I don’t care if they call themselves “mavericks” or “moderates”, scratch a Republican and you’ll find a slimy shitweasel.

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, together, richer than the half of the population of the United States. Bezos was the fortunate recipient of an abrupt surge in the value of Amazon stock that has given him a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. Which makes this comment particularly appropriate:

One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.”

There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.

The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.

It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.

I don’t mind some inequities in wealth — I buy into capitalism just enough to think that a motivating reward system for human behavior is a good thing — but we’re well beyond what is fair or reasonable. I can live with some people making a million dollars a year, but only if we’re also making sure that no one has to live in rank poverty. But someone “earning” billions while huge numbers can barely keep food on the table, can’t afford rent, can’t go to a doctor when they need to, and their children have no opportunities for a good education…that is an obscenity.

James O’Keefe is the sleaziest conservative operator ever. His organization hired a woman to lie and pretend to have been in a sexual relationship with Roy Moore when she was 15 in a failed attempt to sting the Washington Post. They failed because the newspaper did what journalists are supposed to do: they checked her story out.

In the course of standard background research—with which O’Keefe and his organization are, apparently, unfamiliar—reporters discovered holes in Phillips’ story. The company she had named as her employer had no record of her, she had a cell phone number with an Alabama area code despite saying she had last lived there in 1992, and a GoFundMe page published in May under her name had asked friends for money so that she could move to New York “to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”

When confronted by Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen about the GoFundMe page and other inconsistencies in her story—an exchange that was recorded on video—Phillips stated that she had previously attempted to work for conservative website The Daily Caller and that she was not working for any conservative organizations with the intent of sabotaging the paper. Phillips, who then left the meeting, was spotted entering the Westchester offices of Project Veritas on Monday, where O’Keefe refused to say whether she was employed at the non-profit, which purports to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.”

It purports to investigate those things using “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct”. All delivered with maximum incompetence, which O’Keefe has demonstrated in every one of his little projects. Everyone associated with him has emerged covered in slime, but the Republicans keep supporting him. Even Donald Trump donated to “Veritas”, but then, he’s a bumbling slime monster himself.

By the way, I should mention that O’Keefe also dragged down a University of Minnesota Morris alumnus, Joe Basel, who I bumped into a few times, and who was involved with O’Keefe’s break-in to Mary Landrieu’s office.

Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.”

Our conservative alternative paper has long been a source of embarrassment here.

But the most despicable thing about this latest example is that it was an attempt to smear the women who have stepped forward to honestly accuse Roy Moore — it’s a blatant effort to silence and harm victims of sexual abuse. For shame.

There is no shame if you’re a Republican, though. For his repulsive bungling, O’Keefe gets paid $317,000 per year.

Joe Basel has gone on to be a conservative political consultant in Texas, and is running an organization called the American Phoenix Foundation, which includes an “Investigative Journalism program” and a “Journalism Training program”. There are never any prices to be paid for being a bumbling conservative criminal and professional douchebag.

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Look at O’Keefe stonewalling when asked a few questions about his attempted hoax.

Trump, supposedly honoring Indian military service, can’t help taking a racist snipe at Elizabeth Warren.

Trump, while remarking on the age and achievements of some of the veterans, known as code talkers, took the chance to mock the Massachusetts Democrat.

You were here long before any of us were here, Trump said at the White House. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.

You’d think this would be one kind of event where our president could show a little dignity and respect — but he doesn’t have a drop of either in him.

It’s more important than ever, they said. We need to subscribe to the staid, sober journalistic outlets to counter the flow of crap, they said. We’ve got to keep the flow of information going — an informed citizenry is the heart of a democracy.

So I’ve gone back and forth on whether I ought to subscribe to the New York Times. It certainly is professional journalism, but I’m still bitter about their weasely “he said, she said” coverage of creationism from ten years ago, and their dishonest backing of the Iraq War through their lying reporter, Judith Miller, and their utterly execrable opinion pages — Friedman? Brooks? Christ.

And then I think about how Donald Trump hates them, which is certainly a point in their favor. And that they do publish some excellent work — Carl Zimmer, for instance. And that yeah, good journalism costs money, and I ought to contribute, not to the corporate edifice that is the NY Times, but to the principle that we ought to support a healthy journalist class for the good of the country.

And then they go and publish yet another of those shitty pieces that seeks to normalize evil, and I say fuck the New York Times. I will not support a rag that is used to polish the status quo.

The piece in question is “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door”. They’ve moved from banal stories about “Undecided Voter Weighs in on Crap They Don’t Understand” to “Gosh, Trump Voters Are Just Economically Distressed and Not Racist At All” to now, “Nazis Eat at Applebee’s and Go Grocery Shopping, Like You.” It was a story so vapid that the author, Richard Fausset, felt compelled to write another article that basically consists of him shrugging and saying, “I don’t know what the point was”…and the NY Times published that, too.

Honestly, I already knew that Nazis are human beings — horrible, awful, nasty human beings — who eat food and poop and have two arms and no horns and speak words. It’s not as if there is some widespread delusion that fascists are actually demons with wings and horns that needed to be dispelled — that’s the kind of nonsense the Nazis spread about The Jews.

If you want to learn more about the subject of that high profile piece in the big name newspaper, Tony Hovater, do not bother reading the NY Times. There is no depth or insight to it at all. Instead, just listen to Hovater’s wretched podcast on a site called Radio Aryan. Or you could just stop there and note that he’s a ranter on a site called Radio Fucking Aryan, and go no further — you’ve already learned enough.

If you do listen in, though, be prepared to hear a couple of chuckling thugs go on and on about Christian values, those degenerate “trannies”, immigrants and how they hate ’em, Hitler — misunderstood hero, the Holohoax, and The Jew, The Jew, The Jew.

Yes, New York Times, I know there are Nazis next door. You got the emphasis wrong. You completely missed the point. There are a couple of ways you can handle that phrase.

1. There are Nazis next door…they have a nice little house in the suburbs and a wedding registry at Target and oh, what lovely shrubbery.

2. There are NAZIS next door…and they’re promoting a hateful ideology that wants to exterminate their neighbors, and they worship a murderous megalomaniac who tore up the planet with a world war about 80 years ago.

The New York Times chose Door #1. Fuck ’em. Not a penny from me.

There sure has been a lot of screeching about “witch hunts” and “sex panics” lately. All these recent revelations about handsy celebrities and politicians with a poor sense of boundaries aren’t the perpetrators fault, oh no, boys will be boys and we ought to be willing to overlook a few violations of the personal space of mere Playboy pinups — no, the problem is that people have gotten fed up and are willing to speak up and say “NO!”, which makes them all the equivalent of a Witchfinder General.

I disagree. The social mores have always been crystal clear on these behaviors, and we’ve always known that treating women as chattel is what bad guys do, but there has also always been a set of known exceptions: if you’re rich and powerful, or sufficiently brutish, or an ‘alpha male’, it’s been understood that you get to ignore the requirements, especially on certain celebratory occasions, like when you’ve just conquered a village, or achieved a touchdown, or it’s your birthday, or you haven’t had sex in 3 hours. The Witch Hunters aren’t doing anything unfair or unegalitarian, they’re just declaring your exceptions null and void. Now you have to treat everyone at all times with the same respect you expect to be given to your sister, or your bros.

You can smell the desperation oozing off the press. Lazy journalists are already pining for the good old days when you could split the world they were reporting on in two: there were the Movers & Shakers, the powerful people with special rules, and you could do your job by just reporting what they said; and then there was the complex world of everyone else, who had diverse and rather different ideas about what is right and just, who you could just ignore. What mattered was what white men in nice suits with influential positions might say, and your goal as a journalist was to curry favor with them so that they’d give you a nice quote you could use in a story. Right now, those journalists are busy trying to restore the status quo, so they can stop having to work hard to track down facts and evidence and listen to the Great Mob, who are all Witch Hunters.

Saying there’s a sex panic on the grounds that women don’t like having their asses grabbed is the 2017 way of calling women frigid. In the 1950s, the woman who slapped a man’s face for an unwanted grope was mocked for not being sexually open, for being uptight. Now she’s accused of participating in a “sex panic.” But it’s all the same thing across the generations: When women stand up to say “keep your hands off of me” there’s a good chance they’ll be called prudes. Saying there’s a sex panic is a fancy way of saying that women’s bodies don’t completely belong to them the way their cars do. Someone can damage a woman’s car in a very small way, and insurance companies take it seriously and pay for the repair. She owns that car, and has every right to protect it. But if someone grabs her butt without her permission, she needs to lighten up. What is she, a frigid bitch?

In the America of earlier generations, one thing that silenced women who wanted to report unwanted sexual acts was how important it was not to damage a man’s career, his reputation, his family. Was one unpleasant event really enough to cause so much trouble to a respected member of the community, to a breadwinner? The importance of men’s careers has also become a part of the new resistance. After the first Al Franken accusation, Joan Walsh wrote a piece in The Nation in which she urged readers to remember that Franken was “a champion of Planned Parenthood,” and also “a committed feminist,” which was helpful for those of us who didn’t know that committed feminists sometimes—allegedly—jam their tongues down unwilling women’s throats.

What I find odd about this behavior is the contrast with how desperately they’ve been trying to make excuses for the Odious Trump Voter, who must be featured in regular puff pieces that strain to pretend they’re really nice and just economically distressed, rather than poorly informed (by the media!) bigots who have erected the current flimsy and disastrous power structure, because they want to snuggle up to the Trumpians and get those juicy droppings of words for their editorials. But mere women complaining about grabby assholes? Where’s the conduit to power in that? We’re free to dismiss them as witch hunters.

Not all journalists, of course. Goes without saying. But those Beltway Journalists, jesus…just get rid of the whole lot of them. Take a look at Mark Halperin, chief poisoner of all media. Pay attention, too, to the fact that most of our liberal excuses don’t work. He was not a creature of Fox News, which we all know is the homegrown Pravda of American media; he was the Wormtongue of ABC News, working through his pernicious newsletter, The Note, to debase our understanding of politics.

The Note purported to reveal Washington’s secrets. In fact, its purpose was the exact opposite: to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand. It replaced normal words with jargon. It coined the phrase “Gang of 500,” the clubby network of lobbyists, aides, pols, and hangers-on who supposedly, like the Vatican’s cardinals, secretly ran DC. That wasn’t true — power is so diffuse. But Halperin claimed he knew so much more than we did, and we began to believe it.

Once you believe that, it’s not hard to be convinced that politics is only comprehensible, like nuclear science, to a select few. There were those chosen ones — the people who’d flattered Halperin to get a friendly mention in his newsletter, the ones he declared to be in the know — and the rest of us. Halperin wrote about Washington like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.

At the same time, The Note made it seem that tiny events — a cough at a press conference, a hush-hush convo between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell in a corridor — held apocalyptic importance. Cloaked in seriousness, with the imprimatur of Peter Jennings’ ABC News, in reality The Note was not news but simple gossip.

We have to boot Trump and his corrupt cronies from power, but nothing is going to change in the long term until we also eradicate the oily sycophants who have been working to concentrate information in the hands of a select few — the Rupert Murdochs and Jeff Zuckers and the other corporate leeches — and they’re busy little bees right now conniving to get the FCC to undermine Net Neutrality. You know why. Because they’re straining to keep the power of information out of the hands of the people they like to disparage as “witch hunters”. Because you know that if the power structure screws you over in the near future — as you know it will — it’s simpler and easier and more profitable to report on the satisfied sighs of the pigs in power than to relay the groans of the masses. You will not be heard. You will be demonized.

I completely missed this when it happened, but our local conservative trolls got kicked off the air of the campus radio station a few weeks ago. KUMM allows and encourages student groups to broadcast on our station, and the right-wingers took advantage of that, as is their right. That would have been fine if they’d gone on the air to talk about their political views, but instead, it was their childish version of talk-radio hate speech. They used their time slot to rail against gay and transgender people, and the station manager yanked their show, called “Deplorable Radio”, off the air.

The two hosts of the show, Brandon Albrecht and Tayler Lehmann, are also on the masthead of the alternative Trump-loving student paper, the Morris North Star. Here’s what pissed off the station manager:

“Everybody knows everybody here at Morris. Like, definitely, you see one tranny that’s trying to punch someone, you know it’s automatically that one guy, that you know, I’m talking about. I bet you know. I’m not going to dox anybody and name them on air. But you two know if I say the tranny who looks like he’s going to punch someone.”

Like he says, we know everyone here at Morris, some better than others. I scarcely know any of the North Star clique and probably know the members of MOQSIE slightly better, and that rant made no sense at all. I’m trying to picture who among our small transgender community would look like they’re wanting to punch anybody, and drawing a complete blank. They had events to celebrate coming out week a short while ago, I attended some, and the opposite is true: everyone in that group was actively trying to avoid the right-wing thugs. Those nasty people were actively scheduling their own counter-programming to protest the existence of sexual diversity on campus; MOQSIE put on an informational session on respecting gender differences, for instance, and the North Star scheduled a panel on the “oppression olympics” right afterwards (they concluded that the most oppressed group on campus was white men, of course).

Surprisingly, the entire encounter at the radio station was recorded on video.

The station manager overstepped their (by the way, the City Paper source did not use the correct pronoun for the station manager) bounds with the claim that “tranny” is prohibited by the FCC; it is not. It is still hate speech, and they were entirely within their bounds to appropriately shut down the use of campus facilities to broadcast hate. The FCC doesn’t prohibit saying “Sieg Heil” on the air, either, but if Nazis were doing a radio show here, I would hope someone would step in and say “NO.”

Also weird: one of the things that the thugs were babbling about is how few and weak leftists were on our campus.

As one host observed that the school’s left-wing “Antifa” presence is nicer than branches found elsewhere, host Brandon Albrecht said Morris leftists are merely more timid, because there were fewer of them.

But then you read the comments, and you get stuff like this:

I used to attend U of M Morris and it’s essentially a school full of communists and socialists. The students are so far beyond the left that they were actually threatening students like myself who voted for trump. That school is not a school to educate it’s a school to silence free speech and push their agenda

Which is it? Do we have an overwhelmingly liberal student body, or are we weak and timid?

I’m glad to see somebody standing up to the North Star. This is the same right wing group that called a cop on me a while back for allegedly destroying their newspapers (I didn’t, and they had no evidence) and had me hauled off to the station to make a statement, so I have no sympathy at all for them — being asked to stop spewing hatred on the radio is a reasonable request, one that they’re unable to fulfill.

Here we go again. Another murderous rampage: a gunman murdered his neighbors, then went driving through town, shooting at will. He attacked an elementary school, shot some children, and wandered around looking for more targets before he was killed himself. As usual, there’s something in this guy’s history that isn’t association with an Islamic terrorist group, or being black, or being crazy. He had a history of threatening, abusive behavior.

Tehama County Assistant Sheriff Phil Johnston said the shooter was facing charges of assaulting one of the feuding neighbors in January and that she had a restraining order against him.

Johnston did not comment on the shooter’s access to firearms.

Johnston declined to identify the shooter until his relatives were notified, but he confirmed the gunman was charged with assault in January and had a restraining order placed against him.

OK, this seems to be an obvious rule to me: if you can’t play nicely with your toys, they get taken away from you.

Someone beats their spouse, threatens to kill their neighbors, waves a gun around to intimidate someone, engages in stalking, gets a restraining order against them, the first thing the police ought to do is show up at their house with a list of their registered weapons (and all of their weapons will, of course, be registered) and tell the abuser that they have to surrender them until they learn to be nice. The privilege of owning a dangerous tool that can kill people is suspended when you demonstrate an inclination to use it for violence. Zip zoom bam, it’s automatic and swift and is just part of the process of keeping the peace.

Notice: if you’re one of those lawful gun owners we hear about, there’s no problem for you. You’ve got a handgun that you own under the illusion that it will help defend your home, you have a few rifles that you use for duck and deer hunting, there’s no concern that you’ll lose them, unless you’re the kind of assdumpling who likes to threaten people when you get drunk, or thinks smacking around your wife and kids is a right of your manhood. You get in fights? You can’t be trusted with a deadly weapon.

I expect responsible gun owners will gladly support more severe laws requiring confiscation of weapons from individuals with a history of irresponsible gun use and violence against their fellow citizens. Right? Right? The NRA is probably drafting legislation for this simple improvement in our laws right now.