Above, WI Judge David Prosser AKA “Prosser the Tosser” and his dimwitted pal Scotty…
Although I doubt there are many Wisconsinites who need reminding, tomorrow’s WI Supreme Court election between incumbent Judge David Prosser—who has said he’d rubber stamp Gov. Walker’s ticket to destroy the unions—and challenger Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, will be of the most important statewide elections in decades. Important not just for Wisconsin, but to all of America’s working people. What happens tomorrow—and fuck it, our team is gonna win this one—should scare the shit out of the Republican Party, because when the dust settles, they are going to know—definitively—for whom the bell tolls. Guys, make no mistake about it, it’s tolling for your dumb asses.
Judge Prosser’s top aide said that Prosser would be a “complement” to Walker. How can a Supreme Court justice be anything BUT impartial? And Sarah Palin’s brain-dead Twitter-endorsement? I thought Republicans were against activist judges? Oh right, only when they’re on the other side? Seems to me that the Republicans don’t want to live by their own rules, and they damned sure don’t want others to live by their rules either. These people are clowns, just fucking clowns… and tomorrow they are going to have their heads handed to them on a Vanity Fair paper plate. They have to know it.
Last week former Gov. Patrick Lucey withdrew his support for Prosser and endorsed JoAnne Kloppenburg. Lucey released a statement that Prosser’s sleazy behavior has revealed what he described as “a disturbing distemper and lack of civility” in the Republican’s conduct. Earlier it had come out that Prosser is prone to hissy fits, including one where he called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a “total bitch” and threatened to “destroy” her.
David Prosser is a slug that needs some salt thrown on him.
Working people are starting to wise up and the events in Wisconsin have educated even some Tea party-types as that movement burns itself out and loses steam. In the past week alone, it’s been reported that GOP-affiliated special interest groups (many of them from outside of Wisconsin, of course) have bombarded the state with $2 million dollars worth of anti-Kloppenberg advertising. For a state supreme court election? Incredible. Clearly, the Republicans are scared shitless and they should be…
According to Kloppenburg, “The events of the last few weeks have put into sharp relief how important the Supreme Court is as a check on overreach in other branches of government.” The American Federation of Teachers issued a statement that “a Kloppenburg victory will swing the balance to our side. A vote for Prosser is a vote for Walker. It’s time to ‘get even.’”
Get even? Sure, but as much as I love me some Republican schadenfreude—their misfortune, my comedy—I just want to see some justice for the working people of Wisconsin. Tomorrow I expect both.
Breaking with the mainstream media about what happened during the March 26 protest in London, this young woman offers a compelling eyewitness counter-narrative. The way she saw it, it was the police who provoked the demonstrators, and not the other way around.
More about YouTuber “Strange Sanum” here. And if you haven’t checked out Laurie Penny’s important essay at Boing Boing titled “Lies in London.” it’s an absolute must-read.
Republican Representative Sean Duffy (WI) who some of you may recall as the conservative guy on MTV’s The Real World Boston, has a difficult time justifying his $174,000 salary to a constituent who makes quite a bit less…
I think it’s a bad time, generally speaking, to be a Republican from Wisconsin. Endangered species, aren’t they?
I mean, no way, right?
Joe Klein writing on the 2012 crop of potential Republican presidential nominees on his TIME magazine blog:
This is my 10th presidential campaign, Lord help me. I have never before seen such a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers coagulated under a single party’s banner. They are the most compelling argument I’ve seen against American exceptionalism. Even Tim Pawlenty, a decent governor, can’t let a day go by without some bilious nonsense escaping his lizard brain. And, as Greg Sargent makes clear, Mitt Romney has wandered a long way from courage. There are those who say, cynically, if this is the dim-witted freak show the Republicans want to present in 2012, so be it. I disagree. One of them could get elected. You never know. Mick Huckabee, the front-runner if you can believe it, might have to negotiate a trade agreement, or a defense treaty, with the Indonesian President some day. Newt might have to discuss very delicate matters of national security with the President of Pakistan. And so I plead, as an unflinching American patriot—please Mitch Daniels, please Jeb Bush, please run. I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you. And you seem to respect yourselves enough not to behave like public clowns.
Joe, tell us how you really feel…
American Embarrassment (Swampland)
You gotta hand it to him, Rick Santorum, that wacky wingnut Republican no-hoper presidential candidate, a man with even less of a chance of gaining the GOP nomination than, say, Newt Gingrich (or any of the rest of them for that matter), just won’t give up. Despite the fact that NO ONE, I mean NO ONE thinks he’s got a snowball’s chance in hot hot Hades of gaining traction with, you know, actual voters, Rick’s out there, fighting the good fight… or something. It’s hard to say what he’s really doing or what he thinks he’s accomplishing.
Could there be a less-inspiring, less-intelligent, less-attractive candidate than Rick Santorum? Of course there could be, never count out the GOP when it comes to scraping the bottom of the loony bin, but the odds are against a lesser contender turning up in this election cycle. Even Ron or Rand Paul have better chances of moving into the White House than Santorum—effectively none, of course—and yet like a buffoonish Energerizer Bunny, he just keeps on going. BUT WHY? WHO is urging him to run? What kind of people shows up at his campaign events? What’s his motivation to run for President in spite of overwhelming indifference?
Who the fuck knows? Michele Bachmann probably even thinks Santorum is a pinhead. What alternate conclusion could anyone, even a Republican, come to when faced with a statement like this one:
“The social security system in my opinion is a flawed design, period. But, having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. … The reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
Mull that one over. Nope, Social Security’s problems have nothing to do with the fact that after $106,800 the wealthy don’t have to pay anything else into the fund. Repeal Roe v. Wade and America’s financial woes will magically right themselves…
I can’t even get a hard on to make fun of Rick Santorum anymore. Why let perfectly good mockery go to waste on a guy like him?
Via Wonkette
When stock market advice websites like MarketWatch are running articles with tiltes like “Tax the Super Rich now or face a revolution” I think it’s safe to assume that it’s probably time to tax the super rich now or, you guessed it, face a revolution. It’s been a long time coming and it’s going to be quite sweet, I think, as a result. Western civilization is on the cusp of something new and I, for one, can’t wait for it to get here.
Just the other day, I saw a young guy with a tee-shirt with Donald Trump’s severed head on the end of a lance.It’s in the air.
Yes, tax the Super Rich. Tax them now. Before the other 99% rise up, trigger a new American Revolution, a meltdown and the Great Depression 2
Start preparing for the third meltdown of the 21st Century, and depression
Denial and lies. Remember, 93% of what you hear about markets, finance and the economy are guesses, wishful thinking and lies intended to manipulate you into making decisions that suck money from your pockets into Wall Street. They get rich telling lies about securities. They hate any SEC fiduciary rules forcing them to tell the truth.
But the fact is, on an inflation-adjusted basis, Wall Street lost 20% of your retirement money in the decade from 2000 to 2010, over $10 trillion. And “Irrational Exuberance’s” Robert Shiller warns of a third meltdown coming. You better start preparing now.
Before you start betting any more at Wall Street’s rigged casinos, think long and hard about these six megatoxins lurking in America’s Super-Rich Delusion, a mind-altering pandemic infecting our nation’s leadership in Washington, Corporate America and Wall Street … but also “trickling down,” infecting many Americans. Listen:
1. Warning: Super Rich want tax cuts, creating youth unemployment
Bloomberg warns: “The Kids Are Not Alright.” Worldwide, youth unemployment is fueling the revolution. In a New York Times column, Matthew Klein, a 24-year-old Council on Foreign Relations researcher, draws a parallel between the 25% unemployment among Egypt’s young revolutionaries and the 21% for young American workers: “The young will bear the brunt of the pain” as governments rebalance budgets. Taxes on workers will be raised and spending on education will be cut while mortgage subsidies and entitlements for the elderly are untouchable,” as will tax cuts for the rich. Opportunities lost. “How much longer until the rest of the rich world” explodes like Egypt?
2. Warning: rich get richer on commodity prices, poor get angrier
USA Today’s John Waggoner warns: “Soaring food prices send millions into poverty, hunger: Corn up 52% in 12 months. Sugar 60%. Soybeans 41%. Wheat 24%. For 44 million the “rise in food prices means a descent into extreme poverty and hunger, warns the World Bank.” Many causes: Speculators. Soaring oil prices. Trade policies. Population explosion. But altogether they expose “the underlying inequalities and issues related to the standard of living that boil beneath the surface,” says a Pimco manager.
3. Warning: Global poor ticking time bomb targeting Super Rich
A Time special report, “Poor vs. Rich: A New Global Conflict” warned that a “conflict between two worlds — one rich, one poor — is developing, and the battlefield is the globe itself.” Just 25 developed nations of 750 million citizens consume most of the world’s resources, produce most of its manufactured goods and enjoy history’s highest standard of living.” But they’re now facing 100 underdeveloped poor nations with 2 billion people with hundreds of millions living in poverty all demanding “an ever larger share of that wealth.” Think Egypt. British leader calls this a “time bomb for the human race.”
4. Warning: Next revolution coming across ‘Third World America’
We are ripe for one: In “Third World America” Arianna Huffington warns: “Washington rushed to the rescue of Wall Street but forgot about Main Street … One in five Americans unemployed or underemployed. One in nine families unable to make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans on food stamps. Upward mobility has always been at the center of the American Dream … that promise has been broken… The American Dream is becoming a nightmare.” Soon it will implode. a meltdown, revolution, depression.
5. Warning: Super Rich must be detoxed of their greed addiction
In “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill),” David Cay Johnston, warns that the rich are like addicts, and to “the addicted, money is like cocaine, too much is never enough.” A few years ago an elite 300,000 Americans in “the top tenth of 1% of income had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population.” The Super Rich Delusion is an addiction that requires a painful detox.
6. Warning: Politicians infected by Super-Rich Delusion, revolution
In “Washington’s Suicide Pact,” Newsweek’s Ezra Klein warns: “Congress is careening toward the worst of all worlds: massive job losses and an exploding deficit.” How bad? As many as 700,000 more jobs lost, says Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi. What a twist: Remember vice president Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter.” Today the GOP is so blinded by its obsession to destroy Obama’s presidency, deficits are now the only thing they say matters.
Wake up folks. The Super-Rich Delusion is destroying the American Dream for the rest of us. The Super Rich don’t care about you. They’re already stockpiling for the economic time bomb dead ahead. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Time for you to plan ahead for the coming revolution, for another depression.
Read more of Tax the Super Rich now or face a revolution (MarketWatch)
Sad to see that the great New York Times columnist Bob Herbert hung up his Opinion page soapbox yesterday. With Herbert’s departure and of course, Frank Rich leaving as well, the editorial page gravitas of The New York Times will be greatly diminished. How do you fill shoes like theirs? Herberts’s final piece, I gotta say is pretty heavy:
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.
There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.
The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.
You can read the entire essay “Losing Our Way” at The New York Times
In a note following his final weekly essay, Herbert, who is now 66, writes that he’s off to “expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” Few writers in America could convey the plight of the working poor in America to the readers of the New York Times—in a way that they can understand—the way that Herbert has for nearly two decades. Obviously the NY Times Opinion page is no small propaganda platform from which to advocate for the good of the common man and it’s a disappointment, as a longtime reader, that he’s leaving this post. Isn’t the great Bob Herbert more effective here than he could be anywhere else?
Herbert in his high profile role at the Times editorial department, along with Frank Rich, has been at the moral center of that great organization, In my lifetime, I’ve read enough words written by Bob Herbert that I am convinced—and have been for a long time—that he’s one of the smartest and wisest people in this country. Herbert has been such an important contributor to the American group mind for decades. I hope he’ll write again for the Times, and soon. His career has been one spent in service of a better America and his voice will really—really, desperately—be missed in the current era of such wild historical shit and upheaval. around the world. I will miss reading Bob Herbert and I salute him. He’s a good man.
A great interview with Bob Herbert from The Progressive
Above, Carlos F. Lam, former Indiana Deputy Prosecutor, now and forevermore, just an unemployable idiot!
The gods of Republican schadenfreude have once again smiled on America’s working class. However the events in this story took place so quickly that there was scarcely enough time for it to make the news nationally, so here’s a post-mortem on the dead as a doornail legal career of one utterly silly fellow, a former Indiana deputy persecutor prosecutor—and arch Republican buffoon—by the name of Carlos F. Lam.
Amidst the more than 50,000 emails sent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker during the heat of the anti-union uprising, a two paragraph email from Lam, shall we say, stuck out like a sore thumb. In it, a PUBLIC OFFICIAL WHO ACTUALLY HAS A LAW DEGREE wrote:
“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions. Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and umbrella union organizations in the protests. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”
According to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:
Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”
At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it. “He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.
He came into the office and gave his resignation verbally, Cooper told the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. The resignation was announced after the Center’s initial story was published.
Email headers with detailed IP addresses suggested that the message was sent from Indianapolis.
Lam, an Indianapolis resident, at first told the Center he never wrote it.
Reached Tuesday by phone at the number listed on the email, Lam confirmed his email address matched the Hotmail address appearing on the Walker email, but said he had never written to Walker. “I am flabbergasted and would never advocate for something like this, and would like everyone to be sure that that’s just not me,” he said, after being read the email.
Except that it was him. And he SIGNED IT WITH HIS OWN NAME and even added his telephone number! And it came from his IP address! Of course it’s not him, why, a um, a UNION THUG must have sent it!!!!
Shit, these Republicans crack me the fuck up! How can someone able to pass the bar exam not realize this is a PREPOSTEROUSLY stupid thing to do???
From Mother Jones:
Lam wasn’t alone in proposing to undermine unions with sleazy tactics during the Wisconsin protests. The day after Lam sent his email, radio talk show host Mark Williams [former Tea Party Express leader] wrote a blog post urging his followers to cause trouble at a Sacramento solidarity event by wearing Service Employees International Union T-shirts and say outrageous things to embarrass the union. “If I do get the ‘in’ I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there,” Williams wrote. “With any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.” This, of course, was the same Mark Williams who infamously wrote a blog post in the voice of black slave who said that slavery was “a great gig.”
You expect such buffoonery from Williams. But from a deputy attorney general and a county prosecutor? All in all, it’s been a rough month or so for prosecutors in the great state of Indiana.
That last sentence, should you have already forgotten, refers also to disgraced Indiana state Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox, who wrote on his Twitter account that riot police should “use live ammunition” in the Wisconsin capital against union members and protesters. When Mother Jones reported on this matter on Feb. 23, Cox was fired from his job.As he should have been.
With all their new-found free time, Cox and Lam will have lots of time to consider the fact that career-wise, they’re both KAPUT in the legal profession. Who would hire lawyers THIS STUPID? An idiotic, loose cannon attorney is the last thing any respectable law firm requires. These stunts will follow them around on Google like shit on their shoes for the rest of their lives and I sure hope they’ve both got some INSANE debt from law school. Imagine what it must be like googling yourself and reading articles like this one calling you an abject moron and there are tens of thousands of them! And if either one of them is married, good luck holding onto your wife!
Indiana prosecutor Carlos F. Lam resigns after recommending Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage fake attack against himself (Post Crescent)
YES!!! It really looks like the dingbat MN Congresswoman from what must be the lowest IQ district in all of America—they elected her didn’t they? I rest my case—is going to, or has already, if you’ve been watching her behind the scenes moves, thrown her hat in the ring for the Republican Presidential nomination. CNN reports that she’s planning to form a national exploratory committee in June, if not earlier and she’s already making moves in Iowa (where her office could open as early as this weekend) New Hampshire and South Carolina. Comedians, lefty pundits and every single Democrat in the nation are praying to the gods of schadenfreude that Michele Bachmann makes good on her threat. Hell, the woman might even be able to keep the great Garrison Keillor from retiring!
Me? Lets just say, I think it will be good for democracy…. and leave it at that!
One extremely funny thing to contemplate is “Who would be her running mate?” should she secure the nomination (in some fucked up parallel universe, I mean). Looking at the field of all possible candidates—and American electoral politics being what they are—it would almost assuredly be a male Republican. Which one of them would to craven enough to take a strap-on up the ass and be her bitch boy? Obviously, figuratively speaking, that would be a requirement for the job.
