Psychopolitik 2.0

“St. Louis-style pizza”.  Tried it, don’t see the fuss.  Then again, never been a fan of thin crust anyway, so naturally I’d prefer NY or Chicago as far as pizza tribes go.  STL style is a mere snack, I like my slices to be a feast in and of themselves.

One of the funniest lines from that SNL skit about Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric was, well, see for yourself:

According to all the “Breaking News: THE SKY IS FALLING!!!” reports, the House rejected the Emergency Economic Stabilization Make the Moral & Intellectual Bankruptcy of the US Government Even More Obvious Act.  Naturally, I want to see yeas & nays, since this is such a shock (I was assuming narrow passage).  But after doing a search, and having to wait for the House of (alleged) Representatives’ website to man up after its Slashdotting, the page I got had this as the bill title:

“To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes”

Either they linked the wrong vote, or these people had the audacity to take the entire coronation of King Paulson proposal & stick it as a rider to something else.  They’ve been doing that with many other bits of legislation, but to attempt it with this simply takes King Kong balls*.  And to STILL fail?  Brilliant!

If the talk about the vote is otherwise accurate, then the appearance of the reps commonly interpreted as “extremists” of either wing ending up closer to public sentiment than the “moderate” types that people like David Broder enjoy jerking off to is absolutely hilarious.  One more crack in the common wisdom.

BTW: the juxtaposition of this not passing w/ the Dow dropping says a thousand words, none of which any MSM outlet cares to admit.  An economic order that depends on regular bouts of armed robbery in order to sustain itself deserves to fail.

(* - Edit 100108: They did it again.  The bailout bill the Senate passed was an amendment to…The Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007.  My irony meter just nutted.)

In the Google ads section on 538.com, spotted a link to…really? Seriously?  You have got to be fucking kidding me.

As if people aren’t raising dumb enough kids already.  Now they can telegraph to everyone how they plan on loading that brat’s skull with party propaganda before they’re even old enough to not randomly shit themselves, let alone old enough to speak.

Remember that bullshit about the concept of holding stock being equivalent to you owning a piece of the company & having some say in how it’s run?  Well, try to reconcile that with this.

In the “things could be worse” department:

Mirza Kunduzai, 58, a slight man with a short white goatee, had almost reached his house after a day of trading in the capital’s open-air currency market when his taxi was forced to stop by six heavily armed men dressed in Afghan National Army uniforms.

For the next week, Kunduzai recounted, he endured one horror after another — beaten unconscious, hooded and handcuffed, strung up by his wrists and ankles, dumped in a filthy latrine — while his family frantically tried to raise the kidnappers’ astronomical ransom demand of $2 million.

“I was 95 percent sure I was a dead man,” Kunduzai said last week. “They said if my family went to the police, they would chop off my fingers and send them to my wife. I begged them to be reasonable. I offered them my house and my farmland back home. Finally, they agreed to settle for $500,000 and released me. I am poor again, but I am thankful to be alive.”

While Taliban insurgents stage increasing attacks in the Afghan countryside, equally fast-expanding violent crime — kidnappings, carjackings, drug-related killings and highway robberies — is plaguing the capital of 5 million and the vital truck and bus routes that connect the country’s major cities. It is making some Afghans nostalgic for the low-crime days before 2001, when the Taliban sternly ruled most of the country.

Today’s problem, which experts say is intertwined with widespread official corruption, opium trafficking and the get-rich-quick boom of postwar aid and reconstruction, is threatening to destroy public confidence in the government of President Hamid Karzai and drive away what little investment the desperately poor country is attracting. (emphasis mine)

Y’know, I was inclined to make a statement about how perhaps if they had a semblance of foundation of liberalism to fall back on this wouldn’t be the case, but some drunken thought dragged me to the conclusion that that would be bullshit.  That thought was that despite the US’ own history — or maybe because of it, depending on how you look at it and/or how forgiving you choose to be — we in our own young, soft, western way have the same issue.  Conveniently forgetting the bubbles involved, romanticism of the Clinton years has been up, at least until the recent threat of an impending Nelson Muntz moment for Austrian economists came about (if I believed in an afterlife, I’d be inclined to suspect Murray Rothbard was laughing his ass off somewhere).  Eh, at least back then we had the emergence of Wu-Tang Clan as a salve of sorts, now we’re stuck with Soulja Boy & his fellow ringtone rappers, & Carlin & Bernie Mac are both gone on top of that.

Look on the bright side: once it’s shit-obvious that we can no longer afford to engage in global military domination, the argument can shift from bickering about how to fuck nations most of us can’t find on a map to whether we should even do it.  The timetable for acknowledging reality has moved up.

BTW: for a good drink I recommend this.  It’s kinda steep, but for the price you’re getting a combination of intense flavor and ghetto-brew level alcohol.  It’ll do ya.

Reasonable people saw this coming a mile away, I don’t see why anyone is shocked.

Of course, I am talking about the “new” Knight Rider sucking ass…

Matt Yglesias stumbles into an interesting If-Then formulation: If the Democrats support the coming trillion-dollar bailout plan & coronation of King Paulson, Then he’d take that as proof that maybe us anti-state, radical pox-on-it-all yahoos were correct all along.

I won’t gloat.  Gloating would take up valueable time that could be spent learning to brew my own beer so I won’t have to pay billions for it during the last stage of the monetary death spiral.

Hit up a Chinese buffet in town earlier, was around 5:30.  Delicious, but I’ve been blasting off ever since, and it’s 10 now.

WaPo, apparently a few fucking minutes ago:

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said positive and negative developments have led to “challenging times” for the U.S. economy.

“It’s not clear-cut, in terms of all the — is it all positive, is it all negative,” Perino told reporters at the daily press briefing. “There’s a mixed picture. But we do have the strength to be able to deal with it.”

During the press briefing, Perino also addressed the question of why President Bush, an avowed free-market advocate, has now presided over a series of unprecedented federal bailouts with the backing of taxpayer money, including the takeovers of mortgage giants Freddie Mac Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Fannie Mae the Federal National Mortgage Association* and the rescue of AIG.

“I can understand why a lot of Americans would be confused as to why this company, and not another company,” Perino said. “. . . The president’s economic advisers had determined that there were some — some of these companies were so big that to allow them to fail would have caused even greater harm and damage to the economy.” (emphasis mine)

Seriously?  It’s plain as day!  Put two and two together!!  MATH, motherfucker, math!!

Sometimes, man.  Sometimes…

(* - No cutesy euphemisms.)