Let Ryan be Ryan, the Second Term Timebomb, Romney 9000, John Weaver on Obama, the Second Coming, Econotrolls: An Illustrated Bestiary, Sympathy for the Doofus, China’s non-aircraft carrying aircraft carrier, the Old Ball and Chain, Scott Walker breaks the hypocrisy meter, and CEO pay and the myth of transferrability.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
We’re starting off today’s Sausage with a heavy dose of Charles P. Pierce and the Esquire politics blog.
First up: let Ryan be Ryan.
[T]he last time Paul Ryan took a “detailed, policy-heavy fight” to the president, it ended so badly for him that he hasn’t stopped whining about it yet. (He’s never done real well against the Congressional Budget Office, either, and the Nevada Boxing Commission won’t even license a bout between him and Krugman.)
I would pay $50 to watch a pay-per-view debate between Paul Krugman and Paul Ryan. PAUL “THE KEYNESIAN KILLER” KRUGMAN VS. PAUL “THE RANDIAN RAVAGER” RYAN! THIS SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY AT THE MGM GRAND IN LAS VEGAS!
It’s time for an intervention, if not forcible detox. Kids, if you lose this time around, with eight-percent unemployment and the Middle East blowing up, and with a (shh!) Blah President, it’s not your candidate. It’s not your strategy. It’s your ideas, which the country is rejecting because the country just came through the most immense pillaging of its public wealth in the history of human thievery and it has made the link between the piracy in question, and the fact that one of the only two political parties that we permit ourselves to have has been staggering around on the sidewalk, singing old hymns in Latvian while pushing respectable citizens like Willard Romney into oncoming traffic because the party thinks he looks like the man who’s come to put in the microchip. Canned heat, kids. Canned heat is killing you.
At some point, someone is going to have to acknowledge that Mitt Romney is as perfect a product of conservatism as could be expected from any candidate, and is going to get his ass handed to him by Barack Obama. Eventually, it becomes trite to blame the candidate, when the candidate is just the party’s water-carrier and errand boy.
CPP comes back with a hit piece on Andrew Sullivan over Obama’s second term.
As a general rule, second terms suck. Jefferson resorted to the embargo and Madison got the White House house burned down. Monroe’s Era of Good Feeling pretty much ended when he got re-elected and his entire cabinet started jockeying to succeed him while old Andy Jackson was down in Tennessee, howling at the moon. More recent examples are even less promising. Nixon had Watergate. Saint Reagan had Iran Contra, and was very likely a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his second term. Clinton got impeached and, amazingly, George Bush managed to be an even bigger cock-up in his second term than he was in his first. A re-elected president gets (maybe) six months to govern, and then it’s time for all hands to run for president again. Ask James Monroe how well that usually works out.
The man has a point. Assuming the status quo remains, there will still be a divided Congress that can stymie efforts to boost the economy. This, of course, assumes that the GOP doesn’t manage to find enough marbles to go “Wow, we took a beating last cycle. Maybe it’s time we work with the Democrats and attempt to get something done on our terms, rather than just obstruct the President because he’s blah.”
Whatever they’ve been pumping into the Romneybot 2.0 to make the mechanism appear human isn’t working any more. It’s reverting to its original design at an alarming pace. You see, real human beings, who have been wedged into middle seats with screaming tossable toddlers on either side of them, know full well why this sort of thing is a terrible idea.
Please. Like Mitt Romney has ever flown coach.
And finally, an interview with GOP strategist John Weaver, who comes across as mostly hinged.
Doghouse Riley has this to say on Romney’s plane gaffe:
I’m still waiting for someone to explain what, exactly, disqualified Rick Perry.
Me too, Doghouse.
Next up: Noah Smith from Noahpinion has an Illustrated Bestiary of Econotrolls. Very, very funny.
Paul “The Keynesian Killer” Krugman is back with a new blogpost, “Sympathy for the Doofus”.
Long story short, the “three legged stool” of conservatism (social issues, economic issues, and national defense) has been kicked out from under him by thirty years of GOP Fail. They’re out of the mainstream on social issues, they torpedoed the economy, and their national defense plan is “blow up Iran”. Romney is a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.
Some of you may recall that China bought a surplus aircraft carrier from the Ukraine and everybody sorta freaked out about it for about a week. Well, it just officially entered service. Unfortunately, the Chinese have no carrier-capable aircraft, and no carrier-capable pilots. Also, they have no escorts for it.
So, what do you call an aircraft carrier with no aircraft, no pilots, and no escorts? A really big floating target.
After Mitt Romney gets his ass handed to him in November, the Right is going to trip all over eachother like rats fucking their way off a sinking ship to blame anyone else for this debacle. Don’t let them: they got the candidate they wanted.
After catching a few hours sleep, the #Packers game is still just as painful. #Returntherealrefs
Really, Scott Walker? You made your conservative bones by “taking on” Public Sector unions in Wisconsin via legislation (which may not even survive the court system), and you want the NFL, which is famously protected by an anti-trust shield, to negotiate in good faith with the Referees Union? Seriously, get the fuck out.
On a related note, every union in the country should be using this as an advertisement for union labor.
Here, I’ll make the ad for them:
UNION LABOR
NON-UNION LABOR
Lulz.
Anyway, apparently CEOs are overpaid.
As it turns out, when you rise to the level of Chief Executive Officer, the skills and experience you have gained along the way are rather unsuited for moving to a different company, hence why so many CEO transfers fail. However, companies feel the need to pay CEOs exorbitant sums of money to “ensure their loyalty”.
Alternatively, the Board is made of friends of the CEO, and if you got to make up your friend’s salary, you’d give him or her a lot of fucking money because hey, it’s your friend.
Personally, I think pegging CEO salaries to both the long term performance of the company as well as a set multiplier of the median worker wages would discourage the types of lavish, outrageous compensation we see today, as well as boost the middle class.
