Post by JW. Photo Desert News.

Miserable POS. What we saw yesterday was silly. Seriously. It was just silly. For all of my adult life I've watched the so called conservative movement pound the drums and dance round the fire, war dancing its way towards what we saw yesterday. 

The "war on xmas", "the liberal media", "frivolous lawsuits", "they're coming for your guns", "marriage is a sacred institution", "States rights". and on and on goes the list of bullshit that they've spewed working themselves up into a frenzy. 

Honestly, its a bit disappointing when you consider how long they'd worked towards it. Alas, that's what we'd been waiting for. That was the climax. You can see it on their faces in a lot of the footage from inside of the capital. That "aw shucks golly gee, NOW WHAT?" look that so many of them clearly had. That's because there was never anything to their stupid arguments. There was no child sex ring operating out of a pizza parlor. There are no lizard people. 5g isn't giving them headaches. There is no deep state on the other side of the door to Nancy Pelosi's office. 

And so, after all of this, the GOP and Donald Trump led the country to a mass act of vandalism and thuggery. That's it. It's already over. Poof. Those idiots had all of the power of the Presidency of the United States of America, and THATS what they did with it. Think of all of the good they could have used it for. Think of all of the very real problems and threats that we face. Instead of tackling those, they created boogeymen, and episode after episode of political theater culminating in yesterday's show. It was silly.

Everything New Is Old Fiction

Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington

...Kelton’s core idea ― that the government can’t run out of money or go bankrupt, no matter how much it spends ― hasn’t really changed since the days when Buiter and Krugman were trashing her thinking. But it seems the world has. Today she is a full-fledged member of the American power elite, juggling television bookings with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Bloomberg TV’s Joe Wiesenthal, writing op-eds for The New York Times and being quoted in The Wall Street Journal...

 It continues to amaze me that old, recycled ideas are "discovered" by bloggers and politicians and suddenly someone is a genius. Anyone with a smidgen of prognostication could sit back in the 70s and go "What is the logical outgrowth of computers and robotics" and arrive at the conclusion that jobs are going to disappear. The next question, of course, becomes what do we do with all the unemployed people? Solutions vary but the "government job" seems the less onerous and more likely of all the various ideas, which range from the medieval to the ridiculous. All this points toward a favorite hobby horse of mine--- that the deficit doesn't matter because the government can print all the money it wants to and inflation will inevitably lag behind the money supply.

As always, the science fiction writers arrived long before the "scientists." Go here for a reading list.

Hope For The Future

The kids are all right: American Students Have Simple Demands

So, when tens of thousands of schoolchildren walked out of class all over America on Wednesday, they weren’t merely acting in a brave and proud tradition. (Emma Gonzalez, the firebrand from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, even cited Tinker in her remarkable address in the wake of the massacre in Parkland, Florida.) Depending on how rigid their principals and school boards are, they also were taking a considerable chance.

That they walked anyway should be a warning to petty dictators all over a country that has too damn many of them running school boards, city councils, high schools, manufacturing plants, and corporate offices. And there’s one running the executive branch of the United States government, now that I think of it.

Howdy Doody Gowdy Bids Aideu

The Benghazi crazed pol from SC has announced his retirement from Congress. Could this be a get out of town move two steps ahead of the Russia probe? You know, the one being sandbagged by his good buddy Rep. Nunes?

Sen. Duckworth Roasts Cadet Bone Spurs

Triple D X 5 (Draft Dodging Deferments) gets filleted by Iraq vet.

Flynn The Traitor

 From Balloon Juice:

...When the Obama countermeasures were announced, Michael Flynn, who was influential in the Trump transition and who would become Trump’s National Security Advisor, contacted the Russians to tell them that those measures would be rolled back once Trump was in office, immediately undercutting deterrence. The sanctions and expulsions have not been rolled back, but Trump has been careful to avoid saying anything negative about Russia and has praised Russia and Putin. He continues to deny that there was any Russian involvement in the election and has attacked American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies for investigating that involvement...