As we bump along into the summer, the political landscape is as barren as it usually is at this stage of the game. Thank heavens I don’t make a living out of having to write about this stuff, because almost everything that the media is obsessed with now seems perfectly diversionary to me, first of all, and unrelentingly boring to boot.
Obama smoked pot, Willard was a school bully, children sing songs in church about how “homos” can’t get to heaven, Florida is up to their now usual tricks of purging voter rolls, the Eurozone is melting down in slow motion, and several bimbos per week are displaying “side-boob”. Meh.
The real donnybrook won’t crank up until late summer/early fall, then we’ll get to see what kind of alternate universe a billion dollars of superpac money can really create. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Meanwhile, drone strikes are almost a daily occurrence, and are “reported” in the media (by cut-and-paste PR releases from the DOD) to have killed this or that many “militants” in wherever. This conclusion is arrived at, best I can figure, by counting body parts after the fact, then classifying the previous owners of said parts as “militants”. There is no way in hell that the news media knows who was or was not a “militant”, whatever that might mean, but the headline is the same every time, even in the much demonized “liberal” media. Anyway, when did “militancy” become a capital offense?
A random sample from just two days this week alone;
11 militants killed in US drone attacks in Pakistan (Daily News India)
Yemen Drone Strike Kills 5 Al Qaeda Militants (huffpo)
Drone strike kills four militants in North Waziristan (Tribune)
How nice and tidy it all is when presented this way. Goebbels would be proud. A few voices here and there in the MSM about the implications and likely results of this orchestrated lunacy, but otherwise it’s just business as usual—empire hanging on by a thread. This is America, and we can just blow you the hell up if we want to, so move along—nothing to see here.
Anyway, back to domestic politics. About the only thing that piqued my interest at all in that area this last week is the sight of this billboard-style image from the campaign of Jim Landtroop, a republican rep in the Texas House for South Plains. It interested me because I have no clue what it’s supposed to mean, if it has meaning at all.
That’s Jim on the left, photoshopped into an image from that stupid movie “Bigfart” or whatever, starring notable foul-mouthed anti-semite and mysogynist what’s-his-name.
You tell me. What demographic is this aimed at? I lived in Texas for more than 20 years and this leaves me with a total brain-freeze. What the hell are they thinking?
(h/t Harold Cook)
I’m thinking it’s a coded message that says: vote for me because even though I look like pure tasteless wonderbread thru and thru, in my dreams I wear makeup and ride, you know, seriously bareback.
Other news: looks like Julian Assange is not going to be able to avoid extradition to Sweden, in which case he almost certainly will be extradited to the U.S., which means Obama will have another scalp to wave come November.
Well, it’s just Tea Party iconography.
“I may look like your average orange-coloured sunbed wimp, but really I’m tough and hard enough to fight the oppressor for your independence. . .” etc. etc.
Except it’s the wrong flag, of course. Should be the one with the diagonal cross, shouldn’t it?
“Braveheart could not have been more historically inaccurate, even if a Plasticine dog had been inserted in the film and the title changed to William Wallace and Gromit.”
Oh, for the days when propaganda posters depicted heroic muscular women in headscarves going into battle against the deadly wheat field with tractors . . .
I’d give up my nuts for my country.
hmmmm. It is a bit odd, but could it be a play for any expat Scots in Texas? heh, heh.?
Weak jobs report in May and the stock market down 7% since the end of March, albeit still up a bit for the year. If I drive away from the San Jose area where things are quite busy, and get about 50 miles away, or speak to people around the country, my general perception is that things are slowing down again. The optimism of earlier this year is fading, or at least among the people I deal with regularly. I think that is going to be the story of the summer: slow job growth, weak stock market, tight election races.
Might have told this before. A few years ago we took the kids to Stirling and visited the Wallace monument. At the entrance was a life size fiberglass statue of Mel Gibson in Brave Heart character. I wonder if it is still there? Landtroop might want to borrow it.
Oops. With my faulty eyesight, I first read the poster as saying Contagious Conservative.
We’ll it is certainly increasing in popularity Di
Do I have to explain everything? Like William Wallace must have done a hundred times before him, Landtroop has courageously captured the enemy’s battle flag: that emblem of the occupying foreign tyranny that makes patriots’ faces turn blue with righteous fury. Just one more election, and this time we’ll replace it with the One True Lone Star Banner of Texas.
[My courageous emphasis.]
Hey – just like Vermont Nat. And I think Scotland is mentioned in there too.
nat
‘Fraid so.
Dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Hell, in Texas that secession fetish is epidemic. I can remember from my days in Galveston that there was the insistence that Galveston itself, both the city and the actual island, somehow had the right to secede from Texas hidden in the depths of some historic legal paperwork. A few enterprising characters made some serious money selling souvenir tee-shirts with “Galveston, Near Texas” emblazoned on them back in the early 80′s.
That pressure to secede was admittedly an astroturf operation orchestrated by the mob, nostalgic for the wild and wooly gambling days of yore. I imagine, now that they’ve succeeded in getting legal approval for gambling cruise ships to dock and sail from there, they’ve found another way to fleece people without such strategies, so that’s the end of that. But still.
The Vermont version seems to be strictly non-violent. Don’t think that would play in Texas at all.
Expat:
Actually, I came across something about that. They’ve got rid of it. Should think so too. (Nothing against the Scots, it’s Squirrel aesthetic sensitivity.)
Tommy: things are slowing down again
I’ve never been at all sure they’d ever actually speeded up. I noticed somewhere that the
penultimate quarter’s ‘growth’ was really mostly stock market activity (which doesn’t really make anything) and companies squirrelling away $13 billion (which isn’t growing anything either, especially if any got invested in Facebook shares) and ‘growth’ ‘slowed’ because that went down by about $6 billion last quarter.
As I’ve said before, the degree of retrenchment and cuts in (I think, now, the majority of) states is, if you analysed it properly, is probably worse than what’s going on in the UK, and it wouldn’t surprise me if in many it wasn’t actually worse than Spain or Portugal.
Know what you mean Red but this thing was almost Jeff Koons if I remember. Might have a picture of it somewhere.
Oh, and apparently US corporate profits are now higher than they have ever been. After last year, when they were (I think) “higher than they’d ever been”. And after 2007, when they were . . . (yep, you guessed it.) This is the way to end unemployment, grow the economy and make everybody richer . . .
Oh. So why isn’t the Romney/Repug solution working then?
(And we in the UK is officially still in recession, and the Pru’s just bought a US insurance company, I read . . .)
Of course, we of the Red Squirrel Party are unrepentant Marxists, so we can’t be expected to understand 21st century US capitalism. That’s probably it.
squirrel
Yes, I’ve said that very thing, on and off, for a while now.
The economy “improved” only artificially, by cooking the books. Even the slowing down of the housing market freefall is an illusion, due in no small part to banks keeping their foreclosure process running in low gear, and keeping many of the properties that they have foreclosed on unlisted on the market. There is a huge backlog of bank-owned properties in the pipeline. Just sitting there.
Nobody outside of banks and the financial system has any idea of the true nature of the situation. There is no requirement, either here or in Europe, for the kind of transparency that would make it possible to know what’s what.
We’re looking at a systemic meltdown by no means limited to the EZ. It’s going to be ugly. When the American middle class gets a whiff of just exactly how fucked up things are, no telling what will happen, and what madness they might support in futile attempts to prop up that which cannot do other than fall down. Sooner or later. It’s structural.
In the meanwhile, public sectors of almost all modern economies are being stripped, and the assets transferred to private hands. Democracy is under direct assault everywhere you look.
Both phenomena suit the right just fine—they never trusted democracy for an instant, and they think everything is better in private hands anyway. Nothing new about that attitude. They’re still dedicated to stripping anything approaching a commons, a concept they fundamentally deny is even valid.
Mitt Romney has said he doesn’t understand what public lands are for. What he means of course is that he doesn’t understand how they benefit him and his class to the exclusion of the rest of us. It’s still about class. It’s always been about class. The demise of effete aristocrats in powdered wigs hasn’t changed that one bit.
They certainly rebounded after the recession Red but they have ben slowing and the numbers released yesterday by the Commerce Department for Q1 2012 show a 4.1% drop.
A substantial portion of those profits are earned and stashed abroad. This is especially true of the tech industry.
Interesting piece in The G by Clancy Segal today.
Can’t be bothered to comment, I don’t think, ‘cos the usual unthinking gung-ho militarists are already out, and ,missing the point: which is that the drone assassination campaign is being run just the same way. By ‘generals’ — actually civilians from the President down through the NSA and CIA — behind the lines who look at maps, pick targets . . .and it ends there. No thought of consequences. Let alone strategic justification.
What really interested me is that Segal came up with a WW1-type WWII disaster which I’d never heard of; though I’ve heard of the British Arnhem fuck-up, of course.
You know, I’m beginning to feel a little pride (not being a particularly patriotic squirrel, either over England or Italy) that over here we’re having a nice long weekend with a bit of fun over nothing of huge import to the world (or us, really) and there are flags everywhere (a rare sight here!) and it has nothing to do with wars.
(Been trying to find a ‘red duster’ for Water Squirrel. Handy there’s a lot of red in it, it suddenly occurred to me. Couldn’t, annoyingly. You’re not supposed to fly a Union Jack even from a little boat.)
Squirrel,
A bit of information, please. I was once told (I’m sure I was) that it’s the Union Flag most of the time and the Union Jack on a ship. Do runty little squirrel boats not qualify?
Nat, I think Squirrel went to dinner, but this is on wikiP:
So looks like what Squirrel’s flagship needs is a pilot jack. If I had a sewing machine, and any skill with it, I’d run him up one forthwith!
Yikes! Where would we be if there were rules like that for tee shirts and bumper stickers?
As Squirrel said – he needs a merchant navy red ensign or duster
“runty little squirrel boats” indeed.
Acqua Scoiattolo is upset. Were we to go on the Thames (which we’d like to one day, but the tides are very fast and scary) Squirrel would be legally referred to as her “Master” and she would be the “vessel”, just like the big ones, even if she is only 3 metres long. (Well, nearly.) He could probably marry people (as long as they didn’t weigh too much, were fairly small and squashed up a bit). So let’s have a bit of respect, here.
“if science contradicts the bible, then science is wrong.”
Or then again –
Dalai Lama has previously stated his belief that when scientific facts contradict Buddhist beliefs, “those beliefs must be discarded.”