Cruz/Fiorina: Like Attracts Like

Or, shit seeks its own level.  Or something...

April 2016: Busy Month for the Grim Reaper

Let The American People Decide Who Should Be on the $20 Bill

Prince: 1958 - 2016

WTF???

Here are some more links.

South Korea, 1975 - 1988: Prototype for America’s Prison Industrial Complex

Think of it:  mass arrests where thousands of “vagrants” and “undesirables” are swept up and crammed into prisons (with no charges, no trial) for years; decades.

Debtors’ prisons, where people are arrested for petty crimes, and then locked up until they can pay their fines.  They can’t pay off their fines while they’re in jail, and they don’t get out of jail until they can pay their fines…

Private prisons (e.g. Corrections Corporation of America/CCA, The GEO Group) whose owners have every incentive to lock up as many victimless nonviolent “criminals” as possible, with ZERO accountability to anyone.

(“Elected” legislators and police departments working hand-in-glove to enforce a corporate agenda — this is one of the hallmarks of Fascism.)

It hasn’t happened here.  Yet.  But it already happened forty years ago in South Korea.

The linked article is pretty long, but it’s riveting in that horrifying sort of way.  The worst of the corporate/Fascist excesses had pretty much run their course by the late 1980s.  But none of the culprits has ever been arrested, tried, shamed or held accountable in any way.  Every attempt to investigate these crimes has been abruptly squelched by South Korea’s Powers That Be.

From the article:

“In 1975, dictator President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun-hye, issued a directive to police and local officials to ‘purify’ city streets of vagrants. Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up panhandlers, small-time street merchants selling gum and trinkets, the disabled, lost or unattended children, and dissidents, including a college student who'd been holding anti-government leaflets.  They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities.”

The most notorious of these facilities was Brothers Home, which had mutated from an orphanage (supposedly) into one of the most vile, brutal prisons in modern history.

Don’t think for one minute that this “can’t happen here.”  Jillions of dollars in undisclosed/anonymous donations are flowing from GEO Group and CCA lobbyists, and hundreds of taxpayer-financed prostitutes (formerly known as legislators) are willing to spread their legs as wide as they have to — suck those lobbyists‘ dicks as hard as they‘re told to — if they can just get some of that corporate money.

Yes, It Can Happen Here.

Paul Ryan for President?

Does No mean No, or doth Paul Ryan protest too much?  If Paul Ryan reluctantly accepts the GOP nomination at their brokered convention this summer, what are his chances in November?

Mississippi is Sooo Dirt-Poor, a Boycott Wouldn’t Even Be Noticed

The threat of a national boycott — and/or a Fortune 500 company threatening to leave a state — usually gets noticed by governors and state legislators.  The governor of Arizona vetoed the legislature’s “Zee Paperss Pleassse!!!” law a few years ago, fearing a loss of business and tourist-industry income.  And I think the governor of Missouri just vetoed one of those nefarious “religious freedom” bills for the same reason.  The governors of North Carolina and Indiana are under intense economic pressure to overturn the “Jesus Don’t Like Them There Homasexials” laws that they’ve signed.

And last week the governor of Mississippi signed the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” which might be the most far-reaching of all the recent “We’s Gonna Take Our Country Back to the 1850s” laws.

Should Mississippi be worried about a boycott?  ROTFLMAO!!!  Mississippi is in the same position as a disgruntled employee who knows he/she is just about to be fired:  “ooooohhh, what’re they gonna do, fire me?!?”

As Leonard Pitts Jr. says in today’s column, Mississippi is the poorest, unhealthiest and least-educated state in the union.  And with no Fortune 500 companies and not much of a tourist industry, what’s there to boycott?  If there was a boycott, how could they tell?

Leonard Pitts Jr. closes his column with:

“…Mississippi just passed a law that 80 percent of its eighth-graders would struggle to read. If they graduate, those young people will look for work in a state with an unemployment rate significantly higher than the national average. But if one of those kids does manage to find work at the local doughnut shop, say, she will — until the law is struck down, at least — have the satisfaction of refusing service to some gay man, secure in the knowledge that the state that failed to educate her or give her a fighting chance in a complex world, now has her back.

One feels sorrier for her than for the gay man. Her life will be hemmed by the fact of living it in a state that fights the future, that teaches her to deflect and distract, not resolve and engage.

The gay man can buy doughnuts anywhere.”

Don Blankenship Murders Twenty-Nine Employees, Gets One Whole Year in Jail

That comes out to about twelve or thirteen days in jail for the deaths of each one of those expendable employees.  Where are all those Law and Order bots when we need them?

Stop all this God Damn Motherf---in' Name Calling!!!

Separate Restrooms for Inbred Bigots