Financial Frankenstein

Here we go again:  We find ourselves on the brink of an economic catastrophe and once again, it's of our own making.  How is this even remotely possible?

The clock is ticking on the Sequestration Bomb, a breathtaking little bit of insanity that was created not by some vengeful, pissed-off god, nor by some diabolical cabal of fundamentalist Islamists, nor by a gaggle of Chinese cyber-terrorists, but by our very own Congress.  Back in 2011 when Congress was bickering over the debt-ceiling crisis, our very rational, courageous and forward-thinking representatives decided it would be a good idea to force themselves into taking some action on deficit reduction by coming up with a poison pill so onerous that enacting it would be unthinkable.

Congress has become so good at deferring action on critical issues.  Their philosophy seems to be, let's kick the can down the road and worry about it some other day.  Out of sight - out of mind, they think, but their short-sightedness cannot comprehend the fact that someday the piper will have to be paid and they will have to face the issue again, after it's had a chance to fester and grow and metastasize into something truly scary.

On Friday, March 1st, some $85 billion in budget cuts will be imposed across the board.  Everything is going to be hit, even the sacred cow of defense spending.  There are many dire, horrific, sky-is-falling predictions of all the teachers who will be laid off and the hours-long lines at airport security when TSA agents are sent packing.  $85 billion is quite a chunk of change, but it's less than 3% of the national budget.  How so much pain and disruption could happen at such a relatively small bump in the budget is hard to understand.

The Democrats and the Obama administration have been fanning the flames and doing whatever they can to put pressure on Republicans to get a grip and compromise on a debt reduction deal.  Republicans are refusing to consider any increased tax revenues, thinking instead that the President has gotten all the new taxes he's going to get, and are holding out for big-time spending cuts.  Both sides have dug in their heels and the rest of us have to sit on our hands and slide helplessly into Friday when the Frankenstein monster Congress created comes to life, goes on a rampage and eats the economy for lunch.

It's astonishing how myopic Congress can be, and how it can separate itself from the monster it created and disavow any responsibility for it.  They're acting like they had nothing to do with the impending apocalypse, and throw up their hands as if they are completely powerless to do anything to solve the problem THEY created.

All this is eerily reminiscent of another faux-crisis we all endured, the so-called "fiscal cliff" back on December 31st of last year.  This also was a manufactured event, created not by economic forces but by design, by intention.  I suppose we could glean some comfort in the fact that we survived the fiscal cliff, and we will survive the upcoming sequestration.  Leading economists, such as the always erudite Robert Reich, say that most people probably won't directly feel the results of sequestration for weeks or months or maybe never.


But the economy always seems to be teetering on the brink of "another recession."  The recovery from the financial collapse of 2009-2010 has been anemic at best, and even though the stock market has been flirting with record high levels, there's the very real feeling that it's all a house of cards that can come crashing down any minute.  It wasn't that long ago that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in the 6,000 range, instead of occasionally peeking over the 14,000 mark as it does these days.

Congress seems to have effectively isolated itself from the effects of these cliffs and crises, and somehow deflects the blame away from itself.  More ominiously, there's the chance that this has become the new "normal" - already the next two "crises" are being teed up:  another possible government shutdown coming on March 27th and more debt-ceiling churn in April.  Instead of governing for the long term, it appears Congress has chosen to merely jump from crisis to manufactured crisis, like a flat rock skipping over the surface of the water, accomplishing very little, and pushing as much as they can down the road, over and over again.

2012 Year End Review: Part 1

2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end.  The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond.  2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:

Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):  The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse.  It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable.  Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention.  Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds.  It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment.  Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone.  The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair.  Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country.  It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something.  At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.

2012 Douchebag of the Year:  Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared.  Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year.  Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land.  Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on.  At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years.  Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann.  Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist.  I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades.  You just know she used the N-word a lot.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle.  Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire.  But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays.  Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems.  Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem.  Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year.  Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation.  According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns.  It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.


Death We Regret The Most:  Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things.  Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do?  Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation.  It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.

More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!

Words Of Our Lives

Apparently words have expiration dates on their usefulness or popularity.  An august journalistic body known as the Associated Press came out with some changes to their style guide, which a lot of other journalists and even normal people use as a reference for spelling, grammar, etc.

It seems they have decided to drop the words "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" from their roster of Mighty Fine Words.  The reason that they gave was that the "-phobia" suffix was too close of a reference to a psychological disorder and they don't want people to think the words have anything to do with mental illness.

I've always felt homophobia is a mental illness anyway, so I don't understand what the issue is.  It really irritates the life out of me that people discriminate against gay people only because of their choice of who they love.

Gay marriage is not a threat to any form of traditional "heterosexual" marriage.  I'll tell you what are threats to traditional marriage:

Stupid people who have no business getting married and spend the rest of their time fighting each other are a threat to traditional marriage.

Idiots who get married and divorced multiple times like they are changing socks or something are a threat to traditional marriage.

Serial baby-makers with minimal or non-existent parenting skills who bring way too many innocent children into their crazy dysfunctional world to abuse, neglect and abandon, thus ensuring the next couple of generations will be equally as screwed-up, are a threat to traditional marriage.

Disgusting pigs who cheat on their spouses at the drop of a hat are a threat to traditional marriage. The 50% divorce rate bears this out.  Compared to them, the lesbian couple down the street who have lived together for 30 years is not a threat.

Some people are against gay marriage because of their religious beliefs.  To them, I say keep your religious beliefs to yourself.  Anyone is entitled to believe in whatever god-delusion seems to complement their personal agenda, but what one is NOT entitled to do is inflict their beliefs on their fellow citizens.  Believing in something doesn't make it true, and it doesn't give you the right to dictate to other people what they have to believe.

Fundamentalist Christians would scream like stuck pigs if someone tried to pass a law making them believe in Buddha or the Easter Bunny.  Idiotic brain-dead Tea Baggers howl that Sharia law is being imposed in various parts of the United States.  They would pronounce it an abomination if someone tried to force the teachings of the Qur'an on them, but think it's perfectly okay to force the teachings of the bible on their neighbors.  So much for their "love thy neighbor" crap.

Fundies also like to assert that their bible is the literal word of their god and it contains specific prohibitions against homosexuality.  The book of Leviticus is most frequently cited in this case.  Leviticus also contains a lot of other preposterous nonsense about shellfish and wearing certain fabrics, but the fundies pay no attention to that.  This cherry-picking of what you are (or are not) going to believe from the bible shows the worst kind of selfish intellectual cowardice there is.  Either you believe in the bible completely, 100 percent, or you don't believe it at all.  There is no middle ground with religious faith, especially when you're trying to ram it down other people's throats.

Since I'm just as qualified as anyone else, I'd like to throw out a couple of popular words and phrases which have outlived their usefulness and relevance, assuming they had any to begin with.  So, these are things which shan't be said any longer, thank you very much:

"YOLO" - or "You Only Live Once," a cryptic tag line which is used to justify any manner of unacceptable or obnoxious behavior, under the premise that life is short and we should be allowed to try anything once.  Basically a free pass for stupid behavior that doesn't involve death or widespread destruction, YOLO takes its place next to the execrable "It is what it is," a vile little Mobius-strip of circular anti-logic which is the linguistic equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air and passively surrendering to the idiot gods which rule this life.

"Double down" - or actually, lying again.  This came into prominence during the last presidential election when a Republican made a completely absurd, blatantly untrue statement, and when called on it, merely repeated the same bullshit more emphatically.  It is a consequence of Republican supporters who freely and willingly release themselves from the confines of logical argument - which has been used successfully for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks - and instead embrace the stupidest lies and fabrications imaginable because they sound good to them or at least, on the surface, appear to agree with their agenda.  Repeated endlessly on faux-journalistic crapfests like Fox News or by repulsive mountains of sweaty flab like Rush Limbaugh, Republicans and Tea Baggers discard facts as if they were articles of clothing soiled in a septic tank explosion, and will gleefully endorse any kind of ridiculous claptrap as long as it seems to reinforce their personal prejudices.  As someone once said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but not entitled to your own facts."

"Fiscal cliff" - Hopefully this is something we won't have to hear about after December 31st of this year.  Completely fabricated, man-made and unencumbered by any form of reality, it is not really a "cliff" but rather a slope or slide.  Come January 1st, 2013, the entire country is not going to plunged into a dark, fearsome recession.  The banking system won't collapse and the internet won't go belly-up.  With no action from our wonderful leaders, taxes will go up and everyone will start screaming poverty, especially the so-called "job creators" (who, by the way, have been really incompetent in creating jobs over the last two years), but the cliff is really a stepping-stone to the next Armageddon-du-jour in modern American life, the debt-ceiling negotiations upcoming in February.   That will be another round of batshit-crazy political posturing and self-flagellation which serves no useful purpose other than to deceive the low-information majority of American citizens into believing that Congress is actually doing something valuable to justify their existence.  Which is the biggest scam of all.

And no, I'm not getting rid of the term, "batshit-crazy."  I still love using it and it's so very appropriate for almost any occasion.

View From A Cliff

It's been nearly two weeks since the 2012 elections and they are still reverberating through the nation.  Conservative nut-jobs are getting back into their normal mode of slowly-simmering hateful insanity after an extended period of unbridled paranoid schizophrenia when Obama won a second term (I have to admit I did not help the situation much when I went into full troll mode on a number of news sites, rubbing their noses in their ignominious defeat, and I don't mind telling you I had a really good time doing it).

One thing that has become quite apparent recently is that defeated, disgraced Mitt Romney is definitely on some sort of kick-ass anti-depressant/anti-psychotic drugs.  On a recent conference call to his duped and defrauded donors, Romney placed the blame for his decisive, unequivocal loss everywhere except where it really needed to be placed, on himself.  It was weirdly pathetic but not really surprising, given his innate cowardice and total lack of integrity, to hear him blame minorities and women for voting overwhelmingly Democratic, and only because they received "gifts" from the Obama campaign.  Hispanics received the Dream Act, which Romney called an "amnesty program," college-aged women received free contraception and blacks got more food stamps and welfare.  I voted for Obama and I didn't get a single damned present, other than the joy of seeing him re-elected.  Where is my gift, god damn it?

It's hard to believe that someone would be so oblivious to the offensive racism and sexism of such remarks, but apparently Romney is that someone.  The fact that he thinks the vote of college-aged women can be bought with some free contraception is breathtaking in its arrogant stupidity.  Because we know, the only thing young college women care about is contraception.  Same thing with the Hispanics only caring about the Dream Act, and as for food stamps I guess it doesn't make a difference to him that the majority of people who get food stamps are white, and a great many of them vote Republican.

The Republicans are STILL doubling-down on their ridiculous trickle-down theory (and it's a testament to the blinding stupidity of their supporters that anyone is even talking about that anymore) and have transmuted that disgraced, discredited ideology into the "makers and takers" line, in which they divide the country into those who supposedly make wealth and those who take it.  This is just another toxic permutation of the "us and them" dichotomy that the Republicans have been flogging for decades, to demonize a significant segment of their fellow American citizens by turning them into "the enemy," someone to blame for everything that has ever gone wrong.

Romney also made some other completely incredulous remarks about Bill Clinton calling him up after the election and commiserating with him, and doing everything but come out and say that Romney should have won.  It was the weirdest thing ever, and beyond any rational belief.  Clinton worked extremely hard for Obama and campaigned tirelessly for him.  To think that he would call Romney and tell him that he was the better candidate, is completely insane and batshit-crazy.  I've always considered Romney to be incredibly awkward, weird and creepy but his post-election blatherings show with little doubt that he has some serious mental health issues and delusional fantasies which desperately need to be addressed by qualified mental health professionals.  What a horrible, infinitely dangerous President he would have been.

So now we're moving away from elections and into the fun-house world of the "fiscal cliff."  That is the Congress-made line in the sand that was a product of the debt ceiling fiasco in 2010.  Congress and the president couldn't come together to act on the national debt so they created this "poison pill" situation which presumably would force the government into some sort of corrective action on the debt or face horrible, dire consequences as the Bush-era tax cuts go away on December 31, 2012, and everyone wakes up on New Years day with a hangover and a huge extra tax burden.

For some reason the fiscal cliff is being cast as a sort of natural, organic and unavoidable catastrophe, like a 10.0 earthquake or an asteroid collision, and not something completely man-made and artificial.  Congress created the fiscal cliff, and is now cowering in fear in front of it as if it was a Frankenstein monster gone wild.  Oh what a surprise - imagine creating a financial Armageddon scenario and then actually having to deal with it at some point!  Who in Congress ever thought that they would be held responsible for things that they do?

So, both sides are hunkering down in their usual positions: the Obama administration pushing for increased revenue (i.e. taxes) on the ultra-wealthy, and the Republicans screaming that taxing rich people is worse than child molestation and will kill the millions of jobs that those wealthy "job-creators" somehow forgot to create over the last two years.  The Republican mantra is that rich people create jobs - something that is definitively and repeatedly refuted by financial experts of every kind, like here, here and here.  The middle class creates those jobs, by creating "demand" for products and services and having the money to pay for them.  More demand means more jobs - plain and simple.  Seriously, how hard is that to understand?

The Obama people have an election triumph and the accompanying political capital on their side, and have shrewdly boxed the Republicans in by saying that they will keep the tax breaks in place for 98% of wage-earners in this country, but allow them to rise back to Clinton-era levels for the upper 2%.  If the Republicans push back on that, they will be seen as sacrificing tax breaks for middle class to finance more tax relief for the very wealthy, who already have so much.  It will be very interesting to see who blinks first, and my bet is that it will be the Republicans.  Obama learned his lesson about caving in to Republicans two years ago, and I will bet any amount of money that now, at the start of his second term, he has nothing to lose by staring the Republicans down and holding their butts to the fire.

So, it promises to be an eventful end to the year, which has been one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory.  Between the primaries and the election, and now the fiscal cliff and the upcoming end of the Mayan calendar in December, we can be sure the bullet trains to Crazy Town will be running 24/7 through the end of 2012.

The Rapture That Wasn't

There was another incidence last weekend of a predicted end-of-the-world that didn't quite pan out. Some decrepit old fool named Harold Camping on this preachy "Family Life" radio station claimed to have "crunched the numbers" in the Bible and came up with May 21, 2011 as the day the Rapture would take place. This is when all the good, proper Christians would be yanked out of their clothing and sucked up into heaven. In my opinion, having to see millions of naked Christians floating through the air is the closest approximation to hell on earth that can possibly be imagined. I guess the national media was caught with nothing to talk about since gasoline prices appear to be headed downward, at least temporarily, and they all jumped on the end-of-the-world story like Kirstie Alley on a chocolate layer cake. But extreme Christian-battiness aside, what does it say about our culture that such a preposterous thing could garner that much publicity?

That anyone would believe an obviously addled, shriveled old douchebag somehow figured out a fairly momentous event that everyone else on the planet didn't, is somewhat of a stretch. And we all know how precise and exact the Bible is when it comes to relating historical events and timelines. Anyone with at least two firing brain cells would have dismissed this claptrap out of hand, but we're not talking regular people here, we're talking religious nuts whose lives are so empty and dreary and devoid of meaning that they have to take their cues from some desiccated old dirtbag with nothing better to do than scare the witless.

While most of us did just write off this nonsense as kabuki theater for the trailer-park crowd, a number of followers did go to extremes in their blind, lemming-like panic. One man in New York City spent his $140,000 life saving putting up advertisements in many subway stations warning of the impending catastrophe. I don't know which is more depressing: someone throwing away their life savings, or $140,000 even being considered "life savings." At any rate, he's out big bucks and for what? A big pile of nothing. The news reported that this guy was hanging around Times Square warning people that the end is near and when the 6 p.m. hour of reckoning came and went, he frantically starting looking through his Bible for help while a crowd of people laughed and jeered at him.

Harsh treatment, you might say, for someone of obviously limited intelligence who was taken in by just another religious charlatan. But the man was nearing 60 years of age and you would think after all that time you would be able to tell when something is bullshit when you smell it. The old saying goes, "There's a sucker born every minute," but maybe that should be changed to "There's a sucker baptized every minute." After a while, unless someone is mentally incapacitated by a psychological disorder and totally unable to make rational decisions, they have to take responsibility for their own actions and choices. Everything we do has consequences, and some consequences are worse than others, but the fact remains that when you do something stupid and idiotic, it's your own fault, and you have to deal with the aftermath.

But this whole "Rapture" thing is another way for Christianity to do their "us and them" thing, separating the world into the "saved" (i.e. believers) and the "unsaved" (those who don't believe). It doesn't matter that possibly some of the non-believers lead perfectly moral, exemplary lives - maybe even better lives than those who profess to believe in God - the fact that they don't accept the belief system of organized religion automatically dooms them to a horrible fate. I am a firm believer that organized religion of any kind gets in the way of a truly personal, fulfilling relationship with whatever higher power you choose to believe in, and it should be bypassed in favor of a much simpler, direct and honest way of dealing with that higher power. You don't need churches, temples, mosques, synagogues or crazy, Alzheimers-ridden old coots to run your life for you. You have and always have had the key to a rich, productive life in the palm of your hand, and you don't need crazy people telling you what to do.

So now, this old moron has come out from under the rock where he's been hiding for the past couple of days and reset his Doomsday countdown clock to October 21, 2011. That's the new date that the Rapture will happen. I suspect he'll probably get substantially less publicity and markedly fewer followers panicking in the streets at that time, but rest assured there will still be some people who will happily allow themselves to be snookered over and over again, and to whom the other old adage of "Fool me once, shame on you, Fool me twice, shame on me!" has no meaning.