SemiConscious Dot Org

No, despite what you are all no doubt assuming, the title of this post is not a reference to Tom Brady’s knee injury. If it turns out to be as serious as it looked, and the NFL’s best player is indeed out for several months, then this season is over before it even began. However, I’ll wait for the MRI before I commence panicking.

And no, it’s not a reference to Oldy McOld picking a dangerous lunatic to be his running mate, either. After all, there’s still plenty of time left for the American voter to come to his/her senses. If November 5th dawns with the McCain/Palin ticket running the Formerly Free World, then I’ll shit bricks.

Nope, the real reason my knees are knocking together today is the federal government’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As previously noted, these twin giants collectively control 50% of all the home mortgages in America, and are hemorrhaging money by the trainload. If they were to go under, the entire US economy would collapse like a house of cards in short order. As in, tomorrow.

As for the consequences of the government’s buyout, well, we’ll let the Snarky Penguin handle that one:

Over 9% of U.S. mortgages are either in default or in foreclosure. The U.S. government is taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The economy has shed over half a million jobs over the past nine months. Most state and local governments are bankrupt or the closest thing to it. The highway trust fund for repairs to the nation’s crumbling highways and bridges is out of money. The federal government isn’t bankrupt only because it can print money—without the power to print money, there would be no way to pay the bills. But this is driving up the prices of everything to the point where even raw materials are cheaper overseas, meaning that even though the dollar is plummeting like a rock, it is still cheaper to move manufacturing jobs overseas rather than keep them in America—the U.S. has lost 20% of its manufacturing jobs over the last five years.

Meanwhile, this show is debuting on Fox as I write this post. I’d say they’re distracting us with bread and circuses while Rome burns down around us, but the country’s been run by Republicans for eight years, so there’s no more money for bread.

Joe “Clean and Articulate” Biden?

Joe “Barack Obama is not ready to be President” Biden?

Joe “Voted for the Iraq War” Biden?

Joe “Backruptcy Bill” Biden?

I’m trying to console myself with the knowledge that, hey, at least he didn’t pick Hilary. But, frighteningly enough, I’m not sure that even she would’ve been a worse, more wretched choice. I mean, if you’ve decided that, for electoral reasons, you need a centrist war hawk Republican-lite Washington insider on your ticket, at least pick one whom people actually voted for.

More heated and foul-mouthed argument nyah.

Contrary to popular opinion, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are not (respectively) a hilarious comedian and the creator of delicious candies. What they are is the collective owner of 50% of all the mortgages in the United States of America. They’re also roughly 1.7 trillion dollars in debt combined, and teetering so close to complete failure that the federal government may have to step in, take them both over, and print money hand over fist to cover their debts.

And if that happens…yeah.

We now return you to “Dancing With the Stars.”

(UPDATE: 7/16) It’s gonna be so much worse than we realize even now. Of course, given everything else our race has screwed up, total economic meltdown is probably the least of our worries.

Yeah, I’m pissed too. The debate is raging over nyah, so there’s no point in rehashing it here. Read for yourself. Condensed version: yours truly is feeling a hell of a lot less forgiving towards Barack than are most of his friends. Yeah, I know the human race probably won’t survive a McCain Presidency, but does that mean I have to reward Obama for his cowardly, craven vote to repeal the Fourth Amendment?

Sadly, it probably does.

God damn it.

Republican electoral strategy, circa 2008:

Forty years in, the Southern Strategy is finally reaping its own rancid karma. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this vileness in the next few months.

Truthfully, though, if you look at it from the Republican perspective, shit like this makes a certain kind of twisted sense. After all, what the hell else could the Republican party possibly run on in 2008? Their RECORD??!?!?

Ah, the joys of life in post-D.A.R.E. America:

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Oceanside Unified Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi discusses the DUI program as a student looks on.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far.

At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, “Death is real. Don’t play with our emotions.”

Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.

“They got the shock they wanted,” she said.

(link via Badtux)

Man, I am so glad I’m not in high school anymore. Lord knows, they fed us a lot of ridiculous, authoritarian bullshit in school during the Reagan era, but nothing remotely approaching this.

All of you Hilary supporters out there who are clamoring that Florida’s primary votes MUST BE COUNTED!!1!! might want to have a gander at this story first:

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

(link via Badtux the Snarky Penguin)

And lest you think that I’m unfairly tarring an entire state on the basis of a single, isolated incident, perhaps you might take a look at this exclusive footage of the official, Florida State Board of Education-approved science curriculum.

Ok, so maybe I’m the only one speaking about it.

Except for (surprise, surprise!) a Republican congressman:

Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter.

“Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.

His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of “sexually explicit material” on military bases.

The new language would “close existing loopholes” in regulations to bring the military “into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law,” Broun said.

“Allowing sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad,” Broun said.

Broun said he wants to bring the Defense Department into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law “so that taxpayers will not be footing the costs of distributing pornography.”

Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations.

But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved — “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.

(link via TBogg)

I suppose it would be redundant of me to point out the unmitigated lunacy of a political party which believes that torturing prisoners doesn’t sully the troops’ honor and denigrate their moral standing, but looking at skin mags does. So I won’t point that out.

Instead let’s tackle the bigger issue here: why are Republicans so COMPLETELY, UTTERLY FULL OF SHIT? Why does every self-appointed Republican moral guardian eventually end up sending lewd emails to his underage staffers, writing about sex with falafels, heading to the Caribbean for a weekend of Viagra n’ jailbait, or striking a “wide stance” in a public men’s room? Given the proven track record of his peers and hysterical tone of Rep. Broun’s moral outrage, I fully expect him to eventually be found hogtied in a wetsuit with foreign objects shoved up his you-know-where.

Whoops, looks like another Republican beat him to it.

Huh huh. I said “beat.” Huh huh huh huh huh…

It has long been a favorite pastime of lousy traitors who want the terrorists to win liberals to point out the crashing ignorance of Americans concerning the entire rest of the world outside our borders. Well, here’s your chance to prove those nogoodniks wrong and point out that America still excels in the production of something besides war, death and senseless destruction – namely, mad geography skillz!

Yup, to shut those rotten Frenchmen up, all you have to do is take this test. It’s simple, really: you name as many countries as you can in five minutes. I could only get 85, but then I’m terrible typist, and the country names need to be spelled correctly or they don’t count. I’m betting that I’m probably the only person who took the test and remembered Nauru, Kiribati, and Tuvalu while simultaneously forgetting Spain, Italy, and, yup.

Offering you any hints or tips would be tantamount to cheating, but I’m a New England Patriots fan, so obviously I frickin’ loves me some cheatin.’ So here’s my advice: if you get stuck on remembering the spelling of Whogivesaflyingfuckistan or some other place we may or may not have bombed yet, consult this map.

Oh, and also, the clock starts counting down as soon as you click on the test page, so in the time you’ve spent reading these last few paragraphs, you’ve lost valuable seconds. Wicked sorry.

(test link via World O’ Crap)

Don’t these fuckers have anything better to do?

WASHINGTON—With the Super Bowl fast approaching, a senior Republican senator says he wants the NFL to explain why it destroyed evidence of the New England Patriots cheating scandal.

“I am very concerned about the underlying facts on the taping, the reasons for the judgment on the limited penalties and, most of all, on the inexplicable destruction of the tapes,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., in a Thursday letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

The story was first reported by the New York Times.

Specter, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the matter could put the league’s antitrust exemption at risk. In a phone interview with the Times on Thursday, he said the committee at some point will call on Goodell to address the antitrust exemption as well as the destruction of the tapes.

“Their antitrust exemption has been on my mind for a long time,” he said in a Capitol Hill news conference Friday.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: the United States of America is nine trillion dollars in debt, about to enter Year Five of a bloody, pointless clusterfuck of a war that to date has claimed 4,000 American and 80,000+ Iraqi lives and cost half a trillion dollars, our economy is collapsing like a house of cards, oil is pushing $100 per barrel... and this fucking cornpone buffoon wants to hold Senate hearings on football???!?!?

Let’s not forget that all this righteous moral indignance about a football team spying on its opponents (a crime for which it has already been punished, mind you) is coming from a guy who once called DubYa’s illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens a “festering sore on our body politic” – and then turned around and introduced a bill making said spying legal retroactively.

I like football as much as the next guy. Hell, I love it. But as much entertainment as I derive from it, it’s a fucking game. It’s not real life. Nothing is at stake in the Superbowl, other than bragging rights for one group of fans over another. And the fact that our elected representatives are wasting taxpayer money on this shit, with so many real problems causing real human suffering in America and the entire world, drives me to drink. (ok, drink more.)

Tell you what, Arlen: balance the budget, get our troops the hell out of that meat grinder, find a new economic engine to replace the housing boom that was the only thing propping up the American economy for the past six years, fix Social Security and health care… and then you can investigate pro football to your shriveled little heart’s content. Deal?

Until then, Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

(And lest anyone accuse me of being angry just because I’m a Patriots fan, I find the Senate hearings on steroids in baseball to be an equally ridiculous waste of time and taxpayer money.)