Power Line's Pussy Hurts

John at PLB is whining because Google didn't prepare a Google Doodle for Memorial Day.

Google is an international business, and has created doodles for Korean Liberation Day, the World Cup, Persian New Year, Chinese New Year, Bastille Day, Shichi-go-san (Japan), and the Summer games in Australia. But the majority of Google's doodles focus on American holidays. I don't believe they've missed a 4th of July yet.

If crying were chocolate and bourbon, PowerLine would be a 400 pound lush.

BTW, as an alternative to Google, the PLB braintrust point to DogPile. Dogpile, as most of you probably already know, filters its scans directly through Google. LOL!



"What 'clustering'? I barely
understand search engines..."

. .. .. .. .

If you're like me, your favorite moment from the second GOP debate was Ron Paul's analysis of worldwide anti-American sentiment, and its root causes. If you're like most republicans, your favorite moment came only moments afterwards, when Rudolph Giuliani interrupted the man to express his disgust with Paul's opinion.

To most of the right, Giuliani's response reflected their personal views on 9/11 and the War in Iraq. The remainder of the world recognized Giuliani doing Giuliani.

Check out the video for a good laugh.

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Anti-immigration Conservatives Reap What Their Greed Has Sown


Is a gallon of gas worth 45 minutes of this?

Though they constantly say they loathe illegal immigration, the GOP has happily turned the other way while their corporate buddies exploit illegals for profit. But, with an election on the horizon the situation has snowballed into something ugly, and they're being forced to do something not-eactly-hawkish about it. Could the neocons have avoided this mess?

I think so. I think the GOP's habitual refusal to address the federally mandated minimum wage, along with the greed that drove their constituents to nurture illegal immigration, has brought the right wing to this.

In 1981 I got my first job. It was the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I'd just moved to a new town, and wanted to buy a car. And so, on most days of the week I slung hush puppies and North Atlantic Cod for the newly opened Captain D's on Atlantic Blvd in Jacksonville, FL. For 35 hours a week I earned $3.35 an hour - the federally mandated minimum wage of the time.

It wasn't a bad deal. At 16, I had a whopping 80-something bucks a week (post-taxes). I was a kid living at home; the money was all mine! Even with the ridiculous gas prices of the late 70s and early 80s, eighty bucks could keep a teenager pretty happy for a week.

Consider - in 1981, $3.35 bought:

• more than three gallons of gas ($1.10 average per gallon)
• twenty-two stamps (15 cents each)
• seven loaves of bread (45 cents avg)
• an hour and forty-five minutes at $3.35/hr could buy most record albums (at six dollars apiece)
• three hours of work could get you into any concert
• the average new car, at $7,600, cost (pre-tax) 2,267 hours, or 57 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

Now, as you all know, the federal minimum wage hasn't changed in ten years. Obviously, this means today's minimum wage-earner cannot buy nearly as much as I could in 1981.

For instance, in 2007 $5.15 buys:

• one and a half gallons of gas
• twelve stamps
• two loaves of bread
• 3.5 hours will buy most new albums (avg $18)
• five hours, at least, for a concert's nosebleed seats ($25 for the shitty seats)
• the average new car is $27,700 bucks; you're looking at 5,379 hours of pre-tax work, or about 135 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

So it's pretty fucking clear why many of today's teenagers aren't exactly beating down Captain D's doors (and the clueless wonder why today's youth isn't "motivated").

How does the federally-mandated minimum wage affect the current dilemma the GOP is facing on immigration reform?

Rapture-ublicans controlled Congress from 1995 until 2007, and for the past ten years remained stubbornly stagnant on the issue of increasing the minimum wage. Greed, you understand, is considered a virtue among these assholes.

Nevertheless, as time passed inflation happened, and there came a time when $5.15 an hour was insufficient. At the same time, corporations needing unskilled, low-wage labor were losing employees.

The solution? Either (1) raise wages - thereby attracting more unskilled American teenagers/young adults, or (2) find another group of people willing to work for $5.15 an hour.

Most corporations happily chose curtain two. They figured out they could get immigrant workers to bust their humps for the federally-mandated minimum wage. Teenagers and pre-college/trade school adults were no longer needed as the foundation of America's unskilled work force. Better yet, once the fat cats figured out many of their newly found immigrant workers weren't in the USA legally, the corporate-immigrant understanding became "you work for less than $5.15 an hour/we won't turn you in."

So much for conservative values, eh?

Anyway, for over a decade no one said "boo" as Minute Maid, Del Monte, and Mott's boosted their profits on the backs of illegal immigrants willing to work for next to nothing. Immigrants flocked here, illegally. Corporations' profits skyrocketed. Congressional (R)s looked the other way.

And now we are where we are. The GOP's long-standing refusal to keep the minimum wage at a competitive level snowballed into a monster they cannot now escape. With a (D)-run congress in town, a general election on the horizon, and their own rabid-right-wing a.m. radio mouthpieces fueling their base's passion, the GOP is being forced to face a gigantic problem of their own making.




Suck it up, crybabies. You've got no one but yourselves to blame.

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It'd give him the thing that keeps him so popular


Though they are in the minority, right wing extremism has built for itself an ultra-concentrated media complex. One TV news organization. One radio band with one line up. One type of popular music. And so forth.

This concentrated mediaplex is the reason they can honestly claim the most popular cable news network, the most popular radio personalities, etc. For instance, although total viewership of non-hyperconservative news channels outnumbers viewers of FOX News by a ratio of 3 to 1, the rabid right can technically claim they've got the most popular cable news channel in the country.

This tendency to clump around singularities is what defines hyperconservatism. It's a greedy mindset. Stay close to home. Stockpile your assets, and store them all in the same vault. When untouched by outside, regulating forces, it's the kind of thing whose growth is undone by its own overreaching. Without the liberal democratic base, it's dangerous (see: Hitler); in a liberal democracy it's the sort of thing that regularly self-destructs via political implosion. The Whigs, the American Civil War, isolationism, McCarthyism, Nixon.

So, ironically, when we "outsiders" successfully police (e.g., Imus) the singularity-focused type of hyperconservatism that we find alive and well today, this hyperconservatism actually strengthens. It draws its members closer together, confirming for them the world "really is out to get" them. It's as if a delusionally magnified sense of persecution oils the machine that drives these nuts towards their goals.

I think it's better if we ignore the nutcases, like those who run the Excessiveness In Buttboils network, who bait society with their "Barack the Magic Negro" type of nonsense. When they're left to their own devices, they overcram into their condensed locales, ultimately imploding. When outsiders come in and police their stupidity, they actually gain more momentum towards growth, not the overcrowding that regularly does them in.

So, the "Barack the Magic Negro" sort of stunt is more successful at propagating the right wing paranoia machine when it's shut down by mainstream society.

Why not leave them alone, leave them to their own demise?

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