Lying to gain teabagger cred

Orrin Hatch (R-say anything to stave off an even more extreme wingnut) joins the Limbaugh lying liars:

"The top 10 percent are paying 70 percent of all income taxes. The top 50 percent pay something like 98 percent of all income taxes. Fifty-one percent don't pay anything," Hatch said.

"Democrats say they [the 51 percent] pay payroll taxes. Well, everybody does that because that's Social Security. They pay about one-third of what they're going to take out over the years in Social Security," Hatch said.

He knows this is intended to deceive. He knows the Democratic rejoinder is true. Still, he says the lie anyway.

The long dirt nap

What to hope for in Egypt?

The American media appeases its audience with just-so stories that make it appear everything could turn out, like, totally cool and schweet.

Friday’s protests were the largest and most diverse yet, including young and old, women with Louis Vuitton bags and men in galabeyas, factory workers and film stars.

Freedom-loving patriots of all stripes and walks of life!  They undoubtedly hope for freedom, free markets, and a life of peace seeking rapprochement with all other nations and religions.  It's the dawning of a new day.

This is the New York Times, so they follow up with a little un-Disneyfied reporting:

Street battles unfolded throughout the day Friday, as hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of mosques after noon prayers on Friday in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other cities around the country.

Something tells me that they're not going to have to suffer the outrageous wall of separation between church mosque and state.  Oh, snap!  If only Southern Baptists would riot just a little...

A dictator like Hosni Mubarak is like a loan from the mob.  The vig is tough to pay in the best of times.  Sometimes it might even be worth it.  But when the loan is past due, someone's going to start losing fingers.

It's hard not to sympathize with the heady feeling of Egyptians, who are no longer too afraid to shout what they want, who have reached the point where they can boil over and they know that Mubarak can't liquidate them all.  Realists on this side of the world should remember how an organic revolution worked out in Iran under similar circumstances.

All the Muslim Brotherhood has to do to topple the government might be to assassinate Mohamed ElBaradei and make it look like the secret service's work.  He's the great Western hope, a man who has worked for peace.  But radicals know - witness the Bolsheviks - that killing or marginalizing the moderates to polarize the country is a path to decisive victory over a weakened foe.  Or maybe they'll capture our embassy.  That works too.

It's no coincidence that Teapublicans in the U.S. now think Orrin Hatch is not conservative enough.  The GOP has been marginalizing anyone who ever had a moderate thought - or even listened to a moderate expression.

Gaffe-hunting

Politics is about disagreement. Sure, it's about settling disagreements, but it starts with diverging opinions and, when it works, ends with a direction.

Last night, President Barack Obama disagreed with the Supreme Court's recent (and horrible) decision on corporate propaganda. This decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission continued to drive through the heart of our democracy the conservative majority's stake of an axiom that corporate money equals free speech. Obama was pointed but polite:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.

I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.

Yet CNN, especially the useless Paul Steinhauser, is raising its eyebrows over Obama disagreeing with the Supremes right there in front of them. Cripes, fellows, go ahead and wet your pants if you're that timorous.

Then, just to be balanced, Steinhauser tut-tuts at Samuel Alito's reaction. Watch the video. All Alito does is mouth (no, not mouth off), "That's not true." CNN implies that Alito is not allowed to visibly disagree with the President.

That is not the country I live in. Honest, polite disagreement is not a threat. The pretense of unanimity is a threat. There's a big difference between SOTU and STFU.

Steinhauser even raises the spectre of Joe Wilson's notorious intemperate outburst. Ah, now we're getting to the truth. CNN thinks it knows how to cover the story so that it need never - ever - worry about distinguishing truth from fiction, right from wrong, or Constitutional from bullshit.

A story about etiquette requires no journalism, just a lot of spouting. Orrin Hatch of course obliges:

I think [Alito] showed quite a bit of judicial restraint.

Of course, CNN let Hatch's testable assertion go unchallenged:

President Obama last night wildly mischaracterized the Supreme Court's decision.

Our media are not interested in calling bullshit. They're interested in selling bullshit.

Skipping the advice part

Theocons and Bushists alike got what they wanted on the Supreme Court because of the Gang of 14, not despite it. It was a faux compromise in which the Democrats got taken for everything and the Republicans gave up nothing at all. Roberts and Alito are both on the Court, aren't they?

Yet that wasn't enough for the right-wing radicals. They wanted the nuclear option. They wanted to go to war against Democrats and the traditional, rule-based collegial way the Senate has deliberated about judicial appointments for decades.

The oddest thing is that the deal cut by Democrats will severely hinder the next Democratic President's appointment of more liberal judges. Witness what happened to Bill Clinton while the Republicans held the Senate. He got Steven Breyer and Ruth Ginsburg. Breyer especially is very centrist.

The avidly hypocritical Republicans will filibuster any Democrat's nominees without compunction. They will call moderates extreme, where for their part the Democrats have called Republican-appointed extremists moderate. Four of them sit on the Supreme Court.

It really doesn't make sense that James Dobson, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Land dislike McCain for the outcome of the Gang of 14 negotiation. They must dislike him for the disloyalty they perceive in it.

As ever, they simply want silent obedient consent.