Wasted Childhood

I really thought that I had seen all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons when I was a kid. Apparently, I missed this one.



Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the state is considering paying children to study hard. Think about that for a second or two. If you have forty kids in a classroom, that kind of money could pay for enough extra teachers to reduce the class size by thirty or forty percent. Or it might provide money for some basic health care for the poorer kids.

But no, the best idea that the clowns in the state legislature can come up with is to bribe the kids? Hell, why not have the state send money to every driver that doesn't get a traffic ticket for the year, or, for that matter, every state citizen that goes through the year without committing a felony?

Part of living in a society is that you're supposed to do the right thing. Not because you'll get credit for it or because someone is paying you. You're supposed to do what is right, period. Of course, that doesn't work out so well, which is why religions try to bribe their adherents into doing the right thing by promising them rewards in the afterlife.

This program sends the wrong message to children. How about this: "Kids, if you graduate high school with good grades an a reasonable SAT/ACT score, you'll get a tuition-free ride at a state college." If the NC legislators are all fired up to bribe the kids to shut up, sit down and pay attention in school, then do it in a way that can change their lives for the better.

Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart and the Banksters

William Rhoden's column in the sports section of the Sunday's New York Times talked about the Barry Bonds case and the multi-years' long efforts of the Federal prosecutors to put Bonds away for being an arrogant dickhead.

Maybe Rhoden is right and maybe he isn't. The Feds also went after Martha Stewart for some of the same reasons, both the legal reasons and the unofficial ones.

But I can't help think this: The Feds have, to all appearances, not put forth any effort to go after any of the banksters, other than the schmucks who were running obvious pyramid schemes. There has not been, as far as I know, any sustained series of perp-walks for the banksters who violated their fiduciary duties to their clients.

They've not hauled in the big boys who structured the "collateralized debt obligations" that bundled millions of sub-prime mortgages, wrapped them up in pretty paper and sold them as Triple-A rated securities. They've not paraded any of the clowns from Moody's, Standard & Poor's or Fitch Ratings, who closed their eyes to the odious stink of those CDOs and stamped them "AAA", which would be like the USDA stamping putrid maggoty meat as "prime beef".*

The reasons are probably two-fold. First, those cases may be hard to prove to a jury. Second, those banksters can afford to hire the very best in legal talent. And since they can, the prosecutors aren't going to go after them without the banking equivalent of a fresh corpse. Federal prosecutors, at least the appointed U.S. attorneys, are politicians to the core, most of whom have political ambitions beyond being a U.S. attorney. It doesn't hurt them to gin up some bullshit terrorism case, but they are not going to go after the rich and powerful without overwhelming evidence.

So Martha Stewart did time and Barry Bonds might. But the banksters will walk away scot-free.

Or, if you like pictures, this is how justice is supposed to work:

But in reality, this is how it works with it comes to the banksters and the DOJ:

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*Not that this was their first walk down Swindlers' Row. The ratings clowns awarded Enron AAA status until just days before Enron imploded.

Fifty Years Ago

Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space.

Or at least the first to survive the trip.

Update: today only, look at the Google doodle and then mouse-over it.

Memo to All You Republicans Who Are Thinking About Voting For Donald Trump

The Donald once tried to use eminent domain to take an old lady's house so he could have a parking lot for limos at his casino.

Since most rank-and-file Republicans* seemed to have been aghast at the outcome of Kelo v. New London, they might want to know that.

By the way, the Donald's casino operation has been so sound that it has gone bankrupt three times.
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*As opposed to the business elite Republicans, which probably include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch Brothers, who presumably are just fine forcibly with taking a person's home so they can make more money.

The Killing (AMC series)

I like it so far. It's not a "we gotta wrap up this serial killing/bombing in 43 minutes" thing. It's about one single crime, the investigation of the crime, and the effect the crime has on people, all over thirteen episodes.

You can catch the first two episodes here. The third episode, which ran last night, will be rebroadcast Thursday at 10:30 ET, twice more over that night and then at 8:50 on Sunday, just before episode #4.

Republicans and the Debt

First, a cartoon.

I begin with the cartoon because it nails the truth of the Republican zeal to reduce the debt. Their ideas are all based on cutting the social safety net that protects Americans in hard times. Republicans are more than eager to go back to times when senors ate pet food and died of untreated diseases.

I don't think I'm overstating the case.

If Republicans were all that fired-up about balancing the budget, then they would have to admit that they have to look at the revenue side of the federal budget. They'd have to acknowledge that the reason why the annual budgets balanced during the last years of the Clinton Administration was, in part, because George H.W. Bush raised taxes.

It is not an understatement to say that the tax cuts pushed through by Bush the Lesser added trillions to the federal deficit, for while cutting taxes, Chimpy and his band of merry torturers raised Federal spending. Chimpy entered into two wars without any increased tax revenue to support them; no special "war taxes" of any kind. He put two wars entirely on the national credit card.

And this is what it got us:

Yet all the lackeys of the Koch Brothers in the GOP now can do is scream about Medicaid and Social Security. Not a peep about asking the wealthy to cough up a few bucks more. Even though they are the ones who have mostly made out during the thirty year war on the middle class that the GOP has been waging.

For income for the wealthiest has been largely going up for the last thirty years:

(source)

While tax rates for the wealthiest have been coming down like a Bonanaza full of doctors.

And CEO pay continues to go up, even as those same CEOs lay off employees by the stadium-full.

If we are going to make seniors, the schools do with less, if we are going to cut back on FAA safety inspectors and slash infrastructure repairs and improvements, if we are going down the road where life gets meaner and harder for average Americans because the streets become pot-holed tracks worthy of a Third World nation, fire trucks are slow to show up and there are fewer cops on patrol, then the least we can do is tell the rich that they also have to cough up a little.

But making the rich pay taxes is heresy to the GOP. Since the national press now serves corporate interests, you'll see very little coverage of this (other than maybe an opinion column by Paul Krugman}. And there is not a single Democrat of national note who is willing to stand up to the fiscal rapists in the party of Hoover and call them out on this. No, they are all to happy to just go along, which is why in the last clusterfuck of what passes for negotiations with hostage-takers, the Hooverites got about 80% of what they wanted.

We are so screwed.

So What Else is New; Banksters Are Thieves With Computers Edition

JP MorganChase threw its clients under the bus so the bank itself could profit from the collapse of one of its investment vehicles.* The banksters running JP Morgan Chase knew that their clients, mainly pension funds, would lose hundreds of millions of dollars. But the only thing the banksters did was set up a team to take advantage of the fire-sale prices when those investment vehicles broke down.

The bank's "chief risk officer" said, in essence, "fuck our clients, as long as we make money from this,it's all good."

Nobody will go to jail, of course, because as long as crimes are confined to minor details like financial misdealing, political trickery and, of course, torture, the Obama Justice Department "looks forward".
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*An "investment vehicle" is far more costly than a car and far less useful.

Bombers

And don't they look pretty!

Go full-screen for this one.


H5 – WWII Bombers over Arizona Landscape from H5 Productions on Vimeo.

I have a soft spot for B-17s.

Going to the Charlie Sheen Show?

If you bought tickets to the Charlie Sheen "Violent Torpedo of Truth" show, given the reaction of the people who already have seen the show, you should know that they are now handing out signs to those who buy tickets.

Abortion and the Near Shut-Down of the Federal Government

As you may know by now, the elements of the Christian Taliban within the GOP almost succeeded in shutting down the Federal government over the issue of abortion.

I believe that the issue of abortion has very little to do with the unborn child and has everything to do with sin.

But now, it should be plain to everyone that the self-identified "social conservatives," the people I refer to as the Christian Taliban, really do not believe that "all life is sacred". The Christian Taliban's adherents overwhelmingly support execution. Not only do they support it, they would like to see capital offenses broadened. For example, I have no doubt that they regard blasphemy as a capital crime, but they keep their mouths shut about it. Not so much about gays, it's not hard to find public statements by the Christian Taliban calling for gays to be executed.

The Christian Taliban's indifference to life goes far beyond that, of course. If they truly cared about the lives of others, you might assume that they would be all in favor of making health care affordable to all. You might assume that they would be in favor of early education programs, such as Head Start. You might assume that they would want to make education as rich and as vibrant an experience for children as possible.

You might assume all that. You would be wrong to do so.

If the Christian Taliban cared about the unborn, you might assume that they would push to make prenatal care available to all mothers. You might assume that they would work to establish programs for prenatal nutrition. You might assume that they would lobby for courses for new mothers on how to care for their children.

You might assume all that. You would be wrong to do so.

The fight over abortion has nothing to do with the babies being aborted, although that is how it has been sold to the sheeple who comprise the grunts of the Christian Taliban. It has everything to do with sin, more specifically, the punishment of sin. The Christian Taliban regards having sexual intercourse for any reason other than baby-making to be a major sin. (For that matter, the Christian Taliban regards having fun as a sin.) If a woman has sex for fun and ends up getting pregnant, than as far as the Christian Taliban is concerned, both the ensuing pregnancy and the years of caring for the child to follow are the Lord's punishment for her immorality.

You might have noticed that the man gets off scot-free, for he just skates away and does not have to participate in the child-rearing. There is a tendency in religions to regard men as weak-minded, emotionally-retarded individuals who cannot be blamed if they act on their baser impulses. That is why the push for modesty in clothing, from attempts to legislate skirt length or prohibitions against married women showing their hair to the hajib and the burka are found across religions.

But I digress.

The concept that "sex for fun is punishable by death" was also seen in the Christian Taliban's active opposition to any spending for AIDS research and prevention, at least until the disease crossed over into the general population. Only then was there interest on their part in funding research. Until then, they were just fine with the idea of a "gay plague".

It goes beyond sex, of course. There have been studies done which show that needle exchange programs do not increase the number of drug users, but they do reduce the transmission of diseases between drug users. The Christian Taliban adamantly opposes needle exchange programs, for they want drug users to die from diseases as punishment for their sins.

The anti-choice crowd doesn't give a damn about the children. What they do want to see is the mothers punished by having to bear, give birth to, and care for those children. Whether or not those children are born into lives of poverty and crime is not their concern. Their only concern for poor children is ensuring that fewer and fewer social services are available and that they have fewer and fewer opportunities to escape lives of poverty. For the Christian Taliban is all about ensuring that the children pay for the sins of the parents.

All this is why I maintain that the fight over abortion has nothing at all to do with the lives of the fetuses.