Jupiter Too

And so it’s come to this. Mighty Jupiter is reacting negatively to the radical socialist agenda that Obama has been forcing on an unsuspecting ‘Merica:

Jupiter has lost one of its prominent stripes, leaving its southern half looking unusually blank. […] Jupiter’s appearance is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere – one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.

But recent images taken by amateur astronomers show that the southern band – called the south equatorial belt – has disappeared.

Naturally, the last time this happened was when Jupiter reacted to warn Our Country of the coming Carter presidency. Failing to heed mighty Jupiter, America went on to elect history’s greatest monster, Jimmy Carter. And we all know how that turned out.

Let’s review the evidence. Jupiter before Obama:

and the tragically denuded, post-Obama Jupiter:

As per usual, the administration’s response to Jupiter is slow; sources in the White House confirm that response, when it finally comes, will be largely centered around temporarily adding an Islamic crescent to Jupiter’s mighty countenance in the hopes of appeasing Obama’s sharia task-masters.

No matter how it plays out now, though, this celestial incident is definitely shaping up to be Obama’s Shoemaker-Levy 9, and his lack of an effective response or even any apparent planning for this event will doom him just as surely as that comet doomed both the Clinton presidency and the then nascent Gore campaign, which took a notably earth-toned, four-buttoned position on the bands of Jupiter, one which the American public wasn’t ready for.

Why newspapers are dying. Your whopping 14% on Editorial is showing, boys.
cc: publishing houses and Rupert Murdoch. See that 52% line item there? That’s why eBooks (and newspapers) should cost less than dead tree books (and newspapers).

Center-right radical socialism

“ My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

"And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

Robert Kuttner, saying what Obama won’t.
Kuttner goes on:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

To which I add: yep.

Mysterious Una(ni)mi(ty)

Bernie Sanders’ “Audit the Fed” amendment passed today:

The 96-0 vote came after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) modified an earlier version of the audit legislation that was strongly opposed by the White House and Federal Reserve. They argued the amendment would compromise the independence of U.S. monetary policy.

By this margin, even noted fucktard Orrin Hatch can declare himself “satisfied” that it is “good for the country.”
Likewise Ben Nelson, who was irrevocably aboard way back at 70 votes. The era of partisan bickering must be over.

Just so we’re clear, in the 21st century, Republican gubernatorial candidates are attacked for accepting modern biology and being only a partial Biblical literalist.

Steve Benen. Why yes, Steve, yes they are. Nothing to see here.

Hero

azspot:

The hero of the Times Square bomb attempt was an immigrant. A Muslim.  Senegalese newcomer Aliou Niasse was the first to notice the smoldering car and draw attention to it. He had no time left on his cell phone and realized his English probably wasn’t up to the task, so he got a passerby to call 911.  In Arizona the cops would have hauled him off to jail while the car exploded.

I disagree. In Arizona, the guy would have never told anyone what he saw, specifically to avoid being “hauled off to jail while the car exploded.” He would simply have melted away into the crowd, never to be heard from at all. Then there would be lots of delayed retribution about “all these passersby” that didn’t do anything at all and much concern trolling about what is going wrong in the ‘Merican spirit.

Rest assured, though, that the wages of treating people like second-class shit and little more than domestic servants would never, ever come up. That would be shrill.

Hero