Shitbird of the Weekend

Representative Tom Price (R – Georgia)

Who says C-SPAN is boring?

Obviously, You’re Not a Golfer

I have to say, it was strangely disgusting yesterday to listen to all the beltway teevee people sit and wonder aloud how a person could manage to shoot 40 people with just a handgun. It’s one of those little things that underscores how different the world is that most of these people come from.

And today we’ve learned that one of the guns the shooter was wielding not just any handgun, but the FN Five-Seven, a tactical assault pistol that holds TWENTY ROUNDS per magazine (and they come new from the factory with 3 magazines). I purposely posted a picture that shows the cartridge this gun uses. It’s not a traditional pistol round. It’s a tiny little bullet with a fuckload of powder behind it. That makes it capable of, among other things, piercing body armor. That, along with its 20-round capacity is one of the reasons it was targeted for federal ban in 2005. Obviously, that never happened.

My opinion on gun control is that the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s really not a whole lot we can or should do. But good god — twenty fucking rounds? At the very least, I’m not going to pretend that this is a sporting gun or a self-defense weapon. It’s something that was designed for the sole purpose of slaughtering people by the dozen.

Deep Thought

Cheering for the Yankees is like going to the dog track and cheering for Earl Ray Tomblin…or something like that.

Dear Chris Matthews, Please Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

If there’s one thing teevee pundits love (other than false equivalencies), it’s trying to create a political story or narrative where none exists. There’s seemingly no limit to the amount of energy they’ll invest attempting to make an election appear to be “about” something — even if they’re obviously wrong. Best example ever: the narrative they’re trying to spin about today’s elections in New York, Virginia and New Jersey. These elections are, and repeat after me, a REFERENDUM ON OBAMA!!! You just have to view this as a referendum on Obama!!!

So imagine my surprise, nay, utter bewilderment when Chris Matthews pulled up some of the exit polling from the Virginia and New Jersey races: percentage of voters who said President Obama was NOT a factor in how they voted today: 55% and 60% respectively. Again: Obama didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with how the vast majority of these people voted. And there has been a lot more polling that has said the exact same thing leading leading up to the elections. As it so often is, the narrative of the Beltway navel gazers was and is complete horseshit.

Really though. THE bewildering part is what Chris Matthews does with this information — he just ignores it. “I don’t believe it,” he says. “Clearly, this must be a referendum on Obama,” no matter what those pesky voters say. The possibility that voters might vote for the Republican simply because he’s a better candidate will never be exciting enough to these ass hats.

For the love of Christ. When West Virginians voted OVERWHELMINGLY to reelect Governor Manchin, you didn’t see us crazy lib’ruls trying to spin that as evidence of some sort backlash against George W. Bush. Because it WASN’T TRUE.

Watching The Master At Work

The dust-up over the proposal to charge overweight state employees higher PEIA premiums (which has inexplicably been called “the fat tax” — way to confuse people) sure has been fun to watch. If for no other reason, to witness yet another example of Joe Manchin being about as politically tone deaf as a statewide office holder can be. It’s not inconceivable that there would have been some momentum for this — after all, the primary philosophy of governance among our people is the fear that some UNDESERVING!!! person is getting something I’m not and that they don’t deserve. But it shouldn’t take a genius political mind to figure out that this would go over like a lead balloon in a place where the state bird is Kentucky Fried Chicken.

For what it’s worth, Joe is saying that reporting on this has been wrong. Forgive me if I don’t know who to believe.

Nothing To See Here, Including Shame

I always get a bump in traffic whenever stories like this break. But believe it or not, I’m not the kind of person who reflexively protests every single thing that happens. I don’t think there’s anything to see here. Yeah, I’m sure the conects helped. But so long as he’s qualified (which as best anyone can tell, he absolutely is) then I don’t care. And hell. Even if he wasn’t qualified, we’re not talking Jerry Lang money. It just isn’t enough to get worked up over. Unless you’re the kind of person who gets worked up over every single thing.

But I will say this. In a lot of other places, people don’t want to deal with the hassle that comes with taking a job where it even looks like nepotism was a factor. There’s a stigma attached to it. I think that’s even true among a lot of working class West Virginians, where a lot, maybe even too much value is placed on being seen as “rowing your own boat.” But among West Virginia’s ruling class, nobody cares about that stuff. It’s the thing to do.

Shitbird of the Decade

Joe Lieberman.

Shitbird Watching

I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Steve Goodwin resigned from the WVU Board of Governors.  But there’s something you might have missed.

With the obvious caveats about how the Gazette and Daily Mail’s comments are hardly a representative cross section of West Virginians, I can’t resist reading them, as they apparently serve as one of the last resorts of the handful of remaining Garrison loyalists.

Ah, remember those guys? It’s been a while since that breed of shitbird has flown by Fifth Column. But how could we ever forget their collective song, which pretty much always amounted to some variation of “Fuck you, peasant.”

How things have changed.

So it’s interesting, to say the least, to see how the last of loyalists are trying to spin Goodwin’s resignation to their boy’s advantage.  Jack O Lantern opines:

“Most insiders agree that Goodwin was the biggest impediment to all the sweeping changes that the Garrison administration was bringing to campus. He completely mishandled the degree question and allowed the nuts to take over where the bog should have been. As a result, he allowed an atmosphere where an aggressive change-agent president was no longer interested and the seat is and will be filled with caretakers for the forseeable future.”

Are they pouring the scotch out of lead bottles up at the Berry Hills Country Club, or what? I have heard that Garrison and Goodwin had a falling out and no longer speak. (Not surprising, since I imagine that having to resign your dream job in disgrace is the kind of thing that will strain relationships.) But this “Garrison-as-Obama” stuff is something else. Mean old Mr. Goodwin wouldn’t let Mike bring us the Change We Need^TM.

Next we have Ricardo, who is in all likelihood the exact same person:

“Jack is absolutely right – Goodwin was an impediment to Garrison – who actually wanted little to do with him. Goodwin didn’t “get” Garrison the job, sure appeared to be supportive, but so were 15 other people – many of whom never met Garrison prior to the nomination/search process – but decided he was right for the job. As for him being aggressive – just look at the list: record staff/faculty raises, day care after 30 years, biggest private donation of 25 mil., took on rogue football coach and won (when goodwin didn’t want to), etc. You can try and revise history all you want, but the facts are the facts.”

The only thing Garrison was truly “aggressive” about was doing a favor for his old boss, Heather Bresch. And of course, they’re still taking credit for the goddamn daycare center and the raises — they’ll probably be talking about that 20 years from now. Just like our out-of-state relatives, who will still be making MBA jokes during the Christmas of 2029.

But what really set off the bullshit detector was the “Goodwin didn’t ‘get’ Garrison the job” part. It’s a dead giveaway. You see a lot of nonsense CN comments, but it’s rare to see pure, unabashed political spin. But remember, we are talking about a guy who is said to have hired a PR firm to assist him with his candidacy before Hardesty even announced his resignation. Again:

“…[Goodwin] sure appeared to be supportive, but so were 15 other people – many of whom never met Garrison prior to the nomination/search process – but decided he was right for the job.”

That, reader, is some wishful revisionist bullshit history. Appeared to be supportive? Goodwin was the motherfucking cornerstone. He ran the search process. For fuck’s sake, Garrison appointed Goodwin to the BOG himself. And what of those “15 other people“? Well, at least six of them were Garrison’s close friends and/or recent business associates. Two more were fellow Jackson county cronies of Steve Goodwin. And there were people like Ted Mattern, who as best anyone can tell was and still is on the BOG because he’s married to Gayle Manchin’s college roommate. And we all remember who the Governor was behind.

_________

Fun fact: Garrison’s firm bio no longer says a thing about graduating from law school “with honors.” Where did those honors go? But it does say that he has “extensive media and crisis management experience for several clients.” That’s…that’s just great.

Why Traditional Print Journalism is Failing

Time Magazine has what might be described as a somewhat slanted little piece on Joe Lieberman’s upcoming “czar hearings.” In the article, Lieberman more-or-less tows the the Glen Beck line that the Obama is using more czars than past presidents. But the article eventually quotes White House counsel Greg Craig, who says no, the Bush Administration had more czars.

Someone here is right and someone is wrong. So which is it?

Well reader, Time Magazine won’t tell you. And when pressed on this little problem in the comments, the article’s author, Jay Newton-Small replied:

“I presented both sides of the story. I’ll leave it to columnists and readers to draw their own conclusions on who had the best case.”

What the fuck? This isn’t a matter of opinion. Even if both sides are waffling on how they define “czar,” there’s still an objective truth here that we deserve to know. Except Time apparently doesn’t care if you know. If Glen Beck Said the moon is made out of cheese, and Greg Craig said it’s made out of rock, I get the feeling that they’d either leave us to draw our own conclusion, or better yet, suggest the moon might actually be a little bit made out of cheese. Tomasky, as he often does, said it best:

“The broader issue here is … the failure of “objective” journalism to capture the truth. Objective journalism has always operated on the assumption that the truth was about halfway in between what the two sides were saying. That’s still true sometimes, but more and more it is not. A Times story, for example, that concluded that Obama only wanted to send a few dissidents to reeducation camps in a few cases would not represent balance and would not serve as much of a corrective.”

But They Were Drinking ROYAL CROWN Cola!!!

I love that Kabler has a bee in his bonnet over the West Virginia Department of Education spending what he considers to be an UNDESERVING amount of money on professional development seminars for teachers. $500 a day for assorted granola bars? STOP THE MOTHERFUCKING PRESSES!!!

If Mike Garrison and Steve Goodwin had used taxpayer dollars to rent a jupiter jump back when they were rigging the WVU presidential search, would that have gotten his attention?