The UpTake tweets that volunteers and Guard personnel filled over 3 million sandbags in just 7 days up in the Red River Valley. Had the private sector been in charge this would have required at least half a dozen executive vice presidents, an overcompensated CEO, and lots and lots of bonuses.

Isn’t it funny how you never hear people talking about the pre-eminent unsurpassed parasuperlative mega gobsmacked brilliance of the ever resourceful always more efficient paradigm-enhancing gods of capitalistic virtue — the private sector — anymore? 

One of my tests for Obama will be how he handles natural disasters. I won’t be impressed if he finds it necessary to fly over the flooding. When it comes to Mother Nature, senior executives should stay very far away as they just get in the way. (see Bush, George W.)

•=—·—=•

Banks get away with underpaying tellers because banks have elaborate security systems and keep a very tight handle on their cash on hand. Casinos have the same issues but compensate by creating phenomenal tipping opportunities that make the jobs more lucrative (and they also have Death Star level security technologies employed).

So it’s not surprising that the state lottery people, the folks responsible for targeting gambling ads to the lower and middle classes, totally fucking nailed five dirtbag losers in the lottery’s first ever compliance check.

Undercover agents would ask clerks to verify the specially constructed crossword game scratch-offs as winners. The prizes ranged from $7,000 to $21,000.

“Our goal was to find out how people would handle those tickets, and what instructions they would give,” said John Willems, director of alcohol and gambling enforcement for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, which had agents help with the sting.

Lottery tickets worth more than $600 must be verified and cashed in at lottery headquarters — which is what the clerks were supposed to tell the undercover agents. But a few are accused of saying the tickets were losers and offering to toss them. Those clerks then tried pocketing the winnings by cashing the tickets at lottery headquarters themselves, sometimes by using an accomplice.

Fewer than 3 percent of the clerks involved in the sting violated the law. 

Five retail clerks getting paid less than $10 an hour in a part-time setting with no benefits and lousy working conditions took the bait. 

The people responsible for promoting gambling among the state’s poor and struggling must be very, very proud of themselves. Welcome to life in Minnesota under Gov. BridgeFAIL. You can play it straight if you like, but sooner or later they’ll find the right bait and your ass will end up in jail.

Next up: the BCI goes trawling for hookers in a trailer park with some fishing line and a hundred dollar bill.

But if you get caught taking $5,000 suits from Iranian businessmen, it’s either a misunderstanding or, as a last high priced legal resort, entrapment. This country exists for the convenience of good people only, and no, you don’t get to help decide who’s good or bad.

•=—·—=•

Opinuendo seems to have been cleaning up their act a bit of late, but this bothered me:

Last weekend, speaking to a conservative station in the Twin Cities, Bachmann was encouraging people to attend an event aimed at fighting “cap-and-trade”‘ approaches to addressing global warming. She argued that these proposals will greatly reduce the U.S. standard of living, and she added: “The science indicates that human activity is not the cause of all of this global warming, and that, in fact, nature is the cause, with solar flares, etcetera.”

Of the meeting, she said: “I am going to have materials for them when they leave. I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on the issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us having a revolution every now and then is a good thing, and we the people are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.”

The heck with bipartisanship. Viva la revolución! 

They give their corporatist agenda away every time. Congresswoman Bachmann is by any reckoning a counter-revolutionary. Saluting her as a Cuban/Banana Republican revolutionary is bullshit propaganda from the rightwing weenies who write Opinuendo. They slap down their out-of-line own by calling them out as lefties.

Yes, in their opinuendo I’m sure that’s as nasty an insult as they can come up with, but it’s still a double slam on both the right and the left from the smirking frat boy logicians at the PiPress. The worst part? I doubt they even realized what they were doing, so unconscious is the spin that governs their weltanschnauurk.

•=—·—=•

Jim Tedisco must be in deep, deep shit in the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in upstate New York because the NYTimes just dumped AIG on Scott Murphy’s head.

The NYTimes’ political skullduggery would be much easier to take if only the braindead right didn’t keep squawking about how liberal the newspaper of Ross Douthat is.

The NYTimes also gives a full airing to Israel’s claims that their own soldiers are lying about war crimes in Gaza. 

Israel is pushing back against accusations of civilian abuse in its Gaza war, asserting that an overwhelming majority of its soldiers acted honorably and that the account of a killing of a woman and her two children appears to be an urban myth spread by troops who did not witness it.

Officers are stepping forward, some at the urging of the top command, others on their own, offering numerous accounts of having held their fire out of concern for civilians, helping Palestinians in need and punishing improper soldier behavior.

“I’m not saying that nothing bad happened,” Bentzi Gruber, a colonel in the reserves and deputy commander of the armored division, said in an interview. “I heard about cases where people shot where they shouldn’t have shot and destroyed houses where they shouldn’t have destroyed houses. But the proportion and effort and directions we gave to our soldiers were entirely in the opposite direction.”

Because the officers (CEOs) are always in charge, and they’re totally focused on following all the rules all the time.

Always, with liberty and justice for all. Amen.

•=—·—=•

How can you tell when an award-winning high school experiences an influx of urban values? A. They bring in the drug-sniffing dogs.

Because in New Jersey you don’t strip search the rich kids. And because the local wingnuts were getting out of control:

On Jan. 9 a local minister, the Rev. Darryl L. George, 58, of Short Hills, was arrested at the school along with two of his sons, accused of attacking a Millburn High student in a school parking lot. Some witnesses said the victim, an 18-year-old senior who received minor injuries, was hit with a baseball bat. That encounter resulted in assault charges against the minister and his older son, and the suspension of his 15-year-old son, a student at the school.

Most of the article cites drinking and not drugs. You can always count on the bourgeoisie to police themselves and turn in their own kids if need be. How else can you possibly maintain your property values in these trying times?

•=—·—=•

Strategies for improving producer-to-consumer relationships, de-emphasizing the middle men.

It’s past time farmers pulled their reactionary heads out of their traditional asses and did this kind of outreach. And given some time and a positive response, we might start seeing rural rednecked signs replaced by webcams and a better appreciation for their ultimate customers.

American farmers have been in bed with corporate America for a good hundred years now, and still they can’t seem to make the connection between their price support Depends™ and the assfucking they get everytime they sell their crops.

•=—·—=•

Alysheba, R.I.P.

Only in America do we allow race horses to die with more dignity than we afford human beings.

•=—·—=•

The thing that grates most about the Bushies is that even when their bagmen were totally flagrante, no one could do a damned thing about it because the DOJ and their state-based cronies sat on everything.

Again, much of the reason why Obama hasn’t charged forward on many issues is because our government is riddled with bitter enders, Bushies who’ve burrowed deep within our judiciary system so they can sandbag and obstruct any efforts at rooting out corruption.

If these judges are not convicted and sentenced to death, then that’s all the proof we need that the death penalty is culturally biased and unConstitutional. What these men did was in no way morally distinguishable from the buying and selling of human chattel.

Then again, maybe they thought this was the preferred way to go — given the truly old school traditions regarding juveniles.

•=—·—=•

Prop 8 financier Howard Ahmanson just switched political parties, and is taking his wealth with him. And no, this is definitely not a good thing for Dems.

The money that used to fund their ass clowns will now fund ours. I’m sure Evan Bayh will appreciate the campaign donations.

•=—·—=•

Losing both of these guys would not upset me in the slightest.

Seriously, how in the fuck did Chris Dodd manage to charm so many Kossacks? Paired with Joe Lieberman the two had a perfect record of voting against Democrats’ interests (what Chris was OK with Joe opposed, and vice versa).

Nothing about our coddling of Wall Street was OK. Wall Street does not build, manufacture, erect or create anything except money traps for the unwary. Their friends are not our friends.

•=—·—=•

Study: Stem cell treatment effective in heart patients.

Amazing. The things you learn once the people who didn’t want you to know this stuff are run out of office. The pool of people potentially impacted by stem cell research just grew exponentially. This genie is never getting back into the bottle.

•=—·—=•

What others twitter about us:

TBogg is likewise amused.

More seriously, why boomers are twittering.

•=—·—=•

Jeff Gannon sighting.

Incredible, really. It’s like they can’t stop dickrolling themselves.

(linked because it’s a sucker’s click and yes, my stats will tell me how many clicks that one gets)

•=—·—=•

Sorry, I can’t tell if this is make up or Chuck’s whacky sense of humor in play. He tweeted that this was real and happened while he was doing a shoot in an alley. If so he was lucky.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

•=—·—=•

More common sense that surely will have to be denounced, or maybe just sniggered at by our Moderate in Chief.

•=—·—=•

You’re darned right I’m sprouting wood right now. It’s not every day I get to mention Sarah Palin and Scientology in the same sentence!

And Audrey’s finally updated Palin’s Deceptions, but it’s mostly a post about posts to come.

•=—·—=•

Another blog that’s been quiet for a while popped back up this week to let everyone know there’s more legal stuff coming in the matter of reclaiming WCAL for its original listener base (this is the classical college station acquired by MPR for their modern rock format “commercial” station).

In a sane radio market where Clear Channel didn’t own half the stations, The Current would be a going concern on the right end of the dial. They do NOT belong on the left end of the dial. Nothing about this station is left end of the dial from their totally commercial play list to their DJ patter. 

The Current is sitting on bandwidth reserved for bluegrass, classical music, and quality jazz. The Current plays none of that, and MPR’s classical station offers only a sliver of jazz, no bluegrass, and the kind of sliced and diced classical that drives purists nuts.

I don’t care that everything’s moving online, the airwaves belong to the public and we need to take them back.

Fuck modern rock, a puerile, derivative format with all the grace, charm and class of a special ed marching band. (There’s a reason why they don’t have a Special Olympics version of American Idol, and it’s related to why Simon Le Bon doesn’t clog up late night TV with infomercials for The Best of The ’80s, know what I’m saying?).

I like to think of the ’80s as a musical retraining period in which American musicians were busy learning on-the-job how to use polyrhythms in lieu of incessant high hat ricky-ticking.

•=—·—=•

Do as I say, not as I did.

If the other generations had half a clue, they’d hold all us Boomers down and they’d tattoo that on our foreheads as a permanent reminder.

Ours was the generation that did EVERY drug and then tried them again mixed with alcohol. Isn’t it time we stopped punishing the kids for our wild oats?

Oh, and a fast jury deliberation acquitted Kansas’s Dr. Tiller in record time. I guess this means Kansas teens can continue to behave like teenagers have throughout history instead of conforming to the make believe TV sitcom zeitgeist of the ’50s.

•=—·—=•

From the Captain Morgan tent at the Fiscal Responsibility Home and Garden show at the Dome.

•=—·—=•

At this particular moment? Zdob Si Zdub playing Spoiled by People from their Hardcore Moldovenesc album.

This is the kind of music Ted Nugent fans would be listening to if Ted Nugent were still Ted Nugent and not the spokesweenie for the NRA.

And yes, the parking lot across the street is jammed full of Tibetans celebrating Serf Liberation Day. More power to them literally speaking. Me? I’m just hoping my recent online issues aren’t connected to this.

Fuck China and the Mao they rode in on.