The new national currency: stupidity

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I see that liberal bloggers from Balloon Juice to TPM are in high dudgeon because the Tea Party supports a bill to withdraw 1$ bills from circulation and replace them with dollar coins. For some reason they consider this idea to be outrageous. John Cole denounces it as "just weird" and Josh Marshall claims that such a change would be "a huge pain in the butt (perhaps literally) for every American."

The criticism, you see, is that dollar coins are a huge waste of money because nobody uses them, and consequently $1 billion worth are stockpiled in vaults where they do no work but cost tax dollars to store and secure. It must be true: even NPR said so back in June!

Critics of the dollar coin seem to think that eliminating the greenback would force them to carry several pounds of coins in their pockets from now on. Why exactly would that happen? Can you think of any reason why a person would have to carry more than four dollar coins at one time? One, maybe: when the 7-11 cashier or bartender has no fives in the register. Happens every day, doesn't it?

If you've fed a parking meter or vending machine lately, you know that neither provides much of a service or product for less than a dollar. To get a few hours of parking or a plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper you need to have 6 or 8 quarters handy. In my experience, vending machines spit out a used dollar bill about as often as they accept it.

Needless to say, this looks to me like some pointless piling onto the Tea Party by some self-righteous nincompoops. I've often said that liberal ideas are too important to entrust to liberals. Likewise, dumb ideas can easily find a new home in a liberal skull.

Last night I emailed Josh Marshall about his post to ask if he was serious, and to explain what exactly would be the drawback of widely circulating $1 coins. He broke my heart with no reply. Because there isn't a good one, if these ninnies were to think about it for two minutes. So you say a cashier doesn't want to accept 1$ coins? Tell the shift manager you'll shop at Walmart until their policy changes. And if you, the shopper, doesn't want to accept a $1 coin as part of your change, then leave it in the jar for Jerry's Kids! Oh, but your change includes four 1$ coins? If you're not rich enough to leave them in the tip jar, then I guess you'll become an eager adopter of this strange new monetary artifact, just like everyone else.

As an alternative approach, you could ask the cashier for a whole roll of dollar coins, then take it home and fuck yourself to sleep with it! (And by "you," I mean "the indefinite you." Thank you for your attention in this matter.)

Happy Independence Day, Soldier!

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Beer-D is watching Independence Day fireworks tonight in a small town called Mahomet (yes, I agree---it's a much more peculiar name for these parts even than "Podunk" is). It is a Champaign County bedroom community to which affluent people flee from our twin cities for the "good schools" and other mythical quality-of-life perks. Any-hoo, I received a text message from him shortly before the fireworks began, commenting on how well received some patriotic Toby Keith song was by the Proud Americans in attendance. Then, this exchange between him and me:

Beer-D: There's some bugler actually playing Taps right now. The fuck?

RubberCrutch: He must think it's Memorial Day.

Beer-D: Oh my god, they played it for a guy who's ABOUT to be deployed to Afghanistan!

Well, yes, I understand that Taps is played at lights-out on Army installations every night. Likewise, I am familiar with the fact that the sounding of Taps by a bugler is universally recognized by Americans as a musical salute to a deceased soldier at his or her funeral. I am not a military veteran, but I'm pretty sure that Taps is not a song that a soldier wishes to hear immediately before being deployed to a theater of operations. I wonder if this untimely gaffe even registered with anyone other than the soldier and his family.

Microeconomics

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President Barack Obama made a unilateral commitment to economic stimulus Tuesday evening before a joint session of Congress by delivering the largest shovel-ready project of his two-year administration to date: the 2011 State of the Union address.

Wise sayings

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Golf balls. Fucking golf balls!

Ruled by superminority

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Maybe you've heard about this jagoff of a U.S. Senator from Alabama who has abused Senate protocol rules to put a blanket hold on all of President Obama's nominees until he extorts some public funds for projects in his state. This isn't traditional legislative logrolling for the purpose of maximizing the bacon one brings back for the hometown crowd, which happens within routine lawmaking practice. It's the exercise of a secret active veto over pretty much any Senate activity by a single bad actor.

I haven't read the stories about this closely enough to know how the obstructionist's secret identity was revealed, but my understanding is that, at the very least, the Senate Majority Leader by definition must know who has placed the hold... and that it's considered not very gentlemanly for the Majority Leader to "out" that person.

So not only do Democrats feel they can't control the legislative agenda without a Senate supermajority (i.e., 60 votes as needed to overcome the threat of a filibuster). They don't even feel they can act on a routine presidential nomination if a single member of the club decides against it... because holding that member publically accountable would seem impolite.

All of the above, while not unique or profound observation, I present as background for a couple of Paul Krugman blog posts wherein he describes the abuse of the nobility's liberum veto in 17th century Poland. This familiar-sounding political dysfunction greatly contributed to the collapse, breakup, and annexation of that country, by its neighbors, at the dawn of The Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe.

So the bad news is that America seems to be swirling helplessly around the drain that empties into the septic tank of feudalism. (Think of nobility such as the Duke of CitiCorp, the Prince of General Electric, and the Archbishop of Viacom.) The jury is still out on any good news this may portend.

Introducing the failPad

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In the previous comments thread, our prolific commenter "Anonymous" glibly predicted that the overhyped new Apple mobile media device would be "stupid." I could faintly imagine innovative possibilities for a highly portable multimedia touchscreen computer, but could not figure out how it could be successfully implemented. Forward-facing camera for videoconferencing and texting? Maybe cool, but cellular nets certainly don't have the bandwidth to support too much of that. Larger touch keyboard with tactile feedback (haptic) technology? Of interest to me, but I really can't see any advantage to a screen that you can't reach at least 3/5 of the way across with your thumbs, because laying the "pad" flat on a table would give the user a lousy viewing angle, and propping the screen up would give the user lousy typing ergonomics.

I felt that all the mockups were wrongheaded --- basically large iPhones with no apparent redeeming social value. Certainly the guy who sent engineers back to the lab a dozen times until they designed a MacBook trackpad with exactly the right texture would have obsessed over the ergonomics of the device, the hand feel, the effortless graspability, I thought.

Nope. Jobs's failPad is, in my opinion, astonishingly banal. The device appears to incorporate zero technical innovation and clumsy ergonomics. It offers no new essential, or even interesting, capabilities whatsoever (unless you think it's important to have a ridiculously high-def 10 in. display that you can hold up to your face with both hands while watching YouTube porns).

Apple didn't introduce a technology innovation today --- it unveiled a new business model for media content owners. I'd imagine that those giant media corporations --- which actually are people just like you and me, granted --- already have a mighty case of blue balls owing to several years of foreplay. These behemoths have gently been urging Apple (like a thousand tiny fingers) to market a stylish new widget that will seduce foolish young consumers into turning their media collections into a never-ending revenue stream for Time-Warner, Disney, General Electric, and all those other friendly folks who rent you content for your life so you don't have to provide your own.

When I read the description of the iPad today I'm sure I felt the same kind of bile rising as Ralphie did when he discovered that the Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring message was just a lousy commercial. Early Apple geek reaction to the failPad in blog comments threads has been pretty negative (about 2:1, in fact), which is uniformly unheard of after any new Apple rollout.

I may be wrong, but I'll bet anyone a beer that I'm not. I think the reason this new offering is so lame is that it wasn't really designed by Jobs and Jonathan Ives: it was developed for control-horny media conglomerates.

Wise sayings

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It is awesome when the stock market surges on the prospect that healthcare reform will fail, but it's an abomination when the stock market retreats because there's talk of restoring bank regulations that, if the Republican Congress and Clinton hadn't dismantled them, would have prevented the current U.S. economic depression.

A parody of a parody

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The old adage about American politics, updated here using post-feminist lanaguage, was that the difference between the children and the adults is that the children want to be something and the adults want to do something. Today, though, the children don’t even want to be something --- they just want to be seen as being something. With few exceptions, Democrats are children. Or “wimps,” as Republicans have successfully branded them for 30 years. (So are Republicans, though, but that’s beyond my scope here.)

Just look at Obama and other Democrats like Jim Webb now tripping all over themselves to put a halt to a critical legislative process in order to wait for some neophyte Tea Party Republican to be seated in the Senate... so that he can lock down the filibuster for the minority party. This guy is literally a nobody, but they want to grant him a veto over legislation that was nailed down long before anybody outside of Massachusetts heard of “Scott Brown.” The only way this makes one f@*#king bit of sense is if Obama is just simply more interested in being seen by the public as always being the man who takes the high road, even at the expense of his own agenda and even his gross personal ambitions. And what is Webb up to? Maybe he is more interested in being anointed by the media as The New Maverick of the Senate than he is in expanding health coverage to unfortunate average Americans and cutting the federal deficit through good government. To these men... I mean boys... it’s not even about being something: it’s about appearing to be something.

About 10 years ago the phrase “perception equals reality” came into vogue. You noticed, right? But the trouble is, perception equals reality only for solipsists, psychotics, and gullible consumers. And what we have now is a political and policymaking establishment that seems truly to believe that government is about managing the perceptions of the rubes.

And then there are those Real Democrats --- “real” because they perceive themselves to be --- who think now’s the time to scapegoat progressives (i.e., liberals). Why? Because some liberals (1) have fought tenaciously for the agenda on which they ran for office and (2) now they talk about playing the same kind of hardball with their votes in the House like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu et al. have been doing all along in the Senate. Real Democrats are angered by a progressive bloc in Congress that might hold their votes hostage until they extract some meaningful concessions from their Real Democrat colleagues (legislative and executive). This is supposed to be dirty pool, you see, or “irresponsible.” Spare me. Liberals have compromised with moderates every f@*#ing step of the way, and not only on healthcare reform. Frankly, liberals have gone 10 extra miles to appease some very bad men and women who make a career of burnishing their images as “responsible” public servants on talk shows.

There may be a large bloc of Real Democrats who will weep to see their dream of healthcare legislation die this winter. From the commentary I’m reading these days, many Real Democrats now view healthcare reform much more as a Democratic political totem than as a public policy imperative. And that’s the main reason why they’ve stood by while Max Baucus and his warty playmates denuded the Senate legislation of its most important potential policy virtues (e.g., universal coverage and cost reduction for the government). Real Democrats cried crocodile tears while Baucus, Snowe, and their playmates stalled and vandalized, but now they are furious about filthy liberals like Howard Dean and HuffPost and FireDogLake who want to extract a coupla pounds of flesh on behalf of their own constituencies. But hey, why should anyone care about the fury of wimps?

Real Democrats have failed the public and themselves, since the onslaught of The Reagan Revolution, by dealing with the devil as standard operating procedure. It’s the easiest way to grab and hold a seat in The Club, after all. Yes, that’s right: cowardice and self-hatred are now entrenched personality traits of the modern Real Democrat. The way he and she copes with it, of course, is by psychological projection to an external scapegoat --- the filthy, irresponsible liberals. It’s the same way that Republicans cope with their own failures, after all. Unfortunately for Real Democrats, though, their little club can’t get along any better without the progressive bloc than it can without the Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe bloc. So they’d better come up with a Plan C, or else just become Real Republicans. Because most of them already are, and not closeted very well. (Rockefeller Republicans, maybe, if not Nixon Republicans.) Yes, the Elite Real Democrats should just join the Republican Party and accelerate its destruction from within using their own time-tested wimpiness. Not only are Real Democrats wimps, as right-wingers correctly point out: they are parodies of wimps.

See how it works?

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It works like this: Jay Rockefeller denounces Howard Dean as "irresponsible" for suggesting that lousy HCR legislation be scrapped, but he doesn't denounce Joseph Lieberman (King of the United States) as irresponsible for aggressively acting to scrap the HCR legislation unless Rockefeller's public option was removed from the language.

Sure, Jay is upset, he confesses. But that doesn't mean "...I take my football, and run home and sulk, and complain, or hold out for $100 million for something in West Virginia," he assures us. No, he mans up to it all and... blames Howard Dean.

Trashy little friend of the business world

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As seen on Atrios, Scott Simon's "friend from the business world, Joe Nocera," clearly demonstrates the odious nature of celebrity journalists with some intervention by a blogger named Matt Browner Hamlin. Nocera believes it is right and proper that there should be two different kinds of contracts for each of the nation's two principal social castes (i.e., Masters Of The Universe and All The Rest Of Us Slobs) --- one type that is sacrosanct versus another type that is merely a short-term serving suggestion to trick the rubes.

What a trashy little whore a man must be to write such things for open consideration by the general public. When celebrity journalists and pundits are not held accountable by their publishers for spreading lies or demonstrably ridiculous opinions, they need no credibility in order to earn a giant payday. It makes a guy wonder why the New York Times keeps people like that on salary.

I'll bet Joe Nocera is the type of person who thinks he's too important to wash his hands before returning to work. Absent gloves or hand sanitizer, never shake hands with a trashy little whore of a man. And if he touches you anyway, consider chopping off his hands. Thus Sprach StuporMundi.

Suggestion for California libertarians

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Attention California tax resisters: if you don't like Government, then next time a wildfire starts to melt your vinyl siding, call Nancy Reagan.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed your imbecile-of-a-governor's awesome garage sale this past weekend. Don't worry: the 14% wage cut he forced on state employees probably didn't apply to the firefighters (especially not the ones who died Sunday while you were still congratulating yourself about your brand new $10 government surplus office chair).

Just dream of it: state-maintained Highway Patrol cruisers and BMW cycles for thousands under book value --- everything must go. Haha --- LOLROFLMAOGTGBRBZOMGZ! Extra, extra --- read all about it! Illiterate eurotrash governor sells off anything a sociopath might want to pick from the twitching corpse of his own state government, pennies on the dollar for the savvy shopper, courtesy of the state's impoverished public schools, colleges, and diseased poor people. Hey, wait, I've got it: let's call it The Great American California's Fire Sale!!! Government sux, destruction rulez!!!

Canadiennes sans frontieres

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Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram security blog tells of the dismantling, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, of a large sign on the Canadian side of a U.S./Canada border crossing at Massena, New York. The mighty, yellow sign was declared to pose a significant risk of endangering customs agency employees by drawing the unwelcome attention of international terrorists.

No, the sign did not say "Bin Laden Sucks" or "Fuck the Ayatollah." It said "United States." Because if Canadians become aware that they're entering the United States via Massena, NY, then you-know-who has already won.

Apropos of previous post

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Steve Benen, a TPM alum who writes for Washington Monthly (which I really should read more often), reports on an email chat he had with Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush I regimes. It's about the nauseated wonderment with which we regard twin monstrous absurdities: the Republican delusion that they have anything to contribute to society other than ruin, and the corporate media's treatment of these people with continuing deference and moral authority. Benen's observations are worth reading from top to bottom.

In addition to hatred and blame to Republicans and the corporate media, I add a supertanker brimming with typhoid spit for establishment Democrats, all the way up to Obama, for not force-feeding some reality trash talk back down the throats of the people who have been dismantling our democracy for 30 years. Yes: congealed typhoid spit with large, lazy pinwheels of gum abcess blood and thick with mats of wriggling Anopheles mosquito larvae.

I say that the Benen piece is "apropos" of the previous post because I'll bet any of you the best bottle of purple booze in my basement that in the coming days there will be no credible discussion of the absurdity of letting an 8-year-old boy play with an Uzi... and that anyone with enough guts to suggest such a thing on TV will be denounced as a far-left enemy of America's second-amendment right to empower our children blow their brains out. Read the piece.

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

Stories like this bring out the worst in me, but I don't even care. Rest in peace, kid.

Hat tip to "Dworvin" for the link.

Wise sayings

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If we learned anything from the Reagan Revolution it was that you only need a president, an army, a site license for QuickBooks Pro, and a bathtub to run a democracy.

Freedom was on the march

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But then Iran had its very own Brooks Brothers Riot. Before the weekend is over I'll be we're hearing from Republican elder statesmen how Obama "lost Iran."

Proof that torture works

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Today Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asserted in a Senate hearing that torture must work because they've been using it successfully for 500 years.*

In other news, OBL asserted in a pimped-out mountain cave that terrorism must work because he's been using it successfully for 25 years.

* I heard him saying this on All Things Considered this afternoon but I can't find it on the NPR web site.

Truly out of power [updated]

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In addition to all the obvious things that have been said about the tea-bag tax protests today, I have two observations.

First, it's really encouraging to me that self-identified conservatives are every bit as capable as liberals of ridiculously self-marginalizing public conduct. The tea parties are much, much stupider even than giant liberal puppets of George Bush.

Second, I take these events as the first real sign that the far right wing really, truly is out of political power for the first time since 1980. Yes, I include the 1990s, too, when Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband did everything he could, intentionally and unintentionally, to keep the right wing appeased and emboldened. To me, this is huge news. After decades with their pudgy fingers all over the levers of power, the best they can do now is engineer ridiculous publicity stunts and (regrettably, still) haunt TV news-commentary shows where the corporate media continue to legitimize their absurd worldview.

That said, the ideas these people promote remain pernicious and influential, and the media are as much in thrall of them as ever.

Update: I added a sentence to the third paragraph that I forgot when posting last night.

This burns-up me!

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This is an abominable idea, as well explained by this guy.

OK, the 2000 Three Stooges biopic was one thing. I don't know if it was any good, but I'd probably watch it. The intent of a biopic (other than to profit from the production) is at least to pay tribute to the subjects, and possibly to give modern audiences some insight into their sense of Duty and Humanity. But the idea of "recreating" the Three Stooges is so lame that not even Joe Besser would buy in, even if threatened with having shit slapped out of him by Kenneth MacDonald or being breathed on by a guy wearing a gorilla suit.

For starters, who is supposed to be the target market for a reinvention of the Stooge "franchise" --- Stooge fans?!? Every one of us will stay away and will warn everyone we know to do the same. The project is pre-moiderized in terms of profit potential.

Second, there is no way to duplicate the Stooge pace in a feature film format --- it's been tried and it failed every time. The world has enough Three Stooges feature films, such as The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. The Stooges' tautly plotted (or unplotted) action-packed scripts won't work in long form. Predictably, the one halfway decent idea the film developers toyed with --- packaging the film as four separate shorts --- was discarded: the script will now be "streamlined into a single narrative".

Third, it will be too violent and vulgar. Studio suits and focus groups will see to that. The Stooges were violent and vulgar, of course, but not too violent and vulgar. They produced family entertainment, at least for junior and pop if not necessarily for mom and sis.

Fourth, Hollywood will surely go all out with grotesque digital special effects in the upcoming 2010 atrocity, which will completely disrespect the craftsmanship that went into compiling the encyclopedia of hilarious analog special effects that the original Stooge crew developed using only basics such as invisible wires, dummies, fast-motion effects. The same goes for all those lovely, full-bodied audio slaps, cracks, thuds, glug-glugs, bonks, rusty hardware squeaks, nails being extracted from the skull or buttocks, and so on.

And finally, even assuming that Benicio del Toro (?!?), Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey (!!!) might be able to impersonate Moe, Larry, and Curly effectively, there is no way to recreate the contributions of the 4th -- nth stooges. I'm not talking about Shemp and his successors, but all the rest of the recurring cast, including Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, Dudley Dickerson, Duke York, Christine McIntyre (the niece really was nice!), Emil Sitka, and the ever-renewable posse of dowager ladies and the gum-snapping vamps in shoulder pads.

So, even though I regret saying so, I sincerely hope this ill-advised Stooge-denigrating project by Peter and Bobby Farrelly (whoever the fuck they are) is plagued from start to finish by The Curse of King Rootin Tootin. I have a tapeworm and it's not even good enough for him!

That's some opinionifying

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I'm happy to beat a properly selected dead horse if it might help to tenderize the carcass for other critters to pick apart and digest. But I'm even happier when high-visibility media critics take center stage with their hobnailed boots.

Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe laughs at two puffinating "Timesmen" who, offended by President Obama's lack of deference toward their employer at the press conference last night, characterize him as some sort of "professor" boring the nation with his thoughtful answers to the media's ignorant questions.

Then this evening I discover that Jamison Foser of Media Matters scooped Gitlin by a whole 12 minutes. Apparently another "Timesman" also published some comments he intended to be withering about "Professor Barack Obama" (emphasis by the commentator) this morning. But it was a different guy, and a different Times: Andrew Malcolm of The Los Angeles Times. Now, Andrew Malcolm isn't just any full-of-shit corporate pundit --- his previous job was serving as Laura Bush's press secretary.

Corporate newspapers are like 21st century investment banks: hollow assets. We know what's keeping the banks alive, but it's a mystery to me what is keeping the newspapers alive.