;)
Thursday
Jun202013
The Commentariat -- June 21, 2013
Obama 2.0. David Nakamura of the Washington Post: "President Obama on Friday will formally nominate a former high-ranking official in the George W. Bush administration as the nation's next FBI director, officials said. James B. Comey, 52, a former senior Justice Department official, will replace Robert S. Mueller III, who is leaving the agency after a dozen years. Comey's nomination has been expected since last month when he emerged as the top candidate over Lisa Monaco, a former assistant attorney general who became Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser this year."
Ron Nixon of the New York Times: "Opposition by Democrats who rejected huge cuts in the food stamp program and Republicans who viewed farm spending programs as overly generous led to the defeat of the House farm bill on Thursday, raising questions about financing for the nation's farm and nutrition programs this year. The vote, which was 234 to 195 to defeat it, came a year after House leaders refused to bring the five-year, $940 billion measure to the floor because conservative lawmakers who wanted deeper cuts in the food stamp program would not support it. The failure to pass the bill was a stinging defeat for Speaker John A. Boehner and his Republican leadership team...." ...
... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: "... House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made it clear earlier this week that Democrats weren't going to provide the winning margin. Second, if Republicans insist on doing things like trying to cut $20 billion from food assistance programs, they really shouldn't be shocked when Democrats don't enthusiastically jump on board. On the other hand, if Republicans want to give Democrats credit for blocking a bill that would make deep cuts to food programs for poor people, Democrats should be eager to accept it. After all, the public is on their side in this battle. If we want to cut spending from agricultural programs, let's go after subsidies for big agribusiness that destroy our land and encourage the production of unhealthy food." Hilariously, Eric Cantor's spokesperson tweeted that the bill, which the minority leadership & most of its members opposed, failed because "Democrats are not able to govern." ...
... This underscores that Boehner cannot pass bills on his own. He can't do anything with only Republicans. The real power center in the House is not Boehner. It's not Cantor. It's not Ryan. It's not McCarthy. It's the extreme right. This shows the real dilemma ahead for a Speaker who is very weak and very conscious of his weakness within the party.... They're pathetic. -- Norm Ornstein
No, the real power center is Nancy Pelosi. As I've been saying for more than six months, the House can't pass a bill unless the Republican leadership makes it palatable to Democrats. -- Constant Weader ...
... Paul Ryan Hates Poor People. Jason Easley of Politics USA: "Rep. Paul Ryan ... and Rep. Frank Lucas are proposing that categorical eligibility [for food stamps] be eliminated and replaced with an asset limit. If an individual has $2,000 in savings, or a car worth more than $5,000, they will not be eligible for food stamps. The CBO found that the impact of the move to an asset limit would throw 1.8 million people off of the program." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.
Jed Lewison of Daily Kos: the National Review sponsors an archaeology dig in which they think they have unearthed several live specimens of moderate Republican Congressmen "fight[ing] back against the conference's right turn." Lewison is not convinced. ...
... Jonathan Bernstein is not convinced.
Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Obama's staff has turned a suite of offices into an immigration war room on Capitol Hill, aiming to secure passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter century.... While lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it. Some are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all."
Ramsey Cox of the Hill: "The Senate on Thursday rejected Sen. John Cornyn's (R-Texas) immigration reform bill amendment that would have put mandatory border security triggers in place before immigrants were given legal status." Marco Rubio voted in favor of the amendment. ...
... "A Very Large Bag of Money." Ed Kilgore: "... it looks like the Gang of Eight (and the largely Democratic coalition of senators supporting them) are going to announce a new border enforcement 'compromise' that will be attributed to Republicans Bob Corker and John Hoeven. It basically involves massive new spending on border control agents and fence-building that would occur before newly legalized immigrants can get on the famed 'path to citizenship.'"
This is the equivalent of adding three or four regiments to the border. I am very hopeful and optimistic that this will be seen as a major game-changing effort to secure the border and will be enormously helpful to the bill. Literally, it will almost militarize the border as a surge. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on the Corker-Hoeven amendment
Julie Pace of the AP: "President Barack Obama is holding his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board Friday as he seeks to make good on his pledge to have a public discussion about secretive government surveillance programs. Obama has said the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will play a key role in that effort. The federal oversight board reviews terrorism programs enacted by the executive branch to ensure that privacy concerns are taken into account. The president is also tasking the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to consider declassifying more details about the government's collection of U.S. phone and Internet records." ...
... Glenn Greenwald & James Ball of the Guardian: "Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information 'inadvertently' collected from domestic US communications without a warrant. The ... documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009..., detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target 'non-US persons'.... The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used." ...
... Scott Shane of the New York Times: "'Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,' Mr. Obama said.... But as experts on American intelligence knew, that was not the whole story. It left out what N.S.A. officials have long called 'incidental' collection of Americans' calls and e-mails -- the routine capture of Americans' communications in the process of targeting foreign communications.... Americans routinely fall into the agency's global net, even if they are not the intended target of the eavesdropping." ...
... Timothy Lee of the Washington Post points out that the authorizing documents are more like legislation than warrants: "... rather than being drafted, debated and enacted by Congress, the documents were drafted by Obama administration lawyers and reviewed by the FISC. Congress is much better equipped than the courts to review this kind of quasi-legislative proposal."
Paul Krugman on monopoly rents: "... whether corporations deserve their privileged status or not, the economy is affected, and not in a good way, when profits increasingly reflect market power rather than production.... Rising monopoly rents can and arguably have had the effect of simultaneously depressing both wages and the perceived return on investment.... If household income and hence household spending is held down because labor gets an ever-smaller share of national income, while corporations, despite soaring profits, have little incentive to invest, you have a recipe for persistently depressed demand."
Edward Wyatt of the New York Times: "A Federal Trade Commission investigation into the practices of 'patent trolls' is necessary because there is little real evidence about the costs and benefits of a rising tide of patent litigation, Edith Ramirez, the F.T.C. chairwoman, said on Thursday. At a patent and antitrust seminar here, Ms. Ramirez laid out her recommendation for the F.T.C. to use its subpoena power and begin a sweeping inquiry into so-called patent trolls, a derogatory term for patent-assertion entities, or P.A.E.'s, as they are called by the F.T.C. The companies buy bundles of patents and make money by threatening infringement lawsuits." CW: just one of the myriad reasons it is at least marginally better to have Democrats controlling governmental agencies than Republicans, who would probably ignore this problem as a swell example of "free enterprise." ...
... CW: I'll be you haven't given much thought lately to "monopoly rents" or "patent trolls." But the two pieces I've cited above are but two examples of why the mindless conservative/libertarian free-market fetish is a dangerous model. ...
... THEN there's this. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone: "Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash."
Jamelle Bouie in the Washington Post: "The Chamber of Commerce wants to do as much as possible to cut retirement programs, regardless of whether its necessary to deal with the country's fiscal situation. And in that, they have the support of the Republican Party, which continues to push for massive spending cuts to all areas of government, regardless of need or necessity." CW: as someone who has suddenly become largely dependent upon federal retirement programs, my disgust with the band of selfish ageists has magnified. Don't Republicans think they're going to get old or sick?
Judy Nicastro, a woman who decided with her husband to have an abortion at 23 weeks, explains in a New York Times op-ed why second-trimester abortions must remain legal. CW: There are certainly thousands of heartrending stories like hers, & sex-obsessed legislators should turn their attention to porn & other pursuits more wholesome than playing god to Nicastro & her family.
Yellow Cake, the Sequel. Colum Lynch & Joby Warrick of the Washington Post: "Despite months of laboratory testing and scrutiny by top U.S. scientists, the Obama administration's case for arming Syria's rebels rests on unverifiable claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, according to diplomats and experts."
My Favorite Headline of the Month:
"Ted Cruz's Father Bribed An Official To Come To U.S."
Yumi Araki of TPM: "In a report Thursday on NPR about how Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) father..., Rafael Bienvenido Cruz, an immigrant from Cuba, said that while he 'came to this country legally,' he basically bribed an official to get to the United States. 'A friend of the family -- a lawyer friend of my father basically bribed a Batista official to stamp my passport with an exit permit,' the elder Cruz said. Son Ted Cruz [has said,] 'In my opinion, if we allow those who are here illegally to be put on a path to citizenship, that is incredibly unfair to those who follow the rules.'" CW: apparently "the rules" sanction bribery. ...
... The NPR story, by David Welna, is here. Rafael Cruz first came to the U.S. in 1957 as a student, he later moved to Canada, where he married a U.S. citizen. Ted was born in Canada. Because of "laziness," Rafael didn't bother to become a U.S. citizen until 2005. "And yet Ted Cruz wants to change the immigration bill with an amendment removing the path to citizenship." ...
... Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog: "... the thing that really sticks out for me is the fact that his father fought with Fidel Castro. Um, isn't being the fruit of a lefty revolutionary's loins supposed to put a politician under a permanent cloud of suspicion, according to wingnuts? Or is that true only if the pol is named Obama?
For the Son of an Immigrant, Ted Cruz Is Sure Afraid of Immigrants.
If Gang of 8 bill passes, those newly legalized are exempted from Obamacare. HUGE incentive for employers to hire them instead of Americans. -- Ted Cruz, in a tweet
Cruz is off the mark here. He says there will be a 'huge incentive.' But there is literally no incentive -- unless Cruz expects companies to routinely break the law when looking for potential hires. In any case, the pool of companies that could even, by coincidence, possibly take advantage of this quirk is too small to be even worthy of notice. -- Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post
Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times: "The Los Angeles Police Department said there appears to be no foul play in the one-vehicle accident that killed journalist Michael Hastings. The Los Angeles County coroner on Thursday positively identified Hastings as the driver of a Mercedes that crashed on Highland Avenue near Melrose Avenue on Tuesday morning. Hastings' involvement with hot-button stories has led to a variety of conspiracy theories arising on the Internet over his death." CW: Yes, I see we did our part yesterday." ...
... Brian Bennett of the L.A. Times has a bit on the conspiracy stuff. ...
... Also this from Tim Stanley of the Telegraph.
Rachel Hartman & Chris Wilson of Yahoo News: "A Yahoo News analysis of the 444 briefings that [White House Press Secretary Jay] Carney has held since becoming White House press secretary has identified 13 distinct strains in the way he dodges a reporter's question. Since Carney held his first daily briefing with reporters in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 16, 2011, for example, he's used some variation of 'I don't have the answer' more than 1,900 times. In 1,383 cases he referred a question to someone else. But will he at least speculate on hypotheticals? No. In fact, he has refused to do so 525 times." The post includes an interactive feature where "you can browse all 9,486 of Carney's most-used responses and verbal crutches." ...
... Jay Carney "appreciates" 131 questions:
Charles Pierce amuses himself grounding the latest flutters from the eternally confused Peggy Noonan. This time Noonan is confused about the IRS "scandal" because Elijah Cummings -- & some conservative IRS worker in Cincinnati -- wrecked her claim -- which she makes anyway -- that this is an "historical" and "uniquely dangerous" scandal.
Local News
David Lieb of the AP: "States are increasingly adopting laws that purport to nullify federal laws -- setting up intentional legal conflicts, directing local police not to enforce federal laws and, in rare cases, even threatening criminal charges for federal agents who dare to do their jobs. An Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states now have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver's licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state."
Keeping It Classy in Maine. Steve Mistler of the Portland Press Herald: "LePage Draws Fire for Crude Sexual Remark.... Referring to Assistant Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson of Allagash [D], who gave his party's response to the Republican governor's latest budget proposal, [Gov. Paul] LePage said: 'Sen. Jackson claims to be for the people, but he's the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline.' Later in the interview, LePage said, 'Dammit, that comment is not politically correct. But we've got to understand who this man is. This man is a bad person. He not only doesn't have a brain, he has a black heart. And so does the leadership in the Legislature.'" It's worth listening to the interview by WMTV reporter Paul Merrill.
Keeping It Classy in Illinois. Catalina Camia of USA Today: "The local Illinois Republican Party official who called a biracial congressional candidate a 'street walker' resigned Thursday, after his comments were widely denounced as offensive. Jim Allen referred to Erika Harold, a lawyer and former Miss America, as a 'street walker' and 'love child' in an e-mail with racial overtones to the conservative website, Republican News Watch. Harold is challenging Rep. Rodney Davis in a GOP primary in Illinois' 13th Congressional District."
... James Pindell of WMUR: "Controversial state Rep. Stella Tremblay, R-Auburn, resigned from the New Hampshire House of Representatives Thursday, moments before lawmakers were poised to pass a two-year, nearly $11 billion budget and a day after she made another allegation the Boston Marathon bombing might have been a government conspiracy." ...
... John Celock of the Huffington Post has more on Tremblay's conspiracy theories. She is one crazy old bird. New Hampshire pays its state legislators $100/year, which may help explain why they have a surfeit of dimwits.
News Ledes
New York Times: "The prison sentence of Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron who spearheaded the pervasive fraud that destroyed the energy company, was reduced by 10 years on Friday after a federal judge approved a deal between his lawyers and prosecutors. Judge Simeon T. Lake III of Federal District Court in Houston, who oversaw Mr. Skilling's trial in 2006, signed off on an agreement that will decrease his 24-year sentence to 14 years. The reduction was driven in part by a 2009 appeals court ruling that ordered a recalculation of Mr. Skilling's sentence because of a mistake made by the judge in interpreting the federal sentencing guidelines."
New York Times: "The mass protests thundering across Brazil have swept up an impassioned array of grievances -- costly stadiums, corrupt politicians, high taxes and shoddy schools -- and spread to more than 100 cities on Thursday night, the most yet, with increasing ferocity. All of a sudden, a country that was once viewed as a stellar example of a rising, democratic power finds itself upended by an amorphous, leaderless popular uprising with one unifying theme: an angry, and sometimes violent, rejection of politics as usual." ...
... Reuters Update: " Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will hold an emergency meeting of top aides on Friday to figure out how to respond to massive protests that brought 1 million people into the streets and also resulted in widespread vandalism and injuries."
Reuters: "Germany's foreign minister urged Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich on Friday to let his jailed opponent Yulia Tymoshenko go to Germany for medical treatment and he warned against the use of 'selective justice' in the ex-Soviet republic.... Tymoshenko, 52, a former prime minister and arch foe of Yanukovich, was jailed for seven years in October 2011 for abuse of office linked to a 2009 gas deal she brokered with Russia. The Yanukovich administration says the deal saddled Ukraine with an exorbitant price for gas supplies. But the European Union says her jailing smacks of political vengeance and many EU officials say a planned signing of political association and free trade agreements with Ukraine later this year could be in jeopardy unless she is freed."
AP: "Police say more than 20,000 celebrants have gathered at the famed Stonehenge monument to mark the summer solstice."
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Just two days ago, another story ran in the Portland Press Herald re Maine's Tea Party Governor and the company he keeps:
"Former Florida Gov. John Ellis "Jeb" Bush will appear at a fundraiser in Kennebunkport for Republican Gov. Paul LePage's 2014 re-election campaign.
Bush, the son and brother of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, respectively, will headline the event, scheduled July 2 at the Nonantum Resort in the coastal town where the Bush family has long had a summer home."
Enough of LePage. Enough of the Bushes.
Re: Pushing the bird off the flattop... 70 billion in used machinery for sale cheap. Our junk is your treasure. We will not be undersold. Come to Kabul; you won't be disappointed.
We leave, without thought, our trash. Our effort in steel and tire; dusty, worn, beaten, used up.
The blood has dried, the dead buried.
The broken flesh and bone we bring home
to little white rooms also to be forgotten.
Where to next, my general?
I heard that NPR report on Tailgunner Ted and his dad.
It was a pleasant drive into work listening to Cruz yap about how his dad came here the "right way". I guess so, if you mean bribing a Battista official for an exit permit and then claiming political asylum once you got here.
Hey, good luck to the guy. But he had a lot of things going for him, things most immigrants who can't come here the "right way." For one, he was lucky enough to have family connections in Cuba that allowed him to bribe an official. Then once here, pretty much anyone from Cuba was given asylum once Castro was in power (even though Cruz pere was a communist soldier). Finally, Cruz bragged about how his dad did it the hard way with no help from the government (say what?) and was able to realize the American Dream....in Canada. And the old man was so appreciative of what the United States did for him that he became a citizen. About 50 years later.
Like I said, good luck to the guy. He lucked out. Not all immigrants are so fortunate. Not all of them have family connections and money (Cruz says his dad arrived in the US with only $100 in his pocket. Well it ain't much, but in the late 50's it wasn't too bad. Most immigrants arrive here lucky to have pockets).
As always with these stories, I like to flip them around to see how the right and their media shills would play this story had it been about a Democrat.
Let's see: Fought with Castro, Commie sympathizer, bribed a public official, came to the US, got an education, was able to stay after finishing college by looking for political asylum from a government he once fought for, then left for Canada where he put his US education to good use, came back to this country but didn't care enough about citizenship to apply for it nearly half a century after first arriving here.
Limbaugh would have enough material for three strokes and four heart attacks.
And in congress, Ted Cruz would be ripping that Democrat and his family for not doing it the "right way."
JJG: I like your poem––especially the last two lines.
Robert Mueller III, known by his buddies as Bobby three sticks, had to endure those tiresome hearings for days on end. You could see the strain on his face as he faced some of those nincompoops who drilled him with accusations and silly questions. He finally lost it when Louie G. made a fool of himself and went into a tirade accusing Mueller of lying.
And speaking of the magic number of three, the "Monopoly rents," "patent trolls," Moody & S&P (cash only, folks) make for fascinating reading. Throw in Teddy and his papa and we have enough to satisfy us for days. It just never ends, does it?
And speaking of immigration, how ‘bout that Corker-Hoeven amendment. A militarized border with four regiments (I think that’s something like 12,000 – 15,000 troops. Barbarossa, help me out here).
Is that a pip of an idea or what? Just what we need. A two thousand mile border lined with armed troops. Because that's such a practicable plan. Do these people purposely come up with stupid, unworkable ideas? Do the concepts of pragmatism or practicality ever penetrate their indurated domes? I guess when you're an ideological purist (read: irrational loony) such concerns are inimical.
I heard Li’l Randy the other day whining about how he would be fine with some sort of path to citizenship (I think he meant path to the groundskeeper’s shed) after, and ONLY after, the border is “secure” whatever the hell that means. It looks like Corker and Hoeven are helping that along.
I’m guessing by the time we’re done with this there will be millions of military personnel standing on the border from Texas to California, arms locked together, Brobdingnagian American flags posted every 100 yards or so, and the combined forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, and Coast Guard bands in the background playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, all working to protect our freedom.
Or something.
And it will only cost a trillion dollars or so. A bargain!
Oh, but wait. Wasn’t there a report the other day that said we could bank a trillion dollars by allowing a real path to citizenship?
But where would be the fun in that?
A point I have made elsewhere (and maybe here, too--I admit I lose track) about the way the American economy distributes resources and rewards: In short, it is neither rational nor fair, and maybe more importantly, simply unsustainable.
Krugman gets it--though I can see him tip-toeing around even more radical statements than the Times might want to print-- as do some others, but the entrenched powers, from the Kochs to Wall Street will do all they can to make sure as few as possible do. The safety valve all the open (though the natives we destroyed surely thought differently) land and untapped resources America provided to relieve the pressures created by unbridled capitalism is long gone, and ironically the Right wants to shred the social safety net that is the only remaining barrier between it and social upheaval.
As I put it post 2008 Crash: "What will the 15 million currently unemployed, let alone the 25 million or so more who will need jobs between now and 2050 do that can or will not be done more cheaply somewhere else than the United States? Or within our
borders, by machines? Taking in one another's washing won't do the trick and forty million is a lot of Wal-Mart greeters, many of whom are already subsidized by medicare, food stamps or social security.
Our challenge is far more fundamental than how to employ a willing workforce. As long as we use work as the way people access resources, not to mention as a road to personal fulfillment or sense of self-worth, we will have a distribution problem...(and I would add today, a severe psychological one).
Except for the fortunate few who can live on accumulated capital, every family needs at least one steady, reasonably paid job to support it. Having brushed away millions of workers in the last eighteen months like annoying dandruff, our economy has already hinted at how few workers it really needs; and the numbers tell us it is likely to need proportionately fewer in the years ahead. There may be growth in the percentage employed from time to time, but significant unemployment, the numbers tell us, is the way the future looks. More and more will be unplugged from the lifeline only jobs provide. In the world weʼre facing, food stamps and food banks will not be nearly enough."
And now the Right wants to get rid of food stamps or make their recipients grovel and prove in triplicate they have done all that is humanly possible to find jobs that don't exist.
It remains very hard to figure these guys out. What ARE they thinking"
The Republican "outreach" on immigration is akin to fake smiling so long that your face hurts. The only outreach they are in favor of involves an automatic weapon with which border guards point at anybody getting close to the US border. What an immense waste of money, when a an orderly inclusion of immigrants will clearly increase $ in the economy. Especially when a close up poster of Jan Brewer would do the trick for pennies. Now fence and border guards around the perverted self serving asswipes in Congress - I could go for that.
With the hoopla surrounding Brad Pitt's new zombie flick, I couldn't help but think about the obvious comparison to Republicans. Its not a stretch to imagine McConnell as a zombie, even sans make-up? Rand as a confused stoner zombie? Cruz as a nasty little voracious zombie with an affection for young flesh? Vitter as a diaper wearing zombie? Boehner as a crying zombie in search of a caucus? I have to stop this is too much fun.
Ken,
I believe that they aren't thinking.
At least not about anything that really matters. Their primary concerns are ideological purity which translates into substituting fantasy folderol and wingnut frippery for real world solutions. The crazy right demands this. They would interpret solutions that smack of compromise (real world, practical solutions), even ones that would benefit them and their families, as proof positive that a politician is sleeping with Satan (sans Vaseline, as a certain Republican governor might put it) and deserves a ballot box death sentence.
Economic solutions that don't follow the plan (rich get richer, poor get fucked) are automatically discounted.
I'm not overlooking the effects of ubiquitous, quotidian Republican cruelty which adds its own special piquancy to public policy fomented by the GOP, but all that matters is to be elected, and to be elected these days, Republicans must prove their fealty to teabagger demands for purity of essence (bolstered and informed, of course, by Wall Street/Koch greed and cruelty) and loyalty to the Masters of the Universe, and the best way to prove your worth is to come up with ever more draconian ways to economically hamstring the poor and the middle class. Because nothing promotes Koch woodies like seeing pain in the ass citizens too hungry and poor to interfere with their plans for domination.
Why it never occurs to these scumbags that a relatively well off population possessed of jobs, health care, and decent wages can provide a baseline for an all around healthy economy, I can't begin to fathom. The only thing I can think of is that these assholes believe that everything operates on a zero-sum basis. Every penny you had I have in the bank is one less they have in their special Croesus Approved Counting Rooms.
So thinking about real world problems in serious, practical ways is right out.
Diane,
That sounds like a fun game. Can I play too?
The Darrell Issa zombie steals your car then burns your house down. The John McCain zombie stalks Sunday morning talk show producers. The Romney Zombie eats only moochers. The bug-eyed Paul Ryan zombie runs around in gym shorts and a leer. The Rush Limbaugh zombie spends his time stealing oxycontin from drug stores. The Lindsay Graham zombie’s face has fallen off from screaming “Benghazi” too many times.
The Michele Bachmann zombie is exactly the same and the Louie Gohmert zombie is too stupid to eat other people. He eats himself.
@Akhilleus: What is the strength of a regiment? Answer: That depends upon the mission. Around 3000 - 5,000. Your estimate would be the total for all four regiments.
Evil pig fucker Jeffrey Skilling who brayed about sticking it to grandmas and poor aunts, is getting out of prison a decade early. Can you imagine GOP assholes demanding that inner city black kids who had stolen a car and were sentenced to 20 years be let out early? Never happen. Them who gots, gets.
Skilling should really have been sentenced to life.
But he's a rich Republican and a poor black kid who steals a loaf of bread will spend more time in prison than this pig fucking asshole.
It's the way of the world.
Georgie Porgie Bush must be happy because one of Kenny Boy Lay's criminal buddies who sloughed so much cash his way will not have to spend one extra night in that awful prison meant for minorities, not for purebread, right wing white dickpullers like Skilling.
This guy deserves hanging. Instead he'll be lounging around his beach house in the Hamptons in a few weeks.
Goddam Pig.