Election’s over. Dodged another bullet there. That was close … sort of… if three million human votes and about 100 electoral votes is a thin margin. Thank you, black people, brown people, and women for saving us (i.e. white men) from ourselves once again. Without your help, John Bolton would likely be the next secretary of state. You should be very, very proud of what you kept us from doing – that being, quite literally, driving this country into yet another war. Now it’s merely possible that we will have a war with Iran, not likely. A dangerous state of affairs, to be sure, but not a guaranteed catastrophe. Nice work.
Post-election used to be a time to reflect on what happened, what was decided. There appears to be some of that going on, though probably not enough. Suffice to say that the predictions on the center-left were far more accurate than those on the popular right. It was more than a little cheering to see Karl Rove scrambling for data on Fox News after Ohio was called for Obama. This can’t be right! It would mean all of our assumptions are massively skewed! Welcome to the world of fact, fat boy. Couldn’t happen to a better guy. Wish I could be a fly on the wall the next time he speaks with Sheldon Adelson and some of the other rich wing-nuts who gave him millions of dollars to crush Obama, Sherrod Brown, and others.
Right. So… what we’ve got is something very much the same as we had before, minus some very bad actors – namely congress members Joe Walsh, Allen West (it appears), and so on. The administration still has its many problems, namely targeted killing, extralegal detention, craven lack of effort on Israel/Palestine, soft commitment to expanding employment, etc. But as I’ve said many times to friends and family, same is better than worse. That’s enough reason to vote. I think many, many Americans were smart enough to see that this was the case, and many stood in lines for ridiculous stretches of time to cast their votes.
God bless them. They saved our sorry asses to fight another day. That’s something to celebrate.
luv u,
jp
Oh, sorry. I was just on the phone with Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, who wisely chose this week to travel to Madagascar for a conference on … I don’t know, monster-making best practices, something like that. Good time to leave, what with the hurricane and all that. Up here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, we implemented our disaster preparedness plan. Basically that involves closing the windows, drawing the curtains, and blocking our ears. Occasionally someone lights a candle. (When it comes to disasters, we’re not good.)
has adopted his party’s Luddite stance on global warming, advocating massive expansion of fossil fuel extraction, processing, and use and joining the crackpot consensus on the right that sees extreme weather as a series of unfortunate (and wholly unrelated) accidents best ignored.
What’s in the program this month? Well…. pretty much anything we could find lying about the Hammer Mill. Bits and bobs, as they say. Is it lame? You be the judge! My lips are sealed on the quality issue. But I will talk about what’s in the bulging box that is 
We are truly living in a post-modern age of political rhetoric. Romney has a massive right-wing orchestra to blow hard on every note that passes his lips. He makes a claim, and it gets chorused incessantly by FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and countless others like them to millions of Americans. Together they create such a storm surge of bullshit that it pushes far inland to where the mainstream corporate media lives. They who spend most of their time trying to disprove the canard that they are radical leftists feel compelled to report on whatever’s being tossed up, whether it’s the massive Benghazi coverup or the “racism” of Shirley Sharrod. That’s how national news stories are made. That’s how a deadly skirmish in Libya becomes a bigger scandal than Bush’s failure to stop the 9/11 plot.
Dear ignorant buggers,
It is often said that incumbency has its advantages, and it certainly does, but it has many drawbacks. One is that, as president, it’s harder to go around saying what you are going to do because the first thing people wonder is, well, why aren’t you doing it now? You are, in essence, applying for the job you already have. Your performance in that job is an actuality, not an abstraction. On the other hand, if you’re the challenger, you can promise anything, make any wild claim, run against mathematics itself, and act as though you have a big vat of miracle sauce locked up in your car elevator, and that once you take the oath of office, you’ll start ladling that stuff all over everything that’s bad and make it good.
Oh, hi. Just in the midst of blowing someone off… I mean, ending a phone call somewhat abruptly. Just been one of those weeks. Can’t find time to do anything, including this blog. Shoo-wee. Busy, busy, busy. What other meaningless chatter can I share?
claiming that this can be balanced by closing loopholes on upper income earners. Horseshit. Where’s the proof? They don’t have any numbers. They can’t name deductions that they would suggest in any negotiations with Congress. They’re talking about an enormous gap that their plan would greatly expand, they claim they can close it, but they offer no details. They’ve got a secret plan to cut taxes and balance the budget while raising military spending: it’s called “Just trust us.”