Nothing has changed, except they’ve become louder and much worse since the primaries.
The enemy in music for the election countdown.
Global warming and evolution as hoaxes, hound gays, hoard a big pile of gold, put people to death — as many as you can and as quickly as possible, scary Ted Nugent. I got to the screw with the reproductive rights of women bits later.
It’s a lot to stick in one tune.
And I’ll have one later this week, another in the string of ZZ Top-styled satires of the state of that part of the country that dearly wants to redo the Civil War.
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,” said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Many retailers now use sophisticated software that track the flow of customers, allowing managers to assign just enough employees to handle anticipated demand … Many employers have schedule shifts as short as two or three hours … The widening use of part-time employees has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
It is replete with working citizens who cannot earn a living, the wreckage of a technology-assisted all-against-all American system in which human lives exist to be boiled down, reduced and atomized for profit.
In its anecdotal account it is a vision starkly at odds with the views of the dangerous and crazy Republican Party, our country’s Ted Nugents, with their belief that 50 percent of the people are lazy moochers and blood-suckers.
[It] is impossible to look at Mr Romney’s proposals – reductions in marginal income tax rates offset by unspecified reductions in tax expenditures – without concluding that they “would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and lower-income taxpayers???. In an economy with surging inequality, this would make the underlying problem worse.
The issues go far beyond economics. Divides over social and foreign policies are self-evidently profound. But the economic choices are also important. Americans have a choice between a man with modest ambitions and someone determined to double up on the fiscal and financial policies of the pre-crisis era. Mr Romney, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
For the Financial Times, it’s a pretty good kick in the ass.
If you access it, enlarge the graphical presentation for the plot of the “growth in real after tax income.” The top 1 percent dwarf everybody, even their shoeshine army.
Today Washington Times serves up a real Halloween treat: A Q&A with Ted Nugent, living symbol of the Psychopath Vote. So I’ve used the scariest Ted photo I have, one where he’s in his best Deliverance-style pose, a dangerous scowl just before beating a houseful of blood-sucking Democrats to death with his acoustic guitar in Haddonfield, Illinois.
Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive, there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down that same path.
On going after all the parasites, or as the newspaper puts it, “What needs to be done to put the cycle of dependency in reverse?”
he Last Best Place has dwindled considerably since the big lies of The New Deal and The Great Society succeeded in brainwashing a segment of our country to believe Fedzilla would provide for anyone who decided, for whatever reason, to not be productive. In Mao Tse Tung’s Communism, the term “leaning on the hoe??? came about as more and more people learned that laziness would be rewarded and blood could be sucked …
President Obama fanned the flames of this brainwashing, but thankfully a brilliant businessman like Mitt Romney has all the right ideas …
Sage Keffer is a young man with huge ambition. He is a country kid who grew up fishing and camping and always wanted to be a country music star.
So, he thought it was a perfect fit to compete on an outdoor survival show hosted by Nugent.
Keffer said his time with the CMT show Runnin’ Wild…From Ted Nugent, in which contestants display survival skills, was a nightmare and in some ways totally unexpected …
“I said, ‘what’s the prize?’ They said, ‘well, CMT has not told us yet, but you’re going to be blown away,'” Keffer said.
Then, about one year later, the show still had not aired, and Keffer’s emails about the prize had gone unanswered, when one night he received a Facebook message from a fan who said they had just seen Keffer competing on CMT.
What his fans did not know was that all Keffer got for his victory was a set of bleached antlers.
“I didn’t go down to Waco, TX, just to be tortured,” said the contestant. Well, yes, yes, he did.
Maryland’s notorious kook, House Republican Roscoe Bartlett, is nearing what appears to be the end of his political career as head of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby.
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. And conclude that the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
Roscoe Bartlett will go back to being a private citizen, beaten by a banker running on the Democratic ticket. Maryland was redistricted and Bartlett’s once safe red corner of it has been made part of another, mostly blue.
Maryland’s ruling Democrats had a plan to oust 10-term Republican U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett …
Now the 86-year-old incumbent must persuade independent and crossover voters in the Washington suburbs that he is more of a centrist than his 92 percent rating from the American Conservative Union suggests. Meanwhile, the better-financed John Delaney of Potomac, 49, has been running a brisk schedule of events on his home turf.
Voter registrations in the district favor Democrats over Republicans, 46 percent to 34 …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
In the House, the mantle of Bartlett’s leadership of the electromagnetic pulse crazy caucus has been passed to the odious and stupid Trent Franks, GOP birther from Arizona.
Reads the Chronicle:
[Bartlett] recently voted to dismantle the Clean Water Act, block limits on mercury and carbon emissions and continue taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry …
Bartlett chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. He counts among his achievements a 2006 law barring condominium and homeowner associations from restricting how the American flag can be displayed and a 2001 law permitting the adoption of military working dogs after their retirement. He has also championed banning scientific research on chimpanzees, and he warns frequently that an electromagnetic pulse, such as that from a nuclear explosion in space, could disable all electronic devices.
The congressman who first brought the potentially catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse event to the nation’s attention is now under fire from the electric power industry that has fought voluntary efforts to protect the national grid with hardened transformers.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is fighting for re-election against the influences of the powerful electric power industry lobby …
And in a quote from one of the old Electromagnetic Pulse Threat commissioners Bartlett pushed regularly:
“Millions of Americans and their children may well owe their lives and future prosperity to the vision, determination, and political courage of Congressman Bartlett in his unrelenting quest to protect our nation from natural and nuclear EMP …”
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
At the end of Maloof’s piece at WND, a plug for yet another book about electromagnetic pulse doom to throw directly into the trash:
In the [new tv drama Revolution], society has collapsed [due to mysterious electromagnetic pulses] and the country devolved into a collection of mutually hostile self-styled militias, private armies and warring tribes … It shows that basic necessities that Americans take for granted, such as widely available food and clean water, become inaccessible as millions die from starvation, disease or widespread violence.
[And so do shows about zombie hordes.]
A coming book, “A Nation Forsaken,??? suggests that the show actually may downplay the real threat.
Maloof doesn’t tell readers he’s the author, too. And that without old Roscoe, what audience there is for it wouldn’t exist.
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
President Obama enters the final days of the campaign with a substantial lead among women — about 11 points, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — and enormous leads among Latinos and African Americans, the nation’s two largest minority groups. Mitt Romney leads among white voters, with an incredible 2-to-1 advantage among white men.
It is too simplistic to conclude that demography equals destiny. Both men are being sincere when they vow to serve the interests of all Americans. But it would be disingenuous to pretend not to notice the obvious cleavage between those who have long held power in this society and those who are beginning to attain it.
When Republicans vow to “take back our country,??? they never say from whom. But we can guess.
From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly (1984), which had quite a lot to say about American failure in Vietnam, but which closes with something more universal:
While such virtues as [character] may in truth be in everyone’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government or educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity … and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society.
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — this time from the side of our arms manufacturers — finally think they have an electronic bomb.
And they’ve bragged about making and changing history in a p.r. video with only, ahem, one thousand some views as of yesterday.
Boeing can’t show you the Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, in their dog and pony show video with the Air Force Research Laboratory. But they can show you old computers blinking in a narrow view (‘the monitors shown in the video at Boeing’s announcement of the tests only shut down for a few seconds’ reads one piece of Plaster Caster press).
And lottsa animated footage of an animated missile flying over a city.
So the astute viewer, not a stenographer journalist unfamiliar with the long history of these things, will be prepared to ask questions like:
What’s the range when the target PC is interrupted for a few seconds?
What’s the size of the weapon?
What tactical advantage is gained by making the lights and PC monitors in select buildings blink while an unopposed missile is flying overhead?
If it is envisioned as “invaluable against enemy infrastructure like radar and missile launch sites” how is it superior to an ordinary anti-radiation homing or direct attack weapon with longer range?
And if it as short range as exhibited how can it be used as effectively in air defense suppression?
Questions, questions! Why must you ask so many questions? Can you not see, Dick, how Air Force, Boeing and Raytheon boffins have shaken the pillars of science with their work in secret military labs? Surely this will get them to a Nobel ceremony.
Tell it to the Plaster Caster tech press and the guy at Aviation Week. He’s been telling everybody the electronic rays are here for years.
Anyway, that’s where all the easily overawed ass-kissers of military electrical engineers are.
When you make the world a better place rather than make something for trivially annoying people who can’t effectively fight back to charge off on the taxpayer, send me an e-mail.
Invariably, what now happens is that something will be sold to the military that’s an expensive dud, or nearly so. Like the Sheriff, aka the infamous pain ray, brought to you by many of the very same people.
Savor that “made history and stands to change the world” bullshit in the CHAMP commercial. Then look at what some really famous Nobel laureates did once here.
