Opinions differ

There is dissension in the blogroll!

I'm with Drifty -- vote, then bitch later -- but I understand the "whatever, fuck it" mentality that pervades these mid-term shenanigans. We have some interesting shit going on in Beerville (legal marijuana, fuck yeah!) and some really nasty house races. Oh yeah, and piss-lover Art Robinson, always good for a laugh.

It's all a bit anticlimactic here since we vote by mail. "Election day" is a bit meaningless, other than it being the last day you can get your ballot in and the day the counting finishes up. But with luck, hopefully today we'll all get to listen to this in celebration after it's all counted up:

We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed.

Mimic Monday

I needed to get Miley Boner off the top of my blog, and conveniently today's XKCD is pretty good:

How insidery?

None more insidery!

I really need to stop reading TPM.

This "article" from TPM is a classic of anonymously-sourced insidery bullshit. Here, just take the first couple "lede grafs" (as the insidery journamalists like to say):

The unlikeliest of alliances forged between two once-bitter rivals stands to upend the status quo of congressional gridlock and potentially resolve a bitter partisan chasm that has characterized the modern era of crisis governance.

Yes, President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are essentially working together against GOP leadership and the tea party to break the Senate out of its current situation and resolve major budget rifts that have plagued Washington for years.

Of course, if you actually read the rest of the shitty article, it's all just the typical beltway "oh, if only the two sides could just talk to each other and work out a compromise bipartisan agreement that just so happens to be exactly what conservatives want, we'd finally all get our magic tax-free rainbow sparkleponies!" Well that, and it turns out that all McCain actually cares about is the military, as usual.

But hey, it's almost August, just about time for a series of these shitty articles, D.C.'s equivalent of "Shark attacks on the rise!" and "OMG Weiners with wieners!"

Yay. I can hardly wait.

Fuck the NRA

And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.

What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.

Oregon's Dumbest... Aw fuck it!

Oregon's Stupidest Fucking Shithead Glibertarian is at it again.

All you need to know about today's stupidity is that "taxation is theft" -- as if that's a new and clever idea -- and that everybody was better off 100 years ago before income taxes.

No really, that's pretty much it.

I really can't even bother with this shithead anymore, it's just not worth it. I mean you'd think he would at least try!

Fuck it.

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian, cont.

I wish this wasn't part two of a continuing series.

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian is at it again, with another column in today's college paper.

I can't be arsed to do a full-fledged analysis, so I'll just go through a few of the lowlights in the first few paragraphs. You can read the rest on your own if you have the brain cells to lose.

Recently, the sequester has been a big topic. Congress has been debating the sequester in an effort to strike a deal to avoid the “catastrophic” problems we would otherwise face. The political left says without an agreement, cuts would send us into another recession and people wouldn’t be able to eat. The right says that without coming to an agreement, the military would face huge cuts, leaving us vulnerable to attacks.

Ok, other than the scare quotes around "catastrophic" that's not all that bad to start. For bonus points, try to predict where he's going based on this opening paragraph. Anyway, continuing:

But the sequester isn’t alone in topics debated by Congress this year. As the calendar approached Jan. 1, Congress was debating the debt ceiling to avoid the fiscal cliff. We technically went over the fiscal cliff since a deal wasn’t made by Jan. 1. When we “went over the fiscal cliff,” nothing happened. The earth didn’t collapse inward. The sun didn’t burn out. And with the sequester, we don’t have anything to worry about either.

Ah, that's more like it! I especially love the exceedingly grand straw man cliff he fights. And "going over the fiscal cliff" now means "technically, the calendar went past fiscal cliff day and even though the issues were dealt with the next day before we had a chance to hit the ground at the bottom of the cliff, we still totally fell over that cliff." That is exactly the same thing as if the evil useless government did nothing 'cause they're a bunch of know-nothing poopyheads covered in poop.

Continuing directly:

But the real questions and debates shouldn’t center on whether Congress will make an agreement in time, or which side is correct about the repercussions if a deal isn’t made. The real question we should ask is, “Why does the decision of only 535 congressmen in Washington, D.C., control what happens to all 300 million people in the country?”

Wow. He may have managed to outdo the stupidity with this. He actually does not seem to know that our wacky system of government consists of a "representative democracy" where "we the people" elect "representatives" to "represent" us in the decision making process. Really, he doesn't understand this. Read the rest of the damn article if you don't believe me — that is the article's entire point.

He says some other really stupid shit and manages to get a bunch of stuff wrong about The Great Depression and economics (as usual) too, but I don't have the energy to go into that.

At this point I should really start taking bets on which wingnut welfare publication hires him.

Sea Quest. Or?

Once again the fucking idiots in charge of this country have managed to manufacture a completely unnecessary and imaginary crisis and freak right the fuck out about it. And then let it actually happen. Our gloriously useless press is more than happy to cheer on the debacle. They go along because this imaginary self-created crisis perfectly reflects the unfortunately very real beltway consensus that if only there were some perfect, reasonable, moderate people or party in government everybody would get together and talk about reasonable, moderate solutions to this completely imaginary and unnecessary crisis. All while ignoring the few, y'know, actual reasonable people yelling at them. 'Cause "Eew, ick, who wants to talk to a liberal they're always right about everything and so uncivil and so smug. Let's see if we can see what John McCain thinks! He's mavericky!"

Fuck. There haven't been enough fucks in this post yet. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

You may be able to tell that I'm more than a little annoyed by this. Yeah, it's personal. My livelihood relies on money from the ebil gubmint. I actually end up saving we taxpayers a pretty decent amount of money because I do the work of the equivalent of about 10 six-figure-salaried federal workers back in DC. I know this is true because they call me to do projects they can't manage to finish. And I don't mind, really -- they're good folks, generally. They mean well, they just work in a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy that values the quantity of meetings you attend over the work you produce.

Nothing has been solidified yet, but there's a pretty decent chance my project (a long running project that actually benefits the general public) will get chopped because of this. We've already been running bare-bones ever since the cuts a few years ago, and we can't absorb another one. It's too bad, I've been producing some especially good work recently -- I finished my most recent project on time and on-budget yesterday in spite of them constantly interrupting me with work on unrelated projects. It's pretty darn cool and has been well received by the folks that have heard about it and seen previews. It may all just be flushed down the shitter along with thousands and thousands of similar projects done by similar unknown wage slaves all over this country just because we're ruled by a cult of Austerity-worshiping center-right fools.

Fuck.

I can get another job, and have options lined up. I'll be fine. Fucking pissed, but fine.

Oh well, might as well see what else I can get done before we get chopped...

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian

I pointed out over on Sadly, No! recently that we seem to have the state's dumbest glibertarian writing a column for the campus paper. In a state that is home to Lars Larson, taking away the "dumbest glibertarian" crown is no small feat, but this guy is trying his damndest.

(The paper's website is complete and utter crap, so don't be surprised if it barely works most of the time if you click the links.)

Here are some short snippets from a few of his columns, just so you can get a feel for the stupidity without the need for full immersion:

Less intrusive government is key for better market, consumers

One of the biggest places in which the government invades our lives is through transportation. The government built, owns and maintains most of the roads in America. But to think we need the government to do any of this remains absurd. ... Henry Ford is the most revolutionary of them all. ... Ford sold cars to the common man at an affordable price, $850. Over the next few years, the price dropped to approximately $250. The government didn’t force Ford to do it. The government hadn’t taxed people heavily to build roads yet either. Ford sold cars to people before roads existed. ... Now that roads are owned by the government, prices skyrocket due to artificial demand the government has created by printing money.

I especially like this one because the lead sentence in the article is: "Today’s America consists of massive government intrusion and a lack of knowledge of history." And then he proceeds to completely fuck up the history of transportation in America. I mean "Ford sold cars to people before roads existed." is just absurd on its face for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he must almost think that Henry Ford actually invented the wheel or something. Regardless, a nice quick search for road history in America might have led an actual thinking person to the League of American Bicyclists history page, where we find this:

The League began as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) in 1880 -- Newport, R.I. was the location of our founding meeting -- and was responsible for defending the rights of cyclists from its start. The League of American Wheelmen is credited with getting paved roads in this country before the reign of the automobile.

And it's barely worth getting into the utter absurdity of thinking that private industry could have somehow built the railroads and interstate freeway system without government help. He doesn't even know basic history of the Transcontinental Railroad:

The construction and operation of the line was authorized by the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 during the American Civil War. Congress supported it with 30-year U.S. government bonds and extensive land grants of government-owned land. Completion of the railroad was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line. It was one of the crowning achievements in the crossing of plains and high mountains westward by the Union Pacific and eastward by the Central Pacific. Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West.

Yep, no government help there. Stupid government, can't do anything right!

Here's another gem:

Trillion-dollar coin will hyperinflate US currency

Although the U.S. government “averted” the fiscal cliff, a new proposal has risen that could send us maybe not off the fiscal cliff, but into hyperinflation and total destruction of the U.S. dollar. Paul Krugman, and others who have power or influence, but still don’t understand economics, have proposed the minting of a trillion-dollar coin.

(emphasis mine)

Yep, you guessed it, of course the rest of the article is about OMG FIAT CURRENCY! and ending the Federal Reserve and such. The best part of this though is that an earlier article is:

If only people understood economics

If people had a firm understanding of economics and the free market, we could have a much better world. ... Too many people comment on the subject of economics without a firm knowledge and understanding of it. The Austrian School of Economics has been the only school of economic thought that explains real-life behavior.

That really does just not need any further comment, the stupid stands tall and proud, all on it's own.

UPDATE:

In the comments ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© helpfully provided an excellent link to a really good series of articles about the Austrian school. Just in case nobody reads the comments, and so you don't have to dig up the links to the other two parts, here they are:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

And here's a podcast the author did covering the series and another article by the same author that is about the Austrian school and the constant libertarian yakking about gold.

All really good stuff, thanks ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©!

Reminder

Reminder: the Teabaggers aren't racist, they're just strict conservatives that really hate big government and socialism.