Different Day, Same Shit.

It's already been made perfectly clear how many people feel about women's reproductive health, from the issues of birth control and abortion to how many (or how few, if any) kids a woman should be able to have. On the flip side, there's been nothing but positive support in the media for mens' reproductive health, most of which isn't necessarily dedicated to solving health issues such as prostate cancer as it is to things like blue pills that help the menfolk who are woefully past their prime relive their years as a young buck for an hour or two.

Seriously, I thought there was such a thing as aging gracefully. If there really was one, toupees and hair plugs wouldn't exist in our cultural lexicon.

What made me think about all this?

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001.

The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period, from a low of $11 million in 2001 to a high of more than $47 million in 2010. And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs such as Viagra.

The story broaches evidence of fraud in a few instances, but the point is that it got me thinking that if this involved birth control or abortion pills, that the furies that are the religious right and their Teabagger compatriots would raise the carcass of Herman Cain over this issue. Instead, all you're likely to get is a few words on Medicare fraud, a couple of 7th grade dick jokes and that's about it.

Me? I just find it odd how lots of people have moral objections to components of women's reproductive health that don't pertain directly to keeping the fetus healthy (or abstinence), yet they are willing to give a free pass to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to provide elderly men with penis pumps and blue pills in a semi-futile race to reclaim their old vigor. It's things like this that led me to question the priorities of this nation on a daily basis.

When whites catch a cold in America, blacks catch pneumonia.

The American economy's been under the weather for the past two to three years. At the same time, black Americans faced record levels of unemployment. So the following should be good news for everyone, right?

The U.S. unemployment rate fell last month to its lowest level in more than two and a half years as employers stepped up hiring in response to the slowly improving economy.
The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent last month from 9 percent in October. The rate hasn't been that low since March 2009, during the depths of the recession.

That's good news, right? Read on.

However, unemployment ticked up amongst African-Americans up from 15.1 to 15.5 percent and black teen joblessness also went up from 37.8 to 39.6, after three straight months of drops.

But it's not all good news for Americans in general:

Still, 13.3 million Americans remain unemployed. And a key reason the unemployment rate fell so much was because roughly 315,000 people had given up looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.

So the real reason behind the lower unemployment numbers was scores of people giving up any hope of finding any sort of employment, or finding alternative forms of employment that wouldn't necessarily be counted in the stats (i.e. freelancing).

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in black communities remains double of what whites face. When America comes down with pneumonia, black Americans come down with West Nile virus.

I can imagine Newton Leroy Gingrich taking a look at these statistics and coming to the conclusion that this validates blacks as being "lazy" and otherwise unmotivated to do anything that doesn't involve slinging drugs or stealing televisions. You know how Leroy and his people can get.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has surged to the largest national lead held by any candidate so far in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters finds Gingrich on top with 38% of the vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a distant second at 17%. No other candidate reaches double-digits.

Looks like Newton Leroy Gingrich is the newest GOP Flavor of the Moment™, and that flavor's a big hit with the "Anyone but a Mormon" crowd, especially the evangelicals around the country.

Newsmax/InsiderAdvantage polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters conducted Nov. 28 showed Gingrich in the lead in Iowa with 28 percent, followed by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, at 13 percent and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in third place at 12 percent. In New Hampshire, Romney leads Gingrich 31 to 27 percent.

An InsiderAdvantage poll conducted in South Carolina for the Augusta Chronicle showed Gingrich besting Romney by 23 points, 38 to 15 percent.

“This has gone from being an anyone but Romney race to a Gingrich versus someone race,” InsiderAdvantage head Matt Towery tells Newsmax.

Any rational human being would have to wonder what do Republican voters see in a thrice-married adulterer who literally walked out on his first wife as she was knee-deep in a battle against cancer. Especially a guy who was known for "indiscretions" that would have a Democrat burned at the stake:

Kip Carter, his former campaign treasurer, was walking Newt's daughters back from a football game one day and cut across a driveway where he saw a car. "As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then."

Perhaps Republicans are more forgiving when its one of their own (or when it's politically expedient):

One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. The Bible makes room for complicated, morally compromised heroes. Now Christian conservatives, desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney, are learning to do so as well.

Unless they're Democrats. That's when Heaven starts getting orders faxed from RNC headquarters for fire and brimstone to be showered upon those scoundrels.

Another reason for this spent gaseous body's sudden resurgence is his knack for tapping into the pleasure centers of the average wingnut. He can walk and talk the way the 27 percenters and Teabaggers like to see and hear. Take the following, for example:

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.

I know people who were raised in those really poor neighborhoods, and yet they had strong work ethics instilled in them from the get-go thanks to seeing mom and pop (or in many cases, just mom) scraping up a few nickels here and a few dimes there in an attempt to fulfill their duties as the breadwinners of the family.

I also know people who were raised in homes where the mother didn't have to do anything, nor actually aspired to anything more than what the state and feds gave her in welfare and food stamps, plus whatever the man in her life threw in now and again, where the constant everyday refrain was that you couldn't get ahead in life or get the cars, clothes and riches unless you were out on the streets "grindin'" and "hustlin'" everyd.....damnit. My inner Freeper's out of the closet again. Pardon me a moment while I stuff him back in...

This is Leroy's forte, delivering coded speech and rhetoric to the perpetually color aroused and hate afflicted "Real" Americans throughout the country, preying on their drive to see that uppity Negro Barack Obama driven out of the White House and put in his place, preferably in chains somewhere, in order to secure himself a political legacy, along with insane amounts of money and influence. A presidency and political legacy, built on the backs of minorities and poors, and fueled by the hateful and the willfully stupid.

So will Leroy ever get his hands on the nomination? I doubt it. Although the Teabaggers and "Real" Americans are down for pulling hard and long for an anti-Romney candidate, the GOP Establishment would rather have a known quantity who sticks to the script, rather than have a Tea Party-endorsed loose cannon who happens to have more brains than any of the previous contenders. I wouldn't assume he would not win the nomination, although chances are he'll prove to be as disposable as Cain, Bachmann, Perry and Santorum were.

Chances are that by tomorrow, Herman Cain may announce his departure from the 2012 GOP presidential nominee race. See, Herm? It didn't do you any good having all of those white women suddenly come out of the woodwork to remind the viewing public how you tried to slip your double toppings all up in their calzones. You should have stuck to black women. The media rarely gives a shit about them.

The Piece de Resistance came in the form of Ginger White, a 46-year-old mother of three and sometime fitness instructor who spilled the beans about her 13-year relationship with the Herm:

Ginger White says she met Herman Cain in the late 90s in Louisville, Kentucky, when as president of the National Restaurant Association, he made a presentation. She was impressed. She says they shared drinks afterwards and he invited her back to his hotel room.

“’I'd like to see you again,’” White said Cain told her. “’You are beautiful to me, and I would love for us to continue this friendship.’”

She says in his hotel room, he pulled out a calendar and invited her to meet him in Palm Springs. She accepted, and she says the affair began.

“He made it very intriguing,” White told FOX 5. “It was fun. It was something that took me away from my humdrum life at the time. And it was exciting.”

She says during the next 13 years, he would fly her to cities where he was speaking and he lavished her with gifts. She says they often stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Buckhead and dined at The Four Seasons restaurant. She says he never harassed her, never treated her poorly, and was the same man you see on the campaign trail...

..when asked if it was fair to say the relationship is going on even now, White said, “I think it is safe to say that after this interview, that will be the end of it. Yes, we have a friendship now.”

Yes, friends:

When his new book, CEO of SELF, came out in 2001, she says Cain once again autographed it for her writing, "'Friends are forever! Everything else is a bonus.'"

Friends with Bonuses.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the man. After all, I figured if he didn't get his black ass off the campaign trail soon enough and allow Mitt Romney, the GOP Establishment's pre-chosen pick, to get his shine, they'd cook something up or drag something up from his past to sink his nomination chances, not that he wasn't doing that all by his lonesome.

Which is why I don't expect for Newt Leroy Gingrich to get anywhere close to being the top pick for nominee. Oh, I expect him to fight and claw for it, but he won't get it. Given the man's litany of sordid past deeds that would normally make the man a "no-go" for the "family values" folks, you'd think it'd wouldn't be too hard to take ol' Leroy down the same way, but the man seems a rather feisty, crafty character who as a lot of fight in him. Trying to take him down with a scandal centered around his past infidelities and his failures as a husband will be akin to wrangling a bull.

But back to Herm. You gotta feel for Gloria, who's probably doing everything in her power not to pour a scalding hot pot of grits on this knee-grow. Or perhaps she already knew about what was going on and decided to just ride out whatever was left of the marriage until she found a convenient way to part ways with Herm and possibly half of his money and assets.

Half. I suppose that was never covered in the 9-9-9 plan.

I noticed a billboard along the side of the road today, as I was slowly clawing my way through rush-hour traffic. And it wasn't like any other billboard. Just three panels featuring three people who seem like everyday stock photograph models normal Americans, aside from three words along the bottom of each panel: "I'm a Mormon."

Yep. A campaign to normalize the image of Mormon folks, so they won't continue to be seen by the evangelical and Methodist crowds as a bunch of freaky little devils-incarnate. If one wasn't careful, one would assume this could be in response to indirectly normalize the image of the GOP Establishment's preferred candidate, the magic underwear-doning Willard "Mittens" Romney. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints says this campaign's timing with the GOP presidential nomination campaigns and Romney's own bid for the nomination are merely coincidental. Sure.

The reticence of the protestant-based religions in the southeast and other regions to accept Romney, along with other unfortunate events, led to Newt Gingrich becoming the newest Flavor of the Moment™, getting a spectacular bump in the polls. If this (indirect) attempt to make Romney palatable to the GOP's flyover supporters doesn't pan out, the Establishment may be forced to either a)accept Gingrich and mold him for their own purposes, or b)find a way to conveniently spike his nomination push, most likely by using the same ticking time bombs that blew Herman Cain's campaign to smithereens. Wonderful, glorious smithereens. "Ginger White?" Seriously? If The Onion doesn't get it's shit together, it'll be out of business by the end of next year.

Crawling along in traffic, I wonder if anyone who actually had a mind to take a look at that billboard would put two and two together and ponder why the Mormon image suddenly needed a jump-start? Probably not. Most people would rather follow America's Next Top Model or listen to empty-headed pundits expel calorie-free opinions in attempt to feel self-important.

Some high school kid decides to cut loose among her friends on Twitter about what she would have said to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, and Brownback's staff decided to rake her over the coals for speaking her mind. If a man can't handle a teenage girl saying bad things about him (and truth be told, it was miles tamer than what less charitable mouths would have opined), then perhaps he needs to grow thicker skin. After all, no one has an obligation to be nice to someone 100% of the time, unless they're drawing a paycheck from said person.*

Then again, Emma Sullivan learned some valuable lessons in public discourse on-line.

• No matter how much the concept of free speech is espoused, there will always be a crybaby out there who's ready to shut down someone for talking bad about them.
• When said crybabies come out of the woodwork, you have to be ready to stand your ground and stand behind your words.

Fortunately, Emma stood her ground and refused to knuckle under to a bunch of knuckleheads. And the attendant publicity only made Brownback and his staff look like complete idiots and crybabies.

What gets me is that others have said far worse about Brownback, yet his staff chose to target a high school student for silencing. If that isn't the hallmark of a bully, I don't know what is.

And if you're in the mood for an opposing viewpoint that reads a lot like a messy Blue Dress session behind the governor's desk, read what Ruth Marcus has to say about Sullivan's tweets. Wear gloves.

*Or if that someone happens to have a drawn weapon. Your mileage may vary on that one.

Anyone who's kept an eye on the Occupy Wall Street protests may have noticed something a bit odd about most, if not all of the rallies. Or maybe not. With this "something," plenty of people wouldn't be able to notice it. Or a lack thereof.

Yep. A lack of black people.

And this is where most whites moan, groan and think to themselves "oh, THAT AGAIN? You people are never satisfied."

BooMan from Booman Tribune does it up in decent fashion, but I want to approach the issue from a slightly different angle:

1) There seems to be this unspoken obligation for blacks to join up with the OWS movement, if only to even out the whole "middle-class white people with iPhones" visual problem.

2) One of the biggest complaints I've heard regarding OWS was how whites steadfastly disregarded police brutality until they and theirs experienced it. That's part and parcel with most problems black Americans face -- their problems are not worth investigating until ordinary whites are affected by it, too.

3) Remember the "middle-class white people with iPhones" visual problem? When working class black and white Americans see those people at OWS rallies, they see a bunch of people who apparently have the leisure time and financial support to spend their time at a political rally. Meanwhile, working class families of all stripes have to deal with minimum-wage jobs that don't afford them that sort of leisure time or the financial support. And obviously, single mothers can't justify dropping the kids off at a sitter just for an OWS rally or even joining in a rally on break if one is nearby.

4) The police brutality. This is something black Americans have to put up with on a daily basis. They're not going to voluntarily put up with it unless there is something tangible for them that they will directly benefit from. This is not the Civil Rights Movement, no matter how hard OWS supporters try to frame it in that manner.

5) This "sudden" discovery of police brutality by ordinary white Americans. Plenty of black Americans have spoken out about it, yet they were largely not taken seriously until it started happening to OWS protesters. It's something that pisses some of us off.

The biggest failure of the OWS movement in regards to ethnic relations was the organizers not going out of their way to frame it as being all-inclusive to all ethnic backgrounds. Instead, it ended up framing itself as a bunch of middle-class white people holding iPhones while conducting mic checks. And conservatives are more than happy to exploit this with a bit of that ol' "divide and conquer" class division.

If you've checked the ACLU's site or most other blogs within the past three to four hours or so, you've probably heard this about the National Defense Authorization Act:

“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor Monday, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.

“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

The key provisions to watch were Sections 1031 and 1032, which enclosed the language apparently authorizing the U.S. military to get all John Pike* on their own people. And that's where I ran into a little problem.

You see, there's no "Section 1031". Just a "Section 1032". The money shot?

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens-
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.
(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

I know bills get amended, and that may have been what happened. Still, this is not to discount the concern of the NDAA bill, but I just hate it when people run away with a shitload of misinformation.

*I plan to spread the use of "John Pike" as a euphemism for causal, yet cruel violence as perpetuated by a police officer. Help me spread it.

There are some people out there who genuinely believe being on the bottom is a lot better than being on the top.* They're people who'd rather rage against The Man™ rather than be The Man™, or at least be in a position where they just yell and flip birds at The Man™ instead of being in a position to act against him. People who'd rather remain the lovable losers in life rather than go on any sort of winning streak.

I've noticed this within the Democrat party. There's always a cadre of supporters who'd rather play the role of perpetual underdog. They see some sort of beautiful purity in being the perpetual punching bag of opposing forces, where each blow rendered is treated as an absolution of sorts, the same way the Flagellants treated every lash as self-mortification of past and present sins, both real and imagined. For the rest of us, this "beautiful suffering" sucks greatly, as it interferes with other things. You know, like winning elections.

These people don't like President Obama much. They don't like him because he failed in his obligations to play the Magic Negro that most emotional progressives (henceforth known as "Emoprogs") expected him to be. Others don't like him because he doesn't describe to the "beautiful suffering" bit that many perpetual underdog Democrats (henceforth known as "PUDs") subscribe to. He refuses to fall on his sword in grand disgraced samurai style for not bringing the results Emoprogs expected, nor has he shown any inclination to jeopardize support from moderate circles in the pursuit of the PUDs and other groups that have confined the Democrats to electoral loserdom.

A lot of people don't understand that you can't do jack-shit if your people don't win. The Teabaggers, God bless those assholes, understand this well. Sure, they appear to be jokes (because they are), but when Election Time rolls around, they pound the pavement, crank up the Wurlitzers and get their people out to the polls. And after they've won, then they attempt to put all of their crazy plays into motion. Meanwhile, the PUDs are busy thumbing through their Rolodexes in search of the mythical pure candidate who can do the "beautiful suffering" bit on cue with flawless precision.

The PUDs are so pissed with Pres. Obama that they're ready and willing to give him the heave ho at a time where the American people can least afford to do so. To wit, Obama is and will remain an electoral shoo-in, an incumbent who, despite all he didn't manage to do, did far more. With his "11-dimension chess game," he managed to unmask the Republicans as a sorry bunch of obstructionists who are ridiculously obsessed with kicking him out of office, even at the risk of leaving Americans unemployed and uninsured. He gingerly stepped out of the way of the Teabagger bus and watched as the wheels fell off of it in grand fashion. The GOP candidates are a mess and the nominee will most likely be someone who will end up having his head handed to him on a silver platter come November 4, 2012. Democrats have this election in the bag.

And yet there's always someone who can't wait to dump the contents of said bag out on the floor and tear the bag into tiny strips, all because it happened to be a paper bag and not an "environmentally friendly" cloth bag. Which brings me to the brouhaha over Naomi Wolf's op-ed.

As mentioned before, the only crime Wolf can be successfully tried, convicted and flambe'd on is using a bullshit news article to springboard her own sensationalist piece to popularity. And people are still talking about it. In showbiz (or was that public relations?), they say bad publicity is better than no publicity. I'm only surprised at the level of energy being expended on this woman and her crap op-ed, presumably to stop a story like this from becoming accepted gospel.

And why? Apparently because, as Sarah Jones of PoliticsUSA explains:

Why are progressives hawking a right wing rumor? In the best of worlds, I suppose it’s because post-W, we are all government-leary and the Right knows how to stoke this fear in us and use it to scatter us into fragments of what we could be. But just as in any other relationship, a constant attitude of mistrust to such a degree that we believe any smear no matter how unfounded will not lead to positive change. It’s impossible, in fact, to create positive change when you’re hampered by the power of fear and hatred. These are emotional diatribes, at best; at worst, they’re cynical ploys to be King or Queen of the movement.

The Emoprogs and PUDs have this knack for following only "approved voices" when it comes to stuff like this. The Naomi Wolfs, David Brooks and Jane Hamshers of the world. You know, folks like those. Ever since slowly making my way through to the liberal/progressive end of the political spectrum after spending my formative years in Freeper Hell, I've tried my best to divine exactly what about these people that makes them such an anathema to ordinary left-wingers but just perfect to the PUDs and Emoprogs. Unfortunately, my natural tendency to just disregard these people as not being important enough to even bother with hampers my ability to do just that, but I keep trying.

Perhaps it's the condescending manner to which they speak to others and of others who are outside of their personal and political frame of reference. Perhaps its their love of being the darlings of the cocktail circuit, where it is OK to be contrarian, to a point, just not contrarian enough to piss off those who financially or socially butter your bread. Or maybe its because when push comes to shove, these people are far too wrapped up in the art of being a "beautiful loser" and a "lovable underdog" to actually effect any sort of meaningful change to the way things are done in this country. A lot of these people love the current status-quo -- it works out for them, and to change that would mean screwing up a good thing.

The story of Pres. Obama allowing the DHS to run roughshod over the civil liberties of the OWS and 99% fits perfectly with a lot of narratives from the Emoprog and PUD-end of things. Obama is evil because he lets the Homeland Security dickwads encourage local police to wail on and hose hapless protesters with OC spray. Therefore, Obama must be shown the door. No one ever bothers to answer the following question: "Replace him with who?" No, just some throwaway answers about how Elizabeth Warren or Ron Paul would do a better job and so forth.

No one ever manages to connect the dots between weakening Obama's electoral support and having another Republican president in office. In fact, such an event suits the PUDs and Emoprogs well. Both groups can continue to practice the "beautiful suffering" and "lovable underdog" routines without having to deal with the responsibilities that come with actually effecting positive change to our political and social institutions. Meanwhile, the GOP is left to its usual routine of practicing cronyist ineptitude vis-a-vis governmental affairs while allowing the free marketeers to sell the nation off for wholesale prices, one factory at a time. Status-quo achieved. The Brooks and Hamshers of the world are pleased as punch.

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of perpetual underdogs.

*Let's get those homosexual/prison jokes out of the way right this instant.

And how. Michael Moore picked up a rumor from Rick Ellis' article at Examiner.com (which is a rather sophisticated content mill that prides itself on "local sourced" news -- uh oh...). That rumor happened to be how the Department of Homeland Security had coordinated a massive crackdown of Occupy Wall Street protests across the nation with a number of federal and municipal law enforcement agencies. Breathing life to that rumor was word from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on how she was on a conference call with other city leaders to put an end to the protests.

As it turned out, that report was all hat and no cattle. Joshua Holland explained how such brainstorming among city leaders wasn't uncommon and that there was no real pressure from any federal agency, let alone from DHS, to bring the Occupy Wall Street protests to a close. The Examiner.com story came courtesy of anonymous sources. These days, anyone can make up a story and attribute it to an "anonymous source" for credibility's sake. This AP story confirms everything except DHS involvement.

Somehow, Naomi Wolf wasn't inclined to believe that the DHS wouldn't have anything to do with the crackdowns, and instead penned her own op-ed, complete with a sensationalist bent designed to tug on the heartstrings of any reader. The main problem? She picked up the already debunked DHS involvement and ran with it, presumably to juice up the op-ed. And here's one of the many problems with this op-ed:

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

Yet there is no concrete proof that DHS was involved. But if one were to repeat the above line long enough, eventually you'll have the masses repeating it themselves, thereby making an otherwise erroneous statement truth to some and gospel for others. And that's exactly what we need less of -- a fallacy masquerading as truth.

Karoli from "odd time signatures" broke his/her foot into Wolf's literary ass over this issue:

There you have it. Bullshit, spread worldwide, with the full cooperation of so-called journalists. It’ll work, too, because she has enough name recognition that people won’t question her claims.

That's a pretty big problem these days. People with name cred who choose to abuse said cred by peddling bullshit to those who refuse to question their "trusted sources." Sound familiar to you?

And this is where I break away from everyone else who posted their own articles over this issue. I get the sense that maintaining journalistic integrity here is far more important than doing something to address the rampant abuses inflicted on protesters by police at OWS rallies. Perhaps that's not entirely true, but that's the vibe I get when I read a lot of these pieces.

We've spent enough time filleting a journalist hack who was caught fishing for more name cred with a juicy, yet rank piece of literary bait. Meanwhile, there's another OWS protester getting hit in the face with America's favorite condiment.

Unemployment going down in Alabama! Why is this? Illegal Immigrants are leaving and Americans are getting their jobs. Amazing how law and order works. I wish the Democrats could understand this simple concept!

This is the meme conservatives tout when exhorting how well Alabama's immigration law is "working." The above relies on a non-understanding of how unemployment rates are counted and the suggestion that Americans are grabbing onto these jobs for dear life.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed are quite simple:

• People with jobs are employed.
• People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
• People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities:

Contacting:

• An employer directly or having a job interview
• A public or private employment agency
• Friends or relatives
• A school or university employment center
• Sending out resumes or filling out applications
• Placing or answering advertisements
• Checking union or professional registers
• Some other means of active job search

Passive methods of job search do not have the potential to result in a job offer and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.

Workers expecting to be recalled from temporary layoff are counted as unemployed, whether or not they have engaged in a specific jobseeking activity. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work (except for temporary illness).

A decrease in unemployment rates does not mean that more people have found work. To wit, if a person simply stops any and all efforts to look for a job, they're not counted as a person looking for employment and are therefore not counted in the statistics. Neither is a person who moved to another state seeking employment. As far as those who do become employed, those who became self-employed or found some form of freelance work may not be counted in the stats.

Plenty of illegal immigrants have packed their bags and moved out, leaving the jobs they used to work open and available for the taking by legal American citizens. But those folks aren't picking up those jobs, most of which happen to be laborious, backbreaking farm and production plant jobs, jobs that most Americans are woefully out of condition for and not desperate enough to take.

Conservatives believe that ordinary Americans are falling all over themselves to fill in the jobs left behind by their illegal immigrant counterparts. This may shed some light on why Americans aren't as enthusiastic about the new openings as conservatives believe they are:

On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.

Most Americans believe themselves to be far more valuable in regards to labor than $60 for 11 hours of work, or $7.50 to $9.00/hr. They have families to support and unlike illegal immigrants, not enough family members in the home able or willing to commit 95% of their time spent to working minimum-wage jobs. At least when the illegal immigrants go home, they'll live very comfortable lives on the U.S. dollars they brought with them (provided they aren't robbed, harassed or killed by one of the many cartel groups prevalent in most areas of Mexico and other Central American nations). Meanwhile, Americans remain mired in a knee-deep morass of debt, with no way of pulling themselves out anytime soon.

The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could just work at McDonald’s (MCD),” he says.

Now there's an idea. Raising the pay would be a worthwhile incentive to most folk who wouldn't touch these jobs with a ten-foot pole. Most employers won't do this because it will eat into their bottom lines. Others aren't able to do it, since they're already operating on bleeding-edge margins:

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club (WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

Conservatives just don't realize that people won't go for just any job because it happens to be there. A job that entails backbreaking, monotonous work for 12 hours or more per day won't be filled unless it pays a wage that working people can support themselves and their families on. They won't put themselves at risk for developing arthritis, joint pains, back trouble and other health problems unless they know they're getting a working wage that will hopefully compensate them for putting so much wear and tear on their bodies. And a bit of health insurance wouldn't hurt, either. This was why unions came to be in the first place.

I suspect most conservatives already have jobs -- salaried ones that trend towards the six figures. They already got theirs, and they're scratching their heads over why their poorer fellow Americans won't just shut up and take whatever's given to them. They have no concept of how hard most of these agricultural and factory processing jobs are. No concept of standing on one's feet for 12 hours a day, up to six days a week if necessary, for wages that barely support a single person, let alone a family of four.

Individual states are grabbing the issue of illegal immigration by the balls because they feel the federal government isn't doing enough to enforce immigration statues. Perhaps President Obama would do good to find a way to put immigration law back under the purview of the federal government before states like Alabama hurt themselves further.

- Now that Fox News' designated dumb dirty blond Megyn Kelly declared pepper spray a "food product, basically," people all over the country are taking advantage of this new condiment. People like this Wal-Mart shopper who used it to gain an edge over her fellow shoppers on Black Friday:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was "competitive shopping."

Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.

"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," said Lopez, 18. "Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."

This is why I usually stay my ass at home on Black Friday. I'm a patient man -- I usually wait for the after-Christmas sales.

- And speaking of dirty blondes, here's another L.A. Times article that's rather sympathetic to Kelly's "dumb blonde moment." Oleoresin Capsicum, the stuff most people refer to as "pepper spray," is far stronger than the "habanero juice" Rene Lynch refers to in her op-ed.

- Steven J. Baum P.C., the firm that brought you the Homeless Halloween party, has now gone under itself. I doubt any of its former employees will be out on the street.

- Ezra Klein thinks the inglorious failure of the "Super Committee" has left Democrats with a golden opportunity sitting right in their lap:

So now there are two triggers. One is an extremely progressive spending trigger worth $1.2 trillion that goes off on January 1, 2013. The other is an extremely progressive tax trigger worth $3.8 trillion that goes off on...January 1, 2013. If you count reduced interest payments, the two policies alone would reduce future deficits by about $6 trillion. That's far more than anything the supercommittee came close to discussing. It's distributed far more progressively than anything the Democrats have even considered proposing. And all that needs to happen for it to pass is, well, nothing.

Meanwhile, David Atkins thinks the president will wimp out and immediately go into "conflict avoidance mode," apparently by brokering some sort of "bipartisan" deal that snatches defeat from the jaws of something resembling victory.

- AT&T's merger with T-Mobile? Ain't gonna happen, at least for now. Deutsche Telekom still intends to saddle up with someone in the cellular business, but the chances of that being with AT&T are now slim to none.

- No, no. This is just too silly. Surely something this utterly stupid wouldn't breeze through Congress, would it?

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. All I have to show for mine is a mess of leftover food and a bigger waistline.