Congressional credit downgraded

Poor, poor Congressmorons. It seems your actions do have consequences: Standard & Poor’s has downgraded our national credit rating—citing political instability as the main reason. Yes, the economy’s tanking, but S&P has got it spot on: turns out it’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the politicians who are more concerned with balancing their own re-election fund checkbooks than the nation’s.

Enjoy your vacation, the “August break” that you couldn’t wait to get off to, regardless of the state of the economy. Housemorons didn’t even stick around for the Senate vote on raising the debt ceiling, barreling their way to the airports to get their auto-upgrade-to-first-class seats home to their districts or summer homes. And having not a care for the tens of thousands of FAA employees who’d been “furloughed” while ’Pubs shut down operations in an attempt to score points against Dems.

The FAA shutdown—the whole national dysfunction distilled to a single episode—swirled around a Florida Congressmoron tacking on a couple of provisions to the otherwise-ordinary FAA funding extension bill: to cut off subsidies to small airports (only in districts represented by Dems) and to throttle the ability of airline employees to organize and participate in unions. John Mica, that particular moron, quite the posturing puff-pigeon when he thought he’d be a Tea Party hero, spent Friday whining to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Seems, unlike Sally Fields, we don’t like him; we really don’t like him. And he just doesn’t get it.

No kidding.

But Mica’s not the only one we despise; the NY Times reports that 82% of Americans “disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job”. Two thoughts on that: 1) 82% seems low; 2) For “disapprove” I’d have substituted something along the lines of “consider them the lowest form of life on earth.”

So, the Congressional credit rating has been downgraded. Me, I’d put it at about a C: In default with little prospect for recovery.

Imagine that—you screw with the lives of thousands of FAA employees and millions of Americans…and there are negative consequences? Who’da thunk it?

So, pity the poor Congressmorons, who may discover that because of them causing the downgrading of US credit rating and subsequent tightening of money, their corporate contributors may find it harder to write out the really fat checks to their re-election campaigns or sweep them, their families and staff off in corporate jets on “fact-finding” junkets to Costa Rica or Lausanne.

Sadly, though, no matter what hard times these hacks face, the American people will have it worse.

That nuclear glow in Sweden

I was under the impression that Swedes didn’t have to worry about much more than the high price of alcohol & the high suicide rate (which may or may not be connected); but it seems like another potential concern has popped up on the worry radar: whether or not your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

Richard Handl, a resident of Angelholm, a town in the west of the country, attracted police attention last month when he contacted the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority to inquire if it’s legal for an individual to construct a reactor at home. Well, you can imagine how that might perk up official ears, can’t you? It turns out that you’re not allowed to have radioactive materials without a permit in Sweden.

Handl was arrested and released after a hearing. But the cops took all his radioactive stuff away.

Now, here’s the thing: look at the photo of his “melt-down” that Handl posted on his blog. From the number of cigarette butts in that ashtray, I’d say he’s in greater danger of lung cancer, or of setting his building on fire, than of achieving fission.

Following Newt: no human involvement

This should come as no surprise to any human with three synapses firing in sequence:  it’s been reported that 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers on Twitter are not human.

No, we’re not talking Tea Partiers here; a search company has determined that only 8% of little Newtie’s followers are verifiably humanoid. The rest are spambots.

The report goes on to say that an unnamed Gingrich staffer has admitted that he’s paid for followers. I suppose that’s less slimy than paying for sex; but just as sad.

Mashable has produced a chart tracking the human-vs.-bot Twitter-follower ratio for a number of Republican presidential hopefuls. What I am finding hard to believe is that Michele Bachman’s is as high as 28%.

Navigating the galaxy

So, if you don’t like the voice of that cow, Jill, who directs you on your Garmin sat-nav device, you can now let The Force or The Dark Side guide you. According to a report in the LA Times, for a mere $12.99 each you can download the voice—and speech patterns—of Yoda & Darth Vader.

I suppose if you require entertainment with everything, including GPS, it’s value for money. Me, I think either of them would get on my nerves after a while. Jill certainly has, & I got her for free with the device.

I wonder how either Jedi handles the dreaded “reCALculating” that I hear much more often than I’d like?

Tax dollars actually at work

I went trawling the Web to try to find any politician who doesn’t behave like our Congressmorons in D.C. And--imagine this, there is one.

I give you the mayor of Redondo Beach, Calif., a gay, Asian Republican who works with his constituents to maintain both a satisfactory level of services and a balanced budget.

I understand this is a solution that is not, as we say in the tech business, scalable. Mike Gin’s election didn’t come at a campaign cost of millions, so he didn’t have to sell his soul to multi-national corporations. Therefore he’s able to focus on, you know, the work and the outcomes to people who don’t pay his bills.

But, given what we’ve had to put up with for the past few weeks, months and years on a state and national level, I want to focus on the concept that elected officials can actually do right by the people who put them in office, even if it’s just in Surf City USA.

More of our tax dollars not at work, part 2

As of this writing, we’re still waiting to hear what nuts our Congressmorons are going to pull out of the conflagration they’ve been setting around our economy.

These are the words I have for them all:

Contempt

Disgust

Revulsion
Scorn

Loathing

Disrespect

I believe that, whatever they do in the next few days to justify their toying with the nation’s present and future economy to score points with their corporate masters, the American people should recall their worthless asses—every one of them—by special election.

Having no Congress is better than the one we have.

Oh—a couple more words about Congressmorons:

Tar

Feathers