Fraudlant Votes?

No. Not really. That's what the Republicans would have you believe they're preventing when they pass restrictive voter ID laws. The "sanctity of the political process" or "of the ballot box" or some other bullshit. Don't believe it for a second. These people want to restrict voters who are likely to vote for Democrats from doing so.  And now we've got proof positive. Check this out:

The Results Are In: A review of general, primary, special and municipal elections since 2000 – which involved over a billion ballots – found 31 instances of voter impersonations that would have been prevented by any of the new voter ID laws. Thank goodness the Republicans are protecting the sanctity of the vote from blacks and old people.

That, by the way, is .000000031 percent of the ballots cast in the U.S. in all elections for the last 14 years.

Vatican North

The UK is being rocked by a pedophile scandal of mammoth proportions and (of course) official complicity in covering up the crimes of highly placed individuals in British society and government. Here's a summary of events in the probe until now. Susan asked me if I had heard about this a couple of days ago. I had, but just barely. My guess is we're going to be hearing a lot more about this appalling business in the days ahead.

Vatican North: The UK establishment is apparently home to as many, if not more, pedophiles than the Roman Catholic Church, with an appalling concentration in Whitehall. The practice, concealed since the Thatcher government if not before, has been at best passively condoned by politicians and senior government officials. And the denial continues, with over 100 child abuse investigative files being 'missing from official records.' The current Education Secretary, continuing decades of cover ups, insists there is no need for a public inquiry into the cover-up or the crimes – especially in that investigation would show that Madame Thatcher's administration actively hid the crimes of MPs and peers. According to a former UK health minister, as early as 1992, government investigators were aware that “powerful people” used government run children's homes as a “supply line” for their victims.

The Cost of Doing Crooked Business

The cost is actually pretty low, if you're a crooked bank. Which is to say if you're a bank, although I'd really love to see some press on the honest bankers out there. Surely there are some. The point to remember here is that these fines don't mean diddly to these scumbags. They are simply the cost of doing business as usual, which is to say, keeping the world constantly on the brink of economic catastrophe.

Pocket Change to These People. Oughta be Putting the CEO's Asses in Stir

Random Stories

With the subtitle: Mostly bad news. The following headlines appeared in today's USA Today.

• Economy shows new signs of weakness -- Well, for the regular people,the 99 percent of us who don't inhabit the realms of unreality where there is no such thing as not enough money to do any damn thing you want, this is not a great surprise. In fact, I would argue that the so-called "recovery" has not arrived for most of those millions brought low by the recession. The real question is whether it ever will.
• Police: Boy's parents researched hot-car deaths -- A mom and dad in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, did some Internet research on child deaths inside of vehicles and the temperatures required for that to happen. Then the dad drives their 22-month old toddler to his job and leaves him locked in the SUV for 7 hours. The little boy died of hypothermia. The father claimed he "forgot" the kid was in the car. I don't know if there is a hell, but there ought to be. With a special place for people like this. 
• Critical need for primary care providers -- Bottom line is U.S. because of population growth, more aging people, and the Affordable Care Act is expected to need 52,000 more primary care physicians by 2025 and we're going to fall far short. There are a number of issues including funding for medical residencies, the rising cost of med school, more lucrative specialty care fields, and the scope of practice laws (states have been slow in allowing PAs and nurse practitioners to take over services traditionally provided by physicians.) I think the only thing this country is going to have more of by 2025 is idiots and poor people. Everything else, we're going to fall short.
• Ebola crisis now deadliest ever -- When does good news come out of Africa? The crisis in western Africa is the worst ever and it's threatening to spread. 400 dead already. This Ebola virus is deadly. Causes high fever, vomiting, muscle pain, diarrhea and can lead to massive internal bleeding and organ failure. It kills 90 percent of its victims. It's spread by simple contact with victim's (human or animal) fluids, tissues, or blood. Traditional African burial rituals, suspicion of foreign doctors, and just plain ole ignorance are not helping in the fight.
• Iraqi insurgents announce new Islamic state -- This Al-qaeda breakaway bunch (ISIL--Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant--they left because Al-qaeda wasn't radical enough) has overrun parts of Syria and northern Iraq. They say they are now a new Islamic caliphate. I guess we'll have to see, but another piece on the editorial page that asks "If the U.S. is going to re-engage, it should do so with the means to win." sends chills up my spine. Can anyone in their right mind think what we should do is get entangled in that shit again?

Sounds Just to Me

Read this story. Lemme give you the bare bones outline of it. Married man repeatedly sexually abuses his step-daughter for four years, starting when she is 12 years old. He goes to trial for the crimes and is sentenced. That's what this story is about. Now, without knowing another thing about it except that the defendant took a plea, what do you think the judge's sentence was? Most of you, I would hope, would think such a crime, even plea-bargained, would rate at least 10 years in jail. We're talking pedophilia here of the most loathsome kind.

Ten years, you say? You fool. What you don't know in this case are some salient details that change everything about justice for this beastly crime. The defendant was one Samuel Curtis Johnson III, a Wisconsin billionaire. Originally charged with a felony (sexual assualt on a minor) for his deeds, he ended up getting the charges reduced to a misdemeanor (fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct) after two trips to the state supreme court. And the judge, who cited the importance of the Johnson family in the community, sentenced him to four months in jail. He will be eligible to get out after two months.

You will please forgive me for not launching into a rant about the obvious here.

What Do You Think They Should Do to This Guy?

You know the guy I mean. The guy who kidnaps three girls, two of them teenagers at the time, the other like 20 years old, and keeps them for ten years as sex slaves locked up in his house in the middle of Cleveland, Ohio. His name is Ariel Castro. He rapes them repeatedly. Subjects them to beatings. Chains them up. Starves them and  beats 'em in the belly when he impregnates them so they will miscarry the child. (Doesn't succeed in one case because there is a little six-year-old girl that was born into this hellish nightmare.) They are allowed to leave the house maybe twice in all that time . . . to go into the yard and garage.

Ten years of these women's lives, their entire formative years in the case of two of them. It's just beggars the imagination. I'm a pacifist, trying my best to live the kind of life that Jesus did. I cannot suborn torturing or executing this monster, but these are the kinds of cases that severely test my Christian resolve. You just don't think--or rather, mainly feel--that somebody like this should escape some of the punishment he inflicted on these innocent girls. It not what we think he deserves.

There are not many people anywhere who would agree with me on this.

Related articles

• 3 captive women were raped and starved, 1 forced into miscarriages: police (globalnews.ca)
• The Ohio abductions: A decade of torment in the city of Cleveland (independent.co.uk)
• Three women freed after 10 years of capture (efgk5.wordpress.com)
  

Can You Believe It: Nixon Worse Than Previously Thought

First of all, you have to get past the notion that someone is vain enough to want to record everything they say. The first person that comes to mind, if you are aware of history at all, is Richard Nixon. All of us who are old enough remember the Watergate affair, and the key role that tape recordings of Nixon and his cronies' conversations in the White House had in bringing down the president. What I didn't know, and I suspect you didn't either, was that Nixon's predecessor in the Oval Office Lyndon Johnson also recorded himself in the midst of his duties. And it's because of these recordings that we now know Richard Nixon is a worse scumbag than we ever suspected. I mean, we knew that he was an evil guy, that his little engine of revenge and meanness never stop chugging. We know that he trampled all over the Constitution while  he was president.

But as this article shows, Nixon was up to his nefarious tricks before he was elected president. The gist of it is this: during the 1968 presidential campaign against Hubert Humphreys, Nixon through an intermediary tried to get the South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage the peace talks which had just begun in Paris, and which, according to the article, were off to a promising start. Nixon, who was promising a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war "with honor" during the campaign, did not want to see the peace talks succeeding or give Lyndon Johnson a chance to call another bombing halt. (Full disclosure: to my everlasting shame, I have to fess up to voting for Nixon in 1968 – still under the spell of my hyper conservative father, but that's no excuse – largely on the basis of this "secret plan" because like many American youth at the time, I loathed the Vietnam war and I wanted us out of there and just as soon as possible. This is still one of the great embarrassments in my life to have to admit this, but I can say with pride that I have not cast a ballot for a Republican ever since.) Long story short, LBJ found out about this and put kibosh on it, threatening Nixon with charges of treason for interfering in foreign affairs. Quite a gripping tale. All the details are in the story.

So if you didn't particularly like tricky Dick Nixon before, your feelings are going to be substantiated. and if you did like Dick Nixon before, no amount of truth about the scoundrel will probably change your mind.

Related articles

• Even the TradMedia Almost Admits It Now: Nixon Sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks (my.firedoglake.com)
• Nixon Prolonged Vietnam War for Political Gain - And Johnson Knew About It, Newly Unclassified Tapes Suggest (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)

When in Doubt . . .

. . . post a list. Here, verbatim from a site (blogger) called "Buffalo Beast" is the first five of fifty loathesome Americans. I cannot say I have any violent disagreement with this. Listed in reverse order. Fifth to first and worst.

5) Mitt Romney
Crimes: The Schrödinger’s cat of American politics, Mittens is simultaneously on both sides of every issue, and no one truly knows his position until he opens his mouth. He’s so incapable of honesty that he’s even lied about his own name. Morally dissonant, too, much of the seed money for Bain Capital — which made Mittens millions by gutting companies, killing jobs and raiding pensions — came from an El Salvadorian family that financed death squads in the ’80′s, but when it came time to do business with Artisan Entertainment, Romney refused because they produce R-rated movies. But what can you expect from a guy who purports to believe that Native Americans descended from Jews and hung out with Jesus, God lives on the planet Kolob, the devil invented coffee, and underwear can be magic. And he’s so damn white he makes Justin Bieber seem like Gil Scott-Heron.
Smoking Gun: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”


4) Jon Corzine
Crimes: As the Goldman CEO who made the firm public, Corzine scored an instant $400 million, and then spent $100 million becoming senator then governor of New Jersey. He managed the state so poorly that he floated the idea of privatizing the Turnpike, which sent New Jersey running into the fat arms of Chris Christie. Obama’s biggest Wall Street fundraiser reentered the world of high finance in 2010 as CEO of MF Global brokerage firm, where he repeated the shady dealings that led to the ’08 economic collapse — using a billion in client cash to cover insane gambles like some compulsive OTB degenerate raiding his child’s college fund.
Smoking Gun: “I never intended to break any rules.”


3) Grover Norquist
Crimes: Born with money and without decency, young Norquist got into politics as a Nixon campaign volunteer, and his filthy mitts have been picking the pockets of the poor and working class ever since. A coauthor of Gingrich’s Contract With America, and integral in designing the Bush tax cuts, Norquist is best known for his anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform — a member of the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (which crafts corporate-friendly legislation for state reps to pass off as their own). All but two Republicans in D.C. have signed Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which binds them through implied shaming and character assassination to never raise taxes on the rich, thus ensuring a return to a better time in America when children worked in coalmines, got black lung and died hungry without whining about it. Although complicit in the illegal schemes of swine like Oliver North, Jack Abramoff, and Tom Delay, Norquist’s naked duplicity is best summed up with his take on two recent tax issues: He was fine with raising payroll taxes, which would’ve hurt average Americans, but if Obama lets the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire, Norquist thinks he should be impeached.
Smoking Gun: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

2) Rupert Murdoch
Crimes: Who’d have thought that a country founded as a prison, and inhabited by the world’s deadliest snakes, could produce such venomous turpitude? News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal, wherein their Brit tabloids snooped the voice mail of celebs, royals, relatives of terrorism victims, and a missing girl (also erasing her messages and giving her family false hope that she was still alive), can safely be counted among Murdoch’s least offenses as the modern-day William Randolph Hearst. In fact, it’s probably the closest thing resembling journalism his media empire’s done in some time. Back in ’03 a Florida court unanimously ruled that FOX News has the legal right to lie, and, as evidenced by the profound ignorance of its viewership, they’ve since made Goebbels seem a small-time fibber  – beating the drums for war, reporting innuendo and racist opinion as fact, and subverting public understanding on every basic issue from Obama’s citizenship to man-made global warming. Fox News is no longer a propaganda arm for the Republican party; it’s the brain, fanning the flames of extremism, and exploiting white middle class prejudice to the point of economic cannibalism. And he’s ultimately responsible for subjecting you to the intolerable smarminess of Piers Morgan.
Smoking Gun: “I do not accept ultimate responsibility.”


1) David (and Charles) Koch
Crimes: Heirs to a fortune created largely by their John-Birch-crazy father’s oil deals with Stalin, the putrid fruit didn’t fall far from the hypocritical tree. The billionaire Kochs are still profiting from business with America’s enemies in Iran and, as the Tea Party’s sugar daddies, spending big to trump reason at home. Their cash and ideology can be found lurking behind nearly every “free market” think tank, anti-labor front group, global warming-denying sophist, and malfeasant politician hellbent on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps the most sinister Koch-bankrolled endeavor is the American Legislative Exchange Council. As mentioned above, ALEC drafts corporate-approved legislation for state representatives to introduce as their own. These model bills primarily focus on union busting, instituting discriminatory voter ID, and privatizing every state institution imaginable. There’s a multi-front war being waged on the middle class in which these guys are the generals. And in a fitting tribute to the disingenuous gods of irony, Koch scaremongering over socialism and wealth redistribution is subsidized in part by the American taxpayer.
Smoking Gun: “If I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’”

Now Here's What I'm Talking About

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday about the punishment of baseball cheaters, I want to share with you some thoughts from "Blackie" Black, a baseball blogger who lives and dies with the Seattle Mariners. He proposes some really tough penalties indeed, which means, of course, that they will never be given the time of day anywhere that matters.  

Many falsely believe that the doping era in major league baseball-which almost brought down the game- is over as the testing and penalties have cleaned up the game. Obviously, with Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colon failing drug tests and getting 50-game suspensions this week this premise is false. They consciously calculated that the risk was certainly worth the reward. And for making those calculations the punishment does not fit the crime. If baseball is serious about making our great game clean and fair forever then it is time for some stern and harsh disincentives.

Hence, I propose that the Oakland A’s must forfeit each and every game Colon pitched this year. The Giants should likewise have to forfeit every game in which Cabrera played. Commissioner Selig should award the American League the All-Star victory in which Cabrera was the MVP for the winning National League.

Individual sanctions are not working. There have been 76 suspensions this year under the minor league drug program. “Five players have been suspended this year under the big league drug program. San Francisco reliever Guillermo Mota was penalized 100 games in May following his second positive test and is eligible to return Aug. 28. Philadelphia infielder Freddy Galvis and free agent outfielder Marlon Byrd were suspended 50 games each in June.”

It's hard to disagree that there are still a lot of cheaters out there when this many of them are being caught. I think the situation in MLB is much better than it used to be, but I have no doubt at all that these two guys that got caught are only a small sample of ballplayers who are dodging the testing bullet successfully. Baseball needs to tighten the screws on cheaters and make damn sure that punishment for the crime actually fits it. Baseball is too precious a treasure to be sullied by the likes of these guys who don't care about the game but only their already ridiculously-stuffed wallets.

Related articles

• Time to declare 'WAR' on drug cheats like Bartolo Colon and Melky Cabrera? (thecheapseats.ca)
• To Baseball's Chagrin, Steroid Era Continues (nytimes.com)

Unsvelte Doper

Bartolo Colon: Cheating Ain't Just for GQ Types Anymore

See that guy above? He's Bartolo Colon, a pretty damn good pitcher for the Oakland A's of the American League. Two-time all-star and also winner of they Cy Young Award (the Oscar for pitchers) in 2005 when he pitched for the Los Angeles Angels. He's also the second guy in a week--the other guy was a San Francisco Giants outfielder named Melky Cabrera--to be caught cheating by using synthetic testosterone to boost his performance on the field. (See NYT story here.) Such substances along with a whole raft of performance-enhancing and human growth drugs are banned by major league baseball.  I'm sure the ethnicity of these guys is purely coincidental. Cheating is an international opportunity employer. But I personally am chagrined to see a fat guy get caught cheating. We pudgy types have few athletic heroes to look up to, and I have to confess, I'm delighted to see my compatriot more well-rounded guys doing well baseball. Colon was one of the last of these guys around.

Before they started paying players multi-millions of dollars, the game used to have more pudgy types. Now these guys are all cut and trim and usually muscular from the very expensive conditioning regimes and personal trainers they use. Doesn't mean I approve of what Cabrera and Colon have done. Hell, no! They are both suspended for 50 games. I think the penalty for cheating ought to be tougher, but as it is, it probably means the end of Colon's career, and it could possibly be the end of Cabrera's, too when his performance unenhanced by drugs gets down to the journeyman numbers he had before 2011-12 seasons when he was presumably doped.

Related articles

• Bartolo Colon's Suspension Makes It Hard to Believe Performance-Enhancing Drugs Are Out of Baseball (nesn.com)

The Cheater Is Not Guilty

. . . in the courtroom, that is. He is in every other way. Roger Clemens, former major league star pitcher, was found not guilty in what appears to be the last in a string of trials that arose out of the steroid scandal in baseball. The government had even less luck with Clemens than it did with the other marquee cheater Barry Bonds. This trial was about lying to Congress during testimony in 2005, but everybody knows the trial was really about steroid use in baseball. And looks like we're at the end of that road.

There are a billion news stories out there about the verdict. This one makes the points I would underscore. "Count Roger Clemens lucky for many reasons. First, he can afford a good attorney or attorneys. Second, the star witness was a clown. Third, Andy Pettitte’s recent amnesia. [First time around he heard his buddy Clemens say he used HGH; this time he said "he might have misunderstood" that. Yeah, right.] Lastly, the Government, or more specifically Attorney General Eric Holder, had inept lawyers." Surely all of this is true. The main witness against Clemens was a low-life character who claimed to have shot Clemens up numerous times. He was doubtless telling the truth, but he was easy to destroy in the hands of Clemens' smart, expensive lawyers.

I don't for one microsecond believe that Clemens didn't juice up like half of baseball was doing during the steroid era (roughly 1990 to 2005). The numbers he put up between the ages of 35-44 (1998-2007) defy belief, unless a guy is on the juice. But he walks, and now the papers are full of all these testimonials from other players about how somehow after this Clemens has a clean slate and calling for "moving on" and --a lot of them Yankees, which was the team Clemens pitched for during most of those last years in the game.

Anyway. There's no doubt Clemens is a cheater, and I trust the baseball writers who vote for the Hall of
Fame members keep his cheating butt out. He doesn't deserve the honor.

Related articles

• Tom Verducci: Despite verdict, Clemens still on trial in court of public opinion

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• Clemens juror: McNamee wasn't credible

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Santa and His Little Elves (An Early Christmas)

This is an accurate depiction of the state of US politics today.

 

 

 

 

 

This is the True America . . .

I present for your edification, if `have not already seen and been repulsed by them already, some samples of the voices of the true America. The one we like to pretend is not really out there, or that if we do admit it's out there, tend to minimize its size and significance. I have always contended, contrary to all the accepted American mythology we so love to rehearse at every opportunity, that the true a America is the one that's talking right here, the racist one with the killer's soul. Ever since Susan and I were talking politics a couple of years ago with a distinguished Oklahoma guy in a swimming pool at a quite nice house at a quite nice party, and the subject was the various ills of the country, and the solution this distinguished Oklahoma gentleman offered was: "First we have to get rid of this nigger president." Well, since then the looming meanness and violence at the heart of the true America has seemed all that more evident to me. So here are a couple of the latest bumper stickers you can plaster on your SUV:

You would proudly drive around with this on your car, right?

Or this?

This kind of thing is exhibit A as to the truth of my oft-repeated observation: we are a doomed country.

Related articles

• More than a bumper sticker (markhmiller.wordpress.com)
• Crazy Talk: 'Don't Re-Nig' Bumper Sticker (theroot.com)
• Our Lovely, Insane Country (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)

There Are Scumbags, & then There's Limbaugh

What words can I conjure up to commend that execrable wretch Rush Limbaugh to your detestation? I fear whatever they would be, they would prove inadequate. I don't need to rehearse what he's done. It's been in the news for several days now. I mean, what kind of creep gets on the radio and before millions of people brands somebody he doesn't even know a "slut" and a "prostitute." And then goes on to pile on one filthy insinuation after another about this woman? And apparently this rant of his went on for three days. And what did this lady do? She testified before a congressional committee in favor of contraceptives being available through government insurance programs. I don't need to rehearse for you why this is a sensible thing to do either.

I tell you over and over again . . . that we are a doomed people. More evidence of this is in the reaction of many in the Republican party, who refuse to condemn Limbaugh. And that includes the cast of remaining clowns still vying for the GOP presidential nomination.Thankfully, radio stations carrying his hate show and most important, sponsors, are jumping ship. I hope like hell this latest outrage by Limbaugh brings that sack of doo-doo down. This guy has been getting away with the vilest stuff for years. It's time decent people rise up and  shut his damned mouth.

Related articles

• Social Media And Rush Limbaugh's Donnybrook (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Colbert: Rush Limbaugh is a Prostitute Who Will Do Anything With His Mouth for Cash (crooksandliars.com)
• Is This the Lowest Limbaugh Can Go? (thedailybeast.com)
• Radio Stations Drop Limbaugh's Show Over Sandra Fluke Comments (huffingtonpost.com)

Out of Sync . . . Again

Joe Paterno died today. He had lung cancer for a while. He went in the hospital just a day or so ago. And he's not going to come out.

I was doing something very unusual for me today. I watching NFL football. Something I rarely do, unless it's the Saints. But yesterday, Susan and I watched both the AFC and NFC championship games (great ones, btw), and I told her I don't if I have ever in my life watched two NFL games in one day. And during both, the gushing of tributes for Paterno started. Just two thoughts. And I guarantee you, either of these thoughts, much less the two of them put me out of sync with the vast majority of the rest of this country. Which I seem to be most of the time.

First, what was this guy, anyway? He was a damned football coach, for Pete's sake . . . a football coach who held his job a long time. A guy who apparently had already been defied on the Penn State campus long ago. All kinds of stuff named after him, and a holy shrine on the campus for him where the vigil lights--just like for the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mary Immaculate in Catholic churches--now glow at his holy feet.

When prayers to Paterno cure the sick, he'll be sanctified a saint.

I repeat: this man was a football coach. He made no lasting or even temporary contribution to the history of western civilization. He's not leaving a building, a work of art, or even a recipe book behind him. His achievements, wins on the football field, bowl appearances, and so forth are like dust in the wind. Nobody remembers them. Which brings me to the second thought. I'm going to remember this guy, alright, and maybe others will, too. I'm going to remember him as somebody who suborned the practice of pedophilia by one of his longtime assistant coaches right there in his sports complex . He made a perfunctory report up the chain, but he did nothing else. Nothing. ("I wish I would have done more," he later said, after he had been outed. Well, no shit, dude!) He didn't confront the scumbag who was abusing children, much less fire his ass; he didn't press the school to investigate; he didn't follow up on his own report. What he did do was let the scumbag Sandusky continue to abuse kids. That's what "Joe Pa" means to me. I'll never forget him for that, just like I will never forget the hundreds of Catholic bishops who did the same exact thing with their vast collection of clerical scumbag pedophiles at the same time they posed as paragons of rectitude and arbiters of morality.

Update I: As expected, the media is overflowing today with bowing and scraping over Paterno. On Penn State campus there were a thousand candles and votive lights at the bronze shrine to the guy. Tears and lamentations.

Related articles

• Paterno's Fall From Grace (thedailybeast.com)
• Joe Paterno's No Martyr (thedailybeast.com)

Help Me, Will Ya? Like Hell! Bang Bang

. . . and you're dead. Here is the entry in Friday's USA Today for the news from Texas in the "Across the USA" section of the paper:

Arlington -- Arlington police spokeswoman Tiara Ellis Richard says a man who was fatally shot as he walked toward an SUV after a deadly wreck appears to have been a good Samaritan. The SUV driver, Thomas Lester Harper, is accused of causing the wreck that killed one motorist and also of shooting the man who approached to help. Harper is jailed on murder and intoxication manslaughter charges, plus two counts of child abandonment and endangerment, because his twin toddlers where with him in the SUV.

 There's a fuller story with lots of pictures here. (There's a TV news video at the bottom of this story.) Luckily the two toddlers, a little boy and girl, were only slightly injured. But the accident involved eight vehicles and the driver of one of them, a pickup that Harper rammed, was killed. The erstwhile good Samaritan was named Clarence Robinson. He was 19 years old.

Am I the only person who thinks about our idiotic gun policy in this country after something like this happens. Why did this maniac have a gun?  

Related articles

• Suspect, Victims Identified In Arlington Crash, Shooting (dfw.cbslocal.com)

DOH!

Okay, here's the scenario. Former CEO, current COO, and CFO of a multi-billion dollar brokerage firm sitting at a conference table before a congressional committee. Their corporation, MF Global Holdings, which is recently bankrupt, has lost $1.2 billion in money that belongs its clients, 36,000 of them. And none of these three bozos--one of them a former US senator, by the way--have any idea of what happened to that money. They were all like DOH! We don't have a clue; we wish we knew. And by the way, we're really sorry about this and we apologize to our [ripped off] customers. [Story here.]

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the bankruptcy. The company went under after it bought $6.3 billion worth of bonds from heavily indebted European countries. OK, for starters what kind of asinine investments are these? You want to own some of Greece's debt? Ireland's? Italy's? Are you kidding me? And second, I respectfully submit that these three guys are three lying sacks of shit. Is it credible that the top management of a brokerage house knows nothing about transactions in the company involving billions of dollars? Hell, no. What happened is the company used money from client's accounts, which is supposed to be kept sacrosanct and separate from the firm's own investment money, to cover its losses on the shaky European bonds. And they ain't about to 'fess up to this. But you watch. Truth will out, and these guys will all be shown up for the perjurers they are.

Rats on the Move

Hi! My name is Herman Cain and I didn't do it.

Out of the truly motley gaggle of people who are seeking the presidential nomination for the Republican party, none of whom can I possibly imagine in the White House, one has stood out as buffoon in chief. Admittedly a difficult choice for the title, nonetheless Herman Cain gets the honor. No need to recount the many reasons this guy won the title going away . . . well, maybe not going away because Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry were closely contesting the spot, rivaling Cain in the display of the unfathomable depths of their ignorance. Cain was busy doing this himself, but being ignorant is no bar to the presidency. He was kinda hanging on as a curiosity. The black Republican pizza king. That in itself was enough to keep the guy hanging around. But that was before a passel of cluster bombs fell on his head.

A couple of weeks ago, or was it longer? Doesn't matter. Cain was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women. These acts allegedly took place when he was the president of the National Restaurant Association. He has been dogged to death by these charges ever since. Nine-nine-nine has been bye-bye-bye. Till now all Cain has been doing is a pretty poor tap dance around these charges.

Now a nuke has been dropped. A woman in Atlanta named Ginger White has informed the world that she and Cain carried on an affair for the past thirteen years. The buffoon in chief has suddenly morphed into a big, scraggly rat. Do I need to tell you he denies the charge? And does it surprise you to learn that his campaign now reports that he is "reassessing" his run for the presidency. What are the odds do you think that he'll be in the race more than a couple of more days? He ducked a big shindig in NYC tonight with a bunch of media heavies, and reportedly a couple of his staffer rats are deserting the sinking ship and going over to the King Rat: Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich! Can anyone believe that this despicable clown is the best they can find? I have not mentioned Mitt Romney, whom you would think would be the beneficiary of all this, but it's apparent that there's a fairly determined segment of the GOP, not clear how big a segment, who cannot abide Romney. He's an oily, lying bastard who's changed his position on so many issues, he cannot remember where and what he said a week ago. So the beat goes on. Is there a woodwork candidate for the Republicans? Rats are all that's left in the daylight.

Related articles

• PPP surveys show Herman Cain's collapse is good news for Newt Gingrich (dailykos.com)

Quoting Kuntsler

The dust is finally settling, and I do hope I don't have to hit the road again till next year. I'm tired of traveling, tired of airplanes, airports, highways, and living out of a suitcase. We got back from Louisiana last Sunday. Our son Stu arrived about an hour before us, and he just left this morning after an all-too-short visit.

It's catch up time in a bunch of arenas, not the least of which is re-energizing this blog; I've been pretty spotty over the past week or so. And then there's all the blogs that have to be read . . . friends and relatives and my regulars. Of course, there's no way on God's green earth I keep up with all the blogs I dip into. There are few I read religiously, very few. James Kuntsler's "Clusterfuck Nation" is one of the exceptions to this rule (off the top of my head, I can think of only one other: "Baseball Time in Arlington" about the Rangers). Kuntsler and Matt Taibbi are writers who employ what I'd call the slashing style. No pussyfooting around with language niceties or foggy expression of their beliefs. And so Kuntsler begins his piece at the beginning of this month thus:

 Portents of winter and the toothless chatter of flag-draped traitors vies with a fog of lies spread by Koch Brother messenger boys, Reagan nostalgia hucksters, suck-ups in office, Murdoch empire servlings, Banker PR catamites, and Jesus terrorists to occupy the national mind-space with a narcotic Jell-O of half-formed wish fulfillment scams. The nation is hostage to a confederacy of racketeers. Banking. Big Pharma. The Higher Ed / Loan nexus. GMO agri-biz. Fast food. Mandatory motoring. You name it. What a disgrace we are, and the worst of us are the least to know that.

Is there a clearer expression of the calamity that is our current state of affairs than "hostage to a confederacy of racketeers?" Is there a stronger expression of condemnation of what we've become than "disgrace"?

His outrage at the Penn State sex scandal is near boundless. He begins "Rudderless" like this:

     The Penn State football sex scandal, and the depraved response of the university community at all levels, tells whatever you need to know about the spiritual condition of this floundering, rudderless, republic and its ignoble culture.

Correctly, trenchantly he interprets the hideous affair as a metaphor for America. And he's right on. He's revolted by every aspect of the scandal: "The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake moral and ethical culture is instructive. It has many levels . . . " from the cover-up by the university higher-ups to "the pretense that college football is a character-building endeavor." From "the phony 'prayer' session held in the Penn State stadium just before Saturday's 'big game' with the University of Nebraska" to the student demonstrations of support for Paterno and the football program to cable news wall-to-wall coverage of this event while several other earth-shaking events like the European debt crisis hardly got mentioned.

No, Kuntsler's not happy. He's angry and disgusted. Who can say these are unwarranted emotions? 

Related articles

• Cannot Resist (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)
• Straining at the Seams (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)
• Danny Groner: The Fall of False God Joe Paterno at Penn State (huffingtonpost.com)

Happy Valley

Scumbag Sandusky and enabler Paterno in happier times

I knew it at one time, but I was reminded by all the news out of Penn State of late that that campus is known as "Happy Valley." It's more than a little ironic, don't you think, that this latest mecca for pedophilia should bear such a nickname? I don't have to tell you the sordid details of the scandal that is engulfing the happy valley school with its sainted football coach. Seems the defensive coordinator there under Saint Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, sexually abused boys over a period of years, in some cases right there in the Penn State showers where he was seen on different occasions by members a clean-up crew and by a graduate assistant. Early reports say eight boys were victimized; the latest number I've heard is 20. And this is almost certainly too low. We veterans of the Catholic priest sex scandal know two irrefutable facts about pedophiles. They are serial offenders, and they don't stop abusing kids until they are caught. If you're talking years these slime balls are abusing kids before that, the victims can easily mount to over 50 or 60 kids or even more. (Chronology of the events leading to arrest of Sandusky here.)

What makes this thing so sordid is the same exact thing that happened with the Catholic church. Here the institution was a university and its squeaky clean football program and its squeaky clean legendary coach. But confronted with allegations that one of the football lights, Sandusky, had been caught sexually abusing children, the university covered the thing up and two of the college officials, including the Athletic Director, went on to perjure themselves before a grand jury in connection with this. And Saint Joe? Well, he was informed about this in 2002, and he reported it up the chain. And then . . . . does nothing. Doesn't confront Sandusky. Doesn't follow up on the report he made. Doesn't say anything when nothing happens in the case. And of course the higher ups don't do anything either.

WTF is wrong with these people? You have to wonder how much of this heinous behavior--the crime and the silence--is going on all over America. Is Penn State and the Catholic Church just the tip of a huge rancid iceberg?

Update I: The news Wednesday evening is that Paterno and the president of Penn State have both been fired. Good.

Related articles

• 'I'm Not the Football Coach': Paterno Fired from Penn State, Effective Immediately (time.com)
• The Penn State Scandal and the Loss of Faith in Institutions (news.firedoglake.com)
• Sandusky case links: USA Today compares Penn State to Catholic Church; Paul Posluszny, Dan Connor discuss scandal (pennlive.com)