Stickybuffalo.com

Is it me, or has a sort of gray haze descended upon things of late? There is news, there are things happening, but it all seems to have an air of “haven’t we been here before?”

I did manage a pithy little post last night about corporate bribery and BP’s latest cute little trick, but then this amazing free content management platform which I have done nothing but praise turned on me and ate everything I’d written. Oh well.

Meanwhile congress passed some sort of financial reform bill, which probably should be getting more attention, but most people are probably like me afflicted with serious MEGO syndrome. And it’s awfully hard to feel like it would make any difference if more of us did have a strong, well-formed view of that issue.

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In the same “non-news” category as “oil still leaking,” “U.S. economic recovery still unconvincing,” and “corporate executives still douchebags,” let’s not forget to include “United States Senate still ‘unfit for purpose,’” as our British friends might express it.

I mean, mother FUCK, can I some day maybe not have to read headlines like “legislation defeated in Senate by MINUS SIXTEEN VOTE MARGIN?” Because it isn’t funny anymore. Not ironically, not as black humor. It’s just FUCKING RETARDED, and yes, I don’t care; it’s actually so appalling that I’m going to go ahead and use the word “retarded” because however bad it may be to do so, this is an order of magnitude WORSE.

But, of course, aside from the fact that some day I’ll be dead, long before then I’ll probably get a break from this farce… once Democrats are back in the minority in the Senate, and the filibuster goes back to being a purely hypothetical right that the GOP will threaten to take away should it ever be used, and that the Democrats will actually be chickenshit enough to forego, completely ignoring the fact that had they challenged the “nuclear option” threat back in, say, 2005, and actually put an end the fucking thing assuming that the GOP wasn’t just bluffing, then “my” party might have been able to actually PASS GODDAMN LEGISLATION during those few years when they had both the presidency and majorities in the House and Senate, and just might have been able to avoid the clobbering which is likely return the assholes to the majority party in the Senate in the first place and oh, fuck it.

Oil-covered pelican by BP; photo of oil-covered pelican by sfgate.com

So, NPR.org is running a story today about what average motorists think about their own choices and activities in light of the ongoing fiasco in the Gulf of Black Ooze, and naturally their correspondent has done the usual “fair and balanced” soft-soap job. But the conclusion of the story does, probably inadvertently, at least point toward a genuinely interesting line of thought:

What I heard there was that people are angry, but they also don’t see a real connection between the spill in the Gulf and the decisions they’re making about the cars and trucks they drive and the number of times they fill up the tank in the week.

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