Friday, April 11, 2014

DOWN BY THE SCHOOLYARD.

When I was seven years old, a couple of kids in my neighborhood asked me who the ugliest girl in my school was. I unchivalrously told them, and they went into the middle of the street in front of my house, drew a big heart, and put the girl's name and mine inside it, and started chanting that I loved her.

So I can understand Jesse Walker's rage. He's probably a little older than I was when I got mad at those boys, but libertarians don't mature as quickly as the rest of us.


Thursday, April 10, 2014

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

Shorter Aaron Goldstein: I apologize to readers of The American Spectator -- when I celebrated Hank Aaron's baseball career, I didn't realize that he was black.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT, PART 3,293,003.

Oh brother::
Kirsten Powers: Liberals' mob rule
Kickstarter's attempt to censor film about convicted abortion doctor is another example.
This is the latest entrant in the "Mozilla is liberal fascism" derby. Apparently some folks wanted to use the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to fund their Kermit Gosnell horror movie; Kickstarter had some trouble with the gruesome marketing copy that was to appear at Kickstarter's website -- not with the movie, though Powers labors to make that hard to notice -- and tried to work something out with them, which the filmmakers, who apparently know a great PR angle when they see one, found unacceptable.

Thus, Powers says Kickstarter was "blocking the movie," because they love abortion. My favorite nonsense phrase in the story is "Kickstarter, like too much of the news media, wants only one version of the late-term abortion story told." That's really a tell: By bitching about liberal bias in the media, these guys have made major press outlets too shit-scared to assert anything without letting a wingnut rave alongside it in the name of "balance." Powers seems to think the same racket -- show up, fall down, start crying, collect settlement -- will work elsewhere. So she talks about this incident as if setting guidelines for service is media bias. The company's not just supposed to provide its offered service, it's supposed to tell the filmmaker's "story," and any limitation on that is censorship.

The connection with the Mozilla bitchfest is obvious, but I also see a relationship with the religious-freedom cases the brethren have been crying about, in which a few bakers and wedding photographers have been sued for not serving gay couples. These guys hear the civil rights, public accommodation arguments against denying someone services based on their sexual orientation, I'm guessing, and think, "Oh, well, so we'll go where you libtards work and make you do what we want."

JACKASSERY.

Hmph, says National Review's John J. Miller:
A subscription offer for Poetry magazine showed up in the mail yesterday. The outside of the envelope carried a big quote: “New editor, new life, new kickassery.” A card on the inside repeated the quote. I’m all for useful and clever neologisms, but would you subscribe to a magazine about poetry that thinks “kickassery” is its great virtue?
John J. Miller is the author of an essay on "the 50 greatest conservative rock songs." Also, here's something else he wrote about poetry:
Yesterday, I offered qualified praise on the selection of W.S. Merwin as poet laureate. Well, I probably should have qualified it even more! At First Things, Joseph Bottum exposes Merwin as a crazed Bush hater...
Since all us liberals are supposed to be bullies now, I ask the politburo to see that Miller is silenced on matters of poesy. C'mon, I know he's not a millionaire CEO but it'll still be fun!

UPDATE. Commenters feel the sprung rhythm of laughter! "Poetry Magazine was been around since 1912," says (the good) Roger Ailes. "As far as I can tell, it hasn't had to resort to beg-a-thons, bamboozle-the-elderly cruises and Koch kissassery to stay in business." There are also some Michael Berube tribute locutions, e.g., "I used to read the humanists, but ever since the Sicilian Vespers I've been outraged by Dante Alighieri," and God help us a Seamus Heaney parody by coozledad:
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when your car stops in the road, the poets inspect
your Bush/ Cheney sticker and, as one bends his face 
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond. Gelignite, ticking
to sell you an arts magazine, or give you an ass kicking 
and everything is pure condescension
until a poet motions and you leave
after Joseph Bottums is mentioned— 
a little nervous, pulse slightly quickened
as always by that quiver in the shorts
ready to fuck that chicken.
Silent upon a freakin' derr, I am.

Monday, April 07, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Mozilla/Brendan Eich thing. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it looks -- especially when you consider most of the guys weeping over this displaced millionaire CEO wouldn't piss on a low-wage at-will worker if he were on fire.

UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson has addressed the issue but, frankly, his post reads as gibberish to me; can any of you make out what he's trying to say? The best I can figure is, he's vaguely admitting that sometimes he's pleased when market and social punishments fall upon individuals, and sometimes he isn't, but that's irrelevant because liberals are fascists and America is turning into a fascist state in which the U.S. Supreme Court "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian Council." Maybe you can do better.

Friday, April 04, 2014

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE VICTIMHOOD.

Back when Paula Deen got fired or whatever it was, I thought it necessary to remind the world (blind and uncaring as ever, alas!) that Deen was not fired-or-whatever by black people and liberals; she was fired by corporations, sociopathic entities that (or is that who?) care only about increasing shareholder value. By doing what they did, these corporations were not being bien pensant nor trying to make themselves more comfortable at cocktail parties with Ellen Degeneres. They were trying to defuse what they perceived as a blow to their public image and a risk to profits.

The same thing is true of the firing-or-whatever of Brendan Eich. Every wingnut in America will tell you he was fired-or-whatever, not by his company, but by gay people and liberals in a homosexualist conspiracy against godly millionaires. They probably think it's easier to put that bullshit over in this case than in the Deen case because the world of Silicon Valley douchebags is more rareified than that of the Food Network. But it isn't, really; as the Pando coverage of the Computer Gods' power-politics games shows, Silicon Valley is as much of a snake pit as any other corporate district,  black turtlenecks notwithstanding. If Mozilla thought Eich was worth the hit, profits-wise, they'd have kept him. So what if they caught some shade from some gay waiter -- or gay relative? Millions of dollars cuts an awful lot of family ties.

As I thought was amply demonstrated yesterday when every conservative in America raced to kiss Charles Koch's ass, it is not the rich who do our bidding.

UPDATE. I see the top pants-pissers are still talking about this as if The Left, and not Mozilla, fired Eich. It's at times like this that I particularly miss Norbizness' The Left Is Attacking The City series.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

RETRONUT.

Shorter Charles G. Koch: What's good for Koch Industries is good for the USA.

(You may take this as a reference to the famous General Motors quote, or misquote, but I was thinking of General Bullmoose. Like Ole Perfesser Instapundit I'm a fan of L'il Abner.)

This Wall Street Journal "editorial" has got everything a conservatarian could want from a sugar daddy and his communications department: Much bragging on his own integrity and the accomplishments of his own firm (most of which, as a Crooked Timber commenter spectacularly put it, "can be replaced by 'Koch industries is a very large company'"); an assurance that conservatarianism, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA; invocations of the Founders, and of Alinsky (drink!); and the inevitable, outraged assertion that if anyone speaks roughly of the poor patriotic millionaire, it is "character assassination" of the sort "so many despots have infamously practiced... the antithesis of what is required for a free society," etc.

The only problem with it is, while the copy is bound to wow all the people who worship the Kochs already, normal people will look at it, if they look at it, and think: I wonder how much he paid for that?

UPDATE. At PJ Media Bryan Preston stands up for exalted Kochean standards of discourse by repeating the word "smear" over and over:
...a smear first floated by Austan Goolsbee... the smear is the current regime’s preferred method of kneecapping opponents... Obama himself sets the tone, when he smears opponents of Obamacare... That’s a smear and a lie and he knows it.... there has to be some accountability for all these smears...
It's not shitty writing, it's message discipline! Oh, and in the middle of it Preston mentions that "the Obama administration may have been covering up union shop GM’s deadly ignition switch flaw." He said mother-may-have, so it's not a smear. I was going to say, if lack of self-awareness were money he'd be rich, but in Preston's world I suppose it is money.

UPDATE 2. In comments, whetstone: "Now, to be fair, his daddy renounced the Soviet Union and, furthermore, co-founded the John Birch Society. So it's a family that understands both collectivism and character assassination."

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

NO ONE GOES THERE ANYMORE, IT'S TOO CROWDED.

Hitting 7 million customers doesn't prove Obamacare is a good program. But at least it has given us the gift of laughter via the reactions of its opponents. I especially like James Taranto's at the Wall Street Journal:
In a way it's the oddest bit of ObamaCare propaganda we've seen so far. "This Is What an #ACASurge Looks Like" was the title of a Saturday post on the White House Blog by senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness.

"The line started forming at 5 a.m. in front of an enrollment center in Miami," McGuinness boasts. "The final deadline to get covered in 2014 is in just two days, and Americans are literally lining up at grassroots events across the country to make sure they're covered. This is what momentum looks like"...

The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we've recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it's doing a great job.
If you can't complain about how no one wants it, complain there are long lines to get it. Plus communism. You can't lose!

Oh, and even better:
It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama.
He's got a point. I have a health plan through my job, but I was thinking of buying an Obamacare plan anyway, in order to show my loyalty to WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.

Has Alex Jones weighed in on this yet? Maybe it was space aliens.

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

ME-YOW.

You may remember back in 2012 when Ole Perfesser Instapundit called for conservatives to publish women's magazines and thus hypnotize the feckless woman voter. Some of them got excited about a magazine called Verily, which allegedly offers a godly alternative to sexed-up Cosmo with stories like "Are Elite Degrees Wasted on Stay-at-Home Moms?"

Sure, why not, markets in everything, right?  But apparently for conservatism to triumph, it is not enough that Verily do well; it is necessary that evil liberal ladymags do poorly. Jillian Kay Melchior, heretofore best known as authoress of the world's funniest unemployment memoir, does her bit in National Review:
Culture has been replaced by Kulture: Vogue has put Kim Kardashian on the cover of its April issue.
Apparently this is a comedown from the Golden Age of Kate Moss covers.
At its best, fashion is not only an aesthetic choice but a moral one: It’s an expression of values.
I'll spare you. "Though the magazine is distinctly left-leaning" -- an assessment which is never explained -- Vogue, says Melchior, used to "emphasize that kindness, charity, and friendship are as beautiful as any couture dress." But lately they've been embarrassing themselves with features on monsters like Mrs. Bashar al-Assad and Wendy Davis. And now Kimye! Unlike the other monthly fillers-for-fashion-ads, Vogue "degrades its brand" -- you know, like that time Rolling Stone had Britney Spears on the cover -- a cover that had once borne the likeness of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show! Weep, editorial eagle, weep!

I wonder if this has anything to do with Verily abandoning its print edition. Which I think is a shame; I'd rather see more choices out there than fewer, even in scent-smeared timewasters. But then, I'm more interested in pop culture than in pop culture war.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Hobby Lobby case and the tropes it has stirred among out rightblogger brethren: That health insurance that includes birth control is a near occasional of sin; that lady judges are stupid; and that, as devoted as they are to socialism and black nationalism, what the Obama Administration really want to do is destroy Christianity. You know: the usual.

UPDATE. In comments, Meanie-meanie tickle a person informs me that my gag -- "not only aborty, but also facient, which sounds like 'fascist,' right?" -- is actually a serious matter for some people. Kirk Kelsen believes birth control is "ABORTIFASCISM" and that the ACA decrees "you must, under the law, dine exclusively at the government buffet serving up abortifacients," which I guess will be their next legal argument if this one fails -- isn't being forced to eat at the same table as abortion cruel and unusual? Bonus feature: An opera review that doesn't mention the music because the libretto is blasphemous.

Friday, March 28, 2014

WE DO IT FOR THE KIDS.

Nick Gillespie, the fighting libertarian priest who can talk to kids, has a new angle from which to spray youth appeal on his Koch-funded causes:
Based on the first volume of a wildly popular young-adult trilogy, Divergent is set in America of the near-future, when all people are irrevocably slotted into one of five “factions” based on temperament and personality type. Those who refuse to go along with the program are marked as divergent—and marked for death! “What Makes You Different, Makes You Dangerous,” reads one of the story’s taglines. 
Which pretty much sums up Rand Paul...
Ha ha ha ha... wait, no, he's not kidding. Divergent is wow and Paul will be wow too, because 1.) "Paul is showing strongly in polls about the GOP presidential nomination in 2016," which is about as attractive a recommendation as "it's one of pedophiles' favorite child-lures," and 2.) The kids are waving the Gadsden Flag and don't know it yet:
Millennials are "unmoored from institutions," gasped Pew Research recently. There’s every reason to believe that large swaths of the country are ready to shake off the politics of exhaustion and move toward a future that is different from the past.
"A future that is different from the past" -- surely that must be the grim, Pay-or-Die dystopia Paul promises! And if that doesn't convince, hang on, Gillespie's talking in blockbuster tongues again:
“I don't want to be just one thing,” explains one of the protagonists in Divergent. “I can't be. I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind.” If anything explains Rand Paul’s rising profile, it’s precisely his ability to be more than just one thing—a social conservative, a civil libertarian, a budget cutter, a decentralizer, and more.
If only Veronica Roth had thought of using "virtuously selfish" instead of that socialistic "selfless"  -- well, who cares: any teen-angst drama will do for a libertarian mash-up in Gillespie's hands; last year he was trying this same shtick with The Hunger Games. Maybe he should collaborate with the guy from American Enterprise Institute who did "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time." Or maybe just pick some cool band -- how about Fucked Up? "he's the back without the bone/The king sits on a crooked throne..." That's gotta be Obama, right? Plus Damian Abraham was on Red Eye with Greg Gutfield. The future will be ours! 

UPDATE. "'I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind'... Wow. Even in a random string of adjectives describing normal people, Rand Paul goes 0 for 5," says mortimer2000 in comments. The tigrismus version: "In a world where people are sorted based on a personality test, one man fails it."

LUCIANNE'S BOY AND THE FACTS OF LIFE.

The basic theme of Jonah Goldberg's latest is "a Democrat Congressman is maybe a hypocrite, stop talking about the Koch Brothers." To save you time and effort, here is the stupidest part:
Here’s the problem. The profit motives of the Koch brothers are by far the least interesting thing about them. Charles and David Koch are worth about $40 billion — apiece! Could they make even more money in a more libertarian America? Who knows? But let’s say yes. The idea that they are going to all of this bother just to be worth $50 billion instead of $40 billion is pretty silly when you think about it.
I guess they feel that at a certain point they've made enough money.
And profit lust probably has little to do with why Charles Koch co-founded the nonprofit libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, either.
Is it possible that Goldberg doesn't know what the Cato Institute is paid to do for the rich? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't know what he's paid to do for them.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: NOT JUST FOR MARXISTS ANYMORE.

I think Roger L. Simon has outdone himself.
The Democratic Party’s War on Black People and How to Counter It
True, we've seen the-real-racists stuff like this before, but Simon's beats them all. Por ejemplo:
...I am going to say something that will be extremely controversial to liberals, indeed make them hate me.
Did you just feel shockwaves emanating from the nation's liberals? The dull thud of millions of dropped lattes? No? Then I have failed in my purpose [drops head, pushes out lower lip].
Given all those years I spent on the two sides, I have observed liberals to be vastly more racist than conservatives and libertarians.
Plus they smell like poo. Oh, but I'm being ungracious -- Simon isn't offering just his one-man fact-finding tour as evidence, nor just the "obvious Freudian projection" of the left; he also proves liberal racism with LBJ's nefarious "give Negroes money, that'll fix 'em" strategy:
The Democratic Party has been waging a War on Black People since the Great Society of 1964-65 (actually for far longer than that) that has reached horrifying proportions in our time. That nearly 73 percent of African Americans are currently born out of wedlock, 67 percent living in single parent homes, is nothing short of disastrous with yet more disastrous auguries for the future.
No other explanation for it -- nor for black truculence: "All these social welfare programs, affirmative actions, etc. were a signal to African Americans that they were inferior... quite naturally, it engendered a great deal of anger." The next time a black guy asks you for money, make him dance for it or something -- he'll respect you. Here's my favorite part:
And all this during the administration of our first black president. The level of hypocrisy is astronomical.
"But Roger, didn't the Democrats nominate the nation's first black President?" "I know! The nerve of them, huh?" You could show Simon the entire Republican leadership attending a lynching in Klan robes and he'd explain the liberal-racist roots of the phenomenon. But then the whole movement seems to have gone nuts in just this way. Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

COME LET US REASON TOGETHER.

Timothy Carney on ways to, get this, "accomplish peace in the Culture Wars" between liberals and conservatives on the Hobby Lobby case:
I saw a flicker of hope last weekend at a libertarian dinner featuring psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind. Haidt inspired me to try to understand the mindset of religious liberty’s enemies.
That's a promising opening, enemy of women's rights! And what did Carney learn?
The Pill is not just a pill to them. It has become something holy. And they won’t tolerate any burden between them and their Blessed Sacrament.

The culture war isn’t religious versus secular. It’s a clash of two faiths.
Despite the mania of religious liberty's also-religious enemies, Carney is willing to compromise with them:
To get peace in this arena, we have to disentangle employment from health care, which requires repealing parts of Obamacare and scrapping the tax preferences for employer-based insurance.
Look, he's meeting ya halfway, isn't he? Sounds like this dream of comity died, you should pardon the expression, in the womb. Welp, time for another hundred columns about how Thomas Frank is condescending.

UPDATE. First comment, Dr. Bethany Spencer: "Tim Carney wants single payer. Who knew?"

Monday, March 24, 2014

SWEET SCAM OF LIBERTY.

Remember back in 2012 when Ole Perfesser Instapundit was pimping something called Liberty Island, an online magazine of rightwing arts? Well, the thing's getting a big push now in all the best places -- e.g, PJ Media and wingnut Twitter feeds -- and the current offering is more substantial, volume-wise, than once it was.

I applaud the brethren and wish them well -- swindle, comrades! As for content quality, well, no accounting for taste. If you think a noir parody based on CPAC might give S.J. Perelman a run for his money, get a load:
I was surprised, though, at the differences: Young Republicans dressed in business casual with a hundred variations on the red tie, politicians in suits glad-handing the crowd, older women with Sarah Palin glasses and sweater sets, even a sprinkling of guys dressed in Continental Army attire, their tricorn hats occasionally bumping against long rifle props painted safety orange and pink. The last group looked at home near the faux colonial homes that provided space for shops and restaurants. 
At least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges. The folks here understood the world was a dangerous place, and that the police were rarely within reach when you really, really needed them. There was an arsenal fit for a militia here, tucked away in purses and coat pockets and concealed bra holsters. It felt good. But, I reminded myself, at least one of those weapons had been used in the wrong way today.
If you're vacillating, the dame in the tale is a popular conservative authoress named Ann, and the caper gives them a chance to say rude things about Michael Moore.  Maybe some of the other stuff is better; let me know, life's too short.

UPDATE. Ha ha, commenters: "Farewell, My Homely" and "Forget it, Jake, it's Cheetotown." Thanks also for perusing the Island's other offerings. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard finds an interesting personal essay -- "Our lives are always the eggs getting broken to make the Leftoid omelette. Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering if they'll get cracked?" -- that's a shoo-in for this year's Arthur Bremer Award.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...revisiting the Crimea situation, on which rightbloggers have gotten slightly more strategic; though they still tend to get lost in Mad Vlad's eyes -- a worthy adversary, he! He knows how the world really works! -- they are much more interested in painting a picture of a world at war and Republicans the only daddies who can hold the line. Get a few folks who are swayed by this drivel, shove them in the booth with the Klansmen, Ayn Rand freaks, and sadists, and you just might tip the Senate.

Friday, March 21, 2014

YOU WISH.

John Podhoretz at the New York Post:
Even the haunting confusion over the missing Malaysian aircraft, for which no rational person could hold our president responsible, is surely contributing to a general sense that the world is coming unglued — and that the president is hunting around under his desk for a glue stick he hopes one of his predecessors might have left there for him.
You know what else is hurting the President?* The Associated Press allowing "over" to replace "more than" in descriptions of numerable items. The resulting malaise has wafted from copy-editors' desks to the nation at large, and Americans from all walks of life, even those who wouldn't know a gerund from an infinitive, are now asking themselves: If Obama cannot enforce the old certainties, whither the Republic? I can just feel it.

* Besides the usual bullshit thumbsuckers, I mean.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

PROPAGANDISTS IN A HURRY...

...like to multitask. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger does several grafs of the same Scary Putin Menaces Weak America stuff all the other conservative columnists are doing these days, then goes for the hat trick:
Running alongside these old realities is a new phenomenon, surely noticed by Mr. Putin: The nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality. Barack Obama says so, as does the International Monetary Fund. Western Europe amid the Ukraine crisis is a case study of nations redistributing themselves and perhaps NATO into impotence.
This week's other big rightwing add-on  -- that Crimea is all the fault of the environmentalists and we should frack our brains out because freedom depends on it -- at least has to do with oil, and is thus connected in some way with reality. But Henninger's implication that Putin has "surely noticed" and is spurred to mischief by the West's attempts to raise workers' pay is a new one -- particularly since, in the last Cold War, ordinary Americans' upward mobility was one of capitalism's greatest weapons against the Russians. I guess their hope is that they can scare people enough that they'll believe anything they say -- as usual.

UPDATE. In comments, satch takes a little trip down Memory Lane: "We can be certain that Vladimir Putin noticed a couple of things in 2008, starting with that notorious traitor and Commie appeaser Charles Krauthammer, who in his best Neville Chamberlain voice said: 'Well, obviously it's beyond our control. The Russians are advancing. There is nothing that will stop them. We are not going to go to war over Georgia.'" Ah, new realities, comrade!

D Johnston considers: "Two weeks ago, [Henninger] wrote a column about Putin the Strongman, and three weeks before that he did a column on how the President was too obsessed with income equality. It's like a mashup. Maybe this opinion remixing will become the next big thing in conservative circles." It's got youth appeal. I can imagine one taker at least.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

ASSHOLES WANTED: APPLY WITHIN.

Josh Encinias at National Review:
Labor groups held 30 protests against McDonald’s franchises across the country Tuesday. The focus of today’s protests is “wage theft,” part of an ongoing campaign to raise the federal minimum wage.
That's not what "wage theft" is -- it's doing work and not getting paid for it, and at least one major franchisee has recently made restitution for it.

Here's how Encinias ends his report:
Three black-leather-clad French women asked National Review what the protest was about. When they appeared not to understand that it was a minimum wage protest, this reporter raised his hands and shouted “Rah rah, give us more money.” The three visitors to the United States nodded and walked away.
Encinias appears to be new at National Review, but he's already a champ at missing the point.

UPDATE. Some commenters question young Encinias' verisimilitude. "The three visitors to the United States come from a nation famous for a 35-hour work week, vacation the entire month of August, and a willingness to go to the barricades when provoked," says Spaghetti Lee. "I suspect they understand Encinias all too well."

Wrangler says, "it sounds like the kind of pointlessly overspecific detail I use to increase the perceived reality of a story when I'm trying to lie to someone." To me, it sounds like the kind of detail one is taught in writing classes; with this technique, real writers struggle to portray truth, while hacks cheerfully festoon propaganda, hoping their bosses will appreciate their porcine cosmetics skills.


Monday, March 17, 2014

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE RICH FUCKS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK...

Hey, look who the Wall Street Journal wants me to feel bad for:
The Internal Revenue Service's most intimidating weapon is the power to audit—and well-heeled taxpayers are more likely to be the target.
Gasp!
Audits are rare and getting rarer as the agency faces funding cuts. Fewer than 1% of taxpayers endured one last year, according to IRS figures.
Good news, but not for America's Neediest:
But while the audit rate has fallen over the past five years for taxpayers who earn less than $200,000, the rate has risen for those earning $200,000 to $1 million. 
The increase was particularly sharp for people earning $1 million or more. Nearly one in nine of those taxpayers was audited last year compared with fewer than one in 15 in 2009.
I would like to think that the IRS is simply hunting where the ducks are, since rich fucks are more likely to have been given effective means of evading the taxman by their financial factota than us poor schlubs.

But even if that's not the case, you know what? I think I can live with it.

Several of the brethren are shaken by the news, including National Review's Veronique de Rugy: "One does wonder," she says, shaking so with rage you can almost hear her jewelry rattle, "whether that is part of the soak-the-rich mentality that is so prevalent in this administration."

De Rugy also detects a grim irony: "More than $12 billion a year is improperly spent through the EITC," she reports; "or roughly 22 percent of the overall amount spent on the program." In other words, low- to moderate-income working taxpayers are getting a break, and the richest are not! I can see why she's upset. There does seem to be something un-American about it, at least as Americanism has been lately defined.

UPDATE. Another day, another rich fuck says this is Nazi Germany and he's Anne Frank:
“I hope it’s not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
Worse than this latest outbreak of Kristallnuts is the Politico article itself, in which the rich are hilariously posited as just another interest group, like soccer moms and unionized pipe fitters, that must haggle and sweat for political influence:
...the 1 percent fights back hard and the effectiveness of the populist approach comes into question...

...the pro-business wing of the [Democratic] party is ready to draw up new plans...

In two-dozen interviews, the denizens of Wall Street and wealthy precincts around the nation... say they see signs that the political zeitgeist may be shifting back their way and hope the trend continues.
Which simply means the rich fucks and the "political zeitgeist" have finally agreed on a price and -- surprise! -- it favors the rich fucks. Be not deceived, this outcome was never in doubt; these guys run everything and have all along. But into each life a little rain must fall, and they've been forced to endure some bad publicity (which they loudly decry as Hitler) because they've become bigger pigs about it than previously -- so much so that even ordinary Americans, eternal suckers for the rich and famous though they may be, began to grouse about it. I'm surprised they let it go on for as long as they did; maybe there was a yacht race or something distracting them.