Sanity goes tits up

Click image for full Matt Bors/United Media cartoon.

Michelle Obama linked to huge increase in bullshit

Ordinary statistical variation?  Never heard of it.

Michelle said, "Walk."  More pedestrians are dead.  QED!

Wingnut liars:  It's her fault we have to tear her down with bullshit.  It was a slow news day.  Why didn't she wear something sleeveless?  If global warming were real, she could, even in January.

Honestly, the bullshit that Americans will listen to and lend credence is so vast and odiferous that there's no chance of us ever composting it all.  Ya think we could make it our comparative advantage over the Chinese?  They don't seem to have our abilities in this line of manufacturing.

Conservatives traffic constantly in lies.  Their moronic followers believe the most obvious bullshit.  Why wouldn't their heroes keep lying to them?  More tax cuts for the liars!

Independence

Getting the kinks out

Click image for full Jen Sorenson/C-VILLE Weekly cartoon.

Outrage, fine

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.

The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.

"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.

Other countries have different answers.

"There is no way to defend this heinous incident," Alheli Picazo of Calgary, Canada, told CNN by phone. "People often claim their right to free speech to mask blatant racism and insulting bigotry, and always seem to get away with it. When it comes to issues of discrimination, hiding behind free speech just doesn't cut it."

I greatly prefer our ironclad First Amendment guarantees.

Update (11/26): Clarity in the first paragraph.

Wrong lesson from history

When I read that Obama was warning against carbon tariffs, I had a couple of thoughts:

• The only way to equalize cost pressures faced by American manufacturers is to make sure that competing foreign products face them at the border.
• Of course, that same fairness rationale works against other ardent market-based sprints to the bottom - other environmental concerns, labor standards, etc.
• Smoot-Hawley. Raising tariffs in a recession is canonically bad.
• Tariffs blunt comparative advantage and thus the economies of globalization.
  

Good, I thought, Obama is thinking about job one, the economy. Without fixing the economy, there's no scope to fix anything else.

Only, no, these carbon tariffs aren't due to take effect until 2020. If the economy is still dead by then, only Michelle Obama will be eligible for the Presidency, and I'm sure Congress can remain true to form and delay them if need be.

Today, Krugman weighs in:

[I]n this case the non-economic objective is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, never mind their source. If you only impose restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from domestic sources, you give consumers no incentive to avoid purchasing products that cause emissions in other countries; as a result, you have an inefficient outcome even from a world point of view. So border adjustments here are entirely legitimate in terms of basic economics.

So, I've thought about this again, and I now see that the first two points outweigh the last two.

Point of another Mama Obama column

Ruth Marcus writes all kinds of stuff about Michelle Obama, but it all comes down to this:

She is, after all -- by résumé, anyway -- more Hillary than Jackie. But the painful paradox of campaign 2008 is that it came tantalizingly close to giving us an Ivy League-educated female lawyer in the Oval Office but yielded an Ivy League-educated female lawyer sketching out a supremely traditional first lady role.

Its meaning: This is Thanksgiving week and Marcus could write her column in an hour without the need for so much as a single phone call.

(h/t Atrios)

Looking for a wedge

The Bushists will be trying to find a way to muddy up Michelle Obama's wonderful speech last night. Here's a first attempt from Leslie Sanchez:

Is it the dress or what's in it? Michelle Obama covered the key milestones but the image of her in a cocktail dress left us wondering.

Cocktail dress? That's the best bullshit you can fling against the wall? Seriously, if that's a cocktail dress, you're not getting invited to the good parties. Too much boorish behavior, I would guess.

The vacuousness of the Bushists is always on display. If they have two brain cells to rub together, they're hiding it. They've got nothing.

Obama '16

Michelle.

We could not possibly get that lucky.

Updated with links 8/26.

And we thought irony was dead

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Remnick vs. Mencken

David Remnick defends the Republican wet dream cover of the New Yorker:

I think you underestimate the intelligence of the American people, to be quite honest.

H.L. Mencken's anticipatory rejoinder:

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

One of the fundamental problems trying to satirize the Republican view of the world is that it's too extreme to exaggerate. There's probably already an email circulating to credulous wingnuts that says, "Even the liberal New Yorker says that Obama is a flag-burning Muslim al Qaeda foreigner with a revolutionary for a wife." (Yeah, true, at a lower reading level and in all caps, but I'm paraphrasing.)

The medium is the message. Remnick went looking for publicity and got it. You think he might be cuing up McCain in Depends?

They couldn't print it if it weren't true

Last Sunday, Sally Jacobs in the Boston Globe profiled Michelle Obama's experience at Princeton. The piece as a whole was o.k., but one sentence on the front page before the jump galls the hell out of me:

Just last week the Barack Obama campaign took on an apparently baseless rumor that she had once been taped talking of white Americans as "whitey."

Responsible reporters and their editors do not report rumor, dammit! If the rumor becomes the story in this world of Drudge, they do not use weasel words like 'apparently', and they are professionally obligated to tell the back story. Instead, Jacobs let that sentence alone describe this bullshit smear.

Jacobs and the Globe failed on all counts.

No dirtying up the blonde

If Michelle Obama had done what Cindy McCain did, she would have gone to jail. That's just how race and money work in this country. The thing is, I'm sympathetic to people who are in pain, as Cindy apparently was, though I could understand it better if John had needed the stolen pain meds. (My sympathy doesn't extend to Rush Limbaugh, but he's another white wealthy who escaped the law.)

On the other side, I don't expect the right-wing slime merchants to show humane mercy toward anyone who's in their way.