The gift that is the race for the GOP presidential nomination just keeps on a-giving. SNL, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report might as well just add their writing staffs to the unemployment stats, because the candidates are serving up all the material they’re ever gonna need, and for free, too.
Herman “Just Kidding (Not Really”) Cain wants to electrify the fence between the United States and Mexico; I’m not sure who picks up the tab for that, but I suspect Cain plans to bill grieving Mexicans for the cost of electrocuting their kinfolk. “Careful, señores, hot fence!”
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney says that rather than providing foreclosure relief to struggling homeowners, he would let foreclosures “run their course and hit the bottom,” put all those bums on the street, and then sell the bums’ houses to investors, who could turn around and rent the bums’ houses back to them (assuming the bums could pass the credit check, raise first, last and damage deposit, and get out of the leases on the Dumpsters, refrigerator boxes and pup tents they’re living in).
And he says this in Nevada, where a day without foreclosures is like a day without sunshine. It’s like throwing an anvil to a drowning man — more than 80 percent of homeowners there are underwater on their mortgages, and one in 44 houses has been hit by a foreclosure filing in the third quarter of 2011, nearly double the number in runner-up California and putting the Silver State squarely atop the foreclosure heap.
Remember, this isn’t your crazy Uncle Hermie who talks to the toaster and Thurston Howell III, who was a TV caricature of an obscenely wealthy, amoral fuck, not the real deal. These are the frontrunners for the GOP nomination. One of them could actually become president.
Mad Blog Media 
i wish I had something witty to add but they foreclosed on my house back in ’09 (phrased that way it sounds like an eternity huh) while I was working three jobs and my wife had two. Didn’t just lose the house but many tools and possessions too large to move in a hurry in February in Leadville (think frozen to the ground). Now I have a landlord who won’t even fix the roof to protect his own investment, I suspect they burn twenties on their coffee table to keep warm and insult us simultaneously.
Derek, I can’t imagine how that must feel. Neither can Mitt Romney. Let’s hope nobody elects either of us president anytime soon.
Are things looking up at all?
Re: Herman Cain. When did “hey I was a successful businessman” (really?? he runs chain pizza joints, and not even good ones) become qualification enough for the job of president. The government is NOT a business and should never have been, is, or will be run like one. Considering the shit-for-brains that run most of corporate amercia why is there this “common wisdom” that business can do it better??
There really is a “hey we can say any shit we want and get away with it because nobody in the media is really going to call us on it” attitude. And unfortunately they are correct.
(insert heavy sigh here)
In other news. We had an earth quake on your old stopping grounds O’Grady. 3.8 on the Richter. centered just south of Pojoaque. So of course the looneys in the City Different” immediately find a way to dredge LANL into it. Making no mention of that fact that the epicenter was near where a certain unnamed pueblo is illegally pumping water for their golf course and resort. I think they might have awakened a Balrog.
Fly, you fools!
Here’s the details on your little shaker: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0006ap0.php#details
NEIC has it as a 3.5 on the moment magnitude scale (a measure of the energy released). Only at 5km down, that pretty darn shallow; and just 32km southeast of Khal in Los Alamos. Hmm, 10:39am, I wonder if it woke him up?
Hey Khal, what’s the geology down that way? Part of the Rio Grande Rift? Did New Mexico just get a little bid wider?
idiots will always run for office. no surprise there. but it always amazes me how idiots can attract 40% of even a straw poll. speaks volumes about the folks who make up the party base. “i know absolutely nothing about this guy and have only heard three minutes of sound bites from his speeches, but he sounds A-OK to me.”
Its the Rio Grande Rift all right. 5 km depth is probably too deep to be related to pumping, but I’m no hydrologist.
My understanding is the rifting is actually slowing down now that the Farillon Plate has been sinking, but the rifting is related to crustal relaxation after the anomalously thickened Western NA crust began to relax and sink following the peak of shallow Farillon subduction. t
The tectonic activity in the western North America is fascinating. Patrick will have to approve this post. I’m putting in quite a few links.
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/tour/provinces/rio_grande_rift/home.html
http://records.viu.ca/~earles/farallon-kula-may00.htm
http://www.science20.com/conscious_matter/new_madrid_earthquake_and_farallon_plate-834
And amazingly, the CMR Building did not collapse and take me with it. Sigh…so much for all that overhype via the Santa Fe folks, as MD says.
As far as the GOP, it IS Thurston Howell III and Uncle Hermie. Or to paraphrase Firesign Theatre, the President of the United States WILL be named Schickelgruber!
And another Firesignism: Let’s keep the problem in the pockets of the American businessman where it belongs. Glad to hear you haven’t been dragged to the earth’s core, K.
No kidding, O’G. Especially glad the walls are still standing considering we restocked the house with beer over the weekend.
Tea (Coolaid) Party wack jobs must be holding ralleyes (circle jerks) on-mass at the latest lunicy coming out their candidate’s mouths. Talk about a bunch of Mack trucks on a collision course with a fully loaded freight train. The carnaige is going to be something to behold! Fun timesm you CAN’T make this stuff up unless…
did you hear the latest Tea Party Nation pledge? “we the small business owners of America pledge not to hire one new employee until after the election.” sick fucks.
Boy, am I glad I’m not in the US of A now! As an Italophile I would like to ask Herman Cain, who was CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, which I think is an awful stereotype of Italians, how he felt about running such a place and would he have taken a job running something like a “Bubba’s Watermelon Shack” chain if they featured a stereotypical caricature of a black man as part of their marketing campaign? His presence on the Repuglican program seems to be as the new Alan Keyes — “hey, let’s find a right-wing extremist black guy to run against Obama, that’ll work!”
Fuckin; A, Larry. I never even looked at their web site until I read your comment. Yep, that sure is a stereotype on the cover. Double standard?
I love (not really) how these turkeys say it’s the unemployed’s fault for being unemployed. That OWS doesn’t have a leg to stand on since the rich can’t possibly be corrupt since they have jobs and money.
Seems to me we fought a war to get the amoral arrogant corporations off-our soil and claim the nation for our own way back in ’76. What I want to know is how did they get rid of their Brit accent and become Republicans as well as jump ahead over 200 years?
If I recall my political-science classes correctly, American Puritans believed that wealth was a gift from God, indicative of His blessing. Poverty was your own damn’ fault for being a slacker in the eyes of the Lord.
Ain’t much changed since then, has it?
My read is that our own corporate amoral types fought to get rid of the foreign corporate amoral types back in 1776 and get the market share to themselves. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, eh?
There is a bit of a ring of truth to the country deserving its fate. We have been living on borrowed time and money for at least thirty years. Not to mention, electing the same old liars and crooks. No one in this country, save a few around this pickle barrel, seem to realize that there is no free lunch out there. Winston Churchill said it best when he muttered that promise of nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Try getting elected on that platform.
It’s just plain depressing.
Interesting bit in the International Herald Tribune (my lone connection to the US of A these days other than this blog) about the land of irrational exhuberance (is that spelled correctly?) no longer being such a place. I realize a lot of the economic woes now were caused by the idea that “owning” (along with the bank, taxman, etc.) your own home was somehow the guarantee of safe retirement and plenty of money to spend on toys (though we never bought into it, preferring to rent and stay out of debt, since we never knew when we might want to up and move) but the Repuglicans (owned by the rich boyz of course) have done a great job blaming all the problems solely on this…..they claim the government and the rules almost forced them to engage in the shady financial schemes that really brought things crashing down upon seemingly everyone but them. How they have ANY political support in the USA just proves my wife’s three-word explanation for how this crap.
The last GOP bullshit session was in Las Vegas in the audience was in Nevada movers and shakers of the Republican bent; Nathan Adelson, Steve Wynn, and Wayne Newton among others.None of these people are even remotely close to normal. they have given the state 2 ridiculous Governors in a row. Having lived here primarily since 1956, it is beyond disgusting.
Adelson and Wynn are trying (successfully) to move Vegas gambling to Macau, China. More unemployment for Nevada and the US.
Surely there is a time and space warp that is affecting our small world.
Interesting bit in the Atlantic Wire yesterday. Rethuglicans want to prop up huge corporations, while Democraps lean towards throwing money at unions and government workers. But neither field has produced a single job net increase in 20 years. Instead, every “new” job has come from starts ups and new companies — and neither party has a clue how to help them out.
Big screw up on my part yesterday! Sheldon Adelson not Nathan Adelson is the big GOP money guy in Las Vegas. Nathan Adelson is well noted for his philanthropy in Nevada. Twistedd brain cells on my part.