Space out a little; you deserve it. “He who formed the mountains and created the wind, seek him who formed the seven stars and Orion, who turns the shadow of death into the morning and makes the day dark as night.” —Amos
Incorrect order from bored shitless to arrogant fuck Misanthropic Sociopaths: Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, Chevron CEO John Watson, Shell President Marvin Odum, Conoco-Phillips CEO Jim Mulva, BP America Chairman Lamar McKay.
The GOP has a bigger problem than just messaging and policy fails. It has a problem with reality itself.
Breezy Point, Queens, after Superstorm Sandy blew through.
With urgently needed relief for the victims of Superstorm Sandy ignored for over two months by the Rethug led 112th House of Representatives , the 113th sworn in this week managed to pass just $9.7 billion of the $60 billion the Democrat led Senate had already approved, with 67 Rethugs voting no.
In contrast, $62 billion worth of relief for Hurricane Katrina was signed into law within 4 days from the time it first made landfall. Even so, it took a firestorm of protest from such conservative stalwarts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Rep. Steve King (R-NY) to force a vote. King went so far as to threaten switching parties if Speaker John Boehner didn’t immediately put it on the floor. Da Boner has promised to schedule a supplemental authorization by Jan 15.
So, what’s been the holdup? A combination of resistance from the likes of David Koch‘s American For Progress, who object to the whole notion of the social compact and the costs of being our brother’s keeper when the need arises; and a hypocritical regional, red state prejudice against the liberal Northeast. Lee Fang from The Nation explains the Koch connection:
Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Sandy was the second most costly in American history, leaving 100 lives lost, over $50 billion in devastation and tens of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes. Legislative efforts to help those who survived Hurricane Sandy’s wrath will reach a major stumbling block.
Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote”—meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last night. There is some legitimate criticism with aspects of the legislation, including the fact that some of the money will go to non-Sandy related reconstruction efforts in disaster areas.
For AFP, however, the whole bill must die and victims of the storm deserve no help from the government. Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.”
Easy to say when the guy who signs your paycheck is worth over $30 billion. Crooks and Liars addresses the redneck issue:
Rep. Rush Holt came to the floor and said what many are thinking: They dropped the ball because the disaster happened in a blue state. He’s not the only one to think so:
Jamil Smith@JamilSmith Wonder if the House would adjourn without even voting on Hurricane #Sandy relief if it had hit red states the hardest. Having my doubts.
This could possibly be the most despicable non-act of Congress ever. Howie Klein has more on one of the tea party idiots in New Jersey who is probably dancing a jig right now:
Among the Koch whores in the House GOP threatening to disrupt the aid are right-wing hacks in New York (like Staten Island’s corrupt Mafia-related Michael “Mikey Suits” Grimm) and New Jersey’s worst extremist ideologue Scott Garrett. Long Island Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has been handling the bill, is worried that if the money doesn’t get approved while he’s still chair, Texas hate-monger Michael McCaul— the richest member of the House and an anti-tax fanatic— will kill it. Many Republicans still fighting the Civil War look at this as an opportunity to deal a painful blow to the hated Northerners.
Which would be a fitting postscript to the movie Lincoln. And tying the two objections together, Fang continues:
It seems particularly cruel that the Koch political machine would use its vast network of paid activists and professional operatives to kill this bill. For one thing, this is David Koch’s community. From his Upper East Side apartment, Koch lives only a subway ride away from the devastation in Red Hook. Notably, Koch’s group gave away free gasoline during the election in a wide-scale anti-Obama stunt, yet had nothing to give to the victims of the storm. Now, Koch, one of the richest men in the world, is actually trying to take something away from them.
[…]
The other tragedy of Koch’s decision to target Sandy aid is that his company is one reason we will increasingly face extreme weather events like hurricanes, flash floods, droughts and fierce storms. The Koch brothers, David and Charles, sit atop one of the world’s largest privately held conglomerates. Koch Industries is a sprawling company with interests in commodity speculation, timber, oil refining, ethanol production, chemicals, pipelines, consumer products, and fertilizer, among others. The Koch empire, by one estimate, has an annual carbon footprint of 100 million tons. Not only does Koch’s business contribute to climate change through massive carbon emissions, as Greenpeace reported, Koch is the largest financier of climate denial political organizations and media groups. (As an aside, unlike AFP, Greenpeace ignored partisan politics and sent many of its workers to Queens to assist with relief efforts.)
And lest we forget, during the primary debates Willard called for the elimination and privitization of FEMA:
In sum, Willard argues it’s immoral to saddle our children with the bill for restoring the infrastructure that they will have to depend on. Better to leave them with this.
I’m not sayin’ the folks at Bloomberg Businessweek are a bunch of wusses— well, yes I am.
(If you want to see de Jesus, you must click it.)
Bloomborg Businessweek has been pushing their creative constraints lately, notably last week with their “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” cover, and again this week with their “Old Obama“ cover, here.
But if they were really free of their mainstream constraints, like for instance the fictional-centered, cyber publication Bloomborg Bidnesswuss is, they could crawl out on a creative limb and bust it up a tatt or two.
Whatever Barack Obama does in the next four years, whether it’s dying his hair orange, fixing the economy, gettin’ a couple neck tatts, or discovering another source of material energy— wouldn’t that be awesome?— we Americans are going to have to participate.
Now is a time for renewed optimism, but only if we put our optimism to work— on solving a whole slew of problems the past few generations have left in the wake of their, um, reckless abandon. Can we do this thing? Come on. Think it with me:
Yes We Can.
Mechanical inventions and the dissemination of knowledge are modifying civilization; certain economic adjustments and social changes are imperative if cultural disaster is to be avoided. This new and oncoming social order will not settle down complacently for a millennium.¹ The human race must become reconciled to a procession of changes, adjustments, and readjustments. Mankind is on the march toward a new and unrevealed planetary destiny.
—The Urantia Book
¹ That’s right— a “millennium” is a thousand years.
Humanity marches on;
you can fight it—
or you can fight for it.
Change will come with or without you.
The roar of ignorant applause merges seamlessly into the roaring winds of Hurricane Sandy in this iconic anti-Romney mash up from ClimateScience.org
According to the Rethugs, climate change is:
1. A hoax
2. A joke
It’s been obvious for a long time that their standard bearer, one Willard Mitt Romney, is a man who believes that the end justifies the means. The end in this case is the US presidency, and the means his willingness to say anything to any audience to capture it. If for nothing else, his campaign will be remembered for having set a new standard in micro-targeting deception.
An early supporter of a market based cap and trade approach to mitigate global warming, Romney capitulated to the fossil fuel industry funded, anti-science wing of his party in order to secure their support. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his lame attempt to ridicule President Obama’s (mostly muted) concern about climate change during his acceptance speech last August to the the Republican National Convention.
When political scientists and media pundits look back at the 2012 election and analyze the quality and the unprecedented amount of its political advertising, I hope they give the above commercial from ClimateScience.org it’s due. It’s brutal juxtaposition of Romney’s vacuous words and nature’s merciless deeds is a fitting coda to a campaign born of selfish ambition, and run on lies and deceptions unprecedented in modern political history.
One might suppose that Romney wished he could take back that bit of cheap pandering to the RNC crowd, but that would assume a fact not in evidence: a man of critical self-reflection with the ability to admit mistakes. I suppose he could always blame his speech writers– oh, wait. Didn’t he dismiss three professionals before, at the last minute, deciding to co-author the speech with his top aide, Stuart Stevens? Surprising that someone who believes himself to be a business genius doesn’t know that ya get what ya pay for.
Hubris has a penchant for giving way to irony, and often tragedy. Beyond Mitt’s personal tragedy of being exposed as a lying corporate raider with no clothes (magic underwear exempted), the real tragedy is what his campaign has done to the character of the American politics. The 2012 election has been a perfect storm that, thanks to the US Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, saw unlimited amounts of often anonymous cash fuel the ruthless, grandiose ambitions of a secretive plutocrat whose sense of entitlement comes from both the circumstances of his birth and his religion’s religious tradition, Mormonism’s so-called White Horse Prophecy. As Ann Romney told Barbara Walters about their prospects for occupying the White House: “It’s our turn…”
Win or lose, Hurricane Willard will have left mountains of trash in its path. For which, to borrow from the title of his autobiography, there will be No Apology.
