Grapes of workamping

The race to the bottom is over. The 1% won. American capitalism - the kind without a human face - looks more and more like the bastard spawn of neo-feudalism and indenture to the company store.

Workampers - some of them, anyhow - are the Okies of the Great Recession. Psst, only white people have RVs. Good demographic!

At least the workampers can go mobile. The locals are completely stuck between penury and abuse as temporary, disposable employees:

Industry consultants describe the temp-staffing business as "very, very busy." "On fire." Maximizing profits means making sure no employee has a slow day, means having only as many employees as are necessary to get the job done, the number of which can be determined and ordered from a huge pool of on-demand labor literally by the day. Often, temp workers have to call in before shifts to see if they'll get work. Sometimes,they're paid piece rate, according to the number of units they fill or unload or move. Always, they can be let go in an instant, and replaced just as quickly.

In another mind-numbing warehouse:

A few days later, I had breakfast with someone who coincidentally works with the CEOs of logistics companies. Telling him about the conditions and the sterility and the mind-numbing sadness of the warehouse made him almost too bummed to eat his oatmeal. "Somebody did studies and spreadsheets and crunched those numbers," he said, "and figured out that the cheapest way to get that job done is to treat people like that." Which is important, he explained, because "the profit margins on those contracts are razor thin." Of course. A lot of the Internet retailers' merchandise is nearly worthless—ice princess star-shaped ice cube trays, cheap sunglasses, anthropomorphic stuffed bacon toys—and is sold for nearly nothing, often with free or reduced-price shipping.

Susie told me it's pretty dispiriting to act as though her workers are as disposable as the products they're shipping. But that's just the way it is, she said. The logistics clients aren't interested in spending money on a better or more sustainable work culture. Nor do they need to. There are 100 people employed in the warehouse I visited, and Susie could fire every one of them today without costing her bosses a dime of lost profits. She has applications from hundreds of people ready to take the job.

And the logistics companies call their abusive work rules their culture.

All I can say is that Americans are heavily armed, and woe be to those who are inflicting this "culture" on us when we finally figure out that it's not the liberals who are to blame for every ill the wealthy are inflicting on us.

Pure blame-shifting

It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.

Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.

Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.

Update (3/1): Yep:

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.

Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.

But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.

But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.

Sheldon Adelson is the tip of the iceberg

At least we know his name. At least we know who David and Charles Koch are. At least we know the names of Barack Obama's 2008 Wall Street contributors.

In this election cycle, we will never know, thanks to Mitch McConnell (R-double talk) and, yes, Scott Brown (R-whenever you need me, Mitch).

(h/t Salon)

Afraid of their own amygdalas

Wingnut fear is the mind-killer:

That one ideological camp is so consumed with fear also has a lot to do with why conservatives and liberals share so little common ground. Progressives tend to greet these narratives with facts and reason, but as Chris Mooney notes, when your amygdala is activated, it takes over and utterly dominates the brain structures dedicated to reason. Then the “fight-or-flight” response takes precedence over critical thinking.

Life terms

The New York Times has long been arrogant. (Wingnuts and I can agree on that.) If you've ever seen executive editor (now emeritus) Bill Keller interviewed, you know he's completely buried in a Timesman's self-importance. The scenes in The Paper where Michael Keaton's tabloid editor interacts with Spalding Gray's thinly disguised Times editor don't seem exaggerated at all.

The Times has long had a reputation as slow to pay stringers, assuming it doesn't merely assign a staff reporter to your story idea for the price of an insincere thank you. This is a paper that has persistently tried to screw its freelancers out of any share whatsoever of the digital rights to their work.

Still, the Times is the best news provider in America, and it's incumbent on me to read it to stay well-informed. I'll still notice the bullshit that Keller would defend to hair-splitting lawyerly exhaustion - say, Judith Miller on Iraq or Jeff Gerth on Whitewater. Even though the brand is more important to management than the truth, the Times still does reporting and finds the truth often enough to be worth reading - assuming you keep your bullshit detector tuned up.

The new attempt to erect a paywall has been a challenge for me. At first, I had enough computers and enough browsers to read all I wanted, but that window is closing. I've long argued - following many others - that subscribers never paid for the news, they only paid for the newsprint, why should we now pay for pixels? Our subscription fees used to pay for printing and distribution costs alone, and those costs on line are drastically smaller now than they were in the dead tree era.

Yet just as the media need to change their business model, I probably need to change my expectations. Ad revenue, the traditional honey pot of journalism, has shrunk due to the Internet. Keller may think blogs are the problem. Instead, print media companies have utterly failed to notice that their competitive advantage is not opinion - blogs do that free and often without the strange taboos and Village fealties of mainstream outlets - but rather factual news reporting. Those of us who want facts, not the latest bullshit from seldom-right but often right-wing pundits, will just have to buy them. God knows the advertisers have no interest in any truth that might possibly inconvenience them in selling their wares.

Facts are hard. Facts take work to unearth. Facts are worth paying for. Opinions? Shit, I've got way too many of my own to need to pay for anyone's. Except for Paul Krugman's.

All in all, the Times has a quality product, and that justifies some of their arrogance.

But the terms of their agreement are onerous and one-sided:

The New York Times reserves the right to modify the content, type and availability of any digital product at any time.

Only one person may use each account or accounts (user name and password) associated with a purchased product, unless we agree otherwise.

There's an adjustment to a new age! No leaving your iPad on the coffee table as if it were a paper edition.

The Times won't even tell you the price up front. You have to start ordering before you can be sure what it costs:

When you purchase a digital product, the price will be made clear during the order process. You agree to pay the price that is stated at the time of your order, as well as any applicable taxes. You also agree to the billing frequency stated at the time of your order.

Your subscription is permanent:

All NYTimes digital subscriptions are renewed automatically. ...

If your credit card expires or your payment method is otherwise invalid, your subscription or product will not automatically be terminated. You will remain responsible for all charges.

You will be responsible for all costs we incur in connection with the collection of unpaid amounts, including court costs, attorneys' fees, collection agency fees and any other associated costs.

You have to call them to terminate. They, of course, accept no obligation to answer the phone.

The Times incurs no obligation whatsoever:

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your subscription or product for any reason, with or without notice and without further obligation. You will not be entitled to a refund in these circumstances. If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. ...

We reserve the right to make changes to our digital products at any time. If we temporarily reduce or eliminate the charge for content or access that you are currently paying for under different terms, you will not receive a refund.

If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. If we issue a refund or credit, we are under no obligation to issue the same or similar refund in the future.

Included in the terms is a sly attempt to expand copyright protection to prohibit fair use, much as the AP has tried to forbid quoting of their stories:

The Services and Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Services (including software) in whole or in part.

The law guarantees me the right to quote the Times when I comment on it, but the Times wants a more restrictive contract with me. That's legal of course. Let them try to enforce it.

The "privacy" policy requires that you provide information which the Times cannot possibly justify requiring:

Registration for the NYT Services requires that you supply certain personal information, including, in most cases, a unique e-mail address and demographic information (ZIP code, age, sex, household income (optional), job industry and job title) to register. [emphasis added]

And if the corporate structure changes, information about you is an asset - no mention of that asset being constrained to the existing policy:

In the future, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, we may include your information among the transferred assets.

The Times is part of the American oligarchy, which permits them to get away with this sort of one-sided, albeit legal, abuse of the legal system. They can hire the sharpest New York intellectual property lawyers to write tens of thousands of words into an adhesion contract that edges right up to unconscionability in its limits on what customers can do with a simple product, when we as individuals can't even sanely read and understand those terms without hours of investment and hiring our own lawyer.

The law is supposed to be even-handed. Obviously, as O.J. Simpson, Wall St. bankers, and the New York Times know, it isn't.

When you reward bullshit

... bullshit is what you'll get:

The dirty little secret about political punditry, that is not actually a secret to anyone who watches and reads it, is that it’s all lies. It requires very little knowledge or skill, and there are no consequences for being wrong. For a major newspaper to fire one of its columnists for getting something wrong would bring down the whole pundit industry, as that logic would necessitate the firing of them all. Every election pundit is wrong about everything, nearly all the time, and there’s usually a direct correlation between a pundit’s frequency of wrongness and his or her status — see the Washington Post’s stable of columnists for a prime example. The entire punditocracy is a sham, but thank you for reading anyway.

I truly wish I could have a well-paid job with no accountability, that I could show up to with tiny preparation, say my piece, and hit the beach. Instead, I'm a junior pundit, a blogger. I steer clear of bullshit predictions for the most part. I try to bring facts and analysis to bear on my subjects. Foolish!

The dire compostability of American punditry cannot possibly be an accident. It's certainly less expensive than the messy business of turning over rocks to find out what's really true in the world. For infotainment executives with column inches or air to fill, cheap is more attractive than accurate is - as long as we keep reading, watching, and listening.

Pundits didn't simply all decide to be media whores because of some conspiracy of contagious stupid. They steered their bullshit freighters into lanes that elicited rewards. First, they got praise, so they extruded more hot steaming drivel. True? Who cares! It was good TV - or radio or print. Then they got to tackle other opportunities to make up bullshit.

For the power elite, the best part of this market dominance in ruminant by-products was that it crowds out the aforementioned turning over of rocks. So there's no accountability for elite crimes - no perp walks to speak of on Wall St. despite a stockyard's worth of excrement all over our economy.

So, the infotainment outfits sell ads, protect their owners and cronies, and keep America in a constant ruckus over faux scandals, while ignoring real and dangerous issues.

Thus every media outlet big enough to try for the journalistic bastardization of balance is guaranteed to have a combination of:

• allegedly liberal concern trolls who spend their punditry iconoclastically telling us how Democrats ought to be more perfect
• and wingnut propagandists who follow the Teapublican line better than Pravda followed the Politburo

 Apparently, this is what Americans want to read, hear, and watch. Why, I have no idea. I hate the taste of bullshit.

Schlerotic Teapublican faith-based economics

The shrill Cassandra does it again:

So how did we end up in this state? How did America become a nation that could not rise to the biggest economic challenge in three generations, a nation in which scorched-earth politics and politicized economics created policy paralysis? 

We suggest it was the inequality that did it. Soaring inequality is at the root of our polarized politics, which made us unable to act together in the face of crisis. And because rising incomes at the top have also brought rising power to the wealthiest, our nation’s intellectual life has been warped, with too many economists co-opted into defending economic doctrines that were convenient for the wealthy despite being indefensible on logical and empirical grounds.

This time with co-authors...

I find it weird and flattering that, with relatively little formal training in economics and that colored by what was once called the neo-classical synthesis, I arrived at pretty much all of Paul Krugman's conclusions. Maybe I chose the wrong field.

My bemused vanity aside, it's pretty clear that conservative economists either chose the wrong field or only chose their field in order to monetize their credentials in the service of a pack of lies.

Fixing the game

Republicans don't believe in democratic governance. They believe in ruling us:

In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.

Read it all. Depressing as it is, it's better to know and act from reality, rather than some fantasy that they too value self-government.

Moral consequences

Actual moral consequences, rather than the orgasm someone might have in a way that offends Rick Santorum:

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

Too bad to be true

There's a story going around on the net that Rick Santorum's wife had an abortion. I heard it from a friend on Facebook. But it's not true.

Of course, I think the Republicans are frequently terrible hypocrites, but something about this claim rang alarm bells of skepticism for me. If this episode from the fall of 1996 had really been known and covered in the press since 1997, wouldn't it have been well aired earlier? Santorum didn't become a first tier candidate until Iowa, true, but it's a perfect juicy story that our dysfunctional media would have loved to gossip over incessantly.

Turns out Karen Santorum had a second trimester miscarriage in a pregnancy that was doomed by a deleterious birth defect:

Karen was in her 19th week of pregnancy. Husband and wife were in a suburban Virginia office for a routine sonogram when a radiologist told them that the fetus Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die.

After consulting with specialists, who offered several options including abortion, the Santorums decided on long-shot intrauterine surgery to correct an obstruction of the urinary tract called posterior urethral valve syndrome.

A few days later, rare ``bladder shunt'' surgery was performed at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The incision in the womb carried a high risk of infection.

Two days later, at home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Verona, Karen Santorum became feverish. Her Philadelphia doctors instructed her to hurry to Pittsburgh's Magee-Women's Hospital, which has a unit specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

After examining Karen, who was nearly incoherent with a 105-degree fever, a doctor at Magee led Santorum into the hallway outside her room and said that she had an intrauterine infection and some type of medical intervention was necessary. Unless the source of the infection, the fetus, was removed from Karen's body, she would likely die.

Rick and Karen Santorum were willing to choose a medical path that nearly killed her. We can never know whether craven political calculation entered into their decision - well, his decision, since she was not cogent when the decision was made.

There's a whiff of hypocrisy here, but only a whiff. The Santorums, despite their ardent beliefs about proper behavior from the rest of us, were willing to consider inducing labor to save her life at the expense of the fetus:

"If that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to," the senator said as he sat in his Washington office. "I consider it a blessing that we didn't have to make that decision."

While I give Rick props for admitting this, his inability to learn a bit of humility on the subject despite his open suggestion of god's hand in sparing them a hard decision is troubling. It doesn't sound moral to me to find a narrow exception that just happens to fit one's own principles without considering whether those principles are sound or, after this experience, merely convenient.

(h/t Salon)

The meta-message: One of the most damaging aspects of the wingnut approach to national narrative is their complete unwillingness to give up stories they like because those stories are false. Those of us in the reality-based community are obligated not to follow their dishonest example and instead to abjure any propagandist's propagation of this bullshit.

Kindred spirits

Rush and Newt go way back. Steve Kornacki speculates about why Rush is helping Newt with wingnuts and teabaggers now.

But maybe they both just recognize each other as their kind of asshole. Both these guys are hugely more hypocritical than even the typical winger.

Newt pilloried Bill Clinton while, for the second time, he was having an affair that would lead him to divorce one wife in favor of his new lover. Rush pilloried Clinton while taking Viagra on a trip to the Dominican Republic, unaccompanied by any woman, which looked an awful lot like sex tourism.

Rush and Newt are both law and order conservatives, yet both have run afoul of the law. Rush was a pain pill addict whose possession of pills and prescriptions gained under false pretenses would have meant jail time for a mere mortal. Newt repeatedly violated the lax ethical standards of Congress.

Hypocritical assholes on this scale need each other.

Massive resistance again

The Tea Party "movement" is yet another case of Southern sabotage of American democracy:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

The Fort Sumter movement of course has adherents in all states, but mainly the Confederacy actually elects them.

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label.

Full of passionate intensity

The virtue of faith:

So, sadly, I don't think the execution of Troy Davis will have much effect on the national "conversation" about the morality of capital punishment or the glaring flaws in America's system of justice. Because while it's very reasonable to argue that "we" should only kill someone if we're really, really, really sure they did it, the modern American conservative is really, really, really sure about everything.

As in, not a virtue.

Freedom to starve

America's favorite face of Ayn Rand libertarian bullshit:

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

Sane people notice when their slavish adherence to ideology leads them into insane positions. Ron Paul is not one of those sane people. He doubles down on bullshit and calls it principle.

Insane, batshit insane? Sociopathic? Or just a fucking moron? Ron Paul...

The single common thread of radical Republican conservatism is that you're on your own.

Update: Paul is not alone as a batshit insane sociopathic moron. Fox gives space to laissez-faire dipshits from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to argue that we don't need publicly funded weather data. They report as an article of faith that private reports are better. What they omit, relying on the steady ignorance of Fox readers, is that all private forecasts, other than your finger in the wind and their fingers up their asses, are based on free data they receive from the National Weather Service.

"You're on your own" is far too mild a summary of Republicanism. Really, their guiding principle is, "Fuck you."

And it totally beggars belief that these assholes are so willing, over and over and over again, to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, just as long as the penny goes to the wealthy in corporate profit and the pound of costs comes out of the hide of everyone else.

They'll be coming for my dual citizenship

Michael Lind, whom I first read in Up from Conservatism, is always thought-provoking, even when he and I disagree.  But I can't find anything to quarrel with in this:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

Nor in this:

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and their sidekicks from the Midwest and elsewhere to destroy America's credit rating unless the federal government agrees to enact Dixie's economic agenda of preserving defense spending while slashing entitlements is simply the latest act of aggression by the Solid South.

We have a real national political problem that dates from the very beginning of our nation. One part of it, the part I grew up in, doesn't want to be American if that means it doesn't get its own way.

And its way is backward, reactionary, aristocratic, and often violent.

Aztec sacrifice

Chickenhawks fail at the fundamental moral task of putting themselves in the place of those whose lives are at risk:

For chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney who grew up during Vietnam conscription, deft draft-dodging provided them safety and psychological distance from bloodshed. As the data show, compared to draftees, that distance likely made them feel comfortable demanding other people face death on the battlefield, knowing that they wouldn't face such a fate themselves. Put another way, having avoided the draft, there was no "self-interest" in opposing war -- indeed, there was only self-interest in promoting wars in a media and political environment that increasingly rewarded rank bellicosity.

It's no wonder they can't put themselves in the place of the needy. They have no familiarity with the golden rule, the foundation of morality.

Someone else always gets his heart ripped out, not them.

Dreams of electronic sheep

Only these sheep are as bare-toothed angry as they are ill-informed and illogical:

Without exception, however, every reader objecting to my criticism of talk-radio ethics mentioned Soros. It was like being scolded by parrots. Most called Soros a commie -- highly unlikely for a billionaire financier and philanthropist -- although I know very little about his views.

It's called the straw man fallacy: refuting arguments nobody's made.

Then there's the argumentum ad populum, another favorite of talk-radio fans: somebody with a big audience must be correct. Furthermore -- motive again -- I must be jealous of their success.

That's pretty much like saying Rush Limbaugh's jealous of President Obama. You buy that?

Look, these guys are playing you for suckers. They're reading scripts written to trick you into believing that the bigger Scrooge McDuck's bullion pile is, the better it is for you. Take away the call screeners and the mute buttons, and most of them wouldn't last two weeks. Talk radio is the political equivalent of wrestling.

Sex rated R, violence a lovely PG-13

Think of the graphic, frightening violence we permit in our entertainment and our foreign policy. But a penis is out of bounds. That's the wrong kind of first person shooter.

Again, I'm not defending what Anthony Weiner did or the complete foolish narcissism of the way he did it. I just think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that our response to Weiner's peckerdilloes should have been derisive laughter and an immediate move to the next topic. Instead, moving on is what we did on behalf of Bushists who openly admitted doing things that in all previous circumstances had been war crimes. Ho hum, we said.

Taking bullshit seriously

America is filled with ignorant religious nuts (and they're not the only kind).  Some of them make a fetish of the end of the world.

That's not news.  Or, it shouldn't be news.

Yet the media continues to report the pro-rapture statements of Harold Camping as if he were credible.

Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Who are the AP's sources?  Camping, a disappointed follower, and Tim LaHaye, another pro-rapture voice famous for his bullshit "Left Behind" fictionalization of the fiction of Revelation.

I guess all the atheists they asked for a comment must have sputtered out something with bullshit in it, and they couldn't use that.  Yeah, sure.

Usually the media does its false objectivity dance to keep from noticing Republican bullshit, but Christianity is even more completely immune from media critique, no matter how bizarre its backwaters and increasingly its mainstream.