crowd would not be too keen on her right now.

Gil Mertz, who may be the nephew of Fred and Ethel (don't take me for a sap, Fred and Ethel never had sex, that was a beard relationship if ever there was one) told his audience on the first day "Don't be the weird one!", hoping that embarrassing stories would not come out of the conference.

Take a read over at Talking Points Memo here, here, here, here and here.

And, oh yeah, here.

Here's a hint, Gil. You ARE the weird ones. Some Christians delight so much in "not being of this world, but the next", they really don't pay strong attention to this world and what they say comes off as being, well, weird.

Christianity allegedly has huge numbers in this country, but I don't know how many people are truly, deeply committed and when we consider the sub-section that are truly, deeply committed, I don't know how unified a front they can present. In evolutionary terms, genetic advantages this large and even larger have been wiped from the face of the world before, and who knows but it could happen again, especially if this weekend's debacle counts in their fevered brains as "not being the weird ones."

Here endeth the lesson.

Agreeing with Republicans. Or at least one.

Bruce Barlett, a domestic policy and economic adviser to both Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Greater, has called current Texas governor Rick Perry an idiot. Karl Rove, chief toady to George Bush the Lesser, is also not in love with Rick Perry.



Bartlett now considers himself an independent, and his poor opinion of Perry is not that surprising. The minions of Bush the Lesser consider Perry to be a braggart and buffoon and, more importantly to them, the opposite of a compassionate conservative.



Perry is not afraid to run his mouth and in many circles, this is seen as a plus. He's said that if Fed chief Ben Bernanke came down to Texas, "we'd treat him pretty ugly." Some say this is just an example of running against Washington. People whose ears are more attuned to the talk of the South hear a dog whistle of anti-Semitism against a Jewish banker from the Northeast.



I might agree with Bartlett's assessment, but as we saw with both Reagan and Bush the Lesser, being an idiot is no bar to elected office in this country.





But calling names is cheap and easy. I am much more interested in Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and current second tier candidate for president. Instead of insults, he has made a call to arms for reason. Last week, he tweeted "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."

Jake Tapper of ABC News asked, "Were you just being cheeky or do you think there's a serious problem with what Governor Perry said?"

Huntsman's response: "I think there's a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012."

I'm not a Republican because I disagree with many of their beliefs of what the major problems are facing our country and what the solutions should be. But most importantly, it is a damn shame that this country should have a party so ready to overthrow the best ideas science has on important topics, both in terms of human progress and public policy. I understand the push against evolution, since Biblical literalists think this means denying the word of God. But the push against the science of global warming is just the petulance of ill-bred seven year olds who will not give up their toys.

As long as this is the position of one of the two major parties in this land, we have nowhere to go but down.

Even chubby guys can jump sharks.

When Glenn Beck left Fox News - and Roger Ailes said he did not mind the characterization of that departure as a "dumping" - he said he was moving on to bigger things. Now, he is in Israel for his Restoring Courage rally, and a whole bunch of politically connected attendees are suddenly remembering they have to wash their hair that day. Rep. Joe Walsh of Texas told Beck that the Orange Eminence himself, John Boehner, told members of Congress not to attend because he thought the meeting would be too political. Eric Cantor isn't going, even though he will be in Israel on the date.



And just in case you think it's just mean old Boehner spoiling the fun, Droopy Dog himself, Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud-CT) has canceled his appearance.



Apparently, you can get thrown out of the Republican hierarchy for being too crazy, especially if you lose the protection of Fox News. It looks like Beck is heading into Michael Savage country.



Bring warm clothes, Glenn.

Michele Bachmann sez: Hands off my hubby!

Michele Bachmann has now officially asked the lamestream media to keep their grubby hot paws off her husband Marcus! Just because he does therapy that prays the gay away is nothing to be noticed!

No story here!

Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong.

Especially if Donkey Kong abducted Mario and the Princess had to save the Plumber.

Protection from force and fraud.

I have said this before, but I realize I have skipped some details. When I actually was a fresh faced lad, I was registered as Libertarian. This means that in 1976 when I voted for the first time, I cast my vote for Roger McBride, the Libertarian candidate, instead of for the eventual winner Jimmy Carter.

I thought the Democratic Party was too soft on Nixon's worst offenses. If we had any Democratic senators today with the cojones of Frank Church, it would be a dream come true.

I went to a Libertarian meeting, and that one exposure soured me on the party. I had read some of the literature and I understood the first principle of libertarianism at the time, which was that government should protect the people from force and fraud. Hard core libertarians believe in police, prison guards and soldiers as valuable government employees and everyone else is just taking up space. I was upset about illegal wiretaps and the war on drugs. There were some people in the room who could get just as worked up by the idea of the government running the post office. I asked about environmental protections. I was nearly alone in the room in considering the loss or degradation of our common needs, like clean water and air, as force. I didn't go back.

Roger MacBride wasn't an idiot. Seeing that the Libertarian Party was going nowhere, he rejoined the Republican Party in 1983 to form the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group devoted to promoting libertarian ideas inside the Republican party.

Unfortunately, MacBride the non-idiot would never have a significant fraction of the influence of the idiot Ronald Reagan, lionized beyond all recognition. I will grant you that George W. Bush may be duller than Reagan and Reagan did not get us into two wars he did not know how to end, but because Bush's legacy is under such a cloud, I still rank Reagan as the worst president of my lifetime.

George W. Bush is the turd the Republicans flushed. Ronald Reagan is the turd they worship.

Avuncular, well practiced in front of the cameras, Reagan could deliver a line, I will give him that. One of his most revered witticisms is "These are the the nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

He repeated this many times at many campaign stops.

As a former Libertarian and past, present and future logician, I could figure out what this really meant.

Government is force and fraud.

Cops, firefighters, teachers, janitors, nurses, construction workers... all just a bunch of parasites that need to be eradicated.

This is the logical conclusion of what Saint Ronnie said, and the Republican Party at the local, state and federal level are following that statement without question today, in the executive, legislative and - possibly most frighteningly - judicial branches around the country.

The worst ideas of the ugly, cancer-ridden cult leader Ayn Rand have become the unquestioned marching orders of one of the two parties in the alleged greatest experiment in democracy.

Some people might view this as class warfare.

To them I say, "Fucking A."

Better class warfare than class genocide. We can't match their money, but as it stands right now, we have a hell of a lot more ballots than they do. We have to use them every chance we get. Until the conservative movement has a better idea than "Fuck you, I've got mine", they deserve the undying enmity of everyone who works for a living.

Here endeth the lesson.

California tries to enter the 20th Century. The Republican Party tries to hold them back.

It's easy to think that America no longer produces oil, but the fact is we just consume massively more than we produce. We have been in this situation since the 1970s.

According to several sources on the Internet, California is the only oil producing state in the union that does not charge the oil companies for extracting oil out of our land. This is not a Red State/Blue Thing. Texas has an oil extraction fee and uses the revenue to fund schools. Alaska uses theirs for a little socialist trick called the Alaska Permanent Fund, where everybody in the state gets a check for at least a grand every year for doing nothing, courtesy of the oil companies being "robbed" by the gummint.

Extraction fees are the standard across the world, except in California. This is an odd legacy from the days when Standard Oil ran our state like it was a company town.

AB 1326, an assembly bill now being considered in California, is more along the lines of the Texas model than Alaska model. Here is a paragraph I lifted from a recent e-mail from a colleague.

*****The measure " requires that California apply a 15% oil extraction fee on the value of each barrel of oil, California's common resource, extracted onshore and offshore. Following Texas' example of devoting this oil revenue to its appropriated for non-capital purposes in the following amounts: K-12 shall receive 30% (approximately $1.08 billion). The California Community College System (approximately 3,000,000 students) shall receive 48% (approximately $1.72 billion). The California ~State University System (approximately 412,000 students).shall receive 11 % (approximately $400 million). The University of California System (approximately 200,000students) shall receive 11 % (approximately $400 million). This will reduce college and university tuition fees, and restore cut class sections. The funding increases will pay to rehire professors, laid-off teachers, and reduce K-12 class sizes.’ The update (as of May 6) on this tax measure as a bill– AB 1326 – is it was approved on a partisan 5-3 vote in the Assembly Higher Education Committee (Democrats supporting, Republicans opposing) and is now headed to the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee. It would require a two-thirds vote in both Houses of the Legislature for gubernatorial consideration. *****

As you can see, the lion's share goes to the community college system, which would be a boon to Matty Boy and other people whose paychecks come from community colleges. I don't know if these percentages are "fair", but I know that a revenue system can't be fixed until it is implemented. If you are a California citizen, please call your representatives and ask them to support AB 1326, most especially if your representative is Republican. The oil companies have been taking the oil out of our soil for more than a century now, and it's time we saw some revenue from them for taking an important resource from our commonwealth.

Weird numbers from the weirdest party in the free world.

Once again, I look at numbers and they don't quite add up. I'm kinda good with numbers, so this sets me to thinking.

I know, always a dangerous proposition.

The website Pollster is now owned by the Huffington Post, but it's still useful anyway. (Anyone else feeling like HuffPo are the emptiest calories you can get on the Internets?) They have plenty of early polling of the Republican nomination. There's an interesting pattern.

When there are national polls of Republicans for favorite candidate for the presidency, whether by Rasmussen or Gallup or CNN, if Donald Trump's name is in the mix, he is doing very well, sometimes leading or tied for the lead, never worse than a close second. But then there are the polls of Republicans at the state level. In South Carolina, Trump is a distant third behind Huckabee and Romney. In New Hampshire, Romney leads Trump 32% to 17%. In the Iowa caucus polling, Trump is in fourth behind Newt Gingrich, and in Iowa primary, it's Huckabee with the big lead and Trump in third, slightly behind Romney. There are a couple of broken links on the page to polls in Nevada and one more to South Carolina, but they show the same thing. When asked at the state level, Trump is not a major player.

I want to make it clear I am not cherry picking these polls. That's what Trump would do and Donald Trump and I have a major difference in character. I'm a nerd and he's not. Nerds are among the most honest people in the world because we actually believe in facts. When my friends Ken or Art stop by to correct me, they are showing nerd love and I recognize the gesture. They've got it right, I had it wrong and I gladly edit the post to make the correction.

Pollster has a long list of recent polls. The polls from March don't even list Trump as a candidate. He's made most of his noise about running in just the past few weeks. And let's be clear, it's just noise. Even if he declares for president, it's still just noise. He has no ideas, he has no clever plan. He is a pathological liar. He says he's going to talk to OPEC and tell them "Look guys, the fun's over." and they are going to listen, because it's all about the messenger.

Have you ever heard a more delusional load of bullshit in your life? For any country that produces more oil than they use, the fun is nowhere near over. Nations like the U.S. that produce less oil than they use are addicts, and if you have a product that an addict craves, you are being an idiot if you charge anything less than top dollar.

I know that it is not impossible that Trump will run. I wish it was impossible for him to win, but the average American is stone stupid. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Governor Jesse Ventura are proof enough of that. But these polls from states around the country taken over the same period as the national polls seem to indicate than when the rubber meets the road, even Republican pinheads swallowing Fox News nonsense day in and day out know that Donald Trump is a joke.

The 11th Commandment becomes the 11th Suggestion.

Ronald Reagan is often credited with being the originator of the 11th Commandment "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican".

Of course, he didn't originate it. He was an actor not a writer. It was first spoken by Gaylord Parkinson, the chair of the California Republican Party back in 1966 when Reagan ran for governor.

It was a very different time forty five years ago. There actually were moderate and even liberal Republicans. More than that, an actor running for public office was still a novelty, and the other Republicans in the race against him slammed Reagan hard as being an empty suit. They also painted him as being from the Goldwater wing of the party, the group that had been responsible for a truly epic loss against LBJ only two years before.

If you go to the Wikipedia site, you'll see that Reagan broke this rule in his run against Ford in 1976, but in general for many years, the Republicans kept their internecine battles to a minimum, at least in front of the cameras.


Then came 2008 and Sarah Palin. The vast majority of the slams against her came from the opposition, but several conservative pundits hit her on her obvious flaw of experience. After the stinging electoral defeat, John McCain became a non-person, George W. Bush went back to Texas to lick his wounds and the media fell in love with Palin, even after she quit the job of governor to seek fortune commensurate to her fame. For months on news sites of every political persuasion, she was the only conservative voice, and due to a mixture of boredom, envy and self-preservation for their party, Republicans in office, out of office and never holding office began to let their true feelings about the heroine of the trailer trash set come through. Palin, who has never shrugged off a perceived slight in her life, started fighting back, and the 11th Commandment of Saint Ronald Reagan was a dim memory at best.


Enter Donald Trump. It's hard to say if the businessman with the multiple bankruptcies actually is a billionaire or just plays one on TV, but his coy "Will I or won't I?" run for the presidency has catapulted him to the lead in several polls, based in large part to his huge advantage in name recognition.

If Palin is prickly and narcissistic, Trump is just a flat out self-aggrandizing asshole. He will say something nice about someone only as a prelude to saying something nicer about himself. While the polls being taken this far away from a general election are as substantial as cotton candy, they are the closest thing to reality that anyone has to go with, so Trump's non-candidacy candidacy is being taken seriously, most notably now by the pro-oligarchy Club For Growth, who recognize Trump as a traitor to his class for saying a tax increase on the rich would be the best way to shrink the deficit back about ten years ago.

Up until 2004, the Republicans allegedly were a coalition of the pro-Jesus people and the pro-Business people, and both groups saw George W. Bush as one of their own. But the stinging loss of 2008 has shown the cracks in those two camps and emboldened the racists, who have always been there, as Californians who saw the policies of failed governor Pete Wilson can attest. Trump, a man with no scruples and no subtlety, thinks he can bring the racists on board by embracing not only birtherism but several goofy and unsubstantiated Internet rumors about Obama, including the one about Bill Ayers writing Dreams of My Father.

Right now, Trump's success looks like The Fred Thompson Effect, named for the actor and senator who was supposed to be a game changer in 2008 but turned out to be no such thing when he actually ran. The excitement about Trump is really the conservative voters saying en masse, "There's got to be somebody better than these palookas." Should he really run, a few weeks or months in the actual political spotlight and Trump will be outed as just another palooka, and the cry for someone else will continue.

Some commentators are seeing Obama's numbers go down and saying it spells trouble, but even so, the Republicans have to put an actual person up against him, and the field so far looks astoundingly weak, The Donald included.

Ayn Rand: Idiot. Crackpot conspiracy theorist. Hypocrite. (Or Ayn Rand: perfect hero for the 21st Century right wing.)

I was going to write about Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the low budget attempt to turn the sprawling 1957 Ayn Rand novel so beloved by shitheads around the world that it still the #4 book on Amazon to this day into a watchable film. But doing a little research, I've decided to start with a post about Ms. Rand herself, a sick and stupid dwarf who has been turned into an Olympian god by minds even smaller than her own.

In 1974, 69 year old Ms. Rand was still a two pack a day smoker. She believed the medical consensus on cigarette smoking on lung cancer was a government conspiracy. The conspiracy, of course, was no such thing, and she had a cancerous lung that needed to be removed or she would die.

This fits the crowd that idolize her today to a tee. These idiots think that all the ways humans have changed the world cannot possibly have a global effect. It's all just a conspiracy, largely because if they really believed they had to change their ways, it would be an inconvenience, and these narcissists cannot be inconvenienced by the mob, the herd of moochers and parasites who obviously never get anything right.

Except, oh yeah, carcinogens and the basic physics of carbon in the atmosphere.

Other than that, they are always wrong.

Okay, she smoked for several decades, she got lung cancer. Maybe quitting when the evidence was in would have given her a few more healthy years, maybe not. She's not alone. Sir Ronald Fisher had a much better brain than Ms. Rand, but when it came to quitting smoking, he was just another fucking pinhead addict.

But according to Evva Joan Pryor of the Rand Institute, when the bills got too big to be paid even for a woman who had a massive perennial best-seller to her name, she went on the dole and took both Social Security and Medicare.

The miserable, deservedly cancer-ridden, ugly hypocrite bitch.

Did you know that Paul Ryan, the asshole who is telling us with a straight face that Medicare has got to go, considers Ayn Rand to be his personal hero?

Yes, hypothetical question asker, I was aware of that.

By all I hold sacred, I hate these miserable cunts.

Here endeth the lesson.

Lying like a rug in service of the greater good.

Jon Kyl said on the senate floor that abortions are 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

Somebody fact-checked him, the dirty meany bullies. 3% of the services Planned Parenthood does are abortions, and none of those can receive federal funds. Because abortions are more expensive that birth control, abortions are about 15% of the billing at Planned Parenthood.

Still, there's that 90% number. What was that? Kyl's office was reached for comment, and they said that what he said was not intended to be a factual statement.

I guess I could take the time to rip Kyl a new one, but thankfully for the Republic, we have Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac and Stephen Colbert to help out on that front.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
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The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl Lies About Planned Parenthood
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Colbert Report
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And, oh yeah, the folks at Fox and Friends are equally full of shit.

What a surprise.

Can I join the Anti-Republican Party?

Barack Obama has started his campaign for re-election. I got a letter from them this week.

I'm not sending any money, at least not yet. I waited until well into 2008 to do any work for the campaign or send them a check, and unless he faces a primary challenger I really don't like, I probably will wait until the end to help out, assuming I have free time or discretionary cash about a year and a half from now.

I'm registered as a Democrat, but right now they don't thrill me much. I'm much more of an Anti-Republican than I am anything else.



Let's consider global warming, or as it is sometimes known, climate change. (Conspiracy theorists on both sides think the other is to blame for the phrase "climate change", but it was being used in the late 1960s long before this became the political football it is today.)

The Republican Party these days is not monolithic. In fact, there are four acceptable views of global warming inside their big tent.

1. It doesn't exist.
2. It exists, but it doesn't matter.
3. It exists and it matters, but humans have nothing to do with it.
4. It exists, it matters and humans may have something to do with it, but Jesus is coming back before my kid's braces are coming off, so it only matters a little bit and not enough for us to change any of our bad habits.

While this means there are a variety of opinions, there is only one policy. Avoid all action at all costs. The House Republicans on the Energy committee are 100% against cap and trade.

Recall that cap and trade was the conservative alternative to the progressive policy of a carbon tax.

That's their way now. Propose some weak alternative that will not solve a problem in the real world, and if it becomes policy, oppose it.



In Mississippi, a recent poll of Republicans showed that 46% think inter-racial marriage should be illegal, while 40% think it's okay and another 14% aren't sure.

Of course, that doesn't matter to Matty Boy, a lifelong bachelor living in California, does it?

Well, here's a picture of my adorable niece Holly Smith-Smith and her nearly as good looking husband, Cleavon Smith-Smith.

Cleavon was born and raised in Mississippi, where his family still lives. I'd like to think they will be safe when they visit his family, but with the boneheads in charge of the majority party back there, I'm not so sure.

So, yeah, it matters to me.



Of course, that's Mississippi, the armpit of the nation, and they are asking Mississippi Republicans, the cancerous lymph nodes of that armpit. I live in California, progressive, forward-thinking, land of fruits and nuts and good things to eat. What do I care about knuckle draggers 2,000 miles away?

A poll last year of Republican voters found that they oppose openly gay teachers in the public schools by an astounding 73% to 8% with 19% unsure.

Think about this. The issue that killed Anita Bryant's career some thirty years ago is still a fight these assholes want to fight.

Once again, you might ask, what skin is it off Matty Boy's nose? I may be a lifelong bachelor, but I'm not openly gay. (I'm not unopenly gay either, though I don't consider it any business of my employers.) I care because it touches the lives of people I care about, dear friends who are public school teachers and openly gay.

The bigotry has to end. The major political party in this country that still openly courts the bigots need to undergo a radical transformation or it should die before it ruins this great country forever.


And then there is the new great villain of the latest incarnation (or should I say mutation) of the Republican Party, unionized public employees.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that public employees banding together to ask for a redress of grievances sounds like a First Amendment right to me. To see the blatant and often clearly illegal union busting that the new Republican majorities are attempting in Wisconsin, Indiana and other places may not be a direct attack on me as a unionized public employee in California, but even in a state where the Republicans need some major sleight of hand to keep from becoming the 21st Century version of the Whigs (or more accurately, the Know-Nothings), I can see that is in my own enlightened self-interest to stop American Republicanism in all its forms with every legal tactic at my disposal.

Here endeth the lesson.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant.

I didn't intend to make a study of the reports of the causes of the financial meltdown. It happened incrementally, with some very intentional steps and others less so.

First and most intentionally, I bought and read Michael Lewis' The Big Short, which I reviewed earlier this month. Next, I rented Charles Ferguson's Inside Job based on several people's recommendations and a sense of duty to watch a few of the Oscar winning and nominated documentaries.

There are major differences between The Big Short and Inside Job. First and most obvious, it's a book versus a movie. It's easier for Lewis in his book to spend more time explaining some tricky ideas. The two of the main weapons of mass destriction, the Credit Default Swap (CDS) and Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), definitely qualify as tricky ideas, intentionally designed by mathematicians and lawyers to be very hard to understand.

Alliances of mathematicians and lawyers. Even I shudder at the thought, and I'm supposed to understand half of that pretty well.

The second big difference between The Big Short and Inside Job is worm's eye vs. bird's eye. Lewis talked mainly to small players who figured out how to make a profit but had zero power to stop the avalanche. Ferguson got some interviews with the big fish, though there are a lot of times the caption "xxx refused to be interviewed for this film" appears. Glenn Hubbard (no relation), the genius who engineered the Bush tax cuts, is cheerful through most of the questions until he is asked to take some responsibility for the carnage, and there is some talking head from the Business Roundtable, a pleasant sounding name for an evil lobbying group created by the ass covering buffoons who got us into this mess. Almost all of the people who sit in front of the camera and tell the truth are not Americans, people from the governments of Iceland and Singapore and France who got taken for a nasty ride and admit their foolishness and a little of their culpability but make compelling cases that they were among the fleeced and not among the fleecers.

I recommend both the book and the film, so I don't want to give all the juicy bits away. There are parts of the colossal mess that are covered by both. A very fair question is "Where were the regulators?", and both The Big Short and Inside Job have plenty of scorn to heap upon Moody's, Fitch and S&P. One thing both the movie and book agree upon is that it was in the financial interests of the rating agencies to give high marks to repackaged crap. A company would pay a set price to Moody's to rate a CDO, but if it wasn't the highest rating available, maybe that company would ask S&P to rate the next one.

The book goes into more detail than the film on this topic, as was the case regularly when they overlapped. Since the end of the Cold War, a lot of young people good at applied math would go into financial engineering rather than weapons engineering because that was obviously where the money was. Lewis puts forward the thesis in The Big Short that if a young person was going into the field for a big payday (and why else?), then the really good financial engineers (known as quants) would be at the companies giving million dollar bonuses and the second string would be at the ratings agencies who would pay mere hundreds of thousands in salary.

To use a March Madness analogy, it was like a Number 1 seed vs. a Number 16. There was effectively no chance the big money would lose.

To give a point to the film, an excellent point was made in Inside Job as to why the massive financial bailout was voted through in the fall of 2008 by both Republicans and Democrats, an event that was the last nail in McCain's grotesquely mismanaged campaign, doomed to lose six weeks before a vote was cast.

Simply put, the world runs on credit. Sadly then and frighteningly still true today, it's way too much credit, with the big financial players massively over-leveraged, sometimes in the range of 30 to 1 or even 40 to 1 when measuring obligations in the markets compared to cash on hand. While this was a zero-sum game, which means if Company X loses $50 billion, somebody else makes $50 billion, several of these companies were on the hook for more money than they had, so Company X could lose everything, say $30 billion, and others would have $20 billion less than they expected. While all of these were flat out gambling losses, it meant that the people who lent to legitimate businesses had no money to lend. The scary and completely plausible scenario was that airlines would cease to function, because they are constantly borrowing to buy that day's fuel allotment.

No financial service industry, no planes in the air.

Anywhere.

Like... oh, nowish.

No James Bond villain ever made a better blackmail threat.


Add to this mix a talk I heard on the broadcast from The Commonwealth Club by Phil Angelides, the former California state treasurer and failed Democratic nominee for the governorship who was appointed to the blue ribbon government panel investigating the financial meltdown. This was the least intentional step in my search for knowledge, as I was driving down to Santa Cruz and the broadcast came on the radio in my dad's truck.

Yes, my father is a Republican who listens to NPR. I may have to report him to the proper authorities.

The panel was set up after the 2008 elections where the Republicans deservedly got their heads handed to them, so the Dems got six members and the Republicans four. Angelides plays the good boss in this talk, lauding his staff for long hours and excellent work, several of whom are in the audience and mentioned by name. But he doesn't deny the obvious, that this was an investigation done on the cheap by government standards, spending less than $10 million before issuing their report. This is a tiny fraction of the money Ken Starr spent looking for presidential blowjobs, and that total has to be adjusted for inflation. To compare it to another financial investigation from this era, the man charged with looking into the wrongdoing of Bernie Madoff has already spent $200 million.

Charles Ferguson was in the audience at the Commonwealth Club after giving a talk earlier in the week on the same subject, and he was one of many who sent in questions as to why the government hasn't seen fit to prosecute anyone involved in the fiasco. Angelides correctly points out that it wasn't his commission's task to put people in jail, and notes that after the most recent though much smaller similar meltdown, the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, over 1,000 people were sent to jail, including CEOs. As of this writing, there has not been a single person convicted for any wrongdoing. I don't even know of any big wig who has been indicted.

Instead of chiding the judicial system, let me pick up a few sturdy bricks and throw them at the Republican nominees to this committee. Before the final panel released their report, three of the Republican nominees got together to write a rebuttal and the fourth wrote his own separate rebuttal.

Their conclusions were as predictable as the dawn. It was not the fault of their paymasters, the American corporations. It was the crazy Asian investors who had so much cash. It was the semi-government agencies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. No more regulation is needed. No one is criminally culpable.

I'm not sure if it's actually detectable in my writing, but I'm trying to cut down on the addictive drug of vitriol. I actually understand and agree with some of the underlying points of conservatism, but there is really no one in power making those points. The modern "conservative" movement is a loose coalition of fucking morons who think the world is 6,000 years old and fucking thieves who think a CEO making 6,000 times more than the average employee is perfectly acceptable if the market will bear it.

Ah, that first sip of vitriol! It still goes down smooth.

I don't agree with The Tea Party, but from what I see, it's largely a Revolt of the Morons. If these idiot dogs will go for the throats of their moneyed masters, there will be a blood bath and every fatality is a blessing on humanity. As Neils Bohr or Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially about the future, but I could see an internecine fight like this changing the political power structure in this country. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but watching the Obama administration, I think the people with money will just let the Republicans wither and buy more Democrats. Watching people in the streets in Wisconsin gives me some hope.

While I see change in the political world as a distinct possibility, sadly there is no political will to force change in the unregulated markets created by the eager-beaver quants on Wall Street, whom I will immodestly call my evil twins. Human greed focused by human intelligence is the most destructive power on earth, and even 9.1 earthquakes pale in comparison.