Pertinent shit.Let’s take a step towards solving our financial calamity by ending the nearly 40-year war on drugs. Just the thought of the waste of lives and money  boils my bones. Bill Haney sums it up nicely (in a tldr fashion) on the Huffington Post:

Prohibition was repealed during the Depression of the 1930s, as the costs of enforcing draconian anti-alcohol laws became too expensive for society to bear. Today we have laws limiting alcohol use, tax revenues that result from its legal sale and a virtual elimination of violence resulting from its black-market distribution. With our economy staggering and the social, financial and strategic costs of our failed drug policies mounting, it is time for President Obama to bring an end to this ill-conceived “War”. The active search for peace with principle must begin.

May Obama lead our nation out of the clutches of idiocy NOW. Oh, and check out this movie:

With the recent release of secret CIA memos concerning torture techniques used by military personal to obtain information from “the enemy”, people are turning this whole thing into a gigantic deal. With saying that, I do not condone torture of prisoners for many reason BUT shit happens in war. We have killed thousands and thousands of people the past 8 or so years alone, kids and women too, and people are freaking the fuck out over some water getting poured on a guy’s head while he’s got a sheet over his head. Again, I don’t agree with it, but it seems to me there are far worse things that were going on at that time and continue to go on now and for people to be making a big deal of this when it happened years ago, it just seems a little ridiculous to me. Dick Cheney and a few former Bush cronies were of course pissed about the release of the memos by the Obama administration. Cheney bitched about the how the memos didn’t include any of the “good” that came from the waterboarding and other torture techniques used. I’m sure it was world shaking information that changed the course of the war. The biggest problem that I have with this whole situation is, the guys that carried out these orders may get in trouble for all of this. The people who ordered the torture, yes, something should happen to them because they knew what they were doing was wrong, BUT the guys who did it, leave them alone. These guys have been trained for years to do whatever someone in authority tells them to do, essentially they are robots. You can’t punish someone for doing what they have been trained to do which is follow orders, and don’t ask questions. I just think this whole situation is  little ridiculous, people need to get over that shit, move on, and spend their energy trying to figure out how they can help things NOW, not worry about something like water getting poured on a guys head.

While US Navy SEALS were parachuting onto the deck of a US Warship, authorized by President Obama to use deadly force in the rescue of American ship Captain Richard Phillips, whom was successfully recovered after snipers shot three Somali pirates dead, the usual suspects in the right-wing punditry club were too busy calling President Obama a coward for his failure to act and relishing the impending doom of Capt Phillips, to even notice. Sorry guys, maybe next time.

In the meantime however, that same media fear factory has definitely been succeeding on other fronts in their war on reality, forcefully re-introducing the “they’re coming for our guns meme” into the already stoked flames of recession-induced anxiety. It’s already cost a couple of Pittsburgh police officers their lives, and it probably won’t end there. After all, local retailers say they can’t keep enough bullets in stock these days, because every time they get a shipment in, it gets instantly sold-out, purchased in bulk for those preparing for the impending APOCALYPSE ZOMGGGGGGGG

“Every inch of the nation is this way. I have people calling me every day from Wisconsin, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri. I had a guy call me from Denver, Col., this morning wanting .45-caliber auto ammo. There’s not a box of .45-caliber auto ammo in Denver, Col.,” explained Bob Post, manager of Huntington’s Sportsman’s Store in Oroville.

“Our handgun ammo, our pistol ammo, is flying off the shelf. We can’t keep it in stock,” said Dave Ebright, owner of the Sportsman’s Den in Chico.

“Anybody that gets ammo on their shelves, it doesn’t last more than a couple of days and it’s gone,” he continued.

When ammunition does arrive “people want to buy the whole damn case. I try to talk people out of it, but they aren’t going to do it,” said Phil Peeples, partner in The Tackle Box.

If, like me, you’re the kind of person that loves wasting the hours away by watching the degenerative brain candy that is cable news, then you’ve no doubt heard that reliable old political nugget “class warfare” bandied about quite a bit lately in regards to the tax policies of our new President. This is especially true if, like me, you sometimes tune into those cable news channels that focus ostensibly on “business” such as CNBC, or that bastion of fair-and-balanced reporting, FOX News, both of which have been busy mustering their troops to prepare to face this conflict head on. To hear them tell it, we are currently undergoing a criminally unjust redistribution of wealth, from who have to people who need it, by way of higher taxes on the rich, who already, by their estimation, pay more than their fare share of the tax burden. Not only that, but we are concurrently suffering through what CNBC analyst and legendary financial guru Jim Cramer dubbed the “greatest destruction of wealth I’ve seen by a President,” with stocks prices matching home prices at historic lows. And these are, more or less, both true: President Obama is indeed seeking to roll back the tax cuts given to the rich under President Bush, returning their tax rate to their former levels (though nowhere near their historic highs), and this, as part of the Presidents financial legislative agenda, has done little to instill confidence in the stock market, pushing the Dow lower and in the process wiping out much of the value people had accrued in investments over the last decade. Tough times, indeed. And it is thus that I, speaking for many other Americans, would like to express my deepest, most sincere NOT GIVING A SINGLE FUCK. I mean really. Get a life. If this was truly class warfare, rich people would be losing a hell of a lot more than their 401ks and a few grand off their end-of-the-year bottom lines. After all, the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer Americans in the 20 years of post-Reagan deregulated free-market madness has resulted in a disproportionate number of “have-nots” in relation to the relatively few “haves.” And you know what they say about people who don’t have shit: they ain’t got nothing to lose.

Thankfully, for all their other faults, poor people in this country have never taken to armed uprisings, or violent revolutions, the sorts of things one could consider “war.” Instead, they elected a President that seeks to repair not just the appearance, but the foundation of our economic institutions, a President who knows that the real disease afflicting the financial solvency (and, some might say, many other parts) of this great nation has nothing to do with credit default swaps, or adjustable rate mortgages or any of that other shit, but is instead rooted in a single, ancient, vice: greed. And not just the individual, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge-style greed, but an almost universal, intrinsic greed embedded into the fabric of the modern marketplace, and its prime directive, the accumulation of wealth. Of course, unspoken premise of “wealth” at least in the modern sense, is having something more than someone else. So when someone like Jim Cramer comes on TV and tries to rectify his moral and political beliefs (he voted for Obama, and has been a longtime liberal fund-rasier) with his sacred oath to the dogma of capitalism by saying that he wants “everyone to be rich,” the cognitive dissonance is almost painful. Because when everyone is rich, then everyone is poor too; there’s no winner, there’s no loser and MY GOD THAT’S STARTING TO SOUND LIKE SOCIALISM!!11 Someone dig up Ayn Rand!! After all, as the defacto leader of the Republican Party and proponent of the “class warfare” meme Rush Limbaugh made clear in his keynote address at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Committee meeting, Americans “are a competitive people. We strive, enough of us do, to be the best. We strive to win.” Of course, the downside of striving to win, is the real chance that you’ll lose. And that’s exactly what’s happened. America, under the stewardship of those great “competitive people” Rush Limbaugh canonizes, has lost. And lost big. We’ve lost money. We’ve lost wars. We’ve lost the respect of the rest of the world. And now it’s time for change of game plans, and a new coach to boot. If you don’t like it, I guess that’s tough. Like many of us heard over the last 8 years, “America: Love it or Leave It.” Only now the people who want to leave can actually afford to. Not that they will though, after all, then who would they have to compete with?

I don’t have any money, but sometimes I watch CNBC anyway just to see people like Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli get pissed. This morning Rick Santelli laid down the pwn on the Obama Administration’s Mortgage Bail-Out plan and I have to say he’s got a point: at what point do we need to stop sponsoring financial stupidity, both institutionally and individually?

From Drudge:

Senator Gregg Statement on His Withdrawal for Consideration of U.S. Commerce Secretary

Sen. Gregg stated, “I want to thank the President for nominating me to serve in his Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. This was a great honor, and I had felt that I could bring some views and ideas that would assist him in governing during this difficult time. I especially admire his willingness to reach across the aisle.

“However, it has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.

“Obviously the President requires a team that is fully supportive of all his initiatives.

“I greatly admire President Obama and know our country will benefit from his leadership, but at this time I must withdraw my name from consideration for this position.

“As we move forward, I expect there will be many issues and initiatives where I can and will work to assure the success of the President’s proposals. This will certainly be a goal of mine.

“Kathy and I also want to specifically thank Governor Lynch and Bonnie Newman for their friendship and assistance during this period. In addition we wish to thank all the people, especially in New Hampshire, who have been so kind and generous in their supportive comments.

“As a further matter of clarification, nothing about the vetting process played any role in this decision. I will continue to represent the people of New Hampshire in the United States Senate.”

I guess that’s what Barack Obama gets for trying to include Republicans in his administration, when they are obviously sold on the idea that their only hope for political survival is to dig in their heels and hold on tight for the next two years until they somehow manage to regain control of the House or Senate. However, the most beguiling part of this whole debacle is the fact that Gregg openly campaigned for the Commerce post in the first place:

A Democratic source close to the Obama White House said Thursday that Judd Gregg “campaigned for the job” — that the New Hampshire senator had asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to approach the president about the Commerce post.

Gregg “sat with [Obama], said he wanted the job, knew his policies and erratically dropped out without warning,” said the source, minutes after the Republican senator announced his withdrawal from consideration.