Out of Work Wall Streeters Will Kill You and Eat You

Wonkette :

Hard to tell if this is a joke or not, but this supposed e-mail from a pissed-off wall Street broker has been making the rounds:

What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

***

The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on themiddle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply … will he? and will they?

Certainly the "Ve Are Der Ubermenschen" tone reflects the sort of hubris we're used to reading abut from the subpoenaed e-mails of perp-walking fat cats. But "food supply"? Really?

If this little tantrum is real, I really would like to see the arrogant fuck be the one waiting tables or working retail, taking the kind of daily humiliation that shitheads like him used to casually dish out.

Dumb Question of the Day

The Washington Monthly

Just a question I haven't heard anybody ask: Shouldn't the tea party crowd be having a cow over this new immigration bill that Arizona just passed? Doesn't that sound like big government tyranny to them? Giving the police the power to demand "papers" from someone just on their own suspicion?

Any chatter from the tea party folk to this effect? I haven't seen any.

Of course not. It wasn't signed by a black Democrat, and it doesn't affect old, well-off white people, therefore it cannot be tyranny. Duh.

The Poultry-Based Health Insurance Plan

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: The hardest part about writing satire these days is staying ahead of reality, in a world where -people manage to out-weird you every time.

Josh Marshall of the liberal blog Talking Points Memo found this out, to his chagrin, when he discovered a quote from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden, who's running against Harry Reid. In a speech, Lowden suggested that you really didn't need health insurance; you could just barter with your doctor.

"I think that bartering is really good," Lowden said. "Those doctors who you pay cash, you can barter, and that would get prices down in a hurry ... go ahead out and pay cash for whatever your medical needs are, and go ahead and barter with your doctor."

Marshall thought this was pretty risible. He reported on Lowden's statement with the snarky headline, "I Bid Three Chickens for That MRI!"

But, as it turns out, that's exactly what Lowden was talking about. "You know," she earnestly told a radio interviewer a few days later, "before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor."

At first I thought, well, that's a Republican for you: The solution to the crisis in health insurance is to go back to some fantasy of the past. And you want to know what the sad thing is? By Nevada standards, she's the moderate Republican.

But then I started thinking. Hey, what the heck do I know? So I called up my doctor's office.

"I need to come in for my yearly checkup," I said.

"Sure," the nice lady on the phone replied. "We can make you an appointment."

"Great. Where do you want me to send the chickens?"

There was a pause. "What?" she said finally.

"I've decided I don't want to file this on my insurance. I want to pay the doctor in chickens."

"I'm not sure I understand. Did you say...chickens?"

"Sure. Just like my grandpa used to do. Or so I've heard. OK, last time, my checkup cost, what, a couple hundred bucks? With blood work and everything?"

"Sir ..."

"And chickens are going for ... let's see. This farm report I found online says about 84 cents a pound, and the average weight is about 12 pounds, so that's a little over 10 bucks per bird, divide that into 200 ... Wow! Hope the doctor has a big yard."

"Mr. Rhoades ..."

"I'm not sure I can get all of them in the station wagon. Does he mind if I make more than one trip?"

"We don't accept payment in chickens!"

"You don't?"

"Of course not! No one does!"

"How about turkeys?"

She hung up on me. Some people just have trouble thinking outside the box. I guess we won't be returning to those wonderful days my grandparents knew, when highly trained professionals would cheerfully agree to be paid in poultry.

As of this writing, the Lowden campaign continues to stand by their guns - sort of. When the folks from Talking Points Memo called the campaign, a spokesman insisted, "Bartering with your doctor is not a new concept. There have been numerous reports as to how negotiating with your doctor is an option, and doctors have gone on the record verifying this."

It seems as if Ms. Lowden and/or her spokespeople have confused "bartering" with "bargaining." Which is a lot more realistic. I mean, I know my negotiating skills are at their peak when I have a fever or I'm wracked with periodic spasms of projectile vomiting.

So, all you Republicans and tea partiers, the next time you're sick, toss that Medicare card in the dustbin. You don't need any government-sponsored health-care plan! Remember the ways of your hardy forbears. Be ready to throw off that logy, sick feeling, rise from your bed and haggle with your doctor over the cost of treatment, and then bargain with your pharmacist over the cost of your meds.

And bring some chickens. They're sure to love you for it.

Who the Heck ARE These People?

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I'm going to start this week's column with a promise made to my new friend and fellow Pilot columnist Geoff Cutler, who requested (politely) that I no longer use the word "teabagger" to refer to members of the so-called "tea party" movement.

As some of you may know, the term "teabagging" has a number of meanings, at least one of them obscene. Even though some of the things I've been called by these people are worse, Geoff did, as I say, ask nicely. So I will refrain from now on.

Which still leaves us with the question: Who the heck are these people, anyway? Recent surveys of the movement provide some enlightenment, but only some.

While the "tea" in "tea party" supposedly stands for "Taxed Enough Already," 52 percent of the self-identified tea partiers questioned in a recent CBS/New York Times poll said they thought their taxes are fair. At the same time, 64 percent believe that the president has increased taxes for most Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans got a tax cut under the Obama administration.

In fact, Congress cut individuals' federal taxes for this year by about $173 billion shortly after President Obama took office, according to an April 15 story by The Associated Press. Sixty-six percent of these folks have a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin, yet only 40 percent feel she'd be an effective president - less than the percentage of Republicans who feel that way.

A recent Bloomberg poll found that 90 percent of tea party supporters felt the government was too big and had too much control, while 70 percent of people in the same poll thought the federal government should do more to create jobs, and almost half thought it should control executive bonuses. And of those answering the CBS/NYT poll, 62 percent say big government programs like Social Security and Medicare are "worth the costs to taxpayers."

Thus, we have the famous "keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" attitude. Or, as one interviewee put it, "I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security."

Two statistics that should shock no one - 89 percent of tea partiers are white and 75 percent are over age 45, with 29 percent over 65.

While they may not have a particularly coherent set of beliefs, and the beliefs they do seem to hold aren't particularly grounded in reality, one thing's for sure: These folks certainly are mad. Fifty-three percent of tea party supporters describe themselves as "angry" about the way things are going in Washington, compared with 19 percent of Americans overall who say they are angry.

As I've mentioned before, I remember back a few years ago when "angry" was regarded as a very bad thing to be in politics. I even found a particularly ironic quote from the period, by conservative pundit Thomas Sowell.

"For many on the left," Sowell tut-tutted, "indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life. How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans?" (Well, Thomas, quite a bit these days.) Sowell went on: "The source of the anger of liberals, 'progressives' or radicals is by no means readily apparent. The targets of their anger have included people who are nonconfrontational or even genial, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush."

It would be hard to find someone less confrontational and more genial than Barack Obama. And yet tea partiers are carrying signs with him portrayed as the Joker from Batman and even Hitler. What goes around, it seems, has come around. The tea partiers have become that which they once despised.

Here's the kicker: While 84 percent of tea partiers feel that their beliefs are shared by most Americans, only 25 percent of Americans polled say the tea party movement reflects their beliefs.

So who, then, are the tea partiers? They're old, white, ideologically incoherent, angry, out of touch with the mainstream, and deluded about their actual influence. In many ways (except perhaps for their median age), they remind me of the left. The actual left, I mean, not the centrists who actually run the Democratic party in the real world. The actual leftists were screaming "kill the bill!" right along with the tea partiers, because they saw it as a sell-out to the insurance industry.

But "angry as a way of life" hasn't worked out too well for either the right or the left, has it?

This Can't Be Emphasized Enough

Why are people rebelling against lower taxes? | McClatchy

Most Americans don't know they got a tax cut last year, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

Seventy-nine percent said the Obama administration had raised taxes or kept them the same.

Only 12 percent knew that most Americans are paying less in federal income taxes.

The tax cuts are a result of the stimulus package enacted early last year to pump more cash into the economy.

Ninety-eight percent of working families and individuals got a tax cut, saving them an average $1,158 on the tax returns that were due this week, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a research group that advocates for fair taxes for middle- and low-income families and for reducing the federal debt.

Arrogant ignorance is bad enough. Angry ignorance is going to be the end of this country.

Say What?

Poll: Most Tea Party Supporters Say Their Taxes Are Fair:

As Tea Partiers gather for today's rally in Boston, home of the original Tea Party protest in 1773, 42 percent of Tea Party supporters think the amount of income taxes they'll pay this year is unfair, according to a new CBS News/ New York Times poll.

Yet while some say the Tea Party stands for "Taxed Enough Already," most Tea Party supporters - 52 percent - say their taxes are fair, the poll shows. Just under one in five Americans say they support the Tea Party movement.

***

Americans overall are more likely than Tea Partiers to describe the income taxes they'll pay this year as fair - 62 percent do, according to the poll, conducted April 5 - 12.

Okay, for over half of them, it's really not about taxes, despite the ostensible name of the "party."

Anyone care to hazard a guess, then, what they're REALLY pissed off about? Could it be, maybe, that what the tea partiers are really up in arms about is that the wrong guy (or the wrong color guy) won?

Wrestling With History

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When I first heard that Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell had issued a proclamation reinstating Confederate History Month in Virginia, the first thing that entered my head was, "Oh, boy. This is gonna get ugly."

To be a Southerner who loves both the South and the United States at the same time is to understand just how complex emotions can be.

Yes, I admire Robert E. Lee as a great and noble man. Yes, I recognize that Stonewall Jackson was a military genius, whose audacious end run around the Union Army at Chancellorsville was as jaw-dropping a feat of arms as Hannibal crossing the Alps or George S. Patton's turning his entire army in 48 hours to relieve Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge.

Yes, I recognize that the majority of Confederate soldiers, including my own ancestor Oliver Barnes, probably didn't own slaves. As one defiant Southern POW told his Yankee captors, he was fighting "'cause y'all are down here."

And yet ...

If you have any degree of intellectual honesty, you begin to realize there's a paradox inherent in loving the United States of America while revering the memory of people who once took up arms against it and tried to divide it in two. You begin to realize that all of the issues that led to this attempted sundering of the country - nullification, the right to secede, jockeying for political power - eventually ended up, at their core, being about preserving a regional economy that could not survive unless one group of men kept another in chains.

How do you reconcile these competing emotions? Well, as one of my favorite Southern writers, Florence King, once wryly observed, most of us do it by going quietly nuts.

Some do it through the use of denial. At first, that seemed to be the path McDonnell was going to take.

The original proclamation said nothing about the "s" word. It talked about "the numerous Civil War battlefields that mark every region of the state," and the soldiers and sailors "who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth" before being "ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army." There wasn't any mention whatsoever of the issue of slavery.

Needless to say, civil rights organizations were less than pleased with this somewhat sanitized recounting of events. They raised a hand and went, "Uh, hello? Mind if we black folks put a word in here?"

Actually, most of them were somewhat less diffident than that. The chairman of the state's Legislative Black Caucus called the proclamation "offensive " Former Gov. Doug Wilder (who'd supported McDonnell) called the omission of any reference to slavery "mind-boggling."

Which, of course, led to the usual sneers about "political correctness," as if acknowledging even the existence of slavery was somehow suspect. Holocaust deniers have nothing on these people. At least the neo-Nazis try, however ineptly, to claim the murder of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, et al., never happened. For slavery deniers, even acknowledging that the subject exists is "politically correct," and therefore taboo.

Eventually, Gov. McDonnell bowed to the inevitable and issued an amended proclamation. Slavery, the new proclamation said, "was an evil, vicious and inhumane practice which degraded human beings to property, and it has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation."

It went on to say, "As Virginians we carry with us both the burdens and the blessings of our history ... best encapsulated in a fact I noted in my Inaugural Address in January: The state that served as the Capitol of the Confederacy was also the first in the nation to elect an African-American governor, my friend, L. Douglas Wilder."

While some commentators inevitably referred to the amendment as a "surrender," I have to give Gov. McDonnell a lot of credit. It's hard to see how you can argue with saying, in effect, "keeping people in slavery was bad, and yeah, we did it. But we've tried to do better by all our people since, and we've had some success."

We're never going to get anywhere in the South, or in this country, until we acknowledge both the "burdens and the blessings" of our history. We can debate how much slavery had to do with the war, but we can't do it if we pretend it didn't happen. We'll never appreciate how far we've come - or be able to go farther - until we acknowledge and make our peace with where we've been.

Thrillers: 100 Must Reads

The International Thriller Writers organization, in conjunction with Oceanview Publishing, is releasing Thrillers: 100 Must Reads this July. It's edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner, and has essays on great adventure stories ranging "From Beowulf to The Bourne Identity" by writers like Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, R.L. Stine and many more thriller All-Stars.

I'm in there with a piece on one of my all-time favorites: Eric Von Lustbader's THE NINJA. Because who among us does not love ninjas?

And it's available for pre-order!

The Liberal Opponent Who Isn’t There

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When Republican State Sen. (and former Cosmo centerfold) Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Teddy Kennedy, Republicans across the land were delirious with joy.

It was, they asserted, the death of health-care reform. It was the harbinger of a Republican landslide in the November midterms. It was, some even dared say, the end of Barack Obama’s effectiveness as president.

And, to be fair, there were a lot of liberals who were discouraged and demoralized by the Brown win. Until, that is, the Democrats finally woke up and realized that, even in the Senate, 41 out of 100 seats is not a majority. Health-care reform passed in an “up-or-down” majority vote in both houses. It was, as Sen. Jim DeMint famously claimed, Obama’s Waterloo ... except it was DeMint and the Republicans who played the role of Napoleon, with Obama as the Duke of Wellington.

Brown, however, didn’t mope around after the loss on health care. Since he was elected to fill out Sen. Kennedy’s remaining term, he immediately did what all politicians on both sides of the aisle do: He got busy raising funds for his re-election run.

And what’s Republican fundraising without a little fear-mongering? The GOP playbook requires a bogeyman, someone to scare the masses into coughing up their hard-earned cash for the only person who can save them. So who did Brown hold up as his big, scary villain? Osama bin Laden? Vladimir Putin?

Nope. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow.

"Before I’ve even settled into my new job,” Brown warned in a fund-raising letter, “the political machine in Massachusetts is looking for someone to run against me. And you’re not going to believe who they are supposedly trying to recruit — liberal MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow.”

Massachusetts Democrats, Brown claimed, “want a rubber stamp who will vote for their plans to expand government, increase debt and raise taxes. Someone like Rachel Maddow.”

There was only one problem with this. While she does live in Massachusetts, Maddow isn’t running, has repeatedly announced that she isn’t running and, at one point, went so far as to take out a full page ad in The Boston Globe to say she isn’t running. The Massachusetts Democratic Party denies ever approaching her about running.

Brown’s response: “Bring her on.”

I don’t see why this should be surprising. Republicans these days seem to feel most comfortable railing against things that don’t exist.Which is why you’ve got Sarah Palin telling everyone she doesn’t want her Down syndrome baby appearing before “Obama death panels.” You’ve got Michelle Bachmann raving about the census being used to herd everyone into internment camps. You’ve got gun collectors wearing their weapons to Starbucks to protest anti-gun measures that no one has proposed. They’re all arguing passionately with the voices in their heads.

At first glance, Maddow seems like an odd target. Sure, she’s a woman, and she’s gay, but she’s not nearly as harsh, for example, as fellow MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. She actually seems downright reasonable most of the time. I suppose if you’re on after Olbermann, it’s easy to seem like the reasonable one.

But since when does reality have anything to do with Republican fundraising? Fear’s what counts. To paraphrase Master Yoda from “Star Wars”: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. And hate leads to a gain of seats in the midterms.” Or so the theory goes.

Finally, though, even the usually courteous Maddow had had enough. “Sen. Brown, you’re lying,” she snapped. “Stop lying.”

Yeah, Rache, good luck with that. This is the GOP you’re talking about. They’ve given up on being a party of ideas in favor of being a party run by fear and paranoid fantasy, the party that could take as its fundraising guide a paraphrase of the old nonsense poem:

I saw today upon the stair
A candidate who wasn’t there.
She wasn’t there again today.
Let’s run against her anyway!