Hard, like a fist to the face.

It’s not just your .75 cents on the dollar, now it’s no cents at all for you ladies.

Mass layoff events hit a record high in August. On Sept. 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 1,777 firms laying off 50 or more workers. The three job categories most seriously affected were temporary service workers, school and employee bus drivers, and professional association workers. These three occupations employ far more women than they do men. Unfortunately for women, the usual policy response to rising unemployment won’t help them much because this spending does not create jobs in the sectors where women work.

But don’t tell Dana Perino that. She thinks we all just need to stop sucking on the government teat that is Unemployment insurance and GET A JOB!

Did the bailout work yet?

How about now?

Now?

Still waiting to find out what good that $700 billion dollars is gonna do.

Seems like someone who was whipping up the fury in the house to get the bailout package passed was threatening some congress critters with marshal law if they said no.

In more hopeful news, a film by my second favorite Italian Marxist, Piere Paolo Pasolini, is now out on a big shiny 2 disc set. Pasolini is not for the faint of heart or stomach. He shows brutality for what it is.

What you see on screen in “Salò” is certainly bad enough, as the four aristocrats, unable to find any genuine pleasure in their depravity, urge each other to commit ever-worse atrocities upon a group of abducted children. But aficionados of films like “Hostel” and the far edges of Japanese horror have definitely seen worse. Pasolini always maintained that he abhorred the film’s scenes of violence, but that they were necessary as the logical fulfillment of the social system he was excoriating — that is, both the system of the literal fascist era and that of the homogenized, consumerist state he saw emerging in mid-’70s Italy, which for him were two sides of the same coin. It might be more accurate to say that Pasolini saw fascism and consumerism as two aspects of the powerful and evil urge to dominate inherent in human nature; as Marxist atheist homosexuals go, he was always an ardent Roman Catholic.

Unlike our current Hollywood schmucks, Pasolini had no problem sticking a mirror to the upper classes and showing us what they look like. I kinda wish I could do the same to our entire government and every bankster in the country right now.

Big news! McCain is a doochebag.

Okay, not big news. Not even news. We all knew that.

What is news to me is how Obama has suddenly seen the light (or heard some of the phone calls begging congresscritters not to pass the bailout) and NOW he’s all for regulation.

Now, seriously, just like in the last week he’s decided that Republicans have got that whole deregulation thing ass backwards. Was a time not so long ago when Obama was pretty cozy with deregulation and Republican trickle down theory.

And I really don’t know how to take this. Has someone with a giant economic brain smacked Obama in the head and said “stop endorsing criminal thievery you moron!” Did he really need to wait for the collapse of the world wide economic system (Sorry Iceland!) to see that Republicans don’t know shit about economics except how to steal money and influence the Treasury. Cause you all know we are Democrats, right? We’ve always had the better economic ideas (see Clinton- 1992 to 2000 if you need proof, though praise for Bill Clinton’s economic mastery will NEVER pass through the lips of the Precious)

There is NOTHING we can do about the upcoming election. Either way an asshole is going to be in the White House come January. But I am really tired of the Hopey Changey types thinking that Obama is gonna smooth over the nasty economy with one signature from his rainbow colored glitter pen.

My only consolation is that I feel a mighty bout of schadenfreude coming up. Mighty.

Kid and I went sailing around Lake Union tonight on a wee little sailboat. It was beautiful and the most fun I’ve had in a long time.

And now I think I want to steal a sail boat and live on that instead of in a real house. I already promised to come visit Ouyangdan in Hawaii and later in Korea. She thinks I should claim some island that Korea and japan have been fighting over for years and become a real monarch.

But I totally get why people become all obsessive about boats now. Totally.

Free market reforms broke Iceland.

Sorry Bjork.

This is what a casino economy does folks. It breaks countries.

Can we be done with it now?

This story did.

This picture has nothing to do with the linked story. I just liked the lady boxers.

Ouyangdan wrote this amazing post on what it’s like for her to be a white passing native.

She got me thinking (as she often does). I am Cherokee, how much is questionable since my family never did take no long walk to Oklahoma to be put on a reservation. (I’m sorry but even thinking about my family back in North Carolina and Tennessee and I start talking like them). We managed to skip the Trail of Tears because my female ancestors married Europeans. They traded in the power and dignity they had as the matriarchs

gets it right with the Gmail ad stuff.

Today I got this quote:

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

I spent most of the weekend curled up in a ball praying for death or at least a hatchet to my face. I have an abscessed tooth. I came back to Ruth’s last night after spending the weekend housesitting for Ms. J. I was clutching the right side of my face in pain.

“What’s wrong” asked Ruth

“Abscessed tooth. I think my cheekbone is going to break”

“I’ll take you to the emergency room”

“Don’t bother till I’m near death. They won’t do anything if I’m just in excruciating pain. I have to be nearly dead.”

“What about those low income dental clinics?”

“Oh they can get me in in like 6 months or so. Long after I’m actually dead. But if you’ve got an exacto knife, I’m up for some AT-Home dentistry!”

Ruth did not have an exacto knife. Instead I’ve spent a lot of time holding scalding salt water in my mouth and then spitting it out again. This seems to be working to draw the infection out some.

Now when we take over the world, dental is definitely going to be in the universal health care package.