The Truth Unmasked: House Panel Reduces Aid for Poor to Avoid "Defense" Cuts

Make no mistake...when assholes like Paul Ryan blabber on about "austerity" what they are really talking about is making the less fortunate pay so that the corporate welfare gravy train can continue rolling along. How else can you possibly explain this report from Bloomberg:

A U.S. House panel voted to cut spending on food stamps, health insurance and other aid for the poor to avoid planned cuts in defense spending.

(snip)

The spending reductions are triggered by a so-called supercommittee’s failure last year to come up with a plan to reduce the government’s $1.2 trillion budget deficit. About $55 billion would be subtracted from the Pentagon budget, with an equal amount from non-defense programs.

Also yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee unveiled plans to boost defense spending next year by $1 billion to $519 billion, with an additional $88.5 billion for the war in Afghanistan.

The Budget Committee’s measure would cut off food stamps to 1.8 million Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while reducing assistance to millions more. About 280,000 children would no longer be automatically eligible for free school lunches because they receive food stamps, according to CBO.

The bill would give states more ability to pare their Medicaid rolls and would end social services block grants, which fund programs such as Meals on Wheels for senior citizens. The bill would tighten rules on who may claim child-care tax credits in an effort to prevent aid from going to illegal immigrants.

It's an election year, and yet these fuckers apparently believe that they will not suffer at the polls from such a blatant attempt to keep enriching defense war contractors at the expense of the most vulnerable members of our society. And the really sick part is, they're probably right.


From my You Tube channel: "Ain't this new world a shame...I can't stop thinking that it doesn't have to be this way"

If Mitt Romney Had Given An Honest Answer To The "Treason" Question

There was more sound and fury reported from the presidential campaign yesterday designed to get liberals and progressives all hot and bothered after Romney declined to "correct" a dimwitted audience member who asserted that Obama should be tried for "treason." Here is Gawker with the details:

What do you do when your party's base is made up of scared old white people who believe that the president is a traitor? You never, ever, ever correct them, and you talk a lot about God. Take Mitt Romney's example!

"We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution," the audience member said to applause. "And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country."

Romney didn't correct the woman, choosing instead to address the question she posed.

"Well, as I'm sure you do, I happen to believe the Constitution was not just brilliant but probably inspired. I happen to believe the same thing about the Declaration of Independence," said Romney. "I would respect the different branches of government if I am fortunate enough to become president."

Romney later said that "of course" he doesn't believe that Barack Obama is a traitor: "I don't correct all of the questions that get asked of me." No, of course not.

Well, first off, the question is dumb because a president who is "operating outside the structure of the Constitution" is committing an impeachable offense, not treason. BIG difference.

Secondly, here is the answer Romney should have given to the question were he at all honest:

"Well, OF COURSE Obama has been operating outside of the structure of the Constitution, just as his predecessor did for nearly eight full years after 9/11 and just like I intend to do if I get elected this November. That's what the War on Terror is really all about. So sit your tired old ass down and STFU."

Pretty Hate Machine

For today's long post, I am proud to announce that I was asked by Kathleen Peine to be one of the inaugural guest writers at her new writer's website, Painted Fire. In the interest of introducing Kathleen's new site to the world, I beg your forgiveness and ask you to make one more click through to read it here: Pretty Hate Machine.

I imagine that I will also be contributing to Kathleen's site in the future.


Bonus:

Head like a hole
Black as your soul
I'd rather die than give you control
Bow down before the one you serve
You're going to get what you deserve

Why I Don’t Care About Voter ID Laws

We have reached the point in this country that the many distractions have become so numerous that most people don’t even recognize them as distractions anymore. Take, for example, one issue that always gets the liberals and progressives whipped into a raging froth: voter ID laws. Around the country, the Republicans have been passing these laws in a blatant attempt to keep down the numbers of minority and poor voters, thereby presumably suppressing Democratic vote totals at election time. How horrible, the thinking goes, that citizens are deprived of their basic Constitutional rights like this. How can such a thing happen in a representative democracy?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. But then again, “representative democracy” in this country has become a hollowed out façade, a farce that exists only to keep the gullible and the distracted from recognizing that America has in fact become an corporate oligarchy in which the concerns of average citizens matter not one bit, and the hardships facing the members of the underclass who are being disenfranchised by these laws count for even less.

Nothing so dramatically illustrates this point than the upcoming presidential election. I would challenge those who think this issue is at all important to make a reasonable argument that the lives of poor people will materially change in any way during the next four years as a result of this contest between two poodles who are bought-and-paid for by Wall Street. If Obama wins, he will just keep doing what he has been doing for the poor for the last four years: jack shit. Witness how he even allowed Acorn to be thrown under the bus after that organization, which WAS dedicated to helping underclass citizens, helped him win the 2008 election. And for obvious reasons, Romney would hardly be an improvement.

Until such time as the power of the big corporations and Wall Street to completely control the political process is broken, the battle over Voter ID laws will be yet another pointless distraction designed to keep people from recognizing what the real problem is, that all of us who are not millionaires or billionaires are in fact disenfranchised. And in this post-Citizens United dystopia of ours, I see zero chance of that changing any time soon.


Special Friday Morning Bonus: From my new You Tube channel, The Hangdogs sing perhaps the best song I've ever heard summing up our collective predicament:

Twenty floors up in a new high rise
They hate their boss, plot his demise
They play their stocks and their PR lies
And sip their whiskey sours

Down here we buy what they say we need
Play the quick pick five and the OTB
If we could trade in our debt for our dignity
We'd take back what was always ours

Well, the streetcar preacher says just have faith
Says Jesus coming back to take us home someday
But he's running short on time
And something left to save

Five U.S. Businesses That Ought To Be Ashamed Of Themselves

I can't really quibble with this article from AOL Daily Finance, especially since I've taken shots at several of these companies myself:

When a big company gains enough momentum that its direction becomes self-sustaining, its influence can ripple through society with a bevy of positive consequences -- like the creation of jobs, the spread of ideas, and a general improvement in living standards.

But capitalism -- like any other -ism -- is far from a perfect system. Along with a host of American companies that we should view with pride, there are a number that have created situations we think are downright evil. For exploitative behaviors that harm customers, employees, shareholders and the general public, these companies (and one whole industry) have earned their seats on the corporate netherworld's board of shame.

Details are at the link, but here are the shameful five:

5. Walmart

4. Goldman Sachs

3. Cigarette Industry

2. Chesapeake Energy

1. Monsanto

My only quibble is that I would place Nos. 4 and 5 at 1 and 2.


Bonus: A commodity that is in all too short supply these days

So, Willard Was An English Major

You really have hand to the wingnut conservatives. It seems like every time they come up with a certain mantra they can relentlessly repeat in the media in an attempt to thwart popular dissent in any given area, reality almost always seems to rear its ugly head and makes a mockery out of their words. Not that this cows them in any way, mind you. It's just that after it happens often enough you would think that even the movement's dimwitted followers would finally catch on that they are being conned.

As everyone knows, for the past year or so student loan debt and the inability of most recent college graduates to find good jobs has become a very prominent issue in the national conversation. The conservatives have tried to counter the public's growing concern that young adults are being systemically crippled financially before they even have a chance to get started in life by doing what they do so well: blaming the victim. One of the ways this is being done is to chide college students for studying "worthless" degrees like music, art, history, political science, communications, philosophy and English. Supposedly, it is the students' fault for being so daft as to enter a field of study for which there will be few jobs waiting for them when they graduate.

It's exactly the kind of line that sells really well with the selfish old fuckers who make up the majority of Republican Party's base--just another version of the "these kids today got no respect" bullshit that selfish old fuckers have been peddling ever since modern medicine advanced to the point where it allowed enough selfish younger people to live to become selfish old fuckers and affect the outcome of elections. It is, of course, absolute crap. Notwithstanding the fact that there IS value in studying for knowledge's sake rather than to earn a buck later, prior to 2008 the economy never had any trouble absorbing all of those art and liberal arts majors once they graduated. It was the economic crisis created by the greedy elite scumbags who run Wall Street and corporate America, not the students' choice of majors, that created this crisis.

So lo and behold, along comes the most unlikely poster child to prove that the conservative line blaming the students for choosing unprofitable majors is complete bullshit: former Massachusetts Governor and Wall Street titan Willard Mitt Romney himself. On Friday, at a speech at Otterbein University in Ohio, Romney not only admitted he was an English major, but advised English majors that their best option was to go to graduate school. So much for the ridiculous conservative notion that you can't make any money after studying in the liberal arts.

What Romney's example really shows, of course, is that it hardly matters WHAT you choose to study just so long as you are born with silver spoon shoved up your ass into a well connected family. Romney's success on Wall Street and in politics has nothing whatsoever to do with his college major and everything to do with the fact that his father was Chairman of the old American Motors Corporation, Governor of Michigan and a presidential cabinet secretary. In that regard, he is no different from President George Bush the Lesser, who may have been a business major, but actually was a "C" student, a draft dodger, a drunk, a coke head and an all around fuck up who kept getting second chances in life because of the family he was born into.

Nevertheless, I am fairly certain that this latest example of blatant hypocrisy won't slow down the conservative propaganda machine one damn bit. As long as there are plenty of selfish old fuckers out there who are happy to have someone tell them that they should not at all feel guilty about how young adults today are getting boned by a system that is now hopelessly broken, the bullshit will just keep piling up until one day it engulfs us all.


Bonus: They want more

Q: Is Marco Rubio Ineligible To Be Romney's VP? A: Who Gives A Damn?

Fellow blogger and all around irascible economic naysayer Karl Denninger put up a rather histrionic post this past Tuesday stating emphatically that Florida Senator Marco Rubio, currently considered among the front runners to be named by Willard Mitt Romney as his Vice Presidential candidate, is in fact not eligible for the office. Rather than me risking putting words in Karl's mouth, I'll let him tell you himself:

Folks, cut this crap out.

Really.

Here are the facts:

Rubio was born to two parents who were not citizens at the time of his birth. They were here in the country and he was born here, but his parents were not citizens at the time of his birth.

At a later date his parents became citizens of the United States.
Marco Rubio is ineligible to be President of the United States under the natural born citizen requirement. He is a citizen but will never be a natural born citizen as he was not at birth due to the Cuban citizenship of his parents and you cannot retroactively acquire natural born citizenship status.

He therefore must not be nominated as VP, since the primary qualification for that office is the ability to stand as President if something happens to the President while he is in office.

The Constitution's 12th Amendment specifically says:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

I know there are people who think the Constitution shouldn't read this way on natural born citizenship as a requirement for this office, but it does read this way AND IS WHAT IT IS.

If you want to change this the proper thing to do is to amend The Constitution before you run someone who is currently ineligible. Circumventing it as was done with Obama is wrong, no matter which party does it.

We've had enough lawlessness in this country at the top and we are way past the point where we should be tolerating it in any fashion, irrespective of whether you happen to like someone or not.

I am not going to recreate all of the bolding and italics Karl uses in his original post, and it actually reads a bit less hysterical without it. But you get the idea.

As for Denninger himself, I read his blog regularly even though I only agree with about half of what he says. He fascinates me not only because he has been sounding warnings about collapse since before the crash of 2008, but because I know of no other writer who can veer so wildly back and forth between being so spot on and being so spectacularly wrong--even sometimes within the same blog post. What Karl really is is a rabble-rouser, and the world can always use more of them to get people thinking, even if they have a spotty track record.

What is cute about this post is that despite five years or more of writing about how the country is going completely to hell thanks to the venality, avarice and greed of our government and business elites, Karl still seems to think the system can be saved if only we could get the right person into office. Since Karl is all freaked out about whether Marco Rubio is eligible to be Vice President or not, I thought I would take a moment to remind him of a little history.

First of all, and this is very obvious but I will state it anyway, the American people do not elect the president. The president is in fact chosen by the Electoral College, a tiny group of ironically unelected people that nobody knows who gather together a month and a half after the masturbatory November balloting and actually choose the President. Theoretically, the votes of the general public are supposed to be reflected in the Electoral College vote, but that doesn't always happen. In 1876 and 2000, the political system conspired using the Electoral College as an excuse to deny the candidate who polled the most votes nationally. If America truly had free and fair elections by majority (or at least plurality) rule, Samuel Tilden and Al Gore's busts would be lining the Hall of Presidents and Rutheford Hayes and George Bush the Lesser would be modern day trivia questions. Lawlessness in this country is nothing new, Karl. The elites have practiced it throughout this nation's history whenever they have seen fit.

But more importantly, in the grand scheme of things what difference does it really make whether Shrub Bush lost his election by half a million votes and was installed by judicial fiat, or whether President Hopey-Changey's birth certificate was forged, or whether Williard Romney's father was born in a Mormon polygamist's encampment in Mexico or whether Marco Rubio parents were U.S. citizens at the time of his birth? If the elites want those fuckers to be the President and/or Vice President, they will be nominated by one of the two major parties. And the big business, war and empire agenda will roll merrily along no matter which side wins.

But I saved Karl's most priceless line for last, and even left in the all caps and bolding this time:

THE RULE OF LAW MUST STAND ABOVE THE "DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS" OR THIS NATION IS NO LONGER A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.

America hasn't been a Constitutional Republic anywhere but on paper since at least the day Bush the Lesser was installed into office by the Supreme Court, and arguably much farther back than that. If that basic truth has not yet sunk in, Karl, then you are far more hopelessly naive than I would have taken you to be from reading your blog.


Bonus: "I don't wanna vote for your president...I just wanna be your tugboat captain"

Professional Trolling: Meet The 20-Somethings Who Dumb Down American Politics

Ever wonder why there seems to be such a steady stream of fresh bullshit pumped into our ever coarsening national political conversation? Well, thanks to two recent media exposes, the awful truth has been revealed. The Atlantic Wire has the sordid details:

They're as young as they are ruthless and they're the warriors who wage Washington's political battles. Opposition researchers have been around since the dawn of politics but today they're younger, more tech savvy and arguably more bloodthirsty. Today, ABC News and Roll Call each gained exclusive access to the Republican and Democratic war rooms, respectively. What they found was a sweatshop of 20-somethings spending all day looking for the next gaffe, non-gaffe, indiscretion, or closeted skeleton. Welcome to the dirty world of politics.

Who they are In Jake Tapper's tour inside the Republican National Committee's war room, you can see the fresh-faced youths in their 20s, trying to carve out a space for themselves in this competitive field. In Roll Call's tour of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's war room, you find the same age demographic of "mostly 20-somethings."

What they're looking for RNC chairman Reince Priebus says sifting through President Obama's speeches and looking for empty promises is step number one. "We've got a lot of speeches and a lot of material on him and we have to hold him accountable to the promises he made to the American people," Priebus tells Tapper. In terms of gaffe-watching, they'd like to find another Hilary Rosen moment to use against Democrats. For the Democrats' operation, Roll Call gets a lot of research details. "Do the candidates own any small businesses that accepted federal funds they voted against?" asks reporter Shira Toeplitz. "Start digging through the secretary of state’s archives. Do they have more than a few mortgages on their underwater home? A case for fiscal irresponsibility with the right documentation. Runs a construction business? Often there are lawsuits to be found." In one case, a researcher named Diana Asti found a diamond in the rough: A secret marriage. “My head just went in all different directions, like maybe they’ve divorced and he hasn’t paid alimony, or maybe he has a child and he hasn’t paid child support,” said the 23-year-old Democrat. "It was a very exciting moment.”

Weapons of choice While the Internet is key, old school shoe-leather work is still indispensable. The DCC uses a mix of "scouring news clips and YouTube videos and traveling across the country to comb through public records, all in hopes of finding a good hit," reports Roll Call. "Discoveries go into hundred-page research books on their targets that are used as bait to recruit candidates, leaked to reporters or cited in campaign advertisements and mail pieces." For the GOP, Prieubus stressed technology tools. "We - 24/7 - monitor print news, online news, TV, radio, Twitter, Facebook," said Spicer. We try to capture everything that's going on in real time so that we know what's happening ... and we're able to respond within seconds."

Work hours At the DCCC, hit squads search for eight weeks at a time and then break. The team of 20-somethings at the RNC, meanwhile are running a 24/hour operation. According to officials speaking to Tapper, they used to allow the researchers a break at 3 a.m. but now they don't stop scanning videos and news clips for anything. "Oh my God it looks like North Korea in here," Tapper remarked.

What is particularly notable about this story is that none of "reporters" involved seem at all perturbed that the national news media spends countless hours every week obsessing over the slime that these soulless cretins exhaust themselves digging up. Right here, a rock has been overturned and the little maggots who are doing so much to drive us towards our collective doom are being exposed for all the world to see. Of course, the dumbass spin to these stories is that it is all a legitimate part of the political process rather than a hideous abomination helping to ensure that it will be impossible to ever build a consensus to address the many dire issues we face as a nation.

What is truly sad is that these brainwashed kids of both political parties really believe that they are doing a service for their cause and helping to vanquish their opponents. They have absolutely no inkling that they are really just cogs in a gigantic machine owned and operated by the elites designed to distract addle-brained Americans and provide them with the illusion that they still have a real choice when they go into the voting booth. These 20-something twits provide the hateful grist so beloved by the preening freaks and charlatans who occupy the Hologram. If you were looking for a truly Americanized version of the banality of evil, you need look no further than this.

I particularly like clueless hack Jake Tapper's line at the end of the article about how the operation he is visiting "looks like North Korea." Given that America has already essentially become a one party state in which both Republicans and Democrats first and foremost serve the interests of the tiny billionaire elite over over a mass of citizens who are being gradually impoverished in order to maintain a corrupt, undemocratic status quo, he is far more correct in that assertion than he realizes.


Bonus: "In these days of evil presidentes...Working for the clampdown...But lately one or two has fully paid their due...For working for the clampdown"

Are Romney Supporters Smarter Than Obama Supporters?

I have stated repeatedly on this blog that anyone who is not a millionaire or a billionaire who donates money to one of the presidential candidates is seriously delusional at best.  As I pointed out in last Friday's rant, each campaign is expected to raise over (cue Dr. Evil) one BEEEELION dollars, most of it from the fat cat donors who completely own the election process and the two major candidates being put up to give the laughable illusion of "choice."  So far, as you can see by the two charts above that were posted Friday on Buzzfeed, non-wealthy potential Romney voters appear to be more realistic about the fact that he does not support their interests than non-wealthy Obama voters.

There was not an article to go with these charts, just a comment from the blogger who posted them:

March fundraising report shows Romney even more dependent on wealthy donors than Barack Obama and George W. Bush in 2004. Can he fire up the base?

Actually, considering that his "base" is Wall Street and the faction of the corporate elite who support the Republican Party, he already has.  Those tiny donations from the delusional little people do not actually even amount to a rounding error in the fundraising for either campaign. Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that supporting one of the major party candidates is preferable to supporting the other one, just that early on rank-and-file Romney supporters seem to be suffering from fewer delusions about their guy--or maybe they just hate him for being the Mormon former gubbner of Taxachusetts.


Bonus: A commenter on Friday suggested that I could have used this song then...so here it is

Friday Rant: Billion Dollar Men

Return with me now to the year 1972. That was quite a tumultuous time in America. The Vietnam War was winding down, a controversial new sitcom named All in the Family topped the Neilson ratings and had tongues wagging around water coolers all across the nation, a young filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola scored his first big success with The Godfather, starring a young, unknown actor named Al Pacino…oh, and incumbent President Richard Nixon scandalized the nation by raising the then-unprecedented sum of $40 million for his reelection campaign, much of it from wealthy, fat cat donors.

Nixon, of course, got into hot water not so much for the obscene amounts of money his campaign raised that year but because his operatives used a portion of the dough to finance a succession of dirty tricks, including the Watergate break in, that ultimately resulted in his resignation in 1974. That same year in the wake of the scandal, Congress created the Federal Election Commission and placed a hard cap on the amount of money individual donors could give to campaigns. With periodic tweaking, the 1974 campaign finance measures remained the law of the land until the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively eliminated any limits on campaign donations and turned the clock back on 40 years of earnest but ultimately doomed attempts to eliminate the effects of big money on politics.

And now, during this first post-Citizens United election cycle we are already seeing the effects of the court’s ruling as the two major party candidates are engaging in a Romanesque orgy of fundraising that would have made even old Tricky Dick blush. Here is the Atlantic Wire with the story:

Mitt Romney's campaign has set a fundraising target of $800 million for this election cycle, setting up a race with President Obama that could see each side spending more than $1 billion by November. It also guarantees that, for the first time in a generation, neither candidate will accept public financing for their campaign.

The new "Romney Victory" fund — which we first mentioned yesterday — is a collaboration between the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee that, according to The New York Times, hopes to raise $500 million in donations from big-spending donors and "bundlers." They also hope to gain another $300 million in smaller contributions directly to the campaign. Add in another $200 million in Super PAC money (which is technically independent of the Republican effort, but will be spent by outside groups opposed to the President) and that could mean more than $1 billion spent in an effort to unseat the incumbent.

Of course, they have their work cut out for them. Romney, who had to fight a primary challenge against a large field of fellow Republicans, has "only" raised about $86 million so far. More money will certainly flow to him as the general election heats up and those who have been willing to support him so far latch on to the nominee. But President Obama has already raised around $350 million for his efforts, most of which has been sitting and waiting for an opponent that he can bury under it. He raised $53 million in March and he hasn't even really started campaigning yet. Considering that he raised $750 million in 2008, despite splitting Democratic support in a bitter primary fight himself, another billion from his side is also pretty likely.

No matter which side wins the money war, there's no doubt that this will be the most expensive presidential campaign of all time, dwarfing the races from even just four years. In that race, the two nominees — Obama and John McCain — set records by breaking the $1 billion mark between them, but that sum is no longer enough for even one candidate. And that doesn't even begin to account for the outside money that will also flood airwaves this fall. The totals have become so staggering that they almost defy complaints from those who wish to see someone put the brakes on money in politics. With so much being spent and seemingly no hope for reform, Americans may just have to resign themselves the fact that the money game is impossible to beat.

I never thought I would ever say this, but I agree completely with the Atlantic Wire on this one. The fact is that Americans DO need to resign themselves to the fact that the money game is impossible to beat. The only way Citizens United could be overturned is with a Constitutional Amendment, and that has zero chance of happening in a political environment in which no measure that does not have at least 61% support needed to end a filibuster has any chance of getting past the hopelessly gridlocked Senate. And even if it somehow managed to squeak through the two houses, it would still need 75% of the state legislatures to pass it in order for it to be adopted. I have about as much chance of landing a date with Megan Fox as that does ever happening.

The first takeaway lesson from all of this for the average American is that they should never, ever donate money to a political campaign. A puny $100 or even $1000 check will buy you exactly ZERO influence when there are billions of dollars at stake. How much harder do they need to hit the voters over the fucking head before they finally recognize the truth? Save that cash, or give it to a worthy charity if you must. Heck, buy a copy of my book. I swear I’ll only spend the proceeds on beer, which is a promise far more likely to be kept than anything which will emit from Obama or Romney’s pie holes during the course of the campaign.

The second lesson should be perfectly obvious and I’ve said it here many times, but I’m going to say it again because so few people have gotten it through their think skulls. The millionaires and the billionaires now own the political process lock, stock and barrel. Yes, the votes are still tallied up on Election Day, and with the exception of a few hanging chads or Diebold shenanigans, the candidate with the majority or a plurality of them usually wins. The problem is that it no longer matters regarding any issue of real importance who the winning candidate is. The game is completely rigged in the nomination process of the two major parties. The general election is nothing but an elaborate stage show put on for benefit of the partisan zealots, the hopelessly naive and the utterly distracted, who between them constitute the overwhelming majority of the voting public.

It is too early to say for sure how this election is going to shake out, but here is one prediction I will make with 100% confidence. On January 20, 2013, the president-elect will raise his right hand and take the oath of office with every intention of serving the interests of the wealthy elites who put him there over the interests of the tens of millions of voters who stupidly cast their ballots for him. The only thing we do not know for certain yet is which of the two major candidates will be the one who sells the rest of us down the fucking river for four more grueling years.


Bonus: Forgive me, but this song is too perfect NOT to use here

Toxic Wasteland

Welcome to modern day America, where our politics is as toxic as the air we breathe, and the water we drink and the soil in which we plant our crops. It is the playground of unaccountable billionaires, who throw their wads of cash around as they please, buying the political process to ensure they make even more money--long term damage to the environment and the body politic be damned. Here is Common Dreams with the story:

A toxic waste disposal site owned by Texas billionaire Harold Simmons -- one of the GOP's largest donors in the 2012 primary season, and the largest single donor to Karl Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads -- has environmentalists, and at least one Texas state representative, very concerned over the risk of transporting huge quantities of hazardous material across the state and what impact the waste itself could have on groundwater supplies once it arrives.

If Simmons gets his way, toxic materials -- including medical waste, low-level radiated materials, and even depleted uranium -- from up to thirty-six states could end up at the Texas Compact Disposal Facility in remote west Texas.

"Texas is going to become a nuclear waste dump if everything happens under their plans," state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "We will be the major route for nuclear waste."

"We continue to have concerns about the site itself and whether or not there is enough protection ... and whether there will be contamination of the water," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the statewide SEED Coalition environmental group, according to the Star-Telegram report. "Once radioactivity gets into groundwater, it's a difficult thing to clean up and it can get into the millions and billions of dollars."

Simmons has invested huge sums into the political process in hopes that he can ease regulations on the dumping of nuclear and other toxic wastes. “Whatever federal switch has to be thrown to get uranium into the hole, believe me, it will be thrown; that’s how Harold Simmons works,” Glenn Lewis, a former Texas environmental employee who retired in protest over Simmons’s influence-peddling, told Bloomberg news recently.

Simmons has been outspoken about his disdain for the President Obama, and he has spread his large political contributions relatively evenly among the GOP contenders. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” Simmons told the Wall Street Journal recently. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive.”

I would be inclined to argue that it is billionaire asshole Harold Simmons who is actually "the most dangerous American alive," except that he is in fierce competition with most of the other members of his class. I've often said that the truly regrettable thing about Obama is that he is NOT in any way, shape or form the "socialist," so many of his political enemies claim that he is. For if he were, those of Harold Simmons's ilk would have a LEGITIMATE reason to hate him as they do.

The sad part is that liberals and progressives will read his vitriol against Obama, and it will make them more apt to rally behind a President who has sold them out every step of the way. America is governed by two elite factions who compete against one another, and their battles for supremacy are very real to them. But for the rest of us they are a largely meaningless spectacle designed to distract the masses every four years and perpetuate the lie that we still live in a representative democracy.

Does anyone really doubt that Simmons will ultimately get his way regardless of who wins the White House this November? That is the real fallacy of the illusion of choice when people go to the polls. Liberals and progressives may think that if they dutifully line up behind President Hopey-Changey despite their previous disappointments, they are helping to thwart the ambitions of odious cretins like Harold Simmons. Then, two years after his next inauguration when Simmons's radioactive waste disposal operation is going full throttle anyway, they will all stand around scratching their heads wondering what the hell happened.

Welcome, my friends, to the toxic wasteland.


Bonus: The Great Atomic Power

Leon Panetta's Weekend Commutes Cost As Much As That GSA Party

Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on those Las Vegas partiers at the GSA. After all, the Secretary of Defense has been blatantly wasting taxpayer money for his own personal convenience as well. Atlantic Wire has the details:

That Leon Panetta has spent an incredible $860,000 to fly between his day job in Washington and his home in Northern California since taking office may not exactly be his fault, but even the thrifty secretary of defense himself this week can't help but notice the irony of that flight bill. Today, the airfare bill is even getting compared to the Government Services Administration's now infamous Las Vegas bender.

A brief rundown of the controversy: Earlier in April, the AP revealed that the secretary of defense, pushing to get the military to stop spending money like it's still the Cold War, billed the government $32,000 per private flight home since taking office in July, reimbursing the government only $632 for each, an amount dictated by law. Now, Panetta had no choice but to fly on the government's dime, if he wanted his weekends home. "No one understands the budget pressures on the Pentagon better than Secretary Panetta," a Defense spokesperson defensively noted. "As a required-use traveler, he must use government aircraft for all travel." But this Monday, Panetta had his hat in hand, saying he regretted the burden the trips put on taxpayers. And in a comparison of ironies, Foreign Policy notes today that $860,000 is only $28,000 more than the clown-filled Vegas conference for the GSA, an agency tasked with curtailing spending.

But really, Panetta and his flights aren't worthy of the ire of GSA's party. "I’ve gone home because my wife and family are there and because, frankly, I think it’s healthy to get out of Washington periodically just to get your mind straight and your perspective straight," Panetta explained to reporters Monday. We want our family-man military chief to be happy, too. As Time's Mark Thompson puts it, "It is a grueling, relentless job. If Panetta wants to jet off to his California walnut farm to tend to a different kind of nut than those he has to deal with daily in the capital, he should."

But ultimately, the flights are for personal use and not business, so we do have a modest request, Secretary Panetta: as you look for ways to cut military spending, consider your flight bill. If not for taxpayers, then just for the sake of good optics as you push more significant spending cuts elsewhere.

I've got a better idea...why not have Secretary Panetta MOVE HIS FUCKING FAMILY TO WASHINGTON, like any other government official has to do. Or better yet, if he wants to be with them so goddam badly, let the fucker resign. It's not as if there aren't another couple of dozen or so completely amoral high ranking assholes who wouldn't take the fucking job in a minute if he stepped down. We have have a trillion-and-a-half dollar annual federal budget deficit that is actually the gravest national security risk we face. SOMEBODY has to make fucking sacrifices, and it might as well start with the guy who heads the fucking war machine.


Bonus: This sounds like an idea that's actually long overdue

Assholocracy Porn: "I Have Very Little Tolerance For People With Student Loan Debt"

Awhile back, I adopted the phrase "assholocracy" for use as a tag here at TDS, and since then I have already used it on an incredible 52 different posts. Back in the 1970s glory days of Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine, he used to have a regular feature called "Asshole of the Month" (and yes, I only read that particular publication for the articles....really). Not having picked up an issue in more than 20 years, I don't know if Flynt is still running that always amusing feature, but if he is I would humbly suggest that for April 2012, he consider making it cretinous North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx. Here is the Raw Story with the details:

If someone is looking for sympathy for their high student loans, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) would not be among those providing any support.

According to audio obtained by Think Progress, the congresswoman appeared on G. Gordon Libby show Friday afternoon, saying she “never borrowed a dime of money” during her time in college before lashing out at those burdened with heavy loans.

“I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that,” Foxx said. “We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that.”

Despite her disgust for high student loans, Foxx is somehow content with high mortgage notes. Think Progress reported that Foxx owed two individual notes up to $250,000.

Here are a few fun facts that Representative Foxx might want to consider before ever again opening her big fat fucking yap about student loans. According to her Wikipedia page, old battle axe Foxx was born in 1943, which means she would have graduated college around 1965 or so. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average cost for one year of undergraduate tuition, room and board at a public university in 1965 was: $950. By 2007 (the last year for which statistics were available from the NCES), tuition, room and board had risen to a whopping $11,034. At private schools, tuition had risen from $1,907 to $28,384. What's even worse is that since 2007 many public universities have have imposed large tuition hikes on students as cash-strapped state governments have cut back funding.

So it doesn't take a whole lot of fucking imagination to understand how graduates are being burdened with such impossibly huge student loan debts and at a time when there are few good paying jobs with decent benefits waiting for them when they graduate. Unless you are addle-brained asshole North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx that is.

Addendum: But wait, it gets worse. Right after I wrote this post, I came across another article in Salon about Virginia Foxx, who is not only an asshole, but a fucking hypocrite as well:

Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a bill with the impressive, everybody-can-get-behind-this title “Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act.” Sponsored by the ultra-conservative North Carolina Republican Virginia Foxx, the bill ostensibly took aim at an issue close to small-government-loving hearts: intrusive federal regulation of for-profit colleges — fast growing, highly profitable outfits like DeVry University or the online-only University of Phoenix.

Like so many of the bills passed by the House since Republicans gained the majority in the 2010 midterm elections, the bill was designed to repeal specific actions taken by the Obama administration. In this case, the issue at hand was the Obama administration’s efforts to ensure greater “program integrity” in the for-profit educational sector. Specifically, a new federal definition of what constitutes a legitimate academic “credit hour” and a new requirement that all online providers of post-secondary education be accredited in each and every state in which they do business.

Foxx’s bill repealed both measures. (The Senate has yet to address the measure.) According to Foxx, the new federal regulations threatened “innovation” in the educational sector. As reported by InsideHigherEducation, Foxx is on record as declaring that for-profit colleges do a “a better job of being mindful about efficiency and effectiveness than their nonprofit peers.” By, for example, flexibly providing online education when and where low-income working Americans want it, the for-profit free market delivers the kind of quality higher education that Americans so desperately need. The government should just stay out of their business.

I stumbled upon this story while researching the student loan crisis and at first I was perplexed. I didn’t understand why Republicans were opposed to higher academic standards for the for-profit sector, and I didn’t get the connection to student loans. But it didn’t take much research to discover what was really going on: an example of blatant hypocrisy sufficient to outrage even the most jaded observer of American politics.

The for-profit educational sector is an industry almost entirely subsidized by the federal government. Around 70-80 percent of for-profit revenues are generated by federal student loans. At the same time, judging by sky-high dropout rates, the for-profit schools do a terrible job of educating students. The Obama administration’s efforts to define a credit hour and require state accreditation were motivated by a very understandable desire: to ensure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth when federal cash pays for a student’s education. In contrast, Foxx’s legislation is designed to remove that taxpayer protection. So here’s a more accurate title for her bill: “The Protecting the Freedom of For-Profit Schools to Suck off the Government Teat Without Any Accountability Whatsoever Act.”

The for-profit educational sector has been growing extraordinarily rapidly for the past decade: 12 percent of all post-secondary students are now enrolled in for-profit schools, up from 3 percent 10 years ago. But the main beneficiaries of the growth appear to be the shareholders and executives of the largest publicly traded for-profit schools, not the students.

In 2008, for-profit schools registered a a graduation rate of 22 percent. (Public and private non-profits registered 55 percent and 65 percent respectively.)

54 percent of the students who enrolled in 2008-2009 in 14 publicly traded for-profit schools had withdrawn without a degree by 2010.

The biggest player in the for-profit sector, the University of Phoenix, graduated only 9 percent of its B.A. candidates within six years.

The pathetic performance of the for-profit sector in delivering actual degrees becomes all the more alarming when you realize that most of the students who are dropping out paid for their educations with student loans that have to be paid back: According to a report released in the summer of 2010 by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, “Emerging Risk?: An Overview of Growth, Spending, Student Debt and Unanswered Questions in For-Profit Higher Education,” in 2009, the five largest for-profit schools reported that government grants and loans accounted for 77.4 percent of their revenue.

Really, North Carolina, on this blog I have facetiously asked, what's the matter with a lot of different states, but you really have some 'splaining to do as to how you managed to elect someone as purely odious as Representative Virginia Foxx.


Bonus: "But you say that we're the assholes...because we bitched about the hassles...while you're sleeping in your castle"

Crazy Ass Representative Allen West Channels "Tail Gunner Joe"

It was just a tad over 62 years ago in February 1950 when an obscure, back bencher Republican Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy first rose to national prominence by proclaiming in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. Given that the Cold War has been over for more than two decades and that Communism is effectively dead worldwide save for isolated pockets like North Korea and Cuba, one would think that there would be no way a politician looking to score political points would be able to go down that long closed road. If so, one is obviously not familiar with the particular craziness which inhabits the addled mind of crazy ass Representative Allen West of Florida. Here is the Palm Beach Post News with the details:

U.S. Rep. Allen West told about 90 largely supportive Palm City voters Tuesday that locally prioritized federal projects — such as the St. Lucie Inlet dredging — aren't going to matter if Washington officials don't address a mounting deficit.

Later Tuesday evening, a Jensen Beach crowd of 100 with more than 15 protesters greeted the congressman with mixed support, cheers and jeers.

The conservative tea party icon also got in shots at Democrats and President Obama, who spoke Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University. West said Obama was "scared" to have a discussion with him. He later said "he's heard" up to 80 U.S. House Democrats are Communist Party members, but wouldn't name names.

What is it with these lunatic far right Republicans? First it was dingbat Representative Michelle Bachman prattling on about the Soviet Union during her ill-fated presidential campaign and now this. Could it be that they have come to realize that the Islamophobia-terrorism dog isn't hunting anymore as far as scaring the voters into blindly supporting militarism and gigantic Pentagon budgets goes, and they are nostalgic for a bygone era when America at least had a plausibly dangerous foreign enemy? Yeah, that must be it.


Bonus: "Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are...Ha ha ha bless your soul...You really think you're in control...Well, I think you're crazy"

Federal Funds For Retraining The Unemployed This Year $1 Billion Less Than In 2000

Given that it was supposed to combat the worst effects of the Great Recession, one might have assumed that there would have been a provision in President Obama's $700 billion boondoggle Recovery Act to increase the amount spent on job retraining programs for the unemployed. Shockingly, or perhaps not-so-shockingly given what a colossal waste of taxpayer funds the Recovery Act really was, that was actually not the case. Here is Bloomberg Businessweek with the story:

Federal funds to retrain Americans who’ve lost their jobs are drying up. Many job seekers who show up at career centers to request courses in such growing fields as computers or nursing are being turned away because money for that training has already been spent, the New York Times notes.

The U.S. spends nearly a billion dollars less on retraining the unemployed than it did in 2000, when the unemployment rate was 4 percent. Last year the government spent about $1.2 billion, compared with $2.1 billion in 2000.

Whether there will be a new influx of cash depends on congressional budget wrangling. In his latest budget, President Barack Obama proposed an additional $2.8 billion for job training. The National League of Cities says the recent budget proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would severely reduce that funding. Ryan says he’s only streamlining and improving programs that “overlap, lack clarity and accountability, and fail to meet the challenges workers face.”

If there is anything worse than a blow dried little asshole Randian politician, it's a blowdried little asshole Randian politician who is too afraid to even be honest and say that he favors such budget cutting because he is a devotee of a crazy old hag who went on the dole herself in the years just before she mercifully relieved us of her malevolent presence. Instead he has to make up a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap to try and justify his Social Darwinism.

There is a much better reason than just being a selfish asshole to oppose President Hopey-Changey's desire to just throw more money at the problem, and the article actually goes on to make it:

Although the separate budget proposals reflect ideological differences, it’s also very difficult to figure out how much it’s worth spending on programs with a value that’s hard to prove. Even the most effective retraining programs face a huge problem: You can’t retrain people for jobs that don’t exist. And right now, the number of people seeking employment is greater than the number of available jobs. That isn’t likely to change soon, either: As the Wall Street Journal reported today, most of the new hires by S&P 500 companies since the recession have been outside the U.S.

Bingo...give that business reporter a cigar for not buying into the the "jobs recovery" hype. My colleague Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire actually did a post this past Monday about the lack of good paying jobs being created during this "recovery." The key factoid from that post is that more than 55 percent of new jobs added in the past six months have been in the retail, temp, "health care and social assistance" and "leisure and hospitality" sectors. In other words, menial jobs that do not require a great deal of training. In such an economy, Obama could increase the budget for job retraining tenfold and it would likely make very little difference. Not only that, federally subsidized retraining places those who complete it into direct competition for jobs with young adults just entering the workforce and who received no such federal help.

But ultimately, this is the biggest argument against federally subsidized retraining:

To Safeway, the retrained applicants are better candidates. In essence, the government is paying for training that Safeway would otherwise have to provide.

Many of the most “successful” retraining programs work in just this fashion, as a January report from the Government Accountability Office points out. A local employer works closely with the career center to tailor the retraining exactly to their needs. In return, the employer all but promises to hire the workers. That helps officials make their numbers look good, too. The only question is where the money will come from to pay for it.

That's right...the federal subsidies ultimately serve to fatten the bottom line of the corporations. They are, in fact, just another form of corporate welfare, and one we can ill afford at a time of trillion dollar plus federal budget deficits. If the companies need new employees, let their CEOS receive a few million dollars less to blow on solid gold backscratchers.


Bonus: Because with Obama, hope is like the rain

Willard Mitt Romney: The First “Citizens United” Candidate

It’s all over but the shouting in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Former Massachusetts Governor Willard Mitt Romney, who entered the presidential primary season as the favorite, has effectively secured the nomination despite the fact that he is very much loathed by a substantial portion of the party’s fundamentalist conservative base. For nearly a year, the right wingers thrashed around, desperately searching for a standard bearer, ultimately cycling through a motley lineup of alternatives—Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and finally, Rick Santorum—only to watch each one implode as they demonstrated their laughable unelectability.

The final result should not be surprising to anyone who has been paying close attention to American politics ever since the Supreme Court’s unfortunate Citizen’s United decision in 2010 effectively removed all limits on corporate campaign contributions and handed total control of the nomination process to the big money boys. Despite a couple of rogue billionaires who breathed life into the flailing Gingrich and Santorum campaigns, giving each the resources to score momentary primary victories and prolong the process, Romney was Wall Street’s guy from the very beginning. In the end, he was able to use his deep well of financial support to utterly obliterate the other contenders.

What was particularly striking about this campaign was how, given the strength of the “Anybody but Willard” sentiment within the party, no conservative challenger of any real stature stepped forward to challenge Romney in the first place. Most glaringly notable by her absence was of course the former Governor of Alaska, one Sarah Palin. As her party’s previous vice presidential nominee, and with a rabidly loyal following, Palin would have seemed to have been much better positioned to compete for the nomination than any of those other Tea Party pygmies. The fact that she did not enter the fray is unusual given that vice presidents and vice presidential candidates typically do run for their party’s presidential nomination in subsequent elections, even if they are not always selected as the nominee.

No one other than Palin herself, or maybe a few of her close advisors, knows for sure why she chose not to run, but as the old saying goes: follow the money. My guess is that Romney outmaneuvered Palin in securing the support of an overwhelming percentage of the Republican Party’s big money donors, and that knowing she ultimately would not be able to compete on a level playing field she demurred. Palin may have been the Tea Party’s darling, but that was likely also her undoing. She seemed to really believe the rhetoric about slashing big government spending, and those who profit the most from big government largess couldn’t take a chance that she might actually be true to her word. On the other hand, Romney was one of them, having been a Wall Street player himself. All they needed to do was ensure Willard had the cash to buy a blitz of campaign commercials that ultimately brainwashed enough of the party’s less radical voters into pulling the level for him when it counted.

So now we have what is shaping up to be a truly unprecedented election cycle. Ever since Ronald Reagan ushered in the current political paradigm, every presidential election has been largely decided based upon which party’s base is more enthusiastic about their candidate. In 1980 and 1984, it was obviously Reagan, who triumphed over the last two “reality based” Democratic presidential nominees, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Vice President George H.W. Bush then basked in The Gipper’s glow in 1988, which was enough to put him over the top against the passionless Michael Dukakis. By 1992, the enthusiasm finally swung over to the Democrats, as the young and dynamic Bill Clinton defeated the older, seemingly out-of-touch Bush. Some of the Democrats’ ardor for Clinton had faded by 1996 due to his relentless pursuit of centrism, but he was buoyed during his reelection bid by a soaring economy. By 2000, it was the hard right’s desire to “drink a beer” with George Bush the Lesser that was about the only thing separating him from the colorless Al Gore and pushed him to a dubious victory. The right’s passion for Bush’s war policies then helped him eke out a reelection victory in 2004 over the equally bland John Kerry before the enthusiasm swung back to the Democrats and the young and dynamic Barack Obama in 2008.

But this year? Both parties’ bases are thoroughly discouraged with their candidates. Liberal journalist Robert Sheer pretty well summed up the feelings of many liberals and progressives about President Hopey-Changey last week in an article entitled "Obama by Default," which featured a very tepid endorsement of the incumbent. Even though I vehemently disagree with Sheer that liberals and progressives should vote for Obama again, Sheer’s article is illustrative in demonstrating just how disillusioned many on the left now are with their supposed savior.

This “enthusiasm gap” is directly reflective of the fact that the billionaires are now in position to ensure that whatever petty differences may exist between them, the nominees of the two major parties will always first and foremost represent their interests as a class. In theory, we still live in a representative democracy in which the voting public COULD rebel and choose a true populist who will fight to restore some semblance of economic fairness. In actuality, as long as 90 plus percent of the population is totally distracted by the Hologram and refuses to do even the basic homework necessary to be reasonably informed about the issues, campaigns will continue to be decided in favor of those billionaire backed candidates who can most afford to blanket the airwaves with 30-second sound bite teevee ads and frame the media narrative in their favor.

So where is this post-Citizens United dystopian trend headed? It’s too early to tell for sure. At this point, it does not appear that the enthusiasm gap will yet be wide enough during the 2012 campaign to cause the whole political system to begin to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public. By 2016, however, after four more years of gradual economic collapse putting ever more pressure on the working and middle classes, things could really start to get interesting.


Bonus: The future is NOW

Slimeball Defends Pink Slime For $45,000

The headline above was my best New York Post imitation. Anyway, here's the story from Think Progress:

The meat industry has been hammered for the weeks after it was revealed that some companies had been controversially using beef scraps mixed with ammonia hydroxide, called “pink slime”, as hamburger filler. This week, one passionate defender of pink slime emerged: Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

As we know, King enjoys touting his carnivorous habits while beating up on people who don’t eat meat. But meat producers have also been major financial backers of King, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, throughout his political career. A cursory glance at King’s fundraising records shows more than $45,000 in campaign contributions from the meat industry during his time in Congress. This cycle alone, two prominent PACs, the National Beef Cattleman’s Association and the National Council of Pork Producers, as well as Lynch Livestock, have already maxed out their contributions to King’s reelection campaign.

That money appears to have been well-spent. All this week, King has been defending pink slime — or “lean finely textured beef” as he calls it — to his constituents. Indeed, in every one of the half dozen town halls that ThinkProgress attended, King talked up pink slime unprompted. In Emmetsburg, for instance, he said pink slime was actually a “supplement” and an “enhancement.” In Algona, he pledged to hold congressional hearings not into pink slime, but into the “smear campaign” against pink slime.

How much do you want to bet that despite his meat obsession, asshole Representative Steve King has never in his life ever eaten Pink Slime? What's the matter with Iowa? How do you keep electing this fucking slimeball?


Bonus: Instead of Pink Slime, how about some Pink Floyd?

Saturday Night Video: Clarke And Dawe "Enter The Age Of Reason"

If you are not familiar with John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, they are a couple of comedians who appear regularly on Australian television whose bits about politics are both witty and scathing. In the video below Clarke and Dawe brilliantly lampoon how the wealthy really control things, even in a supposed democracy, as Clive Palmer, businessman, mining magnate and part-time critic warns about the perils of an elected government actually running the country.

Choice bit:

Palmer: "People have got to think: do you WANT to live in a country run by the government?"

Interviewer: "Has this ever happened before?"

Palmer: "It happened once, but we fixed it. We got rid of it."

Enjoy!



Bonus Video: A classic Clarke and Dawe bit about an oil spill off the coast of Australia that was making the rounds back during the Deepwater Horizon fiasco.

GSA Chief Resigns After Throwing $800,000 Taxpayer Funded Party In Las Vegas

Maybe it isn't being repeated often enough so that the political appointee types in Washington are getting the message: America has a trillion dollar plus annual federal budget deficit that desperately needs trimming. Now is not the time to be blowing taxpayer money frivolously. Got it?

Well, apparently not. Here is the Atlantic Wire with the sordid details:

Martha Johnson, chief of the General Services Administration, and two of her top executives resigned today. You probably would too if you spent over $800,000 of taxpayer dollars on an extravagant "conference" off of the Las Vegas Strip. If you don't know the General Services Administration (GSA) was created to, in their words, "streamline the administrative work of the federal government" and it "oversees the business of the U.S. federal government." Somehow, Johnson and her crew parlayed those tenets into a "regional meeting" in Henderson, Nevada (having the discretion to not be at a hotel on The Strip--that's a modicum of modesty right?).

Thanks to an investigation and report from GSA Inspector General Brian D. Miller, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, we now know how Johnson and her team spent all that money. Here's how it breaks down (keep in mind that in 2010, according to Inspector Miller's report, the meal and incidental expenses allowance was $71 per day):

$31,000 on a "networking reception" that featured $19-per-person "American artisanal cheese display" and $7,000 in sushi

$3,200 on a session with a mind reader

$5,600 for in-room parties

$100,405.37 in employee travel costs to scout the event--meaning, these people returned to the Las Vegas area multiple times to visit hotels before settling on the fancy M Resort and Casino.

$3,700 for T-shirts

$2,800 in water bottles

$1,500 for "Boursin scalloped potato with Barolo wine-braised short ribs" and a $525 bartender fee for a cash bar.

Three officials spent almost $400 for rented tuxedos

$1,840 for vests for the 19 “regional ambassadors” and other employees

$146,527.05 was spent on catered food during the entire conference

$6,325 was spent on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects (because a certificate and the $800,000 party they're at wouldn't do)

$75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build bicycles (which would later be donated to a Boys & Girls Clubs)

But, we felt this one deserves a special shoutout: "Another agency employee sought a discount on a $98 purse from the hotel gift shop. She received a $30 break," reported the AP. Because hey, when you're making it rain with $7,000 sushi, who has $98 dollars to spend on a tacky gift shop purse?

WTF? $3200 for a freakin' mind reader? Seriously?

The very first question I had when I read this story was to wonder was this idiot's background is and what she was doing before Obama appointed her to the job. Fortunately, the Washington Post had me covered. First up, here is what Martha Johnson had to say upon taking office:

In her resignation letter, Johnson acknowledged a “significant misstep” at the agency that manages real estate for the federal government. “Taxpayer dollars were squandered,” she wrote. At the start of her tenure in February 2010 she called ethics “a big issue for me.”

Okay, that's a really funny joke. What could possibly top that? Well, how about her resume:

Career History: Computer Sciences Corp., vice president of culture (2007 to 2008); SRA-Touchstone Consulting Group, director and vice president, (2004 to 2007); Council for Excellence in Government, vice president of leadership and performance, (2002 to 2004)

I swear, you really can't make this shit up. But I have an idea that might put a stop to this kind of garbage. Instead of just letting Johnson resign, stick her with the bill for the total cost of the conference. Then maybe the next asshole political appointee who takes her place might think twice before trying to so blatantly fuck over the taxpayers.

Addendum: This story has been ballooning pretty quickly. After I wrote the initial post, CNN posted this rather ridiculous update:

The same week that a report documented massive overspending at the General Services Administration, a video emerged Thursday showing an agency employee joking about the excess spending and saying he would never be investigated for it.

The video also mentions an awards program for employees that gave out $200,000 worth of taxpayer-funded iPods, electronics and gift cards to entry-level government employees.

"I buy everything your field office can't afford," raps the employee in the video. "I'll never be under OIG investigation."

OIG refers to the Office of the Inspector General, who originally looked into the GSA's spending on a 2010 training conference held in Las Vegas. His report found the federal agency spent $822,000 on the event, including $75,000 on team-building exercises, $6,000 on commemorative coins, and $6,000 on canteens, keychains, and T-shirts.

The revelations prompted GSA Administrator Martha Johnson to resign this week.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's office, which is investigating the excess spending, received the video from the inspector general and released it to the public on Thursday.

The video was the winning entry in an employee video contest at the 2010 conference. In handing out the award for the video, the deputy commissioner of the Public Building Service appears to mock oversight of the GSA.

The revelations about the GSA's overspending are prompting outrage among lawmakers who are furious about taxpayer money being wasted. The inspector general's staff briefed congressional investigators Wednesday, and a source familiar with the briefing told CNN they were "pretty astonished at the blatant misuse of funds."

As it turns out, they aren't the only ones.


Bonus: I'll bet Martha Johnson wishes she had taken Sheryl Crow's advice

Friday Rant: Obama and Romney's Pointless Argument About American "Exceptionalism"

This past week, some rather tepid rhetorical sparks flew between presumed Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney and President Hopey-Changey about who can blow more smoke up the voters' asses about the laughably idiotic notion called, "American Exceptionalism." Here is the Raw Story with the details:

US President Barack Obama on Monday hit back at his likely Republican election foe Mitt Romney, who questioned whether he shared the notion that America is a uniquely virtuous nation.

At the weekend, Romney appeared to tap into the view, prevalent among the conservative grass roots, that Obama — born in Hawaii of a white mother and Kenyan father — somehow is different than mainstream Americans.

Asked about the comments during a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada on Monday, Obama said the man he is likely to face in November’s election was simply playing to the political gallery.

“It’s still primary season for the Republican Party,” he said, but then took aim at Romney’s central argument.

“It’s worth noting that I first arrived on the national stage with a speech at the Democratic Convention that was entirely about American exceptionalism and that my entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism.”

“But, you know, I will cut folks some slack for now because they’re still trying to get their nomination.”

Then Illinois state lawmaker Obama’s speech in Boston in 2004 extolled the “genius” of America, quoted the Declaration of Independence and called on Americans to reaffirm unique values.

Romney said during an event in Wisconsin at the weekend that when he traveled abroad he stood “a little taller, a little straighter, because I knew I had a gift that others didn’t have, and that was I was American.”

“Our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do,” Romney told a conservative crowd.

“I think over the last three or four years, some people around the world have begun to question that.”

American exceptionalism is a highly charged term, and sometimes means different things to different people, and is a particularly potent concept in conservative politics.

Generally, the term is said to be the notion that America has a unique historic mission, values and ideals, that are either endowed by God or enshrined in the Constitution that make it exceptional in the world.

Holy FUCK, this is shaping up to be one long, miserable campaign. If you want to know why there is absolutely no hope that America will be able to change course before we manage to destroy ourselves, look no further than this happy horseshit. It was this dumbass idea that somehow America is exceptional, and therefore not bound by the limitations that bog down other mere mortal nations, that was a huge factor in getting us into such a huge fucking mess in the first place.

This bullshit all started with Ronald Reagan, of course. Jimmy Carter tried in his own bumbling and inept manner to warn Americans that there were limits not only to our military power but to the energy resources that fueled our very way of life. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan and his minions took Carter's warnings and won big by beating him over the head with them. Then Reagan won re-election by using the same American exceptionalism club to wallop Walter Mondale even harder. And ever since then, the idea that America cannot do absolutely whatever the fuck it wants to do on the world stage has been verboten in the political arena.

Yet the question needs to be asked: just how exceptional is a country that simultaneously launched two major wars of choice against pipsqueak opponents, spent over a trillon dollars on the effort, and actually managed to lose both of them? Or a country that operates its own offshore Gulag where it holds people for more than a decade without trial? Or a country which routinely tortures and abuses prisoners of war? Or a country which secretly arranges for kidnappings and deportations to foreign torture chambers? Or a country that sanctions assassinations against even its own citizens? Or a country which allows the banking criminals who crashed its economy to walk away scott free with hunderds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bonuses in their pockets? Or a country in which 50 million people are at risk of dying from even relatively minor medical ailments because they cannot afford to go see a doctor? Or a country that makes filthy rich mega-stars out of the likes of Brittany Spears, Kim Kardashian, Snooki, Charlie Sheen, Lady Gaga, Adam Sandler, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry? Or a country in which less than one-third of its young adults even know what year it declared its independence?

We'd be a hell of a lot better off if these two assholes would stop trying to one-up one another and level with the public for once, but Spoiled Rotten Nation won't stand for that. It doesn't want to hear the truth: that there is absolutely NOTHING exceptional or more noble about America as a nation-state, other than the fact that those of us who were born here or immigrated and became citizens had the good fortune to not only be living on top of the greatest pile of natural resources ever bestowed upon any civilization, but that those resources were located in a relatively isolated spot on the globe which made us largely immune from conventional military attack.

And what did we choose to do with that incredible bounty? We created a crass, superficial, me-first society that has been devouring those resources as quickly as possible and despoiling this beautiful landscape to create a hideously ugly, coast-to coast shopping mall to accommodate the lowest common denominator tastes of a vast horde of drooling consumer zombies.


Bonus: To paraphrase both George Carlin and Joni Mitchell: "only a nation of unenlightened halfwits would pave paradise and put up a parking lot"