To War with the Pundits We Have

National political pundits rarely have much useful to say. In the heyday of blogging twenty years ago, it seemed to me that blogger amateurs were statistically more likely to be accurate than Cokie Roberts or Ruth Marcus or Tom Friedman or.... Or maybe I just chose well from the frothy, overflowing, mad-dog blogosphere.

Now that corporate mass media has retaken political punditry, it's even more true that the paid pundits are terrible at presenting the least tiny insight. Sure, they know that Joe Biden is old, and it's an easy column to write about that again and again and again. To be sure, Biden gives them plenty of chances to observe his age -- a news hook!

Because Trump floods the zone with Steve Bannon style bullshit, the national punditry hasn't settled on his epithet. May I suggest the Mafia Don of MAGA? Use that in every piece about him like "but he's 81" or "but her emails".

At present, the same punditry that touted Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley a month ago as alternatives to Trump wants to push Haley out of the Republican Primary race with the Mafia Don of MAGA. As ever, pundits fail to understand why anyone besides the Don of MAGA is still in the race. James Pindell of the Boston Globe continues his lame attempts to analyze this political race from any other perspective than a seventh grader's.

All along, the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary has been very simple: DeSantis and Haley have wanted and planned from the very beginning of their well-funded but poorly-voted campaigns to be there to pick up the pieces when the Mafia Don's Teflon finally starts sticking to every bit of ketchup he can fling at a wall.

Campaigns are almost never a sure thing. Shit happens during the campaign, turning obvious winners into unlucky losers or obvious losers into lucky winners. Trump won his first campaign, despite his obvious loserdom. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and won. Hillary Clinton lost because of Trump's free media and James Comey's October surprise (as well as a huge dollop of misogyny). John Kerry lost because he was so bad at politics he failed to respond to the dishonest attacks of the Bush/Cheney campaign.

In the immortal words of Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say what the f*ck. That's what DeSantis and Haley have obviously been doing. Mafia Don is a chaos agent, and sometimes chaos agents face-plant, even when the Republican base is immune to reason and to its own gag reflex.

It might've worked, if only Merrick Garland had appointed Jack Smith in the spring of 2021.

Too thick to be shamed

President Obama hugged Nina Pham. In the Oval Office!!!

All the wingnut chicken littles who've been fanning fear of ebola are probably too out of their minds with cowardice to notice that Obama's message to them is:

I'm not only smarter, calmer, and better informed, I'm much braver than you crybabies.

Right-wing media's purpose is to keep its consumers outraged and afraid so that they don't notice the con and keep swilling the bullshit and voting for its purveyors.

We used to say, "The stupid, it burns." Evidently not. I wish it did, but it wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all be Fox "News" personalities.

The real Massholes

They're going to fight for their right to make you sick.

“Who does the EPA think they are to tell us what we can and can’t do with our vehicles?” Wedge said.

The vast majority listen to Rush, I'd guess.

Next up, shitting in the public water supply.

Renee Loth fail

After getting results from my town in the Massachusetts special election to replace former Sen. John Kerry, I tuned in WBUR for a little NPR vamping until the full results were in. Renee Loth, late of the Boston Globe, managed to offer a couple of factoids in the space of five minutes that were bullshit:

1. Turnout was poor in the 2010 Senate special between Scott Brown (R-dang, I should have taken on Markey) and Martha Coakley (D-what's a fen weigh?).  For a special election in January, turnout was immense - 54%.
2. Elizabeth Warren (D-could you be President please) ran in a "rematch" against Scott Brown. Sheesh, she and Coakley are both petite, middle-aged blondes, but that's like saying Markey's race against Gomez, another specialty-coat-wearing handsome guy was a rematch against Brown, which would be stupid.

There was another one, but after basketball and beer, I don't remember it. If only Loth had had the stones to acknowledge her lack of memory.

Private equity, public inequity

Why does it matter that Gabriel Gomez (R-private equity) took a $280,000 tax deduction on the facade of his home? Don't we all try to squeeze every last dime off our tax bills? Isn't that the good ole American way?

No, and here's why.

The Town of Cohasset values Gomez's property at a little more than $2,000,000. (Go here and search for parcel 27-094.  It's actually not his any more, as he sold it for $1 to his wife in 2008.) This value matches up with Zillow's current estimate, which makes Zillow's 2005 estimate of value credible. Zillow has tended to inflate the market anyway, which would work to Gomez's advantage.

Taking Zillow's 2005 number of $2.3 million, Gomez's tax deduction was over 12% of the total value of his property, pretty extreme. It gets worse when you realize he's valuing the appearance of the facade only, not the twelve bedrooms or the five bathrooms or the land.

Then, it turns out, as the Boston Globe reports, that Gomez's alteration of the facade was already restricted by a town bylaw and thus not his to donate.

One specialist in conservation easement law, Scott Knott, a tax partner in The Ferraro Law Firm in Washington, D.C., said that if easements mandated by local laws are already in place, homeowners have nothing to claim as a tax deduction.

“The key is the valuation of the easement and if there is already a restriction on the property, the value is not diminished by the easement,’’ said Knott. “The value of any easement that has the same restriction already in place is zero.’’

If you want to go all Fifth Amendment on me, you're too late to make the town's bylaw a taking. Gomez bought the house in 2004, well after the establishment of the Cohasset historical district in 1996. So Gomez bought the property with restrictions already on it, and those restrictions necessarily would have figured in the price he paid for it. (Of course, living in a historic district generally raises property values instead of lowering them.)

OK, Gomez's spokesman said, but now he can't sue for relief if the Cohasset Historical Commission won't let him make a change. Except, he can still seek relief in court.

Like Ann Romney's tax deductible horse hobby, this is an outrage of sharp abuse of the tax code. No legitimate public purpose is served by it, just the enriching of the already wealthy out of the public treasury.

This is who Gabriel Gomez became by descending into private equity. Don't the plutocrats already have enough people in Congress - especially in the Senate - whose avowed purpose is to help the wealthy grab even more of the nation's income?

We in Massachusetts took a brave step forward in electing Elizabeth Warren. Gabriel Gomez would work to destroy every single thing that Warren is accomplishing in Washington.

We simply must reject Gomez's candidacy and elect Ed Markey.

Semper Fi

(h/t Boston Globe)

Media performance after the Boston Marathon bombing

Or, should I say, non-performance?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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My observations:

• CNN really truly sucks at journalism.  cnn.com, though, is still a useful source of breaking news.
• Fox I avoid on general principles, but they can manage breaking stories in between the toxic bigotry of their opinion personalities. I watched a little Shepard Smith on Monday while the story was still news and not yet another opportunity to push invidious delusions into the puke funnel of the VRWC.
• MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is vital for background. Her competitors who lean backward into infotainment breathlessly reported on pressure cooker bombs, as if everyone knew what that meant. She actually reported it.
• Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times web sites failed. To judge by the Globe's subsequent removal of access controls, they may lack enough oomph in their user authentication servers.
• NECN was o.k. for a while, but then reported that Boston was being evacuated on the strength of one cop with a bullhorn. Panic, people, panic! But keep watching!
• Any media outlet that gives Alex Jones a platform cannot be trusted.
• Infotainment is the norm:

Something to remember before a premature victory lap

Former governor William F. Weld and former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey also said they would not run, leaving few strong options for Bay State Republicans hoping for a victory in the June 25 special election.

Scott Brown (R-stop Obamacare) was a long-shot State Senator of little distinction when he ran - a campaign 40 times as large as any he had ever run. He was blessed by facing the worst campaign ever from Martha Coakley.

Coronations are dangerous in a democracy. In more ways than one.

Make way for wingnuts

Scott-free Brown (R-#bqatevwr) is out of this year's Senate special election, leaving the Republican Party crestfallen and abandoned at the altar.

Can you really blame Brown?

Democrats are primed and ready. A whole shit-ton of us will have to age off and die before we ever take such an important election for granted again. Don't get me wrong, we'd almost all prefer not to have to go door to door in winter. But we would do it.

Brown's favored chair of the GOP State Committee barely squeaked into office after significant arm-twisting from him. Seriously, would you go down with this ship of wingnut fools?

Brown can make gobs of money speaking to conservatives. Wingnut welfare is a gravy train he could get fat and happy on, much moreso than another sojourn in the Senate. He never wanted to accomplish anything beyond stopping Obamacare (fail!) and watering down financial regulation (lost to Elizabeth Warren, prime advocate of good regulation - epic fail). Why would he want to be in the same room with the divas of the U.S. Senate?

Brown has fundraised and glad-handed and stumped waaay more than any human ought to enjoy. I know I'd be burnt out from it if I faced it.

Hell, getting a private sector job and massaging the clients' egos for some law firm and making half a mill could be just the ticket.

Brown may find he misses his old life not at all.

The Massachusetts Republican Party, however, is likely to miss a conservative who voted for most everything Mitch McConnell needed him to vote for. They're going to have a raft of crazy right-wing wingnuts, which is arrant stupidity in a state already dominated by Democrats.

If you can't beat 'em, co-opt 'em

Huge financial institutions thought they could get off Scott-free. Oops.

Now they want to make nice with Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren (D-their worst nightmare).

“They’ll do what big companies always do,” said [David D’Alessandro, former chief executive of John Hancock]. “They’ll say, ‘The election’s over and what contortions do we have to perform to get on her good side?’ I’m sure they’re already figuring out which lobbyists might get in good with her, how to get their chief executives to have breakfast with her.”

It's not as though Warren is Che Guevara! Plutocratic fatcats tried during the election to portray her that way, but she is fair-minded, probably already inclined enough to cooperate with legitimate economic and local interests. She understands, if anyone this side of Barney Frank does, that an honest financial services industry is in fact critical to an equity-financed economy.

Warren just believes that banking should be free of extortion, fraud, skimming, and outright theft.

Only a crony capitalist could argue with that.

Another lie

I've been too busy canvassing for Elizabeth Warren to post anything, but...

Here's a backgrounder on Warren that I had a moment to read today.

Mixon, the Houston professor, who often had lunch with Warren and became an early mentor, recalled how Warren made an impassioned speech not long after she was hired about her belief in the “middle-class values” of hard work and honesty.

The wingnuts and other fans of Scott-free Brown (R-McDreamy) will miss that paragraph. After all, it shows Warren as authentic, and they can't get that into their addle-pated thoughts.

I'm looking for them to call her a liar because she so obviously once was brunette and now is blonde.

Although that does make Native American ancestry more credible in their superficial view of the world...

Maybe they'll decide she's vain. Never mind she's up against pretty boy.

Retroactive retirement

According to Mitt R-money's latest lame spin, he didn't retire from Bain Capital until 2002, but he backdated his retirement to 1999.

What I want to know:

Did he give back the money his ownership of Bain made him after 1999?

Nothing Mitt ever says is trustworthy.

Dog bites

The Boston Globe has the scoop!

The top “super PACs’’ supporting Republicans in the fall elections have raised more than three times as much money as super PACs aligned with Democrats, $158 million to $47 million, a Globe analysis shows.

Ho-hum. About as surprising as bad hair on Donald Trump...

Free market fundamentalist

Curt Schilling suckled at the public teat and now blames the state of Rhode Island for his own failure to live up to his obligations:

38 Studios, which was lured to Rhode Island from Massachusetts in 2010 with a $75 million loan guarantee from the EDC, laid off its entire workforce last week, including about 300 employees in Providence and more in Maryland. The state would likely be responsible for some of 38 Studios’ debts should it collapse.

The firm’s financial troubles came to light this month when it defaulted on a $1.1 million payment to the EDC that was due May 1. The company later paid — but only after first delivering a check that it acknowledged soon after would not clear.

I enjoyed his pitching - on the diamond, not when it turned to shilling for products or conservative politicians. Now we can expect many more curt statements in which his ideology and his self-interest trump consistency.

Good for Massachusetts, again. We didn't give into his pressure for a sweetheart deal.

Class warfare - the winners

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Shorter Boehner

It's the President's fault that the House Republican caucus won't compromise on anything.

In a letter sent out earlier to House lawmakers, [Speaker John Boehner] blamed Obama for the deterioration of the talks, saying that the president insisted on including tax increases.

“It became evident that the White House is simply not serious about ending the spending binge that is destroying jobs and endangering our children’s future,’’ Boehner wrote. “A deal was never reached and was never really close.’’

“In the end, we couldn’t connect,’’ he added. “Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.’’

Holding one of our federal government's three main political institutions, the Republicans want to make radical changes in an 80-year-old vision of the country. And they'll hold their breath until they turn blue to do it, ignoring the damage to the economy that they will do.

Of course, it has been obvious to me for three and a half years that they were willing to sabotage the economy for political gain. The oblivious voters rewarded the screaming infantile Republicans in 2010. Why would they be measured, mature, and responsible now?

It's going to be a long downhill ride.

Quality of wingnut reason

I know. Debunking Jeff Jacoby is like striking out a kindergartener with a high hard one. It makes you feel like the pre-adolescent asshole who's barely passing 7th grade but gives the short-bus kids a hard time just to feel superior to someone, anyone.

Jacoby's got nuthin'. Well, he has reflexes, sure, I'll grant that. But hardly any higher function.

He hangs his whole column on a thin tissue of thoughts that any intelligent sixth-grader could refute. For example:

No one was a fervent proponent of gay marriage 44 years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws barring whites and blacks from marrying were unconstitutional.

Hmm. While we're in the argument-by-introspection wayback machine, let's venture back another forty-four years before Loving v. Virginia. No one was a fervent proponent of interracial marriage in 1923. Or, at least, not for very long before they were fucking lynched.

This is the quality of wingnut reason - debunked as easily as falling out of a kayak and hitting water. Yet the Jacobyns will continue their claims that gay marriage doesn't feel like marriage to them. Because they can't do the complicated moral reasoning of the golden rule, so they have to fall back on their stunted, childish intuition of what's icky to their daddy.

Near the end, Jacoby makes a prediction:

The new laws in New York and some other states authorizing same-sex marriage may be destined for a long run as well, but I suspect they too will likely eventually collapse.

I suspect Jeff will likely continue to be a reflexive right-wing doofus with a silly boy's scraggly beard. Therefore, he will be. (Yeah, bullshit as reasoning, even if it's probably going to come true.)

Then the capstone:

Marriage — male-female marriage — is indispensable to human welfare. That is why it has existed in virtually every known human society. And why it cannot be permanently redefined.

Which of course is why we're so keen to hang onto polygamy - have to keep that permanent definition out of Jacoby's own Torah. Or why the specific, wife-protecting strictures on a just divorce in the Old Testament (reacting to a previous social norm of disposing of menopausal wives, you think?) have given way to fundamentalist covenant marriage. Unchanging? Ask Britney Spears. Ask Henry VIII, for Christ's sake.

This banal crap passes for reasoning in today's ascendant conservatism. Just fucking shoot me now.

Wait, you mean torture's a crime?

Apparently, torture is illegal. Who knew the U.S. would prosecute it?

Torres said that if Nezirovic is convicted of the naturalization fraud charges, the immigration office will take him into custody and start deportation proceedings after he serves any prison sentence handed down by the federal judge. ... Nezirovic could then be tried for detainee abuse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Torres said.

Oh, it's not the torture, it's the lying.

Take arms against a sea of troubles

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Tongue in cheeks

I've tried to think of a dick joke subtle enough to be original. But I haven't. Too oxymoronic a quest. So...



Really, what kind of narcissistic prick photographs his own penis? Right, self-answering...

Of course, we all know that every woman in western civilization wants one thing above all else, and that's high-res digital pix of what has to be the least aesthetic visible part of the male body. If you're so in love with your own package that you want to show it to everyone, chances are you're also very proud when you make doo-doo in your diaper.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-putz) could have sent around pictures of his tongue. Take a lesson from Ashley Dupré - she's a pro, after all. From a man, a lingual shot would have been evidence of a sense of humor and an eagerness to please at the same time. That could have brought thumbs up on the online dating sites. (Up where? The P spot? How does that geometry work?)

Look yet again at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. A Democrat commits ludicrous peccadilloes, and that's enough to provoke hissing fleeing abandonment. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich (R-when's Callista's expiration date?) is a serial and ugly adulterer in the party of abstinence, and yet his political people only abandon him because he's mailing it in from a luxurious cruise in the Mediterranean and is too lazy to do the work of touching hoi polloi in Iowa.

Weiner is tweeting his 'nads, while Gingrich wants to tweet his ads. Oh, and Gingrich is fatter than Al Gore, but the media are forbidden from noticing.

Last, I am forced by my contract with the Bloggers' Labor Organization (protector of American BLO jobs) to observe that this is David Vitter watch, day 1441. After getting caught in prostitution scandals twice, which by the way is a crime, unlike tweeting your shlong, however weird that may be, Vitter got re-elected as a family values Republican, and the republic hasn't fallen. Yet.