Bits & Pieces #35

 

 

 

How the hell did Elizabeth Warren ever get elected to the Senate? She has none of the qualifications. She’s not stupid, or venal or greedy, She worries about the people who elected her instead of the greedy pigs who want to screw them. Somebody on Wall Street really screwed up.

 

Now she’s at it again, pointing out that congress wants to double the interest on student loans to 6.8% while it’s only forcing the big banks to pay .75%. Why do you suppose  that is? After all, the big banks were complicit in the crash of 2007 that completely messed up the country. Is that a reason to reward them with such a low interest rate when we are charging the kids who are the future of the country about 9 times as much to get their education?

 

What’s more important, bank presidents making millions or our kids being able to afford to go to school? And where the hell is the rest of the congress when this is going on? Warren just got there and already she’s showing these lazy punks how to do their jobs.

 

Robert Scheer has written an excellent column on this subject, in which he explains at length why students being able to afford an education is more important than bankers getting higher bonuses. Isn’t it unfortunate that we have to have this explained to us when it should be self-evident.

 

Maybe if Hillary doesn’t run in 2016 we should all get behind Warren. She’d make a hell of a president.

 

 

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A farmer in Wisconsin is going on trial for producing raw milk and distributing it to members of a cooperative that was formed for the specific purpose of getting raw milk. The state of Wisconsin claims that he is creating a health problem because the milk isn’t pasteurized, but the lack of pasteurization is precisely why the users want it.

 

We live in a completely screwed up world where you can fix mortgage rates and crash the nations economy, launder money for drug cartels, lie to start wars, poison our nations crops with pesticides and our nations land and water by fracking and never go to jail but man, you better not try to produce anything as horrible as raw milk or your ass is grass.

 

 

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Standing at the head of this week’s, “you can’t make this shit up.” cue, is the Tea Party, who went on a three-day boycott of Fox News, because in their opinion Fox is becoming too far left.

 

Yeah you read correctly. It seems that they are upset that Fox hasn’t demanded Obama’s immediate castration and dismemberment over the Benghazi affair. It’s no wonder the guys in congress are morons when people like these elect them.

 

This is the second time this group has boycotted Fox, trying to have the Righty network shift its coverage more in line with the swastika tattooed militia crowd. I laughed my ass off when I found this out but then it struck me: these people are actually having children.

 

 

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The conviction of the heroic trio who walked into our supposedly most secure nuclear facility the Y-12 has now reached the level of political farce. The government attorney’s who have managed to continually increase the charges until the trio is now convicted of terrorism are idiots. This was an act of peaceful protest for which the trio can now face 35 years in jail. All are over 57 and so each faces a potential life sentence. Does no one in the government see how ludicrous this situation is? Eric Holder will you finally get off you lazy ass and do something constructive?

 

This is a perfect example of those in the wrong, everyone involved in the security of the plant, covering up their inability to function on even a minimal level,  by piling on those who have brought their incompetence to light. This prosecution is so enormously wrong that it defies any peaceful reaction.

 

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Following the Boston Marathon bombing we saw the entire force of over a quarter of a million Homeland Security members along with almost all of our Federal & state security forces mobilize to find the killers of four people and the injuring of perhaps a dozen more. I am not saying this to in any way minimalize the pain or suffering of those people or their families. What I am doing is using them as a mirror for those who want to ignore the 30,000 people a year who are the victims of gun violence and to force those members of congress and the lobbyists who are paying them for their votes to stand up to the horrors of their position.

 

Ninety percent of the American people want strong background checks. That means that even many people who can’t pass those background checks voted for them, which makes them smarter and more honest than the members of our congress that voted down the bill that would have provided those background checks.

 

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I’ve heard a couple of big time, big fee doctors whining lately about how Obamacare is going to ruin the medical profession and how they are going to retire because they can’t afford to be in business anymore. That’s total bullshit. The real problem is that they are so spoiled by the humungous fees that they are used to charging that a normal profit looks, to them, like chicken feed.

 

Some will retire because they are already so rich that it just isn’t worth their while to work for normal fees but the majority and all the new entrants into the field will continue to forge ahead working for lower fees which will still be more money than most of us will ever make.  Traditional American motherhood didn’t fight for decades to have their kids become doctors because they thought those kids would love the sight of blood.

 

 

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Watched Jess Sessions, object vociferously to the Immigration bill proposed by the gang of eight. His objections were based on a phony set of figures projected by the Heritage Foundation, a Right Wing non-think tank. The basic premise was that the road to immigration would cost us a couple of trillion because all those people would want to collect welfare. This is an argument that can charitably be referred to as the Bigot’s Plea.

 

When Charles Schumer refuted him with arguments that showed how the inclusion of the eleven million illegal aliens living here would actually raise the GDP through higher wages for citizens, more consumption because of those wages, better education and all kinds of other benefits, Sessions didn’t seem to understand. It wasn’t what he had been force fed by the likes of Bachman, McConnell and Cruz.

 

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Every Sunday morning we are treated to the parody of beautiful gulf residents extolling the benefits of BP & Shell oil and how their commitment to the gulf is the best thing since sliced bread. The commercials love to tell us about how much money BP is spending in the Gulf and how much pleasure they take in helping Gulf residents make a better way of life.

 

In the words of another Gulf resident, Tennessee William’s Big Daddy: Crap and mendacity.

 

BP still hasn’t spent half of what they cost the Gulf and its residents because of the damage their careless and criminally negligent spill cost. The government wants billions more just to cover the damage done but BP doesn’t mention how much they are laying out in legal fees just to fight this demand. BP is one of the worst things to ever happen to this country and we should send them all back to Brittan.

 

 

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At a time when the Right is trying to slash social welfare budgets the Pentagon, the recipient of the largest bite of the budgetary pie is searching desperately for another way to waste money. It’s not bad enough that they have a plane, the X-35 that has set new standards for futility of design, incompetence of manufacture and size of cost overruns, now they want to establish a military intelligence unit that will, even if it’s run right, duplicate what is already being done in other intelligence services at massive duplicative costs to the taxpayers. It’s called the Defense Clandestine Service and the only good or necessary thing that can be said for it is that they didn’t call it The Defense Intelligence Service.

 

We have already established the Army, Navy Air Force & Marine Intelligence services as the great model oxymoron’s of the spy business. Having a new operation doing what will be pretty much the same thing is just another monumental waste of money. But what do the general’s in the Pentagon care? They’ve been on the taxpayer’s tit all their lives. They are, for the most part, career, uniformed, desk jockeys. They claim they need HUMINT (human intelligence) capabilities. What the hell do these toy soldiers know about human intelligence? All they know is how to push buttons and drop bombs.

 

We already have, the CIA, FBI, NSA and probably tem branches of each, along with Homeland Security, DEA, ICE, Border Patrol, plus the aforementioned Service Agencies. And we still screwed up Benghazi and Boston. Does anyone really think that another intelligence unit, this one run by the Pentagon would do anything but waste money?

 

 

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It’s not bad enough that congress isn’t doing anything themselves but on top of that they are blocking everyone else from getting anything done.  They have filibustered all of Obama’s choices for DC circuit court judges. It got so bad, that the court, which is supposed to number 11 was down to 7 until Obama managed to get Sri Srinivasan appointed. It is still 3 members short. It’s not only the DC District court but also a slew of Obama’s other picks like  the heads of EPA,  the Consumer Protection Agency, Department of Labor and many others. You can’t run a business without management. The Right should know that. They’re already top heavy with management, poor management.

 

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And in case you thought the Republicans had run out of morons, the latest stepped forward the other day, slipped and fell on his face. He is Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and he has decided that it’s time to bring up the subject of President Obama’s citizenship once again.  He did it on one of those right-wing radio shows run by a sub-species named Rick Wiles. It’s one of those shows that appeal to fans of Swamp People.

 

This idiot is the chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee and the only oversight that seems to be evident here is that of letting this dim bulb sit on anything except his own butt.

 

Duncan is the perfect example of why congress doesn’t work. It’s filled with too many people who are too stupid to breathe.

 

 

 

One thought on “Bits & Pieces #35

  1. Hear hear on E. Warren! What a champ!

    It strikes me you might enjoy Bill Maher’s novel, “True Story.” Written during one of his dry spells in the late 80s/early 90s, it’s a thinly-disguised roman a clef about his days as a struggling comic, and his wily takeover of the MC position at Catch a Rising Star. Raw and funny, it’s a great portrait of stand-up comics trying desperately to make it, the travails of the road, and low-life NYC in the 70s-80s. The title comes from his trope that whenever you hear a comic say, “true story,” you can bet you’re about to hear nothing but utter BS.

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