Slow learning media

 So... Trump is going to refuse later contributions from people who give Nikki Haley money. Riiight!

The first rule of evaluating a Trump statement, which the media ought to have figured out long ago is:

Is he bullshitting?

Because he's almost always bullshitting. He has no loyalty at all to the truth, but he's not always lying. Mostly, he's bullshitting, shining on, gaslighting. His bullshit tomorrow will often be just the opposite of his bullshit today. He'll say something like, "Thousands and thousands of Haley contributors have come over to MAGA, believe me."

Naturally, any time he says "believe me", you shouldn't.

Srsly, can you imagine this greedy, venal man refusing to take money from anyone? If George Soros had a stroke, entirely lost his open society principles, and offered money to the Orange Mussolini, you know if you've been paying attention and have half a brain in your head, that Trump would snatch it out of his hand in a New York minute.

After all, he's got a rape victim to pay. You don't think he's going to do that with his own money, do you?

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.

Business failures

Businesses and business people frequently think of themselves as rationally self-interested. They used to add the word enlightened, but they don't much any more. That's so retro, an anachronism of a time before shareholder value became everything, before greed was good, before Ayn Rand told them they were virtuous to be bastards.

But, are they even rationally self-interested?

I see a local gas station with a sign supporting the end of automatic indexing of the gas tax to inflation. Is that really in their interest? I remember 1991, the previous time the gas tax went up 3 cents. All - and I mean all - gasoline retailers raised their prices 6 cents. Indexing gives them the chance to gouge every year, not just every 20 something years.

Democrats manage the economy better for growth, jobs, GDP, and the stock market. The Koch brothers have made their vast fortunes tremendously vaster with Barack Obama as President, yet they hate him and all Democrats to the tune of a billion dollars. It's not rational, just their ideology.

The stock market has done tremendously during the Obama administration, yet investment businesses want more. More, more, always more. It's clear the banks won't be satisfied unless every fraudulent, high risk, socialized risk/privatized profit "innovative product" that steals from honest people is permitted. Yet they're making huge profits, just not enough to feed the tapeworm of Randian bullshit economic feudalism.

Export businesses should look at their international competitors and come out for single-payer health care. They need that huge drain off their books and on someone else's. Nope, after supporting Obamacare when it was still Heritagecare, they're looking to dump what coverage they offer - despite Obamacare's early successes at slowing the growth of health insurance costs.

Businesses and business owners prefer weak government because that's their ideology, not because it's better for their businesses. Weird.

More stupid shit

Apparently, I provide tag lines to the White House.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton believes in magic, at least for electoral purposes.

This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

No, it's not an organizing principle.  It's a minimum standard.  One we've been regularly fucking up for the better part of three and a half decades.

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.

Apropos of nothing

Why would anyone pay any attention to anything Sarah Palin says?  The husky that lives next door makes more intelligent noises.

Yet our vacuous media still thinks she has something to offer.

I blog pseudonymously so I can keep using the word bullshit

You never know what sanctions you'll suffer for your opinions or for your language.

Also, too, I can still say fuck. These insane teabagger days, the ability to say fuck without being punished for it in real life is pretty helpful to my continued insouciance in the face of conserfative infestations and the general inability of our politics and our press to deal with evidence.

Syrian Second Amendment

Click image for full Mark Fiore/Mother Jones animation.

It's your fault if a bullet kills you

Not enough dead yet.

By their fruits

Or, in this case, by their fruitcake ideas.

I'm not even sure all these wingnut Republicans really truly believe global warming is natural.  Oh, sure, Michele Bachmann is vacuous enough to believe it, and so do many of the others, especially the idiots who've gone to fundie schools and have not even a passing acquaintance with science, at least not as anything other than a source of evil-ution and a punching bag for bullshit fundamentalist denial.

But surely some of these deniers are intelligent enough to understand the data.  Those are worse than the sincere deniers.  They are simply hypocrites who know what they have to say to be viable Teapublicans.

The fact that success in one of the two main American political parties requires a declaration of one's own stupidity - because so many of its base voters have chosen denial as their core epistemic principle - is truly frightening and a far greater existential threat than terrorism could ever be.

No way to change the climate

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There is simply no answer the teabaggers, denialists, oil tycoons, and wingnuts will ever accept.

What the shit is he putting in his tea?

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo New cartoon.

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.

Loyal opposition would care about facts

The Republicans are interested only in their own power. Yet another faux scandal, this time the IRS's so-called targeting of teabaggers, has crumbled:

Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.

It was obvious from the beginning that the IRS personnel in Cincinnati were using search terms - the way anyone facing a large backlog of work would - to screen for high-priority work. If you don't do this, you're not getting the right work done. You're treating every task as equal in priority and equally likely to pay off. In short, you're an idiot piece-worker.

Republicans should have known this before going after scalps. Instead, they contrived exposure of only the part of the story that fit their apocalyptic victimology. I have no evidence whether they knew and deceived us or whether they simply didn't ask. Those are the two options, and either is unforgivable for the House Oversight Committee and its chair, Darrell Issa (R-police record).

It's long past time we acknowledged that their opposition to Barack Obama goes well beyond honorable, time-honored loyal opposition. They are not loyal to Americans, only to their extremist supporters.

Alas poor Yobama

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Selling soap

The conservative movement is founded on twin implausible literary pillars.

One is Ayn Rand's fictional philosophy, epitomized by the execrable and ridiculous Atlas Shrugged. Calling it literary immediately demands an episode from Leonard Pinth-Garnell.

The other is an ossified literal reading of a notoriously dated translation into English of the bible. At least it has true literary merit, but anyone who labels it the inerrant word of god is either whoppingly ironic or resolutely opposed to learning. The King James translation was done a millennium and a half after the New Testament was written, written often by authors who lied about who they were and whose works have been canonized more theologically and politically than historically.

It's no surprise then that conservative Republicans in the House today spin tales they can't substantiate to outraged true believers.

Congressional investigators have not produced evidence to link the harassment of conservative groups to the White House or to higher-ups in the Obama administration. But the lack of evidence that any political appointee was involved hasn’t stopped the lawmakers from assuming that it simply must be true. And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.

Americans love soap operas. Who cares that these daytime dramas are at best semi-plausible half-truths!

Coors lights their way

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

Bonus joke:  Why is Coors Light like sex in a canoe?  Punchline in comments...

Gullible audience

Fox lies all the time, although you do have to ask whether "Fox and Friends" - the show that dominates the news stupidity in a media landscape that's filled with media stupidity - knows for sure that their bullshit is bullshit.

Here's another lie from Roger Ailes's right-wing propaganda machine:

Fox deceptively edited Obama's answer to only include the portion of his response in which he discusses long debunked myths related to the talking points, removing the beginning of Obama's answer to the question about the Benghazi attacks and the related talking points. 

Obama began his response by saying that "Americans died in Benghazi." He followed by asserting that he wanted to ensure that a similar situation doesn't happen again and that the assailants would be "held accountable."

If you watch Fox and believe it, I don't understand how you actually have enough sense to make a living and not get fleeced out of it by retail scam artists. There are a couple of possibilities:

• You live in a group home with a guard at the door.
• You like being lied to because otherwise you'd have to cope with a complex world whose complexion is not to your liking.
• You're so fearful you can't think straight.

Does Brian Kilmeade remind anyone else of Emily Litella?

By the way, did you know that the word gullible isn't even in the dictionary? Probably another Obama conspiracy...

Pier reviewed

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On a serious note, the corruption of science by conclusions favorable to the powerful continues.

Update: If you want details, see Business Insider.

First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

Rationalizing extremism

The Heritage Foundation doesn't exist to research credible conservative alternatives. It exists to provide pseudo-intellectual claptrap to paste a fig leaf over the nasty bits of wingnut prejudice. Heritage proposed Obamacare in the 1990s, only to go full metal jacket on it when a Democrat proposed it.

Same on immigration:

[T]he study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically.”

The wingnut bullshit artists are in charge, and they need to keep the rubes inflamed so that they don't notice it's the plutocracy who are screwing them.

Update: My man Paul Krugman agrees with me. Usually it's the other way around.

The truth is that Heritage has never been in the business of doing economic analysis; it’s just a propaganda agency posing as a think tank.