Just when I'm beginning to think that none of the stupid political nonsense in this country can surprise me any more, here comes something new.

From Gawker...

South Carolina: Your politicians stink. Mark "All Over Your Appalachian Trail" Sanford's right-hand man, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, refuses to apologize for a comment comparing poor people to "stray animals," arguing we should not "feed" them lest "they breed."

Here's what Bauer said in front of a crowd of people in Greenville:

In government, we are too often giving a handout instead of a hand up. [...] My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals You know why? Because they breed.

You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

The State—a newspaper that is either really good, or just has a good beat, since South Carolina politicians have neither self-control nor discursive filters—reports that Bauer refuses to apologize. Though his words were rough, he says, the message was true. Which is weird, because even if you forgive him for comparing poor people to flea-bag alley cats that "don't know any better" than to blindly rub their genitals together until flea-bag babies spring from their loins—if you actually follow his argument to its logical conclusion? It's that we should starve poor people until their reproductive organs cease to function, which is not only totally messed up, but isn't even efficient.

"This is out of love and compassion," Bauer said. "If I have to take a hit, then fine. ... I will take short-term pain for long-term gain."

Bauer's "stray animals" rant came on the same day that South Carolina reported a jobless rate of 12.6 percent. Some South Carolinians find this coincidence distressing

Great Rant From Gary Lawson At Gawker

Carrie Prejean didn't take that call [on Larry King] because she's a vicious, hateful idiot who has been propped up by gay men and women her entire pageant career and then totally sold them out for a shot at pathetic, fifteen-minute, fried American fame. And now she has to pay the piper for her devil's bargain and she's typically fucking unwilling to deal with it. She is as stringent and wholesale an example of the Christian Right's despicable doublespeak and hatred that has been poisoning our country for too long as there is in modern American society. She's an avatar, she's a monster. Carrie Prejean is a hateful bigot who will not tolerate being called on her shit. And we should not give her any amount of credence for it. That any member of the media, old Triceratops Larry King included, would give her any kind of due is just another shameful and sad example of the fact that rhetoric against gay people in this country is tacitly tolerated by popular media, because some wingnut idiots who believe that someone lived inside a whale for a few months threaten righteous rage if said media doesn't give lip service to their ridiculous, completely untrue, ancient assertions about what makes people's sexuality. The tyranny of religion in this country MUST END if we expect to get anything good and decent and progressive done in this fucked up swamp of a nation we live in. I've had it with this spectacular waste of life, and I've had it with people like Larry King putting up with her bullshit to meet a bottom line. I'm fucking done. I'm outraged. Say "Who cares about Carrie Prejean??" all you want, I CARE. This woman is an enormous example of why gay teenagers across this country kill themselves in droves every year. Gayness is equated with ugliness in every arena. Figures it was a beauty queen who should point this out.

source: Gawker

Oh, The Poor, Poor Bankers!

Gawker reports on an article in the Wall Street Journal...

When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the tables. They used the calls to lobby against the antibonus legislation...

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

And Gawker adds to the argument, rather sarcastically...

If the president wants bankers to accept the billions of taxpayer dollars they need, he's going to have to accept their outrageous demands, like bonuses forever. Wait, what?

American bankers are sitting on trillions of dollars in troubled mortgage securities they can't sell without admitting their banks are nearly worthless. So they need billions of fresh dollars from the government.

But the government has been trying to take away their precious bonuses, as if they're not excellent at running banks. So the bankers are being dicks, to the president.

Who Will Be Our Next Demagogue?

Another good history lesson from Gawker. I won't spoil the surprise by posting their candidates - click on the link to see how they rate the contenders...

Every economic apocalypse needs a good crypto-fascist representative of the working man to drum up popular outrage. Last time around, it was Father Charles Coughlin. Who's going to answer the call now?

Coughlin was a Catholic priest whose CBS radio show reached an estimated third of the country during the Great Depression. He initially supported the New Deal, but his admiration for Roosevelt quickly curdled into rank anti-Semitism and kill-all-the-bankers rage. He was among the first to use the emerging mass media to build up his audience into his own political constituency, a power that he used to talk up Hitler and Mussolini, uncover various Jewish conspiracies, and inveigh against Wall Street.

The current climate cries out for a similar media figure to focus and control our Bailout Rage. He or she could come from any medium—radio, television, the web—and any political stripe. From the left, an anti-capitalist ranter could rise to greatness by relentlessly attack the privileged elites who got us into this mess; from the right, a bilious Real American could stand athwart Obama and shout "lynch!"

So who will it be? Here are the candidates, and their odds of reaching Coughlin's heights :

Bush Cronies Struggling To Find Work

I don't wish anyone ill, but if sombody must be out of work it seems as if it should be the crowd that contributed the most to the conditions that have created the current economy.

From Gabriel Snyder over at Gawker...

After ruining the economy, the country and the world, no one wants to hire former Bush officials. Reports the Wall Street Journal, "only 25% to 30% of ex-Bush officials seeking full-time jobs have succeeded."

One of these most unsympathetic victims of the economy he ruined is ex-Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, who's making ends meet these days by hustling for $25,000 speaking gigs and collecting pay as a director of the United Technologies Corp. But oh, the pain of unemployment:

"This is not a great time for anyone to be job hunting, including numerous former political appointees," said Carlos M. Gutierrez, Mr. Bush's commerce secretary. Previously chief executive of cereal maker Kellogg Co., he hopes to run a company again because "I have a lot of energy."

This is, let us remind you, the same guy who was in charge of commerce while the economy died. Back in October 2006, when it was clear that the housing bubble was bursting and the entire economy was in trouble, this is what was going through Gutierrez's energetic mind:

"We have a very strong, large resilient economy that can absorb a housing correction," said Carlos M. Gutierrez, the commerce secretary. "If you isolate the impact of the housing correction and look at all the rest, those are solid numbers."

Matt Taibbi on Tom Friedman

Adult Language If you like frank, honest, hard-hitting analysis performed on conservative thinkers, you will probably enjoy this article from Gawker. Matt Taibbi is a journalist for Rolling Stone Magazine and also a reporter for Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. Matt is plain spoken and gets right to the heart of an issue. I loved this summary on Gawker so much that I clicked into Matt's article and read the whole thing.

Here's a clip...

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

The Shady Names List

You've got to go to the Gawker web site to see the video, but this is great stuff. The Conservative Ya-yas just can't make up stuff fast enough to try to denigrate Obama. They have absolutely no intention of trying to work with the Democrats to resolve the nation's ills - their only goal is to try to destroy the new majority.

From Gawker...

It's a fun new game and you can play along at home! Just place our president-elect's name in a list of names of shady characters. Then get rich on the teevee!

We're shocked. America elected Barack Obama for one reason and one reason only: it was impossible to place his name in a list of names of disreputable people, without context, and get away with it. It turns out, though, that is is very possible to just rattle off a list of scary and bad names of people and pretend they all have relevant connections to our president-elect that we should be concerned about!

Click on the image or the link to see the video.

Why Don't We Hear More About Iraq?

Good question, ey? Why is there so little reporting on what's going on in Iraq? Once in a while we hear of a bombing with some more casualties, but really - what do we know of what's going on within their government, with their business development or even how oil development is progressing?

Gawker has some thoughts...

The US is still engaged, supposedly, in the occupation of an unfriendly middle eastern nation, called "Iraq." We remind you of this because you won't learn about it on the television. It's expensive!

Brian Stelter reported on the lack of reporting from Iraq in today's Times. The problem? "Iraq has been, according to some executives, the most expensive war ever for TV news organizations." Because it is the deadliest country in the world for journalists, so they need massive security teams, so the networks are all cutting back on covering the country, which is ok because it's obviously much safer and more secure now, unless, apparently, you are unlucky enough to be a journalist.

Some Debate Thoughts from Gawker

Gawker had some interesting points to make about the Vice-Presidential Debate that I thought were a little different from what I've heard on TV - so I post it here (with link) for your viewing pleasure.

For much of tonight's debate, Sarah Palin avoided any spectacularly obvious stupidity and Joe Biden steered clear of any casually offensive statements. Then came "Say It Ain't So, Joe," an attempted cute catchphrase deployed by Palin that not only failed spectacularly but which was also followed by a cascade of other dumb attempts at adorability. The Republican vice presidential nominee then looked increasingly like the end of Tina Fey's most recent impression. She winked! For the second time in the night! She called her own joke "lame" and tried to laugh at it.

And then she said Joe Biden's wife would be rewarded in heaven because she's a teacher. That would be Biden's second wife, after his first wife and year-old daughter were killed in a horrific car accident and are, in fact, now in heaven. Whoops.