politics

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live.
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She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.

many more at Look at this Fucking Teabagger

Frank offers up a good example for the craven Democrats of how to deal—or not—with the hate mongers who've been driving the public discourse on health insurance lately. Here's a longer video from the same event.

The Thick of It is probably my favorite British show since Spaced. It's directed and written by Armando Iannucci (see also Time Trumpet) and there's also apparently a movie out now.

Seriously, how stupid does a high profile politician with presidential aspirations have to be to disappear for a week in Argentina with his mistress? Perhaps he had already given up those hopes.

I give a hearty guffaw to those who defended Sanford prior to today with sentiments like, "Can't a man take a vacation without being picked apart by the liberal media?" HA! I'm looking forward to Stewart and Colbert's followups on last night's coverage of the missing governor.

It's been a bad week for the GOP. I'm sure God's prayer inbox will be overflowing tonight.

On Saturday, Pat Buchanan hosted a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a majority in America. During one discussion, panelists suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.” The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children’s classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.
One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled “Conferenece.”
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Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stones piece gives the best accounting of AIG's role in the economic shit storm I have seen thus far. I love Taibbi's writing, but it seems not even he can make this thing funny, imagery of the Pope going on a meth binge and losing his job notwithstanding. The best tl;dr summary I can copy/paste:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

By the bye, I just acquired a copy of the Get Your War On collection, for which Taibbi wrote the introduction. It's well worth the $11, and I recommend you buy it. Reading the first few pages really brought me back to the "WTF are we doing?" period of '02-'03. Operation Enduring Freedom in the motherfucking house!

One week in, President Obama has broken a campaign promise for the first time. (From the St. Petersburg Times Obameter.)

Holocaust survivors' party teams up with pro-marijuana offshoot

The Green Leaf Graduates, which split from the political party Aleh Yarok, best known for its advocacy of the legalization of cannabis, is making waves with its most recent announcement: a plan to incorporate the Holocaust Survivors Party.
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[a spokeswoman for the Green Leaf Graduates] was forthright about the Green Leaf Graduates' intention to use support for the survivors' cause to further its own agenda of legalizing marijuana and said that the survivors had no problem with the issue.

"They say to us that at their age they don't see why [marijuana] is an issue," she continued. "They don't consider it drugs. They even have friends who have cancer or something who are ashamed to ask for a prescription. Easier access to medical marijuana is something we're fighting for."

link

Five times a day I'll still say to someone, "I don't know what I'm going to do if McCain wins." Of course, the reality is I'm probably not going to do anything. What can I do? I'm not going to kill myself. If I didn't kill myself when I became impotent for two months in 1979, I'm certainly not going to do it if McCain and Palin are elected, even if it's by nefarious means. If Obama loses, it would be easier to live with it if it's due to racism rather than if it's stolen. If it's racism, I can say, "Okay, we lost, but at least it's a democracy. Sure, it's a democracy inhabited by a majority of disgusting, reprehensible turds, but at least it's a democracy."

Several years after the Hot Coffee mod for GTA: San Andreas was released, it looks like the public outrage was mostly generated by political panderers, sensationalist media and opportunistic lawyers. Most gamers just don't give a shit:

Any buyer upset about hidden sex in the violent game could file a claim under a settlement the lawyers struck with the game’s makers, Rockstar Games and its corporate parent, Take-Two Interactive. Of the millions of people who bought the San Andreas version after its release in 2004, exactly 2,676 filed claims.