The Arguments Against Christie Accuser Dawn Zimmer Are Bullshit

The Arguments Against Christie Accuser Dawn Zimmer Are Bullshit:
When it comes to the accusations, made by Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and his administration, the stupidest motherfuckers in the mainstream media are asking the same questions: Why didn't she come forward earlier? Why did she praise Christie even after she had her supposedly strong-arming conversation with Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno? And, hey, what about all the money Hoboken got and/or why does Hoboken need to get more than other places in a small pot? The hecklers are led by small-faced Starbucks spokesjerk Joe Scarborough and his dimwitted, dull ward, Mika Brzzzzezzzinski, who readily, gleefully admit that they are Christie's friends and media accomplices. So let's take these one at a time, shall we?

1. "Why didn't Zimmer come forward earlier?" If you have to ask that question, you are either a liar or a dumb fuck. Pre-Bridgegate, no one could lay a glove on Christie. Here's a governor who wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on a special election for Senate two weeks before the general election because he didn't want Cory Booker voters at the polls for the gubernatorial race.  Christie wanted to  run up the score (a goal that Christie admitted to at his Bridgegate press conference). That's a fuckin' scandal right there, especially when you're cutting things like education. But that got no traction.

Now, Zimmer's the mayor of a town of 50,000 people, many of them well-paid professionals on really expensive property. Because she was relatively new to the political game when she became mayor, she had had little reason to dislike Christie. And, hey, Christie hadn't dicked over Hoboken. But she was desperately trying to get funds for Hoboken, which was fucked like a cat in heat by Superstorm Sandy, to try to make sure it didn't get walloped as badly by the next storm. When Guadagno made her implicit threat over the Rockefeller Group development deal, there was still no way she was going to out Christie as a corrupt bully trying to enrich his friends. That's the frustration to the point of tears that comes out in her personal journal entries. (And let's not leave out that Zimmer herself was in a reelection battle at this point, too. Perhaps that was occupying her time and effort.)

Scarborough made a big deal about how Zimmer wouldn't accuse Christie of anything while his approval was at 60%. No shit. Zimmer still needed Christie for many things, not just the Sandy funds. In a government filled with his cronies and dupes, she had no chance. She'd have been dismissed outright, especially by a media that couldn't get enough of kissing Christie's pimpled ass.

But the George Washington Bridge scandal was an opening, and she took it. Christie dropped his hands, and she jabbed. Obviously, it was a political calculation. As a mayor trying to do good by her constituents, she had to figure that this might be the best chance to get Hoboken the funding it needs. And if it took down the asshole who tried to intimidate her, well, so much the better.

2. "If she thought he was corrupt, why did Zimmer praise Christie?" is mostly answered above. But since it's a couple of tweets that every Christie water carrier points to, let's give those the right context, shall we?

The first tweet from Zimmer, at the bottom, was a response to a tweet about her refusal to endorse the governor. The second tweet was a clarification. Both sent on the same day, they really don't paint a picture of someone who goes out of her way to praise someone. Instead, they are political ass-covering, a desire not to piss off a bully. But, again, she was running for mayor in the only area in the state where Christie didn't have majority support. It was a tightrope walk. But it's important to point out that, without the initial tweet about her, Zimmer would not have praised Christie at all.

3. As for the money that Hoboken got, the $70 million figure that the Christie administration has thrown around is almost all from individual and business flood insurance claims and have nothing to do with help for flood mitigation. Now, yes, there was no way that Hoboken was gonna get the $100 million it asked for out of a federal pot of $300 million, only $25 million of which was designated to go to municipalities (something else that ought to be looked at, since Christie spent nearly that much on tourism ads starring Chris Christie). Zimmer even acknowledges that.

Let's put this in a little more context. On the Jersey Shore, the government has spent millions of dollars on easements to get land from property owners in order to construct protective dunes. (And Christie has moved to eminent domain in order to dick over the people he hasn't dicked over yet.) This is not to mention the cost of the dunes themselves.

Is it irrational for one of the most damaged cities, a popular weekend and tourist destination, in New Jersey to expect the same kind of treatment? And a governor can always ask for more money from the federal government.

4. The question for people who don't believe Zimmer: What's the mayor's motivation in doing this? If she's lying, she's completely discredited and her political career is over. And since she's talked to the U.S. Attorney's office, she could even face criminal charges. So what's the motivation, if not to help her town and take out a corrupt public official?

5. As for Chris Christie? Here's a story, a parable, if you will, to end this post:

The Rude Pundit once knew a male prostitute who had left the business. For the fuck of it, let's call him "Clyde." Sometimes, when he was drunk or high, Clyde'd tell everyone stories of his time as a decently-paid escort. They were not glamorous gigolo shit, even though he wasn't street meat. They were disgusting, debasing experiences. One that stuck with all of us in that group was a tale of a regular client of Clyde's. The john was a well-known lawyer who was morbidly, hideously obese with a gut that might now be called Fordesque. In order to suck the john's dick, Clyde would have to position himself on his knees with the john's sweaty stomach resting on his head. It's an image the Rude Pundit has used before in this here blog. But there was one other thing about the lawyer. He was grateful that Clyde was willing to do it and do it well. The lawyer's wife wouldn't even try, and so he paid Clyde a lot extra. However, he was angry at all the escorts who either refused or tried and failed. He wanted to get them fired from the escort service. He wanted to lash out at anyone who didn't pleasure him the way he wanted to be pleasured. Clyde was just glad he was on the john's good side, which was kneeling at his fleshy altar, although, Clyde said, if there was ever a client he wanted to expose, it was this bastard.

(Note: Due to some confusion, the Rude Pundit wants to be clear: the john is not Chris Christie. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a parable. It would be news.)

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer Will Kick Christie's Ass

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer Will Kick Christie's Ass:
The Rude Pundit buys Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer's story of the threat of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie withholding Sandy relief money because she wouldn't push through a development project he wanted. He buys it not just because he thinks Chris Christie is a walking example of a politician engorged to popping with power, like a particularly ambitious tick, but because he knows Dawn Zimmer.

Oh, yeah, the Rude Pundit lived in that fair, drunk, crowded hamlet for a couple of years. This was well before Zimmer became mayor. And, while he isn't a friend by any stretch of that word, he would call himself an acquaintance, and he has had numerous conversations with her at various gatherings. He has met her husband and her kids. The last chat of any depth occurred as she was beginning her first run for mayor against Peter Cammarano, the choice of the Hoboken Democratic machine. The Rude Pundit remembers telling Zimmer how brave she was to try to break the stranglehold that old Hoboken had on the town's government.

See, Hoboken is made up partly of old school families, the Irish and Italians who lived there for years. They resent the new Hobokenites, the young professionals who moved there for cheap rent, an easy commute, and loads and loads of bars. Those young professionals ended up mating and starting families, transforming the town (although it still is filthy with Wall Street scum). Zimmer's run for mayor was seen as a way to get the town to move beyond its usual crony politics and into a new era. And, really, in the campaign, one of her biggest issues was parks - getting more park space for the families of Hoboken, which is actually relevant to her reaction to the Rockefeller Group's development desires.

Hell, the Rude Pundit was legit friends with one of Zimmer's campaign advisers, and he helped hand out fliers for her campaign one day (don't read too much into that - it was just something he did to help move things along so he could hit a bar with the adviser).

You might know the rest of the story by now. Cammarano won, barely. He was almost immediately arrested during a housecleaning sting of corrupt Jersey politicians who were fake-bribed to push development projects forward. And Zimmer, then City Council President, became mayor, which was affirmed by a special election in November 2009, the same time that Chris Christie became governor.

So the Rude Pundit's observed her up close and personally. He hasn't said more than a few words to Zimmer at various times since she became mayor, but she was reelected last year, on the same date as Christie's reelection. Her constituents genuinely like her, especially after her passionate advocacy for Hoboken after Superstorm Sandy drowned the place, with water in the streets for days and whole sections of the city were dark for months.

Here's what the Rude Pundit believes about Dawn Zimmer: She is as compassionate and honest as they come in the sordid world of Jersey politics. She is really friggin' smart, scary smart, so she would not have told her story unless she thought through the consequences, especially of talking to the U.S. Attorney. And she is tough. You don't know what she took on to win mayor in Hoboken. We're talking an entrenched political culture that thought it could destroy her, and she went right at them and, eventually, won. The old machine is fading fast, dying off and moving on. Zimmer kicked its ass. Christie underestimated her and thought he could roll over her. Instead, she's put on her ass-kicking shoes again.

And here's what the Rude Pundit thinks happened in that Shop-Rite parking lot on May 13, 2013: Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno more than likely took Zimmer aside to talk to her about her requests for a big piece of Sandy aid. Guadagno probably thought she was having a friendly conversation about The Way Things Work. Zimmer had to move the Rockefeller Group project forward in order to get Christie's blessing on the Sandy cash. Guadagno probably thought she was doing Zimmer a favor, schooling someone who perhaps was unclear on how the back scratching worked. You get that sense when Zimmer says Guadagno told her, "I know it’s not right – these things should not be connected – but they are."

Yesterday, Guadagno spoke out like she had been betrayed by an old pal. Of course her intent wasn't to threaten. Having sniffed Christie's farts for all these years, she believes that this is what's normal. But Zimmer's reaction is that of an honest politician. (It's probably why everyone around Christie is so shocked that people care about the George Washington Bridge scandal.)

By the way, one thing that needs to be added here is that Zimmer has insisted she didn't oppose the Rockefeller Group development. She just wanted to follow the laws and rules of Hoboken and the state. It seems the same cannot be said of Christie and Guadagno.

Tomorrow: "But...but...why didn't she come forward before?" The rude answer to that.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Would Still Fuck Your Shit Up ("Loving Your Enemies" Edition)

Martin Luther King, Jr. Would Still Fuck Your Shit Up ("Loving Your Enemies" Edition):
One of Martin Luther King's more famous non-"Dream" speeches is titled, "Loving Your Enemies." Originally delivered on November 17, 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the sermon shows King clearly tying the philosophy of nonviolence to Christian doctrine. King would deliver the sermon multiple times, but there is a revision that is even more ballsy than the first version. He preached it on March 7, 1961 at the Central Methodist Church in Detroit, Michigan.

Between the last part of 1957 and the first part of 1961, King had been through a hell of a lot. He had been stabbed in the chest and nearly killed by a paranoid woman at a book signing in Harlem. He went to India to visit Gandhi's family and grave, speaking with students and politicians. He went on trial for tax fraud and was acquitted by the all-white jury. He gave up his pulpit in order to work full-time for the civil rights movement. That movement had grown even larger, with the lunch counter sit-ins, including one in Atlanta where King was arrested. And a cross was burned on the lawn of his Atlanta home.

Martin Luther King would fuck your shit up because, after all of that, he was still able to give the "Loving Your Enemies" speech. And, in 1961, it included this extra section, not usually in the popular versions of the sermon:

"[We] must learn to say to those reactionaries who have blocked the road to progress: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And so put us in jail, and we will go in with humble smiles on our faces, still loving you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit morally, culturally, and otherwise for integration. And we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hours, and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead, and we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win our freedom, but not only will we win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory. This seems to me the only answer and the only way to make our nation a new nation and our world a new world. Love is the absolute power."

This would become part of his sermons and speeches for the next few years, and, even as other civil rights organizations disagreed with him, sometimes violently, even as he was constantly arrested and threatened, he would continue to make nonviolent resistance the cornerstone of the movement.

When people try to pigeonhole King, when they try to use him to score cheap political points on the left and, especially, on the right, they forget that they themselves would be hard, hard pressed to live up to his radical example.

Note to Conservatives and the Media: Most of Us Still Don't Give a Shit About Benghazi

Note to Conservatives and the Media: Most of Us Still Don't Give a Shit About Benghazi:
It's getting sad, really. There's Lindsey Graham, in a familiar position, on his knees in front of Benghazi, whose got his pants down. Graham is desperately trying to get Benghazi hard, just sucking and jerking, trying to get Benghazi's flaccid cock to have some lift off. Over in the corner, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Ambition is getting bored. Sure, the Right-Wing Conspiracy locked her in this room with Benghazi, promising that he'll fuck HCPA in the ass at some point, but there's been nothing, even after months and months and months of one conservative lawmaker or pundit coming in here, with Darrell Issa massaging Benghazi's balls, Sean Hannity offering vigorous analingus and a prostate fingering, and Marco Rubio showing him Libyan porn (which Ted Cruz ended up jacking off to). The best Benghazi's managed is a half-hearted barely-semi-erection back at the end of 2012. Now Lindsey Graham has told everyone to step aside, and he's gonna show how you get a dick throbbing. HCPA just rolls her eyes, biding her time.

Dear, sweet Republicans and Fox "news," truly, really, speaking for the vast majority of the nation that doesn't watch Bill O'Reilly after dinner or listen to Rush Limbaugh while driving or have Glenn Beck on in the background while boning a blow-up doll, we don't give a happy monkey fuck about Benghazi. Beyond "Man, that was a bad thing that happened. Let's try to stop it from happening again," there is nothing there. No cover-up. No one had any heads up. There were a few tragic errors in judgment on security that, had they not been made, might have prevented shit from going south. That's it. If you read the actual Senate intelligence Committee report, what comes through is the dude who fucked up a great deal on boosting security was Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the attack on the consulate. He was asked repeatedly if he needed more military in Benghazi, and he declined. Sorry if that fucks up the fun narrative, but truth will do that every time.

Desperately trying to damage Hillary Clinton pre-2016, especially now that Macy's balloon Chris Christie has been punctured, conservatives are out in force, trying to pin the blame for the attack on Clinton, even though the report does nothing of the sort. Besides the completely nonsensical comparison between Christie's bridge problem and Benghazi, we have every other Republican with presidential ambitions jumping in to try to show their conspiracy-theory cred to the nutzoids in the base. Rubio promised more hearings. The always-high Rand Paul slurred something incomprehensible. Ted Cruz said obvious Ted Cruz-like shit.

Look, unless you've got evidence of a deliberate cover-up, unless you've got video of Hillary Clinton personally slitting Stevens' throat while Barack Obama fucks his ass as al-Qaeda militants ululate and fire their rifles into the air in praise, the vast majority of us in the United States, the ones who aren't the delusional GOP primary voters, simply don't care.

But, hell, that never stopped the GOP before.

Man Who Shot Movie Theater Texter Is Using "Stand Your Ground" Defense Because Of Course He Is

Man Who Shot Movie Theater Texter Is Using "Stand Your Ground" Defense Because Of Course He Is:
So, yeah, ha, ha, we'd all like to shoot the dumbasses who text in the dark of the movie theater, so it's easy, at first blush, to call 68-year old retired cop Curtis Reeves, Jr. "America's Greatest Hero" for gunning the shit out of Chad Oulson in Florida because the 43-year old apparently thought his convenience was more important than the enjoyment of the rest of the audience. Then you hear that this was during the previews, not during the showing of jingoistic war porn, Lone Survivor (because, again, of course that was the film they were seeing).

Then you hear that Reeves had already complained to the management about Oulson and then confronted Oulson when the younger man asked him if he had complained. And then Oulson threw his popcorn at Reeves. And then Reeves shot Oulson and his wife. Yeah, texting during a movie is bullshit. But this is about about how unsafe we are under the reign of concealed carry laws, which means that there is an implied threat everywhere you go, not about what inconsiderate dicks do in the dark. Being a douche is not a crime punishable by death.

Now, it being Florida and Florida being ground zero for the lie that is the Stand Your Ground law, which allows a person to kill the fuck out of someone if he or she feels threatened, Reeves has indicated that he is going to claim the kind of ex post facto, pre-crime mindreading that forms the legal basis for the application of Stand Your Ground. That's also known as "getting away with murder."

See, Oulson beaning Reeves with popcorn meets the legal definition of assault. Reeves said he feared getting attacked. However, you shouldn't be allowed to fire a bullet into the chest of someone using popcorn as a weapon. But this is America, motherfucker. And that means we get to have lawyers actually say things like "[I]t becomes more complicated if Reeves considered it to be one step in an escalating response from Oulson. If he feared that Oulson would next come over the seats and physically attack him — and if Reeves felt he wouldn't be able to handle an attack from a younger man — jurors might consider deadly force reasonable."

What did big, threatening, strapping young Chad Oulson look like that a former cop thought he couldn't take? Surely, this was a muscular biker type, probably with tattoos and a do-rag, and his wife was some tramp-stamped meth whore. Who wouldn't be threatened by...what?

Oh. And he had a toddler daughter? And his wife loved him so much that she tried to block the shot, injuring her hand in the process?

So what happened is that a psychotic old pussy had a gun and a grudge against the world. Reeves was itching to shoot someone, and Oulson just got to be the one who finally took the bullet. The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it until you pry this keyboard from his cold, dead fingers: Only cops, cowards, and criminals carry concealed weapons. If you're not a cop (retired doesn't count), you're one of the other two.

The Pasco County Sheriff's department doesn't think that Reeves can claim Stand Your Ground as a defense. Surely, he could have walked away after taking popcorn in the kisser. But the point of Stand Your Ground is that you don't have to walk away, right? Even if you're the one who's wrong, you are allowed to just shoot someone rather than suck it up and walk away, like a fucking grown-up should in nearly every situation.

Don't worry, though. It's Florida. A jury of Reeves' peers will no doubt make the sensible decision, as they always do in these cases.

Freedom Industries Pisses on West Virginia While It's Down

Freedom Industries Pisses on West Virginia While It's Down:
Let us say, and why not, that it's the end of a bar fight and you've lost. You're laying in the garbage and filth in the alley next to the bar, the laughs of the dudes who just ganged up and stomped your pathetic ass into the concrete echoing off the walls. Goddamn, it hurts like a son of a bitch. While you don't think you'll die, you sure as shit know that something is broken. Maybe a rib from where you got sucker-kicked by that one fat fuck buddy of the guy you had the actual beef with. Maybe your own knuckles from the few licks you did get in before you were tackled. Maybe your nose from the head butt from the asshole who called you stupid names and you were too drunk just to walk away. You're laying there, gathering yourself, wondering if your phone is around or is someone who was watching is calling an ambulance. And then a stray dog pads up and lifts its leg to take a piss on you.

So it was that the douchiest-named company ever, Freedom Industries, pumped all of the stored chemical, the one that seeped into the Elk River, out of the facility upstream from Charleston, West Virginia. It took 17 tanker trucks and the order of the state's Department of Environmental Protection (which, despite all appearances, seems to actually exist) to get it all out. The trucks went 17 miles up the road to the town of Nitro, which is still on the river, to the Par Industrial Park, the home of Freedom subsidiary Poca Blending. And, upon inspection, the state DEP "issued five notices of violation, or NOVs, alleging improper storage of materials that could contaminate groundwater, failure to follow a DEP-issued stormwater permit, [and] failure to provide required pollution discharge monitoring reports."

And it cited Freedom for not having proper "secondary containment" at Poca for chemical leaks like the one that got into the Elk River. You got that? The place near the river where they sent the chemicals that had leaked into the river was in just as sorry-ass shape as the first place. An inspection report said, "Secondary containment within the facility was deteriorated or non-existent..The plan indicates that the building itself acts a secondary containment, but holes exist at floor level in the building's walls." Yes, it is shocking. Well, not the shape of the facility, but that an actual inspection occurred.

So far about a third or so of the affected people have been told to flush out their water pipes and then start drinking the tap again. Here's the map as of a few hours ago:

It pretty clearly shows that the rural areas of the region are going to be the last to get the high sign to start flushing their systems. And that's pretty clearly where the dirt-poorest people live, the West Virginians whose lives were significantly disrupted long-term by the more and more ironically-named Freedom Industries. Those would be the people who, in the 21st century in the United States, have to walk up to a local spring with containers in order to get water, people who couldn't even afford to get into fights at Wal-Mart over the bottled stuff.

By the way, the chemical that was spilled, MCMH, isn't really very dangerous, not compared to the coal slurry everywhere, filled with chemicals that clean the coal from the destructive strip-mining in Appalachia. And if that gets into the water in a significant amount, if a dam that's holding back a small lake of slurry water at Brushy Fork breaks, well, then all the bottled water in the world ain't gonna save people from dying.

Nitro just got the word that it can start flushing its water. Of course, that's from last week's contamination. The town still smells like sweet licorice.

Dickish Things, Big and Small, in the New Federal Budget Agreement

Dickish Things, Big and Small, in the New Federal Budget Agreement:
So House and Senate negotiators came up with an omnibus budget that will prevent the nation from looking out at a field of land mines and saying, "Hey, that looks like fun," for at least another year or two. House Republicans come away from the deal without any of their larger goals of, as they like to put it, "fucking shit up but good." No, they have to put the defunding Obamacare boner back in their pants and sit around with blue balls until Fantasy President Ted Cruz jacks them off.

But, hey, buck up there, sad conservatives. You still got a number of totally dickish things into the budget. For instance:

1. No, you didn't get new anti-choice regulations. But you did get to get to cut Title X family planning funding by $10 million because nothing says you care about fetuses like slashing money for poor women to get some of the only health care they might receive. And nothing says you want to end abortions like making sure fewer women have access to contraception. Oh, and a bonus $5 million is going to abstinence education programs that are complete and utter bullshit.

2. No, you didn't get to defund the Affordable Care Act. But you did cut $1 billion from the Prevention and Public Health Fund because evil Kathleen Sebelius might use it for Obamacare, and you got a $10 million cut to the Independent Payment Advisory Board of the ACA. That'd be the "death panels" that aren't actually death panels.

3. More fun stuff: The budget specifically prohibits any funds to be used to transfer prisoners from the worthless money pit and torture chamber known as the prison at Guantanamo Bay because the Constitution doesn't mean what it says, except, you know, when you need it to.

4. For pure churlish cuntery, you can't beat this provision: "A prohibition on funding for the Administration’s onerous 'light bulb' standard, which prevents incandescent bulbs from being manufactured or sold, despite a continued public desire for these products." The Rude Pundit isn't sure why the House Appropriations Committee report had to put "light bulb" in quotation marks. Does doing so make energy efficient bulbs fictional or "so-called"? In fact, the budget agreement proudly cuts the EPA by $143 million and prevents funds from being used on several greenhouse gas-reducing regulations. Guess the recent cold weather justified fucking the environment some more.

5. The GOP got to make a paranoid conspiracy into policy by preventing the closure of the State Department's chancery in Vatican City. The evil Obama - no, wait Bush administration wanted to save money by merging it with the embassy in Rome, which is pretty close to the Vatican, if the Rude Pundit's rudimentary ability to look at a fuckin' map is correct.

6. Apparently, Benghazi means shit except as a political bludgeon because the House GOP got a quarter-billion dollar cut in embassy security, maintenance, and construction. Oh, and no funds to UNESCO because fuck those kids.

Yes, yes, there's all kinds of dick moves here. No funding for President Obama's pre-K proposals. A freeze on the salary of the Vice-President and "senior political appointees." And shove your high-speed rail dreams up your ass.

But don't worry. About half of all the appropriations goes to defense spending. Contractors ain't gonna pay themselves.

Conservatives can go home and rest easy that they made life a little harder for women, the poor, the disempowered, and anyone who likes drinking water and breathing. All in a day's work.

A West Virginia Friend Talks to the Rude Pundit

A West Virginia Friend Talks to the Rude Pundit:
"The difference this time," said the Rude Pundit's old friend in Charleston, West Virginia, "is that it wasn't just poor people who were affected." She was referring to the chemical spill into the Elks River, just a mile and a half upstream from the water treatment plant for 300,000 people in the Kanawha Valley, including the state capital of Charleston. "It was rich people. It was politicians," she continued. "I guarantee that when some legislator's wife couldn't bathe the kids, there was hell to pay." She's right, of course. The rural residents of West Virginia have had to deal endlessly with water filled with chemical leaks, run-off from coal processing, and general disgustingness, like mass fish kills caused by the aforementioned things. You just rarely heard about them because, you know, they're dirt poor and who the fuck cares because they're lucky to live in America.

Still, when you live in Charleston, you get used to a certain amount of poison. You get used to there always being some kind of odor. It's one of the things the Rude Pundit noticed when he visited there a few years ago. The friend said, "This time it was different. I smelled it when I first got up in the morning and it got powerful strong later on." She's a professor, by the way, with a PhD.

There's a whole lot of anger to go around. For instance, the storage facility that held the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (calm down there, tweakers. Different meth) did not have to be inspected by regulators for leaks because you don't want too many rules holding back the liberty of capitalists, man. It hasn't been inspected since 1991 because West Virginia law requires inspections only for chemical production facilities, not chemical storage joints. If that makes no sense to you, you hate the job creators.

And, for instance, the dude-bros who own the fucking retardedly-named "Freedom Industries" are fucking assholes and fucking criminals. The company, as it exists now, is only two weeks old. Yeah, three other companies merged at the end of 2013 to become the FI that we all know and love. Oh, and there's a chance that the storage facility was completely automated. So not only was it uninspected, but it was completely absent any human beings that might have smelled something funny. (Yeah, you still have to take off your shoes at an airport, but most of our chemical storage places are unguarded.)

To its credit, West Virginia American Water, which was a victim, surely, but has worked mightily to make it better (the Rude Pundit's friend said that she was "kind of proud" at how quickly the locals came up with a way to test for the chemical - yeah, there was no way to test for it before), kept the public well-informed, as did the governor. The fuckwits at Freedom? The president, a cockknob named Gary Southern, tried to end a press conference by saying that he had had "an extremely hard day." He was practically tackled by reporters and continued to bumblefuck his way through answers.

But, as the Rude Pundit's friend kept saying, this is really about people. She said, "The first night, we drove around, pretty much to Kentucky, before we found bottled water." We joked about bathing in San Pellegrino because we're bourgeois pigs. Then we talked about all the schools and the restaurants being closed. She continued, "People here are already living on the edge. Can you imagine what happens when they're not gonna get a paycheck they're counting on? Most people don't have a couple hundred dollars to just make it through until this ends." Of course, the downside of being constantly beaten down, as the poor of West Virginia have learned, is that "people here just figure this is another thing they have to pull together and get through" rather than blame the people who deserve the blame - the politicians from the statehouse to the Congress, the corporations big and small who are squeezing that beautiful landscape until it is just a dry sponge or a balled-up napkin.

The water will be flowing again soon. The flushing out of the system has begun. So, no doubt, will the effort to sweep it all under the muck-covered rug. Although, like after the BP spill, someone's gonna have to pay people and businesses for all the money that was lost.

The one upside to the whole mess? "On the day we got word that we shouldn't cook with the water, I had already made some butternut squash soup," said the Rude Pundit's friend. "It was a really delicious batch. Next time I cook it, I'm gonna use some star anise because the licorice taste of the water gave the soup this great flavor." Now that's a glass half-full view. Well, half-full with toxic water.

Hey, Anti-Choicers: By Your Own Logic, You're Paying for Abortions in Israel

Hey, Anti-Choicers: By Your Own Logic, You're Paying for Abortions in Israel:
You might have heard over the Christian holiday season that the great and noble and never-wrong-no-matter-what nation of Israel decided to pay for all abortions approved by a government medical council (of two doctors and a social worker, one of which must be a woman) for all women between the ages of 20 and 40. They can get those abortions for any reason: health, financial, inconvenience to a marriage.

Toss that around in your noggin for a moment. One of the things that gets anti-choice and/or evangelical nutbags all frothing at the mouth is the idea that a single penny of government money might, in some minuscule way, be used to make abortion more accessible. Right now, a House committee is considering the stupidly-named "No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act." You may as well name your committee "The He-Man Woman Haters Club," Rep. Trent Franks. The purpose of the bill is to say that Affordable Care Act funds cannot be used on any insurance plan that includes abortion coverage, even if that coverage has to be purchased as a separate rider and no Obamacare subsidies are used on it, because apparently saving money in one place makes buying abortion coverage easier. (While we're focused on just this aspect of it, it's actually a pretty savage piece of legislation.)

This is how the anti-choice right frames part of the abortion debate. It's also used in the backwards "religious liberty" cases where, like, those fuckin' asshole nuns don't want to even sign a paper that excludes them from needing to provide contraception coverage because somehow Satan will burn off their fingers. (Note: as far as the Rude Pundit knows, this is the only way the nuns are fuckin' assholes. They do run a nursing home, so, you know, kudos.) It's what's at stake in the Hobby Lobby case against Obamacare. They have their religion shoved up their asses, so they shouldn't have to spend a single penny making sure their employees don't have babies (which cost a hell of a lot more than a morning after pill). In other words, you should have to insert their Jesus-shaped dildo if you work for them.

Which brings us back to Israel, the land that has to be Jewy and free for the Messiah to come back and rapture the shit out of us, something evangelicals, the vast majority of whom are anti-choice, want to happen because...umm...orgies in Heaven? Dunno. Anyways...

Currently, the United States provides about $3 billion a year to Israel in foreign aid. By anti-choicers' "logic," that aid, which is made up of U.S. tax dollars provided by you and Ted Cruz and the heads of every anti-choice group, frees up Israel to pay for elective abortions. You got it? You are helping pay for abortions for Israel, for a policy supported by Bibi Netanyahu and the Knesset. Sure, there's laws that prevent any money being used for abortions, but that's the rule for Obamacare, too.

Oh, wait. There's this, too, in Israel: "Women also do not need the consent of any male, including the father of the child, nor do minors need the consent of parents or guardians. Israeli medical coverage offers an array of free testing for genetic and congenital birth defects" which can lead to more abortions.

The Rude Pundit is totally cool with that. It's a sane and sound public policy. It treats women as subjects, able to make decisions on their own, and not objects, merely to be acted upon. Is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council cool with it? Others? Who knows? They've clammed up or made milquetoast statements about working to end abortion in Israel.

But this isn't about Israel's policy. It's about your money, American money, Lindsey Graham and Steve King. It's a good thing that "logic" to conservatives is like a third nipple on a man: totally unnecessary and pretty ugly.

Random Observations on Chris Christie's Epically Long Press Conference

Random Observations on Chris Christie's Epically Long Press Conference:
1. Just for shits and giggles, let's take Christie at his word at his press conference answering questions about his staff's involvement in limiting access to the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey. Let's believe everything he said (even though he said he had just heard about the scandal at 8:50 the previous morning and insisted twice that he had lost sleep over two nights which, unless he's living some kind of Groundhog's Day, isn't possible unless he knew that something was going to break, in which case his whole press conference was a lie, but, still, let's pretend, shall we?).

Even looking at what he said in the most generous light possible, what we're left with is a governor who, by his own admission, has surrounded himself with people who are dishonest, who prefers to remain ignorant about problems, who is more concerned with personal betrayal and hurt feelings than public consequences, and who is out of touch with the day-to-day operations of his own government. In other words, he's all bluster and no substance, an incompetent boob. In otherer words, he reached under his gut, took out his tiny penis, and fucked himself in front of the press. In otherest words, the round man waved bye-bye to the Oval Office.

2. But what he said was actually a pretty disturbing portrait of rampant narcissism, as is Christie's way. There was Christie presenting himself as the poor fool, the victim of a lying woman (with its underlying implication of "C'mon, everyone. Bitches be crazy"). He said of Bridget Kelley, "I've terminated her employment because she lied to me." And for no other reason. That's fucked up right there. The sin wasn't mucking up the traffic of the busiest bridge in the United States for some phantom political game. It wasn't delaying ambulances, police, and school buses. No, it was that she lied to Sultan Christie.

Is that too far? Look at the transcript. No less than a half dozen times does Christie refer to Kelly's "lies." And Christie said he didn't ask Kelly why she conspired with David Wildstein to screw the entry lanes to the GWB from Fort Lee because she might be called to testify before a legislative committee? No, fuck that. Again, taking him at his word, you don't ask because you don't want to know.

3. Advice to Chris Christie: When there's ample video evidence, recorded proudly by your own staff, of you being a bully, don't say, "I am not a bully."

4. Advice to Chris Christie, Part 2: Stop giving civics lessons in your press conferences. Yeah, we fuckin' get it. "Politics ain't bean bag" or however the fuck you wanna put it. Really, fucko? We delicate pussies would have never figured that out without you informing us. Oh, and without watching TV news once during our lives.

5. Advice to Chris Christie, Part 3: Yeah, you may have 65,000 state employees. But you don't have that many in your own office. So just stop equating your deputy chief of staff with the poor schlub inputting mailed-in tax forms in some basement office in Newark. You know what Kelly's job was. Or see #1.

6. Advice to Chris Christie, Part 4: In general, stop pretending you don't know people. Port Authority official Wildstein? Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee? Dude, Sokolich backed you on a couple of things. He's one of those Democrats you always tout as making you so glori-fucking-fied bipartisan. There's a photo of you with him. He was elected and reelected at the same time as you. You look like the liar you are when you say such things.

7. And what the fuck exactly is the atmosphere in the governor's office if your minions feel free to do such fuckery?

8. What the Rude Pundit didn't hear amid the apologies and the "Buck stops with me, but, you know, I was lied to, but, sure, the buck stops with me, even though, hey, I was lied to" was Christie saying that anyone should be investigated for possible criminal charges, like misuse of government funds, for starters. We already know what David Wildstein will do under oath: take the Fifth so he doesn't, well, shit, incriminate himself. Someone's gonna be offered immunity and a deal, which leads to...

9. Yesterday, the Rude Pundit said what he thought happened to make the bridge debacle possible. But he's calling "bullshit" on the whole press conference. He's calling "bullshit" on Christie's whole internal investigation, which looks like it'll have the same momentum as OJ Simpson looking for the "real" killers. It was an act of political preservation, delivered with braggadocio and pomposity ("Look how good I am at apologizing"). As such, it'll fool the idiots and the simpering reporters who laughed at Christie's exasperated jokes.

But, somewhere not so very far away, Hillary Clinton just started shifting strategy to how she'll defeat Rand Paul in the general.

Adios, Chris Christie. Don't Let the Toll Gate Hit You On the Way Out

Adios, Chris Christie. Don't Let the Toll Gate Hit You On the Way Out:
Here's how it probably went down:

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie heard that Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich wasn't going to endorse him for reelection as governor in 2013, the first thing he did was swallow the piece of calzone that he was chewing as Christie is always testing just how far the stomach band will stretch. Then he got pissed. "That fucker," he probably said to his napkin-holding aides, "should be kissing my pimpled ass endlessly for shitcanning the Trans-Hudson tunnel." That would be the new passenger train tunnel in Secaucus that would have alleviated a great deal of the traffic on the Hudson River crossings, especially the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge, the cost of which Christie totally lied about in order to justify its cancellation. Less traffic means less traffic tickets in places like Fort Lee, where the GWB, as we sometimes call it up here, sits on the Jersey side. Less traffic means less people stopping in the stores of Fort Lee. A new tunnel means less money going to Fort Lee from the Port Authority, which operates the tunnels and bridges, because a pizza pie only slices so many ways.

An endorsement from a strong Democratic mayor would have been the icing on the presidential ambition cake. There was never any doubt Christie would win against Democrat Barbara Buono. And there really wasn't any doubt that he would win in Fort Lee and Bergen County. But girth never lies: Christie wanted more than he needed. "Sokolich owes me. Big time," Christie probably said. "Someone should teach the cocksucker a lesson."

Now that may have been all Christie had to say to send his aides into action. Whatever happened next may have just been implied, a wink to get creative on Sokolich's ass. Or he may very well have said, "Let's block some lanes heading to the GWB on the first day of school and see how he likes that." However it happened, however two of the three local lanes leading to the toll booths on the GWB from Fort Lee got blocked, it was a waste of time, slowed commutes down by hours, and fucked up traffic for days.

And now we know for sure that one of Christie's closest aides, the almost-comically specific named Bridget Anne Kelly, wrote an email to David Wildstein, a crony at the Port Authority, with the almost-comically thuggish command, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." Wildstein responded, "Got it." That means a plan was in place to punish Sokolich and the schoolchildren of North Jersey because Wildstein knew exactly what to do.

Notice two things in that exchange. First, they were writing from their personal email accounts. That means they thought they could keep it secret. Second, the date is August 13. School wasn't starting until three weeks later. That means they targeted a time when it would dick over the most people in the most abusive way possible.

Other fun highlights in the documents that Wildstein turned over ahead of an appearance before the legislative committee investigating what can legitimately be called "Bridgegate" include Kelly texting Wildstein while standing in line at a wake, Wildstein mocking a pleading Mayor Sokolich with "Is it wrong that I am smiling?", Sokolich wanting to know what's up because he doesn't want to believe the lane closures are a "punishment" but can come up with no other reason, Kelly dismissing the kids stuck on school buses with "They are the children of Buono voters" (which was dead wrong), Wildstein threatening to retaliate against the New York Port Authority for opening the lanes on their own, and a worried Wildstein emailing with a former Christie deputy (and current state GOP chair) Bill Stepien where Stepien calls Sokolich an "idiot."

There's some argument going on about how badly this affects Christie's presidential chances. While we'll know more after tomorrow, the Rude Pundit is currently in the "fucked to death" camp. Christie lied when he said that no one in his office was aware of what was going on. The best he's got there is a plea of ignorance, although, you know, it totally fits with Christie the Fat Bully image.

More importantly, Christie is already seen as anything from suspicious to traitorous by the conservative nutzoid wing of the Republican Party. One thing about the Tea Party is that they despise when some centralized authority tries to control them. That goes for the president and the states, but it also goes for governors and towns. When Rand Paul runs his first ad about Christie, it'll include Bridgegate and it'll include this fun little time bomb: Christie's threat to use eminent domain to take beachfront property in order to build dunes on the Jersey Shore. You wanna tell the teabaggers you don't care about their property rights because of environmental issues? Good fuckin' luck with that.

Of course, the other not-so-secret secret up here is that Chris Christie is a shitty governor, not the undulating savior of the GOP. He is a narcissistic blob, all about the aggrandizement of Chris Christie, everyone else be damned. He got reelected in a landslide party because of Sandy and partly because the Democratic Party surrendered the governor's race and all but abandoned Barbara Buono.

Christie is a rage-filled, vengeance-seeking caricature of a politician from a school so old that it's laughable to think that someone so Boss Tweed-esque could still exist. Imagine Hillary Clinton putting out an ad about schoolkids stuck on buses and sick people stuck in ambulances. It's over.

So are we done with this mad hippo? Can we finally shoot him with tranq darts and ship him to his inevitable Fox "news" show?

Australia Would Like You To Shove Your Climate Change Denial Right Up Your Ignorant Arse

Australia Would Like You To Shove Your Climate Change Denial Up Your Ignorant Arse:
Hey, wow, look at that. It's cold outside in the United States. So cold that if you haven't dried properly after showering and getting dressed, your scrotum will freeze to your thigh. Yeah, it's really fucking cold, as it will be for another day. What that means in the grand scheme of things is that everyone you know will write something clever on Twitter, like "Polar vortex? I thought that was Sarah Palin's vagina;" they'll get on Instagram and post photos of ice doing icy things; and another bunch of fucknuts take to Facebook to declare that the fact that they had to wear longjohns is proof that "global warming" is a hoax or some such shit.

You can't do anything about the first two groups. But that last one? Tell 'em that it's called "global" because it means the entire motherfucking globe. And then tell 'em to suck on a kangaroo's sweaty dong:

Most Americans need to be told that that's Australia and that the temperatures listed there are in Celsius. That means the 50 degrees C is 122 degrees here. Temperature, not heat index or whatever they wanna make up to make it seem hotter or colder. It's so fucking hot in Australia that they had to come up with new colors for the map. It's so fucking hot in Australia that you can't use your iPhone. Because it's too fucking hot.

2013 was the hottest year on record, kicking the ass of the old record, which was 20-fucking-12. Not only that, but the temperatures in Australia are hotter than have ever been recorded there. And unlike our punk-ass two days of arctic cold here, the heat wave in Australia, especially in the states of Queensland and New South Wales, has lasted since December 27. That's two weeks of heat that'll singe off a koala's dick. (First person who makes a "shrimp on the barbie" joke gets a punch in the goolies.)

This is not to mention the fires everywhere. And the dead bats. It's pretty much Armageddon down under.

So today, when your co-worker or your aunt tries to tell you about how stupid climate change is or forwards you some ludicrous denialist email from World Net Daily or whatever, send 'em some wallaby jerky and tell 'em they didn't even use an oven to make it. Then maybe explain that a single weather event demonstrates nothing. But years of heat are a pattern. And patterns...you know what? Fuck it. Just throw some hot water on them and ask them if they feel better now.

(Note: This could also have been about Argentina.)

Frank Luntz Gives a Blow Job

Frank Luntz Gives a Blow Job:
Republican strategist and linguistic manipulator Frank Luntz was still sad as he sat across from the Rude Pundit in a suite at the Soho House in New York City. As Luntz revealed in an interview with Slate's Molly Ball, he, the master of political sloganeering and road-tester of phrases like "death tax," the man who got filthy rich by making the vicious savagery of right-wing policies sound like they were wisdom from Grandpa instead of decadent exploitations of fear and ignorance by his even wealthier benefactors, thinks politics has made people too divided.

And he blames the most obvious person. No, you cruel bastards. Not himself, but the true enemy, Barack Obama. Frank Luntz, the man who had ruined the electorate and set them at each other's throats, said that "Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other's throats, and there was no way to turn back." He described the rabble as beyond his ability to twist them. Of American voters, the man who imposed opinions on the nation said, "They want to impose their opinions rather than express them...And they're picking up their leads from here in Washington."

He looked doughy and sloe-eyed at the Rude Pundit, exhaustedly slurring, "The people are thinking now. They are not being told what to think. They want...stuff. They want...I don't know how to put it."

"A return on their investment?" the Rude Pundit offered.

"That's a polite way of putting it," Luntz responded. "I'd say they were 'takers.'"

"Of course you would."

Luntz repeated what he had told Ball, "You should not expect a handout...You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don't, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them."

"Neighbors don't invest in each other, Frankie. They pay taxes. They invest in Uncle Sam. And sometimes they need to cash that in," said the Rude Pundit. "What the hell is government except an organized way for a state or city or even a nation of neighbors to pitch in?"

"Fuck you." Luntz began to weep, big, heaving weeps that jostled his shoulders and made his man-boobs jiggle. "It's all lost."

The Rude Pundit stood up and put his finger on Luntz's chin. "You know what'll make you feel better? Lemme put my dick in your mouth."

Luntz did not turn away, but he looked concerned. "What...that's just for you."

"No, it's what you need."

"I'm not saying 'no.' I just don't follow."

The Rude Pundit sighed at having to explain the obvious. "Look, Frankie boy, you're used to using that mouth of your to satiate the animal urges of conservatives. Some piggish Republican wants to cut food stamps so that he can lower taxes on rich fucks. You tell him to start calling the U.S. a 'Food Stamp Nation' and shame the needy. When they want to cut or privatize Medicare or Social Security, you say, 'Strengthen and save.' They put out their hard dicks and you go down on 'em until they feel good. You're a cocksucker, my friend, and a gleeful swallower. What other purpose do you have in this world. So?" The Rude Pundit gestured down. "If you're good at something, why stop?"

Luntz took a moment, of course. A man who has plummeted so far in his own estimation has to realize who he is at some point. The Rude Pundit thought he saw a hint of a smile on Frank Luntz's face as he reached for the zipper.

Yeah, Frank Luntz, who owns two mansions and has an apartment in New York City, who has a million dollar sneaker collection, may be having an existential crisis, but he can still suck a dick like a Hoover set on deep pile. The guy'll be just fine.

What Legalized Pot in Colorado Teaches Us About the Implementation of Obamacare

What Legalized Pot in Colorado Teaches Us About the Implementation of Obamacare:
Yes, yes, ha, ha, doofus white fucksack David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a doofus white fucksack of a column about how he broke the law numerous times  by smoking pot (for which he does not apologize), and now that he's a grown-up doofus white fucksack, he thinks marijuana is bad, mm-kay?

The more important story is that legal pot sales started in Colorado on New Year's Day and...well, and nothing. Demand has driven up the price (note: the aformentioned doofus white fucksack columned, "One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such," so, you know, wrong). But otherwise, "a peaceful, respectful and mellow crowd greeted the advent of recreational marijuana sales on New Year's Day."

And the reason that that's so isn't because everyone was high. It's because, over the last few months, as Colorado geared up for the legalization wake-and-bake, officials in the state who opposed the measure didn't act like dicks about it. From the moment that the governor, who opposed it, signed the legalization legislation, to the opening day of doobie-palooza, those who were against it acted like responsible citizens and made sure that the law of the state was implemented in as smooth a way as possible. "Marijuana industry representatives and public officials credited the smooth launch to months of planning and cooperation. Former foes agreed along the way to work together" on things like armed security at the new shops and raising the number of stores licensed to sell pot in order to meet demand and prevent the need for the armed security to use those arms.

In other words, anti-pot Coloradans didn't act like Republicans have during the implementation of Obamacare. In the Centennial State, they made the law work because it's the goddamn law.

As we hear continuous stories of all the blips and fuck-ups with the insuring of people through, especially, the federal exchange, you have to keep in mind that so many of these things could have been solved if, along the way, Republicans in Congress and at the state level had said, "Okay, fuck it. We don't like it, but let's make sure our people don't get dicked over." All states could have accepted the expanded Medicaid and insured another 5 million people. They could have set up their own exchanges, which have, for the most part, worked far more efficiently than the federal one. Over in Congress, they could have worked with the administration to anticipate problems and fix them ahead of time instead of trying for endless futile repeals. Fuck, they might have even gotten a few things in the deal.

If Obamacare is a success (and nearly 10 million people have insurance now who did not before, so, yeah, success), it will only be because so many people were desperate for health care or believed that insurance was such a good idea that they got it despite every time Republicans threw their bodies in the way. The only reason the website's initial failure mattered was because so many people wanted what was being offered. And Republicans simply tried and continue to try to prevent them from getting it.s

Yeah, the whole thing could go crazy. Colorado could become a stoner's hellscape of abandoned children, stores bereft of Cheetos, and slow car accidents. Probably not. But until that happens, at least the state is doing its best to make sure the law of the land and the will of the people are honored.

Of course, then there's the whole deal with gun laws in Colorado, but let's not spoil this happy, clappy picture of high times.

Note to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: How Badly Do You Wanna Fuck Edward Snowden?

Note to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: How Badly Do You Wanna Fuck Edward Snowden?:
Here's one of those messed-up things that seems to apply only to Democrats or people on the left: if you want to try to change the world and if you believe that you in particular can help with the changing, you are called "messianic," as in "Motherfucker has a messiah complex," as in, "Who do you think you are? Jesus?" Ted Kennedy? Messiah. Bill Clinton? Messianic. Barack Obama? Well, he's either a messianic madman or the antichrist - it's hard to keep up. Seriously, Jesus Christ hisself could return to earth and George Will would call him out for acting all messianic and shit.

Now, lookie here. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who is one of the most Washington Postest columnists ever in that "Oh, see how evenhanded I am" way, has declared that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has a "messianic sense of self-importance." Marcus practically breaks her Thesaurus app by saying that the "insufferable" Snowden is also "smug, self-righteous, egotistical, disingenuous, megalomaniacal, overwrought."

And why is Snowden such a smug sucker of ass, according to Marcus? Because he's proud that he revealed the extent of the NSA spy program. You know, that thing that he risked his life and gave up his home to do? Marcus even evokes Orwell, saying that the man who wrote 1984 "would have told Snowden to chill." But then offers a paragraph that would have made Big Brother give her extra rations: "In the government’s massive database is information about who I called and who they called in turn. Perhaps the government shouldn’t have it; surely, there should be more controls over when they can search it. But my metadata almost certainly hasn’t been scrutinized; even if it has, the content of the calls remains off-limits."

Ah, dear, sweet, credulous Ms. Marcus. Do you not understand that it's that phrase, "almost certainly," that ought to make us all queasy because we never, never know? And we would have never known that we are being creeped by spooks sitting at desks had it not been for the actions that Snowden is glad he took.

But the other point, and one that ought not need to be made repeatedly, is that, at this juncture, Snowden is beside the point. If you give a shit about things like oversight and debates about the constitutionality of even the most secret operations (which are the ones that ought to be scrutinized even more closely), what does it matter if Snowden was a hacker with a conscience who hoped to cause a long-delayed debate on what our brave, new wired and wireless frontiers of communication mean or if he's a tiny-dicked geek loser who wanted to act like a tough guy? Who the fuck cares? (And, yeah, he should be allowed back in the United States.)

How fucking blind do you have to be to ask, as Marcus does, "[I]f Snowden is such a believer in the Constitution, why didn’t he stick around to test the system the Constitution created and deal with the consequences of his actions?" Marcus must know about Chelsea Manning. She must know about the boner the Justice Department has for any leakers.

So the only conclusion the Rude Pundit can reach is that Ruth Marcus is harboring a secret lust for Edward Snowden. When she says she hasn't had her "metadata" "scrutinized," almost surely that is a plea for Snowden to go down on her and get her to tell the secrets that can only be revealed with a thumb drive tenderly inserted in her asshole. She wants to say, "Oh, god," and mean Snowden.

If that's not what Marcus's subtext is, then her column is just a waste of everyone's fucking time.

The Rude Pundit's Most Splendiferous Haiku Review of 2013 (Part 2)

The Rude Pundit's Most Splendiferous Haiku Review of 2013 (Part 2):
Somehow, the Rude Pundit found himself in a skeevier-than-usual Waffle House at 1:30 this morning, scattered, smothered, covered, and chunked, which, ironically, are also anal sex positions for the morbidly obese of Louisiana. We had just left a bar in a rickety old house downtown where a masked gypsy-funk band was still fiddling its mad greeting to 2014 into the wee, wee hours. In the booth at the Waffle House, we agreed that the only way we'd ever watch the film Love, Actually again is if Andrew Lincoln showed up as Rick Grimes and just started shooting the fuck out of everyone, thinking they were zombies. In a not terribly rational evening, it was the most rational thought.

But before we move ahead, let's look back one more time in haiku on the desiccated corpse of 2013.

From reader Matt:

DOMA goes bye-bye.
Edie Windsor leads the way.
Fuck you, Scalia.

From Jesse Berney:

Obamacare was
Obama's Katrina - well,
It was one of them.

From Gena in Tampa, FL:

Move to Florida
Governor Voldemort says
Schools? Vote? Health? Jobs? Nah..

From Selvaswami in North Carolina:

Two tours of Iraq
Back here broke and broken down
Can't unfuck what's left

From Nancy G. in Olympia, WA:

How to shame a slut:
Force her to give birth or else
Rape her with a wand.

From Mona P.:

Do Nothing Congress
Like the three toed sloth
Habitat for parasites
Our current congress

From Stephen B. in California:

syria iran
bring rage howls from the right we
denied them new war

From Deb in New Jersey:

Bitch Moan Bitch Moan Bitch
Conservative blowhards, Go
suck a bag of dicks.

Rude readers are awesome and sent in a shit-ton more. Perhaps a few bonus haiku later before regular-scheduled bloggery tomorrow.

The Rude Pundit's Most Splendiferous Haiku Review of 2013 (Part 1)

The Rude Pundit's Most Splendiferous Haiku Review of 2013 (Part 1):
Yes, sir and ma'am, it's the end o' 2013, a year where we were trapped between the radiant angels of progress and the shit-stained ogres of regression. LGBT rights? Step up. Abortion rights? Two steps back. Health care? Forward. Income equality? Gun control? Privacy? Ten paces backwards. The Rude Pundit ain't got the time to recapitulate it all in tidy summaries. So let's make a mess of it with a bunch of sloppy-ass haiku, some from him and some from loyal rude readers. He'll start and then turn it over to the teeming masses, who made the Rude Pundit trawl through some 200 little poems to find the best ones.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
If you think Snowden
Is the story, you deserve
To get your ass probed.

Climate Change I
A typhoon gobbles
The heated oceans like our
Congress sucks crude cash.

Climate Change II
Pope Francis told flocks
To love thy neighbor. Jesus,
For once, did not weep.

And now a few from the mighty email inbox (with some spelling and other errors corrected because, fuck it, because):

From Jim-buh from Ciudad de Buenaventura:

Cowering white males
Fellate yellowed policies
And hope for no rain

From Rabbitearz in Los Angeles:

Paula Deen is not
Niggardly when it comes to
Butter and trans fats.

From Linda in Illinois:

Joe McCarthy fucked
Rats. Now he has grandchildren
Who look like Ted Cruz.

From DS in Toronto:

Rob Ford voters know:
"One of my drunken stupors"
Explains my ballot.

From Max R.:

When Apple Maps sucked,
Did Fox say, "See? The private
Sector can't do shit!"?

From Sasha in San Francisco:

Mandela is dead.
At least he lived to see both
Maggie and Ron die.

Tune in later today and tomorrow for more compact memories of the year that's dying tonight.

Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unmitigated Joy in 2013

Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unmitigated Joy in 2013:
Before the end of the year haiku spree tomorrow and before plunging into the miasma of NSA leaks and ACA numbers, the yin and the yang of the Obama presidency, the Rude Pundit wants to wax bloggily about a few non-political things that got his juices flowing and gave him intellectual and emotional wood:

1. In Berlin, Germany, on the fifth floor of a plain building decorated to look like a Las Vegas hotel by way of Fellini, the Rude Pundit found himself seated at a table with five other people while a fat, bald man wearing only underwear kept bringing us food and telling us about himself. He was Gluttony. Then an evil clown, who was the Devil, came over and punished him by having him strip naked, get in a tub, and get pissed on by a female demon. As they walked away giggling, the nude, pissed on Gluttony asked all of us at the table why did we not speak up for him. It was one moment from the immersive theatre piece Club Inferno by the group Signa, much of which the Rude Pundit didn't understand as he wandered room to room, from circle to circle of Hell, but it was everything he loves about live performance: dangerous, confrontational, and unpredictable. He was fucked with and it was fucked up in the best way possible.

(Other theatre moments that stuck: The cast of Sarah Flood in Salem Mass at the Flea Theatre swimming around the stage like a pack of beavers in a river; Ian McKellen as Spooner, pleading to stay at the home of Patrick Stewart's Hirst, at the end of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land on Broadway.)

2. You hear about these things, maybe see them on YouTube or elsewhere, but you rarely get to see them when you're at a concert. But on a beautiful night on the Hudson River in Hoboken (yes, Hoboken), New Jersey, Wilco was wrapping up its set as part of the Americanarama concert. They invited out the previous acts, My Morning Jacket and Ryan Bingham. They joined guitarist Warren Haynes and Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter for a cathartic version of "All the Young Dudes."

(Runners-up: The Flaming Lips at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ, finally doing a show that was free of gimmicks and giant hamster balls and dancing aliens and just rocking your tits off. The Roots at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, because if you've seen the Roots, you know why.)

3. Two movies about the end of the world where (spoiler, spoiler) the world actually ends. This Is the End was the funniest movie of the year because it embraced the douchiness of celebrity (and Danny McBride and James Franco arguing about who ejaculates hardest actually hurt). And The World's End had more to say about the lives of middle-aged men than a dozen navel-gazing indy flicks. Also, Nick Frost can pretty much do no wrong.

4. Speaking of Danny McBride, the end of his HBO series Eastbound and Down, where he plays a washed up baseball player whose raging ego makes him destroy his life constantly, was almost the equal of the finale of that other show everyone was talking about this year.

5. Street art, man. Tons of street art. From all over the place.

Adios, 5Pointz. You were too cool to survive the greed of Bloomberg-era NYC.

Write Some Motherfuckin' Haiku for the Rude Pundit

Write Some Motherfuckin' Haiku for the Rude Pundit:
It's almost time for the Rude Pundit's annual Haiku Review of the year just ending. Instead of boring you with endless pages of "Hey, wasn't that shit fucked up" observations, he gets Asian on the year's ass in the form of the haiku, the 3-line poem of a line of five syllables, a line of seven syllables, and a line of five syllables. Like:

Miley's twerking ass,
Just like Janet Jackson's tit.
Fleshy distractions.

See? Like a gentle breeze across a rice paddy.

Next week, the Rude Pundit will post his own, and, as always, he invites rude readers to submit their own. The only rule is that it's gotta be a real haiku. Any subject is game.

Using his awesome ability to be a total bastard in his judgment, the Rude Pundit will post the best ones. In case you are chosen, give the name you want with it and a place (city or state or country, however vague you'd like to be).

And email 'em to rudepundit_at_yahoo.com.

End of the Year Note to the GOP: Suck On These Obamacare Success Stories

End of the Year Note to the GOP: Suck On These Obamacare Success Stories:
Hey, GOP, check this shit out:

From Florida:
"Susan, a self-employed 56-year-old decided to talk to a healthcare navigator, then registered on healthcare.gov. When she saw the better and cheaper plans available to her; her excitement was resuscitated.

"Susan said, 'I was doing handsprings and I was thrilled because its more affordable for me and it gives me an extra $75/month that I have in my pocket vs somebody using it on their golf course.'

"Susan got out of a plan that had a huge deductible, didn’t cover doctors visits or medications. By trading up to a better policy; she brought her monthly premium down from $258 to $150.

"Susan said, 'I get my mammograms, my colonoscopies for free. Before I did not and everything now that I’m paying out of pocket will go toward my deductible.'"

From Texas:
"Misty Parker took a job with Recycle Revolution near Deep Ellum in Dallas. It’s a small company that doesn’t offer insurance, but because of her Obamacare subsidy, she can afford coverage. Her bill is $38 a month — a subsidized rate available to someone like her making $12 an hour. It’s a bronze plan with a $6,000 deductible. 'If I had to pay that for some reason, it’s not going to destroy me,' Parker says."

From Montana:
"[Sue] Spanke, a self-employed artist in her 50s, found she was eligible for a federal subsidy. Her new insurance will cover her for a mere $30 to $40 a month with a deductible of only $500. She had been paying $350 a month for a Blue Cross policy with a $5,000 deductible. 'I went from a horrible policy that didn't cover anything, that was breaking me, to the best policy at the best price I've had since I was in my 20s,' she said."

Where else would you like to go on this tour of purple-to-red states? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin?

Oh, sure, sure, Republicans, you'll be able to pull out people whose premiums went up. Those exist, for sure. But they are the minority of cases. No, really, they are, sorry. The Rude Pundit has no doubt that you'll be flogging those stories like a star of S&M porn trying out newer, sharper whips to try to get any feeling at all from his overwhipped, flaccid cock.

The battle's over, motherfuckers. You lost. Tell your soldiers that are out in the jungle believing that the war will never end that you were beaten.

The more that neighbor tells neighbor, "Hey, this Obamacare isn't coming into my house and raping my dog. It's making me tea and asking if I would like a nice muffin," the more you will just sound like petulant assholes. Read those stories again. Read about all the people covered under expanded Medicaid. And drown on your own bitter tears.

So say goodbye to 2013 and welcome to 2014. When all these people start driving their shiny new insurance, you better tell 'em you like how it looks.

(Good liberal note: Yes, it should be single-payer. It ain't. So let's take our little successes where we can.)