Actually, if the asteroid does hit, we’ll be partying at Yoshi’s, so probably won’t update much then either. One way or the other, you’re on your own.

Oh yeah. Kudos to Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for voting no on the bailout buggery bill.

Had a great time seeing Lewis Black last night on his “Let Them Eat Cake” tour, at the incredible Fox. A stellar show- Black was on fire, literally frothing at the mouth at times. Touching upon everything from losing your virginity to LPs vs. Ipods, to the rather disgusting use of whipped cream in the Poconos, and spewing his venom rather equally between McCain and Obama, he again proved himself to be one of our best social critics.

Now, a question to the no-necked lunkhead seated next to me. You paid $75, are sitting not 20 feet from one of the great comedians working today, and yet every 5 minutes you’re checking sports scores and email on your cell phone.

Huh?

You can’t disconnect from your wired cave for an hour and actually appreciate what’s occurring right in front of you? I’m pretty sure they have scores post-game as well, and as for emails, I have some I’ve had since, I dunno, the late 90s, so I pretty f’n sure yours will last the night. Live in the moment you big goof, that’s what its there for.

Thus ends the cranky old man portion of TTP.

The Right in this country — meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years — long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they’re being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).

Go pick whatever right-wing journals or polemicists you want and (with some isolated exceptions) what you will find is this simultaneously self-loving and self-pitying worldview permeating virtually everything they say, think and believe. You can reduce most of their arguments, and all of their group-based drives, to a rudimentary logical proposition: “I am X, and X is both superior and treated with deep unfairness.” It doesn’t matter what “X” happens to be for any one of them — conservative, male, Republican, Christian, Jewish, religious, white, Western, American — that is the formula that expresses how they perceive the world and their role in it.

To that I give a big boo f’n hoo. Instead of accepting that you suck at leadership, and that you hold views far out of the mainstream of America, you mess your pants and hold a pity party.

Boo f’n hoo. Go the way of the Whigs. And I don’t mean Afghan.

The Swamp reports today that “on the last day of September, the national debt hit $10 trillion plus,” as the “gross national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product has, under the Bush Administration, hit a 50-year high. The debt grew the fastest under supply-siders Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush:

The debt was $5.7 trillion when Bush took office; the bailout legislation passed by the Senate last night would raise the debt ceiling further to $11.315 trillion.

Oh, now I remember. They are only good with their money- not ours.

Obama Betrays the Middle Class: Votes for “Bail out the Rich Act”

I can’t think of any way to sugar coat this, I’m afraid. It’s a bad bill and it isn’t just that Barack Obama voted for it, it’s that everything I’m hearing from the Hill says that he’s been actively whipping it, not just in the Senate but in the House. Barack didn’t hold his nose and vote for this, he made it his bill as much as it is Paulson’s.

As Michael Moore points out, the richest 400 people in America, who own as much as 150 million Americans, coincidentally saw their net worth increase by, oh, 700 billion during Bush’s reign. They got that money largely based on government largesse and private fraud aided by deregulatory administration officials. And they don’t intend to give it back to pay for the mess that they and the people who, in effect, work for them, have created.

BROOKINGS, S.D. (AP) — The South Dakota Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments over whether yelling profanities at a passing police officer is protected speech under the U.S. Constitution.

Meyer also said the disorderly conduct charge was appropriate because Suhn uttered the profanities among a crowd of bar patrons, which created a risk, Meyer said.

Gee, I dunno. I think the right to yell “Fuck Da Police” in a crowdful of drunks is precisely what the Bill of Rights intended. Don’t want to get yelled at, get a new job.

Another day, another news story about economic wackiness. Gas prices rise, the dollar sinks, and stores are limiting rice sales. What could be next? Clothes hangers.

News reports indicate that higher hanger prices will cost cleaners $4,000 or more per year. Suppose that cleaners try to pass the increased cost of hangers along to their customers. Charging an extra, say, 10 cents per item will cause at least a few customers to reduce the number of items they send out for cleaning. If so, cleaners will need fewer employees, and M&B’s jobs will have come at the expense of cleaners’ employees. (Similar logic would apply if cleaners reduced their workers’ hours or wages in response to higher hanger prices.)

MOUNT VERNON - Drivers entering the city from the Bronx via First Avenue last night encountered the first police checkpoint searching for illegal guns.

“We’re also sending a very strong and clear message to criminals: Don’t come to Mount Vernon for criminal activity. Period,” he said.

No, actually you’re telling criminals that your citizens are unarmed sheep, unable to defend themselves. And since police are not expected, nor required, to protect the public, disarming law abiding citizens is criminal. The article doesn’t state what the cops do if they find a gun that a person has a permit for (extremely difficult to get in New York), but one can imagine it isn’t pleasant.

Pathetic.

As it happens those 15% returns were lies, they were not real. They were a result of fraud, leverage, booking future profits today and various accounting tricks. They sounded too good to be true and as with most such things, that’s because they weren’t true. They were lies.

A must read: Paulson Bailout Failure: First Shot in the Next Class War

The ad is called “Robot Dance” and you can view it here.

Remember…Free your mind, and your ass will follow.