Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

Sweet talk won't cover bullshit

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Too bad he never served his convictions. In federal prison.

Being ignernt was good enough for my daddy

It shouldn't be a surprise that Texas Teapublicans (i.e. the entire Republican Party) prefer ignorance - they've given us Duhbya and Rick Perry, not to mention a host of dismal ignoramus dinosaurs. From their state party platform (PDF):

American Identity Patriotism and Loyalty – We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive. We favor strengthening our common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.

Only white conservatives are allowed to nurture racial and ethnic alienation.

Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. 

We all know their standard is not the truth but the bible and the oil industry.

Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

That last sentence is the repeal of Head Start. They believe their faith-based constituents need more time to turn their children into credulous followers.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

They're not interested in a populace that can think, hell no. Too much ridiculous bullshit in their platform to subject it to the scrutiny of critical thinking.

It's an extremist document, and not just on education. In 22 pages, there are possibly four things I agree with, other than a few completely mom-and-apple-pie items.

(h/t Education Week)

Inanimatronic economics

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Where's Newto?

Republican primary voters do have a bit of discernment every now and then.

They know Mitt Romney's core principle is Mitt Romney, that he'll say whatever he thinks they want to hear.

They almost fell for Newt Gingrich (again!) because, even though Gingrich's core principle is also Newt Gingrich, he can pander to wingnuts with much greater certitude and vehemence than Milquetoast Romney. Then he started up all that moonbase bullshit, a future-oriented idea, although daft as nuthatch on moldy seeds. The fond, vicious wingnuts are oriented to the past - yes, a golden ideal theocratic past that never was. They've got no use for inspiration. The King James doesn't say anything about a moonbase!

Rmoney didn't kill off Gingrich (again!). The Republican base had a terrible shudder go up its (anti-)collective spine at the thought that maybe we libs are right about Newt, and he's grandiose, unreliable, and probably clinically manic. Not that they would want the last covered by health insurance...

So, Rick Santorum or Ron Paul? Or door number 3? If Jeb Bush rushes to the rescue, will Republicans even acknowledge that he has an older brother?

Not when the facts have a liberal bias

House Republicans: "We'd rather live in a fantasy than deal with facts."

The Peters Amendment would not have altered H.R. 3582 in any functional manner, it simply would had added the following factual findings section:

(1) On January 8, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that President Bush believed that the tax cut package enacted in 2001 and expanded in 2003 would “create additional revenues for the federal government and pay for itself.”
(2) Before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected gradually rising surpluses, from 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2001 to 5.3% of gross domestic product by 2011, with the federal government operating debt free by 2009.
(3) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have added over $2 trillion to budget deficits from 2002-2011.
(4) Despite signing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 into law, President George W. Bush’s administration had, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records” in 1939.
(5) From 2001 to 2009, gross domestic product grew at the slowest pace for any eight-year span since 1953.
(6) Median household income declined during the Bush Administration for the first time since 1967, when this data began to be tracked.

Which is more embarrassing, denying brute incontrovertible facts or acknowledging them when your entire
platform depends on ignoring them?

Duh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

The fraud of Republican debt hysteria

On their watch, they didn't give a shit about the deficit:

The money quote:

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.

Testify, brother, I mean, cousin

Why is it that American big media is so thin on brutal truth-telling such as this?

The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country's reputation.

...

What a nice club that is. A club of liars, cheaters, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites and ignoramuses. "A starting point for a chronicle of American decline," was how David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the current Republican race.

Remnick, even, is late to the party. The starting point of the chronicle of our decline was the Republican scandal-mongering response to Bill Clinton's election in 1992.

Update (12/5): Is help on the way for the redoubtable Paul Krugman? Thomas Edsall joins the growing chorus of those of us sick and tired of Republican lies:

Struggling to justify a recent television spot that reached new heights of deception, a top operative in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign put it plainly, while insisting on anonymity:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Margin of victory

When you're fighting a class war against freeloading workers, this has to warm the cockles of your heart:

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent ($66,384 compared to $58,506).

If only this were hyperbole

The Republican Party has a fetish for crazy.  Hunter nails it on DailyKos:

Make no mistake here, I haven't ever forgiven you for Bush. Listening to that dimwit speak for five minutes should have convinced you what a mistake it would be to let that barely functioning manchild play with the entire free world like it was his personal Jenga game, and his first few public appearances were when you and I parted ways for-freaking-ever. But Perry, now? Rick Perry, who is the dumber version of George Bush? The less principled version? The less eloquent version? If that's who your leading pundits wanted in the race, if that's the be-all, end-all conservative savior (emphasis on the end-all, I guess), then who is it going to be after eight more years? A goddamn vase full of geraniums?

It makes you look bad. It makes you look dumb. It makes you look like, well, like a party so thoroughly detached from their mental capacities that they would actually look up to a guy like Rick Perry as being their brain trust.

I could have quoted any of a dozen other paragraphs. (But not geraniums - too gay - instead a barn full of tobacco.)

Ron Burgundy without his earpiece

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2012 - Mercy Rule Edition
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Karl Rove on an earwig to Duhbya is now even more plausible. But Rick Perry doesn't have Rove.

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Debasing the brand

It's an inevitable result of capitalism that every quality brand is doomed eventually to debasement. (In Boston, Filene's De-Basement.) The reputation one entrepreneur has built will, in the depth of some business downturn, become the easy asset that some lazy bastard can exploit. This B-school grad will work the numbers and think he's an entrepreneur.

Fox owns National Geographic TV, which for no apparent reason from its origins is reporting on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, exploring the execrable Duhbya's memories of that day and time. The teasers for their show bear all the marks of soft propaganda.

I knew from the day I learned that Fox had bought Nat Geo that it too would become a propaganda vehicle. We'll see for sure tomorrow whether that has indeed happened.

Idiocracy, the sequel

If enough idiot voters once again form a majority in 2012 and elect this weak echo of Duhbya, I'm seriously going to get to work on that exit strategy. Belize, I think, or Costa Rica. I had a little Spanish in high school decades ago.

(h/t mistermix on Balloon Juice)

Why Republicans whine it's the Democrats' fault

Because they're so damn delusional from the constant intake of their party's official bullshit that they can't remember who really screwed up.

Dy-nasty!

Click image for full G. B. Trudeau cartoon.

My trickle won't reach that far

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.












Update: Trickle-down cruelty:

All told, President George W. Bush added $4 trillion to the national debt - and there was no debate about raising the debt ceiling at that time, which was raised seven times. What is often missed in these discussions is that deficits have always been the objectives of hard right-wing Republicans and some equally conservative democrats who see them as an excuse for cutting social benefits and generating massive amounts of inequality that benefit the rich

Occasionally I worry

On general principles - that knowledge and insight are dispersed widely, that any organization large enough to be a coalition of interests is bound to make compromises against what's right for the benefit of what's possible, to name two - blind orthodoxy is almost always wrong. When you see Republicans who routinely passed debt limit increases under Duhbya hold the nation's credit-worthiness hostage under President Obama, you know they're rank hypocrites whose principle is not knowledge much less wisdom, but instead only what power they can derive from a political position.

How then can I claim that the Democratic Party and its interest groups are consistently right on every issue?

I can answer this question in three ways:

1. The Democratic Party is not consistently right on every issue. In fact, it's often badly wrong and compromised not just for practical gain but also morally. The Democrats are in bed with corporate lobbyists and the wealthy, just as the Republicans are. The difference is one of degree - Dems are bad, Repubs are actively evil.
2. The Democratic Party is in fact not liberal enough, and I've criticized it many times on that score.*
3. Democratic policies, politicians, and interest groups are reasonably often wrong. Republicans are decisively wrong in their platform. Democrats, like all humans, are subject to excess both personal and political.

To illustrate answer 3, I give you this municipal labor union overreach.

“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”

The purpose of labor unions is to gain a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, not to featherbed. Detailing five guys to walk along behind an asphalt paving machine with hand tools is a day's pay for a smelly stroll. I've heard conservatives use the phrase "unsustainable model" about all labor work rules, but that phrase surely applies to this.

Of course, it's a Democrat who's trying to reform his fellow Democrats.

* A second introspective question: Given answer 2, how do I differ from conservatives who said that Duhbya's greatest fault was his lack of sufficiently extreme conservatism?

Those teabaggers who started during the 2008 campaign to disclaim Duhbya on grounds that he was a moderate (oh, what bullshit) only did it when he was no longer useful to them, when they were facing loss of the government. I've been criticizing President Obama right along. Sure, I was euphoric that he had been elected, but I had believed him to be the least liberal candidate in the Democratic primaries, and I think events since his election - particularly putting Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of economic policy - have proven Obama to be a tepid centrist.

Conservatives march in lockstep when they hold power. Democrats and liberals debate, dissent, and compromise.

Why liberals think bigots prefer the Republican Party

Because they do.

Today at the supermarket, an asshole proud to be an asshole wore a T-shirt that said, "George Bush, Love him or hate him, he killed a ton of Arabs."

This is what the bullies want - not justice, not even law, they want to be the Whitey Bulgers of geopolitics. They want to be vicious, tribal, loyal, and most deadly. The ideals America was founded on? Who gives a shit about ideals? They want the realities - pogroms and genocide against native Americans, enslavement and abuse of forcibly imported Africans and their descendants, extirpation of all linguistic minorities, and elimination of everyone different in thought or behavior.

In short, scoundrels taking their last refuge in sociopatriotism.

Can't trust Republicans with money

The financial failures alone should have been enough to remove Darth and Duhbya from their locations, disclosed and undisclosed, to Leavenworth.  Because they abhor accountability of any kind, $6.6 billion was simply pilfered in Iraq.

Who knows how much of it was five-finger discounted by overpaid mercenaries from the likes of Blackwater (now Xe).

Maybe Ahmed Chalabi is thrilled not to have become President of Iraq.  It always seemed as though he was in the whole three card monte with the neocons in order to get rich.  Maybe it was just a failure of imagination on his part.  By now, he may realize that being President only paints a bigger bullseye on your chest.

Then there are the billions we spent putting coats of paint on rubble and calling it public works.  We could really use that money to create a few stopgap jobs right about now.