Well, well, well. There may be cause for hope in our benighted Republic after all.
Yesterday Bibleburg voters roundly rejected a so-called “Reform Team” slate full of tinfoil-beanie neotards, fuckwits and assclowns, among them Ed Birnham and Doug Bruce. The mayoral race between real estate pimp Steve Bach and pragmatic lefty businessman Richard Skorman was too close to call and will go to a runoff in May.
Said at-large council candidate Tim Leigh: “I think the citizens have spoken very loudly that they don’t want to go back 20 years.” Word. Y’all think this place is fucked up now, you should’ve seen it 20 years ago. Or 40. We had a John Birch Society bookstore downtown — right across Tejon from where Skorman’s Poor Richard’s complex is now, if memory serves — and in the late Seventies we enjoyed a Ku Klux Klan revival (the button-down David Duke version). Good times.
The news on the national scene is less reassuring, alas. The visionaries in the GOP are itching to shut down the nasty ol’ socialist gummint — however will they redistribute what remains of our wealth to their rich pals without a gummint to act as middleman? — and proposing a seriously unserious budget that Paul Krugman has called “a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” Thanks to Steve Benen for the word.
• Late update: Also by way of Steve B. comes the word that if the feddle gummint shuts down, the troops won’t get paid. As he notes, it sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “all-volunteer force.”
Mad Blog Media 
I do believe that your tinfoil types have merely moved west. Dysfunction Junction’s local election saw a record voter turnout for a ballot with only two matters in need of resolution by the voters: one was a five way contest for a city council seat, and the other was a proposal to ban medical marijuana. You can guess how that last one turned out. So I finally discovered what it takes to get your average GJ Faux-viewing right winger off his couch: just ask him to outlaw medical mary jane and they’ll stampede to the ballot box.
One of the five going for the city council seat was an actual liberal type, Jacob Richards. A really cool guy who doesn’t just talk the talk. He has formed an organization to help the homeless around here, and if it wasn’t for him the GJPD would still be hassling and abusing the homeless (two were fired in the wake of a recent investigation). I mean, here Jacob is, who I seriously doubt is a Christian, doing precisely what their Christ preached. However, he also has long hair. He lost in the election. I don’t think the local tea partiers like being reminded of how un-Christian they all are.
Ya gotta hand it to these Repuglicans! They are amazingly skilled at political propaganda. The way their usual “disenfranchised white male” fan tells it, the 2008 economic meltdown was caused by all those low-life minority folks scamming their way into homes they could not afford. Then when Wall Street collapsed because they couldn’t pay up, suddenly all the union-controlled public workers decided to do no work – just sit around and bankrupt the state coffers, while the retired ones collect fat pensions and the old and poor folks live it up on the public dole!
So cutting all that out will fix things in their tiny minds. Somehow they believe throwing even more folks out of work will improve our economy. I know you’re shaking your head now, saying how could anyone believe this–but this is the kind of crap that these folks tell me! After listening to enough Rush Windbag I guess the brain of these angry, dim-witted folks tells ’em, “well I got fu__ked so everyone else should get fu__ked too. Except for the rich folks of course, because when I finally win the lottery I’ll be one of them and I don’t wanna pay taxes to support those lazy, good-for-nothin’ freeloaders.”
As they say, you can’t make shit like this up — unless you’re the Repuglican Party of course!
“well I got fu__ked so everyone else should get fu__ked too…”
About fifteen or so years ago a guy I was riding bike with in the back of Waimanalo (on the Windward side of Oahu) said almost exactly that to me. He, being a working stiff in the private sector, resented that yours truly, as a public employee, had paid vacation. He went off on such a long harangue that I rode away and never rode with him again. What he didn’t know, and I didn’t bother to tell him, was that I sometimes lost my accrual because I was already maxed out on my vacation allowance and that was typical of my colleagues. One year rather than “lose” vacation, I simply took the last week of the year “off”, closed my office door, and caught up on my library reading. Junior faculty don’t get to take vacations, if they expect to become senior faculty. I became senior faculty before parachuting out of that plane.
We also had to keep reminding the Regents and the Governor that SOEST (School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology) brought in four bucks on our own for every dollar of state funds we were allocated. That money went to the local economy. Contrary to popular belief, state workers spend that money in the local economy, along with supporting all the soft money local people who were paid from grants, who also spent money in the local economy. Not to mention, we published in the fields of coastal zone management (important if you live in Hawaii) and volcanic and seismic risk including tsunamis.
Of course one thing you can never get faculty to agree on is what is real work and what is fluff. My wife, who taught five courses a semester in those days at a local community college, once was about to put her fist down the throat of one of the English Dept. faculty at the university center who complained about being overworked and underpaid for teaching one or two course a semester and publishing children’s literature. I ducked those fights.
My SOEST colleagues teased my wife that her job was the educational equivalent of service on the Russian Front. Hence why we took the last plane out of Stalingrad and settled here, far from community college workload issues and pissy taxpayers complaining bitterly about low community college retention rates. About a third of the incoming frosh at the CC couldn’t pass a writing test that most of us would pass in sixth grad, and about half flunked bonehead math.
That, by the way, explains a lot about why PEOPLE ARE STUPID. You can’t make shit like this up.
p.s. That one third functional illiteracy number is interesting. The Nazi party never controlled more than 1/3 of the seats in the Reichstag in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. Plus, it wasn’t just illiterate knuckle-draggers in the SA who drank that kool-aid. They had really smart guys like Albert Speer, too.
I think when Hitler was appointed Chancellor by a doddering President Hindenburg, they controlled about 30%. of the Reichstag, their unicameral version of our Congress Its just the rest of the Reichstag was incompetent to stop Schickelgruber’s people from running wild.
So please, DO BE WORRIED about Rush Windbag and these other shit-disturbers. They can actually win. And, in an age when Uncle Sam is deeply in debt, services are being cut, and gas becoming a luxury, there will be a lot of people, some of them STUPID, asking for irrational answers that get them off the hook. When enough people are stupid or look the other way, it can happen here.
Scary, eh?
It did happen here. The four new members of the library board campaigned on:
1. Teens don’t belong in the library.
2. the professional staff can be replaced with volunteers
3. Simple solutions are best
4. the 2009 operating fund audit is actually an off books ‘secret’ fund of $2 miln for ‘culture and recreation’
5. that a $200K reserve is 60% of the $3miln operating budget and way too much even though tax receipts come in only 2x a year and are always late.
The rebpug motto here is “We must organize ‘cuse something might happen’
They are very proud of the burger franchise they gave $600K in tax payer money to that still hasn’t started construction or bought land.
I have some belief these Repuglicans, led by the Tea Party/KKK will overreach, just as they did when Newt was there instead of Boner. The labor unions, after years of not doing much, NOW have a serious task on their hands and can show the rank-and-file, not to mention potential new union members what is at stake if they let these crazies take over. It seems to me the ideas these whackos are promoting are pretty close to what Hoover did during the Great Depression. Only the “stimulus” of deficiit spending for WWII really got us out of that mess…but it seems the Repuglicans want to keep doing the same “voodoo economics” experiments despite the fact it’s never worked. Unless of course your true goal is to make the rich folks richer at the expense of the rest of us! In 2012 I doubt enough folks will fall for this crap again to give them much more power than they currently enjoy — and with some luck, they’ll have less. Either way, we meet with the tax planning/retirement folks later this month to see how soon we can permanently get out of here and go to Italy – where the problems are only a pedophile president (maybe) and runaway bureaucracy. I can live with that!