Some Girls Live in Texas '78

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

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

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

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

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.