Just heard about another suicide.  The brother of an acquaintance.  Another white male between the ages of 35 and 50 who just gave up.  I don’t blame him.  Give someone with no money, no prospects and no life a reason not to give up.  And don’t turn to that old chestnut about how life is a gift.  Or that he had people who loved him.  The people who love you are the ones who screw with your head the most.

Mom said she doesn’t understand why young men in their forties keep doing it.  Mom isn’t generally stupid, but she can be really myopic sometimes.  She’s in her mid sixties, so people in their forties are “young.”  I told her, “It’s because we’re not young, and because we see no future.”  No response on that one.

People in their forties, specifically men in their forties, came of age during Reagan’s term in office.  We were all basically taught, or indoctrinated with, the same notions.  Money isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.  Nothing matters except making money.  The measure of a man is how much money he makes.  Sure, you should be a good person and care about other people and be kind to dumb animals and blah, blah, blah, but if you do all that and you’re not making a good living, you’re nothing.  This was the governing wisdom of the classes of roughly ’82 through ’89.  And now, more than two decades later, an awful lot of us aren’t making much money.  Some of us aren’t making any money and haven’t for quite some time.  Are you beginning to see the connection?

I know, it’s not just men, and it’s certainly not just white men.  Blacks and Latinos have their own crosses to bear, many of them a lot bigger and more oppressive than anything we spoiled, white, suburban turnouts have had to endure.  But we still have to live with the fact that we’ve failed to live up to Reagan-era expectations.  Well, one expectation, really.  We’re not making money hand over fist.  So we’ve failed.  We may be intelligent, insightful, compassionate, dedicated, humble and eager to make the world a better place.  But again, that’s all ephemeral if your bank account doesn’t measure up.

I’ve been hearing since 1990 that Generation X will be the first in history not to do better than the generation that preceded it.  That generation was the baby boom, the largest generation in history and the one whose members are still patting themselves on the back for the important things they seem to think they did in response to the establishment before they became the establishment and began pillaging the coffers like no one in history and then electing leaders who would enable them to the point that no one would ever be able persuade them to back off a little and let someone else have a few bites at the apple.

Today, wealthy boomers send their kids to exclusive private schools and ensure they live in insular worlds in which they only meet “the right kind of people,” all the while proclaiming to ache for the downtrodden and oppressed.  They just won’t admit that the reason they live in huge, well-fortified mansions in gated communities is so they and their children never have to interact with the downtrodden and oppressed.  It’s a little like the old humorous adage, “I am a friend to the working man.  And I would rather be his friend than be him.”

Of course, boomers are not the only ones living high.  Plenty of Gen-X and Gen-Y superstars have ascended to the upper echelons of success.  And they brag that they deserve it all because they earned it all.  They don’t want to hear about “socialist” concepts like “shared sacrifice” and paying their fair share.  They deserve it all because they earned it all.

They also don’t like to give much thought to the socialists who preceded them, the ones who did believe in things like shared sacrifice.  The ones who went to Europe and the Pacific to try and prevent democracy from falling to tyranny, and in so doing risked their lives and their futures.  The ones who paid a top-tier 91 percent marginal tax rate when the country needed more money that it ever had before.  They didn’t bitch and whine and call it socialism because incomes over a quarter million might have to pay 40 percent.  They didn’t tell the working classes, “send your kids to fight the kamikazes and the nazis, but we can’t be bothered because our kids are too busy ascending to the upper echelons so they can keep building our fortunes.”

All the shared sacrifice and balloon payments to the IRS were in the interest of preserving democracy against tyranny.  The word “socialism” has no place in that equation.  But today it’s all anyone can talk about, how we’re paying too much to the government and punishing the real heroes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Well, I agree on one point: we are paying too much to the government, and the government has already spent too much.  Not “is spending too much.”  The national debt is the cumulative debt we managed to build year after year by spending too much.  We’re 14 trillion dollars in the hole right now not because of current overspending.  Not at all.  In fact, if all the investment bankers and other multimillionaires and billionaires had been paying their fair share all along, and if we hadn’t started two wars that, regardless of what anyone thinks about their effectiveness, were outrageously expensive, and if we had paid for said wars out of pocket instead of piling on new debt each year, and if we hadn’t tossed another 400 billion on the fire to make pharmaceutical firms many times richer with an anti-free market Medicare prescription drug benefit (wherein the sellers set the price and the buyers, namely the government, pay that price without protest), and if we hadn’t made home ownership the nationwide be-all and end-all regardless of consumers’ inability to pay their monthly nut….if we hadn’t done all that, then this seemingly insurmountable national debt would be a good deal more surmountable.

I didn’t mean to make this political.  What’s at issue here is a past with nothing but promise and a future with none at all.  Where twenty years ago you worked and studied and struggled to get the right degree and the right job, and then you worked and struggled at that job so that eventually you would make lots of money.  And now, somehow, the long-term goals of your late teens have gotten away from you, or you just got “downsized” away from them.  All you’ll hear from those in power is that it’s your own fault and you need to stop complaining and get a job, even if there are no jobs to be had.  It’s your own fault you’re unemployed, your own fault you can’t see a competent physician and have that necessary procedure to try and maintain your physical health, your own fault that the personal debt you’ve already accumulated is playing havoc with your mental health, your own fault you lost the house you couldn’t afford because you took the mortgage you couldn’t afford, your own fault you can’t find a new job because you lost your old job so long ago that no one will even consider you since you’re obviously a slacker due to all this time you’ve been out of work….

You did everything right.  That is, you did everything they told you to do.  And everything went wrong.  And all you ever hear is, it’s all your own fault, and quit mooching off the hard-working taxpayers who were lucky enough not to be downsized and/or foreclosed upon.

You’ve failed, and yes, you should blame yourself.  The future holds no promise because, let’s face it, you’re such an irredeemable failure.  Your integrity and your humanity are worthless commodities, and you should abandon them the first chance you get.  The people in the next lane driving the German luxury car with all the amenities succeeded where you failed.  So why should they have to pay for your failure, for your inability to succeed?  If you really wanted things to be better, you’d get a damn job already and start contributing to the economy instead of mooching off it.  But you don’t want that.  You just want everyone to hand you everything.  The mark of a true failure in the greatest country on earth.

Mom can’t understand why so many white men in their thirties and forties are committing suicide.  Me, I can’t understand why there aren’t more suicides.  For us irredeemable failures, it’s really the only noble way out.

Enpon?

Perhaps not, but with the revelation of questionable accounting practices just weeks after the stock went public, the SEC may soon decide that Groupon's got some 'splainin' to do.

We remember Enron. We may not want to. We may not have given it much thought since, oh, say, 2004 or so. But we remember it.

I won't rehash it in it's woeful entirety here. Read Kurt Eichenwald's exceptionally researched chronicle Conspiracy of Lies for a play-by-play of how a misanthropic little shit named Andrew Fastow bilked thousands of people out of billions of dollars using an accounting trick, a method called “mark-to-market,” that, I have to admit, even today I'm still completely incredulous was ever legal. And how his boss, CEO Jeffrey Skilling acted like he had no idea what was going on right under his nose. And how his boss, chairman of the board Kenneth Lay, openly lied to his employees over and over again about the company's health while secretly selling off his shares and then a few years later escaped prosecution and being chased by angry mobs with torches and pitchforks through the streets of Houston by simply having a heart attack and dying. It's a fascinating story of corporate malfeasance that brought down Arthur Andersen, rendered Merrill Lynch stark naked before the SEC, and reached so far throughout the entire American business community that, naturally, no one outside of the of Enron and the aforementioned financial firms was ever taken to task for any of it.

Or, if reading a 700-plus-page book is not convenient for you at the moment, check out a 100-minute movie called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on a book co-authored by Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, who had the temerity to question Enron's godlike status in corporate America back in '01 with an article entitled “Is Enron Overpriced?”, the film, while nowhere near as comprehensive as Eichenwald's book, does give a worthwhile overview of the pondscum in expensive suits who remorselessly destroyed countless lives and shut down electrical grids and shut off dialysis machines throughout California in 2000 while sitting in their air-conditioned skyscraper in Houston, laughing about it and saying, “Fuck em.”

And this all has what to do with Groupon? I'm getting to it.

Like zillions of other bloggers, I caught this evening's segment of 60 Minutes on Groupon and its wunderkind founder/CEO Andrew Mason. It's laudable that he took a clever idea and turned it into a company that employs 10,000 people right here in the U.S., and then turned that into an IPO worth billions. I'm not too proud to say I'm envious of such ingenuity and productivity in a market without a tangible product, and while I'm a bit skeptical of the company's continued success given its seemingly unsustainable business model, I do wish Mr. Mason and his minions well.

But towards the end of the segment, Lesley Stahl changed gears a bit and noted that the company's accounting practices might be viewed by some as a bit suspicious. How else to explain reporting a $60 million revenue in 2010 that, in fact, covered up an actual $420 million loss?

How further to explain such financial reporting in the year prior to Groupon's explosive IPO, when a company's past and potential revenues are absolutely critical elements in determining how the open market will value the newly-issued stock (quite highly, as it turned out, on day one, but not quite as much in the weeks since).

And finally, how to make it clear to investors that such creative accounting is not a harbinger of things to come, only instead of masking a $60 million loss, some disciples of Fastow, Michael Milken or the like might decide they can get away with masking a loss of $60 billion by reporting outsize revenue, profits and growth? After all, it's not like there's anyone in Washington actually protecting the public against such malfeasance and, let's face it, outright fraud. Congressional Republicans will be blocking every nominee for the top post at the newly established (and as yet unnamed) federal consumer protection agency until they can place someone with the impeccable credentials of a Michael Brown. Or until they can make everyone, including the White House, forget that such an agency was ever meant to exist in the first place.

In the world of high finance and crony capitalism, $60 million is not really that much money. Heck, $420 million isn't even that much money. But we've still yet to become so jaded by the endless barrage of corporate fraud anecdotes that we wouldn't consider a $60 billion gain or a $420 billion loss to be pretty darn cataclysmic. Heck, we even managed to balk when Bernie Ebbers initially said he “misplaced” $7.5 billion of WorldCom's money, and that he later had to revise that number upward to roughly $11 billion because of an “oversight.” Or maybe that was just because he threw his wife a birthday party at which giant Statue-of-David ice sculptures pissed high-end French champagne and paid for it out of the company's petty cash account. It's not that we can't forgive a little fraud now and then, but we are concerned about how one specifically misuses the embezzled funds.

Mr. Mason, the latest CEO to be dubbed a maverick and a renegade because he appears to have a sense of humor and doesn't wear a tie to the office, simply claimed that there was no intent. He and his executives were not seeking to do evil with their accounting practices. They are simply young and somewhat naïve, and they made some mistakes in the company's favor, mistakes from which they will surely learn, mistakes they will be careful not to make in the future. Or so we are left to hope.

I admit, an awful lot of people enjoy saving $10 here and $30 there when trying out local businesses and, more with recent developments in Groupon's offerings, saving quite a bit more when traveling to exotic locales. I myself have tried a nearby bakery and have gotten an oil change and a shiatsu massage.

But knowing what I now know, I wonder if these welcome little local savings might someday lead, through a sequence and confluence of events, to another $800 billion national bailout. I wouldn't enjoy that. Things are already pretty tight for me. The job creators aren't creating enough jobs, even with all the tax savings and regulatory variances they received during the Bush years, to ensure that even an old, fat, crusty, technologically-challenged slacker with a journalism degree can find one. So no, such savings would not, in my estimation, be worth enduring billions more in malfeasance an fraud.

Enpon?

No, not yet. And perhaps not ever. But Andy Fastow gets out of prison in 2014. And he may decide to bring his next great idea in financial wizardry to Andrew Mason's door. This time, let's maybe keep our eyes open.

But I repeat myself

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Clinton left office with a surplus, not a deficit.

Bush started two wars and never even suggested how to pay for them, nor did he include line items for anything related to them in the budget.

Bush’s unbudgeted wars and his substantial tax cuts on the top 10 percent of income earners eliminated the surplus from the Clinton years and started us down the road to the largest deficits in history.

Obama inherited more than 75 percent of the current national debt, along with the two unbudgeted wars, which he had to add to the debt; a banking crisis that grew out of greed and lax regulation; an employment crisis; and a floundering middle class.

One could certainly argue that Obama hasn’t done enough to mitigate any of these crises, but if you think Obama’s policies created any of these crises, you are a fool.

The poor and middle classes did nothing to instigate these crises, but they are being forced to pay for them.

If you subscribe to tea party rhetoric, you are a willfully myopic fool and should be stripped of your right to vote.

Illegal emigration

Let’s cut the crap. “If we raise taxes on the rich we’ll lose jobs in this country, and this country desperately needs jobs!” Well, the second part is true. But “we’ll lose jobs in this country” is like saying, in 2011, if we do such-and-so, “we’ll increase the cancer rate!”

The jobs are gone. So-called American companies, which benefit from American infrastructure, defense, etc., began sending jobs overseas en masse a decade or more ago. And since 2002, the tax environment in the U.S. for the rich has been extremely friendly, with enormous breaks for income, capital gains, dividends, etc., not to mention corporate tax breaks six ways from Sunday. Yet all those entitled corporate bastards can do is whine about how their taxes are too high and they can’t create jobs. They’ve created plenty of jobs in India, China, Malaysia, South America, and so on. How is it they’re allowed to continue being American companies?

We need to make emigration illegal. Not people emigrating—if you can afford it these days, I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you packed up and headed somewhere else. Then again, if you can afford it, you’re probably among those who are living higher than ever off the hog right now and wouldn’t dream of abandoning the golden goose (pretend I also worked something in there about a winged horse and the cat that swallowed the canary). No, we need to stop allowing jobs to emigrate. Build a wall around the borders, etc. Not a physical wall, but a digital one. Try and relocate jobs to India, and guess what? Your data won’t be able to follow. No employee data, no sales and marketing data, no production data and, worst of all, no data on executive perks. If even one dollar of next year’s bonus depends on revenue generated from overseas operations, you can kiss all that money goodbye.

For what it’s worth, this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition contained a cover headline warning of the hidden costs of taxing the rich. I’d give more details, but I can’t gain access, as I refuse to pay for a subscription to a once-great publication that should now be retitled Murdoch’s Daily Masturbatory Fantasies.

I can imagine, though, that the “hidden” costs are pretty much the same as the alleged outward costs, with a bit more ominous language thrown in. One thing we’ll probably never hear about are the myriad glaring benefits to making profitable corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the tax burden.

One thing’s certain, though. If our corporate-owned, pussywhipped government would actually make the aforementioned emigration illegal, we’d have so many more jobs than we need, we’d actually welcome all the border jumpers just to fill all the extra vacancies. And that’s not to mention the beaucoup bucks in additional tax revenue.

But it won’t happen. Why? Because this is America, exceptional America, the greatest country in the history of the world. And anyone who suggests otherwise is guilty of giving aid and comfort to our enemies. Enemies like Communist China, where American companies save more than $1 trillion per year by eliminating U.S.-based jobs and employing their near-starving workers at less than a dollar a day. Enemies like Saudi Arabia, where we send hundreds of billions in oil revenues each year so they can fund their citizens to immigrate into this country legally, learn how to fly planes, hijack them and crash them into government buildings and skyscrapers. Enemies like President Obama, who, after being born in Kenya and educated in Indonesian madrases and manipulating his way into the Senate and then the White House and then agreeing to attack Libya because loudmouthed Republican politicians demanded that he do it until he did it at which point they retroactively decided it was a horrible idea.

Enemies like that.

Stop illegal emigration now.

Things I learned last week

Things I learned last week:

-Driving in Southern California the other day, I found myself behind many an automobile sporting a bumper sticker that identified its driver as a Republican, or at least as being of a right-wing political persuasion. No problem. Free speech and all. However, I was quite surprised to learn that Californians have a direct say in Nevada politics. No, not because there are lobbyists in Carson City representing the Golden State. Rather, because so many of these bumper stickers called for us to “Dump Harry Reid,” “Fire Harry Reid,” “Kill Harry Reid” (not so much a political one there), “Waterboard Harry Reid,” and so on. Perhaps, though, this out-of-state activism is perfectly acceptable. Back home in Nevada, I’ve chanced to find myself behind Republican motorists as well, and their understanding of California politics is even more enlightening. While I was under the foolish impression that only voters in California’s 8th Congressional District could vote for said district’s U.S. representative, I’ve seen more than a few stickers calling for the firing, ouster, decapitation, etc., of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. My, the things you learn when sharing the road with those who’ve chosen never to learn anything.

-Apparently, our Mongolian Sikh atheist president is once again trying to deny any ties, past or present, to the Fiji-based Greek Orthodox synagogue he attended as a young Baha’i Mormon in the Principality of Andorra. Thus spake Zarathustra.

-Former President Jimmy Carter headed back to North Korea, this time to negotiate the release of an American teacher working in South Korea who unwittingly wandered across the border. I’m sincerely very glad he was successful at preventing the poor man from having to spend eight years in a prison that would likely cause Hannibal Lecter a permanent loss of appetite. But once again, I have to call into question my own education. I admit, I learned a rather limited amount about post-WWII far east geography during school days. But I’m still pretty sure there’s a fairly noticeable buffer between the two countries. So now I venture to learn, before another week goes by: Is there somewhere in the northernmost part of South Korea where one can trip over a tree root or a poorly disguised land mine and somehow go flying clear across the DMZ?

-I learned about something called “Beck University.” Sadly, my initial assumptions were proven faulty when it turned out that “Beck University” is a symbolic lesson plan, to be imparted entirely on Glenn Beck’s program on Fox News, neither of which I ever view (unless you count the snippets of each that occasionally air on “The Daily Show” and “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” to help the host of each program make a larger point). You see, when I first heard of “Beck University,” what immediately sprung to mind was Beck Hansen, and I thought, with great hope and anticipation, that we could all finally take an intensive and insightful course designed to help us understand the meaning of the words to the song “Loser.” Sigh! Another dream dashed in this age of the ever-declining value of an education.

-I did, however, learn, via Glenn Beck, a few things about the historic Civil Rights Movement in America, things of which I’d heretofore been completely ignorant:

1. White conservatives must reclaim the movement as their own.

2. Blacks do not “own” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

3. The U.S.A. was founded as a nation in which individual freedom trumps all, as long as you strictly adhere to a moral code established and enforced by white conservatives.

4. If you hold a large gathering on the same date, and at the same location, when and where a truly historic rally took place 47 years ago, and you are so ignorant of history that you did not know ahead of time that this was the anniversary of said historic rally, then the only possible explanation for your choosing the date at random is “Divine Providence.”

5. No matter what they may say in their own defense, and no matter how pure their hearts or noble their intentions, progressives are immoral, racist, tyrannical, anti-religion, anti-freedom, pro-slavery Nazi terrorists whose sole reason for existence is to destroy America and all it stands for.

-There is absolutely nothing more interesting, more compelling, more epoch-shatteringly fascinating to the American news media than the upcoming season’s lineup of “Dancing With the Stars.”

And on top of everything else, her voice is unbearably grating....

Bay Buchanan was on CNN Monday night bemoaning Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as not being “the best and the brightest.” Now I realize that understanding irony is not among Buchanan’s basic capabilities (I’m not sure using her opposable thumb was among her basic capabilities until age 50 or so), but the rest of us should really take note of the worst and the dumbest among today’s TV punditocracy espousing an opinion on who is or is not the best and the brightest.

Her last comment before they cut her off was, “She’s no Antonin Scalia!”

Assuming there’s not another Antonin Scalia to whom she’d be referring in this context, I think I’m safe in assuming that this was the same pathetic relic (quite possibly from the mid-19th century) who, in his dissent to Bowers v. Hardwicke (2003), which overturned a state’s right to make sodomy a felony, decried the ruling as undermining the court’s role in providing the country with “moral leadership.” Amazingly, at the age of about 170, and after having served as a judge since at least 1987 (presumably, prior to his appointment, he lived in a cave, under a rock, wearing earplugs and blinders), he was completely unaware that the role of the Supreme Court is to interpret the U.S. Constitution as it applies to modern laws.

So in response to the latest of Ms. Buchanan’s stellar career of always being reactionary, hopelessly stupid, wrongheaded, and just plain wrong, I’ll simply say, “Let’s thank heaven for small favors!”

Now if Scalia would just retire or (forgive me for being terribly politically incorrect) croak, and if Clarence Thomas would find a more appropriate place than the federal bench to sit forever perched with his thumb up his ass, Obama could appoint a couple more judges with some passing familiarity with the aforementioned Constitution.

But I’m not counting on anything.

Random musings

-After watching CNN’s report on the allegedly violent culture of the “Church” of Scientology a couple weeks back, I have to ask: Given all the legal experts they’ve got working for them, how much longer is the “church” going to continue with a legal strategy that seems to amount to “I know you are, but what am I!”?

-We can argue and argue and argue until we’re both red and blue in the face about the merits, flaws, goals, obstacles, members, exclusions, helps, hindrances, and exotic pineapple recipes of the tea party movement. But when all is said (and said....and said....and said) and done, can we try to keep one tiny little fact (oh no, the “F” word!) in mind? The movement, regardless of all the hue and cry about the independence of its loose, nationwide amalgamation of organizations, disorganizations, micromovements and bowel movements, gets the lion’s share (controlling interest?) of its funding (working capital?) from News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News.

-Newt, you’re a bloviator, a hypocrite and an idiot. And no matter what you say or do, you’re old news, a relic from the days when you started your whole party down this destructive path. Now shut the hell up.

-Just something to try. Go into any word processor, close your eyes and gently push down on your keyboard with both hands. The on-screen result will probably be something pretty close to the name of that Icelandic volcano that’s flinging ash all over Europe and destroying the continent’s airline industry.

-I have this bad habit of reading the reader feedback message boards whenever I read a political news story online. And after more than a year of catching the same thread mixed in with all the other commentary from the left, the right, and, occasionally, the sane, I really have to ask: Just how stupid does a person have to be in order to rave about how smart and savvy Sarah Palin is? Allowing that negative numbers are mathematically impossible, is there a gradient that low on the I.Q. scale? I don’t know if they’re doing it just to flabbergast liberals; and if so, kudos on the rousing success of such a move. But the woman has to be the stupidest lump of clay in the public spotlight since Anna Nicole Smith bought it a few years back.

-An open call to the U.S. insurance industry: It’s time for Flo from Progressive and Gordon the GEICO Gecko to declare their love for one another, have a lavish interspecies wedding (he’s male, she’s female, so the wingnuts shouldn’t have a problem with it), and ride off together into the sunset. Many of us have reached our thresholds. Some (I won’t cite names) are bordering on homicidal. The idiot box periodically needs to switch out its resident idiots. We as a society declare the right to make that demand, and to have it heeded by those in media and advertising who take so, so much and give so, so little in return. The Energizer Bunny went. So did the Taco Bell Chihuahua. Seriously, guys. It’s time.

-I’ll finish up with a slightly longer one. And I hate to do it, but I have to bring up Caribou Barbie again.

Now I wouldn’t dare suggest that we should expect citizen Palin to be any better a political strategist than Governor Palin or national candidate Palin, but a great many of her followers, detractors, and even those who wonder why a braying jackass wearing lipstick and heels keeps getting invited to speak at Republican conclaves have suggested that Ms. Palin has a future on the national political stage. And if she herself considers this even a possibility, it might behoove* her to pull back a bit in her aggressiveness at alienating virtually everyone who voted for Obama in 2008.

One of Ms. Palin’s more frequently-used soundbites (at least used frequently enough that she no longer has to read it off her forearm) seems to be a variation on “How’s that whole hopey-changey thing working out for you?” I offer a few observations here:

1) Regardless of her opinion of any particular high-profile invoker of such concepts as “hope” and “change,” when a person or group are in a depressed long-term socioeconomic state, aren’t the very concepts themselves universally good things, and isn’t the denigration of said concepts pretty darn insulting to everyone, regardless of political affiliation?
2) Aggressive “Don’t you just hate Obama and all his supporters?” rhetoric may play well to a conservative base, but mathematically, any candidate is going to need the ballot box support of a lot more than just a conservative base in order to win in 2012; in fact, since Obama received roughly 53 percent of the popular vote in ’08, those who numbered among his supporters then certainly outnumber those who voted for anyone else in the same election.
3) Since you’re going to need at least some of the voters who supported him then to vote for you in 2012 in order to win the popular vote, maybe it’s not such a great strategy to insult all the people who bought into the ideas of “hope” and “change” and would still like to realize them, if not under Obama, then certainly under whomever replaces him in the Oval Office. If you make all 53 percent of the 2008 voters who opted for Obama think you view their “hope” for “change” as nothing but fodder for a bully pulpit soundbite, the response, even from those who might otherwise have considered shifting their loyalties to you and your team next time out, just might come back to soundbite you in the jackass.

(* - I did catch the bad-pun potential of saying that something might “behoove” a “jackass.” I’ve been taught that every once in a while it’s a good idea to let an opportunity pass. I sincerely meant for this to be that once in a while, but given the inclusion of this parenthetical, I guess it’ll have to wait until next time.)

Announcement from Toyota

The Toyota Motor Corporation has officially named G.I. Fuktitupa as its Executive Vice President in charge of Public Apologies.

Mr. Fuktitupa has already put out a press release announcing he will appear before both the Japanese parliament and the U.S. House of Representatives some time in the next two weeks to apologize for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the international slave trade.

Industry analysts speculate that the company may still have to answer for failures in the navigation system and brake pedal of that boat that hit that iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912.