End Times Chronicles

Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken

He will serve Minnesotans for six years.

Good luck with that.

Barack Obrundlefly

Barack Obrundlefly: "What am I working on? Uhh... I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it."



We can only hope along comes a spider.



SBD Note: This is a deliberate mashup of the 1958 The Fly and the 1986 The Fly, both horror masterpieces.

This Week's Nutshell

WSJ's James Taranto provides this week's "In a Nutshell" on the Obama administration's plans for health care:

The Associated Press reports on what it gently calls a "quirk" in the
so-called stimulus law:

When President Barack Obama increased unemployment benefits as part of his economic stimulus, he also made some Americans ineligible for hundreds of dollars a month in food stamps.

Under the economic recovery plan, laid-off workers have seen a $25 weekly bump in their unemployment checks as part of a broad expansion of benefits for the poor. But the law did not raise the income cap for food stamp eligibility, so the extra money has pushed some people over the limit. Laid-off workers and state officials are only now realizing the quirk, a consequence of pushing a $787 billion, 400-page bill through Congress and into law in three weeks.

And for people hurt by the change, there's no way around it.

This is why it's so important to give these genuises control over our health care right this second!

In this example, the government promises help, delivers that help, then promises more help, delivers that help and in the process makes those people worse off.

So the question is posed: will a gigantic government bureaucracy forcing the provision of health care insurance on an alleged 40-50 million uninsured Americans (more likely ruin the health care insurance now provided by scores of corporate bureaucracies held to the other 255 million Americans?

Another question is posed: given that the government already controls almost half of America's health care spending, and costs are declared to be out of control, then why is giving more power to Washington to set costs going to reduce costs when they already can't control a huge portion of the health care landscape?

And a third question is posed: What will Americans . . . ah, fuck it! Americans elected this Ice Cream Man and there's not a damn thing to be done to stop him. We are a nation of children screaming with delight at hearing the sprightly jingle and pling plong bell and running to the curb to pay three times as much for a frozen treat paid for by mom and dad, and if we don't get out there right away the Ice Cream Man will pass by our house and he might never come back!

Wait, Mr. Ice Cream Man, wait!

Well, Our Numbers Don't Lie; They Don't Tell The Truth Either

With the table below, Political Math demonstrates how the Obama administration has been "horrifically, disastrously wrong" in the effectiveness of its "stimulus" policies.

Unemployment Rate	Unemployed Population
Predicted Unemployment without the Stimulus	8.7%	13,492,000
Predicted Unemployment with the Stimulus	7.9%	12,251,000
Actual Unemployment with the Stimulus	9.4%	14,511,000

So, in effect, the "stimulus" has resulted in the loss of 1,019,000 jobs than if there had been no stimulus, at least if we use the President's promise, which was based on a hopeful army of nerds running all sorts of impressive calculations in this new age of scientific inquiry and soulless application of reason and Keynesian quantification, all of it so unlike that crafty bastard George Bush, who used old Atari 64 bit computers to run his budgets and used his complete control of the mainstream media to drown a willing populace in his Deatheater lies. Now, other eggheads will argue that we can't predict what actual unemployment without the stimulus would have been, so why take Obama to task for being rosy about government manipulation of the economy. Oh, right, he's pointing us in the right direction with his government largesse. He promised to save or create 3 million jobs with his stimulus and while the bald facts seem to suggest a complete failure to create jobs and there's no way to actually claim they "save" any jobs, let alone a paltry 150,000 and not including any additions to government worker rolls, we just have to believe the government will take care of it sooner or later. But he really means it now and we can expect 600,000 jobs to be saved or created this summer. After all, the economy can't be allowed to work these problems out on its own. That's never worked, even though it's never really been tried.

As Keith Hennessey points out:

Less than 5% of the $787 B [stimulus] is out the door, and the bulk of the cash flow will not happen until mid-2010. The administration would like to claim credit for the so-called green shoots of good news, and they deserve some praise for the stress tests, but they cannot plausibly claim that stimulus spending is helping the economy now in any significant way. No made up calculation of jobs saved can obscure that the money is not yet flowing into the economy.

[...]

In addition to being inefficient and wasteful, the stimulus was poorly timed. By deferring to congressional desires to shovel taxpayer funds to slow-spending infrastructure projects, the administration got a stimulus law that isn’t helping GDP growth now, and won’t have a quantitatively significant effect until 2010. The administration is in a tough spot — if the economy is not healing, then at some point the president will take the blame. If instead the economy is healing before the stimulus takes effect, then maybe the stimulus was unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Well, what the hell does some right wing economist know? Let's ask the people on whose behalf all this rubbing and stimulating is being done.

According to Rasmussen Reports:

(f)orty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled.

Rasmussen has some other interesting tidbits about Hope and Change in your wallet:

• Only 31% of Americans believe the new government spending in the stimulus package creates new jobs.
• Forty-eight percent (48%) say the stimulus spending does not create jobs, and 21% are not sure
• Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the increased spending will be good for the economy, but 44% say it will be bad. Eight percent (8%) think it will have no impact
• A plurality of government employees believe speeding up the stimulus will be good for the economy. [SURPRISE!] However, those who work in the private sector strongly disagree. [Really?]
• Only 31% of U.S. voters believe the economic stimulus package has helped the economy. That's down from 38% when it first passed in February.
• For the first time in years, voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on the handling of the economy.
• Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans believe that increases in government spending are generally bad for the economy.
  
• For nearly four-out-of-five U.S. voters, the unwillingness of politicians to control government spending is a bigger problem than the public’s resistance to more taxes.
• Most voters [52%] continue to worry that the federal government will do too much in reacting to the country’s current economic problems.

The chances are that Obama will review all of these bellwethers and decide that the best course of action will be to demonstrate his man of the street cred by gathering up Michelle and the kids and flying on Air Force One to a Costco in flyover country (maybe Nebraska where his buddy Warren Buffett lives) to try out the new Kirkland Signature Hot Dog in the Costco food court. He can buy a giant sized Grey Poupon Mustard to go along with it.

Har Har

David Letterman describes Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a slut and jokes about her 14 year old daughter being raped by baseball players and Elliot Spitzer.

First Wave at Omaha Beach:

To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

R.I.P. Asshopper

At a time when the 70s resurgence is in full swing, with unemployment, environmental doomsaying, industrial failure, Big Government ascendance, cultural rot, and speeches by the leader of the free world seeking accommodation with its sworn and implacable enemies, a little bit of the 70s dies at the same time. And thus today we learn of the passing of David Carradine, the zen master of eastern religious schlock, as represented by his tour de force performance as Kwai Chang Caine, a Chinese-American Shaolin monk loosed upon a mythological American west, a proto Mad Max, clad in homespun hemp instead of biker leathers, hobbled by a mumble mouth instead of a shotgunned bum knee, and driven by experiential revelation by sitting on his ass whenever possible as opposed to a gas fueled vigilante hatred for post-nuclear mutants.

Carradine played Caine - some might say became Caine in the end - as a man seeking only to be left in peace in the middle of the 110 degree desert, but he often found himself at the whip end of some malignant synthesis of modern America's ills, some white cracker sheriff or former Confederate racist or a Chicago carpetbagger with his leering eye on a handsome lady of the plains sitting on a fortune of gold. The white man was ill, we were told, then and now in the lost 70s, and he needed his ass kicked by a quiet, long haired monk seeking truth, justice and the Chinese-American Way. Every episode centered around some corrupted stereotype of Western decadence, each story a giant ostrich egg, like the ones they ate on that other multicultural trip through hell, The Land of the Lost, to be broken open, scrambled and reformed into a lecture on eastern jurisprudence.

For Sydney Brillo Duodenum, being raised a Catholic in the 70s, to once a week watch Caine open a door of philosophical madness with his hippy dippy Arizona heat induced flashbacks to his training among the Shaolin monks, principally the frighteningly blind Master Kan, as he searches for an excuse to unleash a wraith-thin sinuous ass kicking on foul disgusting inhabits of the western landscape, is perhaps one of the many reasons he walks outside the fold to this day. The whole Old West setting for a Shaolin monk did not compute alongside Saturday reviews of Clint Eastwood spaghetti hoedowns. It was a constant tug of war whether to emulate The High Plains Drifter or the High Plains hobo.

What American child's psyche could withstand an episode of Kung Fu with the following exchange:

Master Kan: Deal with evil through strength-but affirm the Good in man through trust. In this way we are prepared for evil, but we encourage Good.

Young Caine: And is Good our great reward for trusting?

Master Kan: In striving for an ideal, we do not seek rewards; yet trust does sometimes bring with it great reward-even greater than Good.

Young Caine: What is greater than Good?

Master Kan: Love.

So, while David Carradine is partially responsible for the fall of western civilization for bringing Caine into the homes of millions of bell-bottom wearing, tube sock clad, bowl hair coiffed, malaise afflicted American children - children who would have been better served a steady diet of Eastwoods homicidal angel of death - we cannot be too harsh in our assessment of David Carradine, for as Caine's murdered Master Po said, "if a man dwells in the past, then he robs the present, but if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future. The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past."

Well, on second thought, fuck you David Caine Carradine. Fuck you to hell.

Wild Ass Prediction

GM proudly announced today that they had found a secret buyer of the Hummer division. They were so smug and satisfied with themselves at having discharged the company's supposedly worst symbol of excess and selfishness and environmental depredation. Talking all about the future and retooling and moving forward. Oh, GM certainly has been retooled, with chief screw driver being Fritzy Henderson. Word on the street is that some Chicom firm has picked it up. How ironic that Obama would allow GM to sell its most loathed and despised brand to the biggest polluters on the planet.

And who is it exactly that loathes and despises the HUMMER? No vehicle has caused more diarrhea among the environmental wackjob community than the HUMMER. Whereas receiving a hummer in the confines of the sacred Oval of the People is really none of anyone’s business, driving a HUMMER is an international crime against humanity. Receiving a hummer in a HUMMER would constitute a rip in the space time continuum.

Which brings us to today’s wild ass prediction. It is SBD’s fervent belief, founded entirely on his own imagination and highly questionable understanding of the car, truck, light truck, pick-up truck, SUV, smart car business, that the only company with a legitimate claim on the HUMMER assets is none other than Navistar International Corporation. Americans cross paths every day with Navistar products. They make school buses, delivery trucks, moving trucks, rental trucks, and they make diesel engines for trucks, SUVs and pickups. Navistar is a forward looking American company, making a diesel-electric hybrid. Also, Navistar makes the MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected big ass MoFo armored fighting vehicle, which is responsible for a drastic decline in roadside bombing fatalities among US service personnel in Iraq.

“Well, that’s a grand guess,” the smug assholes among you might say, “but just what the hell does Navistar have to do with owning big ass, nearly impractical, poseur sport utility vehicles such as the HUMMER?” What claim on the offering of four independently operated wheels for the average American does Navistar have?

Well, Navistar used to be called International Harvester and International Harvester used to make some of the iconic American workhorse wagons. Maker of the Travelall, the Travellete, the Scout, the Scout II, the Dana, the Scout Traveller, and the Terra, IH established a firm foundation for solid, no nonsense, four wheel drive workhorses. Designed to haul stuff from one shitty location to another, they offered no pretension of status other than that you probably worked your ass off for the better part of seven days of a week.

SBD is himself a Jeep man. Former owner of a Wrangler, lost to the chastisement of a new wife, and present owner of a low mileage Cherokee Sport 2 Door, another terribly impractical vehicle (unless one finds himself in snow, mud, sand, slush, a field, a mountain road, a creek, a gigantic potholed strewn stretch of roadway in Washington, D.C.), but a keeper for life, regardless of the wifely sighs. Now, Jeep used to hold a similar status to the IH workhorses, in fact competed with them, as well as mother of SUVs - the group of Chevy trucks generally known as the Suburban. Jeeps status has fallen considerably since Chrysler executives began to ask why urban women weren’t buying Jeeps, which has resulted in an embarrassing stable of pussy mobiles such as the Liberty, the Patriot and the Compass. Shameful vehicles all, most definitely meeting needs of urban women, but that’s not what Jeep is supposed to do. Jeep was not ever supposed to give a rat’s ass about urbanites. It was always a fuck you statement, declaring “I don’t belong here and neither does my owner and we are ready to drive over your ass to get out if we have to.” You couldn’t drive over an ant’s ass in a Compass. And Chrysler has wildly confused an entire generation of men, leading them far down a path of personal embarrassment, as they pimp out their second hands with low profile tires and low boy suspension. And despite a few rough years, only the Wrangler stays true to the Jeep brand. The newly styled Liberty attempts to reclaim the hard work of the Cherokee name plate and the Commander is trying desperately to be a Land Rover, causing the old Grand Wagoneer to roll over in the junk yard. Whatever – the whole Jeep mark will probably be relegated to some kind of car Gitmo, as no Chrysler/Fiat executive will know what judgment to pass on it for fear of being visited by Obama’s civilian patrol in the dead of night.

The HUMMER has a lingering credibility because its grandfather is the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or HMMWV, or Humvee, produced by AM General, which was created the commercial version the Hummer. Sold in 1999 to GM, AM General continued to make the Hummer, or H1, as well as the horrendous and laughable H2, but GM took responsibility for manufacturing the H3 and H3T, which now has a decent reputation overseas. Anyway, there’s enough seriousness and utility to be found in the brand and the trucks.

There is a huge market of four wheel drive enthusiasts in this country and they are certainly sick and tired of being lectured by non-child bearing, Ivy League plastic and glass parsers seeking to martyr you and SBD on America’s highways in clown cars so Gaia can focus on destroying humanity with natural disasters. There’s a backlash coming and the company that can take advantage of it by boldly and proudly selling big ass utility to those who need it and who harbor an inner Galt, ready to drive into the mountains, will be solidly positioned and will be doing God's work.

GM and Chrysler are now owned by a government whose mission is to rob Americans of their pleasures and force them into purchasing goods based on how good they make other people feel about themselves. Navistar makes things people need to work efficiently and to support their livelihood. Owning Hummer would give them an opportunity to lay claim to a heritage of serving the individual with solid, no nonsense engineering and simplicity. Many people may be like SBD, unwilling to ever consider buying any product owned in part by the government. As much as he loves Jeeps, it will be a long time before he considers buying one. Same for GM products. There’s great potential in the HUMMER brand. Great opportunity to allow a fair number of Americans to say fuck you to Obama and his army of fun crushers and scolds. SBD hopes that Navistar climbs that hill.