I don’t hate Chris Christie because he’s fat. I actually feel sorry for people who are fat. To a large extent, I don’t think they have too much choice. Although I will admit, Christie allowing his weight to get as out of control as it did doesn’t speak especially well of him. But I have the same kinds of tendencies for letting my own life get out of hand. So I understand. But someone like Christie who has such public evidence of his imperfection would cause most people to have a bit of humility. But of course it doesn’t have that effect on Christie.

That’s what gets to the core of why I hate Chris Christie. He’s a jerk. He’s a bully. He’s a guy with lots of power and he abuses it. In my perfect world, we would put people like Chris Christie in jail. All the drug addicts could go on their merries and they could be replaced by people like Chris Christie and Dick Cheney. Well, Cheney should die soon enough—in fact, he should have died a long time ago. Who knows how many people died for lack of healthcare while Cheney has gotten all his extra healthcare that no one deserves—much less a man so directly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people. But enough about Dick Cheney.

It looks like we may get to see Chris Christie in jail after all. Scott Raab and Lisa Brennan reported today, Exclusive: Prosecutor Is Closing in on Gov Christie. It’s a fun article. It starts by quoting Christie in Utah last Saturday saying, “It’s over, it’s done, and I’m moving on.” That’s good PR, I guess. But with the new information, it sound a bit more like, “You ain’t never gonna get me, copper!”

US Attorney Paul Fishman has been quietly building a number of cases that circle around Christie. Much of it is not especially illegal, just sort of the typical stuff that we know that goes on when a bully is put in charge of anything. And at this point, nothing makes it quite to Christie. But the big news is that Fishman seems to have David Samson. You may remember him as the walking and talking conflict of interest who Christie trusted because he talked to him and Christie just has the power to know when people are telling the truth. Except when he doesn’t. According to one of the authors’ sources, “They’ve got him cold. He got sloppy, arrogant, and greedy.”

It all sounds like typical case building. From David Wildstein and Bridget Kelly, they’ve got Samson. Will Samson rollover on Christie. Well, he’s 74 years old and reported suffers from Parkinson’s disease. If he doesn’t rollover on Christie, he’s going to die in jail. So it’s looking pretty good that we will see Christie in jail. It’s an experience he richly deserves.

I have nothing against Chelsea Clinton. In fact, when she was growing up, I felt a bit sorry for her. The modern right-wing media echo chamber had only just come of age and its hatred of the Clintons went all the way down to the young girl. As I remember it, Rush Limbaugh seemed to take some relish in pontificating about her looks. That’s nothing especially surprising from that well known misogynist, but Clinton was only a young teen at the time—and one who her parents seemed to take care to keep out of the spotlight. So I’m inclined to like her.

But I was less than thrilled when she was hired by NBC News two and a half years ago. It was an especially ironic choice given that her mother had written a syndicated column when the younger Clinton went off to Stanford University (Of course!) asking that journalists leave her alone. But instead of using her history degree to do something useful like write books or teach people or even do original research, she decided to be on air “talent” for Brian Williams’ pathetic Rock Center where she did “serious” reporting like this interview with the Geico gecko:

Now friends, don’t get me wrong. I like fun. But this is a pathetic excuse for what someone who had literally every advantage in life has decided to do with her life. And now, according to Politico, we learn that for the first two years of her time interviewing animated corporate spokes-characters, she was paid $600,000 per year. They recently changed it to a month-to-month contract so I’m gonna guess $50,000 per month. Or is that too low? After all, she doesn’t have the job security that she had before.

Ain’t it great to live in a meritocracy?! Remember when she graduated from Stanford with honors and how that was a big story? Is it genetics? She has two smart parents after all! Or could it have something to do with the fact that she had every advantage growing up; she had the best teachers; and in college, she didn’t have to work one or two jobs?

Of course, NBC News doesn’t come out of this looking rosy either. Remember when they hired Jenna Bush for the Today show? But it is sad that America has an aristocracy that runs around telling us that we don’t have an aristocracy. You can do anything you set your mind to—if your father was President of the United States. And what do you set your mind to? Interview an animated gecko.

Chelsea Clinton by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Speaking of football, Jonathan Bernstein has long been making the argument that the Washington Redskins should change their name simply based on the issue of etiquette. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a whole lot of other issues, but you don’t even need to go there. The Native American community finds the name offensive. It’s as simple as that. So change the name.

Well, today I made the mistake of reading the comments of his most recent iteration of this argument, About That Washington Football Team. Well, apparently he has a troll that has nothing better to do than spout his ignorant opinions hour after hour. He goes by “Elesis” (a female name, but I don’t buy it) and I wouldn’t have even noticed him except that he kept making the same argument again and again and again.

And what an argument it is! Basically, “Sure ‘redskins’ can be a pejorative, but it isn’t a pejorative when the Washington football team uses it!” This is kind of like someone calling you “stupid.” When you complain, they say, “Hey, I know ‘stupid’ is generally a bad thing, but I don’t mean it that way when I refer to you that way!” In fact, here is an actual quote:

This made me think of a line from the film Pulp Fiction. What if Daniel Snyder decided that he wanted to name his team the “Washington Hard Pipe-Hittin’ Niggers”? I mean, in the movie, Marsellus doesn’t say that as a pejorative. He means he’s gonna bring in some hardcore guys who are going to “go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” I can hardly think of a better name for a football team that is going to open up a can of whoopass every time they hit the field!

By Elesis’ logic, that would be a perfectly fine name for a football team, “Rather than denegrating [!] African Americans, the Hard Pipe-Hittin’ N…..s (or just the N…..s for short) are in fact honoring them.” Why would African Americans have any reason to complain?

The only reason that occurs to me is that it is a totally racist name regardless of what Snyder and Elesis claim. And that’s be just as true of the Redskins as the Pipe-Hitters. So I think we can get rid of the whole idea that “Redskins” is an honorific moniker. I’m still with Bernstein: it’s just a question of etiquette. But obviously, for people like Snyder and Elesis, etiquette doesn’t matter. I think I’ve dispensed with the pejorative and racist arguments. I wonder what they’ll come up with next?!

I noticed something interesting in Dean Baker’s vicious but fair review, Stress Test: The Indictment of Timothy Geithner. It is a long and detailed review going point by point over how Geithner is nothing more than a hired gun for the banks who didn’t didn’t give two bits for actual homeowners or the real economy except in the sense that they might hurt his banker friends. Go read his article, or my discussion, Tim Geithner: Grifter of the Power Elite. But here I am interested in one very small thing.

I’m used to politicians cherry picking whatever data is useful to them. But Geithner is supposed to be an economist—sort of a scientist. I understand that in his book, he would want to present himself in the best possible light. But to be actively deceptive? That goes way beyond what is acceptable. He really is an evil little man.

Geithner provided a graph of housing prices up to 2010 and claimed that it was his policies that caused the rapid drop in prices to stop in 2009 and then start rising. But this was actually a bad thing. The reason the prices of houses stopped falling was because the administration provided an $8,000 new home buyer’s credit. I have friends who used this to be able to buy their first home, and that’s great. But what the policy did on the macro-scale is to create another mini-housing bubble. The truth is that home prices had not yet reached their correct prices.

But you would never know that because Geithner decided to end his graph at 2010. He left out the part of the graph that I’ve shaded in grey when prices when down by about 6.5%. And this is just the overall price of houses. As Bake pointed out, Minneapolis saw a fall of almost 29% and Atlanta saw a fall of almost 52%. So a lot of homeowners got really screwed and Geithner is being extremely deceptive about it:

Now to be fair, after 2012, house prices did finally start to increase. But that doesn’t change the fact that many people paid more for their houses than they should have. And it doesn’t change the fact that Geithner is a liar who will say anything and present data in a totally dishonest way just to make himself look good. But lest we forget: Geithner is part of the power elite. Incompetence and outright villainy are rewarded in the power elite because the power elite are always rewarded no matter what they do. See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz.

Where this photo comes from is a bit of a complicated story, and if you want the details, you can go to my sources, David Atkins’ article, Two of the Most Heartbreaking Photos You Will See All Year. The picture of two of the fathers of boys involved in the Isla Vista killings—one of the perpetrator and the other of one of his victims. Both boys are dead now, of course. They met on 1 June and the photos were just released. They are already working together to end gun violence. And the photos are heartbreaking.

Atkins wrote, “Any politician who looks into the eyes of these two men and does nothing to curb the proliferation of guns in America deserves universal scorn and public shaming.” Of course, we all know that. Sadly, we also all know that they will not get universal scorn and public shaming. In fact, it will work the other way around. Any politician (Republicans most especially) who even suggests that the smallest thing be done about gun violence will be publicly shamed. And as usual, the NRA will get their folks out to vote while the vast majority of people who want sensible gun restrictions will sit at home and watch as any politicians who does anything is thrown out of office.

This isn’t just an issue of the NRA being a lobbying group for gun manufacturers. It is also the case that there is a sizable group of people who are not only single issue voters, they are single letter voters. The NRA rates the candidate and the members vote for whoever happens to have a higher rating, even if the politician would get an F on every other issue that the NRA member cares about.

There were seven people killed at Isla Vista. There were 27 at Sandy Hook. And not only was nothing done after that shooting, there are a whole bunch of people who claim the shooting never took place. Really, enter “Sandy Hook” into Google, and it will offer you, “Sandy Hook conspiracy.” Enter “Sandy Hook shooting,” and it will offer you “Sandy Hook shooting fake.” The same thing doesn’t happen when you enter “Isla Vista shooting.” But give it time.

As I’ve argued for a long time, this isn’t about gun rights. After all, there isn’t a mass movement calling for the right to own flame throwers, bazookas, and nuclear bombs. This is a mass movement developed by the gun manufacturers’ lobby. This is all about profits. And it isn’t just guns. It’s everything. The rallying cry of the conservative movement ought to be, “Profits Before People!” Because that is what they think. Just to take a single example at random: over the last four decades, almost 2,000 coal miners died each year of black lung. Yet all we hear about is how coal companies might lose profits if we modernize our power plants.

I ask you: what are 30,000 gun deaths per year in this country compared to the $30 billion gun industry? That’s only a million dollars per person. Is a human life really worth a million dollars? To the people who make that money, the answer is clear enough: no.