Sadly, No!

Above: “…Erick is idle/ Pam’s found a bone…”

Don Surber, the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail:
The peace blimp

• Michael Moore is fat.¹ Lookit the dumb liberals.² Ha-ha, imagine them blown up by terrorists.³

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Per my item below, it seems that many in the Tea Party crowd are excited to see Colorado Springs descend into a Mad Max-style state of anarchy and chaos:

About time some taxpayers said enough is enough! Bloated salaries and benefits of public employees have to be stopped and REVERSED. Simply let them go and hire private contractors at less than half the price and everything will be fine again.

All uneconomic activity has to stop sometime. And NOW is the time to stop the ludicrous situation of overpaid public employees.

And:

The ratepayers of Colorado Springs are my new heroes.

Congratulations on taking a stand to send a firm message to the politicians. Reduce the services to just the essentials. Get rid of the union jobs and start with a zero-based budget using contractors. Arm the citizens and you will need a lot fewer cops.

And of course, the obligatory racist post:

It all depends on the population. The more “diversity” they have, the worse the prospects of maintaining peace and order. But a racially homogeneous and traditionally American population will probably fare quite well with less cops and will benefit economically from a smaller tax burden.

Last week I entered into my, “Man, WHAT-ever” stage in trying to reason with people. But if you really want to live in a country where you have to hoard guns and stay in a constant state of fear to guard your belongings from roving packs of bandits, hey, I can’t do nothin’ for ya, man, except to say, “Stay the hell outta my neighborhood.” I kind of like the fact that I don’t have to regularly kill people, but if you want to mow down any stranger who steps on your lawn, be my guest.

Get ready, friends. Colorado Springs is just a trial run for what awaits us all:

Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

This is just awesome. And here’s the best part:

• Though officials and citizens put public safety above all in the budget, police and firefighting still lost more than $5.5 million this year. Positions that will go empty range from a domestic violence specialist to a deputy chief to juvenile offender officers. Fire squad 108 loses three firefighters. Putting the helicopters up for sale and eliminating the officers and a mechanic banked $877,000.

Attention drug dealers! You now have a city where you can practice your trade without hindrance from pesky local authorities!

The bitch of this is that a good chunk of Colorado Springs’ economy rests on tourism. Good luck drawing people to a city that is totally dark at night, that has acres of dead brown grass across its public spaces and that is overrun by criminals due to police cuts. I doubt that even the most dedicated Randroid would have the stomach for crap like this.

(But then again, I’m sure things will get better once the town contracts all public safety functions out to Blackwater.)

HTML adds: Megan McDepratmentle is angry!

Reviewing, in the NYRB, a new biography of Arthur Koestler, Anne Applebaum quotes her

favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine.

Needless to say, the evening was full of drunken attention-whoring, in the postwar French style. So they were overwrought; so what?

So, intellectuals don’t behave that way anymore, is Applebaum’s brilliant point:

Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one[.]

I think I just puked in my mouth. The first is a glib popularizer at best, the second a garden-variety Tory historian (Thatcherite division) who happens to be both telegenic and have at his command a legion of grad student researchers, the third is a fucking idiot. Finally, the only thing “intellectual” about them is their gift for PR; unlike the 1946 crowd, who were intellectuals in the true and traditional sense of the word, none of these propagandists have made anything close to resembling art, by which I mean here, something brilliant.
Read the rest of this entry »

The two biggest mistakes the Democrats made during the health care reform process were:

a.) Trying to pay for it with cuts to Medicare
b.) Trying to pay for it with a tax that screwed union members

In other words, the Democrats forgot the first rule of smart politics, which is DON’T PISS OFF LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE WHO VOTE FOR YOU.

Now their only hope in the entire world of salvaging things will be if the GOP really decides to pull the trigger on the following “strategy”:

House Republicans don’t have an official budget yet. But they have what amounts to a first draft. The official budget will be released in March or April and will be authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee in consultation with the other Republicans on the Committee. But Ryan has released a budget he’d like. And it’s actually fairly detailed. And if you read it, which we have, you start to wonder why Democrats aren’t making a bigger deal out of it.

What’s in it? A few interesting things.

First, it calls for big cuts in Social Security benefits for everyone currently under 55 years of age. On top of the cuts it also calls for privatizing Social Security.

Basically the exact plan President Bush tried in 2005. Next, it calls for the full privatization and phasing out of Medicare. It’ll be replaced by a system of vouchers in which instead of getting Medicare you get a voucher to buy un-reformed private insurance.

This budget plan is basically the wingnut id unfiltered by Frank Luntz-approved talking points.

I say to the Republicans: go for it. This plan of yours will raise medical expenses for the elderly by astronomical sums and will lead to many of them going completely bankrupt trying to pay for their care. And then maybe, just maybe, the sight of old people dying in the streets will help Americans to understand that paying taxes for social insurance programs isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

UPDATE: On the other hand!

I think old people could still find a way to get affordable medical care even if they were tossed onto private insurance. And that way is… drum roll… enlisting in the armed forces!

“But the elderly aren’t fit to serve in combat!” you howl in protest.

But that’s the best part! We don’t send them into combat. Rather, we train them to perform the functions of bomb-sniffing dogs and send them out into the field to hunt for IEDs! If you old folks want free health care, it’s time for you to earn your keep!

ABOVE: Bob Owens demonstrates his own patented method of
self-defense

---

We briefly interrupt our extended coverage of wingnut wunderkind James “Great White Hope” O’Keefe to bring you breaking news from the backwoods of North Carolina where Bob “Confederate Wanker” Owens has improvidently waded into the “fucking retarded” brouhaha involving Rahm Emanuel. Apparently Rahm referred to some fellow Democrats as “fucking retarded,” and now Owens, the newly-minted defender of the dignity of the developmentally disabled everywhere, has penned a goober-splattered post calling for Rahm Emanuel to be fired, dragged on a rope behind Owens’s pickup for a few miles, and then tied to a fence somewhere until he comes to his senses and apologizes to Trig Palin.

Oops, wait, apparently now even an apology from Emanuel won’t satisfy the Confederate Wankee. Emanuel’s only hope for absolution from the Wankee is for Emanuel to commit ritual disembowelment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Of course, when Bob Owens done got hisself all het up cause somebody called Democrats “retarded” it doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein to figure out that there’s a story here somewhere: either Owens has switched parties (about as likely as Pam Geller taking on the hijab) or he’s pooped his own pants before he could grab a gun and run out to his privy in his backyard. Thanks to the miracle of Google, where wondrous things can be found without the need of dressing up as Verizon technician and sneaking into a federal government office building, your faithful Tintin seached the Confederate Wanker website and — lord have mercy I think I’m going to faint now — found this:

I’ve long thought that the mental acuity of the average leftist was highly retarded … .

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

UPDATE: It is absolutely amazing the things you can learn at Confederate Wanker. Today we learn, in an update to the original post, that when Rahm Emanuel says “retarded’ it’s a noun but when Gomer Owens uses “retarded” it’s a verb. And here I always thought it was neither a noun or a verb but a participial adjective.

SECOND UPDATE: Confederate Wanker is now deleting comments that suggest that his noun-verb distinction is fucking retarded.

Andrew Breitbart is giving Tila Tequila a run for the money with an epic, ongoing trainwreck on Twitter. Some highlights:

The Washington Independent’s Dave Wiegel points us to Andrew Breitbart’s first tweets on the breaking story about his boy ward James O’Keefe’s allegedly racist past:

Desperate Salon, Max Blumenthal, Gawker, Village Voice (usual smear artists) lying through teeth over James O’Keefe. Details to come…

Curiously, Breitbart seems to have skipped Phase Two in our predictive model for how he and his cohort would handle this burgeoning scandal, going straight to Phase Three (Sputterings About ‘Hatchet Job’/’Character Assassination’/’Partisan Agenda’).

Breitbart is now tweeting that ‘Weigel DENIES’ that O’Keefe manned a table selling Neo-Nazi claptrap during a White-Man-Negro-Haters Club meet-and-greet held at Georgetown University in 2006.

Odd, because here’s what Weigel says about this:

I was at the 2006 event that leads Blumenthal’s story and can confirm all the details about it.

It appears that ACORN-scourge and Andrew Breitbart boy ward James O’Keefe ran into some trouble at college over his alleged use of racial slurs and Stormfront-esque attitude towards non-whites and gays who had the effrontery to be assigned to live on his dormitory floor. Oh, and he also has a pretty nasty habit of palling around with racists, including American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor and random-black-woman-karate-chopper Marcus Epstein.

Hardly shocking to followers of his work, but it’s nice to see O’Keefe’s skeletons displayed for all to see, courtesy of Max Blumenthal and the One People’s Project.

Now the ball is in the court of Breitbart and his apologists (Patterico, we’re looking at you). Having seen this sort of thing play out before, we’ve put together a handy-dandy flow chart for how the ‘James O’Keefe: Total Fucking Racist’ scandal is likely to play out in the wingnutosphere over the coming days:

INITIAL STAGE

PHASE ONE: Ignore, Ignore, Ignore ->

BUYING TIME STAGE

PHASE TWO: Demand Nobody Speak Until ‘All The Facts Are In’ ->
PHASE THREE: Sputterings About ‘Hatchet Job’/’Character Assassination’/’Partisan Agenda’ ->
PHASE FOUR: Float ‘Youthful Indiscretions’ and/or ‘Obama-Rev. Wright=Lefty Hypocrisy’ Angles ->

COUNTER-ATTACK STAGE

PHASE FIVE: Kerners Are Go! Mission: Discredit Blumenthal, OPP ->
PHASE SIX: ‘Real Scandal’ Is Minor Clerical Error In MSNBC’s Follow-up On Blumenthal/OPP Reporting ->
PHASE SEVEN: Declare Victory ->

LONG-TERM STRATEGY STAGE

PHASE EIGHT: Diligently Scrub Wikipedia Of References To Scandal ->
PHASE NINE: Prefer Simple Reboot Of PHASE ONE In Face Of Future Challenges To PHASE SEVEN Dogma, But If Absolutely Necessary Cite PHASE SIX Findings With Patronizing Sneer

The NY Post’s link adding machine has an interesting notion of what a (control) group is.