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.

A drinking life:The ballad of Bob Ryan and Rob Ford

I drink my share. As a matter of fact, I drink your share, too. It used to be that folks with my hobbies would be forcefully precluded from public office, lest I become something of a national embarrassment.

Well, no longer, good people. The times, they done changed, just like Bob Dylan warned us they would, lo those many years ago. These days, I'd be barred from office for the simple reason that my copious drinking and fucking hasn't resulted in a lengthy arrest record. Damn my ability to handle my high. It keeps holding me back.

Meet Sheboygan, Wisconsin mayor Bob Ryan. Mayor Ryan clearly knows how to have a good time.

Mayor Bob Ryan has big plans for this little city. He wants to dredge the Sheboygan River to lure bigger recreational boats, build a green corporate park and bring high-end housing to the sleepy downtown.

But before he gets to any of that he has to deal with a problem. Mr. Ryan is an alcoholic, and since taking office two years ago, he has fallen off the wagon four times. His sobriety slip-ups, including a bar fight, have been documented in a police report and a YouTube video, making this small-city mayor the butt of late-night television jokes and international news coverage.

(...)

In his office lined with photos of his favorite Green Bay Packers, the 48-year-old said he has been a binge drinker since he was 12. At 42, he concluded he was an alcoholic and entered a 12-step recovery program.

He sold his oil distribution business a couple of years after he ran successfully for city council in 2006 and, even though he was in a lot of bars while he campaigned, he said the discipline and focus of the election was good for his sobriety. But after the race "it was all kind of stored up," he said.

One night, after becoming mayor in April 2009, he went drinking with the city's human resources director, who later alleged he made a pass at her. After he fired her a few months later, she sued and eventually won a settlement from the city's insurance company for $310,000. The mayor admitted no wrongdoing.

That was followed by an off-color declaration about his sister-in-law at Brennan's in July of 2009 that was filmed and posted on YouTube. The incident was incorporated into one of Jay Leno's monologues. Mr. Ryan apologized and publicly admitted he had a drinking problem. In July 2010, he was seen drinking at a local bar. And then, this past July, he went on a three-day bender culminating in a bar fight. When police arrived, his watch had been stolen and he was sitting quietly on a curb.

"It wasn't good," he said.

Because he likes to have a good time, and because Wisconsin is historically a hotbed of populist nonsense, there is a drive to recall him which seems unlikely to succeed.

As my long-time readers know, I forcefully reject populist horseshit notions like recalls because they serve only to absolve voters of their own bad decisions. The greatness of the American system of seperation of powers is that it allows other branches of government to remove the executive, but only for truly egregious conduct. Recalls mean that elections are never final, the voters never have to really make up their minds, and the much celebrated "permanent campaign" mentality that has destroyed government is cemented.

Moreover, recall serves to absolve legislators of their constitutional, if difficult and often unpopular, responsibility to check the executive. They can hide behind meaningless "will of the people" horseshit rhetoic that the very idea of impeachment was created to circumvent. Indeed, the concept of a republic is built around the fact that governing is hard and the people are not infrequently very stupid. There are no good reasons for recall that impeachment doesn't address.

Populism is fantastic is you're beheading Louis XIV or storming the fucking Winter Palace, neither of which ended particularly well. Otherwise, it's just another example of retarded and irresponsible voters getting played by demagogues and scumbag spin doctors.

But if the dice don't roll Bob Ryan's way in Wisconsin, he can always move to Toronto and run for mayor here. Rob Ford was elected Last October, even though it was widely known that his love of booze has led to him being in handcuffs more often since 1991 than Axl Rose. Having said that, Hizzoner currently cuts a more slender figure than the aforementioned Mr. Rose.

Among Ford's more celebrated sins was driving drunk, as a foreign national, with marijuana on his person in downright medieval jurisdictions, like Florida. He was also ejected from a hockey game for drunkenly attempting to provoke violence.

The mayor's drunken antics are known far and wide, and they didn'y stop him from being elected. Neither, for the record, did his hallucinatory campaign promise to "stop the gravy train" by cutting taxes and fees in a huge way, while maintaining and expanding social services and subway construction, and paying for it by cutting essentially $75,000 in gardening fees at City Hall.

One presumes that he did all of that shit stone-sober, which presumes that the city of Toronto is either drunk, stupid or both. Which we apparently are. Ford won the mayorality with nearly half the vote in field of a half dozen serious candidates. What passes for the conservative movemement these days remains four-square behind Ford because the he embodies everything the modern conservative movement is built upon - drunken bellicosity, stupidity, and a proud ignorance of the laws of mathematics. They see him as a badass in the face of the godless liberal Intelligenstia.

Until, of course, he isn't. When he's confronted as something as awful and menacing as an unfunny 60 year old woman in a Xena suit and a plastic sword, he stopsbeing a badass pretty quickly.

Mayor Rob Ford had a rough start to the week.

He called 911 after being accosted outside his Etobicoke home around 8 a.m. on Monday as he was leaving for a council meeting at City Hall.

The attackers turned out to be from the CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which specializes in catching politicians unaware. By the time police arrived, the TV crew and Ford had gone.

According to a neighbour, a woman brandishing a microphone jumped out of a dark blue Jeep and ran yelling toward Ford’s driveway with a cameraman in tow.

The woman was 22 Minutes alumna Mary Walsh, in character as her alter ego Marg Delahunty and dressed outlandishly as Marg, Warrior Princess, CBC spokesman Chris Ball confirmed.

Ford, who has received death threats in recent months, was furious at the ambush, saying he had no idea who was coming at him.

Look, I don't doubt that Rob has had his share of death threats. But I have my suspicions that none of them involved female seniors with professional camera crews. I'm a cynical prick that way.

But let's look at what the "fair and balanced" media has to say about all of this, shall we?



Hackish 14 year-old Brian Lilley has Sun Media resident dickhead Mark Bonokowski admit that he's ambushed politicians at home .. but never as a prank. Which is apparently important, because your odds of being assissinated by a sixty-year old woman with a Xenu suit, a plastic sword and a camera crew are much greater than being murdered by a middle-aged white guy in black clothes, coke-bottle glasses, a political agenda and a creepy mustache. Look at your fucking history, people!

Again, Lilley and Bonokowski apparently have no issue with the media ambushing folks at home. Bonokowski admits to doing it himself, while simeltaneously condeming it. And neither has mentioned The O'Reilly Factor - which is Sun News' operational model - regularly doing exactly the same thing.

However, I can see how Rob Ford, Brian Lilley and Mark Bonokowski missed the joke, because I did, too. This Hour Has 22 Minutes has never been funny, and the CBC has lacked a sense of humour since the Kids in the Hall went off the air.

Having said that, the incredibly selective "conservative" outrage machine is a fucking scream. Most of these assholes seems to have stopped even knowing when they were lying years ago. They soak their fucking panties over Bill O'Reilly's intern and James O'Keefe, but can't contain their indignance over someone who calls herself "Marg, Warrior Princess" on a show that no one watches.

Look, Mary Walsh - or anyone on her fucking show - wouldn't know a joke if it bent them over and stuffed a vodka bottle in their asses. But in making allegedly conservative dickheads twist themselves into hypocritical pretzels of almost awesome stupidity, they made this sorry spectacle one of the funniest goddamned things I've ever seen.

And it convinces me that we need someone like Bob Ryan as mayor. Our pal Bob would just punch Xenu in the side of the head, admit he was drunk, and not rely on a bunch of journalistic hacks and amatuer crybaby fucking bloggers to clean up his mess.

If nothing else, Bob Ryan carries with him a sense of personal responsibility that Rob Ford, Sun News and 99% of the asshole blogosphere never will. At least he's ashamed of being a lout, and I think we all need more of that.

Video ruthlessly ripped off from Blazing Cat Fur

For the love of Lindsay

I've spent the better part of a decade dreaming about seeing Lindsay Lohan in handcuffs, but never like this. My wish to se her physically restrained involved her humiliation, to be sure, but I always wanted that to be a private matter, just between the two of us. Unless she actually wanted TMZ cameras recording the tawdry spectacle for the world to see, which I also wouldn't object to. Women say that I'm a giving lover for a reason, you know. But it was always a sexual thing with me, as opposed to a pernicious fiat by the judiciary.

I've written endlessly about the state of California's persecution of La Lohan and the wrongness thereof. The courts, lo these many years later, just don't seem to understand that she really is better than the rest of us. This is amazing, in that they've spent as much time looking at her tits as the rest of us have.

I always thought that anyone with jugs as spectacular as Lindsay's has the constitutional right to give the finger to the judicial system.The fact that this apparently isn't taught in America's law schools says, more than anything, that America ignores God's Natural Law. Maybe Fred Phelps was right after all, and Kevin Smith's majestic Red State was more of a documentary than anyone is willing to admit.

For the record, I'm not predisposed to defending drunk driving. I don't drive precisely because I enjoy spending the majority of my life inebriated. I'm a much better person when I'm drunk. I help the homeless, which is the kind of shit that I would never do sober. But drunk driving has the annoying habit of killing people who are just going about their daily business. which makes it indefensible.

That, however, is entirely beside the point. Lindsay hasn't driven drunk in something like two years. That's gotta be worth something, right?

No, she's being continually being fucked over by The Man over probation violations. Which makes sense until you recognize that probation is a stupid fucking concept to begin with.

If you break the law, you should go directly to fucking jail. The problem is that they're are so goddamned many stupid fucking laws against horseshit that taxpayers can't afford the necessary jail space. The concept of probation allows idiots to think that the system is still working, when it does no such thing.

Let's get over the idea that Lohan is being raked over the coals for drunk driving, okay? She isn't. She being raked over the coals for violating her probation, the terms of which were retarded to begin with, and have nothing at all to do with her original crime.

One of the conditions of Lindsay's probation was that she work in an abused women's shelter. Apparently, she found this to be "not fulfilling," which is the source of her current legal dilemma.

This has driven everyone that isn't me all out of sorts, mostly because I've dated women who claim to have been abused and found them to be a huge pain in the ass. Neither was physically abused, but both were so bitchy and crazy that that fact speaks to the restraint of their respective husbands more than anything else.

I've been in Lindsay Lohan's position. And I'd prefer jail , too.

.gif ruthlessly stolen from What Would Tyler Durden Do

Written at the behest of our Maximum Leader.

A conservative quandry

At this point, you needn't be a liberal or a libertarian to recognize that the War on drugs is little more than a failed, extraordinarily expensive exercise in deliberate obliviousness. You just have to be paying attention.

Drugs are even more available and cheaper than they were 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon first launched the retarded endeavor. The more the government spends in suppressing drugs, the richer the traffickers and local dealers become

Moreover, just as was true during Prohibition, the prohibition of drugs have made them a worse public hazard than they were before. Drugs, in and of themselves, kill or seriously harm very few people. The fact that they're completely unregulated, however, has had savage consequences for millions of people. People overdose for the simple reason that they have no idea what the purity of the drug they're consuming is. Instead, they have to rely on criminals to tell them, which is almost never wise.

The foreign policy ramifications of the War on Drugs is easy to see. Countries around the world have been torn to pieces, not because their citizens like doing Tony Montana-sized mountains of blow, but because Americans do. It's almost like the Opium Wars in reverse, except the Opium Wars made economic sense, if only in the most perversely inhuman way. The American drug war is ruining other countries simply because the U.S government has decided to deny the American people what they want. It's almost as if the laws of supply and demand don't exist at all.

The War on Drugs has accomplished nothing other than create a prison industry that is the envy of every country that isn't North Korea or China. That Prime Minister Harper campaigned on bringing those same demonstrably retarded policies to Canada is one of the reasons I voted against the Conservatives this past May.

The cost of the drug war to individual freedom in America has been astronomical. Under asset forfeiture laws - which were designed as a military measure during the Civil War - the government can relieve you of you property, including your house or car, without even charging you with a crime, let alone doing the fairly easy work of obtaining a conviction. Almost all of the most constitutionally egregious anti-terror policies in the last decade have their origins in the drug war in some way. In fact, measures like the USA Patriot Act is almost never used to fight terrorism, but it is used in drug and money laundering cases quite a bit. Square that with what was said during what passed for a debate when it was proposed.

Now the War on Drugs is going to further deny the people their constitutional rights, but this time in ways that should outrage conservatives and Republicans everywhere, although it probably won't.

If my fellow conservatives were even halfway honest federalists, they would repeal federal drug laws that don't involve importation, and leave them to the states. That's what they say they would do with abortion in the event that Roe v Wade was overturned, except that they're lying about that, as evidenced by the continued Republican support for a constitutional amendment barring the procedure.

Republican support for "the will of the people" is undercut by their continued support of the drug war. They love referendums when they deny people the right to marry or make it effectively  impossible for legislatures to impose taxes, but when it comes to drugs, the rhetoric changes dramatically. 17 states - comprising over 25% of the American public - affirmed ballot measures legalizing medical marijuana, effectively decriminalizing the substance.

And Republicans - the very same people who were driven to distraction over Rush Limbaugh's "persecution" for just wanting to be Keith Richards - were indignant. The Bush administration instructed the Drug Enforcement Agency to continue prosecuting federal drug laws in states that had popularly passed medical marijuana laws, and Republicans cheered.

Well, the Obama administration is kicking it up a notch. Enjoy.

Michigan's medical-marijuana users can't catch a break.

Three major state appeals court decisions have gone against them in the last month. Now, federal authorities have issued an order that licensed medical-marijuana users nationwide can't possess a gun.

That means no hunting, no target shooting, no gun collecting and no guns for personal protection -- even by patients who legally cultivate marijuana crops -- according to a Sept. 21 directive to prosecutors nationwide from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The Second Amendment aside, there is a certain logic to this measure. If you consume marijuana - a Schedule One narcotic (which goes a long way in proving that the U.S government doesn't even know what narcotics are) - you're guilty of a federal felony. And felons are subject to a lifetime ban on gun ownership.

I happen to think that this is constitutional nonsense. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a clause that allows for the lifetime surrender of guaranteed rights. Even Antonin Scalia's celebrated opinion in District of Columbia v Heller, which affirmed that gun ownership is a fundamental right of citizenship, cut several giant holes in that right which weren't addressed or anticipated by the Constitution, such as bans on possession by felons, the mentally ill, and near schools and federal buildings. Heller might in fact be the least originalist decision in Supreme Court history precisely because of those unenumerated exceptions.

If you combine Heller exceptions with with the even more dramatically wrong-headed decision in Gonzales v Raich, which extended the interstate commerce clause in ways that can't avoid making ObamaCare constitutional, you have the perfect predicate for potentially denying Second Amendment rights to over a quarter of the American people.

The most odious part of this measure is that it is an ATF directive, which carries absolutely no force of law. The ATF, for the uninitiated, isn't Congress. It is an enforcement agency, not a legislative one. It's a lot like the Environmental Protection Agency, which the GOP has spent the last two years blowing several gaskets over proposed administrative standards that amount to passing Cap and Trade.

Remember, just as the case with asset forfeiture, no conviction or even charging document is necessary. Under DOJ's hyper-stupid letter "Any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes ... is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition." Just possessing a medical marijuana card, which in most cases was ratified in state ballot measures, is enough to deny you your Second Amendment rights under the federal Constitution.

And, as expected, no major Republican or Tea Partier has spoken out against this. Not one. This isn't like President Reagan imposing a national 21 drinking age by threatening to withdraw federal highway funds to non-compliant states. This is the DEA, ATF and DOJ saying "because we says so" to the states. There's nothing in the Constitution that guarantees Federal highway money, after all.

If you sense that I'm a little celebratory about this, I commend you on your powers of perception. As I've alluded to over the years, I've been waiting for this day with bated breath. This is because it forces stupid people into a corner of their own twisted logic and just might bring some honesty into the debate.

Among the questions this issue might force some answers out of are;

• Drugs, which actually existed in 1789 (despite the popular Republican perception that they were invented by the Beatles during a break from recording Revolver ), aren't among the enumerated powers of the federal government. Doesn't that make them a state issue under the Tenth Amendment?
• Do popular referendums in the states always mean something, or just when it fits your ideology?
• Why should the ATF have extra-legislative powers when the EPA shouldn't? Is one more special than than the other? If so, under what legislative or constitutional authority?
• Can enforcement agencies circumvent constitutional amendments even with a vote of Congress, let alone without one?
• If a decision by an enforcement agency can deprive medical marijuana users that haven't been charged or convicted of anything of their gun rights, can the same apply to voting rights? How about First Amendment rights? If not, why not?
• If, in 2014, you refuse to buy medical insurance - which will be mandatory under federal law - can you be stripped of your Second Amendment rights, irrespective of what your governor or state legislature says about the Affordable Care Act?
• If medical marijuana users can be denied gun rights by administrative fiat, why can't they also be denied Medicare and Social Security benefits by Treasury and HHS?
• Why are adjudicated prescription drug "users or addicts", like Rush Limbaugh not subject to lifetime gun bans, particularly when they violate both state and federal laws in obtaining their high? Is a state prescribed card or license really worse than doctor shopping?
• If so, can that be enacted by a letter to state and local prosecutors by a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, absent an act of Congress?

I really look forward to Republican answers to this questions, although I'm not expecting them. At least not sensible ones.

No Mo', No Mo': Notes on monster fightin'

Today is a day for Republicans everywhere to point out that President Reagan spent about six months calling the recently departed Moammar Gadhafi "the mad dog of the Middle East." But at exactly the same time, Reagan was also selling anti-tank missiles to the real mad dogs of Iran's Revolutionary Guard in a ridiculous bid to free American hostages in Beirut. I mention that only to point out that Republicans lie or are wildly ignorant about any number of things.

Gadhafi went out this morning in the most predictable way possible in his neighborhood - he was whacked by his own people. Folks keep telling me that the "Arab Spring" is changing the game, but it's living up to its history in deposing leaders. And you know what? That's the way it should be!

The popular view out there is that Gadhafi was one of history's great monsters, which is all the proof you need that the popular view is made almost entirely of stupid.

Ole Mo' was, for the most part, a ridiculous little man - a caricature of what a great dictator is supposed to be. By his final years, he even started looking ridiculous, so addled by plastic surgery and megalomania that he looked like Muhammad Ali and dressed like Michael Jackson. Yes, he would blow up discos and airliners full of innocent people from time to time, but he was largely a joke. A hilarious joke, to be sure, but a joke, nonetheless. Any guy who surrounds himself with chick bodyguards usually is.

And jokes were a useful resource to American foreign policy during the Reagan years, and even today. Libya was never a major player in international terrorism. But the Soviet Union and Iran were. And you know what they were dished out by the White House? The Soviets got state dinners and treaties, while Tehran got fairly advanced weaponry and a personally autographed bible from the president of the United States. Shit, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were Ronald Reagan's best friends, until they weren't.

Libya, being a piss-ant little country that most Americans can't find on a map and led by a silly cartoon character in grandiose costumes, got bombed. Moammar Gadhafi was demonized because he was easy to demonize. And he was even easier to fucking bomb.

That's still true today, and it says a whole lot about the much ballyhooed War on Terror than pretty much anyone wants to admit. Iran killed more Americans in the 80's than Gadhafi did, but Iran could fight back and had oil, so Libya got the tits blown off of it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provide the lion's share of money, muscle and ideology to the modern jihadi movement, but Afghanistan and Iraq get blown into even bigger shitholes than they already were.

That's not to say that I'm a proponent of attacking Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Those motherfuckers are rich, well-armed, will to fight and generally crazy. An America that's used to fighting idiots like Moammar Gadhaffi and Saddam Hussein isn't anywhere near ready to punch in the weight division of International Terror's real badasses. Iraq and Afghanistan have broken the United States military, maybe past the point of no return, and the shit only got serious in both places after the original villains were tossed out on their asses. Given that very real history, what do you suppose an attack on Pakistan or Iran would bring?

The correct geostrategic answer is that no one wants to find out, other than grotesquely unserious Tea Party fucks and Fox News blowhards.

Lookee, I'm as glad as the next asshole that Gadhaffi's finally croaked. The man was a monster to live under. However, that hasn't historically been the metric under which leaders are deposed with foreign support. You know how I know that? Because Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile and a long, long list of other countries were America's favoured dance parters when they were headed by far more monstrous folks that Boy Mo was on his worst fucking day.Pinochet killed political opponents in downtown D.C, and that didn't stop him from being feted by at least three successive presidents.

The scary thing is that the world's real monsters know that as well as I do. And they also know another important piece of recent history that escapes most Americans. That is that taking out a comic book villian, more often than not, creates a vacuum that real villains quickly fill. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, where demonic communism was banished by psychopathic militant Islam. Even in the best case scenario, you get Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega was eventually replaced with ... Daniel Ortega.

Let's get real for a second, shall we? Without NATO air support, Libya's "freedom fighters" would have accidentally killed more of one another than Gadhafi would've, which is why NATO air support was given in the first fucking place. Sure, President Obama said otherwise, but President Obama was consciously lying. He does that sometimes.

As the great Dan Carlin has often said, "When you depose Mossedegh to bring back the Shah, you get Khomeini." The fact is that we don't know the first goddamned thing about the leaders of "democratic Libya." But that isn't stopping us bringing out our political blowjob machines to welcome them to power. And if they turn out to be monsters, by Christ, they're gonna be our monsters. And I hope we don't forget that after we stop congratualting ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzche didn't live in the Oprah-friendly 12-step world of today. If he did, he famous quote

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." would read more like "Whoever dutifully avoids fighting real monsters should see to it that in the process he does not enable greater monsters where only minor ones exist today." You neer know if the streetcorner corner is shooting up to supress the urge to rape kids. And where I come from, it's the better part of wisdom not to find out.