RIP Jonathan Winters

If anybody deserves a state funeral, it's this guy. His brand of insanity kept a lot of us sane over the years.

With All Due Regrets, Click Youse Meme-ber & Go Stifle Yourself

Thanks to Nan Socolow for sharing this (useless, she says) response to a query about her New York Times commenting profile:

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Gray Lady Falls Into Smelting Pot?

 

Salmonella Nation

Remember when President Obama assured us that no Americans would ever be placed on his Targeted Kill List? Well... not so fast. If he has his way, thousands of us will get sick, even die, from eating tainted eggs, meat and poultry. Michelle Obama's Let's Move program touting healthy diets will morph into Let's Move to get to the bathroom on time.

Even though studies show that at least two-thirds of the chicken sold in this country carry bacteria, President Obama's budget is calling for an unbelievably drastic reduction in USDA poultry inspectors. He apparently thinks that the Wall Street method of self-regulation, which has obviously worked out just fine for defrauded homeowners and looted pension plans, will work just as well for factory farms. He apparently thinks that thousands or millions of  new cases of salmonella a year are the price we must pay in order to have a thriving free market. He apparently has learned no lessons from the hundreds of cases of fungal meningitis caused by that self-regulating compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts. 

It's the usual blatant pro-corporate rationale behind most of this administration's deregulatory actions. Firing federal poultry inspectors who protect the public health would actually save only a paltry amount of taxpayer money. But firing poultry inspectors who protect the public health will greatly enhance the bank accounts of the factory farms. Their profits will bloat even faster than a salmonella-infested oven stuffer roaster. The fox-guarding-the-henhouse way of doing business will be taken to a whole new literal level.

Under current procedures, teams of USDA inspectors working at America's poultry plants are now able to examine about 35 chickens a minute as they come flying down the assembly lines. Under Obama's proposal, the reduction in staff would result in a lone token inspector having to examine 175 birds in the same time frame -- a physical impossibility. As a result, the rate of production could potentially increase by five-fold.

Tony Corbo, of the public policy group Food and Water Watch, notes that a pilot program replacing government Agriculture inspectors with self-policing industry employees has already been proven dangerous. Salmonella cases actually increased, and even carcasses bearing obvious fecal contamination were being missed. In an interview with the Real News Network, Corbo said the Obama Administration is well aware of these dire statistics, but is playing fast and loose with the public health anyway:  

I mean, when the administration proposed their regulation, they had a report doing an evaluation of these pilot plants. And it showed the last two years of data that they collected, that the pilot plants had actually higher salmonella rates than the conventionally inspected plants. And lo and behold, just this past month--USDA does a monthly report on the testing that the government does in these plants to test to see if the salmonella rates are either high or low, and two of the pilot plants showed up as failing the salmonella test.

So here's the ultimate irony. The administration keeps on going around and saying that this new model, this new inspection model is going to be able to reduce salmonella, and yet all of the evidence points the other way.
 

And just as an aside: the Office of Management and Budget, largely responsible for the relentless deregulation frenzy in the Obama Administration, will now be headed by Walmart executive Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Walmart sells a whole lot of chicken. Just sayin'. 

And here we thought Chained CPI represented the ultimate in  cruelty. Not only will we be forced to eat cat food, we'll be forced to eat tainted Walmart cat food.
 
 

Being Margaret Thatcher

Barack Obama opened his oversized vintage 80s handbag this morning and dumped the entire contents on a sleepy unsuspecting public. No cash -- just a pile of IOUs payable to the Wall Street elites, to be drawn from our Social Security trust fund to go straight to their trillion-dollar tax-free offshore bank accounts and CEO pay packages.

The only shocker is that there are still a few hold-outs who are still shocked by the Great Betrayal. Happily, most New York Times reader-commenters are up in arms, with one woman (Renee of Manhattan) even suggesting that Barack be dragged bodily from the White House. I hope she does not receive a visit from the Secret Soyvice! Here is my comment:

Mr. Obama will dine with a dozen Republicans tonight, feasting on gourmet goodies as they discuss imposing a diet of cat food on a nation of struggling retirees, veterans, widowed parents and orphans, and the disabled.

Despite what the president says, his is not a balanced approach. Economist Dean Baker has crunched the numbers, and the upshot of Chained CPI will be that poorer people will be contributing at three times the rate as those making over $450,000. And those pesky tax loopholes? They'll be closed temporarily, and then lobbyists bearing scissors will descend upon Congress to let the snipping open begin anew.

But the cuts to our safety net would be permanent, and Obama's proposals represent a sneaky backdoor way to eventual privatization.

More than 80% of Americans polled do not want Social Security, which has added not one dime to the deficit, touched. If anything, we should scrap the cap on FICA contributions to ensure the program's solvency into perpetuity. In this time of chronic unemployment and underemployment, with one in five Americans living in poverty, we should actually be lowering the retirement age and raising benefits.

That a Democratic president is doing the cruel bidding of Wall Street and the deficit hawks instead of doing the bidding of the people who re-elected him is proof positive that lesser evilism is still pretty darned rotten. I hope he's ready for a fight -- because he'll be getting a big one.
 

I usually don't sign petitions, (they're just hooks for endless fund-raising appeals) but I made an exception this week, and for the hell of it added my name to 2 million other signatures delivered yesterday to the White House by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a while contingent of demonstrators. As you can tell by the contents spewing out of his Thatcher carry-all today, Obama must have cackled gleefully if he even deigned to give it a glance. Of course, when people like Sanders and the other sundry inhabitants of the veal pen preface their protests with "I am a big supporter of the president, but....", who wouldn't burst out guffawing? Also humorous are the hordes who continue to insist that the president is being "forced" to cut the safety net by all those nasty Republicans. 

But if you like gallows humor as I do, what could be more laugh-out-loud hilarious than Obama sending his new Treasury Secretary to Europe to lecture them on the dangers of austerity?  As Yves Smith writes today, it must be getting awfully hard out there for an Obamabot.

Maundering Monday (Links, Chains & Threads)

The Iron Lady: rust to dust.  

Eleven dead Afghan children are just a thorny issue in the American side. But a couple of Americans killed during the endless aggressive American occupation of their country? A deplorable humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions. Dead Muslim babies are a sticky wicket, having the nerve to get themselves murdered in the middle of a valiant American effort to protect American lives during American airstrikes in which Americans shockingly also get killed anyway, when they're only there to help Afghan children learn to read American books. (NY Times.)

President Obama is running out of legacy-burnishing time, probably because the American corporate media are wasting their rags and apple polish on the rotten little crab The One. He's only got 10 days to close the deal on guns, 'gration, and gutting (the safety net.)

According to Obama's former bankster-budget director-turned bankster pal Peter Orszag, chained CPI won't even save much money as it condemns millions of Americans to needless suffering and early deaths. So, sez Pete, the fact that Obama is pushing for it anyway makes him one brave crusading asshole.

The president is having second thoughts (or pretending to) on his Terror Tuesday baseball card collection. The likely scenario, of course, is that he's just resorting to more liar's poker, gushing anonymously to NY Times reporters in yet another bout of legacy-burnishing propaganda, preparatory to his much-anticipated burble to the American people on Drones. Having killed thousands of people "over there", he could well be running out of victims. Maybe the killing game is boring him. Plus, killing people is not who he is as a country. Plus, the ends don't necessarily justify the means, especially when there's plenty of domestic means-testing on his plate already.

Apparently feeling no tinglings of cognitive dissonance, let alone irony, the president is traveling to Connecticut today to shed more glycerine tears for dead American children and to deplore the civilian use of American-manufactured terrorist weapons and ammo.

When the town of Mayflower turns into the town of Oilslick, the real government of Exxon-Mobil takes over -- the water, the land and even the skies are off-limits to reporters. Deja Deepwater Horizon vu all over again. It even looks like they're cleaning up their mess with cheap Oil Baron Koch Brothers Bounty paper towels:  

The Quicker Slicker Picker-Upper

 

Asses and Asteroids

Included in Barack's Budget is $100 million for NASA to go into space and lasso a 500-ton asteroid to bring back to earth. Maybe he can use his space junk to beat the old, the young, the sick and the poor to death quickly instead of imposing slow starvation upon them through his austerity manifesto. Or else, he can pay a few McWorkers $7.50 an hour to have them sledge-hammer it into a million tiny pieces, sell them in the online Obama Store, and use the proceeds for construction of his billion-dollar Presidential Cathedral. On second thought, he'll use unpaid interns, call them grass-roots activists, and hit them up for a $5 donation.

But it gets even weirder. For some reason, Obama also wants to put an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025. I think he might be suffering from a case of arrested development, thinking that  Antoine de St-Exupéry's fable of a young prince is all about himself -- similar to Paul Ryan thinking Ayn Rand was an actual economist. Maybe Obama can find an asteroid named B-612, that has volcanoes, a baobab tree and a sexy rose. And he can go himself, right now. Because although he may not really be a prince, his deficit-cutting ideas that stick it to ordinary people are definitely on the petty side.



Sharez la Sacrifice, S'il Vous Plait

Meanwhile, back on earth, while the Obamian imposition of chained CPI for Social Security recipients amounts to snatching several meals a month from the mouths of the old, the surviving, the sick and the disabled, our government is ironically force-feeding Gitmo prisoners who are currently conducting a hunger strike. The inmates, many of whom have been ordered released, are protesting the utter and cruel illegality of being kept behind bars. They have reached the point where they just want to die. Our leaders don't want to let them go, however,  for fear that they might fall in with a bad crowd, especially in places like Yemen where the bad crowds are growing every day due to their friends and families being bugsplatted by American drones. Of course, the Obama Administration is shoving feeding tubes into them out of sincere concern for their well-being. The Obama Administration needs a kick in its ass-teroid. 

 

In other news, the esteemed sycophants of the corporate journalistic class are keeping secret the name of a CIA operative up for promotion to a top spot in the agency because she was supposedly instrumental in the destruction of evidence showing that the United States tortured prisoners at Gitmo and elsewhere. The NY Times and the Washington Post are therefore awarded this week's Ass-teroid Prize for excellence in media malpractice.

Murder, Inc.

The overseas victims of President Obama's drone attacks no longer need feel so all alone. That's because Barack has just added 330 million Americans to his Kill List. 

Make no mistake. Coupled with the festering Sequester Sasquatch, his proposed budget will cause people to die. Not only is he forging ahead with his Chained CPI formula for cutting lifetime Social Security benefits, he wants to reduce disability payments, Medicare payments, veterans' benefits and unemployment assistance. He even wants to hasten the demise of the United States Postal Service, perhaps to cut down on the well-deserved hate mail that will be flooding his corporate board offices, mansions, and billion-dollar cathedral of a presidential library for the rest of his misbegotten life.

I guess the only things more infuriating than President Obama are those few diehard loyalists who think we should cheer for the man just because he'll make the Republicans look stupid as he starves, sickens and kills us. Or pundits like Ezra Klein who labor under the theory that Obama is still playing a cute game of 11-dimensional chess. Writes Klein:

The upside of this strategy is clear: Obama gets “caught trying” on a budget compromise. House Republicans have put forward a series of extremely conservative budget proposals that show no interest in a compromise. Senate Democrats have a more modest plan, but one that doesn’t include any notable concessions to Republicans. Obama will position himself in the middle. He will include, in public, high-profile concessions to Republicans — though he will emphasize that he’ll only accept those concessions if they come with significant new revenues. No one will be able to say he isn’t trying to reach a deal, and the cries from liberals will prove that he’s forcing his base to accept very tough medicine.
 

Readers' comments to the New York Times's piece on the Obama slash-o-rama were almost universally scathing. But this example of good, slavering, dutiful citizenship is what the paper's Obama-friendly sycophantic team of moderators chose to showcase on the homepage:

Maybe he's making this compromise because he thinks it's better for ordinary Americans on net, or maybe he's bluffing as part of a political strategy to box in the other side. Either way, I won't pretend to know better.

One consolatory bit of news today -- a federal court has just overruled his paternalistic, misogynistic and "bad faith" ban on over-the-counter sales of the morning-after contraceptive pill to teenage girls, including to his precious Sasha and Malia.

If Obama cared anything about struggling people, he'd call for an immediate ban on the sale of over-the-counter rat poison. Some people, facing a lifetime diet of Walmart cat food, eviction from rental properties owned by vulture capitalists, bankruptcy from medical bills unassuaged by ObamaCare, will no doubt choose to take the quicker way out than suffering his death by a thousand cuts.