But in more optimistic news…

the Department of Homeland Security’s latest No Fly List is protecting us from those terrorist six-year-old Hannah Montana fans. Here is little terrorist Alyssa Thomas with her Musical Weapon of Terroristic Terror:

The horror! Oh the horror! Protect me, oh Big Brother!

— Badtux the Terror Penguin

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The new orthodoxy

Whether it is the economy, Iraq, or Afghanistan, the new orthodoxy described by Paul Krugman holds true:

It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

Too bad about all those dead Iraqis and Afghans. Too bad about the unemployed who are having their unemployment benefits cut off, the school kids who wanted to take classes during the summer who are adrift on the streets right now because their schools don’t have money for summer school, and so on and so forth. We must show leadership by imposing suffering on them, yo!

Have you ever noticed that the man proposing imposing suffering always proposes imposing it on other people, not himself? Sort of like the man who says to the unemployed, “there are plenty of jobs, if you’re willing to work for less.” But don’t ask that man for a job, or for the name of someone who has one of those jobs, because he neither has a job to offer himself, nor knows anybody else who is hiring. His knowledge of the existence of jobs is purely theoretical rather than one which he has any personal first-hand knowledge of, sort of like knowledge of the existence of unicorns and cotton candy trees.

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Thought for the day

Bud Light Lime is the waterboarding of beer.

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Senator Robert Byrd dead at 92

Rest in peace, ye olde warrior. He was the only voice in the Senate questioning the Chimperor’s march to war, and all too prescient when he called the war resolution “Bush’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution” — given that he’d voted for the original, he shoulda known. And he did.

— Badtux the News Penguin

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Bars

By now you should be getting the connections that drive my musical tastes. From Nick Drake to Sandy Denny to… uhm… Elliott Smith.

This is “Between the Bars”, off the album Either/Or.

— Badtux the Music Penguin

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Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, …

EBM points out that governments are turning to higher and higher traffic fines/fees to pay for basic services because of the refusal of the general public to raise taxes on themselves to pay for the services they demand from their government.
What, you say there is no free lunch, that if we want to have government services we must pay for them? Heresy, heresy I say! Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that suspicious looking feller over there behind that tree! Oh wait, no, that feller happens to own most of the politicians in town, so we can’t do that, can we? Heh.

At which point the tighty righty interjects,

Here’s a thought. How about we cut some spending.

Sure! So what spending do you want to cut? Spending on regulators for gulf drilling? Yeah, that worked out well. Spending for defense? Your ilk shits your tighty whities every time we suggest that, even though defense is over 50% of the federal government’s discretionary budget when you add in the war spending. Spending for unemployment insurance? Uhm, these folks paid into the unemployment insurance fund for all their working lives with the promise that if they needed it, they’d get unemployment compensation while they looked for a job, your ilk sure likes breaking your promises. Shall we cut spending for children’s health care insurance and watch children die? Well yeah, I know that gives tighty whities like, the biggest erections of all time, they just stroke their rods at the thought, tighty righties just *love* the thought of people dying (preferably brown people, but they’ll stroke to children dying too, but *never* fetuses, fetuses are God’s special little ugly monkeys)…. oh I know! We’ll cut Medicare! Those wrinkly old prunes ought to just have the sense to die when they get sick like they used to back before Medicare! (50% of our elders had no health insurance before Medicare was passed, and basically no access to health care if they got sick).

Or cops! We don’t need police departments anyhow, because you, a pasty-ass soft white cubicle dweller, are perfectly capable of taking on vicious criminals with that .22 caliber pistol in your dresser drawer that you’ve never, ever fired but hey, the people on Westerns manage to do it, so how hard can it be? And fire departments, let’s cut fire departments, because after all, if your house catches on fire you should have just installed a fire sprinkler system that would have put it out so if it burns down it’s your own darn fault, right?! Too bad about your *neighbor’s* house that burned down because there was no fire department to keep pumping water on its roof to keep the embers from your house from catching it on fire…

Or maybe… just maybe… being the OECD nation with the lowest taxes of all major economies isn’t a healthy place to be? I mean, fuck. Even SOUTH KOREA and JAPAN have a higher percentage of their GDP going to taxes than the United States! How fucked up is that?!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Mortality

Fairport Convention, with Sandy Denny singing “Who knows where the time goes”. I’m listening to Richard Thompson’s electric guitar sort of winding around Sandy’s voice in a restrained yet interesting way and thinking of how I’d play that part if I ever were in a band with a singer as strong as Sandy…

— Badtux the Music Penguin

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Crazy?

Sandy Denny is one of those singers who most folks who aren’t of a certain age have never heard of. Unlike some other contemporaries who similarly died at an early age, Sandy’s best-known work at the time of her accidental death in 1978 was with the folk-rockers Fairport Convention, with whom she did three albums as lead singer, and the band existed both before and after her presence in it so at the time, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.

But Sandy Denny was also a singer-songwriter in her own right, and did several quite good solo albums during her lifetime. The 1970’s weren’t a good time for a folk singer — remember, this is the era when metal and disco originated — so these albums were overlooked during her lifetime. But today, some folks are starting to rediscover her work…

— Badtux the Music Penguin

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The truth gives Republicans the vapors

Republicans are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy, states a Democratic Senator from Michigan after a Republican filibuster kills Federal aid to states plus kills unemployment benefits for 5.29 million of the 9.6 million Americans receiving employment benefits.

So, starting next week, millions of Americans will no longer have enough money to buy bread and water for their supper (because that’s all the pitiful “unemployment benefits” offered here in the USA will buy), and states will have to fire 40% or more of their employees, adding yet *more* unemployed people to starve in the streets. And this is all according to plan, according to the leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, who publically has stated that the Republican plan is for Obama to fail.

And now the Republicans are having the vapors, the vapors I say, over Senator Debbie Stabenow’s stating of what their very own leader said was the plan. So it goes… “hypocrisy” and “Republican” go together like “macaroni” and “cheese”, yo!

– Badtux the Unsurprised Penguin

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BP burning sea turtles

And in other news, apparently BP employees have been spotted stealing lollipops from toddlers.

Well, not yet. Just waitin’ for it.

BTW, yes, a) the top hat is back, for whatever good it’s going to do — the blowout preventer is now leaning significantly, and if it breaks off the casing entirely, we have an oil volcano at the bottom of the sea, and b) the relief well is within 1,000 feet of being where it needs to be to shut down the gusher. Let’s hope that the casing of the gusher is intact enough that it’ll hold the mud and not let the mud ooze out into the surrounding rock formations, otherwise the only thing that’ll stop the gusher is the final bleedout of the reservoir — which BP at one time estimated to hold 2 billion barrels of oil.

– Badtux the Oily Penguin

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