Postcards of the Hanging

A backhanded endorsement for the Republican presidential nomination

2012-01-20T23:04:00.004-05:00

For most of my life, I sympathized with the Republican party, y'know, as much as a Canadian can. To this day, I believe that the greatest American president in my lifetime was George H.W Bush, who was also the last fully formed adult to hold that office.

Having said that, it takes me a long time to learn hard lessons. It wasn't until the Terri Schiavo case in the spring of 2005 that I finally internalized just how fully of shit the GOP actually is.

When a Republican Congress decided to use the power of the federal government to reverse four thousand years of legal tradition, to say nothing of their own stand on family values and small federal government to pass a law keeping one person alive (and remember, the law was very specific in applying to only Theresa Marie Schiavo), I called bullshit.

The fact that the second, slightly retarded, President Bush flew back to Washington to sign it - when he stayed in Crawford after reading a briefing headed "Bin Laden determined to strike in America", and went to a McCain fundraiser/birthday party in California immediately after learning that New Orleans was sinking - sealed the deal for me.

Republicans are no different than Democrats. They'll do whatever it takes to make their moron base, even when their moron base doesn't know what it actually believes. It took the Schiavo case to convince me that the Republican party believes nothing at all, and that it really makes no difference if Obama - or Pol Pot, for that matter - wins a second, third or fifteenth term as president of the United States. The opposition is just as craven, whorish and detremental to the interests of the country.

That's why I think that one Newton Leroy Gingrich is perfect standard bearer of the modern Republican party. Being, as he is, on his third wife and second religion, he's the antithesis of principle.

This is a dude who will will sit on a couch with Nancy Pelosi, asking for government action against climate change and, less than a year later, publish a book called "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less." There's also the small matter of Gingrich masterminding the impeachment of a president for getting blown by an intern while he himself was actually fucking a paid staffer.

Republicans have been demagouging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for a full decade now, so why now nominate a guy who made millions from them in his capacity as a "historian", despite his inability to be tenured as such by some bohunk community college in the middle of nowhere?

Ethics in government? It's hard to beat Newt on that, his having been the only Speaker of the House to be censured by his own body and fined to the tune of $300,000 ... when the Congress was controlled by Republicans. To suggest that his problems were a political witch hunt is not unlike suggesting that that American Revolultion was an Australian plot.

But he can do this....

That's called dodging the fucking question in a way that modern conservatives have mastered, killing the messenger.

I don't remember Republicans assaulting the Goddamned Liberal Media for their historinic coverage of Bill Clinton's blowjobs or Anthony Weiner's cock-shots, do you? And neither Clinton or Weiner made their own character a selling point to their campaigns. On the other hand, it's hard to find a better spokesman for the dignity and privacy of the family than someone that's on his third one, isn't it? You do the math.

But it's a hackneyed trick. You'll notice that ol' Newt never comes right out and says that "My ex-wife is a lying cunt," which most of us would under the circumstances, He just says that "The charges are false", whuch he can do because the ex never quoted young Newton as directly asking for an open marriage. Rather, he just implied it. It's a very Clintonian answer, but even Clinton wasn't ballsy enough to do it with that kind of tirade.

Besides, King was too stupid to get Gingrich on the truly devastating quote from his ex-wife, "He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected," Get Newt to try to answer that, and you have no more Newt, because everything in Newt's personal and public lives speak to the truth of it.

Look, I know that I've been saying for at least three years that Mitt Romney will be the nominee, and he actually will be. But I wouldn't vote for the bastard. I just know how the GOP works, and I think that he'll keep it close, say, within five points. But not only will Romney lose to Obama, he probably should. Most conservatives secretely believe that.

Here's a good question. Why do you think that it is that solid Republicans that could have potentially beaten Obama chose not to run? There are so friggin' many of them that I can't be bothered with a list.

It's because Republicans have to become hysterical fucking women from time to time and suffer a devastating defeat before they can bothered to actually win. Idiots like to blame FDR's four terms on "moderates like Wendell Willkie and Tom Dewey, ignoring that Roosevelt's biggest victory was against the very conservative Alf Landon, who only won Vermont and Maine.To this day, Republicans are trying to figure out a way to explain how Barry Goldwater lost to LBJ that doesn't admit that he was the right guy at the wrong time.

The GOP needs a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking if they're ever going to win the presidency again. They need to be almost sexually humiliated with one of their Erik Erickson-Dan Riehl types if they can ever be expected to come back again. Instead, they'll nominate a milquetoast motherfucker like Romey, who'll lose by a John Kerry margin, so they can blame it all on "moderates" and "sane people."

I was hoping that the Republicans would nominate someone who would lose to Obama in a forty-five state blowout, like Sarah Palin or Rick Perry. Someone that leaves the jihadi wing of the party with no fucking excuses as to why they lost.

Make no mistake, Newt would lose about 35 states if he's nominated. But that could easily be explained away by the Jihadis that he just wasn't pure enough. And they'll repeat all of the things that I'm saying right now. By next January, the very people who are supporting him now will pant him as a cross between Salvadore Allende and Caligula, which isn't far from the truth.

Unfortunately, Gingrich is all they have left. So let them lose with him and explain why they didn't really "mean" it later.

That's why I'm endorsing Newt Gingrich for the Republican nomination for president. Because I hope That Dan Savage is right and that "It Gets Better."

I only wish that I trusted Dan Savage more.

New at the Volunteer

2012-01-20T20:15:00.000-05:00

My thoughts on the MegaUpload bust.

Thanks again to the great Mike Brock for his trust and indulgence.

Rae's Day: How He Can Win and Why He Won't

2012-01-15T08:44:00.001-05:00

A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.

Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.

This is because Liberals love nothing more than going to war with one another. At this point, they love it more than winning elections. The party has been fighting their retarded leadership wars since 1975 and is divided into two factions: the Trudeau-Chretien-Rae wing and the Turner-Martin-Ignatieff wing. And each faction has acted as suicide bombers against the other for almost the entire time.

Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.

The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.

Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.

Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.

Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.

(For the record, I voted against Rae twice in Ontario, casting ballots for Progressive Conservative Mike Harris in 1990 and '95. After the 1999 campaign, I've voted exclusively for minor parties and independents provincially.)

Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.

He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.

But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempted in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit. That's problematic because Canadian Conservatives tend to look at U.S Republicans for spiritual guidance, and Rae Days undercuts that.

Bob Rae's deficit reduction plan, while not wholly effective, might be the most courageous political effort in my lifetime. He had to know that assaulting his own political base would lead to his ruination, but he did it anyway. As a matter of practicality over politics, it ranks with the first President Bush's budget reconcilation deal of 1990. And for that, Rae has at least my respect for trying to do the right thing against political self-interest. Bob Rae made tough decisions that doomed him, which none of those who oppose him would ever dream of doing, mostly because they're cowards and hacks.

I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.

Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.

Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.

Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Queen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked magnificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.

But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.

One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.

Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.

Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.

If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.

But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.

They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Liberals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.

Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.

Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amateur that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it.

Dana Loesch Wants to Pee on People

2012-01-14T11:41:00.000-05:00

Dana Loesch works for Andrew Breitbart, and I think we all know how I feel about him, don't we? She edits his moronic Big Journalism blog (which in fairness isn't even close to being as idiotic as his Big Peace blog, which is seven separate types of retarded), despite the fact that she's not a journalist. She's a radio talk show host, which is a completely different profession. Reporters are supposed to at least have a passing acquaintance with the facts. Radio talk show hosts, on the other hand, are glorified disc jockeys with a long and storied history of making shit up. If you think about it really hard, you come to the conclusion that Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann have more in common than not.

Both Breitbart and Loesch are a big part of this new trend in "pretend conservatism", wherein people call themselves conservatives without actually saying anything that's particularly conservative. They're both part of the tri-corner hat, Tea Party crowd that is constantly calling for revolutionary change. And if you pick up a fucking dictionary, you'll notice that is sorta the opposite of how the word conservative is defined. You can argue that George Herbert Walker Bush was conservative, but you can`t say that about his eldest son. Well, I guess that you can, but you`d look like a goddamned fool in the process.

It always amuses me when so-called conservatives on the fucking Internet make fun of Meghan McCain, who is at least instinctively right when she says that you can`t win elections by picking on homos and Mexicans, despite her not being especially bright. But these idiots are in love with practically everything Dana Loesch says, ignoring the fact that she has no idea what she`s talking about. I`ve watched Miss Loesch on TV talking about economics, and if I wasn`t made entirely of testosterone, I would`ve lost my hard-on.

And that brings me to a larger point. Dana Loesch is smoking hot. She`s a smouldering little brunette, so the stupid shit that pops out of her pretty little cocksucker doesn`t stop me from gripping my crotch until my frigging knuckles turn white and I look like I`m going to have a stroke. As a matter of fact, the fact that`s she`s so cute is the only reason I take her seriously at all. If Dana was a pig, I wouldn`t be writing this in the first place because I probably wouldn`t know who she is or what she thinks about anything.

That`s why I wasn`t all that bothered by her feelings about this week`s invented media outage, a videotape of U.S Marines pissing on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.

CNN political contributor and Editor-in-Chief of Big Journalism Dana Loesch came out in support of the video showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters during her radio show Thursday on FM News Talk 97.1. “Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses,” Loesch opined. “Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too. That’s me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do people think this is?”

Well, firstly, it`s a crime. Desecration of a corpse is, astonishingly, against the fucking law. If you don`t believe me, try shooting someone and then urinating on them after they expire. Then brag about it to your local constabulary. It won`t end well. Putting on a nifty set of fatigues and doing it in someone else`s country doesn`t make it any more legal. Actually, the reserve is true.

Secondly, it`s just unsportsmanlike. War is traditionally pretty gentlemanly. No matter how much you hated the enemy when he was alive, you treated his remains with a certain amount of dignity after you killed him. That was certainly true of the way dead Nazis and Japanese were treated, and you can`t historically argue that the Taliban are worse than they were.

Which brings me to my third point, that Loesch is - surprise! - factually wrong. The Taliban aren`t ``part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans``. Al-Qaeda were, but al-Qaeda and the Taliban are distinct entities. As a matter of historical fact, the Taliban predates al-Qaeda by some four years. Yes, al-Qaeda was allied with the Taliban, but Hirohito`s Japan was allied with Hitler`s Germany. That doesn`t mean that Imperial Japan was responsible for the Holocaust.

Of course, Congressman Allen West lept to Loesch`s defense, in a particularly hilarious way.

I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

As someone who came this close to being an adjudicated war criminal - conducting a mock execution against someone that he himself conceded might have been innocent - Representative West is something of an authority on being wrong. It`s also worth noting that West served in Iraq and was therefore never shot at by the Taliban. It for that reason that I hold him to his own standard and ask him to shut his fucking mouth.

Dana then went to Twitter to publish all of the horrible things that the Left was saying about her, a decidedly unconservative embrace of her own victimhood, and something that the supposed New Right sees no irony at all in doing. To listen to modern Republicans howl about sexism and racism, you`d think that they were being clubbed by the cops in Grant Park during `68 Democratic National Convention. Yet they manage to do this without renouncing the many jokes they themselves told about Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the eighties and nineties, most of which were actually pretty funny.

But all of that is beside the point. I`m more fascinated by Dana Loesch `dropping trou` and unleashing a river of golden goodness on folks.

Now, I`m hardly a pee freak. Not only have I never pissed upon someone or been pissed upon, I stopped reading Penthouse in the late nineties when they had the Pet of the Month blasting urine about in practically every picture.

Having said that, I understand the repressed sexual desires of Republicans and, if they`re good looking enough, I`m more than willing to accommodate them. I`ve jerked off for girls on the Internet like they were Mark Foley. What I`m getting at is that I`m a very giving lover.

I want to usher in a new age of compromise and mutual accommodation. For that reason, if Dana Loesch wants to sit on my face, I`ll let her piss on my chest while I eat her ass.I`ll even play dead afterwards. I just want to go to bed at night knowing that I`ve done my part for the New Tone of Civility.

Dana, you can reach me at skippystalinATgmail.com.

I Wonder What Rick Perry's Been Up To ...

2011-12-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

I'm disappointed that I used all my best one-liners on Texas governor and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry last night. This is because I just saw the most amazing piece of tape and just realized that he really deserves a post of his own, even though he has zero chance of being the nominee.

First, I want to make a point I wanted to include in last night's essay, but left out so it wouldn't take six months to read. I have a real bug up my ass about sitting office-holders, especially executives, running for one office while holding another. I'm not as aggravated when legislators do it because they're a dime a dozen. The United States Senate, for example, didn't run any better or worse without Barack Obama and John McCain there.

But executives, like governors, are different. They are the seat of power in their states. If you look at recent presidential elections with incumbent governors running, you learn something shocking. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush spent twelve and eighteen months out their respective states to campaign for their parties nomination and the presidency. That means that they spent upwards of half of their final terms not doing their fucking jobs. Sure, Clinton would go home to suffocate a retard,* which would be illegal today, so that a sex or draft scandal might go away, but more often than not, he was out of Arkansas. And that goes double for Bush.

If the Tea Party gets their much-sought after Constitutional Convention, they gain at least a little respect from me by passing an amendment specifically prohibiting sitting governors from running for president. You could theoretically take the Tenth Amendment position that the states could pass such a law, but can you think of a single governor that would sign it?

As you all know, my dream candidate this year was Mitch Daniels, the incumbent governor of Indiana. But I would have hoped that he would resign his office at the moment that he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, and I would have forcefully criticized him if he didn't. It seems to me to be intellectually inconsistent to piss and moan and Obama golfing - which Republicans never did about the second President Bush setting a record for vacation days - while supporting a governor that is out his state for months at a time.

Let's assume that Perry's candidacy is anything other than a painkiller-induced hallucination and he actually won the nomination. By election day, Governor Perry would have spent a full fifteen months out of Texas during a truly ruinous economic period. Sure, I hold Perry in special contempt because I think that he's a moron and a fucking murderer, but I also support the general principle. You can't run as an executive if you're busy not being an executive because you're running for another office. Two recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, seemed to do well as former governors. Mitt Romney will probably be nominated five years and a half years after leaving his only elected executive office with a 43% approval rating.

But that's not what I want to write about this morning, Rick Perry's stellar ignorance of almost everything is. Just looka this, teenagers.

How fucking great is that? It's abundantly clear that Perry has no idea that he knows what he's talking about, so he veers into talking points and accusations of "gotcha questions" toward a guy who sounds like he retired from the Albanian military in 1976 and is highly unlikely to be a mole from the hated New York Times.

For the unititaed Lawrence v. Texas, is an important test of just how "small government" you are. Most Republicans and busybody religious types fail the test in ways that only astronomers can properly measure. If, for example, you think that limited government should act as a butt-plug, you should probably see a psychiatrist.

Lawrence overturned the hilariously named 1986 ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick. In both Bowers and Lawrence, police entered a private domicile without a warrant and arrested homos for doing what homos do in their private domiciles, that being fucking (in Lawrence ) and sucking (in Bowers.) In the ironically nicknamed Whizzer White's majority ruling in Bowers, the right of sexual privacy extended only to procreative sex. That being the case, the state had the right to throw you in the can for ass or face fucking, be you gay or straight. I think it was wrong, but you can at least make a coherent argument in defense of Bowers.

By the time Lawrence came before the Court, the state laws had radically changed. 11 of the 13 states impacted by Bowers had changed their sodomy laws, specifically allowing for straight cocksucking and ass-fucking, but denying it to gays. That's a straight Fourteenth Amendment equal protection case that you can't argue against without being slack-jawed. The Lawrence minority specifically said that the states could pass a law allowing a given activity for one social group while criminalizing it for others, in direct defiance of both the spirit and the letter of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Do the facts in Lawrence fly in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment? It's almost legally and logically impossible to argue that they don't. The facts also make a pretty persuasive Fourth Amendment case, too. So what are you left with?

Look, I'd respect the opponents of the Lawrence decision if they just came out and said that they oppose it because God Hates Fags. But they won't. Perversely, they won't argue the legal or constitutional merits of their position either, mostly because they're silly. Instead, they argue on ridiculous grounds like "societal impact", "incest" and "bestiality" - what I like to call the "Santorum Default Position." They ignore the long-held conservative belief that the law and the Constitution mean what they say, or they don't.

Lawrence, unlike Bowers, wasn't about cocksucking or buttfucking as a general proposition. It was very narrowly about gay cocksucking and buttfucking, since the state in question had legalized it for straights, as had most others where the law was applicable. And you just can't do that, which is, in large part, where my support for gay marriage comes from.

If you take the Santorum Default Position, you pretty much deserve to have your name publicly associated with ass-lube and feces, This is because you aren't arguing the Tenth or Fourteenth Amendments, you're just saying that God Hates Fags without actually having the balls to say so. Fuck you because you're stupid and dishonest.

I wouldn't interfere with your silly little superstitions by saying that you have to like gays. I certainly wouldn't use an instrument as fearsome as the law to do any such thing. As a conservative, all I want is the government to leave people the fuck alone when it comes to private behaviour that doesn't hurt anybody else.

By the way, the terms "Family values" and "the 99%" can be pretty much be used interchangeably when it comes to government action. And "upholding family values" is mentioned as a function of the federal government in the Constitution exactly as often as "providing universal health care" is. Look at the United States Postal Service and the war in Iraq. Do you really want the folks who produced those defending your family values? Because I can pretty much assure you that it won't end well.

But Perry very clumsily just ignores that very question because he has no idea what Lawrence even is. Amd it's even more impressive when you consider that he was governor at the time the state went all the way to Supreme Court to argue and lose. Moreover, this wasn't a case about some obscure administrative law that was thrown out. Homosex tends to generate a certain amount of unavoidable attention in the U.S.

So Governor Perry did what Governor Perry always does, he gave an answer that was 100% fucking gibberish. But Christ, it's fun to watch. More candidates should run on an opiate rush and the pure, environmentally-friendly body wave of stupidity.

*Whenever I suppose that the 42nd president might be doing something good for mankind, I think of the last moments of Ricky Ray Rector to remember that Clinton is an irredeemable abomination of a human being. Rick Perry, who probably executed a factually innocent man and then knowingly covered it up, is even worse. Specifically because of the actions of craven motherfuckers like Clinton and Perry, I now oppose the death penalty, except in military cases in a volunteer army.

A Presidential Election Prediction

2011-12-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

I haven't written a whole lot about the coming U.S presidential election for two reasons. First, I haven't written a whole lot about anything lately. Secondly, the entire sad spectacle is the most predictable thing I've ever seen.

My method for calling elections, which I often do years ahead of time, is simple. I look at the incumbent and ask myself "Who's going to beat him?"

Taking into account almost living Republican, I figured that only Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman could beat Barack Obama. One decided that he couldn't be nominated and didn't run, while the other just won't be nominated in the absence of an actual miracle.

Daniels would have easily taken back his home state and Ohio from the Democrats and forced the President to spend time, energy and money in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania - neither of which have gone red since 1988 - that would be better spent holding Virginia, Florida, Colorado and North Carolina. A Huntsman nomination would do pretty much the same thing in the southwest. He'd take Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada back, hold Arizona (which I think is in imminent danger of turning blue) and make Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida at least competitive.

Pretty much everybody - including people who don't like them - agrees that Huntsman and Daniels aren't crazy, stupid or lying. They're reasonable enough to win with independents that the four "Reagan Democrats" that still exist. Both would recreate Bush's 2004 map, and this might be the last opportunity to do that for the Republicans because the southwest is rapidly slipping away and, without it, the GOP is done forever at the presidential level. You can't win a national election when the former Confederacy is your only reliable region. The math just doesn't work.

The rest of the GOP field consists of morons, psychotics, liars and, in some cases, all three. It's the most pathetically flawed Republican offering in my lifetime. None of them can win, barring something like a successful Iranian invasion of the eastern United States in late October. I know that there's no shortage of Republican bloggers out there suggesting otherwise, but the nicest thing I can say about them is that they don't know how to read a fucking map.

Mitt Romney, who is almost certain to be the nominee, at least brings the race within five points, which is about the margin John McCain lost by when the world was actually ending. But he has two insurmountable obstacles. The first is Bain Capital, which I noted would be a problem four years ago. You don't win votes in a shitty economy by being the guy who got rich throwing folks out of work. Forget the ideological horseshit about "the creative destruction of the marketplace." That's the toughest of tough fucking sells. The second is the fact that he's a whore. Nobody in America is convinced that Romney has told the truth about anything, ever. And Romney is easily the most electable of the major candidates. But he's not Ronald Reagan, he's John fucking Kerry with a much uglier resume.

Newt Gingrich is not only a joke, he always has been. People forget that he was thrown out as Speaker by his own caucus after he actually picked up 5 seats in '98. Not only did his own people loathe him, his own conservatives did. And 1998's vintage of conservatives were a lot different than 2011's, which is to say that most of them weren't droolingly fucking dumb. The point is that Republicans iced Gingrich within days of his actually winning an election, so hated was he. You don't see that very often in politics.And that's at least suggests that Newt is one decidedly unpopular cat with the folks who know him best. Besides, there's no way that he carries independents, women or wins a single Democratic vote.

Everybody keeps telling me how brilliant Newt is without mentioning that three out of every five of his ideas is extraconstititional nonsense or batshit fucking crazy. Like putting huge mirrors in space, presumably so Newt can watch himself cheat on his wife from an even more unflattering angle. Or calling federal judges before Congress to "explain themselves."

That last idea is the most wildly stupid thing I've ever heard. The Constitution operates under the model of a separation of powers, which means that federal judges cannot be subpoenaed unless they're actually being impeached. And even then they aren't compelled to attend.

What numbnuts doesn't understand that if you can extend Congress' reach past the separation of powers doctrine with the Judicial Branch, there's no reason why it an;t be done with the Executive Branch. Under Newt's own reasoning, a president - even President Newt - could be compelled to come before Congress and "explain himself." About anything, including "Commander-in-Chief" decisions. His is a fundamentally retarded position that all but even the most mouth-breathing of evangelical shitheads are disturbed by.

A Iot of Gingrich's esteem comes from his self-description as a "historian", which is weapons-grade bullshit. Newt taught history at some bohunk clown college in the sticks where half of the student body was majoring in incest ... and he couldn't even get tenure there. If you support Newt Gingrich for the election of anything based on his credentials as a historian, you should probably be castrated.

Gingrich was insanely popular for about ten minutes in 1994. By the spring of '95, he was politically toxic. And you know what? He still is. This crap about his having changed because he's "a 68 year old grandfather" is all the evidence you need that he thinks you're an idiot. What serious person would actually believe that he self-immolated both his career and second marriage because he was a crazy kid of 55? If you buy that, you are an idiot. He did those things because he was a pathological narcissist, and there's no evidence that's changed at all.

Ron Paul doesn't bother me nearly as much as you might expect him to, especially on foreign policy. If all those Tea Partiers in their goddamned tri-corner hats actually sat down and read what the Founders had to say, they'd very quickly learn that they're much closer to Ron Paul's position than any other Republican's since the 1930s. The Founders disagreed with one another on almost everything except that there shouldn't be a standing army or permanent foreign alliances. They were pretty much unanimous about that. As is true with the Bible, most folks only take seriously the parts of the Federalist Papers and American history itself that they already agree with.

Besides which, given America's financial, and therefore military prospects, a good long bout of isolationism would do them good. If you're an actual, honest Tea Party "constitutionalist," you almost have no choice but to vote for Ron Paul. He's certainly more of an orginalist than someone who believed that the proper functions of government are to provide health care, bail out banks and bomb the shit out of everyone that they think said something untoward about them.

Luckily, there are no actual, honest constitutionalists in the Republican Party, so that isn't a problem. If it were, the GOP would violate everything it stands for, including the law, to deny him the nomination if there was ever a serious danger of his winning it, which there isn't. And that goes a long way in explaining why I have barely written about him. More importantly, 99% of Americans are so unserious about their Founding Fathers fetish that Paul would be the first nominee of either party to lose all fifty states.

Michele Bachmann actually looks crazy three-quarters of the time, and Rick Santorum's name need only be googled to understand the impact he's had on popular culture. Plus, he lost his last statewide election by an asshole-ruining 20 points. There's a reason that he's never photographed sitting down, you know. He's still in agony from what Bob Casey did to him six years ago. And has anybody heard from Bob Casey since?

Which leaves Rick Perry, the only guy to have actually spoken of secession as a rational state option to have the balls and run for president at the same time. Rick Perry as the nominee would be a lot like the Democrats nominating Jefferson Davis in the Union in 1864. The rest of his ideas are so exceptionally silly that he can't even bother to memorize them. We learned last summer that his agricultural policy consists entirely of praying for rain and his job-creation history is pretty impressive until you understand that two-thirds of it was the result of growing state government.

He's also the most thoroughly bought and paid for living politician in America today. While tool bloggeres and media hacks never fail to mention that the Governor isn't a Bush Republican, they almost never point of that he's a Tom DeLay one. When he gets crushed in the primaries, he should run for governor of Illinois. Or Pakistan. The fact that Perry is the longest serving governor in the history of Texas says much more about Texas than it ever could about Perry.

Then there's the insanely overstated Tea Party "wave" that I've wasted nearly two fucking years hearing about. Well, they won. And the approval rating of Congress has dropped ten points subsequent to that. If you look at the Tea Party governors - Kasich in Ohio, Walker in Wisconsin, Haley in South Carolina and Scott in Florida - you find that their numbers fall neatly between church burnings and beastiality.

No Republican has ever won nationally while losing Ohio. Losing Ohio and Florida makes winning a mathematical impossibility. Most presidential candidates don't have the money to target ads against individual governors that aren't on the ballot. But President Obama is reasonably expected to have a billion dollars. And he'll have any number of Citizens United - inspired 501 (c) groups to work alongside him in those very states. Spend enough money tying a Republican nominee to Kasich and Scott and you have one fucking doomed Republican nominee.

Even if President Obama dumps Joe Biden from the ticket and replaces him with Jerry Sandusky, I can't see a map where he loses this election. Sure, he'll lose Indiana and maybe Virginia, but that still gives him a comfortable cushion in the Electoral Collage, particularly if he wins Arizona, which is definitely possible. But Obama doesn't have to win new states. In fact, he could lose two, three or four and still win. If the President only wins Al Gore's states, plus a teeny one, like West Virginia, it's over.

On the other hand, not one Republican idiot blogger or TV pundit cocksucker has shown me a realistic map where the GOP gets to 270. Not one.

It's very hard for me to see a scenario where Obama loses. And you know what? Given the Republican field, I'm not sure that he should lose. Sure, he's every bit the child president that his two immediate predecessors were, but going for someone even more childish, petulant, stupid or crazy might not be wise. Or conservative.

If you're an even halfway smart American, I urge you to start looking - just look - at groups like Americans Elect. You're in a situation where the incumbent deserves to lose, but the challengers are nowhere near competent, inspiring or deserving enough to win.

A Christmas Card From From Tom Waits

2011-12-24T14:27:00.000-05:00

Tom Waits "Silent Night / Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis" from Austin City Limits on Vimeo.

It Hath Come!

2011-12-20T17:46:00.000-05:00

And so hath I! Christ, I'm handsome!

Hitch 62: 1949-2011

2011-12-17T11:31:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night and we're all a little worse off for his loss. He was 62 years old.

When I started writing regularly nearly a decade ago, I knew that the exercise would be an exploration of my own outrage and contempt toward virtually everything. That being the case, I chose as models the two writers who best expressed those feelings, Hunter Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom were very much alive in the spring of 2003.

Of the two, Hitchens was a better writer for longer. Though legendary, Thompson was only truly incandescent between 1970 and 1979. Afterward, he became a truly erratic writer. The genius would pop up from time to time - the best example of which is his 1994 eulogy of Richard Nixon - but, more often than not, he wrote like a Hunter Thompson impersonator. You could see him trying to top his own past and failing. It was almost tragic to watch, and most likely the reason he ultimately killed himself. Not only was football season over, as his suicide note said, it had been for a good long time.

Hitch was consistently brilliant for decades. If anything, he got better as he got older in ways that Hunter never could. While he never produced anything as immediately classic as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", Christopher Hitchens was a better writer than almost anyone else for thirty years.

Where Thompson's written expressions of indignation were rhetorically violent, Hitchens' were outstandingly elegant without being foppish, a curse of most British writers. Thompson's outrage was energizing while Hitchens' was almost narcotic. His turn of phrase was so beautiful that you almost didn't notice the anger that drove it. And that, my friends, is art. Like Hunter Thompson, Christopher Hitchens turned something as terribly pedestrian and dreary as journalism into something literary and beautiful to read for it's own sake. The only other political journalist I can think of that turns cynicism into something akin to poetry the way Hitchens did is George Will.

I've made the proud ignorance of the Republican Party something of a religious text here for nearly four years. I've referenced it over and over again in this space, without knowing that Hitchens said it first on Hardball with Chris Matthews 11 years ago before yesterday. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."

Here's the full quote;

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

As was true of Bobby Kennedy, when Christopher Hitchens hated you, you stayed hated. His best books, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger were all moral condemnations of their subjects and all far more eloquent by several degrees than anything else written on the subjects of his scorn.

Even God His own Self wasn't spared the wrath of Hitchen's typewriter. His 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything posited that most of mankind's evil is sanctioned in our holy books, in one way or another. And the truth of that is almost inescapable. You can argue whether the good religion produces outweighs the evil it condones, but you cannot reasonably argue that said evil isn't textually sanctioned and, in some cases, actually demanded.

I was raised Catholic, so there are few things that I love more than precious (mostly, but not always, liberal) Catholics who feel that feel that the One True Church is "misguided" in believing that things like divorce, homosexuality and abortion are abominations and mortal sins, while maintaining that they are "good Catholics."

If you're one of those folks, you're a hypocritical asshole and should probably suffer any number of biblical fates for several deadly sins, not the least of which being pride.

The Church isn't a grassroots organization like ACORN, for Christsakes. Moreover, it never pretended to be a "bottom-up" democracy. Foundational beliefs like papal infallibility tend to undercut silly notions like that quite nicely.

The Church is their club, not yours, and their rules are law. To suggest that you can "reform" what even you believe is the Word of God - and is actually written in the text of the book - is more than a little presumptuous and definitive proof that you're simply bad at your religion. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that your religion disagrees with you, rather than you with it.

When I was twelve years old, I determined that the beliefs of the Church were dangerous and silly, so I refused confirmation and stopped considering myself a Catholic. As a matter of theological fact, liberal Catholics aren't Catholics, either, I'm just honest enough to say so. The Church was there long before I was born and will continue long after I'm dead. I merely choose not to prticipate in it's extraordinary silliness.

Under no circumstances would I associate myself with anyone running around Africa and telling the locals that AIDS was bad, but condoms were worse, so I quit. But I would never presume to say that Church's position wasn't biblically sanctioned because it is. I just happen to believe that the sanction is moronic and demonstrably lethal to the most vulnerable people on earth. If you believe that "God hates fags", you sure as shit better not have a tattoo while doing so because that just happens to be the next verse in Leviticus.

Essentially, that's what God is Not Great is about. If you wrap yourself in some supernatural, superstitious ceremony, you should also be called to account for the true - and sometimes breathtakingly so - evil that's done in it's name. If the world was populated with rational adults, rather than overly tall children, that book would not have been as controversial as it was.

The facts are the facts. And the facts are that the Catholic Church didn't renounce the biblical interpretation that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ - the basis of 1,000 years of Christian-propagated pogroms - until Vatican II, seventeen years after the Holocaust ended. And, to my way of thinking, that's more than enough reason to renounce Christianity.

Of course, Hitchens wasn't without his own messianic impulses. He was fervent supporter of the idea of regime change, particularly in Iraq. While I was - mistakenly - at the time, as well, Hitchens and I differed on the entire point of the war. He strongly advocated Bush's disastrously wrong "democracy agenda", which argued that you can maintain Iraq as a cohesive country while enhancing regional stability under the will of the people. It should be pretty clear by now that you can't.

His position was eminently justifiable as an ethical matter. He morally identified with the plight of the Kurds., who are the world's largest minority without their own country. For Hitchens, it was a matter of loyalty to leftist comrades against what he rightly called "a pornographic regime." But he never, to my knowledge, shared their aspirations for a national homeland.

And that's where his case falls apart. There is no reason to believe that the Kurds will ever abandon their desire for a state, but any declaration of independence will result in a catastrophic war with Arab Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, some of whose territory would be a part of such a state. And unlike Kosovo, there is no international guarantor that can protect such a fledgling nation from immediate destruction.

Having said that, you can't help but admire the passion that Hitchens brought to the issue, particularly when you consider the personal and professional friendships his stance cost him on the political left. He was unwavering in what he believed was right, and that couldn't have been easy.

On the other hand, he did popularize the term "Islamofascism", which I've had a number of things to say about. It is the one instance I can think of where Hitchens carelessly throws words together, contrary to their diametrically opposing meanings. Like "progressive conservative" or "revolutionary conservative", "Islamofascism" is an oxymoron and well beneath the linguistic standards of a titan of the language that Christopher Hitchens was. Being an Islamofascist is not unlike being a "pro-abortion Catholic", a ridiculous contruct on it's face and not something to be taken seriously.

One can't truly appreciate Christopher Hitchens without exploring the way he conducted the last 18 months of his life. Instead of engaging on a maudlin celebration of his own mortality, Hitchens instead used his esophageal cancer as a point of intellectual exploration, especially in his Vanity Fair column. If you read anything today, it should be "Topic of Cancer" and his most recent essay "Trial of the Will."

It was on the topic of his own mortal illness that he truly broke through a journalist, and produced some of his most beautiful writing. There was no sentimentality or self-pity in those columns, particularly "Trial of the Will", published just a week before his death. It was an intellectual and philosophical exploration on what it is to die, written by someone who was in the process of doing just that. "Tuesdays With Morrie" it wasn't.

Christopher Hitchens explored his own death with the same courage and valour that he lived his life. It didn't matter if you agreed with him or not because he was smarter than you are and would argue circles around you. Even when he was wrong, he could make a persuasive case that he right. That isn't normally the job of a journalist, but it is the raison d'etre of a writer.

Hitchens on Bill Clinton

Hitchens on Mother Teresa

Hitchens on the Tea Party

Hitchens on Jesus and the Exodus

Hitchens on 60 Minutes

"Reminds Me of Childhood Memories"

2011-12-16T19:05:00.000-05:00

I don't tend to talk about my childhood much, mostly because I've spent decades repressing it. This is because I hate children even more than I hate myself.

Children are short, smelly and can't hold their fucking liquor. Christ, I'm not fully convinced that males under six feet tall are even human, which should tell you all you need to know about my feelings towards kids. I'd be completely comfortable if the voting age was raised to thirty-five and everyone under twenty was subject to being fired out cannons during wartime.

Whenever I'm forced to remember that I was once like that I feel like going Hemingway. I therefore tend to stuff my childhood into the same tiny ball of rage deep inside of me that makes me the world-famous blogger that I've become.

However, from time to time, external forces bring memories from my shorter days surface, sometimes even refreshing ones. This occurred most recently on Tuesday.

It started out innocently enough. I was checking my e-mail at work and I received a notification that startled me. I was being followed on Twitter by something called LesbianAssWorship.Net (or @LesAssWorship to you uncouth swine.) That's when it all came rushing back.

I think I was five years old. Maybe six. And it was a holiday when it was cold outside, so it was either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Whatever it was, we were having turkey. Anyhow, we were sitting around the holiday dinner table and I guess I looked a little sad. Life, you see, was out to get me even then and I was even worse at hiding my disdain than I am today.

Suddenly, my elderly grandmother pounded her fist on the dinner table, causing a turkey leg to fly off the serving plate and into my lap, and holler "Nothing soothes a crisis of the spirit like Lesbian Ass Worship! Nothing!"

It didn't stop there, either. She went on and on for almost an hour. According to her, straight men could worship lesbian ass, too. It was almost like hearing Stephen Hawking expound upon theoretical physics. There was just no arguing with the fucking woman. She was crazed in ways that I had only previously seen in National Geographic. And there was no shortage of crazy in my grandmother on a normal day.

Finally, my father fired a tranquilizer dart directly into her neck and the peace of my home was restored. Even today everybody in my family referes to it as "That strange and horrible night that grandma went nuts about ass-eating."

As deeply and darkly strange as that evening was. I still can't say that she was actually wrong. As an adult, one of my sexual heroes was the grand dame of lesbian porn, Janine Lindemulder, from whom a learned a great deal about tonguing a lady from both the front and the back. And every women I've ever been with considers me something of a sexual MacArthur. and that night, over thirty-five years ago, was an enormous gateway in my becoming the man I am today.

Who knew that Twitter could be so rewarding?

It Hath Arrived! Thoughts on Lindsay Lohan and Playboy

2011-12-10T12:53:00.000-05:00

I'm of the considered opinion that everybody should have a friend like Elisson. The man is an outstanding blogger, single-handedly popularized the 100 word story and is a world renowned expert on all things cheese-related. In a world almost entirely without heroes, Elisson stands alone .. except when he's holding up my own personal Jesus, Velociman. I'm honoured and pleased that Elisson has ever bothered to read my nonsense, let alone say the extraordinarily nice things about it in public that he has.

Having said that, there are things that can tear even the closest friendships asunder. Like when Elisson commented that Lindsay Lohan's titties looked "awfully saggy." I was enraged for months, almost to the point of violence. But I came to understand that the whole point of friendship is overlooking the things that divide you, like how metaphysically wrong your friends may be about certain things.

Look, the rap on LiLo for years has been that she has big fake udders. Not that I give a shit. I think that implants age better than the real thing, and the science is with me on that.. But if a lady chooses to get implants, she should endeavour to get them with just the right amount of sag, lest she wind up looking like a fucking cartoon.That's just common sense, people.

But what if her ginormous jugs are, as I suspect, real? The fact that a 25 year old starlet looks like a 42 year old MILF (albeit the hottest one this side of Julia Ann) says something important to me, specifically that she knows how to live! I learned while still in the crib that old women who look young are never to be trusted, but that young women who look old before their time should always be treasured for the ability to please a man. Verily, they know it all, teenagers. They've lived in ways that most of you never will.

Most of you by now understand that I feel a special kinship with La Lohan. With our shared love of vodka, cocaine and vehicular mishaps that can easily be blamed on a black kid, how can I not? That's just the way love works, as any well-adjusted adult will tell you. I know that Paula Abdul used to sing about opposites attracting, but how well did her marriage to Emilio Fucking Estevez work out, huh? And because Lindsay and I are medically incapable of being each other's liver donor, that's enough to make us perfect together! I really have thought this through, folks. She's the Nancy Reagan to my Ronnie, the Nancy Spungen to my ... Oh, I guess I should re-think that one, huh? If memory serves, that love story didn't end particularly well.

That being said, I wasn't as excited as you probably thought I would be about Lindsay appearing in next month's issue of Playboy. Don't get me wrong, the prospect of seeing her naked always makes my testicles rattle like Jerome Green's maracas on those great Bo Diddley records, but Playboy is just the wrong forum for it.

After all, who in the fuck does Playboy, anymore? I actually do read Playboy for the articles, which is a terrible thing to say about pornography! A titty mag should never be a literary journal, and that's exactly what Playboy has always aspired to be.

To remain relevant, I posit that Lindsay needs to be edgy in something other than a criminal justice-related way. And Playboy just hasn't been edgy since the early 1970s. That's why I always thought that she would be far better off appearing in her altogethers in a magazine like Black Tail. Fans of irony everywhere would love her for it.

As absolutely everyone on earth expected it would, Lindsay's spread (so to speak) has leaked online. I'd post the pictures myself but two things get in the way of my doing so. First, I can't post nudity because far too many of you crazy bastards read this dopey blog at work. I'm just not funny enough for anyone to lose their job over it. Second, I understand that Playboy is highly litigious and I've had quite enough of twisted old cunts threatening to sue me over utter fucking nonsense for the time being. It's rather exhausting.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't offer my thoughts on the pictorial, wouldn't I?

A number of blogs have insulted LiLo over her apparent lack of areola of any kind. I on the other hand find it novel and really quite endearing. There's a lot to said for tiny nipples on huge knockers, and if you need a giant bullseye on a titty to know where your teeth are supposed to go, you probably need to mature as a lover. And most of the bloggers who make that criticism are probably too far advanced in their faggotry to convince otherwise, anyhow.

As is true with areolas, pasty-skinned, redheads shouldn't have public hair. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible. Probably in Leviticus. But you won't know if Lohan does from the Playboy pictures, which is a goddamned shame. When you know more about a given girl's twat from paparazzi pictures of her getting out of a car than you do from Playboy, that tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of modern mainstream pornography. No friggin' wonder the Hefner family wants to take the company private again. The stock must be fucking worthless. And if it isn't, it should be!

Forget about Miss Lindsay's intimate grooming habits for a second. La Lohan is said to have been paid a million dollars for these pictures. And it's not like her career trajectory is going up these days. She's about where Robert Downey, Jr. was a decade ago, uninsurable and under the constant threat of immediate incarceration. For a million dollars, we should all be able to visually inspect her for cervical cancer! This is a dire economy and modesty is just not acceptable marketing. Who doesn't know that?

I'm always amazed that what a gorgeous ass Lindsay has. So fixated are we on her majestic mammaries that we too often overlook what the other side of her has to offer. It's tragic that's it just sitting there, ignored, when it should be desired, bitten, licked and fucked endlessly. And a dynamic little dumper it is. If nothing else, the Playboy shoot does give it some attention, albeit far from enough.

I also know from some experience that pasty-skinned natural redheaded girls have the prettiest assholes that you're ever going to see in your entire life. They're just the pinkest little things in all of creation. But don't go to Playboy to learn this. No, those useless pricks just had to go waste a perfectly good teachable moment that could have brought humanity a little closer together. Take it from me, if you've never seen a redhead's rectum, I implore you to so at the earliest opportunity. You'll thank me for it. They're tasty, too!

The Lohan pictures are about as good as you would expect them to be. She's a remarkably well-built girl, especially when you consider her now legendary extracurricular activities. My only problem is that Playboy didn't fully exploit her current financial woes to give us the full-airport-cavity-search that we truly deserve. As celebrity exploitation, they're wonderful. But as pornography, they're a huge disappointment. I jerk off to hotter things than this twice before dawn every day. I just can't lie to you.

For these pictures to be considered truly epic, they would have had to have been shot by Paul Little. Sure, we can all do without the urine and vomit that ultimately sent the erstwhile Mr. Hardcore to the federal pokey, but the shots would have at least been interesting. The man really could wield a specula like no other.

Of course that shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't have a giant erection looking at Lindsay Lohan naked. Because I do.

Am I sharing too much?

Black snake moan: Sad dispatches from the Cain train

2011-12-03T18:04:00.000-05:00

You know, I was just starting to admire Herman Cain and then this happens.

It wasn't always so. For most of the year, I thought that Mr. Cain was a dick and emblematic of everything that's wrong with politics. Not only was everything that he knew wrong, he couldn't have been more smug about it. More importantly, the nickname that he gave his economic plan had the disquieting tendency of making Schindler's List sound like a friggin' sitcom.

While everything he said was silly in ways that learned adults have trouble comprehending, I still grew to respect Herman Cain. More specifically, I grew to respect his penis.

Lookee, say what you will about the man, but he managed to be married, carry on a thirteen-year long affair and have no fewer than four sexual harassees, all the while lobbying his ass off. What energy! I ask you, how can you not admire the dedication it takes to put your wang in so many strange places?

Of course, that's ultimately what sunk his jokey presidential campaign. No self-respecting Republican would be caught cheating on his wife with adult women. If it were meth addled teenage boys that were the object of ol' Herm's affections, he'd probably have won the nomination by acclimation, but it wasn't to be. This is what happens when novices get into politics.

I will say one thing about the Cain train. As their sad and strange campaign ground to a fucking dead stop, it did become pretty expert in the very identity politics that Republicans used to mock. Cain, his idiot blogosphere cheerleaders, and the ghouls at Fox News never failed to point out that the candidate was black, which they imply was the source of his recent misery. Granted, they had some practice, having spent the last three years passionately displaying the genitals of both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann whenever one of them said anything impossibly dumb. The GOP really has come a long way from making gender-based jokes about Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno, haven't they?

The persecution complex of these fucking people is nothing less than phenomenal. The way that modern conservatives - very few of whom are actually conservative in a traditional sense, or under the dictionary definition of the word - play identity politics almost brings a tear to your eye. I'm pretty sure that's ultimately why Barney Frank is retiring. When even the most revolutionary Republicans can't go before a television camera without being a whimpering cocksucker and asking why everybody keeps picking on them, his work is pretty much done. It seems like only twenty years ago that conservative thinkers were publishing innumerable books condemning "the culture of victimhood", a number of which I read. Now they actually define that culture . Progress!

There is a distinction, however. Herman Cain, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann rarely play the race card themselves. They let white males - which sort of includes Ann Coulter - do it for them.

Lest you think the Pizza Train is going off track, be schooled, teenagers!

In suspending his candidacy, as opposed to saying that he was quitting the race or ending his bid, Mr. Cain maintained his ability to accept money to pay for his campaign so far and to finance the new venture that he called his Plan B: to travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans. If Mr. Cain had decided to formally close his campaign organization, he would not be able to use donations that may come in.

Let's see, Cain is shutting down shop in all but name, so that folks can continue donating money to what's billing itself as a presidential campaign, although the head of said campaign is no longer seeking the presidency. Shifty and devious, just like a ... Republican.

Having said that, I agree that he should "travel the country promoting his tax and foreign policy plans." Especially his foreign policy plans, since they're so thoroughly thought out.

People really need to hear this, and Herman Cain is just the kind of cat to tell you. Plus, he'll try to fuck you. Just don't tell his wife, okay?

People of British Columbia: Go Fuck Yourselves!

2011-12-03T09:20:00.001-05:00

Sometimes people wonder why I seem to hate democracy so much. In actual fact, it isn't democracy that I hate so much as it is people. Despite living in an age where more information is available to more people than at any other time in human history, most people are not only getting deliberately dumber, they seem so fucking proud of it. Anyone who has been following the Republican primaries has probably noticed this. And since you can't really have a democracy without people, my faith in the institution is more than somewhat undermined.

The triumph of ignorance is probably best exemplified by the recent Resurrection of populism in our body politic. Populism has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of how governmental systems work, and is therefore crass, deplorable and should be destroyed every time it rears its misshapen goddamned head.

Populism is predicated on the idea that we live in a pure democracy, which no one does. Western nation states universally live under one form or another of representative government, which means that we elect people to make decisions for us and get the fuck out their way for about four years. Populists think that we live in an Athenian democracy, where everybody gets to vote on everything, or that we even should.

The fact is that we don't and we shouldn't. Moreover, Athenian democracy wasn't all that and a bag of chips. As a matter of fact, "only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens", thereby restricting the franchise to about 20% of the population. I'll grant you that this did weed out the retards and reprobates who currently determine our fate, but it was hardly the perfect picture of "the people's voice" that populist morons try to paint for you.

You know what you get when you let everyone vote on everything? California is fucking what! Conservatives like to paint California as a horribly liberal place. It really isn't. It's just a perfect representation of self-interested human stupidity, which populism enables. When given the choice, folks will always vote themselves free shit, while retarding their ability to pay for it. Do that long enough, and you wind up being California. Or Greece. Or Italy. Or the United States of America.

Which brings me to British Columbia.

One thing you need to know about Canada is that we have a federal sales tax, the GST, which was introduced in 1991. Since then, no fewer than five federal governments have been trying to entice the provinces to merge their sales taxes with the GST.

A couple of years ago, the Harper Government (which I think that I'm now legally obligated to call it) struck harmonization agreements with Ontario and B.C. Because harmonization extends the reach of provincial taxes, Ontarians were furious for about twenty minutes, but Ontarians are only ever furious about anything for about twenty minutes.

The hillbillies in B.C stayed mad. For the most part, this had a lot to do with being governed by Gordon Campbell, who, despite being massively unpopular, governed for a full decade when he wasn't being arrested for drunk driving in foreign countries. He was able to do this because he lacked any real opposition, the provincial NDP having imploded years earlier and the Conservative party not existing there at all. When his approval numbers fell beneath even Jerry Sandusky's, he got the fuck out of Dodge and fled to Limeyland. Campbell was succeeded by talk-radio host and professional nobody, Christy Clark.

Clark, for reasons that escape anyone with even the slightest understanding of how life works, allowed the HST issue go before the people in a referendum. She supposedly thought that people would enthusiastically vote to expand their own tax liability. Guess how well that went?

There was a small catch. Ottawa isn't exactly stupid. When the deals with Ontario and British Columbia were sealed, the provinces got a ton of money, roughly $4 billion and $1.6 billion respectively. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, who at the time was also about as popular as kidfucking, gave it away to taxpayers as a way to successfully bribe himself into reelection. The Campbell and Clark governments just spent it on horseshit.

Harper's dimwitted finance minister, Jim Flaherty, in perhaps the only smart thing he's ever done, included a clause in the Ontario and B.C agreements that said if either province fucked with tax structure in any way in the first two years, he got his money back.

Is Premier Clark proposing to do the responsible thing and live up to the agreement her government signed? Fuck, no!

The B.C. government is exchanging ideas with the Harper government on ways to ease the province’s burden in paying back the $1.6-billion advance it received from Ottawa to establish the Harmonized Sales Tax in 2010, Premier Christy Clark said Wednesday.

Clark, who spent Tuesday in Ottawa meeting with Conservative politicians on various federal-provincial issues, said her government is floating several payback options.

Clark said her government has suggested that B.C. receive some credit for the more than two and a half years the HST will be in place before it is dismantled.

Turns out that B.C is over $3 billion in the hole, and can't afford to just pay back Ottawa, like it is obligated to do.

To which I say, "Tough shit! Give back the fucking money, you dumb cunts! Do it NOW!" You got the money all at once, pay it back all at once, you dipshits.

Here's my issue. Once you let one dickhead province renege on a deal because it isn't prom-queen fucking popular, you're left with no choice but to let them all do it. And then you're left with no government at all.

Besides which, people need to know that their idiotic opinions have costs, if they think that they can be governed by them. The stupid goddamned B.C HST referendum chipped away at the very idea that a duly elected government can be held accountable for anything at all.

That might sound like a middling point, but imagine that you're an international baker, or just hold bonds on that province's debt. Are you going to go out of your way to extend credit to crazy cocksuckers that renege on deals on a fucking whimsy and expect no consequences to arise from it?

Fuck each and every person in British Columbia. I hope that those dumb motherfuckers are forced to pay higher taxes at goddamned gunpoint to pay back Ottawa immediately, not that I expect Harper and Flaherty to have the balls to do it. They might be the biggest fiscal cowards and ward-heeling motherfuckers that this country has ever shit out. I suspect that they'll both gladly let Christy Clark peg them infinitely if they think that they can get a few Vancouver seats in the next election out of it.

Those crazy bastards need to be taught that, in the words of the great Dr. Hunter Thompson, if you buy the ticket, you take the fucking ride. And if Harper doesn't do it, I hope to Christ that the financial markets do.

The funniest part about this who fiasco is that the same stupid pricks who voted against the HST in B.C also voted for Harper in the federal election three months earlier.

And you people expect me to take popular democracy seriously?

Some Girls Live in Texas '78

2011-11-26T12:17:00.001-05:00

In pretty much every sense of the word, the Rolling Stones were at a crossroads in 1978. After three grindingly mediocre albums (1973's Goats Head Soup, 1974's It's Only Rock n' Roll and 1976's Black and Blue, all of which admittedly had a few great songs on them, as even the worst Stones records tend to), they were widely derided by the emerging punk movement as bloated comic charactures of what masterpieces like Exile on Main St, railed against.

Worse, the punks weren't exactly wrong. The Rolling Stones had become complacent and decadent in the ugliest sense of the word. Largely because Keith Richards' increasing heroin addiction and the fact that the band now lived in different countries, the spent the period from 1972 to '78 coasting on their reputations.

It didn't help that their live shows kept adding musicians like Billy Preston, Ollie Brown and progressively larger horn sections. The Stones brought the Vegas "revue" pheonmoenon to rock that finally collapsed under its own weight on Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion tour, which seemed to have horns, keyboards, chick singers, a massuse, three dwarves and a charterd accountant on stage with Axl, Slash and Duff. And that nearly bankrupted GN'R, which is why that fucking tour seemed to go on forever, and ultimately destroyed the band.

Then there was Keef's misunderstand with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over the 22 grams of heroin that they found on his person in Toronto's Habour Castle Hilton in March of 1977, which threatened the very existence of the Rolling Stones.

22 grams is a lot of smack to have on you at any given time, especially if you're only supposed to be in town for less than a week. The Mounties developed an interesting theory around this; that zillonaire rock star Keith Richards made music as a hobby, but his real passion was selling junk. They charged him with possession with intent to distribute, which carries a sentence of seven years to life in Canada.

In doing so, they overlooked the fact that even the dumbest junkie musicians aren't that dumb. Even though they need to get high, they obviously can't afford to be caught with smack at a border crossing. So they get other people to do it for them. Because the potential for one source getting nabbed was so great, folks like Keef would have multiple supplies coming to him in a city. However, sometimes none of the sources would get nabbed, which is what basically happened at the Harbour Castle.

If the Rolling Stones were broken up by Canuck justice, they were threatened with irrelevence by groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. It was under these clouds that the Stones decamped for Paris to record what would become their "New York" album, Some Girls.

With the exception of the incomparable Sugar Blue on harmonica, "guest musicians" were almost completely absent from the Some Girls sessions. It was the five Stones, along with regular keyboardists Ian Stewart and ex-Faces Ian McLagan, and that was pretty much it. Having said that, Sugar Blue is impossibly good, and should've joined the Stones full time. The harmonica he plays, especially on "Miss You" sounds almost nothing like a harmonica, which is a pretty rudimentary instrument. Sugar's parts are played live with a saxophone to this day.

The Stones always had a weird dynamic with guest musicians. Instead of the guests complimenting the band, the band tended to support the guests. If you listen to Black and Blue - with standout exceptions like "Hand of Fate" - it sounded more like a Billy Preston album of the era than a proper Stones album. And that's not necessarily bad. Billy Preston was fucking dynamite in the 70's. But it wasn't really the Rolling Stones. That's also true of "It's Only Rock n' Roll" with is structurally David Bowie meets the Faces, which makes sense since Bowie and Ron Wood wrote it with Mick Jagger. Keith Richards doesn't even play on the recorded version of the song.

Some Girls was destined to be the last great album of great "new" Rolling Stones songs (1981's Tattoo You was almost as good, but it was mostly a hodgpodge of outtakes from Goats Head Soup through 1980's Emotional Rescue sessions. Jagger finished and cleaned up Tattoo You pretty much on his own in the studio.) Unlike every subsequent record of new songs, there isn't a bad fucking tune on Some Girls. Sure, some of them are better than others, but none of them actually suck. The Stones hadn't done that since Exile on Main St., and they'd never do it again.

Last week, the Stones decided to cash in on Some Girls yet again. To understand this, you need to understand the peculiar business position the Rolling Stones are in. In 1971, they started their own record company, which would license their albums to a major distributor, but the Stones own the masters. That means if you sign the Rolling Stones, you don't just get the next three records that no one but me will buy. You get everything from Sticky Fingers onward, and the Stones catalogue still sells a fuck-ton of units in an era where no one is dumb enough to actually pay for music.That's why there have been at least three "remastered" editions of those records in the last 25 years.

Maybe later in the week I'll write about the reissue, which is way better than last years reissue of Exile. The hidden treasure this week is the brand-spanking-fucking new Some Girls Live in Texas '78 BluRay and DVD. Unlike last year's home video release of the 1974 movie of the '72 Exile tour, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones - which is well worth picking up - Some Girls Live in Texas has never before been seen by the public.

And Live in Texas, 78 is rocks the gawdamn casbah, teenagers. From 1989's Steel Wheels tours - which comprises most of the band's live concert home video releases (there have been five, six if you include Martin Scorcesse's feature film, Shine a Light) onward, there were almost as many people on stage as there were in the audience. Of them all, the only one that comes close is the Paris theatre show on the Four Flicks box set, and that's because so many rare and cool songs and covers were on it) comes close. Because Jagger was so concerned with recreating the records on stage from '89 forward, he ressurected the "Stones Revue" idea of the '75 tour, but more bloated and without anyone as fucking hip as Billy Preston with them. Live in Texas '78 is just the five Stones, with Stewart and McLagan on keys.

More importantly, the Some Girls tour was the last time the Rolling Stones exclusively played arenas and theatres. Forever afterward, they played your local enormodome. While the Stones are better at it than almost anyone else, pretty much all rock music sucks in a sports stadium, especially outdoor stadiums. And domes are even worse. When a band plays outside, the music goes everywhere but your ears. And when there's there's a steel dome involved, it bounces all over the fucking place.

Worse still, when you play in a place for 30,000 to 120,000 assholes, you had goddamned well better play the 22 songs that everybody hears on the radio 13 times a day. And God help you if you play too many songs from your new record.

Some Girls Live in Texas, '78 doesn't do that. This show had seven (then) new songs - ('When The Whip Comes Down', 'Beast Of Burden', 'Miss You', 'Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)', 'Shattered' ,'Respectable' and 'Far Away Eyes') in a row. The only band I know of that's done that lately with a new record was the Foo Fighters, and they only did it in clubs before Wasting Light was released. I'll grant you that the Stones haven't made an album with that many great new songs to play in a row subsequent to Some Girls - after all, no one's chanting for, say, a suite from Dirty Work or Undercover - but it's a ballsy move, nonetheless.

What stands out on Live in Texas is the paucity of the "Greatest Hits." Yes, "Honky Tonk Woman", "Tumbling Dice", "Happy", "Brown Sugar" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash" are all here, and "Miss You" and "Beast of Burden" eould later become part of "The Big 22", but there's no "(I Can't No) Satisfaction", "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Street Fighting Man" to be found here. In fact only two orignial songs pre-date Exile on Main St., which would be unthinkable for the Stones to do now.

Instead you get two Chuck Berry covers - and you just can't go wrong with a Chuck Berry song - the brilliant "Star Star" from Goats Head Soup and the classic Robert Johnson blues "Love in Vain."

If you want a giant "hits" set, Some Girls Live in Texas, 78 likely isn't for you. Nor are you going to get all of the fucking fireworks, fire and confetti that the Stones have employed since '89. There isn't even a giant video screen behind the band. But if makes you feel better, Mick does spend a good deal of the show in a douchey red leather disco cap, a punk t-shirt with an obscured swaatika, and really odd pants and shoes. That's about all the spectacle you're going to get.

But if you want to see a fantastic band fighting for their fucking lives, then you have to buy Some Girls Live in Texas, 78.

Editor's note: The audio on the actual Live in Texas Bluray/DVD/BitTorrent is much, much louder than it is on the YouTube clip above.

Gadaffi's dead. Now deal with the consequences

2011-11-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

My thoughts Kevin Mooney's extra-stupid article on Moammar Gaddafi and Oliver North last night reminded me of something that I've been meaning to write for about a month and never got around to. I'm exceptionally lazy and pretty drunk most of the time. You can deal. Or not.

As you've probably figured out by now, I'm of the opinion that American foreign policy since 1993 is more like something you'd find in Penn State's showers than the product of a deliberative process engaged in by smart people. It is every bit as much the embodiment of a "if it feels good, do it" philosophy as your average gang-bang is. In neither instance does anyone consider the consequence of a specific action until it's too late.

That's certainly true of the three men that followed George H.W Bush into the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush thought that they could use NATO to surround Russia, and that the Kremlin wouldn't mind all that much. Both thought that they could carve new countries out of Yugoslavia where none had existed since the 12th century. Then there's Iraq, which I believe will become history's most epic clusterfuck in the next decade or so.

The Obama administration's Libya policy is a microcosm of all that bad thinking that is U.S foreign policy in recent years. The overthrow and subsequent murder of international fashion icon, Moammar Gadaffi, will have consequences that are easy to see, but everybody chooses to ignore.

Don't get me wrong. I celebrated the man's death. I'm of the considered opinion that any head of state that dresses like Michael Jackson and acts like Prince probably should have his corpse dragged through the fucking streets. Having said that, I will miss his legion of chick bodyguards and busty Ukrainian nurses more than words can say. The man had a legendary libido that so closely resembles my own that I can't help but feel a certain kinship with him.

Be that as it may, I believe that NATO's intervention in Libya, like the American invasion of Iraq, is going to create almost metaphysical problems in the conduct of foreign policy.

As we're already seeing, the Libyan people aren't all that interested in democracy. If they are, they have an interesting way of showing it, what with the flying of the al-Qeada flag over the Bengazhi courthouse, and all. In any event, I think the rhetorical focus on freedom is utterly inconsistent with America's post-World War II conduct of foreign policy, anyhow.Yes, the rhetoric was there, but the deeds almost never aligned with it.

If you're not sure what I mean by that, ask Mohamad Mossaddegh, Jacabo Arbenz and Salvador Allende: all three of whom were products of the democratic process, and were deposed by contemporary of future American client tyrants. That the Iranian, Guatemalan and Chilean people suffered for decades afterwards was hardly a secret, it's just that 10 U.S presidents and the American people didn't give a fuck. People tend to forget this, but despots that were later painted with Washington's famous "Hitler brush", like Manuel Noreiga and Saddam Hussein, were at one time or another useful tools of U.S policy in their respective regions. Until they weren't. And then they became "like Hitler."

I've never really gotten into this before, but I oppose the International Criminal Court, the concept of universial jurisdiction, and the American process of trying foreign nationals in Lower Manhattan for crimes that were committed in places that no one in Lower Manhattan can find on a map.

The reasons for my opposition are pretty simple. If it is determined that a dictator must go, it's always best to let him flee into exile in some shitty place like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and sometimes France. It worked for Idi Amin, and that motherfucker actually ate people.

However, if you take exile off of the table, which the ICC, universial jurisdiction, and American criminal trials do, you leave said despot with no other choice than to stage a murderous "last stand" which will almost certainly kill untold numbers of innocent people.

And here's a neat fact. Dictators tend to pay attention to one another's fates. You only need to fuck over a scumbag like Charles Taylor on a safe haven deal once before you ensure that there's never going to be another such agreement. In reneging on a deal with a monster, you practically guarantee that the next monster will chance a seige of Berlin-style last stand, thereby killing more civilians than you otherwise hope to save.

Poorly thought out policy always creates unintended - if utterly predictable - consequences. When you invade Iraq for WMD that it doesn't have, you necessarily teach Iran that they probably won't be invaded if they actually demonstrate that they have WMD. Although he probably didn't intend it to happen that way, the second President Bush did more to further weapons proliferation than even A.Q Khan. Dr. Khan only supplied the weapons. President Bush created the strategic imperative for phychopathic regimes to obtain them. If you doubt me, ask yourself a simple question: "What would you do if you were Iran or North Korea in the wake of the Iraq invasion?" The answers really shouldn't surprise you, if you aren't a half-wit.

The comical demise of Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar Gaddafi, esquire, also taught the evil men of the world another valuable lesson: that being America's new buddy doesn't pay.

After 2003, Gaddafi did everything that Washington wanted to. He abandoned his almost satirical nuclear program. He accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing and paid restitution to the families. And not only did he renounce terrorism, it is widely believed that he tortured suspected terrorists for the United States as part of their "extraordinary rendition" program.

The picture to the right should give you a pretty good idea where playing ball with the United States got him.

Again, I hoisted a drink in toasting Gaddafi's inglorious passing. And it was a drink of such size and depth that only true heroes can really appreciate it. I imbibed it, fell down and giggled my goddamned ass off when I found out that ol' Muammar was murdered like a fucking rat.

But, in the grand scheme of things, my opinions don't matter all that much, do they? The opinions that you should really strive to influence are those of folks like Bashir al-Assad, Islam Karimov or Pakistan's ISI. And I just don't see how they view Gadaffi's fate after becoming part of the "family of nations" as being in their self-interest. Do you figure that Omar al-Bashir is pulling the fingernails out of more of America's enemies, or fewer of them, after being indicted by the ICC?

Sure, Moammar made cool friends. Barack Obama shook his hand. Paul Martin and Hillary Clinton came to visit. He comissioned "Black Rose of the Desert" in a failed attempt to get into Condolezza Rice's pants. Tony Blair cut him in on a few business deals. But none of that stopped him from ultimately being found in a fucking sewer and shot in the head. And that, teenagers, is the kind of thing that the West's other unsavoury allies - and they are many, for they are legion - tend to take notice of.

Most Americans like to believe that their foreign policy is based 100% on morality and freedom, almost entirely the product of candy, unicorns and angel farts. But Americans are hardly regarded as the world's most dilligent readers, are they?

I think that the LIbyan people are going to hate us for getting into bed with Gaddafi to the extent that we did, and our secret little friends with the dirty histories are going to take note of just how quickly we threw Moammar over the side when shit got ugly.

We're playing both sides of a sucker's game, and I figure that it's going to end about as well for us as it did for the banks when they did the same thing in the subprime mortage scheme. Just because Gadaffi was a megalomanical idiot doesn't mean that we should presuppose that all of our savage playmates are. We should start to understand our animals have their own self-interests that they're all keenly aware of.

You don't get halfway into bed with evil because eventually evil is going to make you sleep on the couch, and the victim's of evil aren't ever going to give you credit for your attempt to keep one foot on the fucking floor while you were still in the boudoir.

Andrew Brietbart's Big Peace and the "Fuck Me Jesus" Broad on Sepulveda Boulevard: Equally Credible

2011-11-18T21:25:00.000-05:00

The above is a pretty funny video and I recommend it to you all. But I didn't just post it because it's hilarious. There is a larger point here. Specifically, if you read an Andrew Brietbart blog expecting anything even remotely approaching the truth in history or politics, you may as well be straddling the hood a fucking Datsun on Sepulveda Boulevard yourself. All of the "Big" blogs are like dating sites for people who shouldn't be allowed out of their homes without electronic monitoring. If, however, you enjoy having your stupidity force-fed to you, I can't recommend the House of Brietbart more highly. You'll feel at home there.

I bring this up because I read the most remarkably dumb fucking thing I think I've ever seen on Brietbart's Big Peace this week. It's an "article" - and I use the term loosely - by some yutz named Kevin Mooney called "Oliver North’s ’80s Counter-Terrorism Efforts vs. Gaddafi Instructive to Post-9/11 Era." The headline alone nearly made me shit myself with laughter.

As much as I like to think that I excel at encapsulating stupidity for you folks here, I just can't do it this time. There's just too much of it. You really need to read the whole piece for yourselves.

Mr. Mooney spends a great deal of post drawing on the mitigating evidence from Colonel North's 1989 criminal trial. Oddly, he spends no time at all detailing what North was actually on trial for. Which is usually a pretty god clue that the guy that you're dealing with is a liar, a scumbag, an idiot, or a special bundle of all three. Pretty much all Mooney says about the trial is that the charges against Ollie were either dismissed or overturned on appeal.

The report of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh is pretty enlightening on why some of the charges against North were dropped;

"North was indicted in March 1988 on 16 Iran/contra charges, along with Poindexter, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim in a 23-count indictment. After the cases were severed and the central conspiracy charges were dropped due to classified-information problems, North stood trial beginning in February 1989 on 12 counts.

I'm a weird guy in thinking that you can't claim to vindicated if you aren't tried because the government doesn't allow the evidence against you to be heard. You'd be surprised how often that stance keeps me from getting laid. Really you would.

Yet North still managed to get himself convicted of three counts: Aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding and altering official documents, and accepting an illegal gratuity from former National Security Advisor Richard) Secord. The "illegal gratuity" in question was a security fence around his home, the proceeds of which were diversions from the Contra payments, which were themselves diverted from the Iranian arms sales.

Colonel North's convictions were reversed for the simple reason that he was given transactional immunity by the Select Joint Committee investigating Iran-Contra. That immunity made it almost impossible, given North's televised - and immunized - testimony before Congress, to prosecute him criminally. Walsh should've resigned the second North's immunity was granted by Congress because it destroyed any number of Iran-Contra prosecutions.

But let's be clear about one thing. Oliver North wasn't vindicated on a single fucking thing. He got off on numerous technicalities. From a factual perspective, the good Colonel is no different than a rapist who was acquitted because it was dark outside that night. Actually, that's not true. Most rapists don't admit to, and try to justify, their crimes on national television.

Mooney never comes right out and says what the "counter-terrorism strategy" in Iran-Contra actually was. And you know what? I wouldn't either, because it was phenomenally goddamn silly.

In the 80s, a dozen or so Americans were being held by Iranian-supported terrorist groups in Beirut. President Reagan then decided to negotiate with the sponsors of that terrorism, Iran. He did this by having North sell them weapons - through Dick Secord, John Poindexter, and North - through, of all countries, Israel. This was being done while Reagan was also extending financial assistance to the country that Iran was at war with, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Oh, and Iran-Contra was illegal from top to bottom. Because President Reagan only signed a back-dated presidential "finding" and never informed the relevant congressional authorities of the Iran arms sales, he was in violation of the National Security Act of 1947. The Contra diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales - and the administrations solicitation of funds for the Contras from several foreign countries - violated the Boland Amendment, which specifically prohibited such horseplay under color of law.

Iran-Contra was as criminal, if not more so, than even Watergate. Reagan should have been impeached just for the things that he admitted to, such as trading arms for hostages through a third country without notifying Congress, and backdating intelligence findings. Can you imagine the outcry from Brietbart's legion of Big Shithead blogs if, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama tried anything like Iran-Contra?

Besides, The arms diversion, and the subsequent Fence That Ollie Built, are things that the President specifically denied any knowledge of. Not only did Reagan deny it on television to the American, but he denied it under oath.

Remember, it was the Reagan administration themselves that threw North under the bus, and Nancy Reagan herself condemned him - specifically by calling him a fucking liar in public - during his 1994 Senate race.

Kevin Mooney's deliberate (and extremely poorly executed) obfuscation did succeed i what I believe in what I think it's purpose was - making the heads of smart people hurt.

But even there I have a remedy! Fantastic tits!

Those fucking things are a damned near perfect and always make me feel better in all the places that count. It is my hope That I'll soon be promoting a website where you'll be seeing a whole lot more of those magnificent milkbags. I love them and the Two Feet of Terror that they belong to, if only because they always clear my head of the shitheadery that people like Kevin Mooney put out there,

That's why Miss J is a much better hero than Oliver North.

The Ballad of Lonesome Jack

2011-11-12T07:16:00.000-05:00

Whenever some Republican shitheel tells you that they want to change the way Washington works, you should kick him directly in the calls and laugh as he hits the ground. The fact is that they had their chance to do that between 1995 and 2007. And you know what they did? They made Washington work for them. Y'know, when they weren't out trolling for some homosex.

If you ever have some free time and the inclination to be completely disgusted with the GOP, I suggest that you do some reading on then- House whip Tom DeLay's K Street Project.

The K Street Project was DeLay's effort to take the axis of campaign politics, government and lobbying that the Democrats had perfected over several decades and replace it with a more Republican-inclined one. DeLay and the GOP majority wasn't interested in reforming shit, and anyone that actually believed that they were is an abject idiot and should be drowned for their own good.

It should be pointed out that Newt Gingrich, who is adorably delusional enough to think that he can be elected president next year, presided over the entire mess.

It was from the cesspool of the K Street Project that the felonious two-legged beast Jack Abramoff rose. Abramoff's life and career warrants some study, as well, and I can't recommend Alex Gibney's 2010 documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money to you enough. It's as good a primer into how the world of big-time world lobbying works as you're likely to find.

Of course, everybody still likes to pretend that the savage saga of Casino Jack is the exception to the rule because if they admitted the truth, practically everyone currently involved in politics would not only go right to fucking jail, they'd very likely be deported to Angola afterwards. Instead, only Abramoff, a few of his assistants and a hapless Ohio hick like Bob Ney did.

The fact is there's really no other way that the story could have ended. Jack's single biggest sin was that he took what happens in government every day to such cartoon villain levels that he couldn't avoid being called out. But, in the end, Abramoff is a pretty accurate reflection of how the entire twisted industry is supposed to work.

Because the insolent twats in politics, lobbying and the media actually believe that you're stupid, they want you to believe that the problem is money, rather than influence. And if you actually are stupid, you'll believe them. Granted, you'll be ignoring the fact that money is nothing more than an instrument of influence and not influence itself, but everyone will feel better for your inability to think independently.

The fact is that you can pass all the campaign finance reforms in the world and never actually address the problem. Sure, you'll feel better for the effort, mostly because you're not especially bright, but you'll effectively be treating cancer with lollipops.

Repeat after me: "Money. Is. Not. The Problem." Don't believe me? Let's ask Jack, who - for all of his celebrated faults - is something of an expert on the issue. Luckily, he discussed it on 60 Minutes last weekend.

Let's look at the key parts of the segment, shall we

Abramoff: When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, "You know, when you're done working on the Hill, we'd very much like you to consider coming to work for us." Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to 'em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they're gonna do. And not only that, they're gonna think of things we can't think of to do.

Neil Volz: Jack Abramoff could sweet talk a dog off a meat truck, that's how persuasive he was.

Neil Volz was one of the staffers Abramoff was talking about. He was chief of staff to Congressman Bob Ney, who as chairman of the House Administration Committee had considerable power to dispense favors. Abramoff targeted Volz and offered him a job.

Stahl: You're the chief of staff of a powerful congressman. And Jack owns you and you haven't even left working for the congressman.

Volz: I have the distinct memory of, you know, negotiating with Jack at a hockey game. So we're, you know, just a few rows back. The crowd's goin' crazy. And Jack and I are havin' a business conversation. And, you know, I'm-- I'm wrestlin' with how much I think I should get paid. And then five minutes later we're-- he's askin' me questions about some clients of his.

Stahl: When you look back was that the corrupting moment?

Volz: I think we were guilty of engaging in a corrupt relationship. So there were several corrupting moments. There isn't just one moment. There were many.

That, teenagers, is how influence works. At the end of the day, campaign finance reform isn't going to ever address that. Neither will the silly little nibbling around the edges that constitutes lobbying reform. Lesley Stahl's fake outrage and Abamoff's Hallmark card contrition aside, the system is working exactly the way it was designed to.

Here in Canada, the Harper Conservatives are congratulating themselves over their useless lobbying reforms and Canada's scumbag lobbyists are indignant over same. But all those reforms do is keep currently registered lobbyists out of election campaigns, which is effectively meaningless. They don't prohibit campaign or government staffs - or even politicians themselves - from future lobbying. And that's the only thing that's going to work.

Again, from Abramoff on 60 Minutes;

He says the most important thing that needs to be done is to prohibit members of Congress and their staff from ever becoming lobbyists in Washington.

Abramoff: If you make the choice to serve the public, public service, then serve the public, not yourself. When you're done, go home. Washington's a dangerous place. Don't hang around.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, that will sound oddly familiar to you, if only because that's exactly what I've been saying - almost word for word - for years now.

Now, sleazy politically-connected zillionaire lobbyists are going to (or already have) respond to these points by saying "But that's not me, or even most lobbyists. We work on behalf of charities, hospitals, orphanages and shit." Which doesn't make a lick of fucking difference. Furthermore, that argument rests on the premise that you're a moron.

It doesn't matter who a former politician or their staffers lobby for. In relation to the lobbying itself's corrupting effect on the system, there's no difference between Doctors Without Borders, Big Tobacco or even NAMBLA. Who the client is couldn't be more immaterial. The industry itself, as currently constituted and regulated, is an open invitation to abuse by some of the worst fucking people on earth.

Don't look to bloggers to even talk about it all that much. The bloggers who aren't actually retarded, addicted to simplistic talking points, or both (which is most of them) are already in somebody's hip pocket, or very much want to be. Some either want to be political staffers or lobbyists. Others just want influence with one or both. That's why they always talk about who's lobbying for whom, and never the way the lobbying industry itself is structured. If you make it a partisan issue, you neutralize the issue itself. 99% of the bloggers who are actually smart enough to understand how the system is fucked are either already part of it or are actively trying to be.

Think Lesley Stahl is going to do a giant expose? Think again. I'm willing to bet that her bosses at Viacom hire multiple lobbying firms, all of which employ former politicians and their staffers. Look at the networks that produce the news, and then think of the corporations that own those networks. I'm actually surprised that 60 Minutes had the balls to close out the Abramoff profile the way they did. I thought that I was going to be the only person who said that in public for a very long time.

Lastly, don't expect politicians are going to do. Remember, they and their staffers are the ones that most directly benefit from the system as it is currently is. No amount of public outrage (which there never will be because the issue lacks sex appeal) is going to outweigh the self-interest of the political and lobbying classes. It just won't. But if you want to see just how futile it is, write your MP or Congressman. Let me know what they tell you, especially if they respond with anything other than derisive laughter.

However, soulless cyborgs like Stephen Harper will institute the most tepid and meaningless reforms from time to time, lobbyists will pretend to be outraged about them and everyone will think that something is being accomplished, when it isn't. And then folks will pretend to be outraged when Harper cronies Rahim Jaffer or Bruce Carson come out of the lobbying woodwork with pussy actually spilling out of their pockets. But most folks only ever pay attention to the pussy.

Lookee, it's easy to point fingers at Jack Abramoff, mostly because he had the monumentally bad judgement to wear a black hat to his sentencing hearing. But you have to understand that he only perfected a system that existed decades before he came to town, albeit so flamboyantly that you have to wonder if it wasn't fuelled entirely by hubris and crank. But as Abramoff himself tells us, no one is doing anything to prevent the next Jack Abramoff from twisting democracy into an unrecognizable husk of what it's supposed to be.

And no one really cares, which just proves that there's a little Jack Abramoff in all over us.

The End of Supply-Side and the New Republican Economics

2011-11-05T09:09:00.000-04:00

It doesn't seem as though many folks have been paying attention over the last year, but if you have, you might have noticed that supply-side economic orthodoxy has died in the Republican Party. And you know what, that's fine with me.

Supply-side was always patently silly. Every time that it's been implimented, giant deficits have resulted. That was true under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. It was also true under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when the deficit actually tripled. And I think we all know what happened with George W. Bush over the last decade.

"But," I'm sure that my GOP book-licking friends are screaming at their monitors right now. "None of those presidents are pure supply-siders. Supply-side economics requires spending cuts equal to, or greater than, the tax cuts to actually work." And that's how supply-side is exactly like Marxism. Both are fine in theory, but impossible in practice.

This is because politicians are lazy and voters are, for the most part, delusional and idiotic. Each and every practicing politician alive today understands that the easiest way to win your vote is to buy it. And if you're too old or poor to benefit from a tax cut, by God, they'll throw a shit-ton of program spending your way to keep you happy and voting early enough to make the exit polls look good. Voters expect it, and politicians of very ideological stripe are more than happy to oblige them.

The difficult part for Republicans to admit is that supply-side can't help but cause catastrophic debt that way.

While I'm freeing you of illusions, let's once and for all banish the horseshit idea that Obama's deficits are worse than Bush's. I'll begin by conceding that Obama's look worse than Bush's ... if you're an economic illiterate. Or a partisan, shit-hell fucktard. Virtually every allegedly "conservative" blogger and talking head spin doctor alive falls into one of those two categories. They're either liars or retards.

To understand what I'm saying, you need to understand that not all deficets are created equal. There are structural deficts and non-structural deficits. Most of Barack Obama's deficit came from his ill-considered stimulus package in 2009. As was the case with Bush's Troubled Asset Relief Program, that money's been spent, and there's little likelihood that there's gonna be much more of it coming down the pipeline. Because it constituted mostly one-time spending (which was the chief complaint among Republican governors), it was non-structural deficit spending.

Structural deficit spending is a different beast entirely, in that it's almost impossible to kill. As we learned in 2009, even giant Democratic majorities weren't enough to repeal a tax cut, even a repeal that targeted a very small percentage of the overall population. (In the interest of full disclosure, I support repealing all of the Bush tax cuts, including those for the middle class.) That's structural deficit spending, and the 2001 and '03 tax cuts alone account for about $4 trillion of it a decade.

When was the last time entitlement spending for the middle class was voted away? If you answered "never", you just won yourself a cookie. Therefore, only acid fiends think that programs like Medicare Part D - at a cost of about $700 billion a decade (or nearly all of Obama's stimulus cost) - are going anywhere.

Then there are the wars, and this is where I get really cold, so forgive me in advance.

Because of miraculous advances in combat medicine, soldiers that would have been dead in previous wars aren't today. Particularly in the case of serious head wounds, which a large percentage of the casualties sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan are. But those so wounded are still all fucked up. In some cases, terribly so. If you assume that a wounded 22-year old is going to require care for the rest of his life, and lives until he's at least sixty, you're talking about some pretty serious money. Just caring for the seriously wounded, particularly from Iraq, might actually double the cost of the war over the next forty to sixty years. And, friends, that's structual spending.

You could argue that all of the miltary material that was used, blowed up or just worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan could be replaced at once, but that would make you look stupid. Moreover, almost no one is seriously discussing changing U.S foreign policy in a way that would avoid replacing all of that material.

Long story short, the second President Bush could barely get out bed in the morning without engaging in the hardest of hard core structural deficit spending. Outside of health care, Obama's single largest example of structural deficit spending is pledging to continue the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. There's just no contest. And almost everything Bush did in office cost almost as much, as much, or more than the Affordable Care Act. That doesn't mean that I like the health care law, but the numbers are hard to hide. Worse, Bush's spending is of the sort that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to stop.

Keep in mind also that most of the structural deficits were enacted under unified Republican control of the government. The GOP no longer has the excuse that they used to justify the fiscal excesses of the Reagan years, a Democratic Congress. The biggest ticket items Bush passed between 2007 and 2009 were TARP and the 2008 $150 billion tax rebate stimulus, both of which were one-time expenditures. The serious money vanished between 2001-'05. And titanic fuckheads like Grover Norquist were silent about that spending when they weren't actually shaking their pom-poms for it.

As much as the spending makes me crazy, the hypocrisy makes me physically vibrate with indignation. If you shoot your average Republican politician full of sodium pentathol, give a few drinks and a teenage boy to fondle, he'll tell you that spending shit-tons of money is the best way to get re-elected without working very hard. And anyone who knows anything about John Boehner knows that he doesn't like working very hard.

But you can't put your pants on in the morning without seeing those assholes storming the barricades and screaming about fiscal responsibility. The rhetoric is a cheap pose for the yokels, to be sure, but thirty years of it has taught the American people that money isn't something to be taken seriously. I think we can all see how well that's working out for their economy today.

The good news is that no one in the GOP is even discussing supply-side as a serious policy option anymore. Sure, they like pulling out their dead Reagan puppet like some nostalgia act, but they've completely abandoned supply-side as a theory.

It's important to remember that supply-side dictacted accross the board rate cuts, which would presumably create growth without deficits. Because they pay greater percentages of their income in taxes, of course the rich would get the biggest cuts. That only makes sense under supply-side theory.

But you almost never hear today's Republican Party advocating that any more. Instead you hear an almost violent railing against the 47% of Americans that don't pay federal income taxes at all. Never mind that most of that 47% is either too poor or too retired to pay those taxes, because class warfare works just as well for Republicans as it does for Democrats. In fact, it works better for the GOP.

Oh, it's also important to forget that the 47% pay into the most regressive parts of the tax code. President Reagan doubled payroll taxes in 1983, which the working and middle classes can't escape, but the wealthy have a cap on. And the cost of corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer in increased prices, which is effectively a tarriff by another name. They also pay state and local taxes.

Since Steve Forbes introduced the idea into the popular vocabularly in 1996, the GOP has had a major fetish for flat taxes, which has become orthodoxy in the last year. Both Rick Perry and Herman Cain have some variation of a flat tax in their economic platforms, both of which are silly and both of which actually raise taxes on the majority of Americans. That populist Tea Partiers, most of whom are lower and middle class, love these ideas is all the proof you need that populist Tea Partiers are functionally retarded.

Firstly, any economist that isn't crippled by either a huge drinking problem or paralyzing stupidity will tell you that for a flat tax to work, it would need to set at about 27%, without deductions. Neither the Cain or Perry plans come close to that. Both are riddled with the childish deductions that Americans have come to know and love.

Second, neiher touches entitlement or defense spending in the near term, which is where the real money is in the budget. If you look at Paul Ryan's plan as a yardstick, as both Perry and Cain seem to, there are no serious spending cuts wothy of the name for at least 15 years.

However, unlike the Ryan Plan, the Cain and Perry schemes provide an immediate and gigantic tax hike on most Americans.

The famous 47% that don't pay federal income taxes at all right now will be expected to pony up either 9% or 20%, depending on which plan you look at. And that will presumably be on top of their federal payroll, state and local taxes. Cain's plan in particular mandates an immediate 18% tax hike (through the flat sales and income taxes) on the 47% upon enactment.

And Erick Erickson's self-celebrating "53%"? Almost all of them will being paying more in taxes, too. Yes, the top one percent of them will have a rate cut from about 37% to either 20% or 9%, but almost all of the rest of them will face a pretty significant increase in taxes. Keep in mind, they'll still be paying payroll, sate and local taxes, too.

Sure, capital gains and estate taxes will vanish in most of the GOP's most hyper-sexualized fantasies, but only a very small percentage of Americans pay those at all right now. On the other hand, they drive a shitload of revenue. That burden will necessarily be shifted to the lower and middle classes, but not all that efficently. Always remember that 9-20% of shit is still shit. For example, let's assume that half of the 47% are Social Security receiptients. So far as I know, no one is seriously suggesting taxing benefits or, god forbid, cutting them at all.

If you're reading this, the odds are overwhelming that the Republicans will be "spreading the wealth around" just as much as they accuse Obama of planning to. And it will be your wealth that gets spread around, just not in the Christian "help the poor" kind of way. It's the same kind of economics that were behind TARP, but without the benefit of saving the entire financial system of the United States from collapsing around your ankles.

Other than Ron Paul, no Republican is thinking of ways to change U.S foreign policy in ways that would drive defense costs down. Dwight Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" will continue to grow and syphon the wealth of the nation to no real benefit to the average citizen. And no one is thinking of ways to reduce entitlement spending in the near-term, meaning current beneficiaries, or those who are about to be, who are the real fiscal problem.The fucking Boomers, who actually are the problem from an entitlement sense, are spared any pain at all. Those unfunded liabilities remain untouched under any Republican plan.

The supposedly conservative, Tea Party wing of the GOP is effectively a second "tax and spend" party. Deal with it. Or not. Whatever.

I don't remember the Bill of Rights including a right to remain utterly ignorant of math, yet still remain prosperous, but I suppose that the Republicans will sponsor a constitutional amendment addressing that before next November.

A drinking life:The ballad of Bob Ryan and Rob Ford

2011-10-29T14:08:00.000-04:00

I drink my share. As a matter of fact, I drink your share, too. It used to be that folks with my hobbies would be forcefully precluded from public office, lest I become something of a national embarrassment.

Well, no longer, good people. The times, they done changed, just like Bob Dylan warned us they would, lo those many years ago. These days, I'd be barred from office for the simple reason that my copious drinking and fucking hasn't resulted in a lengthy arrest record. Damn my ability to handle my high. It keeps holding me back.

Meet Sheboygan, Wisconsin mayor Bob Ryan. Mayor Ryan clearly knows how to have a good time.

Mayor Bob Ryan has big plans for this little city. He wants to dredge the Sheboygan River to lure bigger recreational boats, build a green corporate park and bring high-end housing to the sleepy downtown.

But before he gets to any of that he has to deal with a problem. Mr. Ryan is an alcoholic, and since taking office two years ago, he has fallen off the wagon four times. His sobriety slip-ups, including a bar fight, have been documented in a police report and a YouTube video, making this small-city mayor the butt of late-night television jokes and international news coverage.

(...)

In his office lined with photos of his favorite Green Bay Packers, the 48-year-old said he has been a binge drinker since he was 12. At 42, he concluded he was an alcoholic and entered a 12-step recovery program.

He sold his oil distribution business a couple of years after he ran successfully for city council in 2006 and, even though he was in a lot of bars while he campaigned, he said the discipline and focus of the election was good for his sobriety. But after the race "it was all kind of stored up," he said.

One night, after becoming mayor in April 2009, he went drinking with the city's human resources director, who later alleged he made a pass at her. After he fired her a few months later, she sued and eventually won a settlement from the city's insurance company for $310,000. The mayor admitted no wrongdoing.

That was followed by an off-color declaration about his sister-in-law at Brennan's in July of 2009 that was filmed and posted on YouTube. The incident was incorporated into one of Jay Leno's monologues. Mr. Ryan apologized and publicly admitted he had a drinking problem. In July 2010, he was seen drinking at a local bar. And then, this past July, he went on a three-day bender culminating in a bar fight. When police arrived, his watch had been stolen and he was sitting quietly on a curb.

"It wasn't good," he said.

Because he likes to have a good time, and because Wisconsin is historically a hotbed of populist nonsense, there is a drive to recall him which seems unlikely to succeed.

As my long-time readers know, I forcefully reject populist horseshit notions like recalls because they serve only to absolve voters of their own bad decisions. The greatness of the American system of seperation of powers is that it allows other branches of government to remove the executive, but only for truly egregious conduct. Recalls mean that elections are never final, the voters never have to really make up their minds, and the much celebrated "permanent campaign" mentality that has destroyed government is cemented.

Moreover, recall serves to absolve legislators of their constitutional, if difficult and often unpopular, responsibility to check the executive. They can hide behind meaningless "will of the people" horseshit rhetoic that the very idea of impeachment was created to circumvent. Indeed, the concept of a republic is built around the fact that governing is hard and the people are not infrequently very stupid. There are no good reasons for recall that impeachment doesn't address.

Populism is fantastic is you're beheading Louis XIV or storming the fucking Winter Palace, neither of which ended particularly well. Otherwise, it's just another example of retarded and irresponsible voters getting played by demagogues and scumbag spin doctors.

But if the dice don't roll Bob Ryan's way in Wisconsin, he can always move to Toronto and run for mayor here. Rob Ford was elected Last October, even though it was widely known that his love of booze has led to him being in handcuffs more often since 1991 than Axl Rose. Having said that, Hizzoner currently cuts a more slender figure than the aforementioned Mr. Rose.

Among Ford's more celebrated sins was driving drunk, as a foreign national, with marijuana on his person in downright medieval jurisdictions, like Florida. He was also ejected from a hockey game for drunkenly attempting to provoke violence.

The mayor's drunken antics are known far and wide, and they didn'y stop him from being elected. Neither, for the record, did his hallucinatory campaign promise to "stop the gravy train" by cutting taxes and fees in a huge way, while maintaining and expanding social services and subway construction, and paying for it by cutting essentially $75,000 in gardening fees at City Hall.

One presumes that he did all of that shit stone-sober, which presumes that the city of Toronto is either drunk, stupid or both. Which we apparently are. Ford won the mayorality with nearly half the vote in field of a half dozen serious candidates. What passes for the conservative movemement these days remains four-square behind Ford because the he embodies everything the modern conservative movement is built upon - drunken bellicosity, stupidity, and a proud ignorance of the laws of mathematics. They see him as a badass in the face of the godless liberal Intelligenstia.

Until, of course, he isn't. When he's confronted as something as awful and menacing as an unfunny 60 year old woman in a Xena suit and a plastic sword, he stopsbeing a badass pretty quickly.

Mayor Rob Ford had a rough start to the week.

He called 911 after being accosted outside his Etobicoke home around 8 a.m. on Monday as he was leaving for a council meeting at City Hall.

The attackers turned out to be from the CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which specializes in catching politicians unaware. By the time police arrived, the TV crew and Ford had gone.

According to a neighbour, a woman brandishing a microphone jumped out of a dark blue Jeep and ran yelling toward Ford’s driveway with a cameraman in tow.

The woman was 22 Minutes alumna Mary Walsh, in character as her alter ego Marg Delahunty and dressed outlandishly as Marg, Warrior Princess, CBC spokesman Chris Ball confirmed.

Ford, who has received death threats in recent months, was furious at the ambush, saying he had no idea who was coming at him.

Look, I don't doubt that Rob has had his share of death threats. But I have my suspicions that none of them involved female seniors with professional camera crews. I'm a cynical prick that way.

But let's look at what the "fair and balanced" media has to say about all of this, shall we?

Hackish 14 year-old Brian Lilley has Sun Media resident dickhead Mark Bonokowski admit that he's ambushed politicians at home .. but never as a prank. Which is apparently important, because your odds of being assissinated by a sixty-year old woman with a Xenu suit, a plastic sword and a camera crew are much greater than being murdered by a middle-aged white guy in black clothes, coke-bottle glasses, a political agenda and a creepy mustache. Look at your fucking history, people!

Again, Lilley and Bonokowski apparently have no issue with the media ambushing folks at home. Bonokowski admits to doing it himself, while simeltaneously condeming it. And neither has mentioned The O'Reilly Factor - which is Sun News' operational model - regularly doing exactly the same thing.

However, I can see how Rob Ford, Brian Lilley and Mark Bonokowski missed the joke, because I did, too. This Hour Has 22 Minutes has never been funny, and the CBC has lacked a sense of humour since the Kids in the Hall went off the air.

Having said that, the incredibly selective "conservative" outrage machine is a fucking scream. Most of these assholes seems to have stopped even knowing when they were lying years ago. They soak their fucking panties over Bill O'Reilly's intern and James O'Keefe, but can't contain their indignance over someone who calls herself "Marg, Warrior Princess" on a show that no one watches.

Look, Mary Walsh - or anyone on her fucking show - wouldn't know a joke if it bent them over and stuffed a vodka bottle in their asses. But in making allegedly conservative dickheads twist themselves into hypocritical pretzels of almost awesome stupidity, they made this sorry spectacle one of the funniest goddamned things I've ever seen.

And it convinces me that we need someone like Bob Ryan as mayor. Our pal Bob would just punch Xenu in the side of the head, admit he was drunk, and not rely on a bunch of journalistic hacks and amatuer crybaby fucking bloggers to clean up his mess.

If nothing else, Bob Ryan carries with him a sense of personal responsibility that Rob Ford, Sun News and 99% of the asshole blogosphere never will. At least he's ashamed of being a lout, and I think we all need more of that.

Video ruthlessly ripped off from Blazing Cat Fur

For the love of Lindsay

2011-10-22T14:43:00.001-04:00

I've spent the better part of a decade dreaming about seeing Lindsay Lohan in handcuffs, but never like this. My wish to se her physically restrained involved her humiliation, to be sure, but I always wanted that to be a private matter, just between the two of us. Unless she actually wanted TMZ cameras recording the tawdry spectacle for the world to see, which I also wouldn't object to. Women say that I'm a giving lover for a reason, you know. But it was always a sexual thing with me, as opposed to a pernicious fiat by the judiciary.

I've written endlessly about the state of California's persecution of La Lohan and the wrongness thereof. The courts, lo these many years later, just don't seem to understand that she really is better than the rest of us. This is amazing, in that they've spent as much time looking at her tits as the rest of us have.

I always thought that anyone with jugs as spectacular as Lindsay's has the constitutional right to give the finger to the judicial system.The fact that this apparently isn't taught in America's law schools says, more than anything, that America ignores God's Natural Law. Maybe Fred Phelps was right after all, and Kevin Smith's majestic Red State was more of a documentary than anyone is willing to admit.

For the record, I'm not predisposed to defending drunk driving. I don't drive precisely because I enjoy spending the majority of my life inebriated. I'm a much better person when I'm drunk. I help the homeless, which is the kind of shit that I would never do sober. But drunk driving has the annoying habit of killing people who are just going about their daily business. which makes it indefensible.

That, however, is entirely beside the point. Lindsay hasn't driven drunk in something like two years. That's gotta be worth something, right?

No, she's being continually being fucked over by The Man over probation violations. Which makes sense until you recognize that probation is a stupid fucking concept to begin with.

If you break the law, you should go directly to fucking jail. The problem is that they're are so goddamned many stupid fucking laws against horseshit that taxpayers can't afford the necessary jail space. The concept of probation allows idiots to think that the system is still working, when it does no such thing.

Let's get over the idea that Lohan is being raked over the coals for drunk driving, okay? She isn't. She being raked over the coals for violating her probation, the terms of which were retarded to begin with, and have nothing at all to do with her original crime.

One of the conditions of Lindsay's probation was that she work in an abused women's shelter. Apparently, she found this to be "not fulfilling," which is the source of her current legal dilemma.

This has driven everyone that isn't me all out of sorts, mostly because I've dated women who claim to have been abused and found them to be a huge pain in the ass. Neither was physically abused, but both were so bitchy and crazy that that fact speaks to the restraint of their respective husbands more than anything else.

I've been in Lindsay Lohan's position. And I'd prefer jail , too.

.gif ruthlessly stolen from What Would Tyler Durden Do

Written at the behest of our Maximum Leader.

A conservative quandry

2011-10-22T08:32:00.000-04:00

At this point, you needn't be a liberal or a libertarian to recognize that the War on drugs is little more than a failed, extraordinarily expensive exercise in deliberate obliviousness. You just have to be paying attention.

Drugs are even more available and cheaper than they were 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon first launched the retarded endeavor. The more the government spends in suppressing drugs, the richer the traffickers and local dealers become

Moreover, just as was true during Prohibition, the prohibition of drugs have made them a worse public hazard than they were before. Drugs, in and of themselves, kill or seriously harm very few people. The fact that they're completely unregulated, however, has had savage consequences for millions of people. People overdose for the simple reason that they have no idea what the purity of the drug they're consuming is. Instead, they have to rely on criminals to tell them, which is almost never wise.

The foreign policy ramifications of the War on Drugs is easy to see. Countries around the world have been torn to pieces, not because their citizens like doing Tony Montana-sized mountains of blow, but because Americans do. It's almost like the Opium Wars in reverse, except the Opium Wars made economic sense, if only in the most perversely inhuman way. The American drug war is ruining other countries simply because the U.S government has decided to deny the American people what they want. It's almost as if the laws of supply and demand don't exist at all.

The War on Drugs has accomplished nothing other than create a prison industry that is the envy of every country that isn't North Korea or China. That Prime Minister Harper campaigned on bringing those same demonstrably retarded policies to Canada is one of the reasons I voted against the Conservatives this past May.

The cost of the drug war to individual freedom in America has been astronomical. Under asset forfeiture laws - which were designed as a military measure during the Civil War - the government can relieve you of you property, including your house or car, without even charging you with a crime, let alone doing the fairly easy work of obtaining a conviction. Almost all of the most constitutionally egregious anti-terror policies in the last decade have their origins in the drug war in some way. In fact, measures like the USA Patriot Act is almost never used to fight terrorism, but it is used in drug and money laundering cases quite a bit. Square that with what was said during what passed for a debate when it was proposed.

Now the War on Drugs is going to further deny the people their constitutional rights, but this time in ways that should outrage conservatives and Republicans everywhere, although it probably won't.

If my fellow conservatives were even halfway honest federalists, they would repeal federal drug laws that don't involve importation, and leave them to the states. That's what they say they would do with abortion in the event that Roe v Wade was overturned, except that they're lying about that, as evidenced by the continued Republican support for a constitutional amendment barring the procedure.

Republican support for "the will of the people" is undercut by their continued support of the drug war. They love referendums when they deny people the right to marry or make it effectively impossible for legislatures to impose taxes, but when it comes to drugs, the rhetoric changes dramatically. 17 states - comprising over 25% of the American public - affirmed ballot measures legalizing medical marijuana, effectively decriminalizing the substance.

And Republicans - the very same people who were driven to distraction over Rush Limbaugh's "persecution" for just wanting to be Keith Richards - were indignant. The Bush administration instructed the Drug Enforcement Agency to continue prosecuting federal drug laws in states that had popularly passed medical marijuana laws, and Republicans cheered.

Well, the Obama administration is kicking it up a notch. Enjoy.

Michigan's medical-marijuana users can't catch a break.

Three major state appeals court decisions have gone against them in the last month. Now, federal authorities have issued an order that licensed medical-marijuana users nationwide can't possess a gun.

That means no hunting, no target shooting, no gun collecting and no guns for personal protection -- even by patients who legally cultivate marijuana crops -- according to a Sept. 21 directive to prosecutors nationwide from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The Second Amendment aside, there is a certain logic to this measure. If you consume marijuana - a Schedule One narcotic (which goes a long way in proving that the U.S government doesn't even know what narcotics are) - you're guilty of a federal felony. And felons are subject to a lifetime ban on gun ownership.

I happen to think that this is constitutional nonsense. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a clause that allows for the lifetime surrender of guaranteed rights. Even Antonin Scalia's celebrated opinion in District of Columbia v Heller, which affirmed that gun ownership is a fundamental right of citizenship, cut several giant holes in that right which weren't addressed or anticipated by the Constitution, such as bans on possession by felons, the mentally ill, and near schools and federal buildings. Heller might in fact be the least originalist decision in Supreme Court history precisely because of those unenumerated exceptions.

If you combine Heller exceptions with with the even more dramatically wrong-headed decision in Gonzales v Raich, which extended the interstate commerce clause in ways that can't avoid making ObamaCare constitutional, you have the perfect predicate for potentially denying Second Amendment rights to over a quarter of the American people.

The most odious part of this measure is that it is an ATF directive, which carries absolutely no force of law. The ATF, for the uninitiated, isn't Congress. It is an enforcement agency, not a legislative one. It's a lot like the Environmental Protection Agency, which the GOP has spent the last two years blowing several gaskets over proposed administrative standards that amount to passing Cap and Trade.

Remember, just as the case with asset forfeiture, no conviction or even charging document is necessary. Under DOJ's hyper-stupid letter "Any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes ... is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition." Just possessing a medical marijuana card, which in most cases was ratified in state ballot measures, is enough to deny you your Second Amendment rights under the federal Constitution.

And, as expected, no major Republican or Tea Partier has spoken out against this. Not one. This isn't like President Reagan imposing a national 21 drinking age by threatening to withdraw federal highway funds to non-compliant states. This is the DEA, ATF and DOJ saying "because we says so" to the states. There's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees Federal highway money, after all.

If you sense that I'm a little celebratory about this, I commend you on your powers of perception. As I've alluded to over the years, I've been waiting for this day with bated breath. This is because it forces stupid people into a corner of their own twisted logic and just might bring some honesty into the debate.

Among the questions this issue might force some answers out of are;

Drugs, which actually existed in 1789 (despite the popular Republican perception that they were invented by the Beatles during a break from recording Revolver ), aren't among the enumerated powers of the federal government. Doesn't that make them a state issue under the Tenth Amendment?
Do popular referendums in the states always mean something, or just when it fits your ideology?
Why should the ATF have extra-legislative powers when the EPA shouldn't? Is one more special than than the other? If so, under what legislative or constitutional authority?
Can enforcement agencies circumvent constitutional amendments even with a vote of Congress, let alone without one?
If a decision by an enforcement agency can deprive medical marijuana users that haven't been charged or convicted of anything of their gun rights, can the same apply to voting rights? How about First Amendment rights? If not, why not?
If, in 2014, you refuse to buy medical insurance - which will be mandatory under federal law - can you be stripped of your Second Amendment rights, irrespective of what your governor or state legislature says about the Affordable Care Act?
If medical marijuana users can be denied gun rights by administrative fiat, why can't they also be denied Medicare and Social Security benefits by Treasury and HHS?
Why are adjudicated prescription drug "users or addicts", like Rush Limbaugh not subject to lifetime gun bans, particularly when they violate both state and federal laws in obtaining their high? Is a state prescribed card or license really worse than doctor shopping?
If so, can that be enacted by a letter to state and local prosecutors by a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, absent an act of Congress?

I really look forward to Republican answers to this questions, although I'm not expecting them. At least not sensible ones.

No Mo', No Mo': Notes on monster fightin'

2011-10-20T19:52:00.001-04:00

Today is a day for Republicans everywhere to point out that President Reagan spent about six months calling the recently departed Moammar Gadhafi "the mad dog of the Middle East." But at exactly the same time, Reagan was also selling anti-tank missiles to the real mad dogs of Iran's Revolutionary Guard in a ridiculous bid to free American hostages in Beirut. I mention that only to point out that Republicans lie or are wildly ignorant about any number of things.

Gadhafi went out this morning in the most predictable way possible in his neighborhood - he was whacked by his own people. Folks keep telling me that the "Arab Spring" is changing the game, but it's living up to its history in deposing leaders. And you know what? That's the way it should be!

The popular view out there is that Gadhafi was one of history's great monsters, which is all the proof you need that the popular view is made almost entirely of stupid.

Ole Mo' was, for the most part, a ridiculous little man - a caricature of what a great dictator is supposed to be. By his final years, he even started looking ridiculous, so addled by plastic surgery and megalomania that he looked like Muhammad Ali and dressed like Michael Jackson. Yes, he would blow up discos and airliners full of innocent people from time to time, but he was largely a joke. A hilarious joke, to be sure, but a joke, nonetheless. Any guy who surrounds himself with chick bodyguards usually is.

And jokes were a useful resource to American foreign policy during the Reagan years, and even today. Libya was never a major player in international terrorism. But the Soviet Union and Iran were. And you know what they were dished out by the White House? The Soviets got state dinners and treaties, while Tehran got fairly advanced weaponry and a personally autographed bible from the president of the United States. Shit, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were Ronald Reagan's best friends, until they weren't.

Libya, being a piss-ant little country that most Americans can't find on a map and led by a silly cartoon character in grandiose costumes, got bombed. Moammar Gadhafi was demonized because he was easy to demonize. And he was even easier to fucking bomb.

That's still true today, and it says a whole lot about the much ballyhooed War on Terror than pretty much anyone wants to admit. Iran killed more Americans in the 80's than Gadhafi did, but Iran could fight back and had oil, so Libya got the tits blown off of it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provide the lion's share of money, muscle and ideology to the modern jihadi movement, but Afghanistan and Iraq get blown into even bigger shitholes than they already were.

That's not to say that I'm a proponent of attacking Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Those motherfuckers are rich, well-armed, will to fight and generally crazy. An America that's used to fighting idiots like Moammar Gadhaffi and Saddam Hussein isn't anywhere near ready to punch in the weight division of International Terror's real badasses. Iraq and Afghanistan have broken the United States military, maybe past the point of no return, and the shit only got serious in both places after the original villains were tossed out on their asses. Given that very real history, what do you suppose an attack on Pakistan or Iran would bring?

The correct geostrategic answer is that no one wants to find out, other than grotesquely unserious Tea Party fucks and Fox News blowhards.

Lookee, I'm as glad as the next asshole that Gadhaffi's finally croaked. The man was a monster to live under. However, that hasn't historically been the metric under which leaders are deposed with foreign support. You know how I know that? Because Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile and a long, long list of other countries were America's favoured dance parters when they were headed by far more monstrous folks that Boy Mo was on his worst fucking day.Pinochet killed political opponents in downtown D.C, and that didn't stop him from being feted by at least three successive presidents.

The scary thing is that the world's real monsters know that as well as I do. And they also know another important piece of recent history that escapes most Americans. That is that taking out a comic book villian, more often than not, creates a vacuum that real villains quickly fill. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, where demonic communism was banished by psychopathic militant Islam. Even in the best case scenario, you get Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega was eventually replaced with ... Daniel Ortega.

Let's get real for a second, shall we? Without NATO air support, Libya's "freedom fighters" would have accidentally killed more of one another than Gadhafi would've, which is why NATO air support was given in the first fucking place. Sure, President Obama said otherwise, but President Obama was consciously lying. He does that sometimes.

As the great Dan Carlin has often said, "When you depose Mossedegh to bring back the Shah, you get Khomeini." The fact is that we don't know the first goddamned thing about the leaders of "democratic Libya." But that isn't stopping us bringing out our political blowjob machines to welcome them to power. And if they turn out to be monsters, by Christ, they're gonna be our monsters. And I hope we don't forget that after we stop congratualting ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzche didn't live in the Oprah-friendly 12-step world of today. If he did, he famous quote

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." would read more like "Whoever dutifully avoids fighting real monsters should see to it that in the process he does not enable greater monsters where only minor ones exist today."

You neer know if the streetcorner corner is shooting up to supress the urge to rape kids. And where I come from, it's the better part of wisdom not to find out.

On Stephen Harper, the Death of the Liberal Party, Richard Nixon and pie!

2011-10-09T12:19:00.001-04:00

Historical revisionists on the left have been dodging the truth what precipitated the so-called "coalition crisis" of November 2008 - March 2009 ever since it started. It's pretty funny to see, although it's good to see liberals maintaining their natural level of dishonesty.

They like to tell you that the notion of banding together to oust the recently reelected Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government came from shitheel Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's economic statement that essentially said that everything was fine. Revisionists on the right like to pretend that that didn't happen, either. But it did.

Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15th and the End of the World began right in the middle of a Canadian federal election campaign. Flaherty and Harper spent September and October pretending that it wasn't happening and trying to distract everyone from the fact that they had pissed away a $13 billion surplus on socialist electioneering bullshit, like babysitters and hockey sticks. Conservative Party partisans like to pretend that Harper pissed away the surplus on his subseequent economic stimulus, but they lie about a lot of things, such as not being Keynesians in the first fucking place.

Flaherty did in fact deliver an economic statemement that November that basically said, in a soothingly Tracy Bonham-esque way, that "everything's fine." But that's not all that was in it. To deal with a deficit that Flaherty insisted didn't exist, he proposed abolishing the then $1.75 per vote public subsidy to the political parties.

That was what launched the Liberals and the NDP into a proposed coalition that would be supported by the Bloc Quebecois. In fact, they barely mentioned the economic crisis at all during those first few weeks. They were determined, more than anything else, to stop Harper and Flaherty's "undemocratic" dirty tricks, and they said so repeatedly. Harper responded by whipping up an idiotic constitutional crisis and destroying his chances of ever winning anything Quebec again.

The incessant lying on both sides of the political spectrum over the last three years has been nothing short of adorable, but the preceding five paragraphs of this little essay are about as an impartial and honest history of what happened as you're likely going to see anywhere. And it didn't even take me 700 pages to explain, like Peter Newman and his retarded Greek fishing hat would have.

Well, Harper has his precious majority now, he's still a Keynesian, and he brought back his plan to end the political subsidy. In fact, legislation was introduced on Tuesday, which will almost certainly pass.

Wanna hear a secret? I'm fine with killing the political subsidy. I oppose most campaign finance regulations precisely because the political parties are private entities, no different than corner stores or rub and tugs. Most folks who support campaign finance laws and regulations wrong-headedly insist they do so to prevent bribery and corruption. What they fail to see, or are too stupid to admit, is that bribery and corruption are already against the law.

Moreover, almost everyone supports keeping the revolving door between politics and lobbying, the single most destructive thing in democracy and government, well oiled. What no one seems to understand is that complex campaign and political regulations lock the scumbag lobbyists in place, since almost no one else can understand or navigate them. As I've said before, I'm not against lobbying, per se. I'm against otherwise unemployable people using public or political service to enrich themselves by corrupting everything that government is supposed to do. And I despise conservative politico lobbyists as much, or more, as I do their liberal cousins. To have anything approaching a representative government, they all need to be destroyed because they're all walking conflicts of interest.

Because I feel that political parties are private groups that should be free of government oversight and regulation, I also feel that they shouldn't be the beneneficies of government charity. If I think that they should be able to spend their money however they see fit, it's incumbent on me to demand that they raise it on their fucking own and stay out of the taxpayer's pocket. I see belonging to (or working for) a party as something of a charcter defect, and I'm outraged that those cocksuckers get a nickle of my loot, pathetically small though it is.

I'd love to support Harper's abolition of the public subsidy, but I can't because he isn't serious. It's almost impossible to believe that the prime minister is acting on principle, if only because he never has before.

For example, let's look at what Stephen Harper's is deciding to keep in the system and is rather dilligent in not mentioning at all.

Federal parties will still enjoy tax deductibility for the donations they receive that is 3-1/2 times more generous than the writeoffs available to registered charities. Four hundred dollars given to the Tories, Liberals or NDP will yield a tax credit of $300, while $400 given to a charity will lead to a deduction of just $88.

The message that sends is that our elected representatives believe they and their activities are more than three times as valuable to Canada as the work of the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Canadian Cancer Society.

And at election time, individual candidates and national parties can count on refunds, too, of around one-half of their campaign expenses, totalling tens of millions of dollars. This enables national and local campaigns to fundraise only about half of the money they intend to spend. It permits them to count on taxpayers for the rest.

So even after the direct subsidies (which are worth $27 million a year) are gone, politicians in this country will still be receiving an average of more than $80 million in help - directly and indirectly - annually from taxpayers.

My strategic vote for the NDP this past spring marked the first time in over a decade that I voted for a major political party at any level in over a decade. In last fall's mayoral election, I voted for a candidate that had dropped out of the race weeks earlier. But the major parties have been taking my money for my entire life, wheither I voted for them or not. But the minor parties and independents that I regularly support get shit. Under the tax code, my vote isn't equal to that of anyone who votes for the major parties.

Any Ottawa bureaucrat that cares to take an illegal peek at my tax returns over the last 25 years will see that I've never claimed a charitable deduction. That's not because I haven't given. Rather, it's because I decided as a very young man that my giving is mine, and not something that I have any right to expect the public to subsidize. Furthermore, charity is supposed to be about sacrifice, and sacrifice doesn't entail getting a third back in April. In large part, that's why I've used this blog to support foreign charities that Canadians can't claim on their taxes. If you're a halfway decent human being, you'll give anyway.

If given the chance, I'd almost certainly repeal the charititable tax deduction because it distorts the very idea of charity. That being the case, you can bet your ass that I'd do away with the political deductions, subsidies and refunds to the parties, which are considerably less benevolent.

I earlier said that Stephen Harper is a man without principle. That's not true, at least not entirely. There has been one principle that has guided him throughout his life: Destroying the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Grits were pretty much ruined in May. Never before had they been bounced out of both government and opposition. For a party that exists only to win and exercise power, that's lethal. Almost everyone that isn't me never saw the possibility that the Liberals would hold fewer than half of the NDP's seats in Parliament. The Liberals have historically been unforgiving toward losers, and now they are losers. It's nothing less than remarkable that more of them haven't committed suicide. It's also very sad, because many of them should die in humiliating ways. May I suggest auto-erotic asphyxiation?

Their civil war remains alive and well. If you read Liberal blogs, you'll see that being leaderless is inconsequential to them. They've just turned their fire on party president, Alf Apps, instead. And anyone who thinks that an endless leadership campaign is going to accomplish anything other than fan the flames knows nothing about history and even less about politics. The Grits weren't able to unify when they were in government. Why does anyone think that they'll be able to when they aren't even marginally influential?

Would you give those people money, or ruin your reputation by running for them as a candidate? As bright people, I'm guessing that you wouldn't. That will leave them with a candidate pool of social misfits, such as those that used to run for the NDP or still run for the Green Party today. The Grits are in a logistically irrevisable death spiral. They can't get good candidates without money, and they can't raise money without good candidates. Brothers and sisters, they're well and truly fucked.

In abolishing the political subsidy, Harper is not only destroying one of the Grits' significant source of money, he's taking out their only significant source of money. The Liberals weren't like the Conservatives, who always did well with individual small donations. They were traditionally a tool of Bay Street. When Jean Chretien ended that as his final "fuck you" to the party that gave him a life, they became wholly reliant on the government in a way that no other party was.

The Harper Tories effectively killed the Liberals on May 2nd. By withdrawing the subsidy, he's shovelling dirt onto the casket.

But please don't try to tell me that Harper has a deeper principle involved than that. This has everything to do with strategic political positioning and nothing to do with Harper's imaginary belief system. If it did, he would take the parties out of the tax code in one fell swoop, which his majority makes him able to do whenever he pleases. That's exactly what he would do if he really believed that "money should come from voters, not from corporations, not from unions, and not from government."

By killing the direct public subsidy, Harper wipes the Liberals off of the face of the earth as surely and as finally as the Nazis were by military means. As a political positioning statement, he gets to make a giant show out of saving a middling $27 million. But by keeping the tax code exactly the way it has been for decades, he preserves $80 million in government giveaways with fewer people to share it with.

Imagine the tax code as it relates to the parties as a pie. If there are four people sitting around a pie and two of them are butchered to death with plastic forks, the survivors get more pie, don't they? It stands to reason that the stronger of the survivors will get a great deal more pie than the weaker one does. Who do you think is stronger, Stephen Harper or an NDP Opposition leader to named later?

For the upteenth fucking time, Stephen Harper had the opportunity to do something truly conservative, and instead just jiggered the existing system just enough to benfit himself and hurt his enemies. As someone who has read about 100 books about the life and career of Richard Nixon, I can appreciate that for what it is, clever opportunism. But I'm not going to pretend that it isn't anything other than that, and neither should you.

The dream of my lifetime, the final lonely death of the Liberal Party of Canada, has been realized. But I've woken up to the very real nightmare that the Harper Conservative have become the Liberal Party of Canada.

Everyone's Gone to the Movies: Black Snake Moan (2007)

2011-10-08T16:57:00.001-04:00

I try to be a good man. Honest, I do. But like most men, I know what it is to be led astray and have my very soul dominated by the little slice of heaven that lives betwixt a woman's sticks. As you move down a girl's belly and up her thigh, you'll more often than not know that you're on the road to personal damnation. And once you know that, you're almost guaranteed to have a good time. I'm pretty sure I read that in the bible once.

Now, if I've learned anything at all in my advanced years, it's that being a good man is highly overrated and that it's always easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you that the very concept of redemption is predicated on the idea that you can have your cake and eat it, too. Because you're my friends, I'm here to tell you that you can enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and still enter the Kingdom of Heaven, if'n that's your thing. And don't let another soul try to tell you different, folks. If I'm not mistaken, and I ain't, the bible also says that the Lord's going smite a motherfucker for being a smartass about such matters.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to Christina Ricci, who's always given me a deep throb in the underoos. She sends the very same thrill up my leg that Barack Obama sent up Chris Matthews'. The difference is that I'm not going to be as coy about it as ol' Christopher. When I say "leg", I really mean "cock." I just wanted to avoid any confusion about that. The stiffness in my legs is a result of my being asshole deep in middle age, whereas the iron in my Johnson is all for Christina.

As you good people probably already know, I don't have a "type" of woman because I love 'em all. But Miss Ricci is about as close to the ideal as I'm likely to find. She's about two feet tall and 36 pounds, soaking wet, which would be exactly the state that I'd be fixin' keep her in. She's got dark purty hair, giant eyes and a tiny lil' ass that speaks to me in a secret language that only I can understand. She's so goddamned cute that I'm willing to overlook the fact that she's had breast reduction surgery, a medical procedure I find toxic and unforgivable in any other woman. I'm guessing Jesus feels the same way. I also reckon that He'd want to wear Christina like a wristwatch, just as I do. Turns out that Jesus and I have a lot in common.

From everything I've heard, Black Snake Moan (which premiered on my 37th birthday) is far and away the best film in little Miss Christina's canon, and I've been fixing to see it for some time now. The only problem has been that I'm very lazy. Why, as recently as five AM this morning, I resolved that I'd never again view a film that didn't feature Sophie Dee. But my wang got sore by noon, so I relented and played the bitTorrent of Black Snake Moan that I downloaded a few months ago. Because I've been several flavors of unproductive lately, I decided that I'd write about the movie as I watched it.

That was probably a mistake. Ricci spends the first third of the movie wearing nothing more than a Confederate belly shirt and tiny white panties which outlines her beautiful little box wonderfully. About 40 minutes into the picture, a forty pound chain around her waist is added to the ensemble. As much as I'd like to avoid discouraging every woman I know from dressing the same way, it isn't doing my inflamed pecker any favors. In retrospect, watching seven Sophie Dee movies in a row here in the masturbatorium this morning probably wasn't wise. Live and learn. My constant Twitter flirtations with the unbearably hawt Joan Crawford throughout this experiment aren't helping my groin any, either.

The film centers around Rae, played by Ricci, a white trash Tennessee nymphomaniac, which the available science tells me is a serious medical condition that more women should suffer from. Rae responds to Justin Timberlake being deployed to Iraq by being stuffed with all the booze, drugs and cock she can find, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But she coughs a lot, so Timberlake's hillbilly best friend beats the shit out of Rae and dumps her on the side of the road to die, just as you'd expect from someone who hangs with Timerlake.

She's found by the great Samuel L. Jackson's character, Lazarus, a former Delta blues singer whose enthusiasm for Jesus and sharecropping prompts his wife to fuck his brother. As is often the case with Jackson's characters, Lazarus don't cotton well to that, and middling pool hall violence ensues. However, his preacher assures Lazarus that attacking his kin with a broken liquor bottle is cool with God. I'm just shocked that Lazarus had to inquire about it in the first fucking place.

Rae is delirious, unconscious and, most remarkably, still horny when Lazarus brings her back to the crib. Lazarus, being something of an pious and annoying blowhard, refuses to fuck her, which is where the giant chain comes in, and goes a long way in explaining why I abandoned religion when I was twelve.

See that? Pretty high on the list of the sexiest fucking things you've ever seen, right? You or I would see that in our yard and our penises would tear through our pants and begin beating us about the head and shoulders, whistling "Dixie" while it did it. Not ol' Lazarus, though. Like his namesake, he's dead, but only from the waist down. This is perhaps the strongest evidence yet seen that Christ makes you gay, the entire Catholic Church notwithstanding. No right-thinking heterosexualist can resist a chained girl with a teensy butt and a propensity for showing some underboob. It just isn't done in straight circles.

Rae reacts to this rejection pretty much the way you would expect any clinically slutty Southerner to: by taking a thirteen year old black kid from behind, which Lazarus breaks up because Lazarus hates everyone.

Timberlake, having been kicked out of Iraq for being a pussy, returns home to find Rae gone. When his shit-kicker buddy tells Justin that he fucked her, Justin whips his ass, which must comfort al-Qaeda in Iraq greatly.

Back at Casa Lazarus, he and Rae start drinking moonshine, as one does, and he frees her from her chains. Instead of pounding her in the dumper, which I would have done, Lazarus tells Rae about his wife's sluttery and enthusiasm for Mississippi abortions while playing a beautiful cherry Gibson ES-335. Rae responds by hallucinating and putting her head in Lazarus' lap, further proving that gay dudes have all the luck.

Things go downhill from there. Secrets are shared and pretty much everyone exposes themselves as irredeemable pussies. Worse, there's an adorable little nymphomaniac in the middle of the mess, and no one even so much thinks about fucking her. If there's a real tragedy in Black Snake Moan, that's it. Also, I can tell you from some experience that most nymphos don't look like Christina Ricci, which compounds the tragedy of the film. There's nothing sadder than seeing a smoking little nymphomaniac that spends the better part of two hours not getting fucked, and I can assure that doesn't happen in Sophie Dee's fine films.

I think I made a terrible, terrible mistake today.

Actually, that's not true. I'm just being bitchy because I'm still awesomely horny, even after a morning of brutal jerking off that has left me swollen, sore and dejected. The always heroic Kevin Smith called Black Smith Moan "the most beautiful love story" he'd ever seen and "the best movie of 2007." Not having seen any other movies from '07 that I remember, I'm inclined to agree.

But it is a pretty good flick, and I suggest that you all check it out. Craig Brewer makes a pretty good movie. I'm just sad that Christina Ricci wasn't naked a lot more in it.

Now I have to go pound my pud again. I'm just .... heroic that way.

I'm coming, Sophie!

The truth about Tim Hudak? He's desperately fucking stupid and useless

2011-10-07T20:13:00.000-04:00

As I said I would on Twitter over the weekend, I voted for the Freedom Party in the sad spectacle that was Ontario's provincial election yesterday. And I had never even heard of the Freedom Party of Ontario before last week. As you can imagine, it was a pretty proud moment for me.

Like most Ontarians, I hate Premier Dalton McGuinty, who has governed for eight years with approval ratings slightly below those of the guy everybody in your neighbourhood suspects of being a pedophile. Virtually every sentient human in the province would beat McGuinty to death with a fucking shovel if given the chance.

The only thing that they wouldn't do to be rid of ol' Dalton is vote for Tim Hudak. To understand this, you need to understand that Canadians are different than Americans in that we're willing to governed by evil people if the alternative is being governed by stupid people. We collectively decided yesterday that we'd rather tolerate the stench of McGuinty's brimstone than the sight of Hudak drooling on himself and struggling to breathe with his mouth closed.

If you paid any attention to the campaign at all, you should immediately understand what I mean. This was Tim's race to lose and, well, he did it! A couple of months ago, Hudak's Progressive Conservatives were a not-at-all surprising fifteen points ahead of McGuinty's Liberals and poised to win a majority of testicle-shattering proportions. Yet I instinctively knew that he'd piss it all away. I tried explaining it to my pal, the Tiger on Politics, but he was having none of it.

I knew this was going to happen two years ago, when Hudak first won the Tory leadership, and I said so publicly. This is because I understand how populism and leadership races (or American primaries) work.

In leadership contests (or primaries), you try to appeal only to the people who actually pay attention to such useless exercises, the party's base, which is almost always unusually superstitutous, uncommonly ignorant and crazy in ways that remain uncharted by modern science. Once you win, you then "run to the middle" to win over the moderates and independents that really decide elections. It's a subtle art and, when properly performed, a beautiful thing to see.

Which brings me to populism, which is physically repulsed by subtlety; along with common sense, proportionality and history. Historically, as populism rises, politicians get dumber until that era of populism ultimately recedes back into its sea of stupidity. Populism actually punishes subtlety, which is why so few populists have ever actually been elected as chief executives of anything.

Tim Hudak's leadership campaign went beyond even populism. He was running to be the prom king of the idiot fucking blogosphere and Randy Hillier's Ontario Landowner's Association, which is more like the Branch Davidians than anyone cares to admit in public. None of this should surprise anyone, given that even Hudak's best friends wouldn't accuse him of being especially bright. He's an intellectual lot lizard, and he actually seems oddly happy that way.

As a leadership candidate, and as Leader of the Opposition, Hudak took positions that were so implausible that they couldn't survive even ten minutes of scrutiny under the harsh light of a campaign. Timmy swore up and down for a goddamned year that he'd get rid of the new Harmonized Sales Tax. When the press got around to asking "really?", his only reply was "okay, not really."

During the leadership campaign, he promised to abolish Ontario's version of Section 13 (a) of the Human Rights Code, which is intellectually laudable, but politically disastrous, since there is no way to respond to the inevitable dishonest attacks against that position in a 30 second TV spot. You might not like that tragic reality of politics, but it doesn't change the fact that it is the reality.

Hudak's long walk away from those promises infuriated even those dumb enough to love him, and doubled the resolve of everyone who already hated him. It was at that moment that his polling started to collapse and the horrid stink of desperation overtook the Tory campaign. The Tories were hoping for Toronto mayor Rob Ford to ride in and save the day for them, but Ford subsequently collapsed under his own considerable weight and lack of accounting and political skills. At the same time, Stephen Harper stopped returning Tim's calls.

At that point - which was the week the writ was dropped - Hudak went down the only path left to him, yokelism. He berated McGuinty for "giving Ontarians jobs to foreigners", thereby falling into a deeply cynical and effective trap that the Liberals planted in their platform.

The McGuinty plan called for helping new citizens that were professionals in their native lands - like, say, doctors - get accredited in Ontario, so that they wouldn't be driving fucking taxis or running 7-11s. But, as the great Andrew Coyne pointed out in Macleans, the plan was structured in such a way that almost no one would be able participate, therefore meaning that it would cost next to nothing. As an added bonus, the Grits were then able to paint the Tories as xenophobic, Nazi shitheels, which they did with relish.

And that was the first week of the campaign. The last week was downright bizarre in blatantly sexual way. Several Tory candidates started putting out pamphlets - seemingly authorized by the Provincial Progressive Conservative Party - that said that the McGuinty Liberals were forcing public schools to teach first graders how to be transvestites.

The Tory campaign had effectively become the second verse of "One in a Million" by Guns N' Roses. And, at this point, Axl Rose is hard enough to defend as a bloated rock star, let alone as a policy position. On the rare occasions that anyone cared to talk to Hudak at all, all they wanted to ask him about was "immigrants and faggots." And at that point, his Song of the Doomed had become an aria. Serious people everywhere had already abandoned him,

Sure, Timmy ultimately won 12 new seats and - with the considerable help of the NDP - reduced the inhumanly unpopular McGuinty Liberals to a minority, which is a lot like sentencing a serial rapist to an unsupervised curfew. And Conservatives everywhere seem to be fucking proud of this, ignoring entirely the fact that just 11 weeks ago, they were poised to actually drown McGuinty.

Last night and then again this morning, Hudak went before the cameras and demonstrated his almost precious brand of obliviousness, thereby reinforcing why he blew such a majestic lead in the first fucking place. He bloviated endlessly about "a tight leash" and "not allowing" this, that, or the other. It was almost as if Tim Hudak was utterly ignorant of the fact that he's now the most irrelevant person in Ontario.

McGuinty is one seat shy of a majority. If he wants to cut a deal, he can do it with the much more accomodating NDP, making Hudak about as influential in the legislative process as the pantless pervert in your local park. Nobody is Queen's Park is going to give a shit what comes out of the Tory caucus for the foreeable future.

And, bluster aside, the last thing Hudak should want is another election anytime soon. Given the fact that he threw away a perfectly good election in record time, he's lucky to still have a fucking job this morning. As a betting man, I'd wager that Tim rolls over like a good pussy for any confidence motion that McGuinty introduces that the Dippers find even mildly objectionable. Ol' Dalt is Little Timmy's Big Daddy for the next few years. Deal with it, boy.

I voted for the Freedom Party yesterday, and I couldn't be more pleased with myself. That's because I suspect everyone who voted for the Hudak Tories of fucking a kid, if only because well-adjusted adults don't devote that much time, money or energy to cross-dressing six-year-olds.