Friday, December 30, 2011

Kim Jong Un[sophisticated]



Hey fat ass, your country suffers from "chronic food shortages."  What's wrong with this picture?

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Iran issues new warning



US says it will not tolerate closure of key strait as Iran issued second warning in 2 days


TEHRAN, Iran - The U.S. warned Iran Wednesday that it will not tolerate any disruption of naval traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran's navy chief said the Islamic Republic is capable of closing the vital oil route if the West imposes new sanctions targeting Tehran's oil exports.
Again.  


That's enough shit out of these major assholes.


Kill 'em.  Kill 'em all.  Give 'em a "do over" and start 'em from scratch.


F Iran and the Muslim extremist horse they rode in on.

***Reggie F Cat is now offering a $25 cash reward to any president that authorizes kicking the shit out of Iran***

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

3 year old dies in North Minneapolis

Stray bullet kills 3 year old kid in North Minneapolis.  No surprise here, blacks kill themselves in droves in North Minneapolis.

Nice culture.  Put away the guns you shit-for-brains.  Some people can't understand my reluctance to embrace other cultures.  This is a good example why.  I prefer my culture, where gunfire isn't used to solve trivial issues.  Got insulted?  Shoot something up.  Bad mood?  Shoot something up.  Someone looked at you goofy?  Shoot something up.  Smart.  Real smart.

from the STrib:


Mayor R.T. Rybak on Tuesday called the killing of 3-year-old Terrell Lamont Mayes Jr. an "outrage" and a "reckless act," and appealed to the public for help finding who shot the stray bullet that took the child's life.


Standing on a lawn outside the north Minneapolis house where Terrell was shot, Rybak said that no one should withhold information or shield the people responsible. With two council members and police at his side, the mayor announced a $1,000 reward.


Police said the stray bullet struck the toddler in the head Monday evening inside a house in the 2600 block of Colfax Avenue N. in the Hawthorne neighborhood. He died at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at North Memorial Hospital.


The bullet that hit him came from outside the home, but there was no evidence that people inside had been targeted, said Sgt. Steve McCarty, a police department spokesman.


"Sitting on this information can only make it worse," said Minneapolis police Inspector Mike Martin. "This family needs justice."

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi gets it...

From Rolling Stone magazine columnist Matt Taibbi's blog.  The guy gets it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Christmas message from America's rich.


It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hJibJo5d

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

More Iran, just for Don...

Welcome back to my continuing celebration of one the most technologically innovative countries to treat their women like shit.

My tribute to the Iranian Navy, seen here during their Aerospace celebration [some kite reached 100 feet in the air].  Although I admit I didn't check my Jane's Guide To Pathetic Navies Of Piss-Ant Countries.



Impressive boys.  [Maybe you ought to stick to what you know.  Which was what again?  Space?]

US.  Moonwalk.  Check.  Reusable Space Shuttles.  Check.  Mars rover.  Check.

Iran.  Moonwalk.  No.  Reusable Space Shuttles.  No.  Mars rover.  No.  Cool Aerospace Division baseball cap.  Check.

Conclusion:  the United States is an Aerospace power and Iran is an Aerospace joke.

Clear enough?

PS.  Any Iranians reading this: your country just sucks ass.  Mine doesn't. [Sing-songy] ha ha ha ha ha.

Monday, December 19, 2011

A rong time coming.


So long Kin Jong Il [as rendered in the politically correct movie Team America].

Now that the diminutive rice-dick with the massive "little guy" inferiority complex is dead as fried chicken, perhaps North Korea might opt to join civilization, shedding the paranoia and self-defeating policies championed by the humorous Il.

We love how he was portrayed in the above mentioned movie.  We love that he hated how he was portrayed in the above mentioned movie.

Kim Jong at his best: check out the soundtrack for the above mentioned movie for his stirring rendition of "I'm So Ronery."

Never gets old.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

More Iran, and why not?


Just a quick note after seeing this picture in the paper of some Iranian jackoffs looking at an American spy drone that somehow ended up in their posession.

The humor comes from the caption, which states:

This photo released by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards claims to show the chief of the aerospace division of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, left, listening to an unidentified colonel as he points to a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone which Tehran says its forces downed.

Why that's funny is this:  Iran's Chief Of The Aerospace Division.  Huh?  Aerospace Division?  What a jackoff, leader of an aerospace division that has never even caught a whiff of space.  Might as well call himself  Iran's Chief Of The Aerosmith Division, because he can "dream on."

What, was Iran's Chief Of National Football League Scouting Division unavailable for the photo?  Or Iran's Chief Of The Flying Shit Log Division?

That asshole's probably unemployed and just snuck onto the premises for a look-see.  YOU HAVE NO SPACE OR ORBITAL VEHICLES IN YOUR ARSENAL.  Just what exactly, WTF are you in charge of, Mr. "Aerospace Division?" [loud, uproarious laughter]

Nice made up job title, Gen. Alli Alli Akbar.  Maybe some of Iran's noted Admirals can clarify this.

Sweet Jesus, I hate Iran with a white-hot passion.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Minneapolis Police: More Fun!



Headline and tiny capsule from Mpls. Star-Tribune:

Botched raid costs Minneapolis $1 million

City Council approved the payout nearly two years after police used a stun grenade that left a woman with permanent injuries.

[I'd give you more of the story, but ever since the STrib went back on ten years of giving away online content free....  Anyway, point is, paying for it now: just not gonna happen.  Thanks anyway.]


The reason this is humorous is because even when Minneapolis cops aren't trying to be assholes, they still are!  Again, a little institutional control please.  How that shitbag Chief Of Cops still has his job is an absolute Christmas Miracle.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

RIP CowPotter

Farewell to great "old-time" actor Harry Morgan, who passed today, December 7, 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Morgan

Liked him as Col. Potter.

Loved him as stoodgy Officer Bill Gannon.