Mitt Romney: Gormless Motherfucker

Serendipitous coming so soon after my Labor Day observations:

Sounds like he’s channeling Australian mining heiress Gina Rinehart, doesn’t it?  If all you poors would just step up to the plate and pony up your fair share of the taxes (read:  at a higher rate than Rmoney pays) out of your paltry $20,000 per year earnings, then the noble Job Creators could catch a much-needed break on their taxes.

I can’t wait to see polling numbers at the end of this week.  It’s beginning to look a lot like a landslide.

A Socialist, Anti-Family Political Movement That Encourages Women To Leave Their Husbands, Kill Their Children, Practice Witchcraft, Destroy Capitalism And Become Lesbians*

Yes, this image is a few years old, but it’s timely:

…thanks to barking-mad Indiana state legislator (Republican, of course) Bob Morris, who in a letter to other Indiana Republican legislators, urged that they not support a resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the Scouts.

“Many parents are abandoning the Girl Scouts because they promote homosexual lifestyles,” Morris’ letter reads. “In fact, the Girl Scouts education seminar girls are directed to study the example of role models. Of the 50 role models listed, only three have a briefly-mentioned religious background — all the rest are feminists, lesbians, or Communists.”

He also wrote that the fact that first lady Michelle Obama is honorary president should give lawmakers pause and that “abundant evidence proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts, which is quickly becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood.”

I’d like to thank Bob Morris and Cerberus at Sadly, No! for giving me an excuse to post this image, which has been hanging around in My Pictures for quite some time.

*Title courtesy of Pat Robertson, from 1992 Iowa fundraising letter opposing a state equal-rights amendment.

Romney Newtered In South Carolina

Even his name is vaguely Dickensian

So the results are in from the primary voting for America’s Most Racist Party™ in America’s Most Racist State™, and not surprisingly, the candidate making the most openly racist appeals won.

I got into quite the online discussion last night with someone insisting that we should fear Gingrich more than Romney.  I disagree; while Romney really isn’t liked by most everyone, he’s not loathed the way Gingrich is in most places.  I noted that I wouldn’t be surprised if turnout was up yesterday in South Carolina, given what was offered on the menu – appeals to states’ rights (Paul), appeals to stick-up-the-ass faux religiosity (Santorum), and not-even-veiled appeals to racial bigotry (Gingrich).  You’d expect such a smorgasbord to really draw them out of the woodwork in the most reactionary state in the country, and it turns out this is exactly what happened – turnout was around 602,000, compared with 445,000 in 2008.  But let’s look where those “extra” votes went – Romney improved his 2008 showing by about 100,000 votes, which still put him far back into second place.  Gingrich bested him by about 70,000.  Both scored more votes than winner John McCain did in 2008. 

So what does it all mean?  Well, I don’t think it’s all that complicated, really.  I think what it means is that in the most reactionary state in the country, a lot of voters are motivated not by who they think is most likely to win a head-to-head matchup with the president, but by who they think is most likely to call him “ni**er” to his face, and Newt won that contest walking away.  I’m sure the magic underwear didn’t help Romney any with the snake-handling crowd, either.

Should we be worried about this?  Not particularly, I think.  Turnouts in both Iowa and New Hampshire were about even with the apathetic turnout in 2008, probably because the concentration of crazy in those states simply isn’t nearly as high as in South Carolina.  Sure, Newt may race-bait his way to further victories in primaries in the states of the old Confederacy, but that shit doesn’t play elsewhere.  Add to it the man’s history of shooting himself in the foot at the worst possible moment, and this is definitely the guy we’d prefer to go up against in the general election.  Because while Romney isn’t really liked, he’s not overtly offensive to many in the mushy middle.  Gingrich, on the other hand, seems to think it’s his life mission to be as offensive as possible to as many as possible.  And can you imagine evangelicals turning out in droves to support this guy in the general election?  I mean, we know from experience that they will be instructed from the pulpit to “fall in line” once the nominee is chosen, no matter how unpalatable to the brethren that choice may be.  But I can imagine quite a few of those folks just deciding to quietly sit at home on election day rather than going to the effort to show up and pull the lever for a serial adulterer whose fidelity to any particular church has been no better than his fidelity to his multiple spouses. 

So, while it’s true that the crazy isn’t confined to the south, what’s needed to harness it varies a great deal around the country.  God-botherers in the Midwest aren’t going to be motivated by code phrases like “food stamp president” in the way southern wingnuts will be, and Newt doesn’t have the religious fundamentalist chops to appeal to those folks the way he appeals to the bufords in South Carolina.

Go Newt!  Whether you win the nomination or not, your continuing presence in the race can only help in delivering victory to Obama in November.

In Memorium: Kim Jong Il

The depiction of the pint-sized psychopath in Team America may have been the only redeeming thing about him.  “Fuck you, Hans Brix!”

Wherever Kim Jong Il is now, I’m sure he’s looking up at us.

The F Stands For “Effing”

Who knew that all it would take to get some participation up in here would be for me to go AWOL for a month?  Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see another of the Weird Sisters dropping a few pearls here.  I’m actually worried that I won’t be able to top the kink of a Christmas decoration depicting a guy whipping another guy, but on my word, I will try…  O yes, I will try.  Just not in this post.

No, this post concerns something near and dear to my heart, and to Beth’s as well:  our awesome US Postal Service, which like all else that serves the overall public good rather than just one small wealthy slice of the public, is under attack from various morons, ninnies, and lying assholes these days.

Under category the last, we find this bit of toxic effluvia issuing from the pen of one George F. Will (you know what the F stands for) and appearing in the pages of the used-to-be-a-newspaper, The Washington Post.  It’s essentially an ideological hit piece, and at turns, both a comically clueless and willfully dishonest paen to the concept that only activities which return a profit are a) worthwhile or b) efficient.

Let’s tackle “willfully dishonest” first.

Will starts by citing big scary numbers about USPS’ “red ink”, while carefully omitting the fact that it can all be attributed to one cause:  the departing Bush Congress in late 2006 gave one final flip of the bird to the American public and passed a mandate requiring the post office to fund employee benefits 75 years into the future from revenues over the next 10 years.  Yes, the USPS is currently funding benefits for workers it won’t even be hiring for another 25 or 30 years, and if not for this one purposely created problem, the post office would have shown a small profit for every year since 2006.

Will then spews out a bunch of factoids about the percentage USPS, UPS, and FedEx respectively spend on labor costs to try to demonstrate that USPS’ labor costs are out of control thanks to the evils of unionization.  Of course, he faithfully omits that he counts the pre-funding of benefits USPS is forced by Congress to pay now as part of the USPS’ percentage of current labor costs.  Using this tactic, he claims that 80% of USPS revenue goes to labor costs; the actual figure is 60% when Will’s dishonest accounting is thrown out.  This compares to 53% labor cost for UPS and 32% for FedEx – that last figure being hardly surprising, since the non-unionized FedEx has quite a few employees earning the princely sum of $8.50 per hour, which may explain why, even though the volume of mail I’ve sent/received via FedEx is much less than 10% of what I’ve sent/received via the USPS, FedEx managed to lose or misdeliver my packages with such regularity that I stopped using their service 10 years ago. 

But I digress.  The big issue here is that “percentage of revenues devoted to labor costs” is a dishonest measure of efficiency to begin with.  Will waves it around as though it’s the end-all, be-all, which is understandable given that the cause of his butthurt is the idea that the people who handle our mail are paid living wages because they’re unionized.  Will wants to pretend that if they weren’t, the post office’s financial problems would disappear and we would also get better service.  But “labor costs” considered in a vacuum are meaningless; you’d expect that a business with twice as many employees as another business would have higher labor costs, for example, and this is why Will uses the “percentage of revenue” dodge.  Again, though, that’s not a measure of “efficiency.”

For comparison, I did what Will would have done if he were other than a dishonest hack, and compared USPS’ revenues, size of workforce, and daily delivery volume with that of UPS and FedEx, then calculated how much each costs in terms of deliveries to separate, unique addresses.  It’s not an exact comparison, because for UPS and FedEx I can’t locate data for “delivery locations” but only for number of letters/packages delivered daily.  Here’s what I found: 

FedEx has annual revenues of $40 billion and a workforce of 290,000 to deliver 3.5 million letters/parcels per day.  If we assume that each of those 3.5 million pieces are going to a different address, FedEx’s per-location cost works out to $44.82.  Keep in mind that this is the conservative figure; if FedEx is dropping multiple packages at locations, this means that their cost per delivery location is actually higher.

UPS has annual revenues of $49.5 billion and a workforce of 340,000 (inside the US) and delivers 15 million parcels per day in the US.  For that maximum possible 15 million delivery locations, this works out to $12.50 per delivery location.

USPS has annual revenues of $67 billion and 574,000 employees and delivers to 142 million delivery locations per day, at a cost of $1.86 per delivery location.

If we look at it from a standpoint of labor cost per delivery location – which we should, because otherwise we’re comparing apples to oranges – FedEx’s labor cost per delivery location is an astounding $14.34 and UPS’ is $6.63, or more, compared to a USPS labor cost of $1.12 per delivery location, thus proving that private business is a lot more efficient at hoovering money out of people’s pockets for performing essentially the same functions as evil government non-profit enterprises.  Which, after all, is what Will REALLY means whenever he waxes on about the glorious “efficiency” of private business.

Now, to be fair, both UPS and FedEx operate on a different model than USPS – it does cost more to move things cross-country and deliver overnight, just as it costs more to move large and heavy parcels.  But the fact remains that neither of them are able to cover the ground USPS does for 6 – 13 times the labor cost.

Will also throws around claims of how great privatized mail systems are working in other countries.  I looked into that as well, and found that most of the countries that conservatives claim have privatized their mail systems simply haven’t.  What they’ve done is lift the government monopoly on first class mail, allowing private carriers to compete in providing first class mail service.  This is true of both the UK and Sweden.  Other countries conservatives claim have privatized have only partially done so, as in Germany, whose service is 69% private.  The only example I came up with for a fully-privatized postal system is the Netherlands, where you can send a first class letter from one side of the country all the way to the other side 100 miles away for only 50% more than what we pay for first-class postage from Miami, Florida to Nome, Alaska (first class postage rate for the Netherlands is $.62).

So if a privatized mail system in a country smaller than most US states and more densely populated than any other on earth costs almost 50% more than what we pay, how would a privatization of our mail service compare?  There aren’t any vast, sparsely populated areas in the Netherlands which are more expensive to serve like we have here.  A private system can only work in the US if it’s mandated to cover unprofitable routes as well; otherwise you end up with companies cherry-picking the areas that cost the least to serve and so yield the highest profits, and either neglecting the less profitable or unprofitable areas completely or charging exorbitantly for service in those areas.  This is why both UPS and FedEx send about 25% of their shipments via USPS for “last mile” delivery – because the post office is already going down that rural route in Wyoming, and it’s uneconomical for UPS or FedEx to go there themselves. 

Here we come to the comical in Will’s hit piece, where he suggests that Wal-Mart could take over the role of the local post office.  Because as we all know, if there’s anything more appealing than standing in line at the post office, it has to be going to Wal-Mart and standing in a line there.

All of the preceding ignores that the entire USPS deficit for the current year could be solved with a $.03 increase in first class rates or by a lower first class increase coupled with a bulk rate increase.  The seemingly insurmountable projected deficit of $14.5 billion forecast for 2012 would raise first class rates another $.09 – that’s if we did nothing else  – no repeal on the benefit pre-funding farce, no increases on bulk rate, no closing of distribution facilities or community post offices, no cut-back to 5 day delivery.  Taken together, if the post office addressed the deficits with only an increase in first class rates, we would be paying $.56 instead of the current $.44.  That’s a large increase percentage-wise, but hell…at $.56 for delivery in 5 days or less to any address in the US, that’s still a hell of a bargain – and it’s less than almost any other first-world country pays for first class mail currently.  Note that it’s still less that what the Dutch pay in their fully privatized system to serve their postage-stamp-sized country.  At $.56, our cost for first class mail service would still be less than every country I looked at other than Brazil (at $.39, the only country currently cheaper than the US for mail service), Poland ($.46), New Zealand ($.47), Israel ($.46) the Czech Republic ($.53) and Mexico ($.52).  All the other European countries, Canada, Japan, and Australia are already charging more than what we’d have to charge to keep our system just as it currently is.

So it is indeed discouraging to hear the discussion I heard on NPR day before yesterday, in which NO ONE bothered to point out any of the above facts, but instead both host and guests just solemnly intoned that “the USPS is broken,” “mail service is a dinosaur,” “they haven’t kept up with the times,” and etc.  None of that is true.  What is true is that with falling volume on first-class mail, there is no doubt that some tweaks need to be made.  But don’t let anyone fool you – none of them would require cutting back delivery to 3 days per week, or closing mail distribution centers in remote areas, resulting in delivery slowdowns of 2 days or more.  Those things aren’t necessary if the post office is allowed to do what any other business would do in the same situation – raise prices.

I fear this is all too late.  What will come next is the gutting of the postal service – as the mail is slowed down and deliveries per week are cut back, the morons who elected the morons who created the problem will conclude that the morons they elected are correct – government can’t do anything right, because look at the post office.  It costs more than it used to and we’re getting less in return.  Unfortunately, being morons, they will conclude that the answer is to turn the whole enterprise over to some private company, who will likely provide even worse service for double – or more – the price we pay now.  Imagine Comcast in charge of delivering your mail, and you get an idea of just how bad it could be.  And then there’s the issue of legally certified mail, ballots sent by mail, and other things of that type.  I’m sure Koch Brothers Delivery Services, Inc. will make sure those ballots are handled correctly.  Of course, they’ll also be paying employees a sub-living wage to maintain profit share, which will further ensure that we’re getting the best possible service.  And then, all will be right with the world and George Effing Will will finally be happy, as some worthy investor is profiting from a service where the revenues used to go to support the lazy layabouts who delivered our mail, and their families.

Comment, With Context

Roger Ailes

Could Newt Be The Next F.D.R. Let’s expose him to the polio virus and find out.

Sometimes a comment is so good, it deserves its own post. 

I’d like to hold this comment’s hands while staring dreamily into its eyes as we loiter over a bottle of good cabernet in a picturesque French bistro.  I’d like to bear this comment’s children.  And etc….

That’s from the good Roger Ailes (the one who blogs and frequently comments over at roy’s joint – not the one who runs Fox News), in comments at Charlie Pierce’s Esquire blog.  The topic was this tweet by courtier journalist Jon Meacham:

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is *wrong with you people out there?

This week’s search terms include…

monkey throwing poop

shadoobee poop

not furry sick bastard

choad

nice pennis

(several other porn search terms, both with and without clothes, often involving toes, that are too vulgar to repeat even on  this site)

(except for this one. I have to repeat this one) bill maher huge penis

rick perry looks like a used car salesman

thomas kinkade not worth it

… and my personal favorite … bacteria bridge club.

Jump on his head

Why would someone who tries to position himself as smart say really stupid things like this … and let someone record him doing it? Is he trying to achieve some sort of reverse snob appeal?

Americans can’t handle pop music? The radio has been hijacked by … something other than pop music?

Where does he think most of the world’s pop music comes from? And that’s not because Europeans are buying it (although they are). It’s because there’s a huge market for it here.

“The combined 2001 value of the recorded music industry in the US and Europe [is] (24 billion euros). … Fears of American dominance in music are not entirely unfounded: from 2001 through 2007, 31 artists have appeared simultaneously on at least 18 countries’ charts in at least one year. Twenty three of these artists – Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys, Beyoncé, Black Eyed Peas, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Destiny’s Child, Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, Evanescense, Faith Hill, Gnarls Barkley, Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Outkast, P!Nk, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rihanna, Usher, and Vanessa Carlton – are American.”

Now me and the wanker don’t know shit about radio music, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that at least a few of these qualify as “pop.” Here’s the full article, which concludes that basically people like music from their own country the best. Which may be why you’re not hearing quite as much EuroPop in gay bars stateside, Mr. Sullivan.

I don’t know why I let this get me so worked up.  It doesn’t matter who makes the music or who buys it. It’s simply a matter of personal taste.

Or maybe Kipper’s right and Andrew Sullivan has no soul >

Unfuckingbelievable

I got a phone call earlier this evening, from…wait for it…COMCAST.

The purpose of said phone call was so that the Comcast employee could helpfully inform me that, with a payment of only $23 and some odd, I could “avoid interruption of service.”

That would be the service that I informed not one, but TWO of their employees by phone on August 9th that I no longer wanted.  It would be the same service I cancelled, again, IN WRITING, on August 20th.  The conversation went something like this:

Comcast Dude:  “If you’ll pay $23 and some odd right now, you can avoid interruption of service.”

Me:  “Interrupt the fucking service all you like; I cancelled it over a month ago.”

Comcast Dude:  “There’s nothing on the account about that.”

Me:  “Well, THERE’S a bigfuckingsurprise.  I only told two of your employees on the phone and wrote a letter a week and a half later.”

Comcast Dude:  “Well, did they do such and such to disconnect?”

Me:  “I have no fucking idea, but you know, that’s really not my problem.  I sent in my final payment with the letter.  If Comcast is only just now getting around to “interrupting the service,” then they were providing a service that wasn’t being used and that they were told wasn’t being used…I’m not paying another penny.”

Comcast Dude:  “I’m going to give you a number to call for customer ser…”

Me:  “Forget it.  I’m not wasting another minute of my time to cancel a service I’ve already cancelled THREE FUCKING TIMES.  It’s not MY fault that Comcast hires incompetent employees who ignore what customers tell them, or that the company ignores cancellations in the hope that they can continue to charge people for services they don’t want.  I’m certainly not going to pay for incomptence or dishonesty on the part of Comcast or its employees.  Goodbye.”

Here ends my tale.

I would feel a little bit bad about being so rude to someone on the phone if not for the fact that…he works for Comcast, so I know that, had I asked him to make sure the service was cancelled, I would get more calls demanding payment.

Bonus surrealism points for that veiled threat…”interruption of service.”  Yeah, motherfucker, that shit’s got me shaking in my boots!  As if “interruption of service” isn’t the reason you dumbasses lost the fucking account in the first place.

Sheesh.

As I noted in my last Comcast-themed post…next stop, city franchise authority!  I’ve no doubt that’s where this will ultimately end; these dumbfucks don’t know when to stop, so next it will be a referral to a collection agency and it will end only when I go down to the city and raise holy hell, taking with me the notice of cancellation I gave them in writing along with the delivery confirmation slip that proves they got it.

Worst.  Company.  In.  America.

Extra bonus points:  cue “Comcast Mark” in comments in 5…4…3…2…

Imagine My Parents’ Pride

The following are the top search engine terms that found our site:

Search	Views
perry and corndog	4
rick perry corndog	3
rick perry eating corndog creation of adam	2
rick perry eating a dick	2
perry corndog adam	2
rick perry penis corn dog	2
choad	2

Since I see no reason to break this streak, I give you the following:

Anticipation….an-ti-ci-payay-shun…

I haven’t done any political consulting since way back before the dawn of the Internets, but even then, I would have never allowed any of my candidates to eat a corndog in public.

It’s just too….obvious.