The Nightstick Cometh … tbc

This ad is viral already – as a fan of the show, I can’t help but wonder if someone from the crew at “Friday Night Lights” is helping out with these ads from SarahPAC – they have the look and feel of the most authentically flyover-country show of the last decade. The music, the filler, the themes … it all fits.

Everyone is Perry this and Perry that right now, which is fine by me. As I’ve said from the beginning, until z’Cuda declares one way or the other, everything else is just a warmup.

GayPatriot » The Michele Bachmann Obsession

What he said – dittos:

Now, I’ll grant that many of her activities should draw scrutiny.  But, she has already been subject to more scrutiny than had Barack Obama at this point, indeed perhaps at any point, in the 2008 campaign.  She has her associations with some fringe social conservatives.  He has had his with some very radical leftists and sat for twenty years in a church helmed by a pastor who regularly spewed hate from the pulpit.

I think Nick’s onto something in suggesting that the media seek to focus on the social issues so as to avoid the Democrats’ failed economic policies — and to paint conservatives as fringe cranks more concerned with what people do in the privacy of their homes than as concerned taxpayers worried about a bloated, inefficient and intrusive federal government.

They want to make Mrs. Bachmann the face of the GOP — and not the Michele Bachmann who has shown a remarkable fluency on fiscal issues, but the ostensible crank who worked with someone who knows someone who praised someone else who once engaged in some truly inflammatory language.

via GayPatriot » The Michele Bachmann Obsession.

TPaw’s dunzo, Perry’s in and z’Nightstick cometh

An old friend of mine who happens to be one of the only liberals who made it through several Facekook purgest recently posted a status update asking her GOPer friends what they thought about John Huntsman. Although I do my best to eschew politics on z’kook, I couldn’t let that one pass, so along with all her decidedly non-GOP/Conservative friends who couldn’t resist chiming in, I noted that Huntsman and Newt are despised by the base, and the only two running who I would not vote for.

So there’s that.

Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames | london, want, book – Opinion – The Orange County Register

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from lifes vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJs Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”

via Mark Steyn: Lessons for us from London in flames | london, want, book – Opinion – The Orange County Register.

Mad Debt – Mark Steyn – National Review Online

Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the ObamaCare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing — like when you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel combined.

via Mad Debt – Mark Steyn – National Review Online.

The nightstick cometh…

 

Catching on yet?

Yep:

Are you starting to understand the scope of what we are talking about now?  Obama is going to embezzle considerably more than the entire economic output of Canada, India or Russia to his cronies before the 2012 election — and that is just counting this round of spending.  This doesn’t include the other $5 Trillion he has already burned through since 2009.

China is not going to lend us this money because they simply don’t have anything close to that much money to lend.  This $2 Trillion is going to come from the Federal Reserve.  Where is the Federal Reserve going to get $2 Trillion?  They are going to print it out of thin air.  We are in the midst of the largest currency debasement ever seen in human history.  There is only one result that can come of currency debasement:  hyperinflation and total economic and societal collapse.

Have you also forgotten the so-called “Bush tax cuts”?  Yeah.  Those rates are going to expire on January 1, 2013.  Obama will presumably still be occupying the Oval Office at that time assuming that he is not forcibly removed or that the Republic is still intact at that time.  Taxes will increase significantly at that point, and the Congressional Budget Office has scored everything put before them given the fact of the massive tax increases on 1/1/2013.  Do you understand that?  When these Republicans and even these so-called “Tea Party Freshmen” tell you that there are no tax hikes in their “plan,” they are consciously, willfully, knowingly lying to you through their teeth.

via Blog: We The Stupid.

Well, that’s that

So, the Senate passed the debt ceiling deal, and the POTUS signed it off camera, and that, as they say, is that.

I broke a long-standing tradition of Fred-6 oratories and my relation to them by actually listening to his little speech after the bill passed, and what do you know, for a deal sold as a big winner for the Tea Party and Conservatives, the POTUS talked about jacking up taxes for the four minutes I could endure, ensuring that people who provide jobs such as a) educators and b) scientists will continue to get the funding they deserve.

Yep, that sounds like real victory.

There are times when I want to throw tantrums and rhetorical bombs simultaneously – that time is now, although I don’t have much energy for it. Instead, I want to shout at the GOP in the manner that Eric Cartman shouted at his mother in the middle of Best Buy after she refused to buy him in iPad and instead suggested the cheaper Toshiba model:

So, GOP leadership, are you guys ready to go out to dinner? Why do I want to go out to dinner? Because I like being treated to meal before being bent over and royally fucked, that’s why. 

This is different, much in the way that Obamacare was different. How is it different? First, unlike Obamacare, the GOP was not only complicit in this generational train robbery, they could have stopped it. Default? Who the fuck cares? Never negotiate with someone pointing an empty gun at you – it only encourages them, and it makes you look weak.

Second, as with Obamacare, it speeds up the changing relationship between Citizen and State. We are now, more than ever, servants of the American debt, a debt whose “cuts” are generated through baseline accounting, which I will not even pretend to understand. However, as (I think) Rand Paul put it, baseline accounting means that were next year’s budget to have zero government growth or shrink in it, it would be scored by the CBO as as including $9 trillion in cuts, even though nothing was cut.

This isn’t Chick Little time, this is the part in any particular Bruckheimer film of your choosing where something big has just happened, and the lead looks at the sidekick and proclaims, “Shit just got real.”

Remind me again – how is giving Fred-6 a couple trillion more dollars to squander on his re-election efforts and the efforts of his allies a big win for the GOP, the Tea Party, and Conservatism? It’s not – it never was, it isn’t, and it never will be.

I am one of those so-called terrorists Joe Biden on down are referring to – one those people whose life is probably half over who understands now more than ever that there is only one thing any sane citizen can do at this moment: shed any and all debt, hide any savings, expect to fund the retirement and medical care of people twenty-years older (and older than that), and watch as people who think as I think and live as I live are blamed for every financial problem this nation is about to endure.

What a fucking country we’ve inherited.

We can never, ever, ever, ever pay back this debt as it stands right now, much less the debt that is about to pile up in record time. The worst part is we are getting absolutely nothing to show for it – zero! Cars can’t drive on union bailouts, and bridges don’t span education initiatives. The country is not defended by Islamic outreach, and my bills and your bills don’t get paid using baseline accounting.

The GOP sold us out and the Donkeys hate us. The few Tea Party members who stood up to this have been branded as terrorists, and the establishment Conservative media is just now beginning to understand that worse than being Judas’s to the cause, they are the spineless Peter: denying again and again the very obvious sellout that was staring them in the face.

My wish list for what comes next? Simple:

• Everyone pays Federal income tax – everyone. If you get student loans, you pay federal income tax on what you receive, if you get Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps or any other government assistance, you pay Federal income tax on it – let’s spread the fucking pain around if this is a shared sacrifice;
• Remove the tax exemption from churches, charities, 501(c)3s and every other mooching pillar of society that conveniently brings up Jesus, altruism, sacrifice et al whenever talk of cutting assistance comes around – let’s share that sacrifice;
• Want to pass a bond for local improvements on schools or anything else? Half the money raised should go to the Federal government. Need $1.2 million to build a stadium? Let’s make that $2.4 – let everyone share in the fun!
• Since the states are using casinos and lotteries for convenient tax-free revenue raising, I say it’s time to start Federally taxing all that money – it goes into the pit of education anyway, so it’s already being wasted. For every dollar that goes to the State, a dollar should go to the Fed.

Since we’re so eager to feed this beast, let’s get started feeding it. Instead of milking it out of the half of us that already pay, let’s instead start going after that great untapped resource: those people, organizations and entities that have one excuse or another for not chipping in. Too poor to pay, then too poor to play.

If we’re going to get Draconian about foisting our debt off on to people who haven’t even been born, then let’s get literally Draconian – let’s post it on every wall in the country that the taxman cometh, and there are no more write-offs, no more exemptions, no more write-arounds. Why should corporate jet-owners get all the moral certitude of helping the cause – let’s spread that around a bit.

Fury doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to the sell-out that took place today. We keep hearing it – elections have consequences. When will there be a good consequence for my side? Ever?

Pessimism, they name is King B, and the writing is now on the wall – the end is near. It may not be tomorrow or next week or next year, but elections no longer have consequences. The country as we knew it is vanishing, and we’ve stood by and let it happen. Where my fiddle, for it’s time to light this mother up.

Jonah Goldberg + Epic Rant = Instant Classic

Epic Rant is Epic:

So flashforward to this week. Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a “bunch of terrorists” on the day Giffords returned to the Congress. Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises “troubling questions” about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, “Hell yes they would!”

via To Hell with You People – By Jonah Goldberg – The Corner – National Review Online.

z’King’s political compass

Unsurprising. You can take the test here – I take this every couple of years, and I continue to hover in the bottom right quadrant, typically a few notches below the Authoritarian range and a few notches from the end of the Right line – a classic, American ultra-Conservative, of course.

You can learn about the test and take it here.