The Morning Line: The Forum, Filner and TeaBagger Frauds

7/30/2013 9:38 AM

The Morning Line 7/30/13

I listen to AM radio, with all its ads, and the same advertisers also interrupt the MSNBC TV simulcast on XM satellite radio in the evening. Apparently, America is made up of limp-dicked men, wide-waisted women, all of whom are in foreclosure, need a loan, and cheat on their taxes. Oh, and their teenage sons back-talk them (what, they never did that to their parents?), their dogs have mange and their cats have fleas.

Oh, well, at least our cat gets fleas when I forget to use the stuff on him. Otherwise, you’d think I wasn’t American.

Meanwhile, here in California, things seem to be getting, well, not worse. Democrats passed a budget on time, without the kinds of bookkeeping that Enron’s Kenny Boy and his buddy, George Bush, made famous. It even includes more funds back to K-12 schools, and a billion-dollar rainy-day fund.

Since this kinda puts the dagger in the ‘austerity lifts all boats’ crap that the GOP is selling in the red states, you knew they’d want to exact some revenge.  So their House faction is going to try to roll back (read ‘federalize’) a lot of the environmental and business practice regulations that make California capable of having some of the least polluted (per capita) cities in the U.S.  The problem is, some of this is flying under the radar by being included in Senate (!) bills to “strengthen” the EPA.  Sounds like the Dems are gonna get rolled again. C’mon, Lautenberg, haven’t you learned?

Meanwhile, and I can’t tip a big enough hat to Dave Dayen, Republicans and the banks are trying to get off the hook of having to produce the paperwork for their foreclosures (and cut your local registrar out of the business of tracking deeds) by adding a new, privately-owneddatabase as the national record of all real estate ownership. Boy, can’t wait ‘til it gets hacked so that everything belongs to the Whitewater Investment Company of Arkansas.

Locally, the Forum is gonna be back in business as a “music venue” in 2014, starting off with three nights of a band that made me run to KROQ for music back in the 70s. I haven’t been to a Lakers game since they left the Forum, and hadn’t seen a local game until the Expo line got to Culver City, and took me to a Clippers game this year. (Yea, while they were on the winning streak.) . Gave up on downtown ages ago. Can’t stand that Santa Monica Fwy parking lot. More time on the freeway than at the events. Now the light rail means someone else drives, and parking isn’t an issue, so I’m going more.

‘Cause if there’s something LA needs, it’s another venue for the circuses in “bread and circuses”, since we’re losing one, while the Republicans do their damnedestto sink this country.  So let’s all wait to see what a bunch of aging wanna-bes do in the audience of a band of wish-they’d-beens at the Forum come January.  It’ll be a nice way to start a year when the TeaBaggers want to take us back to the ‘70s…the 1870s.

I have one thing to say about Mayor Filner in San Diego.  Seventy? He’s seventy and he’s doing this? And he thinks anyone would believe two weeks anywhere is going to change he approach to, well, to anything? That thought process, as much as his well-reported handling (literally) of women, make him unfit to continue what, if you read that wiki bio, is a long career as a progressive, starting as a Freedom Rider in Jackson Mississippi. Buh-Bye, Bob. Don’t ask San Diego to pay for your lawyers, just take your publicly-funded pension and go

While Dems doing dirt seems to be the theme of the day, at least we call for them to step down, if they don’t do so on their own. As opposed to the freaks on the GOP side of the fence. If you want to spend a few bucks to make a statement, send $13 worth of men’s diapers to Senator David Vitter  at his Capitol office, 516 U S Senate, Washington DC 20510. Or to one of his many Louisiana offices.  Warning, shipping and tax will get this up to $22, but the childish satisfaction is so worth it.

And finally: Nuts. Reds lost to San Diego 2-1 last night. If you know baseball, you can tell exactly when the Padres got all their runs by seeing that the losing pitcher was Aroldis Chapman.

7/30/2013 10:36 AM

7/30/2013 10:43 AM

Holding Rick Perry Up For The Shining Turd He Is

‎Thursday, June 23, 2011 21:29:40

So, the pad in my hip pocket collects thoughts. Of mine mostly. For instance, today included ‘Inheritance tax – Walton/Koch/Crow/Forbes’ followed by ‘Corporations v. Islamic Companies: the advantages of the former have been overwhelmed by the negatives (how our economy collapsed) while the latter’s positives never overcame the negatives, which is why so much has stagnated under those economies. Have Corporate Autocracies and Oligopolies any less impunity these days than the Kingdoms of Islam?’

I still need to write letter to our new Citizens Redistricting Commission, emphasizing the need to move a couple of lines on the new congressional districts (I’m sure they’ll listen…yea, that’s one word for the round file) and to agree with requests two friends made at the local meeting the Commission had near here last week.

Next page: taking a page, or actually a rhyme, from my youth, in response to the Big O’s Afghanistan speech:

Hey! Ho!

BHO!

How many more die

‘til we finally go?

And then there’s Rick Perry, governor of texas (always with a small ‘T’, considerin the quality of leader they’re sending out these days.) He gave a speech the other day at the Republican Leadership Conference down in Loooz-iana. I heard some of it, god help me, on a radio report (NPR, I think, or maybe POTUS on XM) and one particular phrase jumped out at me, one that his audience never hears the way everyone else in America does. No, I’m not talking about the usual christ-whistles these right-wingers blow to attract voters. We all know those by now. Just listen for when they’re talking like the Reverend, the minster, the priest that you had to sit through until you were thirteen or fourteen and could finally come up with a good enough reason to not be wasting your time sitting on those hard-assed pews, listening to a foreign language.

No, I’m talking about when these incredibly un-christian ReagaNazis hold themselves and their morals up as examples for all of us to live by. Because they don’t hear how that then leaves them open to the massive amounts of disgust when they and their leaders do what Vitter and Ensign and Massa and Lee and so many Republicans do, picking up guys in Minnesota restrooms, accidentally getting their penises in other men’s mouths, soliciting men and drugs while leading an anti-gay ministry, so many examples.

Here’s the money quote from Rick Perry’s speech, at least on this subject:

“Let’s speak with pride about our morals and our values and redouble our efforts to elect more conservative Republicans. Let’s stop this downward American spiral.”

This is not something Weiner said, or Clinton said, or Spitzer said. They never held themselves up as paragons of virtue. When they fucked up, it was as if they were finally human. But the republicans constantly paint themselves as saints, as capable and deserving to judge the morals of all others, even as Tom Coburn negotiates bribery and the House chair on abandoned abused children solicits sex from underage Congressional pages. The daughter of our current but fading right-wing goddess was paraded pregnant through her mother’s failed campaign, carrying her infant brother while coming to term herself. Because fecundity as well as an inability to say ‘No’ apparently run in the family. And our newly-rising female star has five children, more foster children, and a husband no one ever sees, who picks out and buys all her fabulous outfits.

Why do these people defend their feet of clay so heavily? Because to admit any flaw is impossible. “That’s living in the past. Let’s look to the future” is their mantra, refusing the one thing that the past provides: a learning experience.

And so they fail to learn either of two things from any of these episodes. They neither learn why they are not being treated to a double standard, they are being held to the standard they claim to stand for. I don’t stand for it, this sanctimonious, literally holier-than-thou, according the Governor Perry. And they never learn to shut up, that they are human, that they will make mistakes, and claiming that they won’t makes them look stupider, not just individually but as a movement, every time one of them opens his mouth, and then later, his fly.

The Republican Party’s learning curve is a flat line. That’s my line, my bumper sticker. If I see it on a car, I’ll know where you got it. It’s a theme I come back to time and again in political conversations with people who seem to think I know something about the subject.

To prove it, here’s a page of a site that’s just a blinkered bumbler’s delight. It picks out some choice quotes from Perry’s speech and holds them up high, not realizing that all the world sees these nuggets for the turds that they are. And if you can bear it, it also links to the entire 25-minute video of the whore-o-rama that was his full speech. Have the Epicac ready. Although perhaps it is its own version of that childhood favorite of mine.

The last not in my notepad for today wants me to research how commodity trading has changed in the last 30 years, including who is allowed to participate, types of trading instruments and their ratings, and the size of the financial market versus the actual volume of the product available for trade. Want to write my State Controller about the kinds of things that are apparently now legal for state pension funds to invest in that they could not have 20 or 30 years ago, another reason why so many pension funds are strapped these days.

But for now, Rick Perry is my official douche du jour. Keep an eye on him. And whenever anyone holds him up as a success, ask, ‘At what?’ Then cite texas’s dismal standing in poverty, K-12 education spending, state debt, wages, pregnancies, mortality rates, literacy rates, just about any statistic of the quality of life for those not in the top one quarter of one percent, ie., that jerkoff that’s touting Dick Perry to you at that moment without any regard for his own well-being.

1028 ~ Thursday, June 23, 2011 22:16:36