Summer Olio

• Our story so far: Mitch "Never Trust A Corporate Lackey Named Mitch" Roob, gets a job heading the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (I-PONZI) for Mitch "Never Ever Trust Mitch Daniels" Daniels, and, promptly a) gives the 10-year, $1 billion privatization gig to the subsidiary of IBM where he used to do whatever these people like to describe as "work"; b) watches as the thing promptly hurtles down a cliff, and needed services for the state's most needy--including children, Mandrake--start running six months behind, assuming they can even be found; and c) gets a better, higher-profile government sinecure as a result.

The Billion Dollar Boondoggle is so bad the state's "Press" actually begins to notice, which prompts Daniels to pull the plug (disproving the idea current among at least one ravening blogger that the problems were a feature) after only three years of the state's money swirling down the crapper. IBM and the state sued each other; Daniels refused to testify on the grounds that, as Governor, he couldn't be put under oath, and, as Mitch Daniels, he couldn't be expected to tell the truth anyway. * And won.

So last Wednesday, Marion County Superior Court judge David Dreyer ruled that the state owes IBM $12 million, on top of the $40 million he'd already given it. He also blasted both sides for screwing taxpayers.

Mitch Daniels was properly contrite. Right?

Governor Daniels's office released this statement about a Marion County judge's ruling in the state's welfare modernization lawsuit against IBM:

"Here's what matters: Indiana, which eight years ago had the nation's worst welfare system, now has its most timely, most accurate, most cost effective and fraud free system ever. That was always the goal, and changing vendors was essential to achieving it. We'll seek and expect a reversal, and either way, it's all been well worth it to solve the problem we set out to fix."

Mitch Daniels: Financial Wizard, so long as he gets to set the rules, do the judging, and is the only participant.

• Speaking of Mitt Romney, if posting has seemed a little light around here, it may be due in part to my utter befuddlement at how the Republican party managed, somehow, to nominate its true, distilled essence despite the fact that Stupidity still outpolls Cupidity 3:1.

Look at the goddam list of people who've held the GOP national standard since Eisenhower. Richard Nixon is responsible for half the aggregate IQ.

Honestly, if Mitt Romney isn't the textbook example of how wealthy families, which in their accustomed fiefdoms sent their idiot children into the clergy, now send them into finance, it's only because George W. Bush got there first.

• David Brooks had written the same column like six times in a row before he decided to do one of his Damning With Faint Damns Which Prove I'm A Moderate numbers on the President Friday. Somewhere among those was this nugget:

One thing is for sure. As Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has said again and again, it’s not enough to say that capitalism will make you money. You can’t fight what is essentially a moral critique with economics.

Right. You have to buy it, and figure out how to write it off as a loss.

Jesus. Money is your only fucking argument, and your point is that you deserve most of it. Isn't the correct formulation "You can't fight what is essentially a moral critique when you're a amoral shitbag at the core" ?

• Indianapolis, under proto-Teabagger Mayor Lt. Col. Gomer F. Ballard, has decided to take a run at hosting the 2018 Super Bowl, since the total bullshit about how much money "we" made on this years' went down so easy.

My favorite bit, so far: the local teleprompter readers dutifully sounding out the "fact" that the $2 million campaign won't actually cost us anything, because that's how much money we saved on snow removal this year.

• Chuckles Krauthammer disproves the Prez:

Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad.

Can we make a simple request? If you're of a certain age, and you didn't own an Apple product until the middle of the Naughts, shut th' fuck up about Steve Jobs. In fact, shut up about him, regardless. Your American success story is Bill Fucking Gates. Or Sam Fucking Walton. If you don't eat at McDonald's four times a week you have no right to tout our exceptionalism. If you do, save your breath, and say your prayers.


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* Slight exaggeration of Daniels' petition. Very slight.