THERE’S A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID out there in “Merca,” and over the last four decades or so, it’s been allowed to proliferate quite unimpeded by other aspects of cultural society, especially by things like intelligence, wisdom, facts, and truth.
The current poster weenie for this affliction is National Rifle Association executive tool, Wayne LaPierre.
LaPi— Mmm. Wait.
Actually, the poster weenie for this affliction is NRA tool, Ted Nugent. But LaPierre is the suit that spouts the crazy at official NRA propaganda sessions. Recently he pointed out to a few Senators that tighter gun control laws aren’t needed— because criminals ignore laws.
“They’re criminals, they’re homicidal maniacs… we all know that homicidal maniacs, criminals, and the insane don’t abide by the law.”
Ah. So, since criminals don’t always follow laws, no new laws (regulation) would work— because criminals break laws— so laws won’t work— because criminals, by definition, break laws— so we shouldn’t resort to laws as a way of trying to regulate or restrain criminals, homicidal maniacs, or the insane, because, you know, laws break.
See?
Ironically, it’s a perfect example of what Right Wing Nut Jobs call “Special Stupid” — a peculiar and tortured logic maze created and justified by fear— and its shadow— hate. It’s simplistic and selfish, and a hypocritical way of negating everything Jesus ever said about loving your neighbor, one another, or, because, foreigners.
But like nearly everything in the lizard brain, the blazing irony of Special Stupid defies not just logic, love, fact, truth, and common sense, but even the most basic level of moral humanity— while assuming the very mantel of superior morality at the point of a gun and wrapped in an American Flag.
And it is this ongoing cultural conundrum of the cold dead values of the past, being inexorably and evermore forcefully supplanted by the progressive values of true brotherhood, which will occupy center stage of American politics until the battle is won. And it will not be won with bullets.
These are wing parts from chickens who died to make your Super Bowl great. Recipe below.
It’s just common sense, Homer: Don’t watch a bird team in the Super Bowl without eating some kind of wings. We prefer the wings of chickens, because they taste like chicken, and chicken is gooood. But don’t take any chances, get free range organic unless you have an early death wish; in which case you’ll probably be hitting the nearest KFC again anyway.
If you read this blog— and you should— then you already know that “beer is for pigs,” just like Steve Allen said. So be sentient and pick up a few inexpensive and excellent bottles of Rodney Strong Sonoma County Chardonnay and get it chilled. Drink that first glass during the first quarter; it’ll help relax you if your team didn’t show up.
Realize that you’ll be hungry before the second quarter; get some real chips, or make some yourself; Ima just assume you know how. And use them to scoop this delicious fresh stuff up and in:
Painless Pico*
Painless Pico
2 fresh limes
2 large ripe tomatoes, or 4 plum tomatoes
1 big jalapeno
1 big serrano
1/2 cup chopped Bermuda onion
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste
(Don’t fuck it up by adding cucumber either— this is for the Super Bowl.)
Method
1. Seed the chilis if you want to taste the wine— and chop them into healthy chunks— this is for the Super Bowl, remember?
2. But why do people seed tomatoes? Eat those damned seeds! This is the Super Bowl! Chop the tomatoes. Did you wash them first?
3. Put the chilis, tomatoes, onion, and cilantro in a super bowl and sprinkle the salt over it.
4. Half the limes, and cut a cross halfway down each half, and squeeze every last drop of that amazing liquid over everything.
5. Stir, and let stand 3 seconds or less before serving yourself a giant chip full of this stuff.
Note: this is a single manly serving, for a man, watching an exciting Super Bowl. Do the math if you’re making pico for other men and women.
Wings To Die For
12 whole chicken wings or drummies, or you know, as many as you need
3 ounces organic butter
1 large clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup of your favorite hot sauce (We like Cholula)
A healthy tablespoon of Sambal Oelek (Super Bowl— this can be hot)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Method
Place a 6-quart saucepan with a steamer basket and 1-inch of water in the bottom, over high heat, cover and bring to a boil.
Remove the tips of the wings and discard.
Using kitchen shears, or a knife, a hatchet, anything sharp, separate the wings at the joint.
Place the wings into the steamer basket, cover, reduce the heat to medium and steam for 10 minutes.
Remove the wings from the basket and pat’em dry.
Lay the wings out on a cooling rack set in a half sheet pan lined with paper towels and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour. Do I have to tell you again— this is the Super Bowl?
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees, and if you’re cool, you’ll do it so the preheat timer goes off on the stove the same minute the hour in the fridge is up.
Replace the paper towels with parchment paper. Your wife will know what this is, and she may have some. But You could impress the hell out of everyone and bring some home with the other goodies, because you actually did the shopping.
Roast on the middle rack of the oven for 20 minutes. Turn the wings over and roast another 20 minutes— check the color at 10 minutes— or until meat is cooked through and the skin is a delicious golden brown.
While teh Wings be roastin’, melt the butter in a small bowl along with the garlic.
Pour this and the hot sauce and salt into a really super bowl, one large enough to hold all the bird parts, and stir it, stir it good.
Remove the parts from the oven and put’em in the bowl with the sauce. Shake it, dudes. Serve’m at halftime because, watch the game.
Optional petition: GO Falcons! Ravens! Cardinals! Seahawks! etc.**
* As in: Pico de gallo (literally, “Rooster’s Beak”)
**I always root for the team with wings, if there is one.
WASHINGTON D.C. — The reprehensibility bad U. S. Senatorial comedy team of Mitch and Harry reprised one of their most popular routines this week, “Who’s Fullabluster?”
The “gag me with a filibuster” routine goes something like this: Harry tells Mitch about a genuinely good bill he wants to pass, and Mitch replies, “Tell me about it again.” Harry repeats the idea, but upon hearing it again, Mitch jumbles it into utter nonsense, and says there’s no way he’ll ever let it pass, and he’ll filibuster.
Harry says he’ll do it anyway, and announces to the public that he’ll even using the nuclear option if he has to. But Mitch says Harry is being unreasonable, calls him a bunch of names, and threatens to hold his breath until he “turns blue” and passes out; making Harry feel like a bully, irresponsible and embarrassed, and willing to compromise anyway Mitch wants him to, so poor Mitch won’t turn blue.
“Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me — should be clear to all of you — that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.”
Boehner continued, claiming that the broader goal of the administration was “to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”
According to the NRA ad above, President Obama is just another “elitist hypocrite” for accepting Secret Service protection for his daughters.
Seriously.
And this on the heels of a new first person shooter phone app called “NRA Shooting Range.” It features coffin shaped targets using a virtual semi-automatic pistol that , for an extra 99 cents, can be upgraded to a MK11 sniper rifle. It is being marketed to an age appropriate audience of wanna be killers; that is, from four year olds to adults.
As I type this, President Obama is on my teevee announcing the results of Vice President Joe Biden‘s commission on how to limit the carnage with a combination of proposed congressional legislation and 23 new executive orders. Naturally, this has the wingnuts up in arms (literally), including a threat of impeachment from Texas Representative Steve Stockman, who compares Obama to Saddam Hussein.
There is, of course, much more to this current gun nut craziness than meets the eye, beyond the role that groups like the NRA play as marketing shills for the billion dollar munitions industry. Cognitive science, narratology, evolutionary psychology, identity politics, and ongoing wingnut propaganda all play a role, which I hope to address in a future post.
Meanwhile, a debate that has long been held hostage by “gun enthusiasts” has begun in earnest, and is already producing policy changes that can make society a bit safer. President Obama has decided to spend a significant amount of his political capital in realizing that goal. It remains to be seen whether there is enough courage on Capitol Hill to match his commitment to turn the public’s outrage over the massacre of first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School into the first sane restrictions on gun control in a generation.
We conclude with this totally vile performance by Rush Limbaugh mimicking the pleas of children to make their world a little safer, which he and Fux News characterize as “human shields” used by the Obama Administration to promote its fascist agenda. Or something like that.
Breezy Point, Queens, after Superstorm Sandy blew through.
With urgently needed relief for the victims of Superstorm Sandy ignored for over two months by the Rethug led 112th House of Representatives , the 113th sworn in this week managed to pass just $9.7 billion of the $60 billion the Democrat led Senate had already approved, with 67 Rethugs voting no.
In contrast, $62 billion worth of relief for Hurricane Katrina was signed into law within 4 days from the time it first made landfall. Even so, it took a firestorm of protest from such conservative stalwarts as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Rep. Steve King (R-NY) to force a vote. King went so far as to threaten switching parties if Speaker John Boehner didn’t immediately put it on the floor. Da Boner has promised to schedule a supplemental authorization by Jan 15.
So, what’s been the holdup? A combination of resistance from the likes of David Koch‘s American For Progress, who object to the whole notion of the social compact and the costs of being our brother’s keeper when the need arises; and a hypocritical regional, red state prejudice against the liberal Northeast. Lee Fang from The Nationexplains the Koch connection:
Billionaire David Koch’s prime political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), having failed in its $125 million quest to oust President Barack Obama, is now aiming at a slightly less sophisticated political target: victims of Hurricane Sandy. Hurricane Sandy was the second most costly in American history, leaving 100 lives lost, over $50 billion in devastation and tens of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes. Legislative efforts to help those who survived Hurricane Sandy’s wrath will reach a major stumbling block.
Earlier this week, AFP, which is chaired by Koch and believed to be financed by several other plutocrats from the New York City region, released a letter warning members of Congress not to vote for the proposed federal aid package for victims of the storm that swept New Jersey, New York City and much of the surrounding area in October. An announcement on the group’s website says that the vote next week for the Sandy aid package will be a “key vote”—meaning senators who support sending money for reconstruction could face an avalanche of attack ads in their next election. Already, opposition to the bill is growing, although it passed one procedural hurdle last night. There is some legitimate criticism with aspects of the legislation, including the fact that some of the money will go to non-Sandy related reconstruction efforts in disaster areas.
For AFP, however, the whole bill must die and victims of the storm deserve no help from the government. Koch’s top deputy in New Jersey, a surly gentleman named Steve Lonegan, who heads the local AFP state chapter, called the aid package a “disgrace.” “This is not a federal government responsibility,” Lonegan told reporters. “We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.”
Easy to say when the guy who signs your paycheck is worth over $30 billion. Crooks and Liarsaddresses the redneck issue:
Rep. Rush Holt came to the floor and said what many are thinking: They dropped the ball because the disaster happened in a blue state. He’s not the only one to think so:
Jamil Smith@JamilSmith Wonder if the House would adjourn without even voting on Hurricane #Sandy relief if it had hit red states the hardest. Having my doubts.
This could possibly be the most despicable non-act of Congress ever. Howie Klein has more on one of the tea party idiots in New Jersey who is probably dancing a jig right now:
Among the Koch whores in the House GOP threatening to disrupt the aid are right-wing hacks in New York (like Staten Island’s corrupt Mafia-related Michael “Mikey Suits” Grimm) and New Jersey’s worst extremist ideologue Scott Garrett. Long Island Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has been handling the bill, is worried that if the money doesn’t get approved while he’s still chair, Texas hate-monger Michael McCaul— the richest member of the House and an anti-tax fanatic— will kill it. Many Republicans still fighting the Civil War look at this as an opportunity to deal a painful blow to the hated Northerners.
Which would be a fitting postscript to the movie Lincoln. And tying the two objections together, Fang continues:
It seems particularly cruel that the Koch political machine would use its vast network of paid activists and professional operatives to kill this bill. For one thing, this is David Koch’s community. From his Upper East Side apartment, Koch lives only a subway ride away from the devastation in Red Hook. Notably, Koch’s group gave away free gasoline during the election in a wide-scale anti-Obama stunt, yet had nothing to give to the victims of the storm. Now, Koch, one of the richest men in the world, is actually trying to take something away from them.
[…]
The other tragedy of Koch’s decision to target Sandy aid is that his company is one reason we will increasingly face extreme weather events like hurricanes, flash floods, droughts and fierce storms. The Koch brothers, David and Charles, sit atop one of the world’s largest privately held conglomerates. Koch Industries is a sprawling company with interests in commodity speculation, timber, oil refining, ethanol production, chemicals, pipelines, consumer products, and fertilizer, among others. The Koch empire, by one estimate, has an annual carbon footprint of 100 million tons. Not only does Koch’s business contribute to climate change through massive carbon emissions, as Greenpeace reported, Koch is the largest financier of climate denial political organizations and media groups. (As an aside, unlike AFP, Greenpeace ignored partisan politics and sent many of its workers to Queens to assist with relief efforts.)
And lest we forget, during the primary debates Willard called for the elimination and privitization of FEMA:
In sum, Willard argues it’s immoral to saddle our children with the bill for restoring the infrastructure that they will have to depend on. Better to leave them with this.
WRT to the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations, President Obama, as expected, caved on his many promises to draw the line of tax increases at $200-250k, settling for $400-450k. This has the effect of reducing his initial position of raising $1.6 trillion in new revenues to a mere $620 billion. The difference will likely be made up in even further cuts to discretionary spending, including an already weakened social safety net, though Obama made some vague promises to offset some of the difference by closing some tax loophole and other exemptions.
While in the short run the Obama Administration won some significant concessions on issues like extended unemployment insurance, green energy tax credits (at the price of extending subsidies for the fossil fuel extraction industry), and patching the Alternative Minimum Tax loophole (that was starting to sweep more and more of the middle class into its grasp because it wasn’t originally indexed to inflation), he has substantially weakened his future negotiating position with the Rethugs by not insisting that the debt limit be extended permanently.
This latter development sets up a replay of hostage taking strategy that the Rethugs used so effectively in 2011. While Obama has stated in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t entertain negotiations on the issue, he hardly has the negotiating cred to convince anyone that he won’t fold on that issue as he has on so many others. (I heard today a spokesman for Patriotic Millionaires, who have lobbied for higher taxes on individuals in his income class, say that Obama was the worst presidential negotiator evah.)
That said, the bottom line on the income tax issue for Rethugs is that because they agreed to higher income taxes (if only on the top 0.016%), it represents a clear break with the vaunted Grover Norquist no tax increases ever pledge. Nonetheless, as a leader in the Grand Old Denial Party, Grover tried to spin the defeat, saying:
“The Bush tax cuts lapsed at midnight last night. Every R voting for Senate bill is cutting taxes and keeping his/her pledge.”
Interviewed on MSNBC by a dumbfounded Andrea Mitchell, she offered a more realistic assessment:
“Wait a second,” Mitchell interjected with a laugh. “We’re not living in the Alice in Wonderland world here. There is a tax increase for wealthy Americans. It’s literally a tax increase. Rates are up.”
“We had an election Boehner was elected speaker. Now lame duck obama should get over it.”
Oh, Grover, you quack us up. The Rethugs regained control of the House despite receiving less votes than the totality of Democratic reps nationwide, thanks to the 2010 census and some heavily biased redistricting shenanigans.
That sound you’re hearing is the cement shoes hardening around your feet as history awaits your plunge into the primordial D.C. tidewaters. Future generations might find it necessary to re-drain the Washington swamp, at which time your rotted corpse will surface and serve as a time capsule embodying the worst of the Greed is Good ethos that has done so much to corrupt the US government.
Bon voyage, you selfish prick. And may the Ancients of Days judge you divinely.
