Fumesucker
Fumesucker's JournalThe Squid Business Principles
Found on Zero Hedge, I don't read that site personally but one of my neighbors does and we were chuckling over this graphic early this morning while having coffee in his den, we are both early risers and sometimes get together in the AM. It's sometimes amazing how much people with radically different political philosophies can find to agree on.
Some things never change dept: Experts agree, Meese is a pig
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115032/meese-pig-ed-meese-now-wants-kill-obamacareMeese's return to the headlines is bad news for the country, and likely bad news for his fellow Republicans, whose efforts to blame President Obama for the shutdown might be undercut by news that a secret cabal of veteran Beltway insiders plotted the shutdown months ago. But for people who lived in Washington in the 1980s, it brought with it a certain sweet nostalgia: Few government officials ever represented better targets for mockery.
For people who followed politics, of course, Meese was the guy behind some of Reagan's most divisive policies. But ordinary commuters also experienced the Meese-bashing in ways they didn't with other officials: During the last couple years of the Reagan administration, walls, construction sites, traffic signal boxes, and highway overpasses throughout the Washington area were festooned with giant posters that read "Meese is a Pig." Soon afterwards, a second series of the poster appeared, with an additional two words: "Experts Agree!"
The campaign, in turn, drew ample national media coverage and represented something of a cultural moment—a pre-web meme of sorts. Stores began selling T-shirts bearing the same message.
(. . .)
Krugman: The upper hand is on the other foot
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/shorting-out-the-wiring/?_r=0I have no idea whether that’s right. But as I was reading the various news reports, it occurred to me that there’s a subtler but possibly profound form of damage the GOP is doing to itself, one that will cast its shadow for a long time.
It goes back to something Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo used to say — that Washington is, in effect, wired for Republicans. Ever since Reagan, the Beltway has treated Republicans as the natural party of government. Sunday talk shows would feature a preponderance of Republicans even if Democrats held the White House and one or both houses of Congress. John McCain was featured on those shows so often you would think he won in 2008.
And there was a general presumption of Republican competence. It’s hard to believe now, but Bush was treated as a highly effective leader who knew what he was doing right up to Katrina, while Clinton — now viewed with such respect — was treated as a bungling interloper for much of his presidency. Even in the last few years there was a rush to canonize Paul Ryan as a superwonk, when it was quite obvious if you looked that politics aside, he was just incompetent at number-crunching.
(...)
Read the entire piece at the link.
Massive Welfare Fraud Exposed
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/10/02/welfare-fraud/The Federal Communications Commission yesterday accused five wireless service providers of obtaining duplicate payments from a federal fund for low-income consumers. The FCC wants the companies to repay the extra money and, in addition, to pay $14.4 million in fines.
The wireless providers allegedly violated rules of the Lifeline program, which has helped people afford basic telephone service since 1985. It was expanded to cover pre-paid cell phone service in 2005 under former President George W. Bush.
This wasn’t chump change, either: over three years, the FCC thinks it can reduce overcharging by $2 billion once the 1.1 million duplicates are removed from the program.
"It's easier to make it inside than outside"
I helped keep a man from going back to prison today and that's his comment that made the most impression on me.
I'm kind of buddies with the manager of one of our local thrift stores, I help him with his fairly frequent computer problems at the store and sometimes he cuts me a bit of a deal or holds stuff for me that he thinks I might be interested in. So I was working on his computer today when I got in a conversation with a guy that was looking over my shoulder and made some fairly intelligent remarks about what I was doing and mentioned that he was looking for that sort of work himself.
One thing led to another and pretty soon it became clear Chris was really in dire straits financially and had no one at all to help him. He had been living with a elderly friend who had passed away and now he's in a fleabag motel room right next to the thrift store @$150/week. His most pressing problem was he had a court mandated counseling session twenty five miles away this afternoon that if he missed it they already told him his probation was going to be revoked and it was back to prison. Chris is a little man, 135 lbs or so, short and slight, early forties but looks fiftysomething, well spoken and obviously intelligent but also fairly obviously with some sort of head problem it's beyond my pay grade to diagnose.
For my computer work my manager buddy gave me a old donated desktop he had in the store and I told my new acquaintance that if he fixed it up for me I would take him to his counseling session and also give him an old bicycle I have laying around so he could at least ride that instead of walking everywhere. I could have done the computer work myself but I sort of liked Chris and wanted to help him without it feeling like a complete handout, he's more knowledgeable than I am about certain aspects of computers so it wasn't entirely silly me letting him work on my latest acquisition. I actually ended up giving him the bicycle plus a large aluminum framed hiking backpack I had picked up at a yard sale somewhere so he could go shopping on the bike.
There are so many people out there in really horrible situations, Chris told me he was right on the verge of calling his probation officer and just telling them to come get him, it's actually easier to survive in prison than it is out on the streets for more people than most of us would credit. I'm not sure what that says about our society but I don't think it's anything good.
Pohl's Law might as well be DU's law
Fred Pohl's passing got me to thinking about him and while it's not as familiar as Murphy's law or Newton's laws, Fred does have a law named after him because he dreamed it up, or realized it however you want to think of it.
Pohl's Law is either "No one is ever ready for anything" or "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere will not hate it".
Greewald trolled the US government and they bit.. Hard
They aren't going to find anything in all that electronics confiscated from Glenn's partner, the trip and announcements and so forth was strictly a move to trigger exactly what happened.
Greenwald was a good move or two ahead of the spooks, the actual data is on a micro SD card or three headed to Germany by DHL or FedEx or even the Post Office as anonymously as Greenwald and the Guardian can arrange.
You know if we've got to have spooks can't they at least be smart ones? This is twice now in only a few weeks that the spooks have been punked big time.
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Member since: Sat Mar 29, 2008, 10:11 PMNumber of posts: 45,851
