It begins:

Karen Handel was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. After graduating in May 1980 from Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, Handel attended both Prince George’s Community College and The University of Maryland but did not complete any degree. She then went to work for Hallmark Cards.

Hints. And glints. It begins, with the chunky teen’s college cocaine cruising and boozing, followed with not graduating, lou-wheez school is hard, and a glancing off the greeting card industry, plus an internship with the Marilyn/Wife of Dan/Quayle brain collective, then a subtle shirking at the Land’s End Peat Marwick, ascending to the Greater Fulton County Chamber of Commerce, the proactive non-profit business advocacy and community development organization with three principal objectives, who tasked her with running the operation whole shebang next big thing, where her trusted/best/only employee instantly embezzled every last nickel of the organization’s finances leaving Karen and Georgia’s job creators asscrack-slumped on the train tracks at the county line, feeding the crows.

Remember breast cancer?

But three sources with direct knowledge of the [Susan G.] Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new “no investigations” rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is “pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

Or should I say . . success?

In the 24 hours after the news broke, Planned Parenthood received more than $400,000 from 6,000 donors, followed by pledges of a $250,000 matching grant from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a $250,000 gift from a foundation run by the CEO of Bonanza Oil Co. in Dallas to replace the lost funding.

Four days later, Komen’s Board of Directors reversed the decision and announced that it would amend the policy to “make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political”. Several top-level staff members resigned from Komen during the controversy. In August, Brinker announced she would leave her CEO role. The number of participants at various Komen fundraising events dropped 15-30% in 2012, compared to the previous year. It is unclear whether this was because of the initial decision to defund Planned Parenthood or the reversal. Karen Handel, the Republican Brinker protégé whose opposition to abortion was at the center of the Planned Parenthood controversy, resigned and has published a book on the controversy titled Planned Bullyhood.

Well Chauncey. There goes a winner.

Former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel announced her campaign for Senate on Friday morning, as the state’s Republican convention was set to kick off in Athens . .

Handel is the fourth Republican to enter the race for the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss. Notably, she is also the first woman and first candidate who is not a member of Congress. GOP Reps. Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston are running.

Hmm. You think those guys might recall the years that she played banker to America’s abortion factory?

The [2010] primary campaign was particularly heated, and Karen Handel’s past membership in the gay rights group Log Cabin Republicans became an issue. When [Nathan] Deal used her membership against her, Handel denied that she had ever been a member of the group, which was an important and influential constituency when she was a commissioner. An investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution confirmed that she was on the Log Cabin Republican’s membership rolls in 2003 and 2004, and that she had signed a questionnaire affirming her support for domestic partnership benefits. Politifact rated her denial a “Pants on Fire” lie.

Ah, life. It’s a roller coaster in a shoulder-padded brocade jacket. Isn’t it?

It should be a terrific championship game. A clash between two great teams tonight. Well, I see the squads are entering the arena, so now would be a good time to make our introductions.

Now stepping on to the court, dressed in yellow and blue, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, would you please welcome the University of Michigan Rise To The Occasion®.

And at center court, dressed in red and white, hailing from Louisville, Kentucky, would you please welcome the University of Louisville Rise To The Occasion®.

A quick question for you fans. Why exactly does Adidas hold this tournament every year? They know they’re going to win, so why do they bother? Can’t they have the kids walk around on stilts, or do handstands atop a strobe-lit stage instead? Make them harangue the crowd with bullhorns, anything other than having them splinter their precious legbones for the benefit of Adidas Group Inc. and the NCAA? There’s got to be a more civilized way for good young men to make zero money out of this.

This was Bob Owens on Wednesday:

Clackamas
Written By: Bob – Dec• 12•12

It’s been a depressing day. As most of you aware aware by now, yesterday a defective 22-year-old missed a flight to Hawaii, or got his girlfriend pregnant, or maybe just realized how retarded he looked with idiotic gaping holes in his earlobes. Said douchebag stole a rifle [an AR-15 --ed.] from an acquaintance and shot up a mall in Clackamas, Oregon.

Bob on Thursday:

Billet Templar Custom for sale
Written By: Bob – Dec• 13•12

I’ve mentioned several times before my affinity for Templar Custom AR-15 rifles. I wrote about the Templar MCWS for Shooting Illustrated, and was impressed enough to pick up one myself.

While I didn’t have the cash to go all Victor Kiam and buy the company, I did just sign on to rebuild their website and work on their social media (consider this my disclosure and statement of complete and utter bias).

There is now a rare Templar in SPR configuration on Gunbroker if you want one of the best precision ARs built.

Bob on Friday:

Massacre in Newtown just the latest result of the culture of “violence for pleasure.”
Written By: Bob – Dec• 14•12

Our popular music is soaked to the brim with misogyny and glorified violence, especially rap and metal. Should it really be any surprise at all that the shooters are in the demographics that listen to this music? . .

We foist our kids off on popular media, filled with violence at every corner and every angle, while falsely telling them how precious each and every little thing they do is, and give them a participation trophy just for showing up. The end result?

A massacre. And Bob’s next bargain, of course, a sweet Bushmaster .223.

Oh look it’s Jack Welch. Former CEO of General Electric, high-profile denier of global warming, business titan revered by 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy. What’s on an industrial gobshite‘s mind today?

It’s True: Corporations Are People
By JACK AND SUZY WELCH

. . Of course corporations are people. What else would they be? Buildings don’t hire people. Buildings don’t design cars that run on electricity or discover DNA-based drug therapies that target cancer cells in ways our parents could never imagine. Buildings don’t show up at a customer’s factory and say, “We won’t leave until we solve your inventory problem.”

Buildings do leak cyanide across Madhya Pradesh, India, killing or permanently disabling 7,000 and injuring half a million. But if you want to blame Union Carbide for it, that’s a good start. Who can you arrest for the 9/11 of Bhopal, incidentally? Nobody. Because a storage facility’s wrists are too big for shackles. Still, the corporation paid out $2,200 for every child they poisoned and choked to death, so everything ended up square and legal. Union Carbide was consumed by Dow Chemical soon after, and a share of Dow stock was worth $29.71 at the close of trade yesterday. Time marches on, just like these lifeless entities that transcend fairness, jail and death.

Corporations are people working together toward a shared goal, just as hospitals, schools, farms, restaurants, ballparks and museums are. Yes, the people who invest in, manage and work for corporations are there to make a profit. . .

But most individuals working in corporations are regular people, people just like you and your friends and neighbors. People who want to make a living and want to make a difference.

Here’s the genius of Welch at work. Corporations have people in them, therefore they are people. This is disastrously wrong. Corporations have some features of the lives of American individuals, but they are not individuals per se.

It is well known that people make critical decisions based upon their essential nature: they are stuck with suffering. They are short-lived and they are dying. And everyone they know and love suffers the same way. Life’s pains and limitations are influential bargains. If the CEO of Union Carbide, or maybe the safety manager alone, had known they could be put in jail, to suffer, to be institutionally raped and then die, they’d have given the storage of cyanide the respect it richly deserved.

And while they’re doing that, people in corporations do indeed love and cry and dance. If you don’t know that, you’ve never been part of a team that has pulled together over coffee and late nights and shouting and laughing and created something amazing to hit a deadline. . .

Ever seen a flagellated bacterium under a microscope? Now that’s dancing. Still not people. Other entities that display life-like behavior without being American citizens? Ebola virus. Bacterial plague. Computer scams.

To further mock the corporate argument, consider all the people that, say, work at a Koch brothers subsidiary. How does it express the employees’ political speech when the CEO alone can donate the millions in profits they created? It doesn’t. What if they don’t like Karl Rove? Then they’re roundly screwed. And Domino’s Pizza? What if you like the taste of their pepperoni? Why should they be able to turn hungry folks’ money into anti-abortion TV advertisements by the hundreds or thousands? They shouldn’t. There’s a pretty good case to be made that vast money-multiplying entities are powerful parasites of the body politic. The Founding Fathers knew exactly what corporations were, but they chose to build a new political system centered around the concerns of the individual: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

. . this movement afoot that hates on business is craziness. It will destroy America as we know it because very few jobs get created in an environment that’s outright hostile to business. And without jobs, the whole thing falls down. It becomes a welfare state. We become a welfare state.

Corporations fail and we die, my the irony. Speaking of parasites, who is Suzy Welch? She’s the latest Mrs. Jack, about 2/3 his age. She’s best known for writing a corporatist manifesto done up in the rah-rah style. It is called “Winning: How To Fuck Jack Welch Right Out Of His Second Marriage And End Up Rich Wife Number Three.”

The Romney campaign releases a video where a former VP of that damned Kansas City steel mill, GS Technologies, essentially thanks Romney and Bain Capital for buying and bankrupting it. Hours later, they take the video down. Maybe talking about the loss of 750 jobs during a recession is a bad idea.

It’s another indication that the Romney team are confused. They very badly want to pound away at the “I’m a great businessman who will find you a job” message. But Romney the actual person isn’t that guy.

My reading of the facts (here, here) behind Bain’s handling of GST Steel is that they were very aggressive in manipulating the company for gain while the business environment was volatile. This included charging the company (which they owned) $900,000 a year to manage it. Bain’s typical behavior was a bad fit for a troubled company in difficult times.

The first thing they did was raise money by selling $125 million worth of bonds. What did they do to justify all that new debt? Gave almost all of the cash away in dividends to stockholders. Bain was the biggest stockholder of course, so it was paying itself handsomely for buying the business. The sizable dividend also sent a strategic message to the other well-off owners and potential investors, hedge and mutual funds: we are looking out for the rich guys. We will take care of the bottom line.

“Paying distributions with debt is not uncommon,” Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University, told Reuters. “The only thing that strikes me as a bit unusual is the size of the dividend. There would be logic in them saving some cash for a downturn.”

The grand scheme failed. They ran the business poorly, later saddled it with even more debt, and had no cash to survive the upheavals in energy costs and foreign competition. When the company went belly up, the management reneged on severance, pension and health insurance promises. You-know-who had to come in and bailout the workers, and only a little bit.

Seeing that, the Obama team pounced: “After purchasing the company, Mitt Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy.” Cue Politifact:

We found, through corporate filings, interviews and investigations by other news organizations, that the statement is accurate but needs some clarification. First, it’s true that Bain added significantly to GST’s debt load while paying dividends to itself. The plant’s closure, however, happened after Romney had left daily operations at Bain, though he led Bain during six years of its majority investment in the plant. And other, outside factors were at work, making the steel industry a tough business. Steel prices were low and electricity costs were high, and those forces drove other steel mills out of business around the same time.

The statement’s last two claims are solid: Bain (and Romney) made a profit from taking over GST, and the employees lost many benefits their union had negotiated, including supplemental pension payments. The federal government had to step in to shore up the fund.

We rate the claim Mostly True.

I find it odd that the Romney people would get anywhere near the GST Steel story. They’re either incompetent or deaf to the howls of pain coming from the working and middle classes. Bain was a very aggressive business even in the worst of situations, and this reminds us of so many other businesses, bankers and investment entities in particular, whose habits ended up decimating the economy.

Knowing the ease with which The Candidate Who Wasn’t There can disappear, you can guess his take:

“I take personal responsibility for making the investment,” Romney said in a statement at the time of the plant closure, according to the Globe. “But I didn’t manage these companies. Our philosophy at Bain Capital was to support management teams in companies where we saw potential for growth, or in companies that were in financial distress that we thought we might be able to save.”

And isn’t that odd? He’s running as a business wizard who’d like to personally find you a job, or a career. But all he’s ever been is a profit-driven mega-manager, a remote and reliable source of worker misery. His record puts the lie to his promises.