Romneyborg 2012
Mitt Romney seems to have a very hard time understanding complex human emotions such as pity, remorse, and fear. But why should he? They are as alien to him as hunger, pain, and depression. This is a person who has spent his entire existence wrapped in the gentle cocoon of privilege and wealth without any exposure to reality. How can you expect anything different?
Romney talks about paying for health insurance as if it were the same as getting a pedicure, hiring an escort or getting the fancy wax at a car wash. It’s a luxury service being provided to him, and he doesn’t like it, he can take his business elsewhere. Romney’s is the language of a man who has never wanted for anything, never worried about where his next paycheck would come from, never worried about going bankrupt if he got sick.
It is the language of an entitled empowerment utterly alien to the experience of most Americans, who feel victimized and bled dry without recourse by these rentier corporations. Romney sees himself as in charge of the relationship between himself and these entities. Most Americans don’t. That’s why the statement rankles and feels so off-putting to us. The mention of enjoying the act of “firing” them is just icing on the cake.
Everyone needs a hobby I suppose. Romney’s is firing people.
Then again, he might just be programmed that way.
Putting the Bane in Bain Capital
Steve King had a fantastic idea on twitter this morning…
Internet. I’m very disappointed in you for not photoshopping Romney wearing the Bane mask. Make it happen.
— Steve King(@steveking_) January 9, 2012
And so I did.
Never pass on a good idea.
The Fall of Ricarus
“…with melting wax and loosened strings
Sunk hapless Icarus on unfaithful wings;
Headlong he rushed through the affrighted air,
With limbs distorted and dishevelled hair;
His scattered plumage danced upon the wave,
And sorrowing Nereids decked his watery grave;
O’er his pale corse their pearly sea-flowers shed,
And strewed with crimson moss his marble bed;
Struck in their coral towers the passing bell,
And wide in ocean tolled his echoing knell.”- Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles)
Poor little Ricky.
He has no chance against the withering heat to which he is about to be exposed. Daddy Gingrich may help him get aloft, but his impending fall will be as spectacular as it is inevitable.
There are few people in American politics more vile than Rick Santorum. He represents everything that is wrong with the fundamentalist theocrats on the right. He is an atrocious person, and the public humiliation he is about to receive could not happen to a nicer guy.
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My sincerest apologies to Jacob Peter Gowy for splattering his wonderful painting with Santorum.
The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011
Go browse through the fantastic collection of this year’s best pulled together by Batocchio over at Vagabond Scholar. It’s a continuation of a tradition started by the late blogger and satirist Jon Swift/Al Weisel, and provides a wealth of links to some outstanding blogs you may never have found otherwise.
Quit wasting your time here and go check it out.
John & Eric
Nationwide crime sprees tend not to end well...
The Speaker of the House, in an apparent suicide pact with Eric Cantor and the radical wing of his party, has decided to drive the GOP off a cliff.
After staging a dramatic rebellion from GOP leadership, and putting the payroll tax cut at real risk of expiring, House Republicans are now taking an enormous leap of political faith. By nixing the broadly bipartisan Senate plan, they’re hoping to force Senate Democrats’ hand and bring them back to Washington to negotiate a 12-month extension of the payroll tax cut, in the final days of the year.
The gamble is three-fold: that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will cave; that Republicans will get a better deal in the next two weeks than they will in two months; and third, that if the payroll tax cut expires they’ll manage to spin their way out of the blame for it.
Part of that spin will rest on the convoluted procedure Republicans used to reject the Senate compromise. They didn’t give that bill an up-or-down vote. They gave it a down-or-down vote. The question before the House wasn’t “do you agree with the Senate bill?” It was “do you disagree with the Senate bill?” Thus a “yes” vote was actually a vote against extending the payroll tax cut and vice-versa; and even if the majority of the House had supported the Senate bill, it wouldn’t have passed. It was set up to fail.
Isn’t the term “Tax Cuts” some kind of goddamn mantra in the GOP? Isn’t that the end-all solution to literally every problem in the world for them? And yet the GOP leadership of the House are dead-set on killing a major middle class tax cut. Strange right?
Oh, maybe it’s that little part about benefiting the middle class that they’re objecting to.
Whatever their true motivations are, whether it’s disdain for average working people or hatred of the President, it certainly has nothing to do with the “We have to negotiate this in conference!” bullshit they’re spouting publicly.
Vince Morris, a spokesman for Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) notes the irony.
“Speaker Boehner says it’s important that the Senate agree to sit down and conference out the differences between the House and Senate payroll tax extension bill,” Morris says. “It’s worth noting that for nearly a year, Boehner has steadfastly refused to appoint conferees on the FAA bill. Chairman Rockefeller has asked repeatedly for the Speaker to appoint conferees. Instead he has been satisfied with a series of short term extensions. In fact, the latest short term extension expires in barely a month. If short term extensions are fine for the FAA, what’s wrong with a 2 month payroll extension?”
Imagine that, John Boehner is a lying asshole.
They’ve even lost the Wall Street Journal.
Senate Republicans say Mr. Boehner had signed off on the two-month extension, but House Members revolted over the weekend and so the Speaker flipped within 24 hours. Mr. Boehner is now demanding that Mr. Reid name conferees for a House-Senate conference on the payroll tax bills. But Mr. Reid and the White House are having too much fun blaming Republicans for “raising taxes on the middle class” as of January 1. Don’t be surprised if they stretch this out to the State of the Union, when Mr. Obama will have a national audience to capture the tax issue.
Most of that WSJ article is a smelly stew of revisionist history and outright lies, what do you expect, but it’s certainly targeting the House GOP and its leadership. Oops.
Well I for one hope that John & Eric, and their dear friends in the house GOP enjoy their short ride right off the cliff, and the sudden, inevitable stop at the bottom.
(Original Poster for Thelma & Louise)
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For the record, the Senate’s “compromise” two month extension is actually a really bad deal. Which is why it got such broad bipartisan support. I was just pointing out the unending stupidity of the House GOP’s intransigence.
The Repeal of the Twentieth Century is Well Underway
The Republican party has officially embraced the repeal of the twentieth century as a party platform.
H/T to Crooks and Liars for the video
(quote below begins at about the 3:50 mark)“I think every person up here worked at a young age. What I suggested was kids ought to be able to work part-time in schools, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods…
If you take one half of the New York janitors, who are paid more than the teachers. An entry-level janitor gets paid twice as much as an entry-level teacher. You take half those janitors, you could give lots of poor kids a work experience in the cafeteria, in the school library, in the front office, in a lot of different things. I’ll stand by the idea young people ought to learn how to work. Middle class kids do it routinely, we should give poor kids the same chance to pursue happiness.”
Wild applause from the audience.
Let me remind you that we are just a few weeks away from January 1st, 2012, and yet one of the two major political parties in the United States of America is openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws that have been in place since 1938.
Laws that took over 100 years and immeasurable suffering to finally implement at the national level.
Laws that are in place to protect the human rights of children.
In Newt Gingrich’s America, poor children would once again have the opportunity to “pursue happiness” through exploitation and misery. Let’s take a little walk down memory lane for a moment and revisit the good ‘ol days when the poor children of America knew how to work.
(All photos and quotes are from The History Place – Child Labor in America. Fantastic website, go check it out.)
“Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and to put back the empty bobbins.
Bibb Mill No. 1. Macon, Georgia.”-Lewis Hine, Investigative Photographer for the National Child Labor Committee
What is it about poor people that Republicans find so offensive? Must be the tattered clothes.
“Some of the young knitters in London Hosiery Mills.
London, Tennessee”-Lewis Hine, Investigative Photographer for the National Child Labor Committee
Just look at that work ethic. Thank goodness these kids were allowed such valuable life experiences.
“Fish cutters at a canning company in Maine. Ages range from 7 to 12. They live near the factory. The 7-year-old boy in front, Byron Hamilton, has a badly cut finger but helps his brother regularly. Behind him is his brother George, age 11, who cut his finger half off while working. Ralph, on the left, displays his knife and also a badly cut finger. They and many youngsters said they were always cutting themselves. George earns a dollar some days usually 75 cents. Some of the others say they earn a dollar when they work all day. At times they start at 7 a.m. and work all day until midnight.”-Lewis Hine, Investigative Photographer for the National Child Labor Committee
What do those dirty poor kids need all those fingers for anyway? They’ll just waste their days away playing video games instead of learning how to work.
“View of the Ewen Breaker of the Pennsylvania Coal Co. The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrated the utmost recesses of the boys’ lungs. A kind of slave-driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding or kicking them into obedience.
South Pittston, Pennsylvania.”-Lewis Hine, Investigative Photographer for the National Child Labor Committee
Well someone has to keep the lazy little good-for-nothings busy. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop you know.
I could go on and on with this. The suffering of impoverished children is very well documented, and continues unabated in developing countries today.
According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 250 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labour worldwide, excluding child domestic labour. The United Nations and the International Labor Organization consider child labour exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that:
…States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. Although globally there is an estimated 250 million children working.
In the 1990s every country in the world except for Somalia and the United States became a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or CRC. Somalia eventually signed the convention in 2002; the delay of the signing was believed to been due to Somalia not having a government.
International corporations, with the support of the U.S. Government, have moved their manufacturing to these nation for this very reason. It’s cheaper for them to chew up and spit out powerless children then to exploit adults who might actually fight back.
Notice how Newt always goes back to those over-paid unionized janitors? The GOP believes that poor children should be made to work for pennies-on-the-dollar what we pay unionized adult labor in this country. They’re going after poor kids to undermine the last seventy years of established labor laws because their war on the middle class just isn’t destroying it fast enough.
Remember kids, the party of the rich doesn’t like how the New Deal worked out, and back in 1980 they decided they wanted a do-over.
They even have a twelve step plan.
- Deregulate the economy… Check
- Stagnate wages and funnel earnings to the wealthy… Check
- Cut taxes on the wealthy to run up the deficit… Check
- Gut the ability to unionize… Check
- Start an endless war to run up the deficit… Check
- Do away with basic constitutional rights in the name of “National Security”… Check
- Crash the economy and bail out the criminals responsible to run up the deficit… Check
- Use the enormous deficit as an excuse to destroy the Social Safety-net… Underway
- Use “National Security” laws to crack down on protest movements… Underway
- End all environmental and labor protections, including child labor laws… Pending
- Turn the U.S. into a tin-pot, third-world nation of cheap labor, segregated wealth, and rigged elections… Pending
- Corporate Profits… Always
And it’s well underway.
Defining Dickensian
In the spirit of the season, I’d like to pay homage to one of my favorite holiday tales.
Are there no poor houses? Are there no janitorial positions at the local schools?
There is truly no one in the leadership of the GOP who can pull off the “Insufferable Rich Asshole” bit quite like Newt Gingrich.
“Start with the following two facts: really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working, and have nobody around them who works. So literally they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of “I do this, and you give me cash.” Unless it’s illegal.
And so I come around to this question: You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money, they have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they came in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian? What if, and I’d pay them as early as is reasonable and practical. OK? What if you, and and let me get to the janitor thing. And I get, these letters are written that say janitorial work is really hard and really dangerous and it’s this and that. OK, fine. So what if they became assistant janitors, and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom? And you paid them?”
This is becoming a plank issue for Newt. He really wants to repeal the twentieth century… bad.
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My apologies to the incredible George C. Scott, who’s portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge will always be my favorite.
And Frank Said Unto The People…
“I think it’s really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It’s such an absurdity to take anything really seriously … I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what’s the story here? Being alive is so weird.”
-As quoted in No Commercial Potential : The Saga of Frank Zappa (1972) by David Walley, p. 4
“I think that if a person doesn’t feel cynical then they’re out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization, you can’t just swallow it whole.”
-The Dub Room Special (1982)
“I’m probably more famous for sitting on the toilet than for anything else that I do.”
-Interview on Nationwide (1 July 1983)
“Their stupidity does not amaze me, it’s when they’re smart that amazes me. It’s baffling whenever you find someone who’s smart — incredible. Soon you’ll have zoos for such things.”
-When asked what amazes him about people, in an interview with Grace Slick on Rockplace (11 February 1984)
“When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else.”
-Appearance on Thicke of the Night (28 April 1984)
“I have four children, and I want them to grow up in a country that has a working First Amendment.”
-Appearance on CBS Morning News (18 September 1985)
“The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else’s life.”
-In response to Joe Walsh on The Howard Stern Show (1987)
“The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn’t asked any questions.”
-Interview in Playboy (2 May 1993)
“Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?”
-Late Night Special BBC (1993); the American version this documentary was presented on A&E Biography
(Watch the whole series, it’s excellent)
“The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich.”
-”A Conversation With Frank Zappa” by Dave Rothman, in Oui (April 1979)
May you enjoy the blessings of Zappadan.
Behold… Gingrich The Destroyer!!
"...out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged... Gingrich"
The great white hope of the GOP (who’s not Mitt Romney).
I can’t help but think of the epic press release back in May following his MTP “right-wing social-engineering” comment…
As read by John Lithgow on The Colbert Report
Pure genius.
Crazed and Confused
Another ghost-written “memoir” from another right-wing clown…
That means another photoshop challenge!!
All too easy.
