We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Pedro: If I win, you can be my secretary or something. Napoleon Dynamite: Sweet! Plus I could be your bodyguard, too. Or like, Secret Service Captain, or... whatever...
"Responding to the anger about bonuses paid to AIG traders, the House approved a bill Thursday that would impose a punitive 90% tax on bonuses paid by American International Group Inc and other financial companies that receive federal help. The vote was 328-93. The bill would apply to bonuses of people making more than $250,000 a year, and would apply only to payments from companies getting more than $5 billion from the federal government."
From James Madison:
"Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ... The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community."
Sober people are in short supply nowadays, ain't they?
I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
There's a monotonous feel to the interaction between the stock market and government these days. A government hack says something dumb, and the market tumbles. The only adult left in the room, Ben Bernanke, will appear in some forum and talk a little sense. First the market stabilizes, and then jumps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Then every once in a while, the big kahuna of them all, Studs Urkel Obama, opens his yap and everyone with even a sock full of pennies heads for the exits. It's like clockwork.
Yesterday was only one in a raft of examples of this dynamic. Bernanke appears on Sixty Minutes, the market's riding on multiple consecutive days of big gains, likely fueled solely on shellshocked investor optimism that there's enough stability to preclude their money being subject to a kind of three-card-monte oopsie the next day. The DJIA is up 200+ by midday and it looked like maybe people might start to think it's dangerous not to be in the market. Then at noon a picture of Little Timmy and President Urkel running their mouths about AIG appears on Drudge and the market gives up three percent in two hours. Little Timmy Geithner has fallen into the Treasury well, and Lassie is dead. President Urkel can't even be in over his head, because he's never even been to the pool. He literally knows nothing about being an executive. Here's some advice for the dynamic duo: AIG deals in counterparty risk. The counterparties listen to you too.
It's the executive branch, you know. He's the chief executive. And it's his first executive position. It shows. President Urkel went live yesterday, and he complained. Whined, actually. He made an impotent gesture, talking about how someone should do something about those bonuses they dole out at AIG. Or he was going to do something, except he can't. Well, he said something, I'm not quite sure what, and neither was he. The US government owns 80% of AIG, and the chief executive of the US whined like a recently promoted secretary still asked to make coffee. He could do anything he wanted. But he did what all bad executives do: He tried to leave his castle with a pitchfork and join the mob and yell at the spot he used to be standing in. It doesn't work that way.
If President Urkel knew the first thing about being an executive, he'd know that you only whine up the ladder. You never whine to your underlings. They whine to you, you whine to your boss, and so forth. There is no "up" where you are, Mr. President. You're the Decider, now, remember? You asked for the job. That's why Nixon roamed the halls and talked to the pictures of dead people. They're your only colleagues now.
Be quiet, or do something. My advice is the former, because you seem to have no clue about the latter.
I contribute things, but that's it. I'm not in charge. So I am not responsible for what is said here. I'm simply responsible for my own behavior, and to choose my friends wisely. But as my father often told me, nothing good happens in a bar after midnight; so if you choose to stay in there, whatever happens is partly your responsibility.
I have sharp Internet elbows. I say outrageous things for effect from time to time. When you try to use humorous turns of phrase, it's easy to piss people off. In general, the Internet could easily be renamed: A Pigpen for Pissed off People anyway. If I woke up tomorrow and everybody's URL began with PPP instead of WWW I'd be down with that. I still say we should call a "call a spade a spade."
But some people like to find offense where it isn't because they've got nothing else but outrage. They're willing to manufacture outrage to suit their crabby worthless worldview. If someone didn't care for my politics, they might take issue with the expression "call a spade a spade," for instance. They're hoping that they could wield a sort of moral Kryptonite they could use to say that any particular argument is settled, because you're obviously not even of sufficient moral stature to dispute with. Political Correctness is the attempt to end discourse by introducing extraneous moral elements that, in general, are imaginary.
But what of the flip side? What of people who claim that their right to express themselves is being impinged by PC, when in reality, no such extraneous elements are being introduced to the equation?
This image, among others, was inserted in the comments here at Maggie's, to mock the people in it. But not in just a humdrum way. They were used as a sort of intellectual club to try to beat the political opponents of the person that used the picture. It was an exponential, not just an arithmetical, extension to the insult.
The person that offered it has nothing of any merit to say about anything. If they told me the sun was rising in the East today, I'd check. If they did have anything of merit to say, they wouldn't have to resort to using a picture like that to complain about being enjoined from fantasizing about the murder of their political opponents.
I must be immune to the charms of the urge to mock the mentally disabled. Because I don't see it. I see two people, in every way my equal in the eyes of the creator, looking directly into the camera -- unashamed, friendly, outgoing, sunny, and smiling. They are useful to other people. They are --get this-- happy. Contrast their demeanor with the crabby, xenophobic, greedy, unfriendly, spiteful, whining, paranoid, and anti-intellectual outlook of the person that placed it here, and the cowardly context of the original sentiment expressed.
Yes, indeed, the photo depicts people who aren't "smart enough" to drink their own urine and eat Spam in their bunker while telling people on the Internet they're praying for an apocalypse that never comes so you can say "I told you so."
I'll take a planet filled with people like the picture, please.
You know, people often ask me why I write for Maggie's Farm. That's a poser, as we say on the Farm.
Truth be told, the proprietor of this sorry place, Bird Dog, promised me hookers and blow if I joined the Maggie's team. So I attended the Christmas party expecting great things. It didn't work out exactly as I had planned.
At this point, it's just plain stubbornness keeping me around. On a farm, sometimes being stubborn is all you got.
Some say P.J.O'Rourke is the new Mark Twain; but of course I'm the new Mark Twain so that can't be. He is the new Mencken, at least, or as fierce as Bierce, surely. I can't tell if he's lazy or smart --I imagine it's both-- because he almost never writes anything. He certainly never writes anything not worth reading.
Somebody at the Weekly Standard and the Defense Department got the bright idea to send him out on the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and he didn't go up the gangplank to get on, either. If this doesn't explain John McCain to you, you're beyond explaining, and should just pull the lever for the empty suit or the empty pantsuit right now and get it over with.
Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There's Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"
Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?
Environmentalism, so called, is essentially an urban religion. Like Lenin organizing agriculture from an office, environmentalists have a bizarre worldview based on never really knowing much about the subject at hand. Most environmentalists got all they ever learned about the real world from Bambi.
There are many conservators of nature. The only people I ever met who understand anything about nature are hunters and farmers. I never met an academic whose opinion about the natural world was worth a fig.
A person that has killed another beast in the wild, and eats it, has smelled the very musk on the beast, and felt the last shivers of its life ebb away. A hunter knows a lot about a deer you don't. And they didn't do anything that wasn't going to happen to that creature anyway. There are no nursing homes in the forest, and eventually every beast loses a step on the manifold forces arrayed against it. Some sooner than later, as we will see.
A goldfish would eat you if it could get you in his mouth. That's all you need know about Nature. Go out in it, and have something real to do with it. Life and death; or a test of will, anyway. You can never respect it if you don't know about it. And remember it's still as cruel and remorseless as God made it in the first place.
Our friend Gerard Van der Leun tried his hand at a little musical comedy today: Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?, by the Lovin' Superdelegates. A fine effort of course, as are all things American Digest. But of course, we can't help thinking he's mining a shaft with precious little ore in it. Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews is the mother lode, my brother!
SuperClintObamaDelegateFightIsAtrocious! Howard Dean is whining: Hey! infighting's gonna croak us If he says AARGH! loud enough He hopes the flock will focus SuperClintObamaDelegateFightIsAtrocious!
When Obama starts to speak Assembled throngs go mad Rodham gives his nose a tweak Points out his pastor's rad Then old Barry learned a word That saved his aching nose SuperClintObamaDelegateFightIsAtrocious!
Conversely under sniper fire There's no need for dismay For losing votes in Florida for caucusing last May Just claim those superdelegates If they can make parole SuperClintObamaDelegateFightIsAtrocious!
I'm being silly, of course. The feckless Stilton scarfers are actually looking down their aquiline bluenoses at us. The Independent, which is a sort of digital newspaper for wrapping your crappy online fish and chips, says in the Headline: USA 2008 The Great Depression. They've even got the requisite breadline picture:
Woe is us, huh? Here's the accompanying text. Warning! Englishmen don't know how to pluralize things properly. You know, not like Americans, who are important people, and not doily-fetished tea-slurpers.
Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.
The increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs losses and fast-rising prices all add to the squeeze.
Emblematic of the downturn until now has been the parades of houses seized in foreclosure all across the country, and myriad families separated from their homes. But now the crisis is starting to hit the country in its gut. Getting food on the table is a challenge many Americans are finding harder to meet. As a barometer of the country's economic health, food stamp usage may not be perfect, but can certainly tell a story.
Yes, and after all, "telling a story" is exactly what you're attempting to do. You're just not very good at it.
But I want to be kind to our friends on that miserable pile of rocks and coal across the pond. I think it's swell that they've taken time from their busy schedule of crushing each other to death against fences at soccer games, throwing up on themselves in the gutter outside pubs, and surrendering to imams to pay any attention to our festering hive of poverty and depravity here in the States. I especially like the fellow that's the centerpiece of their pieta of poverty there in the picture. Let's zoom in on him, shall we?
You see, in the thumbnail view of the picture, the noble Bob Cratchit figure is holding his poverty-numbed fingers in the universal sign for "Please sir, can I have some more porridge?" It's a shame to ruin it by showing him in closeup, fiddling with his MP3 player to get just the right mix, and shod in elaborate, new, expensive footwear and clothes. Because what we're looking at here, is indeed a line of people who are willing to stand in a line to get free stuff. You're right there, Percival. Unfortunately for you Someone at the National Review Online read the caption on the image you used, and it reads:
NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 30: People wait on line to receive donated coats at the kickoff of the 17th annual New York Cares Coat Drive a the Bowery Mission November 30, 2005 in New York City. Bloomberg helped give out coats to residents of the Mission and the coat drive hopes to collect and distribute 80,000 coats to needy New Yorkers by New Years. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
But your point is made, even if fraudulently. Very truthy, Cedric. People are lining up virtually, if not physically, for free food coupons, which you inartfully mention later in your article can be illegally sold to unscrupulous people for seventy cents on the dollar to buy drugs and booze and... well... I don't know, maybe MP3 players.
I might mention that this isn't much of a line in a big, strapping adult country like the United States. It might impress you over there in that little dollop of dirt you live on, the remaining wreckage of your "Empire." Do you guys even get to lord it over Scotland anymore? You guys shed power and influence like dandruff, I can't keep up. But let me assure you that if that was a line to get free Hannah Montana tickets, that line would reach to New Jersey. You remember New Jersey, don't you? We beat your inbred monarch-ass-kissing fruity wig-wearing generals like a drum there in the 1700s. With guns we used to shoot squirrels with.
But I digress. After all, it's not fair to compare Hannah Montana tickets to Food Stamps, as Hannah Montana is more important than food to a teenage girl. And Hannah Montana is bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of Great Britain. But then again, what isn't around here?
In the article, those Malvinas-pestering cold-water-flat-loving hollow-chested Britishers refer to everybody in the picture as "disadvantaged Americans." Fair enough. I'll use their criteria: that queuing citizens trying to get free stuff from the government is a sign of an apocalyptic breakdown of a whole society.
Hey, Alfies: 100% of the population of Great Britain gets in line to get their chit to see a doctor. So by your reckoning, your entire country has collapsed. And it's been collapsed since 1948, if you go by the National Health Service. You know, right after we saved you the trouble and expense of German lessons.
I was always enchanted when I was a lad to read compelling news stories of daring Britishers swimming the English Channel. Shame you just end up in France, though. Nothing to do there but warm your hands over the burning cars. So I have some advice, you crumpet nibblers. Swim west from now on. You might like it here. I bet the NHS doesn't hand out MP3 players with the calendar you get to plot your wait times for your medical care.
It appears Maggie's Farm readers and contributors were taken in by a hoax photograph. I hear tell that such things are rife on the Internet. I'm in a hurry, as I have a date witha Canadian Moose/Elk hybrid tonight, but I had time to locate the actual original source photograph for the now infamous Obamaphone hoax. As you can see, Obama's people have obviously airbrushed out the artery-clogging submarine sandwich Obama always devours for his lunches -- before having an evil cigarette. It's an obvious attempt to pander to the Minivan Mom demographic to "disappear" the sandwich like one of Stalin's out-of-favor colleagues, but politics is a rough and tumble business these days. And a man's gotta eat.
Oh man, do I love getting my investment advice in the comments section of Maggie's Farm. It's Bretton Woods crossed with the Algonquin Roundtable around here.
If you huddle around our investment topic entries, a virtual hobo campfire, burning hyperinflated banknotes, appears in the comments. Everybody's nervously fingering their Mauser triggers and wondering what will happen if they're the first guy to fall asleep with a pocket full of Spanish Main money in their raggedy (but thank god, not leveraged or made in China) clothing. It's great fun.
There are, as they say in the garden, a few hardy perennials. Let's have it one more time, for old time's sake:
-There's going to be a run on banks! They'll run out of currency and you'll have to settle for deposit slips and lollipops! Um yeah, sure. There's $150,000 on your average mall ATM. But we're all going to be at the window at Mr.Potter's bank trying to get our doubloons before our neighbor does. Then we'll bury it in the yard! It'll be grand. -Buy gold! Gold I say! Yeah sure; of course it lost ten percent of its value last week, but hey, it recently passed the value it had - in 1980. Fantastic investment, that. You would have done better to hoard Member's Only jackets since then and sold them at flea markets near colleges now. You are laboring under the illusion that you're hoarding a superior sort of money, and all you've done is gone from being an equities investor, or a plain saver, to a commodity futures investor. And with all your money in one material. Profoundly dumb -- unless you're Hillary Clinton posting on the Internet under an assumed name. And the Internet doesn't work that way. Everybody is really a guy pretending to be a hot seventeen year old girl. -I bought loose diamonds! This is my favorite. I remember this one fondly since the first time I heard it on a low-rent golf course in the eighties. A guy wearing hand-me-down clothes telling you he's got all his money in "investment grade diamonds" that he knows how to sell in all the international hot-spots he read about in CondeNast in the dentist's office once. "You know," he says sotto voce while shanking a putt, "for when the really heavy sh*t comes down."
Let's do an experiment in "investment grade" diamonds, (snerk) shall we? Buy one. Walk right back into the same place you bought it and talk to another clerk. Offer to sell it to him. He'll offer you 30% below wholesale. You paid retail. Of course, if the world turns to the Road Warrior (snerk) every fat housewife has a diamond, superior in every way to yours, (the skinny wives with big boobs have ten) and holds it simply for sentimental reasons. So in a real pinch, everybody sells theirs and your diamonds are less than worthless. And of course, you're assuming that even with running gun battles in the streets over the last Twinkie in the world, the diamond merchants will still be open. Maybe not. At any rate, it won't be a total loss -- you could make metal cut-off saw blades with your diamonds if you've got enough glue, I guess, and go into plumbing, which is an honest profession.
I tell you what: let's test our hypothesis. Go into the same diamond store with a $100 fiat currency bill (oh noes! the debbil's money!). Ask as a favor if they'd break it into small bills so you can get money for the meter. Now go back in and give them all the small bills back and ask for your hundred. I doubt they'll offer you $30.
But the doomsayers are probably right. You will save a lot of money on your water bill if you drink your own urine to wash down the Kruggerands you're eating in your bunker. I think we can all agree on that.
I'm going to break with a long tradition of never offering anybody any advice. Here's mine: Happy Easter everybody! Use your worthless fiat currency to buy a great big ham and a bottle of wine! Enjoy! And God bless you, every one!
From today's 
I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine. 
There's a monotonous feel to the interaction between the stock market and government these days. A government hack says something dumb, and the market tumbles. The only adult left in the room, Ben Bernanke, will appear in some forum and talk a little sense. First the market stabilizes, and then jumps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Then every once in a while, the big kahuna of them all, Studs Urkel Obama, opens his yap and everyone with even a sock full of pennies heads for the exits. It's like clockwork. 
This image, among others, was inserted in the comments here at Maggie's, to mock the people in it. But not in just a humdrum way. They were used as a sort of intellectual club to try to beat the political opponents of the person that used the picture. It was an exponential, not just an arithmetical, extension to the insult. 
Some say P.J.O'Rourke is the new Mark Twain; but of course I'm the new Mark Twain so that can't be. He is the new Mencken, at least, or as fierce as Bierce, surely. I can't tell if he's lazy or smart --I imagine it's both-- because he almost never writes anything. He certainly never writes anything not worth reading. 
Oh man, do I love getting my investment advice in the comments section of Maggie's Farm. It's Bretton Woods crossed with the Algonquin Roundtable around here.
"A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money."