Reince Priebus isn't Very Bright

You what a good sign that the Republican party has finally gotten it's shit together would be? When they stop running against the media.

Too many of my fellow conservatives embrace the conflicting positions that the mainstream media is dead and ignored by everybody, yet still powerful and nefarious enough to foil the GOP at every turn. You can believe one or the other, but not both.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true. You can argue both positions if you're appealing solely to inbred yokels and the recently head injured. They loves them as much anti-intellectual populist fuckheadery as they can stuff inside their little pin heads.

And that brings me to Reince Priebus, the singularly ineffective chairman of the Republican National Committee. I thought that anyone would have been an improvement after Michael Steele's reign of error at the RNC. I thought wrong.

Priebus was supposed to be the Godhead brought to earth. Under his stewardship, the GOP was supposed to expand its margin in the House, win control of the Senate and banish forever the vulnerable Barack Obama from 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard.

None of which actually happened. Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Senate, eight in the House and Obama put Mitt Romney down like a rabid cur. Oh, and the party came out of last November looking more like wild-eyed dipshits coming out of the election than they did going in. Not a spectacular result, to say the least.

So Republicans did what they always do: Blame the media for their own bad performance.

Now Priebus is getting pre-emptive with his retatded nonsense, declaring the RNC won't partner with NBC or CNN for the 2016 primary debates if the networks go forward with planned Hillary Clinton-centric projects. 

The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.

On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.

NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.

Oh, fucking spare me.

I'll ignore for a moment CNN, which no one watches. But it should be pointed out that young Reince wasn't bitching too hard when CNN ran a Mitt Romney documentary last year.

The NBC mini-series (starring the always hot as fuck Diane Lane as Dame Clinton) is being produced by NBC's entertainment, which is a largely separate entity from the news division. You know how I know that? The entertainment division is located in Hollywood and news is run out of New York.

Moreover, who gives a shit if the RNC doesn't play with the networks? I can almost assure you that the networks don't.

The freakshow primary debates are expensive to produce, a nightmare to coordinate and don't do much in the way of ratings. There's a reason the broadcast networks stopped running them years ago. They can make more money with re-runs of a snuff movie or Saved By the Bell.   The only reason that they run the hour a night of the convention coverage that they do is because their FCC licenses demand it.

The presidential debates between the nominees are vapid and pointless enough. The primary debates are little more than an excuse for the candidates to show off how dumb and psychotic they are. And there are literally dozens of the fucking things now.

From there, Priebus just starts lying outright.

I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.

The networks didn't turn the 2012 debates into a "traveling circus." The candidates did more than an adequate job of that all on their own. 

The fact is that all of the halfway smart Republicans stayed as far the fuck away from the 2012 nomination as they possibly could. The '12 primaries were so sad that at various times the main challengers to Mitt Romney were Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, some pizza lobbyist who likes pussy, and the stupid and stoned governor of Texas. How can that be anything but a travelling circus?

Furthermore, the shithead base of the GOP, as exemplified by blogs like RedState, has served only to force the candidates to marginalize themselves - and their party - to the point that they're almost incapable of winning a presidential election. People watch the Republican primaries for the same reason they stop to gawk at car accidents; Because blood has a certain glimmer to it when it's mixed with gasoline.

The fact is that you can't put a dozen third-tier mutants like Michele Bachmann together on stage and not expect people - including even the media - to not point out that they're third-tier mutants.

Were it up to me, the primaries would be abolished in their entirety and the nomination would be decided in the "smoke filled rooms" of yore, by people who at least have some idea of how government and politics work. No party that considers people like Erick Erickson power brokers can be taken seriously by anyone else.

But I think we all know that I'm not going to get my way, don't we? I rarely do.

However, there is a way to make the primary debates at least a little less self-destructive

1. Have fewer of them: Look, whoever decided that having upwards of two dozen debates that no one watches should be committed.

Dozens of debates serve only to provide dozens of opportunities for the eventual nominee to make mistakes that will kill him or her in the fall. Or the losing candidates will launch attacks that will cripple the nominee later.

As much as Republicans like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats didn't make Romney's ties to Bain Capital an issue, Newt Gingrich did. And Rick Perry, not Barack Obama, coined the phrase "Vulture Capitalism." They set Obama up for the layup that destroyed Mitt Romney forever.

2. Have no more than five: Primary debates are no being held upwards of seven months because the first primary, which is insane. All that does is take unelectable misfits like Bachmann and Herman Cain and make them national figures with access to the money they need to cause irreparable harm to the party. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they've never run a collection of monsters like the Republicans did last year.

If you deny the real freaks national TV time, you deny them the money to keep their campaigns going. And if they're out, you allow yourself to present what passes for your party's best face right from the get-go. That wouldn't have stopped Gingrich and Santorum from clearing that bar last year, but I suspect that 2016 will be different.

Since there are only five primaries that matter, there should only be five debates. Those would be within two weeks of voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Super Tuesday. If the nominee isn't decided on Super Tuesday, the party has problems that will only be amplified by more debates.

3. Have the most antagonistic moderator you can find, or none at all: Political swine and their shithead consultant-lobbyist enablers aren't really interested in debates, they want an infomercial. That's why Priebus wants them turned into ball-washing exercises conducted by idiots like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

But that doesn't prepare you for a general election. Sure, it'll thrill the practically retarded primary base of the party, but it doesn't get the nominee ready for the attacks that they'll face from increasingly disciplined Democratic nominees.

If it were up to me, I'd find the smartest, most viciously liberal Harvard professor in all of Christendom to moderate the Republican debates. Or I'd have no moderator at all, and just let the candidates beat each other to death with their podiums.

The Conventions became infomercials after 1976, and the broadcast networks carry the minimal amount they can get away with, and the cable networks only carry them because they're starved for content. That will happen to the debates if fuckheads like Reince Piebus get their way.

Sun News Network & the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't support public subsidies of most things, particularly in the cultural arena. As a practical sort of fellow, I recognize that when you pay for something, you get a vote in how it's done. For obvious reasons, government should be kept well away from culture, which I would include news as a part of.

I also don't believe that running a television network is an essential function of government, and it's almost impossible to argue that otherwise. You may have been able to make a case for the existence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early years of radio and television, when it simply wasn't profitable for private industry to service large parts of a huge and sparsely populated country. But that hasn't be true for decades now. The federal government's sponsorship of the network has long outlived its usefulness and the CBC should be either sold or abolished.

I also oppose the government regulating the cable industry, especially as it pertains to programming. Cable does not utilize "the public airwaves," at least not as traditionally understood. The market, rather than the CRTC, can and should determine the fate of individual broadcasters.The CRTC retains jurisdiction over cable simply because it can.

As things currently stand, the government mandates the carriage of certain channels by the cable companies, who are then forced to pay the broadcasters for the privilege. Worse, individual households are forced to pay for the channels, whether they want them or not. I could probably list off dozens of channels that being artificially kept alive by CRTC policies in an age where it's getting harder and harder to justify the CRTC's very existence.

And that's where the Sun News Network comes in. The Sun started off as a newspaper chain for people who can't read. In 2011, it started a television news network for people who don't enjoy thinking very much.That network is losing money hand over fist and it's owner, Quebecor, appears to be gutting the newspaper business to keep it alive.

To say that Sun News is bad television is unfair. It's actually spectacularly bad television. It took all the worst aspects of Fox News and MSNBC and made them look like they were produced by a high school AV club. The on-air personalities, such as they are, are exclusively people who are genetically incapable of getting a job outside of Canada. The chances of a Peter Jennings or John Roberts emerging from the mess of Sun News are somewhere between slim and none.

One of the mantras of cable news is that all perspectives should be treated equally, which is nonsense and they know it. There are any number of opinions that are just stupid. But cable news thrives on what they call they call "diversity of opinion" because it allows them to put freaks on the air, and freaks are good for ratings.

Cable news - both liberal and conservative - isn't news. It's political propaganda, which is fine, but it shouldn't be treated as anything other than that, and certainly not by government regulators. But Sun News has spent the last few weeks agitating for mandatory carriage from the CRTC. These champions of the free market are demanding the same government cheese that everybody else gets.

SNN is unique, at least in Canada. The other broadcast networks at least pretend to maintain the pretense of professional neutrality. Sun News doesn't bother presenting itself as anything other than the house organ of the Conservative, Republican and Likud parties.

Like MSNBC and Fox, there's almost no wall between their "news" and "opinion" programming at Sun News. And like Fox, Sun devotes an incredible amount of time bitching about its competition and how unfairly it's treated by the world. In that, it is a perfect representation of what the conservative movement has become. Like modern conservatives everywhere, Sun News has embraced the cult of it's own victimhood and hilariously does so under the banner of "personal responsibility." .

Initially, I opposed granting Sun News mandatory carriage because I'm against the involuntary subsidization of political activity. Not only do I think that political parties shouldn't receive public money, I would eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to them, which is an indirect subsidy to both the parties and their contributors. If I don't believe in the involuntary subsidization of the parties, it stands to reason that I would oppose it for their broadcast mouthpieces.

That shouldn't suggest that I agree with Sun's liberal critics. They've been wildly dishonest in this debate. They oppose carriage for Sun simply because they're conservative. I can guarantee you that if there were a network blatantly supportive of the NDP or Liberals, they'd reverse their position in a heartbeat. They also don't seem to mind mandatory carriage for CTV or CBC, which I do. Were there a Canadian version of MSNBC, they'd be making exactly the same noises Sun's supporters are.

Denying SNN carriage does little more than play into their pathetic sense of victimhood and reinforces their argument that they're being unfairly treated because of their politics.

Look, Sun News is going to fail, and probably within two years. Not only are its ratings pathetic, its core demographic - old people - is one that advertisers don't care about. Mainstream advertisers are also awfully reluctant to support a network that goes out of its way to piss off so many of their potential customers. Advertising on SNN makes businesses boycott bait, and it's hard to see how that fits into any sane business plan.

Carriage is going to keep Sun News on life support, but not for as long as people tend to think it will.

I'm not signing any petitions for those hypocritical monsters, and I'm not asking any of you to, but I've very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Sun News should be granted mandatory carriage.

However, that should be accompanied by rescinding the CRTC's jurisdiction and a wholesale deregulation of the cable industry in this country. If a cable provider decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want to carry Sun News (or any other channel) or pay them what they want, they can drop them without the federal government getting involved. Cable companies would also be required to compete, and I would drop the ban on foreign ownership. If Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Sun News and make it profitable, like he has with his anti-Semitic and anti-American Rotana network in Saudi Arabia, he should be free to.

Will anyone at Sun News support my ideas for deregulation? Of course they won't. Once they get mandatory carriage, they'll take the money and find new ways to pretend that the world is out to get them.

But they won't be able to pretend that they've been forced off of the air for any reason other than they produce an unwatchable and hackish product.

Jay Leno and NBC: Twenty Years of Duplicity and Incompetence

Television executives are human garbage. The only people worse than them are music executives, with violent pedophiles actually being slightly better than both. They are merciless guardians of the bottom line and not only is loyalty a foreign concept to them, they see it as a sign of weakness. They can and will destroy both you and everything you love the second your value to them diminishes even slightly.

That's what makes NBC's relationship with Jay Leno so perplexing. It's almost as if they go out into the wilderness together once a year, spit on their hands and grunt that they don't know how to quit one another as they unleash their conflicted sexual identities on another and Anne Hathaway grows ever more confused.

Leno has now twice almost single-handedly brought down the NBC brand, yet the brass there keeps running back to him. Few people in the history of television have displayed such mechanical skill in manipulating soulless monsters like he has.

If you haven't read Bill Carter's books The Late Shift and The War For Late Night you really should. Few other tomes are as insightful into the depravity and incompetence that infests the human condition. You can easily apply the lessons of those books into any industry or social interaction that you find yourself life. All you really need to know is that the vast majority of the population is stupid, cowardly, or all three. Few writers have laid that out as clearly as Carter.

Some background is necessary before I touch on recent developments.

First, Johnny Carson didn't leave the Tonight Show of his own accord. Jay Leno (more exactly, his late manager, Helen Kushnick) pushed him out. Carson was handily winning his time slot, just as he had for almost thirty years. The problem was the demographics. Carson was having his ass handed to him by Arsenio Hall (remember him?) with men aged 18-54, which happens to be the only demo advertisers care about.

Leno, Carson's permanent guest host, started quietly talking to other networks (primarily ABC) about starting his own show at 11:30. The brass at NBC, not wanting to see both Arsenio and Leno competing with Carson for a demographic he was already losing, panicked. Over the next 20 years NBC would be panicking regularly, which is why they're hardly a network anymore.

The network then told Carson that he could leave on his own terms, but there was to be no mistake about his leaving. To be fair, Johnny Carson was a world-class prick his entire life, especially with NBC. He got away with that as long as he dominated the demo. Once Arsenio came along, that leverage ended, and the network was stuck with a aging, domineering host who was down to only working three days a week.

They promised Leno the Tonight Show, which is where things got interesting.

Carson had explicitly promised David Letterman the Tonight Show, and NBC had promised it to him implicitly. Letterman's contract was ending just as Leno's maneuvering had become known and Dave, himself not an easy guy to get along with, properly went insane.

Contrary to all available evidence, NBC thought Letterman would stay at Late Night while Leno took over the Tonight Show and everybody would be happy. The network had either forgotten or never cared that, without Letterman, nobody would have ever heard of Leno. Someone with as little self-esteem as Dave would never tolerate such an affront to his pride.

After months of pointless and circular negotiations, the worst case scenario happened: Letterman signed with CBS for a 12:30 show, which despite losing in the overall ratings, regularly beats Leno with men aged 18-54.

I will give NBC credit for one thing in this mess. The signed and stood by Conan O'Brien as Letterman's replacement. O'Brien was the brilliant head writer for the Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, but he had exactly no performing experience. As he himself will readily admit, O'Brien's first six months as the host of Late Night were physically painful to watch, but the network stood by their guy until he got his footing. It would be the last time NBC showed any courage whatsoever.

Fast forward about 12 years.

Conan started worrying about beginning and ending his career at 12:30. Like everybody else in comedy at the time, he dreamt of hosting the Tonight Show. If Leno was going to try to beat Carson's reign, O'Brien would start putting out feelers elsewhere and he started talking seriously to Fox, which would have been a perfect fit for Conan's style.

Once again, NBC panicked. They concocted a deal where Leno would relinquish the Tonight Show to Conan in five years and everybody would live happily ever after.

Or not. Toward the end of his contract, Leno started talking to ABC (which was apparently willing to throw the much funnier Kimmy Kimmel and Nightline - which beats all of the comedy shows in the ratings - over the side.)

NBC panicked yet again. Just as was true in 1992-'93, they didn't want their two late night hosts on competing networks when they could keep them both. They came up with an idea the looked great on paper, but proved to be a disaster in practice: They signed Leno to do a show at 10 pm.

Prime time dramas cost about a million dollars an episode to make, whereas talk shows barely cost a tenth of that. Even if Leno caused a dip in prime time ratings, the network would still make more money with him there.

NBC couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their own brilliance, at least until the ratings came in. What they hadn't counted on was that absolutely no one was interested in watching Jay Leno at 10. If another network started broadcasting kiddie porn, it would have beaten the Jay Leno Show. NBC affiliates were dropping Leno at an alarming rate, and there was almost nothing the network could do about it.

At the same time, Conan was finding his feet in an earlier time slot and the Tonight Show's ratings had dipped. Unsurprisingly, NBC panicked.

This was complicated by the contract they gave Leno for the prime time show. They stupidly gave him a "play or pay" deal. They committed to air the show for two years. If for whatever reason the show was cancelled before that, the network had to pay Leno $50 million and let him immediately go to another network.

Faced with that, NBC chose to fuck with Conan. They wanted to move Leno to 11:35 for a half hour, and move the Tonight Show to 12:05. O'Brien rightly refused and tense negotiations about ending his contract ensued. In the end, Conan walked away with about $37 million and was only kept of the air for a few months before going to cable.

You would think that NBC would have had its fill of late night drama by now, right?

Guess again.

There’s word that NBC brass are ruminating over Jay Leno’s future — which would involve finally giving their current late-late guy comic, Jimmy Fallon, the coveted job as the host of "The Tonight Show."

The latest rumblings about Leno come from various talent agents who admit they have quietly been contacted by NBC officials hoping to find a new late-late host who will eventually take over Fallon’s 12:35 a.m. time slot.

Leno’s current $15 million a year deal expires in 2014, and came about after he “volunteered” to take a 50% pay cut earlier this year, a move that helped NBC slash "The Tonight Show’s" $100 million budget by about 20%.

What's going to happen next year is perhaps the easiest prediction to make in human history. Not only Jay Leno seem to have no life outside of television, he has the survival instincts of a fucking cockroach. More importantly, we have two decades of experience demonstrating just how nutless NBC is when it comes to Leno.

Not only will he not go quietly, he won't go anywhere at all. My guess is that by spring we'll start hearing about Leno talking to Fox (since ABC seems committed to Jimmy Kimmel, that avenue is closed off.) Astronomical numbers will be bandied about, and word will go out about Fox strong-arming affiliates in giving a potential Jay Leno show 100% network clearance (meaning that individual stations have to carry it, much like NBC does with the Tonight Show.)

And, as they did in 1992 and 2009, NBC will panic. And this time, it'll be Jimmy Fallon would gets it, sans lube. Don't worry about him, though. If there's one person that Fox probably wants more than Leno, it's Fallon.

But NBC will have screwed three of its 12:35 hosts - Letterman, O'Brien and Fallon - in favor of Leno in a row. Who would be crazy and desperate enough to take over Late Night under those circumstances? No one with any career prospects or human dignity would subject themselves to that, and any one that would is almost guaranteed to be a loser in the ratings.

There's gotta be a point where Jay Leno and NBC know how to quit either other or there won't be an NBC at all.


I couldn't address this topic without sharing this, the most brilliant takedown of Jay Leno ever. Better still, it was done to Leno's face.

And here's Letterman venting some hate.



And Howard Stern ...



I'd love to share some moments from Conan's last week or so at the Tonight Show but the cowards at NBC appear to have stripped them all from YouTube, the bastards.

Two solitudes: Why Canadians will stay richer than Americans

I'm constantly amused by people who have no idea what they're talking about getting on TV, which you see a lot of on Fox News. The obvious pride that Fox stuffs into its ignorance, combined with great production values and hot chicks, is what makes the network essentially viewing for me.

Just this morning, I was watching something called Cashin' In, a business affairs show with M*A*S*H's Wayne Rogers as a panelist. Rogers used be Trapper John and is now a Republican mouthpiece who pretends to be a financial analyst.

This week's report that Canadians are wealthier than Americans for the very first time in history was the main point of discussion.

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

As U.S News points out, this isn't the old Canadian dollar, which was only worth about 60 American cents, either. Due to a spectacular free fall of the greenback that began in 2002-'03, the two currencies are at about par and have been for about three years.

By the way, a high Canadian dollar actually hurts our economy. Given that we're an export economy, a higher dollar increases the price of said exports. We're doing better than the Americans in spite of a high dollar, not because of it.

Trapper John was able to hijack the debate by issuing a ton of GOP talking points about corporate taxes that are sort of true, but only sort of. The Cashin' In folks that passed for liberals, and pretty much everyone in the Canadian media, decided that they were only going to tell half the story, as well.

For that reason, Canada is very probably going to stay richer than the United States, which I figure is about five years from the point of no return.

Yes, the Canadian government has cut corporate taxes fairly significantly in recent years, and there's a lot to be said about the competitive edge that those cuts give an economy. On this, Trapper John is actually right, while telling not quite a third of the story. I'm seeing this talking point throughout the American media and blogosphere, so I thought that I'd address it. But I warn you now, it's gonna take a while to explain.

One of the major differences between the United States and Canada is that we could afford to cut corporate taxes. We weren't crazy enough to think that they would spur enough growth that they would they would pay for themselves, which tax cuts by themselves almost never do. Even classical supply-siders will tell you that but modern Republicans won't.

Canada got where it is today over the course of nearly thirty years. It caused a lot of hurt, unspeakable amounts of political upheaval, and intelligent decision making from both of the major parties at the time.

When the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in 1984, our debt problem was as bad or worse than America's is today. The outgoing Liberal Minister of Everything (and future prime minister) Jean Chretien said in public that "we left the cupboard bare." Consecutive Liberal governments between 1963 and 1984 vastly expanded the role - and therefore the cost - of the federal government. They just couldn't be bothered actually paying for it.

Mulroney tried cutting spending, but the opposition Liberal Party made that politically toxic. He instead focused on the revenue side of deficit reduction. First he signed the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which grew the economy and therefore the tax base. Then he instituted a national 7% sales tax, the Goods and Services Tax.

While the constant dollar size of the debt and deficits grew, they began shrinking as a percentage of GDP. They were still unacceptably high, but trending in the right direction.

Of course, the idea of a national sales tax was about as popular as you'd think it would be, and Mulroney's government was reduced to two seats - a drop of 154 out of the then-295 seat Parliament - a few months after his 1993 retirement.

When Chretien took office that year, the international markets forced his hand on the spending side. The Economist was calling for Spain to replace Canada in the G7 and there was a very real fear of a confidence crisis in the market. That would have driven interest rates up and made the situation impossible to correct without a major devaluation of the dollar.And Canada's credit rating actually was downgraded during Chretien's first term.

Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, took an axe to everything, cutting ministries by roughly 25% each. Between those cuts and the Mulroney revenue, not only was the budget balanced by the turn of the century, the government was running surpluses.

And those were real surpluses, not the imaginary ones that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress created out of whole cloth in the late 1990s. Those were the product of the tech bubble and accounting fraud. Even if Bush hadn't passed stunningly large tax cuts and gone to war with everybody, the U.S government still would have gone back into deficit because Clinton and the Republicans hadn't factored unfunded liabilities into their budgets. Plus, they raided the Social Security trust fund to create the mirage of a balanced budget, thereby increasing the unfunded liabilities.

It was only after dramatic revenue enhancements under Mulroney and draconian spending cuts under Chretien that subsequent prime ministers Paul Martin and Stephen Harper even thought of cutting corporate taxes. Had it been done during the Mulroney or early Chretien years, it would have only ballooned our crippling deficits and shaken market confidence to the point that we couldn't service our debt anymore.

Then there's the more recent history to consider. Unlike the United States, the Canadian government didn't allow the banking and housing markets to become huge under-funded and over-leveraged casinos that were born to fail.

Like most conservatives, I supported the push for Canadian banking deregulation a decade ago. I was wrong and Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were right. Canadian banks are temperamentally more conservative than their foreign counterparts, so I doubt that they would have over-leveraged themselves in a whirlwind of idiotic derivatives trading that even they didn't understand. But the proposed mega-mergers at the time would have created Too Big To Fail institutions that would have dwarfed even America's as a percentage of our economy.

What the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act did wasn't so much "unleash the economy" as it let the banks become really fat guys who had to be taken out of their apartments by a crane because they were stuck to the couch.

Nor did Canada ever get the insane idea that absolutely everybody in the country had to own their own home, regardless of their ability to actually pay for it. I was raised by a banker, so I can tell you that things like NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assests) loans would have been unthinkable here, even if they were magically legal. And remember, NINJA loans were a creation of the lenders, not the borrowers. Despite what Republican talking points tell you, there was proportionally very little borrower fraud in the housing crisis.

Canadian law also didn't allow for what amounts to "no money down" mortgages, and those rules have only gotten tighter since the Great Collapse of Ought-Eight. Canadian homeowners can't even deduct their mortgage interest from their taxes. Granted, no other sane country on Earth allows that, either.

We didn't reap the benefits of the housing and banking bubbles, but we didn't lose our shirts when those bubbles burst.

Exactly no one in the United States is proposing anything close to what the Canadian experience demonstrably proved can work. Even the most liberal of Democrats are suggesting minuscule revenue increases by the letting the Bush tax cuts expire only on the wealthy, when they should all expire, including those for the middle class. And Republicans are demanding huge, unaffordable tax cuts up front and not cutting real program or entitlement spending for more than a decade.

When proposed spending cuts and entitlement reform are that far in the future, one can safely assume that they'll never happen at all. The idea of trusting a kid to eat his broccoli after he has his ice cream is so idiotic that even those most negligent parent knows it. And yes, I do understand that I just compared the American government to a spoiled child.

Worse still, the short term (ten-year) cost of entitlement reform would be so high that it would negate the possible (and incredibly optimistic) benefits of the tax cuts. Remember that George W. Bush's Social Security reform plan would have cost a trillion dollars over ten years, and there's no reason to believe that Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms would cost less.

Former President Bush's institute this week put out a laughable book that suggests that America can just grow it's way out of the problem. The only problem is that it assumes a significantly higher average annual rate of growth (4-5%) than the United States has enjoyed since the end of World War II (3.2%.) And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of wishful thinking that put America where it is today.

Unlike what Republican politicians tell you, this isn't 1980. The problem then was unsustainable inflation, which was only broken by dramatically high interest rates that caused a brutal recession. The Reagan tax cuts might have spurred growth after the 1982-'84 recession, but they did so at the cost of tripling the deficit.

For my liberal friends, it isn't 1932, either. Revenue generation alone, as we saw during the Mulroney era in Canada, isn't going to do the trick. Things on your end of the ledger are going to have to change in a big, bad way.

Unless you want them to disappear entirely, entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security are going to have to be means-tested immediately, accompanied with an increase in the retirement age to at least 70. Both are going to have to treated like the middle-class welfare that they are, since the contributions being made to current retirees only barely match the costs. If you want to avoid outright privatization, costs are going to have to dramatically cut.

Oh, and don't look to everybody else for sympathy. Their 401(k) plans got annihilated in the market meltdown four years ago, including those right on the threshold of retirement.

In the very near future, public employee contracts regarding pensions and health care - which are rapidly bankrupting the states - are going to have to be renegotiated in good faith. Public workers going to have to pay dramatically more into their benefit plans. If they don't, current retirees, who really can't fend for themselves, are going to take it in the neck soon.The fact that mid-size American municipalities and counties are already going into bankruptcy is a bad sign. It's just a matter of time before enire states follow them into the rathole. And stop pretending that you can make more in the private sector. That hasn't been true in quite a while now.

You know what? Unlike what most politicians will tell you, now is precisely the time to do it. No politician is going to attack the free lunch mentality when times are good. Any time reform is mentioned in a time of prosperity, that reform s said to threaten an economic downturn. The way I see it, consumer demand isn't going to rebound the the U.S economy for probably a decade, so now might be an ideal time to go with austerity.

But that's never going to happen. As opposed to the Canadian experience in the 1980s and 90s, no one party is going to have the political majority needed to enact a holistic reform of the taxation and entitlement system. The reforms then necessarily have to be bipartisan, and that just isn't going to happen.

Canada gave its governing parties the electoral mandates to carry out the reforms that it did, and it had fifteen years in which to do them. Even then it was painful and politically unpopular. It wasn't easy for the Progressive Conservatives to create a national sales tax, and it lead to to the biggest political debacle in history that I'm aware of. The only reason the Chretien Liberals survived making the cuts that they did was the absence of a unified opposition at the time. God knows that Harper spent enough money once the Liberals fell apart.

No one in the United States, of either party, has the time or the will to do what's necessary before it's too late.

Trapper John won't tell you that. I just did.

After bin Laden, part two: "There goes the neighborhood"

If there's one thing that cable news excels at, it's whipping up a frenzy of populist stupidity without taking the time to think through the consequences of what it proposes. Moreover, there's never a shortage of politicians out there willing to give a helping hand. That's bad enough when the topic is something like deficit reduction, but it can be deadly when we're talking about foreign policy, as we have been all week.

I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the cable networks - primarily Fox News and Sun News Network here in Canada - since last Sunday, night when it announced that bin Laden had been taken out in Pakistan. I had a pretty good idea what was coming and I knew that no good could come of it.

If you've paid any attention at all to the networks, you know that their personalities have a much more profound relationship with their goddamn blow dryers than they do with international affairs. As a matter of fact, they're only slightly more informed about the topic than their audience is, and that's only because the audience doesn't have the benefit of a research staff and a teleprompter. As for the political types, they lie. A lot.

When I first saw Geraldo, of all people, first report the rumors that bin Laden had been located and killed in Abbottabad, I found myself thinking "wait for it, wait for it ...."

I didn't have to wait long. First thing Monday morning, every half hour started with the same question from some blond-headed anchorbot: "Should we cut off aid to Pakistan?"

"Great," I thought. "The stupidity is starting to take over, and it's eventually going to bite us directly on the fleshiest part of already ample asses." Stupidity, especially in foreign policy, is a lot like a malignant cancer. If it isn't aggressively countered early, it destroys the systems that keep us fully functional. As the body retards itself, an agonizing death becomes all but inevitable. I'm terrified that this is what's starting to happen with South Asian policy.

One of the thoughts that immediately gripped me upon hearing about the hit on Osama is that it pretty much means the end of the war in Afghanistan. I've supported getting out for since December of 2009, but only because it had by then become crystal clear that the United States and NATO had never taken Afghanistan seriously and never would.

In my opinion, that's a terrible mistake and one that we might live to forget, but the only thing worse than abandoning a war is fighting it by half-measures. And anything less than a full counterinsurgency strategy, complete with approximately 300,000 - 500,000 troops on the ground, is a half measure. If we're going to keep throwing our kids into the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, we had damn well better accomplish something for the trouble.

That's never going to happen, and I can't continue to ask kids in their late teens and early twenties to get dead by the thousands just so that we can lose a little more slowly than we otherwise would. The so-called "light footprint" strategy means that we have to overly rely on bombing, which is contrary to the purpose of counterinsurgency and primarily serves to create even more insurgents. For domestic political reasons, we're never going to have a larger force there than we do now, and that's pretty clearly not enough.

Political support for the war has collapsed over the last three years. And that was with bin Laden alive. Now that he's not, most folks will see 9/11 as having been avenged and the remaining popular support for the Afghan mission will evaporate completely. I'm guessing that it'll take less than six months for it to drop below 20% in the United States.

The death of Osama bin Laden may have the perverse effect of ensuring our ultimate failure in Afghanistan, which means that, yeah, he won. He might not be around for the trophy ceremony, but he achieved his strategic goal of getting the United States bogged down and humiliated in Central and South Asia. Bin Laden saw the Soviet Union beaten and bankrupted in Afghanistan and, although he won't survive to see it, he knew that the United States was headed directly in the same direction.

Having said that, we'll be able to ignore Afghanistan once again, letting it spiral into chaos until it again explodes in our face. That's not true of Pakistan and it never will be. It's simply too dangerous. South Asia makes the Koreas look like the more boring parts of Northern Europe. India and Pakistan have already fought four wars and nearly fought three more since both countries successfully tested nuclear weapons in the late 90s. Unless some sort of strategic accommodation is reached, there will be a full scale nuclear war, sooner rather than later.

With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That's definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan's first, last and only concern is India.

And they aren't wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn't be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America's closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan's conduct makes infinite sense.

Afghanistan matters to Pakistan only because it provides Islamabad "strategic depth" in the event of an overwhelming Indian invasion. Because the native terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as opposed to the Arab imports) are primarily Pashtun and tribally allied with the Pakistanis, they aren't Islamabad's primary strategic concern. Their military has been, just as it always was, mostly deployed to the east and south, to deter New Delhi. As long as they face an existential threat with severely limited resources, they have no interest in fighting America's wars - which happen to be against what Pakistan considers strategic assets - for them.

Islamabad has also been down this road with America in Afghanistan before. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Pakistan was the conduit for American, Saudi and Chinese aid to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin. This was of great benefit to the Pakistanis, in that the aid allowed them to build influence with various groups in Afghanistan and allowed them to build training camps that could later be used in their own anti-Indian campaign in Kashmir. An unknown amount of the Afghan aid (I've seen accounts that put it at as much of half) was diverted to Islamabad's nuclear program.

Well, after the Soviets bugged out, the U.S abandoned Pakistan and imposed nuclear-related sanctions on it. Worse, the Clinton and second Bush administrations moved to strengthen ties with Pakistan's mortal enemy, India, which had been a Soviet ally during the Cold War. From this, Islamabad concluded that Washington cannot be trusted. It shouldn't surprise anyone that events in South Asia truly began to spiral out of control; with the jihad in Kashmir, the nuclear tests, Indo-Pakistani brinksmanship and the ISI's sponsorship of the Taliban, between 1989 and 9/11.

After September 11, Pervez Musharaff rightly concluded that he couldn't overtly obstruct the United States without running the very real risk of being wiped out. But he did know that he could hedge his bets so that Pakistan's options would be preserved when America inevitably betrayed Pakistan again. As we're seeing now, he wasn't entirely wrong.

To understand the situation, you need to understand the political dynamics in Pakistan. Because the threat from India is so grave, the military and ISI don't answer to the civilian government and the population likes it that way. There have also been eight military coups in Pakistan's sixty-five year history, none of which were broadly protested by the people. And if my analogy of the Soviets being on the U.S border was a reality, the same would probably be true of America.

Long story short, Osama bin Laden was able to hide in the suburbs of the Pakistani capital because finding him was far down on the list of Pakistan's national priorities.

The government of Asif Ali Zadari, which succeeded Musharraf's military dictatorship in 2008, is wholly dependent on American aid, but it only has so much room to maneuver with the army and ISI. if Zadari oversteps those bounds in ways that the military thinks compromises Pakistani security, they'll depose him. And if the United States withdraws from the region, abandons Pakistan again, or even tilts further to India, they'll depose him.

Either way, the situation returns to what it was between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and 9/11. If that happens, the United States will have spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for essentially nothing. Within months you'll see exactly the same dominoes lined up exactly the same way, except that this time you won't see Arab terror groups like al-Qaeda threatening American interests, it'll be South Asian groups, trained and armed by the ISI, which will be more dangerous by several degrees of magnitude. And that ignores entirely the possibility that a threatened Iran could seek to expand its influence to their east, just as it has to the west.

Had the United States not abandoned the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. The change in policy set into motion that made the rise of al-Qaeda and the attacks on New York, Washington and Shanksville all but inevitable. And now congressional idiots and cable news ghouls want to do exactly the same thing again.

Put another way, the United States needs Pakistani stability a lot more than Pakistan needs the United States. Hopefully, someone will sit Bill O'Reilly and the Republican congressional caucus down and explain that to them.

Even more deep thoughts on Krista Erickson and Sun News Network

If there's one thing that makes me bouncing-off-the-walls crazy, it's the recent embrace of the cult of victimhood by the conservative movement. People like Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin have built very lucrative careers out of whining about how unfair life is, and their ignorant acolytes in the media and blogosphere can't seem to get enough of it. Problematically, they engage in this very public bedweting as they continue to chide liberals for it.

This is just one example of modern conservatives being no different than the old-timey Left, just a lot more hypocritical about it. If nothing else, liberals have always been up front about being whiny assholes. They're actually rather proud of it and give each other awards for excelling at it. Modern conservatives, especially those in the fucking blogosphere, just seem to be doing it for fun.

And this brings me yet again to Krista Erickson and the Sun News Network. I've been watching Sun News diligently since Monday and, just as I feared, I'm falling in love with it. They're playing up the media hype that they're a conservative alternative to the Goddamn Liberal Media, which is hilarious to me because the news isn't conservative or liberal, it's the fucking news. I'm more than capable of deciding how to interpret it on my own, but I love watching conservatives being as friggin' pretentious as liberals famously are.

I'll say this for the first and last time: if, as a conservative, you feel that you need an entire network to reinforce things that you already believe, chances are that you're too dumb to be a conservative. And God knows that there are already more than enough idiots on the Right these days. Someone like William F. Buckley wouldn't have survived fifteen minutes in this media culture, if only because willful ignorance and herd mentalities are actually celebrated by the modern movement. If Barry Goldwater, easily the most conservative major party presidential nominee in U.S history, were alive today, he'd be revolted by the entire sideshow spectacle.

As I wrote about on Monday, Quebecor decided to make SNN's afternoon anchor (and my current soul mate, Facebook friend, and the object of much furious masturbation) Krista Erickson the face - and smoking hot little body - of the network. And you know what? I'm fine with that. As a matter of fact, I'm more than fine with it. I'd go so far as to say that I'm throbbing with glee. As you might imagine, I support the corporate sexualization of virtually everything.

Not everybody, as it happens, is as cool - or violently turned-on - with that as I am. The Globe and Mail published a particularly snotty column decrying Ms. Erickson's innate ability to get me hard enough to cut diamonds. And "Canada's Jon Stewart," Rick Mercer, tweeted “Just yesterday SUN TV’s studios was full of dry wall, today it is full of silicone," which is actually pretty funny.

The problem is that Krista can't let it roll off of her back and over the curve of her superior, heart-shaped little ass. She's made several snide remarks about both Mercer and the Globe on the air, and now she's putting this on Facebook

Hopeyou enjoyed the world premier of Bob Rae's cover of "Imagine". Another star-studded lineup today. Topics: Is Michael Ignatieff a phony? More on our Sun News exclusive on Iggy's role in the Iraq invasion. Speaking of plastic, Rick Mercer says we're all silicone here at SNN - shall we clear the air once and for all? I think so! Ottawa's celebrity stylist and my BFF weighs in on that and campaign fashion.

Oh God, please tell me that another hot TV chick is going to strip her down and feel her up, looking for silicone. If she's a certified gynecologist or proctologist, that would be even better. Nothing would be "must see TV" quite like that!

Look, Quebecor made the decision to have Krista as the sexy image of the network, primarily because she's a piece of ass. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have made that marketing decision if they hired, say, Helen Thomas as the afternoon anchor. That was a conscious decision and one that she happily went along with.

If Erickson is going to allow herself to marketed primarily as my masturbatory fantasy, she shouldn't be shocked or outraged when someone remarks on it. As much as she'd like to, she can't have it both ways. Sun News can't spotlight her perfect and perky cans and then waste airtime getting indignant about anyone pointing out that her cans are indeed perfect and perky. Being a hot piece of ass doesn't undermine her journalistic credibility (as much as she may or may not have any, I hadn't heard of her before Monday), but constantly whining about it most assuredly does.

If I were to offer Krista any advice at all, it would be to pick a side of the fence and stay on it. Unless, of course, she wants to straddle it, in which case I'd ask only that she take pictures of it and post them on Facebook. Because I'd really dig that.

My friend, the great Mark Bourrie, wrote about Sun News Network in a continuing column that you should really read for Ottawa Magazine.

Krista Erickson will do: Thoughts on Sun News Network

I've written about my complicated love-hate relationship with cable news several times now. I hate it because it's not only stupid, but actually goes so far as to glorify stupidity. On the other hand, I also love it because it's stupid and glorifies stupidity.

I also don't have a problem with opinion journalism. In fact, some of my favorite writers, including George Will, David Frum, P.J O'Rourke and Matt Tiabbi, are all very opinionated. But what they have in common is that they're all smarter than I am. That's not the case on cable news, where I'm being told what to think by people who don't know half as much about the issues as I do. That's more than a little grating. The worst thing about it is that I'm not all that bright. I'm three-quarters retarded and have been carried through life by my elephantine genitals.

Luckily, I really enjoy being angry. I can't begin to tell you how many of my girlfriends I've alienated by yelling at the television when some talking head says something demonstrably wrong or just stupid, which happens to be one of my favorite past times. I'm a cable news junkie not because I actually learn anything from it, but because I'm a blowhard who's in love with his own indignation. Cable news gives voice to that indignation in ways that nothing else does.

I bring this up because the Sun News Network began broadcasting this afternoon, and I love a good car accident as much as the next guy. Sun News, in it's first fifteen minutes, used all of the buzzwords that are almost guaranteed to make me crazy. "Populist," "controversial," "challenging political correctness," and, God help us all, "street." You know what? Look at the goddamned AP wire and tell me what it says. That shouldn't be any of those things. And for Christ's sake, please don't pretend that you're "on my side" or "looking out for me," okay? Such self-descriptions don't tell me that you're not going to be annoyingly idiotic, just a different kind of annoyingly idiotic than the rest of the "lamestream media."

Having said that, if you absolutely must insult my intelligence, I'd prefer that you be exceptionally hot as you do so. As a general rule, I tend not to be very offended by ignorance when it causes me to squeeze my own crotch until my fucking knuckles turn white. And that's where Sun News Network excels. The network launched at 4:30 eastern with a "pre-game show" hosted by Krista Erickson. That half hour consisted of her introducing me to a room full of people that I had never heard of before.

Miss Erickson, the host of something called Canada Live, which looks and sounds an awful lot like Megyn Kelly's show on Fox News, got off on the wrong foot with me by not kissing the hostess of First Look, former Miss Canada, Neelam Verma. In fairness, Krista is really cute, has a banging little body and her show could be a huge hit if she spends her daily two hours in a bikini and bouncing quarters off of her ass.

That might sound terribly sexist, I know. But I'd defend myself by pointing out two things; First, it's true. Second, I'm not the one who made her today's Sunshine Girl, which is usually an homage to vapid bikini chicks that I'd like to sexually defile. Quebecor, which owns Sun News, did that.

Everybody at Sun News has two particularly big chips on their collective shoulder, the CBC and the "Fox News North" designation by their critics.

The problem is that all cable news networks operate from a basic template that Fox News created and perfected, "news" (or something news-like) during the day and poorly-informed opinion programming in the evening, all of which are melted in a giant pot of narrative. However, there's no indication that Sun News will devote their weekend programming to the prison experience, as MSNBC has already pretty much cornered that particular market.

SNN didn't help itself when Ezra Levant (who, in the interest of full disclosure, has been very nice to me in the past) began his debut show by refuting the Fox News North meme ... using Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo format. Somebody named Theo Caldwell later referred to Toronto Sun editor Mark Bonokowski as "Poppa Bear" at least three times.

As for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the in-house name of which at SNN seems to be "the State Broadcaster," the correct course of action should be to ignore them completely. If the Mothership's ratings are any indication, everybody else in the country is.  But like Fox News' relationship with MSNBC, Sun News Network is aching to have an institutional enemy. The predictability of that makes it entertaining. Problematically, the news isn't supposed to be predictable. But since journalism has become professional wrestling, it is. And that's why I love it so.

You know what? If I'm not careful, I'm gonna be addicted to this soon.

Glenn's End: An Open Letter to the Lamented Mr. Beck

Oh Glenn, it's like we just met and now you're leaving me. What am I going to do now? I mean, we've learned so much together!

How else would I have known that Nazism and communism were basically the same thing? The war between that killed upwards of 75 million people always led me to believe otherwise. And no one other than you would have been able to figure out that jihadis, Marxists and organized labor were working in concert to establish an classless, atheist caliphate ... with dental! Anyone with even a high school level understanding of history and a minimum of common sense would have written that off as ridiculous before even finishing the sentence.

Who knew, for example, that some 90 years after his death, Woodrow Wilson was still destroying America? I knew that liberals were a pain in the ass, but I never suspected that they were that tenacious!

But you, much like the late Micheal Jackson before you, aren't "like other guys." No, you dug through each layer of almost impenetrable nonsense until you found at its molten core the most entertaining television that I've ever seen. Before Glenn Beck began airing on Fox News two years ago, I never knew that I could laugh my guts out and be profoundly confused at the same time. I thought that learning things from sources other than talk radio would have left me crippled inside forever, but there really is another way. And now it's slipping through my fingers like so much sand.

My studies of contemporary U.S history taught me more about the John Birch Society than any Canadian should know, but I'm too young to have witnessed them firsthand. But you actually brought them back to life and made them a political force in the Republican Party, proving yet again that there's no reason that half-bright paranoids should be marginalized in America when they can actually control much of its agenda for months at a time.

On second thought, that's not fair ... to the Birchers. They never would have held up signs saying "Government hands off of Medicare." At least not in public.

Prior to your rise to the top of Fox Nation, however, I was grievously unfamiliar with your hero, Cleon Skousen. And it was through Skousen that I came to understand your intellectual underpinnings, such as they are. Too demented for anyone who ever met him, including even the Mormon Church, to deal with, Mr. Skousen went on to author your political bible,  The Five Thousand Year Leap.

The Five Thousand Year Leap is a gigantically tedious and an intellectually painful exercise in religious fantacism. Despite 50 years of research and writing, it displays an almost towering ignorance of - and outright hostility to - both American history and civics, and for that alone, it should be cherished as a precious heirloom by the deliriously stupid everywhere. The central premise of The Five Thousand Year Leap appears to be that the Founders were devout Christians and the Constitution is a divinely inspired work, which explains why those very same Founders began amending it almost immediately. Ten times even!

But from it came most of your own books, your television show, and the 9/12 and 8/28 projects, even though I still can't figure out the point of the last two. However, that doesn't mean that I don't love them any less. How could I do anything other than admire such grandiose exercises in self-aggrandizement? I do, after all, have a blog!

That's why I was saddened to see this press release this afternoon;

FOX NEWS AND MERCURY RADIO ARTS ANNOUNCE NEW AGREEMENT
(New York, NY) Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year.

Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News said, “Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards. I look forward to continuing to work with him. ”

Glenn Beck said: “I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and Fox News. I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership.”

Joel Cheatwood, SVP/Development at Fox News, will be joining Mercury Radio Arts effective April 24, 2011. Part of his role as EVP will be to manage the partnership and serve as a liaison with the Fox News Channel.

Roger Ailes said: “Joel is a good friend and one of the most talented and creative executives in the business. Over the past four years I have consistently valued his input and advice and that will not stop as we work with him in his new role.”

“Glenn Beck” is consistently the third highest rated program on cable news.

For the 27 months that “Glenn Beck” has aired on Fox News, the program has averaged more than 2.2 million total viewers and 563,000 viewers 25-54 years old, numbers normally associated with shows airing in primetime, not at 5pm. “Glenn Beck” has dominated all of its cable news competitors since launch.

I noticed that while the phrase "the third highest rated program on cable news" (or some variation thereof) was used three times in just four paragraphs, the word "profitable" was strikingly absent.

Profitability in television is determined almost entirely on advertisers, and national, name-brand advertisers never stopped persecuting you from the minute you called the president of the United States a racist, did they, Glenn? They left you only with the gold mongers that you usually see only in the middle of the night. Judging only by your commercials, one could easily make the mistake that your key demographic is geriatric survivalists and people that really like other Fox News shows.

Of course, national corporations aren't usually given to involving themselves in massive conspiracies, and there was almost certainly a conspiracy involved in bringing about the end of Glenn Beck. I agree that it can only be the Democratic party, Van Jones, the Mulslim Brotherhood, Francis Fox Piven, SEIU, George Soros, CAIR, Media Matters for America, the rest of the "Lamestream Media," the Federal Reserve and the ghost of Leon Trotsky. There can be no other explanation. I, for one, would never suggest that Roger Ailes wants to bring up someone less alienating from the minors that will work for a third of the money, or that maybe Geraldo wants a full-time job again.

But you've got a safety net, you clever bastard. If I understand television contracts as well as I think I do, this production deal will pay you for whatever you develop, whether it ever airs or not, and has a strict non-compete clause. That means you get off of television, which you never liked and publicly complained about on television, while guaranteeing that you still get paid by television. And all Fox News gets out of it is the assurance that you won't pursue some far-fetched fantasy of starting your own television or Internet network. It's genius!

Sadly, your radio program doesn't air in Canada unless I specifically pay to listen to it on my computer, which isn't going to happen. So I guess that our relationship is going to end later this year, and I can't tell you how much this pains me.

I'm gonna miss you, big guy. I thought I'd miss the constant crying the most, but now I've got John Boehner for that.

I Think I've Figured Charlie Sheen Out

- "The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some
kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism
industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men
die like dogs, for no good reason."

- "In a nation run by swine, all
pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts
together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely."

- "I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times. People
trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in
German."

- "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to
anyone, but they've always worked for me."

For years I've loved and admired the work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. When I first started blogging in 2003, I tried writing primarily in that style but quickly learned that I'm not an especially gifted wordsmith. Granted, I still write that way from time to time, but only about sex, porn stars and Lindsay Lohan. This is because Thompson virtually never wrote about sex. His were amongst the most asexual musings in recent popular culture and I think the juxtaposition of that style on the subject is hilarious. It was an inside joke that only I understood and appreciated.

As Charlie Sheen's upward spiral into madness - which I refer to as "upward" because it has finally made him interesting - has continued, I began to notice something. His vocabulary and the cadence of his speech sounded increasingly familiar. Then when I saw the fourth installment of Sheen's Korner, everything came together for me like a thunder strike.

Charlie's turning into Hunter. Compare and contrast.

Granted, there are mild differences. Hunter rarely spoke in the same frenzied tone as he wrote. He also rarely met the press in the grips of a cocaine, mescaline and Wild Turkey frenzy. But Charlie can hardly be expected to understand these things, can he?

It's also unknown whether Sheen the Younger grasps that the good Doctor's wild ride didn't reach an especially pleasant destination, ending as it did looking down the wrong end of high-powered firearm in his heavily fortified Aspen compound. But these things are for Charlie and his Tiger Blood to find out on his own.

Soon football season will once again be over. But it's nice to know where the literary inspiration is coming from.

Charlie Sheen, Das Übermensch

Charlie Sheen is my hero, and if you're even halfway smart, he's your hero, too. If the last couple of weeks have conclusively proven anything, it's that all men aren't created equal: there is Charlie and the there's the rest of us. his is a higher form of existence that you need a mercury surfboard to properly process. Or a lot of cocaine. But I don't have either of those things and I doubt that very many of you do, either.

Charlie walks with goddesses and fires torpedoes of truth. Verily, he is winning and isn't shy about us letting us know it. How do you spend your days? 'Nuff said.

Most of the Goddamned Liberal Media has watched Mr. Sheen over the last several weeks and reported what they saw as a pharmaceutical and id fuelled public breakdown. But no one should trust a journalism school graduate further than they can be thrown. They wouldn't recognize Winning if it snuck up behind them and slit their fucking throats.

Most importantly, journalists aren't intellectuals, nor are they schooled in the rich philosophical traditions of the West. As such, they cannot be expected to recognize Charlie Sheen and Winning for what they are, the physical personification of what Friedrich Nietzsche described as das Übermensch in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche introduces the concept of the Übermensch in contrast to the other-worldliness of Christianity: Zarathustra proclaims the Übermensch to be the meaning of the earth and admonishes his audience to ignore those who promise other-worldly hopes in order to draw them away from the earth.[3][4] The turn away from the earth is prompted, he says, by a dissatisfaction with life, a dissatisfaction that causes one to create another world in which those who made one unhappy in this life are tormented. The Übermensch is not driven into other worlds away from this one.

Zarathustra declares that the Christian escape from this world also required the invention of an eternal soul which would be separate from the body and survive the body's death. Part of other-worldliness, then, was the abnegation and mortification of the body, or asceticism. Zarathustra further links the Übermensch to the body and to interpreting the soul as simply an aspect of the body.

As the drama of Thus Spoke Zarathustra progresses, the turn to metaphysics in philosophy and Platonism in general come to light as manifestations of other-worldliness, as well. Truth and essence are inventions by means of which men escape from this world. The Übermensch is also free from these failings.

Zarathustra ties the Übermensch to the death of God. While this God was the ultimate expression of other-worldly values and the instincts that gave birth to those values, belief in that God nevertheless did give life meaning for a time. God is dead means that the idea of God can no longer provide values. With the sole source of values no longer capable of providing those values, there is a real chance of nihilism.

Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values. In this way, it appears as a solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism. If the Übermensch acts to create new values within the moral vacuum of nihilism, there is nothing that this creative act would not justify. Alternatively, in the absence of this creation, there are no grounds upon which to criticize or justify any action, including the particular values created and the means by which they are promulgated.

In order to avoid a relapse into Platonic Idealism or asceticism, the creation of these new values cannot be motivated by the same instincts that gave birth to those tables of values. Instead, they must be motivated by a love of this world and of life. Whereas Nietzsche diagnosed the Christian value system as a reaction against life and hence destructive in a sense, the new values which the Übermensch will be responsible for will be life-affirming and creative.

Sound familiar? Okay, maybe it doesn't, if only because Nietzsche wrote in German and everything in German sounds confusing, melodramatic and borderline psychotic. Only a modern man with a warlock brain can translate the concept of the Übermensch into terms that the rabble can properly understand and appreciate. Charlie Sheen has done that in ways that show him to be a creator of new values following the death of God.

But don't take my word for it. Just watch his UStream shows from over the weekend and I'm sure that you'll agree.



And the second is even more powerful, to say nothing of succinct.



I think you're starting to get the idea.

On the other hand, like Nietzsche, Charlie Sheen may just have been driven mad by syphilis. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Jimmy Kimmel is Right! Fitness is Important!

Yeah, I know that I haven't posted very frequently or written anything that good lately. Some of you have been concerned, wondering if I'm drugs. Well, I'm here to say that it's true. I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. And I don't ever want to get off of it. It just makes life so much more interesting and entertaining than it otherwise is.



Of course, some of you might be shocked by that revelation and concerned about my heath. No need. First, I can cure addiction by closing my eyes and using my mind. Second, I have tiger blood and Adonis DNA. This allows me to expose people to magic, I expose them to something they're never otherwise gonna see in their boring, normal lives. No need to thank me.



Although I've never really written about it at any length, I'm very proud of my physique. I'm a gorgeous man and not only is my body my temple, it should be yours, too.



Sure, the tiger blood and the Adonis DNA have a lot to do with my beauty, but it does take some work and that work started in my childhood.



You see, I was a short, scrawny kid. If you saw the boy that I was, you'd never believe that I'd grow into the man that I am today. Then, when I was about seven, I was walking home from school and this guy in a van drove up beside me and asked about the football I was carrying. I said that I wasn't very good because of my size and that the other kids picked on me. The guy said that he could fix that and have me winning games in no time. Of course, I believed him. After all, he had a van and strangers in vans always tell the truth to kids, don't they?



Amazingly enough, what the guy in the van showed me was almost exactly what Jimmy Kimmel featured on his show last night.







I've long maintained that if something is good enough for me, it's good enough for Scarlett Johansson, Minka Kelly, Jessica Biel, Emily Blunt, Kelly Ripa, Sofia Vergara, Jessica Alba, Eva Longoria, and my soul mate, Lindsay Lohan. Like me, they're all glorious to look at and they all came about it the same way, by humping. And now they're all hotties, too!



Having said that, while you can put down the Shakeweights, I wouldn't recommend it. Just look at what they've done for premier porn star April O'Neil. (Note: that link couldn't be more NSFW) Her body is even tighter than Lindsay's, although in fairness, her cocaine intake is unknown.



Yes, getting in shape is hard work. If it wasn't everyone wouldn't be such a useless tub of shit. But nobody's saying that it can't be fun. Sure, the first few times in the van, I cried just as much as Jessica Alba. But then I started seeing results and immediately felt better about myself. It was a miraculous transformation and it made me what I am today!



I just wonder if Jimmy Kimmel has a van.

The Battle of Madison and the GOP: Not What It Appears

It's been fun watching Wisconsin's alleged budget battle, now in its second week, in that it demonstrates just how unserious the Republican party and their ball washers at Fox News and the blogosphere are about balancing budgets. It's really educational if you know what to look for.

Before I go any further, I should restate that I'm against the unionization of public employees. On the other hand, I'm also against snow and organized religion. The fact that I'm against all of these things doesn't necessarily mean that they're going anywhere, or that they even should.

If you've been paying attention to half-witted, duplicitous Republican politicians or the gutless and ignorant curs in the media, you would think that American deficits were mostly due to the existence of the state and federal workforces. All things being equal, it makes for a pretty good narrative. The only thing that gets in the way is that the facts don't bear it out.

I'm exhausted by writing this over and over again, but the fact is that the United States - and by extension, the individual states - have been spending far more than they take in for about fifty years now. Most of that spending has come in the form of program spending and unnecessarily large ideological cuts, although U.S foreign policy and the military needed to carry it out has played a part as well.

Unaffordable tax cuts are no different than social programs and various subsidies in that they are examples of politicians bribing people with their own money. Americans have never been good at austerity. Certainly, they won't engage in the kind of serious and deep program cuts that Canada carried out in the mid 1990s until it's too late. Nor will they do anything to prevent the banks from creating bubbles that wipe out the stock market two or three times a year.

To be fair, there's no real reason to make politically hard decisions when you can scapegoat groups that aren't very popular, and there are few groups as unpopular as public employee unions. If you do that, you can continue to cut taxes and fund the monstrously expensive program spending that everybody loves while appearing to actually address deficits. And in politics, appearances are the only things that matter.

Last night, I watched Bill O'Reilly engage in a debate so mystifyingly wrong that it was actually hypnotic. Ol' Bill built his argument around two points that either had nothing to do with anything or were just powerfully dumb.

First, he said that public employee benefits are bankrupting the states, so they had to be repealed mid-contract. To ensure that it never happens again, collective bargaining has to be crippled.

I'll concede that the benefits governments, particularly retirees receive is unsustainable. However, that's largely because the federal and state governments spent decades engaging in accounting that would send anyone to jail forever. The benefits that governments were granting their employees weren't a secret to anybody. But instead of actually funding those benefits, they continued cutting taxes, expanding program spending and subsidizing farmers, corporations and sports stadiums.

The federal government certainly didn't help when they "ended welfare as we know it" during the Clinton administration. Yes, the federal government ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but that didn't "end" welfare as much as it dumped it on the states. And if you're really interested, you'll notice that state budgets started going into the toilet in the late 90s.

What Bill O'Reilly, Scott Walker and pretty much everyone isn't telling you is that the real sinkhole in state budgets isn't public employees, but the public itself. Medicare and Medicaid are barely funded from year to year at the state level, let alone in the outlying years when the Boomers are fully retired. The reason that no one is telling you that is because Medicare and Medicaid are very popular among people that vote in high numbers.

O'Reilly's second argument was almost incomprehensible. He said that Governor Walker has no choice but to pass a hundred million dollar corporate tax cut because "businesses are going to 'right to work' states and that the cuts will create jobs."

In fact, one has nothing nothing to do with the other. Right to work states tend to have lower taxes than the rest of country, but they're also still losing jobs or not creating them as much as they should. Furthermore, cutting taxes in this economic climate will accomplish absolutely nothing because of the paucity of consumer demand.

The fact that interest rates are at nearly zero can properly be seen as the biggest tax cut imaginable, particularly in a country fuelled by consumer debt. If non-existent interest rates aren't creating jobs, there's no reason to believe that corporate tax cuts will. Indeed, all further tax cuts will do is widen existing deficits, just as the extension of the Bush tax cuts has federally.

Almost no one in the United States will admit that America actually does have a revenue problem, and that's equally true at the state level. Everybody loves the big-ticket spending of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and defense, which is why most mainstream politicians never address any of them in a serious way. They just want to keep benefiting from those programs without actually paying for them. This is happening in the states as well.

The Battle of Madison makes no sense from a budgetary perspective. But it makes much more sense as a political matter. You see, the Democratic party would cease to exist were it not for unions generally, and public employee unions in particular. Not only do they give a lot of money to Democrats, they also provide crucial "Get Out The Vote" coordination that is invaluable in close races.

Once you hobble the collective bargaining power of those unions, you also undercut the case for mandatory dues from members. Without membership dues, the union effectively disappears and poses no political threat or benefit to anyone. That's what this is really about and if you bribe any halfway smart Republican with enough whiskey and nude young boys, they'll tell you just that. The Battle of Madison isn't budgetary as much as it is blatantly political.

So why doesn't your average voter see this? Easy. The average voter, as I've long contended, isn't very bright.

The great Dan Carlin addressed this beautifully in the current episode of his podcast, Common Sense. Once upon a time, there was a trade-off between the public and private sectors. You'd make more money in the private sector, but if you worked for the government, you'd get great benefits and job security. That's changed somewhat, as we see with all of the rhetoric about public employees "making more" than people in the private sector.

The only problem is that it isn't exactly true. Because the United States has outsourced so much of its economy over the last thirty years, private wages - particularly for the middle class - have stagnated in the last decade. It isn't that public employees are making more, it's that private employees are making less. And tax policy is never going to change that. You can cut corporate taxes to zero and that still won't make American workers competitive with their cousins in India and China, who will consider themselves exceptionally well-off making less than a third of the average American.

And not only can you not significantly downsize government, the overwhelming majority of Americans aren't interested in doing any such thing. If they were, you'd see an honest debate about what's causing the budgetary imbalances in the first fucking place. While you can send your tech support jobs or heavy industry to Mumbai or Shanghai, you can't send your teachers, cops, fire fighters and the bureaucracies that support them there. Well, I guess you could, but the results would probably be less than ideal if you're a crime victim, on fire or illiterate.

But you have fun explaining that to an unemployed Allentown steelworker. Demagoguery is one of America's few remaining growth industries for a reason. I expect that Republicans like Scott Walker and John Kasich to prevail in the short-term, but they're just as likely to get their asses kicked in four years when absolutely nothing changes.

The only problem is that they'll be replaced with equally childish and dishonest assholes who won't address the real issue, which is the unrealistic expectations of the American people themselves. And don't think for a second that they Democrats are any better. They spend most of their time denying that there's a problem at all.


My friend, The Far East Cynic, also a wrote an interesting, if different piece on this subject.