Unelected Asshole

Captain of Industry

After David Koch Leaves NIH Board, NIH Hands Down Long-Delayed Classification Of Top Koch Pollutant As A Carcinogen

"Last year, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that billionaire David Koch, whose company Georgia Pacfic (a subsidiary of Koch Industries) is one of the country’s top producers of formaldehyde, was appointed to the NIH cancer board at a time when the NIH delayed action on the chemical."

"Faced with mounting pressure from Greenpeace and the scientific community, Koch left offered an early resignation from the board in October."

Two Elected Pricks

"An investigation by ProPublica found that Sens. David Vitter (R-LA) and James Inhofe (R-OK) had used their power to add years of delay to the report. The piece linked Vitter to lobbying from Koch’s Georgia Pacific company, which has plywood plants in Louisiana."

You realize we're losing this game, right?

Work-life Soundtrack

Sunday Soundtrack

A good day to unplug.

Libertarians Are Really Crazy

"New York is by far the least free state in the Union. It has also experienced the most interstate emigration of any state over the last decade. New York has by far the highest taxes in the country. Property, selective sales, individual income, and corporate-income taxes are particularly high. Spending on public welfare, hospitals, electric power, transit, employee retirement, and “other and unallocable” expenses are well above national norms."

Crazy, and well funded by the Koch brothers.

Context...

...for previous post.

Three parts of a BBC documentary from 1991.
It doesn't necessarily answer the question "why then and not now?" But it does give one a sense of the complexities of our culture in the late 60s and early 70s.

Artists, in this case, were working to disrupt the indifference of political and cultural institutions on a variety of fronts. Their work often reflected a broadening of the civil rights movement—or at least its energy—to include feminism, gay rights, class, and opposition to the war.

One could argue that then, unlike now, the media was much less homogeneous and certainly less corporate. Narratives that focused on the inhumanity of Vietnam, poverty, and discrimination, were more widely available and consequently had more power in the culture. There was a language for dissent on the left that doesn't really exist today.

Dissent in our current culture and media is largely conservative. A message designed to undo the gains of the broader civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s—a cynical effort to leverage an economically insecure population into believing that it's just too darn expensive to care about war, poverty and civil rights.

Art Break

Leon Golub
Head-Napalmed, 1971

Afterthought:
We are currently engaged in 3 wars; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (covertly Yemen and Pakistan). It challenges the mind to contemplate how much our culture has changed since this painting was made.

Got Nothin' (and busy)

h/t Dependable Renegade

Also...





I want this movie.

Rand Park

h/t Dangerous Minds

Breathe deep—finally, a life free of the liberal nanny state.

Jeebus

Texas Governor Rick Perry to host prayer summit that calls upon Jesus to solve America’s problems

"Perry is the longest-serving governor in Texas history and is considering making a run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In April, he issued an official proclamation urging Texans to pray for rain in the midst of a severe drought that had sparked more than 8,000 wildfires. Last year, he said the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might have been an "act of God" that would have occurred regardless of safety regulations."

From here.

Bush squared

Work-life Soundtrack

1969.

"Long-term unemployment worse now than during Great Depression," Chris Matthews didn't say.

Because all he could think about was Anthony Weiner's cock.

Original headline from here.

Good Grief

Please kill me.
One of the more vocal and combative progressives shoots himself in the foot. Andrew Breitbart can now play victim and dragon slayer simultaneously.
What a fucking mess.

From Hullabaloo:

"But listening to Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman crow and strut about cornering him into admitting his "crime" is far worse. This is the essence of the Village folks. We are about to be treated to endless nauseating lectures about propriety from a bunch of wealthy, decadent, television celebrities who will be rending their garments over the allegedly shocking sexual behavior of politicians as if they are the elders of a small American town circa 1957..."

"I honestly haven't seen a Hardball this turgid and throbbing since some time in 1998. Matthews is positively beaming..."

My take: we need more women in politics—the men are too often moronic ego monkeys.

..................................................................................................................

The media will spend the next week or more NOT talking about the things that truly matter. This thing is like catnip laced with angel dust.

I'm glad I cancelled my cable TV last week.


Updated: The inimitable Matt Taibbi last Friday:

"I don’t want to gloat too much about Weiner. Milligan is right, it’s not like the guy is a serial killer. But as the Monday Night Football crew would say, C’mon, Man! If you want to be a national political figure, run for high office, and also have a family at the same time, you can’t be playing Russian roulette with your wife’s reputation every time you log on to your basement computer.

In other words, when you’re a certain kind of famous, there are a few things you’ve just got to give up in life – like uploading pictures of your dick, for instance, or tweet-herding hot twentysomething women by the hundreds. Is it really that hard to find other hobbies? Why do I feel like this kind of thing isn’t a problem for someone like Bernie Sanders? Politicians never cease to amaze."

Pandering Liar

"Jeebus, is there any historical event these ignorant GOP assholes won’t shamelessly hump in the service of their reactionary agenda? First Palin tries to posthumously induct Paul Revere into the NRA, and now this booger-eating moron tries to co-opt The Greatest Generation into Coupons4Codgers. For shame!"

Betty Cracker at Rumproast

Santorum

I Got Nothin'

He's a hungry little bastard.

Because They Care Deeply About The Nation

Privatize Medicare or else.

Everybody gets that the Republicans have every reason to prevent any improvement in the economy—it's their 2012 campaign. You get that, right?

Image from here.

Good Grief

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

 PALIN: He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free...and we were going to be armed.

"Bells!? Oh, for christsakes..." Piper thought.

It's interesting, while local media ribbed Palin for garbling history, most of them edited out the bit at the end about being armed.

Big Boned

Chris Christie, R-NJ
Not fat, just full of shit.

The nonpartisan New Jersey Office of Legislative Services analyzed Gov. Christie’s proposal and found that a middle-class family of four earning $40,000 a year would see a tax increase of $1,066, while a family of four earning $500,000 would see a decrease in taxes of $1,811.

From here.

Come on.
Everybody gets this, right? Republicans are engaged in a multi-front war on the middle class.

More to the point, it's a nationwide effort to shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the great unwashed moochers that make up 97% of the nation's population.

When Republicans say shared sacrifice, they mean shift sacrifice—it sounds similar.

Stormy Massachusetts Soundtrack

Pretty wild weather for Massachusetts.

The Future

Casually accurate.
The Wink Martindale dad/husband approving the little woman's purchases is more 1955 than 1966.

So, they foresaw a future of e-commerce, e-banking, home security, and residual sexism—it's interesting that they couldn't predict that most available bandwidth in the future would be devoted to porn. Huh.