SemiConscious Dot Org

Occasionally, I feel guilty about the fact that, despite being a Bonafide Honest-To-Jeebus Liberrian, I hardly ever post anything remotely library-related. You have no idea how much this sad fact torments me! Oh, the nights’ sleep lost, the hair pulled out. For god’s sake, I’m starting to go bald! Therefore, I will do penance by pointing out that tomorrow is the first day of Banned Books Week, in which the American Library Association draws attention to all the literature that stupid people have tried to censor over the years.

Of course, what would Banned Books Week be without obligatory appearances by those very same stupid people? This nice lady, for instance, decided to take this opportunity to compose a lengthy screed lamenting the fact that we don’t ban more books. Specifically, she seems pissed off that more libraries don’t ban books urging tolerance for homosexuals. Or maybe she wants libraries to stock more books demonizing homosexuals. Or maybe she’s just stupid and confused. I’m voting the latter. (link via World O’ Crap. )

And speaking of The Gays: if, as assorted religious nuts have opined, Hurricane Katrina was God’s Divine Vengeance on Queers, does that mean that Hurricane Rita will be God’s Divine Vengeance on Rednecks?

Just a thought.

Ahhh, Seattle. Since moving here from the East Coast, we have come to appreciate and even love the eccentricities of our adopted hometown. It takes all kinds to fill a city this large and diverse, and we do indeed have all kinds here.

For example, there’s the guy who tapes advertising slogans to homeless people:

“So much traffic goes by these sign holders, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they could advertise themselves and me at the same time?’ ” he said.

A 22-year-old economics major who tore through the University of Washington in three years, Rogovy packed his knapsack with cash, a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and three professionally printed posters advertising his venture, PokerFaceBook.com. Then he hit the streets.

The idea was simple: Pay panhandlers a few dollars to let him attach a glossy, green PokerFaceBook ad to their own signs, and drivers scanning the beggars’ rumpled, hand-lettered pleas would inevitably notice his.

Thus was born “Bumvertising,” a name Rogovy has trademarked, and a concept that has suddenly won him national, even international, attention.

And people say the American entrepeneurial spirit is dead!

Of course, we are quite confident that, given the large number of tofu-nibbling bleeding-heart bed-wetters in this city, there will be a large, mewling outcry. The librarian who blogs here, for instance, and spends every day working with homeless families, will probably be moved to a foul-mouthed tirade when he reads this story.

But in truth, young Rogovy is a shining example of the new Compassionate Conservatism that has swept this country since the Supreme Court thoughtfully placed Dear Leader in power five years ago. Expecting taxpayers and government programs to alleviate poverty and homelessness is soooo Old Europe. No, the way to lift the homeless off the streets is through the grandmotherly kindness of the Free Market. After all, if one advertisement nets our enterprising bum five dollars, then twenty advertisements would rake in 100 dollars! Heck, he could use the stickers to cover up holes in his clothing, thus relieving him (and us) of the financial burden of buying him some new ones! Glory!

At this juncture, our only obligation to this Raggedy Rockefeller is to lower his taxes, so that the big nasty gummint won’t take any of his hard-panhandled earnings to feed or clothe any other bums, thus denying them the self-empowering experience of panhandling while covered in advertisements!

If the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has taught us anything, it’s that a humanitarian catastrophe is the best time to indulge in unfettered, predatory capitalism. It is more than our right to do so, it is in fact our religious obligation as conservative Christians. Because if Jesus said anything, it was “Every Man For Himself.”

Or something like that.

Enough with the gloom and doom, already! We are fed up, from the tips of our toes to the top of our pointy Pope hat, with all the bellyaching about wars and hurricanes and asteroids that might hit the Earth in 2029. You are seriously harshing our mellow, people! Do we need to quote Scripture to you?

This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who… - Monty Python’s Holy Grail

What’s more, your incessant whining could not be more out of place on this, the most holy of all Church of Nixon holy days. That’s right, it’s

International Talk Like a Pirate Day! ARRRRRR!!!!

So there’ll be no more mewling today, me laddies, or we’ll keelhaul every last one of ye scurvy swabs! We’re not even sure what keelhauling is, but rest assured, we’ll be doin’ it anyway! ARRRRRRR!!!!

Let the record show that Snark officially passed away on August 29th, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

For most of the past year, the main response of this blog’s contributors to the latest example of Bush administration stupidity, ineptitude, or corruption has been to shower it with mock sympathy in an attempt to be funny. Since Katrina’s aftermath and the horrific death toll resulting directly from administration bungling, however, I no longer have the energy to poke fun at these scumbuckets. How can you mock an administration that is already a mockery of all human hope? It’s redundant. They are officially snark-proof. My attitude mirrors that of longtime Bush nemesis Molly Ivins:

Many a time in the past six years I have bit my tongue so I wouldn’t annoy people with the always obnoxious observation, “I told you so.” But, dammit it all to hell, I did tell you, and I’ve been telling you since 1994, and I am so sick of this man and everything he represents—all the sleazy, smug, self-righteous graft and corruption and “Christian” moralizing and cynicism and tax cuts for all his smug, rich buddies.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

These people are stupid and greedy and evil and the truth is not in them. They are destroying this country and all it stands for, and they are doing it for no other reason than to make a buck. They need to go.

The case for Bush’s impeachment is strong and getting stronger by the day, but I’m not foolish enough to think that impeachment proceedings will ever happen with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court as well. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to return control of Congress to the Democrats in next year’s midyear elections.

Granted, the current leadership of the Dems seems to be mostly composed of lame, useless twits whose main response to each new administration affront for the past five years has been to say “thank you sir, may I have another,” and wave their flags while they spread their cheeks a little wider. However, I can only assume that newer, younger freshmen Dems elected in ‘06 will have a much more appropriately antagonistic attitude toward this doomed and stupid junta. If nothing else, partisan gridlock will grind the “President’s” agenda to a screeching halt.

It’s pretty sad when the best we can hope for is for our government to be able to get nothing done. However, at this point, even nothing is better than the something Bush and his cronies want to do, which amounts to nothing less than deliberately dismantling and pissing on everything that made America great in the first place.

Such is the grim reality of life in the Post-Snark Era.

UPDATE 1: BadTux points the way to the best essay I’ve ever read on the guiding philosophy of Republicans and the people who vote for them. It’s vicious, profane, insulting, and 100% guaranteed to offend and alienate those mythical “swing voters” and “centrist Republicans” we’ve heard so much about but never seen. And you know what? I don’t care. I’m sick of pretending to understand these assholes and the sick, twisted impulses that motivate them. If you can even attempt to defend George Bush or his party after this disaster, you are an asshole, and you are not an American. Period. I don’t want to know you or have anything to do with you.

UPDATE 2: The post-Katrina reconstruction effort has been put in the capable hands of….. Karl Rove. Yes, that’s right. Apparently, running dirty smear campaigns qualifies you to coordinate a multi-billion dollar rebuilding effort. And guess who’s getting no-bid reconstruction contracts? You bet, our old friends Halliburton and Bechtel, who’ve done such a bangup job in Iraq. And last week, Bush signed an executive order suspending a law that required federal contractors involved in the rebuilding to pay their workers the prevailing wage for the area.

And finally, Senate Republicans killed an effort yesterday to establish an independent bipartisan commission to investigate failures in Katrina relief efforts at all levels of government. But not to worry, DubYa will lead the investigation personally. Because, you know, that’s the quickest way to get to the truth: investigate yourself.

These people truly have no souls.

Sometimes, in spite of all their best efforts, the news media accidentally tells the truth.

And for those of you who aren’t visual learners, allow the words of my new favorite columnist to expand upon that picture:

Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we’ll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol’ days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.

But as I’ve said many times, President Nero is not the disease, merely a symptom. If he’s guilty of being crooked and stupid and utterly incompetent and The Worst. President. Ever (and he is most assuredly that), equally guilty are all the paid enablers in the media who cover for and whitewash his uncountable lies and fuckups, and the voters who returned him to office last year, despite the indisputable evidence of his massive unsuitability for the job. And now that DubYa’s stupidity and corruption has caused the needless loss of lives of American civilians, Michael Moore has a few pointed questions for those Bush voters. They probably won’t listen, of course, but they’ve been tone deaf for five years now, so why would this situation be any different?

(UPDATE: If these links aren’t enough to make you fighting mad, check out The Goat’s comprehensive roundup. Guaranteed to raise your blood pressure.)

Cry a tear of compassion for the poor, maligned, misunderstood, Apostle of Free Markets that is the humble price gouger. These brave, selfless martyrs endure the slings and arrows of Nattering Nabobs, on both the Left and Right, who accuse them of exploiting the humanitarian tragedy of Katrina to raise prices astronomically.

Balderdash! As Libertarian reporter John Stossel helpfully explains, the charging of exponentially higher prices to victims of a humanitarian tragedy is not, as so many fools assume, the action of a predatory scumsucker, but in fact an extraordinarily compassionate act of grandmotherly kindness:

Politicians and the media are furious about price increases in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They want gas stations and water sellers punished.

If you want to score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-”gouging” rules is a very good thing.

But if you’re one of the people the law “protects” from “price gouging,” you won’t fare as well.

Consider this scenario: You are thirsty — worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that’s open, and the storeowner thinks it’s immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won’t charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can’t buy water from him. It’s sold out.

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an “outrageous” price — say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn’t demanded $20, he’d have been out of water. It was the price gouger’s “exploitation” that saved your child.

It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.

Do you understand now? The price gouger is charging many times the normal market value for a product you need to stay alive and have no other source for—because he cares about you! He loves you, in fact, and he has kindly raised his prices so that those nasty water-hoarders will not buy up all the water and selfishly keep their own kids alive with it. And besides, if you didn’t want to pay through the nose for necessities of life in a disaster-ravaged city, you shouldn’t have lived in a place filled with poor black people who don’t vote Republican to begin with!

I think you all owe the price gougers an apology. Maybe if you say you’re sorry very, very nicely, they’ll forgive you and allow you to empty your bank account to keep from starving.

Behold the power of the Free Market! Glory!

Stand in awe as the Bespectacled One lays down the smack:

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Of course, not even this colossal failure will cause DubYa’s paid enablers to turn on him. Quite the contrary, they have already switched into “Protect Dear Leader At All Costs” mode, playing Blame The Victim with all the ferocity of a pack of baboons throwing feces.

What’s it like to not have a soul? Guess I’ll have to track down a DubYa Defender and ask him/her.

...and on a completely different note, my Summer of Peace and Quiet in the Liberry is coming to an end tomorrow, as the rugrats will be back in school. Pray for me.

(Update: 9/7) Well well well, surprise surprise, it turns out that the stories of gang rapes and murders in New Orleans, so breathlessly repeated as gospel truth by the Blame The Victim crowd, are turning out to be unsubstantiated and untrue. There really is no depth to which these scumsuckers will not sink in order to deflect blame away from Dear Leader. God damn their shit-filled souls.

Yeah, neither do I.

Every once in awhile, however, the newspaper most singlehandedly responsible for allowing DubYa to sell the phony rationale for his bullshit war (do a Google search for “Judith Miller” if you doubt me on that point) remembers that, once upon a time, it used to be a respected journalistic institution that featured a strong editorial voice, rather than parroting unedited administration talking points.

Apparently, this is one of those rare times, for DubYa’s pathetically inadequate response to the absolute carnage and horror unfolding in New Orleans was enough to get even the Times’ dander up:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

..........

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America “will be a stronger place” for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won’t acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

Perhaps DubYa’s decidedly underwhelming response to this tragedy may have been some sort of repressed guilt; after all, his administration’s slashing of federal aid to maintain sinking levees undoubtedly contributed to their failure. (Where did that money go? Take a wild guess. ) In a very real way, he is personally responsible for, if not the disaster itself, certainly its magnitude in terms of the loss of human life.

Of course, he’s already responsible for tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives lost, and he’s never expressed a shred of guilt or remorse for any of those, so why would the monster change his tune now?

(Numerous links courtesy of The Goat. )