Interesting story from the Wall Street Journal, on the use of military hardware to hunt wild pigs in Texas.
It’s a Ted Nugent thing and illustrates the way the country has sorted itself, irrevocably. Pasadena isn’t anything like the places described in the piece. It might as well be another planet with alien locals and customs with which you’ve no desire to mix. The feeling’s mutual, I presume.
The men advanced in the sweltering, pitch-black night, scanning the landscape with night-vision goggles and armed with semiautomatic rifles fitted with silencers …
The prey in this high-tech hunt: feral pigs in pastures near Madisonville, Texas. Hunters Chuck Coiner and Frank Hahnel, clients of guide service Tactical Hog Control LLC, killed five wild porkers that June night, including a 30-pounder that took five bullets to finish off …
Tactical Hog Control, started in 2009 by Texas ranchers Clark Osborne and Mr. Dreher, is among a handful of next-generation outfitters across the South offering a new style of hog hunting designed to appeal to hunters’ inner commando. Each client on a nocturnal hunt with the two men suits up with roughly $40,000 of military-grade gear, including semiautomatic rifles like the DPMS AR-10 …
“I believe every man in the U.S. has a tactical gene,” said Rod Pinkston, an Army veteran and former Olympic sharp-shooting coach whose Jager Pro guide service conducts high-tech hog hunts in western Georgia. “They’ve always wanted to be a soldier, a SWAT team member. We’re the closest thing to combat that these guys are ever going to experience.”
Well, now, here’s the thing. All these guys, the salesmen and the hog hunters, could join the army. It’s not like opportunities to go overseas and get involved in the real thing are scare and limited only to a select cadre of Nick Furies.
This is Ted Nugent land, too, as the Journal piece makes abundantly clear.
Nugent runs feral hog hunts in Michigan for profit. And when that state moved to outlaw ownership of such hogs, which are deemed an invasive species, Nugent went to the governor to complain.
The ban on hog ownership hits him in the bank account.
The paradox, which Nugent has tried to obscure, is that some of the private hunts, those which keep the hogs on property, have contributed to the problem of hog control in the wild … which, in turn, has led to even more people offering wild boar hunts on their ranches. And to state laws calling for the eradication of the animals.
It’s the definition of a conflict of interest.
And it is here where the Michigan law banning ownership of hogs has struck at one of the planks of Nugent’s hunting business in the state.
Near the end of the WSJ piece:
Messrs. Osborne and Dreher have shot hogs on their East Texas ranches for two decades. Not until 2009 did they start enticing would-be Rambos. Their Tactical Hog Control offers hunters a six-hour hunt, beginning at dusk, for $500.
On Ted Nugent’s summer tour of 2011, the cream puff features reporters and free-lancers of the small newspapers of the nation have found it a lot harder to ignore the truth of him than last year.
It’s because things are very noticeably worse now.
Polarization and raging bigots have made the US government paralytic. So an asshole screaming profanity about destroying said government, all his enemies and the President through megawatt amplification onstage isn’t so damn funny or as delightfully idiosyncratic an exercise in free speech as it was in 2010.
When he shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …
Next, his bandmates – all in helmets now – recreated the famous photo of troops raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. It was a strange thing to tag on at the end of a concert. But in true Nugent fashion, they triumphantly waved their machine guns …
Nugent is ranting at a furious pace, cramming in more obscenities in three minutes than a roomful of cursing sailors, and undoubtedly saying something shockingly funny, or just shocking.
On Tuesday, many of Nugent’s rants were directed at Canadian visitors. Standing in front of a huge backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, Nugent invited Canadian visitors to “taste freedom.” Nugent later quipped, “I love you Canadians, it’s your government that is (fucked) up.” I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the picture.
There was also a massive one-finger salute to President Barack Obama, for which Ted pulled both hands away from his guitar and thrust two of his middle fingers in the air …
For the grand finale, the band donned military helmets and recreated the famous flag-raising scene at Iwo Jima …
All the reviews have one thing in common. The reporters rate as good only Ted’s old music and shtick, the last part meaning him shooting a flaming arrow into a target during “The Great White Buffalo,” a song which was in his set when he still called the band the Amboy Dukes.
The new stuff is not commented upon. And there’s no getting around the barrage of cursing and damnation leveled at over half the country, foreigners and the government.
The headlines are sometimes polite code for “questionable show” in newspaper rooms.
Nugent is also traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, where it’s now become impossible to ignore his animosity toward unions, teachers and those who mounted the recall against the state’s Republican legislators.
National musicians from Tom Morello to Arlo Guthrie to Ted Leo supported Wisconsin’s union protest movement earlier this year.
Now a musician is coming to town to declare that “government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce.”
Unions? [Ted Nugent] says they’ve brought America to its knees …
Q: On the topic of politics, this year Wisconsin substantially limited the collective bargaining rights of public employees. There were intense protests against this at the state Capitol in February and March. Do you think public employees should have the right to collectively bargain, or do you see unions as too powerful a force in the public sector?
Nugent: “Overall, unions in America have brought this great country to its knees. The NEA has seen to it that American kids are the dumbest kids ever, the auto industry was raped, and government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce. What’s not to despise?”
“The guitar rocker strikes harsh political notes,” reads the subhed.
Believe, at a newspaper the size of this one, it’s as close as a features editor can come to saying, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s with this guy!?”
Here’s Ted Nugent, performing “I Still Believe,” the title song for this tour, in some dive.
While not horrid, you wouldn’t go out of your way to see it. It’s teetotal Ted playing for an audience of white guy drunks with a band a bit better, but not a lot better, than the hard rockers who aren’t famous on off nights in the same place.
This, on the other hand, is not spitefully vindictive, old or embarrassing.
And in it’s snappy drumming take down it destroys stuff like phonus-balonus “I Still Believe” songs and an ass’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Laughter is a far better as remedy and entertainment than mechanized spite.
In Friday’s database crash, emergency backup eliminated the post: “The Party of Howard.”
But it didn’t kill it from my records, so republished, here it is.
UPDATED
[If] you’ve read the Ted Nugent tab for the last two years, [the next bit from the wires is no surprise.]
This is what President Obama seems constitutionally unable to grasp. That even if they are a sometimes useful foil, and (sadly) sometimes equally useful in getting him the policy results he wishes, by definition the Tea Party brigade sees any compromise as evil, because everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan is viewed as a mortal threat to their imagined perfect society, which looks a lot like Utah.
With fewer minorities. And a lot more Jesus …
[Any] compromise, no matter how small, is seen as an act tantamount to treason, which is precisely why we need to stop engaging these tottering tea lovers, because they simply do not believe in the workings of democracy.
The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or even Reagan – the GOP in its current form is nothing more than the party of Ted Nugent – hopefully with somewhat better hair.
It’s true.
Barack Obama doesn’t understand the level of hatred aimed at him every night from the stages of Nugent’s summer rattletrap tour through the heartland. And, by disposition and mental bent, this is the personality he is up against in the GOP House.
I’ve taken two years to follow Nugent on DD blog.
He’s unrelenting and the substantial public record shows him seemingly without a single shred of simple human decency. There’s no bargaining with such a mind, only complete surrender. Like the Tea Party, it’s all Nugent’s way. Everyone else, anyone with differing beliefs, needs to to be run off, destroyed, hit with a crowbar, beaten, hunted down, imprisoned or put to death for the sake of the country.
Last year I proffered a book idea for a modern biography of Ted Nugent as a parallel parable for our times, when lunatic unpalatable extremism, that which was totally unacceptable a decade or so ago, became tolerated and embraced in the mainstream. No one was interested.
Many people, including those in the mainstream media, have no idea how radical and offensive Ted Nugent is because they’ve never bothered to read his columns and track down everything the man’s said when he thinks people not in his core audience aren’t paying attention.
Nugent has paraded around on his summer tours of our dives (and I know the territory firsthand) for the last two years.
The jaunts take him to all the one and two-horse town fairgrounds in the heartland, where he curses out the president, foreigners, minorities, Muslims, everyone not like him and everything a modern society would consider decent and good, from the stages.
Mostly, the locals never complain because Nugent’s audience, those who come for the riffs, are uniformly lower middle and lower class white trash assholes who get in free on county fair omnibus tickets. It’s a demographic that never buys the new records he makes.
However, Nugent also takes the time to peddle his views in the capitol’s Tea Party paper, the Washington Times, and to parlay himself onto regular appearances on Fox and even CNN.
Add to this the people who put Nugent in in the small newspapers of the heartland every week — music journalists/stringers who have generally called the man some manner of quaint, one who is “opinonated??? and “conservative,??? a polite and intelligent person.
Invariably these tyros always ask Nugent if he’s going to run for office. And he always begs off on answering. In any case, Nugent doesn’t have to run for office in 2012. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, or some other odious GOP reptile, will do the job.
Most of what I have written has shown how Nugent’s most bankable commodity is his role as an outdoorsman’s Glenn Beck. It has nothing to do with his music and everything to do with his reactionary views.
The views are totally unacceptable in a reasonable or thinking human being with a heart.
However, Nugent’s been mainstreamed in the last couple years. You can find him semi-regularly on CNN, where they bring him in for being a colorful character, and regularly on Fox.
Ironically, or stupidly, he’s often on Huckabee because saintly Mike likes to play a pantywaist’s version of old classic rock tunes with long-in-the-tooth rockstars.
The last time Nugent was on Huckabee it was before an old white audience, people who would have never gone to see him, as I and other reprobates did regularly, in the Seventies and Eighties.
When Nugent’s in front of such audiences, an older Tea Party demographic that loves to hear his views on stamping out the parasites and bloodsuckers (words he loves) bringing down America, he stifles the four-letter words for fifteen minutes.
I thought MSNBC’s work in Wisconsin on Tuesday night wildly inappropriate. They front loaded the news and were burned to a crisp.
Between Ed Schulz and Rachel Maddow, the network had built up the Wisconsin recalls as a huge victory, a raising the flag on Iwo Jima moment, a big strike back against the other side.
What they got was the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge.
Specifically, the big movie starring Richard Shaw, Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and a bunch of other name stars.
Shot in Spain, it was one of those big production movies so badly done it’s silly. Which, coincidentally, is unfortunately typical of premature Dem proclamations of victory.
By the end of the Bulge the climactic panzer battle looks like it’s taking place on a hot desert plain, not the forests of the Ardennes in the dead of winter.
“How did we get to el Alamein?” someone should have asked in post production.
Still, the Battle of the Bulge is something of a tragi-comedic show of fanaticism and delusion.
Richard Shaw plays Hessler, the ramrod steely German miraculous panzer leader, brought back for a last campaign, one to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He gets carried away by the new Tiger tanks he’s been given (in the movie they’re old crap Pattons we sold to Spain in the 50’s and 60’s) and a group of young soldiers singing “Das Panzerlied.”
Pick the one — uploaded by “arddel.” The sound is exquisite. Can you recognize the actor who would get a bigger role in “Where Eagles Dare”?
(It comes at 1:49.)
Behind those singing soldiers is a big banner: “Der Sieg wird unser sein.”
“The victory will be ours.”
Another banner reads: “Glauben. Kampfen. Siegen.”
“Believe! Fight! Win!”
Win the fucking future.
Hessler orders his skeptical orderly, a much older soldier who has been through all the campaigns, to sing. The man does so but you can see in his eyes he know it’s rot. What was once great now just isn’t good enough.
And to my mind it’s a good metaphor for our leaders. It was Ed Schulz in Wisconsin.
It’s Barack Obama when he went onstage yesterday at some measly battery plant in Michigan, choosing not to seriously discuss any of the problems that need fixing.
Everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault he can’t do anything. But he just can’t bring himself to speak it. Instead, another exhortation — onward to victory, the equivalent of singing a song — from the local bunker.
(Between two states, the place employed 150 people! Bethlehem Steel, even in major decline in the mid-Eighties when I lived near it, dwarfed the place.)
And, of course, the delusion applies in extremity to all the wild-eyed crazies in the GOP, virtually the entire party.
None of our leaders can bring themselves to admit what the old geezers standing behind them know, those who can be ordered to sing and go along but who do so only reluctantly.
Like in the movie, the country’s best now is not going to be good enough. Not by a long shot.
“Pivoting to jobs” and making speeches at piss ant firms found by the advance team using Google for a few minutes won’t fix it. Budget cutting and deficit chopping and clapping your hands in glee when the government is downsized and more people are put out of work certainly won’t.
There are answers but fanaticism and delusion make them unreachable and unspeakable to the people in power.
At the end of Bulge everything has gone to hell for Hessler. The battle is lost but he’s trying to force the last panzer up the hill as barrels of fuel incinerate him. The Panzerlied can be heard in the background. (Here.)
His aide, the old man, walks back to what’s left of Germany.
That’s us. No Marshall Plan or anything else, awaits, though. Just more of the same.
In any case, the link is to a piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, syndicated from TD to the Guardian, and from a new piece added to her ten-year-old book, Nickel & Dimed, on not making it in America.
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalised in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
True.
It no longer makes you blink to read stories about the homeless being chased around in SoCal for being unsightly or people in Vegas being punished for giving out food. (The covering rationalization is that such a thing is unregulated and could lead to food poisoning cases. Which, as a practice, is even more evil than just admitting you don’t wish to let any beggars have food.)
Afflicting the afflicted is part of the national genetic character. In the last decades we’ve selectively bred for it.
It’s reinforced by economic collapse, the fear that if you don’t kick down on the person below you, you’re next, and the natural tendency of frightened people to scapegoat.
The Tea Party is the apotheosis of this. The party is made up of classic kick-downers and I’ve expressed admiration for their capability at unified rage. Rage motivates. It’s something Dems can’t do. Ever.
If you watched MSNBC for the last couple months, between Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, you’d have thought the GOP was on the run, headed for a good head-cutting session for attacking labor in Wisconsin.
And so when MSNBC put all their effort into covering the Wisconsin state legislator recall like it was raising the flag on top of Suribachi and got the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge instead, it was a big reverse. Very Republican districts stayed very Republican, the guy from the Nation magazine explained today.
The Dem labor protests really didn’t move the border that much.
And there’s no way to tell if they won’t be in for another 2010 nasty shock in 2012.
When rage is afoot over the economy and jobs, you’re for the fool’s hall of fame to think it can be used just because all GOP presidential hopefuls are defined in the narrow dark spaces between the categories of “odious reptile,”“white power Christian mullah” and “weird numskull.”
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions”, which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled”. In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space – by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers …
Whether households wanted to acknowledge overcrowding or not in 2010 census was immaterial The census-takers worked it out.
(At least here we did.)
From my standpoint as an enumerator in downtown Pasadena, overcrowding was obvious. And very frequently it took the form of big old houses, abodes which looked fine on the tree-lined streets off Colorado Street, but which hid a practice of cutting the interior rooms into stealth apartments.
You walked into these once fine homes and you were in the equivalent of a flop house with single bedrooms and large closets employed as rentals. Conditions ranged from poor to plain abominable.
In these, the kitchen and bathrooms were all common use. And these modern flophouses — while not in the mansion district near the Rose Bowl — were right beside the upscale condos inhabited by the lowers in the upper class. Grinding poverty was in spitting distance of wealth, made easy to overlook by silence, neatly cut lawns and painted exteriors.
Ehrenreich discusses one family on food assistance, even that made inhospitable by requirements, put in place to drive people away under the assumption that those who need the assistance are probably parasites.
“[They] discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting,” writes Ehrenreich. “In addition, [one family member] had to drive 35 miles a day to attend ‘job readiness; classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were ‘frankly a joke'”.
A few months after I moved to California I met Barbara Ehrenreich at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Nice lady. I was so in awe she probably thought I was a stalker.
Krugman, in one of today’s later blog posts at the NY Times:
And now it turns out that what really terrifies the markets, let alone the suffering unemployed, is the prospect of a second Great Depression — a prospect that has become much more likely thanks to the utter wrongness of elite policy priorities.
Great work, guys.
As an aside, with regards to eating squirrel or raccoon meat, there are good reasons why we got away from it.
Many decades ago, trichinosis was a problem in Pennsylvania because of the local predilection for eating their own pork sausage. Modern hog farming, while causing other problems, put an end to it.
On the other hand, raccoons can carry the enzootic disease, rabies. And the incidence of rabies appears thankfully rare in Michigan.
Rabies in wildlife (raccoons) has been successfully controlled in some parts of the United States through the use of oral rabies vaccination programs. In these programs packets of vaccine are distributed for consumption by these terrestrial rabies vector species.
So eat raccoon if you must. But be careful out there and encourage and reward diligence in your local bushmeat butcher.
Here’s a chance to spend a day in the outdoors with legendary rock star Ted Nugent the Whackmaster himself at his Waco, Texas compound.
The iconic madman and avid hunter has put a day of hunting and fishing for two lucky fans at his compound on the auction block at leading charity auction site Charity Buzz .
The auction is an effort to raise funds for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital through the Eric Trump Foundation’s online auction.
The lucky winning bidder and a guest with join Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Jr. for a day they’ll never forget.
The current standing bid is $5,250. The experience, valued at $30,000, is open for bidding through Aug. 8th …
Endure a day with Ted? Wouldn’t you just give the research hospital the money and pass?
We need more smart bombs, more predator drones, more advanced intelligence equipment and assets, more special-operations teams and more improved tactics, more ammo, better night-vision equipment, more human-intelligence capabilities, more stealth and a never-ending commitment to kill the enemies of freedom and America under whatever rock they may try to hide. Kill ‘em all as quickly as possible. That’s the most effective deterrent there is …
America is a peaceful nation.
“Sixty-years ago … Hiroshima and Nagasaki were flattened with atomic bombs,” Nugent writes. Never has so little been furnished by one so small.
“Mostly agree, Mr Nugent …. However, make that fifty six years ago, not sixty,” writes one of Howard’s equally arithmetic-challenged pals in the comments section.
File this one with the fiat money fear and loathers. The difference is that Bitcoin fans are obsessed libertarian young tech geeks as opposed to obsessed old nuts GOP/Tea Party white guys hoarding gold, heeding the commercial advice of Gordon Liddy and convinced the US dollar is going to turn into a one trillion Zim note.
If you download the Bitcoin software and read through the on-line site you’ll be tempted to try some bitcoin mining. Don’t bother.
I did it a couple months ago. You can leave your processor on for a century and maybe see the equivalent of a few bucks worth of bitcoins. Even semi-hard days of mining them are well over.
Think of it as the citizen’s gold mining crew shown in Pale Rider, except there’s no chance you’ll find the big rock like Spider Conway before he was gunned down by Stockburn and his marshals. And no Clint Eastwood as “Preacher,” either.
Bitcoin is all now Coy LaHood.
Maybe that will change.
But the info from F-Secure that a ‘bot controlling a Bitcoin mining operation was using purloined Twitter accounts certainly isn’t good news.
“Last month Symantec blogged about the potential of creating botnets used to mine bitcoins, without the computer owner ever knowing,” reads something from the Internets.
Security, liquidity and stability are now things one does not associate with Bitcoin. Which would seem to be very bad news, if not a death knell, for the currency. Readers searching through Google will find some wags have already come up with the new name — shitcoins.
If you have a lot of them, they’re allegedly worth something. If not, ehhh.
Bitcoins are generated all over the Internet by anybody running a free application called a bitcoin miner. Mining requires a certain amount of work for each coin. This amount if automatically adjusted by the network, such that the bitcoins are always created at a predictable and limited rate.
Believe this and you waste your time. Bitcoin exploitation is now the domain of speculators who can buy significant sums of them in the belief that value will appreciate according to the graph here. Or that value can be accumulated by exploiting Bitcoin exchange problems which cause rapid fluctuation in the currency’s value.
Unfortunately, practical bitcoin mining, which comes as a “feature” in every downloaded copy of the Bitcoin software, is totally out of reach
of Joe Average User now. (Somehow the “good boy” at the Atlantic never deigns to mention it.)
So as a currency, it’s no longer of any value to a middle class (indeed, there’s no compelling reason for anyone from the middle or lower classes to even believe in Bitcoins) — which would seem to be a requirement for the success of any newish money.
“Sounds like a Ponzi scheme,” said my friend Don, as I explained it to him at a small party a couple weeks ago.
“You should accept Bitcoins,” he added.
If you have a Bitcoin wallet, Bitcoin.org used to (at least about a month ago) suggest going to the Bitcoin Faucet (you can Google it) for some shards of the virtual currency. This to get you started and whet the whistle.
DD didn’t have much luck with that. “Sent!” said the Bitcoin Faucet, in metering out my milibits of a Bitcoin. No transactions, hours later, in the ol’ Bitcoin wallet. Not even an atom of a crumb.
Another fly in the ointment is the necessity of keeping up with everything happening re Bitcoins and the troubles of the sites built to service the networked currency. If everyone was faced with a similar but limited thicket of interesting dysfunction and intriguing trouble when using real money the homeless would rapidly become the largest segment in the American economy.
“We can’t balance the budget on the backs of people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,” the president said, renewing his call for higher taxes on the wealthy. “Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair.”
The Census Bureau reported last fall that 43 million Americans, one in seven of us, were poor. But what is poverty in America?
The most recent government data show more than half of the families defined as poor by the Census Bureau now have a computer in the home. More than three of every four poor families have air conditioning, almost two-thirds have cable or satellite television, and 92 percent have microwaves.
How poor are America’s poor? The typical poor family has at least two color TVs, a VCR and a DVD player. A third have a widescreen, plasma or LCD TV. And the typical poor family with children has a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation.
So with Heritage, you have the ready made Tea Party/GOP argument for eliminating food stamps because they’ve written that America’s poor are spoiled and with too much cheap consumer electronics in the apartment.
Of course, I didn’t see this while canvassing for the census. The poor people in Pasadena’s city center were definitely visibly poor.
“None of this means America’s poor live in the lap of luxury,” concedes the Heritage man near the end, apparently a little self-conscious over where he’s taken the reader. “The lifestyle of the typical poor family certainly isn’t opulent.”
Isn’t opulent. That seems safe to say. Where do they dig up these manglers of English and critical thinking?
The consequences for 2010, a very bad night for the Democratic Party, when the extremists were let in.
They always wanted to destroy government and are implacable. The Democrats can’t fight that animus given the willingness of the Tea Party/GOP to shoot the middle class dog if it doesn’t get its way. (However, they are somewhat culpable in their inability to explain this to Americans, again and again.)
The civilians are not without blame. It’s as if elections are viewed as a recalcitrant machine. Confronted with a lit green button that didn’t work, one which left them feeling bad because of the destroyed economy, most simply pushed (or push) the red self-destruct button right beside simply because it’s different than the one that’s operating poorly. That’s idiocy.
For every Robert Reich who is carping on the left, there are a dozen unhappy Republicans who think the GOP is acting recklessly. John Boehner’s speakership is in ashes. Michele Bachmann in now polling about evenly with Mitt Romney. The GOP is having a huge internal fight and is loathed and mistrusted by the entire international community. They have been exposed for the radicals that they are, and the people disagree overwhelmingly with their behavior and their approach …
The truth is, the 2010 midterms were a catastrophe. They had horrible consequences. This weekend was one of those consequences, and it couldn’t be avoided through “leadership.”
The rest of the world knows the US has unstable government and is in what sure looks like irreversible decline. Most people here now get that, too.
Finally, it was just too sad seeing the President thank people for using Twitter and getting on the telephones.
Infernally, the banner ad for made-in-China counterfeit Gibson guitars seems to be everywhere. Obviously, one big Net advertising firm in the US spins these out as part of a package deal going everywhere.
And I don’t know who it is. If you do, put it in the comments or please e-mail me.
I can’t figure out why the President thinks asking the public to launch what amounts to denial-of-service attacks on Congressional telephones and websites means anything.
Does anyone with a brain think anyone in the building even remotely cares if staffers have a hard day, inbound goes directly to voice mail and servers time out?
Why would you even waste time on television triggering it?
If I had the psychology of the GOP I’d see it as an indication to keep on, only even harder. You can almost admire the maniacal desire to bring down the enemy no matter the cost, the pure kamikaze nature of it.
And all the opposition can do is ring the phones? It’s pathetic.
Reminds me a little of the few books of fiction on nuclear conflict I read during the Cold War where the tit-for-tat limited escalations become unmanageable. Both sides found it impossible to avert total calamity because communication and control were swept away while they were caught thinking they still had enough time and maneuvering room to say “Stop.”
