TV News LIES

After a year of traveling, I had planned a last, short trip. I was going to take the train from Montreal to New Orleans. The travels I had been undertaking earlier this year had brought me to places that were meant to form the background of my second novel.

This trip, however, was for my dad. He, a trumpet player, loved New Orleans and had died a year ago. It felt like the first sensible trip I undertook this year. I had been searching for ways to forget about the last hours at his deathbed. He had been ill for 15 years and his body just would not give up. It was a violent sight. I had decided the trip to New Orleans would put an end to those memories.

It's an interesting phenomenon:  You have a tiny shard of the U.S. population holding itself, and the world, hostage via the Shutdown-Blowdown-Blowup fever dreams of a handful of boneheads who dress up like Constitutional preservationists and protectionists -- while those same boneheads betray the very document they themselves claim to be supporting and providing safe harbor, all while using that same document as a handy club on all who dare disagree with them.

It's interesting, all right -- and in the same twisted, horrific, hold-your-breath-way that it's interesting to consider what happens, say, when a freight train filled with 13 million gallons of molasses and Super Glue piles into an oncoming train loaded down with 42 tons of high grit sandpaper and radioactive goose feathers .

Here’s the way it shakes out. Paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, Slovene philosopher and cultural critic:

Of these three features:
personal honesty,
intelligence,
and sincere support of Republican policies,

it is only possible to combine two, never all three of these attributes.

If one is honest and supportive … one is not very bright.
If one is bright and supportive … one is not honest.
And if one is honest and bright … one can not be supportive.

There’s no such thing as a smart, honest, Republican. I challenge anyone to find this elusive creature. The odds are you’ll stumble across the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman playing cribbage in The Vatican before you’ll be able to snap a couple shots of a smart, honest, Republican.

New unemployment claims jumped by 66,000 last week to 374,000 after months settling down toward 300,000. This doesn't begin to show the real effects of the government shutdown as contractors are only now beginning to kick people to the curb. The effect this will have on the rest of economy will begin to show soon as the lack of spending by those affected by the shutdown starts to mushroom into a reduction in US GDP. This is one of those self reinforcing feedback loops that are commonly referred to as a 'death spiral'.

You see, the problem isn't confined to the simple math of less spending, but is actually multiplied by the fact that the natural mitigators of an economic downturn that we commonly refer to as 'government safety nets' are also being removed. State run programs are running out of 'pass through' money, and the charities will be affected soon. Right wingers are always saying churches could care for the poor better and somehow do it at no cost, but the christian charities get 2/3 of their money from the Feds. With Uncle Sam out the picture, their private donations will dry up too.

October:  This is the traditional month for frost on the pumpkin,  a jump-started sweet tooth, and a handful of artificial horrors.

Except every day is a day of all-too-real horror with Republicans.  Forget Elm Street -- every day is Nightmare on Capitol Hill these days, and each day comes with at least one twisted plot twist and adrenalin rush.  It's not unlike the ultimately depressing, empty-calorie gore-banquet of a slasher flick.

You know the feeling:  The highly-charged, hyper-energized sensation stemming from emptying half of your Trick-or-Treat stash in one sitting.  As usual, that sugar-rushing rocket ride can be exhilarating, but the plummet back to Earth is always queasy and dizzy-making.

Obama is talking to Wall Street about the Government Default as in (the end of the F'n world) being a very real possibility. We'll see what that does to the markets starting in Asia in just a couple of hours. Is he really talking about a Pale Horse who's rider said unto him, "Come and see"....

Maybe we're just talking about the Federal Reserve going all QE666 and buying up all the outstanding dollar denominated debt on the planet. They could actually do that. It would put an awful lot of cash into circulation.... I'm not sure what that would really do.... Since all that cash would be in only a relatively few hands, maybe nothing would happen.