Better living through Internet

The big media whines incessantly about the perils and depredations of the Internet. Even so, they know they have to publish here, and they bring their art departments - if they still have them - to bear to give us traditional newspaper graphics.

Oh, sure, the New York Times pastes up some cool interactive widgets. Many of them go beyond eye candy and are actually informative. They are also well beyond the budgets of ordinary papers.

There are thousands of stories that will never contend for a Pulitzer, for which the Internet provides freely available tools to make those stories better. Any story about a particular place can put the reader there much more effectively with a clip or a link to Google Maps or Microsoft Bing or one of the other mapping sites. Sure, it might be better to send a news photographer out, but that's too heavyweight and expensive for bread and butter stories that fill out a paper.

Here's a pedestrian story about real estate and eminent domain that shrieks for illustration. In five minutes of googling, I found the Newton Assessor's database and this aerial view with approximate bounds shown:


Google Maps gives a better image, sans plot plan, here.

Imagine what I might find if I were a professional journalist! (Yes, I know there are savvy people who are professional journalists. I even know a few. I just don't get why more of their savvy doesn't find the page.)

Sorry, my wallet's in my banker's pants

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Copping a drill

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Still slinging it

McChrystal, fired for insubordinately trying to make his biggest boss look bad, again tries to make President Obama look bad.

Good riddance! Take your fired ass back wherever you'd like to retire.

More Truman, less Coolidge

McChrystal fired. No "Heckuva job, Stanley." Accountability is a good thing in all administrations.

President Obama just broadened his range. I'd like to see him apply a little more authority to the Gulf - and then to the backside of the always recalcitrant Republicans.

Mr. Reagan, tear down this economy

When I said a couple of weeks ago that there was nothing Republicans wouldn't screw up for sake of private profit, I had no idea it would be so graphically illustrated so soon. Here's one of the graphs - on income inequality:


No one should be surprised by this. It is intentional Republican policy to make rich people richer.

Ronald Reagan made people feel better as a sop for not making them better off. Just say no.

(h/t Susan Gardner on DailyKos)

Straight from the horse's ass

Orrin Hatch sent me a letter on behalf of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). Here's why they want my help:

[The Democrats] oppose all the values and principles you and I share.

I've said many times that Republicans are against the Constitution and the rule of law. I just never thought they'd come right out and say it. And it's flabbergasting that they have finally admitted that they are opposed to women's rights, minority rights, and equality under law irrespective of social class.

What are these radical Republicans running against? Hollywood, labor, environmentalists, and peace activists! Sure, they throw in some derogatory modifiers, but that's their plan:

• Fascist realist art
• Corporate dominance
• Even more ill-advised deregulation
• War

They are running in favor of:

• Permanent tax cuts that favor the rich
• Anything "tough"
• Ben Tre reform of Social Security and Medicare

Here's part of the NRSC survey:

The highlighted Republican take on the Democratic platform is mostly a tissue of lies.

• The tax "increase" is allowing the awful Duhbya tax cuts to expire, and the GOP exaggerates the amount because the Dems will keep part those cuts.
• Cutting the defense budget has to happen at the end of the wars (though I will concede there is some accuracy to this one item).
• Gay marriage only undermines heterosexual marriage in the fever swamp of the homophobic imagination.
• Republicans are completely untrustworthy on Social Security. They want to destroy it as a social insurance program and give its revenues to Wall St. They also provide no plan to fill the revenue gap for those who are already receiving payments.
• It's Republicans who are blocking U.S. energy independence. Democrats are blocking U.S. oil-ocracy.
• UN control of the war on terrorism? Where do they even get this stuff? Answer: They make shit up to keep their choleric base frothing at the mouth.
  

Ironically, the letter - which the GOP has cannily kept hidden - accuses the Democrats of dishonesty! Par for the course...

McChrystal's gambit

You're running a war. It isn't going well. Your troops are trapped in swirling dust populated by hostile Pashtuns around Kandahar. When the local Taliban need to, they can slip easily across the border into the safety of Pakistan.

Worst, you've agreed to a deadline, you've stated in public that you'll be finished with counter-insurgency by summer 2011.

What do you do?

You either need to be fired, in which case it will be President Obama's fault for nicking the indispensable man (heh) on the threshold of success. Or you need to paint the President and other civilian authorities into a corner so that they'll have to acquiesce to grinding more meat in Afghanistan. You care about your place in history and even project it on your government:

“[Ambassador Karl Eikenberry]’s one that covers his flanks for the history books,” General McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Now, if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

You think Obama can't afford to be a firm manager of the military in the run-up to the difficult 2010 midterms. So you thumb your nose and dare him to fire you.

It's time to reassert civilian control of the military.

Update (6/25): Chan Lowe sees McChrystal's escape too.

Summer of self-reliance

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

Leaves less for them

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Stopwatch for Democrats

If Duhbya had spent less than an hour in Ohio, the big media would have congratulated him on his punctuality, assuming - and it's a big assumption - that they even noticed the time.

Total war

There is no blow too low for a South Carolina Republican when an election is at stake. Really, it was only a matter of time before the fundies there would attack the religious sincerity of Nimrata "Nikki" Haley.

These politicos are thoroughly tribal. They're not allowed to attack her off-white color any more even in the state that originated the great treason of 1861. She is a convert to Christianity, too conveniently they think, but they know that she's still the other.

It's almost enough to make me root for a wingnut libertarian. Well, maybe not almost - but as close as I get.

Certifiable

With Rand Paul, caveat emptor is not merely an empty phrase. He lives it personally.

Paul's only certification was provided instead by something called the National Board of Ophthalmology, which is very convenient because he operates that organization himself.

If you believe the libertarian bullshit he peddles, he might be able to dig up the title to that bridge he's trying to sell.

Joe Conason nails it:

Libertarian ideology rejects most of the modern regulatory systems that protect consumers, because everyone should be responsible for determining whether the hamburger contains E. coli on his own.

Among other odd beliefs they hide, libertarians such as Paul believe they have every right to lie to you as long as they don't commit the lie inside a contract.

Which side are you on?

Republicans are for the corporation:

"It is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown."

These so-called conservatives don't give a shit about the damage BP did and is still doing.

Big media blows dead yaks

It is truly incredible how duplicitous big media is with the statements of politicians:

Mondale and Kerry made this list for accurate statements. Reagan, Bush and Bush don’t appear, despite some famous groaners. In fairness, you can’t entirely blame the editors; their recollections faithfully track the culture of the insider press corps over the past forty years. All too often, groaning misstatements by Major Republicans have been ignored, fudged and wished away, eventually lost to history. Accurate statements by major Democrats have been turned into major scandals which linger in insider memory. Outlook is simply recording the era as it actually has unspooled. But during this era, the culture of the insider press has often turned truth on its head.

Democrats get pilloried for telling the truth. Republican skate despite obvious bullshit.

This is the reason our culture is in existential peril. Al Qaeda is the least of it. We don't care what's true any more, only what the conventional wisdom is - no matter how far nor how obviously it departs from reality.

The Daily Howler still got game! After all this time, Bob Somerby is a blogging stud!

Carlyfornia

Carly Fiorina (R-tonsure) went catty on Barbara Boxer's hair style? When Carly herself wears a nun-boy? And she - I mean, her "friend", whom she was merely quoting - thinks her style is au courant?

Okaaay. We're in middle school...

Joke's on me

Click image for full Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau.

Rhinoplasty

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

National self-interest

Immigration policy is a minefield of conflicting interests.

Corporations want cheap labor to exploit and to keep citizen labor costs down. Citizens would of course prefer to make better salaries with less competition.

Elites want inexpensive landscapers and house-cleaners. Native born workers need jobs too, especially when unemployment is nearly 10%.

We all want someone to help pay our Social Security, but that assumes illegal immigrants are not being paid under the table. Of course, when I say all of us, I should exclude the open racists who don't want Hispanic immigration because the immigrants are brown.

No one wants the crime of immigrant communities who can't report their criminal elements to the police, though it's not clear that illegal immigrants in general have a higher crime rate than good ol' natural born Murkins. No one wants immigrants to drain welfare funding (well, hardly anyone).

Mostly, immigration policy should be framed, not in moral terms, but in terms of national self-interest. What immigration policy best serves Americans? We clearly both gain and lose by immigration. How do we make our society better by adding new people from outside?

In the case of Eric Balderas, it's hard to see how our national interest would be served by deporting a college kid made good. Especially since he'd be eligible for a student visa in any case...

Where

Exactly where a news story happened is often important. The Arkansas flash flood deaths occurred here. You can see how the hilly terrain could concentrate run-off into a flash flood.

Yet big media seldom pins down location. I don't understand why not. The tools are readily available on the Internet. During the Tennessee floods, I was able to locate the site of a photo in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which told me how far the flood was out of its banks - a couple of hundred yards - which might be an important fact needed to understand the story.

There's also the back story of Albert Pike, a relatively minor Confederate general. Most non-Southerners would be amazed how many federal government sites in the South are named for Confederates.

Syncronicity: I happened to learn who Albert Pike was because the second National Treasure movie was on in my house, and it mentioned him. Yep, besides being a Confederate, he was a Freemason. Ooooweeooo.

If other people can say "What Digby said"...

... so can I:

"Deficit reduction" doesn't mean deficit reduction. It means welfare state reduction, period. Military spending is sacred --- like the right to pack heat in church and gas guzzling. It is non-negotiable.

Update (6/18): Yet again, deficit hawks on anything that doesn't benefit their wealthy corporate sponsors...

Of by for

The most incredible thing about John Boehner (R-BP) and the Chamber of Commerce is how openly they side with corporations against the interests of the people. I guess it's the Chamber's job, but Boehner is elected by actual voters.

Then again, they believe in managing incentives so that they get all of them, and there haven't been many consequences at all for corporatists. The media doesn't enforce any, and many Americans are so captive of the pro-corporate narrative that often the voters don't enforce anything.

A good politician could make Republicans pay for their lazy inability to hide their true allegiance.

Update (6/13): Looks as though Boehner wants to walk this one waaay back. Even a corporate hack like him can see the danger of shilling so boldly for BP.

Right to swing your colon

Well, your cow's colon...

I don't worry about the gentle wafting odor of cow shit teasing the scent receptors of my nose, but once your cow's shit starts damaging the commonweal, then you've reached the limit of your freedom and slugged in the nose in a way that matter. You have to clean up, even if you're a walking talking anachronism that romantics who once saw "Witness" fantasize about - just as long as they don't have to give up their cell phones.

The point is that you cannot opt out of society as long as you're interacting with it. All the non-Amish conservatives who plead just to be left alone often want to take what's offered (public roads, schools, criminal justice, a clean environment, common defense, an economy that doesn't crash and burn to the ground every ten years) just as long as they don't have to pay any part of anything they don't use directly.

You can fairly argue about where to draw the line for public actions and the taxes to pay for them. But the radical libertarian position of the likes of Rand Paul is anti-social selfishness, and contrary to Ayn Rand and Gordon Gecko, it doesn't work.

Pluck BP

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Nothing the GOP won't screw up for profit

The Gas and Oil Party of two oilmen, Duhbya Bush and Darth Cheney, allowed offshore oil spills to quadruple. You'd expect them to allow child poverty to get worse. Daddy Bush presided over the previous peak of child poverty, and everyone knows they don't give a shit about that. But they let the oil industry get worse too.

Because it's all about the money.

Note: Yeah, I started my day at 5:00 a.m. in a hotel that provided a free copy of McPaper. But vacation's over after a couple of long plane rides, and I'll be back to my usual haunts as soon as time permits at work.

Sample bias

USA Today reports empathy on decline in college students and waxes Chicken-Littlish about technology. My reading of news comment threads tells me that Claire Raines, at the bottom of the story, is right:

Raines says that empathy is declining in all generations...

Traditional liberals are empathetic (by which I mean New Dealers, not the imaginary rugged individualists that excuse-making posers such as Jonah Goldberg call "classical liberals"). Ted Kennedy was empathetic. Neo-liberals are technically and analytically sure that activism from government makes society better - so long as government is not too too active, but they're not strong on empathy. John Kerry...

Reconciling these two threads of liberalism is an important political problem for the coalition of the left of center.

Austerity is just around the corner

Contracting our economy away from prosperity is what the teabaggers want. They'd rather have more of a shrinking pie than to have ... more.

Now international economists are joining them in opposition to economic stimulus:

[T]he conventional wisdom now is that these countries must nonetheless cut — not because the markets are currently demanding it, not because it will make any noticeable difference to their long-run fiscal prospects, but because we think that the markets might demand it (even though they shouldn’t) sometime in the future.

Shooting fish in a bbl

Click image for full John Branch/San Antonio Express-News cartoon.

Some are gone, and some remain

Memo to John Boehner (R-Sinatra):

Conservatives fought rock and roll. They lost.

The Beatles may or may not have been bigger than god, but Sir Paul towers over the pipsqueak likes of you. Deal with it.

By the way, do you really think it's smart to tie yourself and your wretched party back to the hopeless legacy of Duhbya?

Light posting for the next week

Having finally reached the pinnacle of writing the number 1 political blog in Massachusetts, I'm going on vacation. It's great to have recognition, but I have to wonder whether my rank this week came straight out of a random number generator.

Maybe I'll drop by here while on vacation. I do have a couple of ideas simmering, and I'm taking the laptop. But maybe I won't. So don't be surprised if your vast and prolific (hint, hint) comments don't get moderated right away.

Nothing to say

The Gores are separating. Anything I might say about that fact would say more about me than about them.

The media ought to consider what they reveal about themselves before they post any further breathless gossipy adolescent maunderings that pretend to be meditations.

Knowledge is power? Sez who?

Click image for full Matt Bors/United Media cartoon.

Still the cost of war

Click image for full Garry Trudeau cartoon.

Cigarettes or eggs

Journalists like to think they write the first draft of history. More often, they write the first draft of "As the World Turns" (which in its time was my grandmother's favorite story - no wonder journalists are losing audience). All dialog, no resolution.

The New York Times had a long story yesterday about the possible regulation of salt in prepared foods. Mostly, it's a history of attempts to justify or forestall regulation of the amount of salt that food businesses use.

The article seems sympathetic to regulation, but it never provides its readers with a way to sort out the truth of one claim from another, even provisionally, as empirical claims of this type have to be sorted out. Instead, it spends vast arid salt flats (heh) on what a publisher might call news you can use - dissertations on Cheez-Its and chicken noodle soup and how good salt tastes.

This is really news you can relate to. It's not intended to edify but to draw you into a commonplace domestic narrative and make you feel you have expertise on the subject. Without helping you gain that expertise...

Not that there weren't glaring opportunities:

In 1982, [soup company] Campbell sponsored an American Heart Association symposium that included a study on calcium, which is now seen as having only a small role in reducing hypertension, and another that asserted that only some people were susceptible to hypertension from salt.

Thirty years later, I explain my own excellent blood pressure despite significant salt intake by guessing that I'm merely not susceptible. Still, I would expect something new from the intervening three decades. If there's a genetic link, I'd expect it to be confirmed by subsequent research and probably even available as a blood test by now. Instead, reporter Michael Moss simply drops the ball. Maybe scientists have too, but Moss owes readers the follow-up.

The Times story ran in the Science section. Is it too much to ask that it sort out the state of the science on the connection between salt and hypertension? If that connection really only affects a segment of the population, how can we tell whether we're in that segment? That would be news we could really use.

There are further hints at facts in the story:

Making deep cuts in salt can require more expensive ingredients that can hurt sales. Companies that make low-salt pasta sauces improve the taste with vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh herbs that cost more than dried spices and lower grade tomatoes.

Also dropped. It could be that my b.p. is good because so little of what I eat comes out of a box, highly processed. But you'd have to be a hippie or something equally dismissable to expect Americans to eat real fresh food.

American media consistently fail even to try to distinguish fact from self-interested argument. Is the prepared food industry fighting a fight like the cigarette industry, defending its merchandise of death, or like the egg producers, whose product contains cholesterol but has been shown to be healthy, leading the Heart Association to withdraw its advice to avoid eggs?

The methods that corporations use to defend their income are the same, whether they're scientifically justified or not. Media can't get to the bottom of them by reporting about how the industry is lobbying.

Somewhere, some reporter has to remember - or reinvent - getting to the bottom of the story. Finding out what's actually true...

End of empathy

Classic Republican response, "Tough shit." Here done humorously.

Mediaocre

On a daily basis, big media resolutely fails to pull back the curtain on the great and powerful Oz. The alleged Nikki Haley affair is a case of our credulous media's eagerness to accept bullshit with a bow on it as if it came from Tiffany's.

Will Folks is not a blogger. He is a political consultant who runs a rightwing news site. In any case, calling him a blogger (big-media-speak for pipsqueak upstart, by the way) is not informative. Doesn't everyone have a blog by now?

Folks is also not credible as a supporter of Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, the press dutifully prints his claim in every story. When he says he outed his alleged affair with Haley as a proactive step because the story was being shopped to the media, he can't possibly be credible. If he were really to try "getting ahead of the story," he wouldn't milk it for daily attention with promises of proof and death-of-a-thousand cuts delivery.

Folks has also claimed that he went public to protect the wife he married after the alleged affair. Surely someone in the editorial chain is married or has had an intimate relationship. "Honey, I had an affair with someone before we married, and I'm going to publicize it to protect you." Look, this is bullshit so runny you couldn't even tie a bow on it without first injecting drilling mud and huge amounts of concrete.

I have no idea whether Folks and Haley had sex. In fact, I have no idea what Folks is claiming and Haley is denying.

He says they had an "inappropriate physical relationship." Did she hug him a little too long? Did she spank him like a bad boy? Did he massage her feet with peppermint cream?

She denies having an affair. Well, what does she mean? Would it be o.k. if they necked a little but never did it? I'm sure her husband wouldn't approve, but would such a small dalliance count?

If they weren't both in the anti-sex base of the anti-sex party, I wouldn't care what they did. But I'd still care that the media is less concerned about finding out what's true than it is about repeating what everyone says and then shrugging - with both shoulders for balance.

We Americans have a political culture that seldom rises above the throes of puberty. Part of the reason why is that our media culture is about putting a bow on gossip and calling it news.

Not in it for the sex

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

Doom and gloom

The Democrats are doomed, doomed, I tell you, in the 2010 mid-term Congressional election!

That's the conventional big media narrative, anyhow. Could it be, like so much past received wisdom, wrong?

The Senate was never really in play. It's even less in play now:

• Harry Reid is back from the dead.
• Joe Sestak may be primed to hold Pennsylvania, which Arlen Specter would not have (if you could even call re-electing Arlen Specter a hold).

There's even an opportunity for a Democratic pick-up in Ohio, where Bushist Ron Portman trails his Democratic opponent, although within the margin of error of the poll. In Kentucky, Rand Paul has a lead that's smaller than the margin of error, another opportunity to pick up a seat while Paul alternates which foot is planted firmly in his mouth.

No one expects the Democrats to gain seats in either house, but losing control of either house is much less likely than the teabagger narrative.

Mom in the patriarchy

With Dad off hiking the Appalachian Trail, someone has to keep order.

Click image for full David Cohen cartoon.

Mad as hatters

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times/Tribune cartoon.

Sucking up to wingnuts

Why would a Louisiana magistrate go out of his way to compliment the alleged talents of the Fake Pimp of Wingnuttia?

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III, who cited the defendants’ potential as investigative journalists though he was critical of this incident, sentenced Mr. [James] O’Keefe, 25, to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

...

Mr. O’Keefe, whom the judge described as “extremely talented,”...

Louisiana elects its judges. Knowles was just playing to the crowd.

That's what you want in a judge, right? No reason to question the justice of a wrist-slap sentence - it's what the people wanted!

Hold your wrist out, young man

Of course, in this IOKIYAR world, the four wingnut lawbreakers who pretexted their way into Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-BP) office got probation and minor fines after pleading to a misdemeanor.

Meanwhile, the Democratic scion who guessed Sarah Palin's password and posted it on the web was convicted of a felony and awaits sentencing that could bring him years in prison.

Then of course, there's the disparate media and legal treatment of Eliot Spitzer (D-ho) and David Vitter (R-ho ho ho).

And of course Rush Limbaugh gives hypocrites everywhere an even worse name.

Free to choose

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

Area 51 revisited

"Take me to your John Galt."

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

The story of an angry reader

Shorter David Brooks: My poor fantasy life with a thin gloss of convenient interpretation justifies my continued living in a fantasy world while you live as undeserving peasants.

In other words, in school, [a character named Ben] labored when others didn’t. At work, he sacrificed when others didn’t. He bought a house he could afford when others didn’t.

Ben, whom Brooks doesn't bother to report, but asks us to imagine! Who gives every indication of being no more than a figment of Brooks's weekend-bound imagination.

Wildlife biologists often have to parse through animal scat to determine diet and health of the animals they study. If I had limitless time, I could peel away the feces Brooks has put on paper to its awful, inane content. Except that he's engaged in coprophagia, and he expects us to eat and enjoy bullshit just as he has.

I'll tell you what really steams me: Brooks gets paid New York shitloads of money to make up bullshit like this. He doesn't even have to pretend to look for what's true. He can write down whatever would be convenient for him - for his weekend plans, for his lazy desire to have an early dinner, for his ideology, for his vanity of deserving.

If I ran the New York Times, I'd fire Brooks's lazy, undeserving, no-account ass. Let him stop pretending to know the pulse of real people. Let him work his contacts for another easy, well-paid sinecure from which he can pretend to stand for working people everywhere - a pretense he makes while defending established wealth.

Greater threat

Newt Gingrich is - or wants to appear - insane:

"The [Obama] secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

Gene Lyons says:

A sane political movement would keep a prating coxcomb like Gingrich off television. Whether Newt actually believes this rubbish, or is merely following the Tea Party fife and drum corps around the bend, strikes me as of little interest. Politically, it's pointless to reason with crazy people -- make-believe or real.

Thirty percent of Americans apparently agree. With Gingrich!

Does that doom democracy?

What's in your wallet?

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon. But show your papers first.

For the wheel's still in spin

I may have spoken too soon.

The New York Times almost certainly went to print with Republican oppo. There'd be no fatal sin in that - if disclosed - but the long habit of Richard Blumenthal's self-description, including the very speech in 2008 the Times is on about, may have been honest. Which would make Linda McMahon the liar, even if it doesn't exculpate Blumenthal completely.

Time will, uh, may tell.

Update (6/1): Added to paragraph 2:

• the parenthetical in sentence 2 with the link to DailyKos
• the dependent clause at the end of sentence 3
  

Safe bet

If wingnut commentators are selling it, chances are good that it's borderline fraudulent.

What's their stock in trade? Outrage, fear, and bullshit. Hard to make a rational investment decision in the throes of even one of those...

Narrative correctness

Why is Rand Paul's Republican Teabagger victory in Kentucky CNN's top story on the political ticker? In the home state of Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, no amount of ideological extremism should be a surprise, and Paul's victory was so widely expected that it barely qualifies as news.

There was real news yesterday:

• Mark Critz (D-Murtha) unexpectedly beat Tim Burns (R-oops), which CNN gives one line.
  
• Joe Sestak (D-reality) ended the (elective) political career of Arlen Specter (DINO-opportunism).
• Richard Blumenthal (D-Apocalypse Now) ended his own political career.
• Bill Halter (D-semi-reality) forced Blanche Lincoln (D-subsidiary) into a runoff.
  

But CNN is wasting its pixels on teabaggers. It's not that CNN is filled with teabag sympathizers. But the "TRENDING" tag ought to be a clue.

Big media no longer wants to report what happened today. It wants to develop a story arc. That makes writing and editing easier - and laziness is the great inertial force in human behavior. But it also leads to all the really good gigs:

• Slots among the shouters on TV
• Big stories that the Pulitzer Committee might look twice at
• The change to cast a story into book form (or maybe that's just my dream)
  
• Hollywood (in their wildest TV movie fantasies)

Electorally, it was a pretty good day for Democrats. Why couldn't that have been the narrative? Pasting up a new narrative is hard work!

I suppose I should be happy that the media didn't go with its bullshit false equivalence reflex to claim that both Republican and Democratic extremists won. Maybe calling Sestak, Halter, and Critz extremists was too obviously nonsense even for the (non-Fox) media.

Oh hell no

The George Duhbya Bush Presidential Center wants a tax deductible contribution.

I'd contribute to a special prosecutor.

Meanwhile all I can manage is to transfer a small amount from honoring the worst President of my lifetime to the Post Office - the joy of business reply mail.

Buh-bye

Honesty means more than simply not lying, but Richard Blumenthal (D-buh-bye) failed even the easy test of not lying:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. [emphasis added]

During Vietnam would have parsed as true, but even that phrasing would have left room for deceit. During the Vietnam era would have been still better, with the word era flagging the statement for a bit more interpretive analysis.

Blumenthal could claim - and he has - that he simply misspoke. But there are too many instances of self-interested silence in the face of falsehood to credit this as the slip of his tongue.

The root problem, which should be fatal to his candidacy for Senate, is that Blumenthal has shown a life-long pattern of failure to correct the record clearly and forthrightly. He continues his deceit with this bullshit:

“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him.

Bullshit. Politicians care deeply and obsessively how they're covered in the press. They may not see every single article, but they or their staff see all the big stories, especially those in major publications. Nowadays, they all have Google alerts to keep them on top of media all the way down to the smallest blog.

The emotional impact of his reserve service and of seeing the postwar treatment of veterans from in-country could still be true. He could still tell it honestly from the perspective of a reservist. Instead, his claimed experience sounds more like echoing of urban legends than first-hand witnessing to the travails of returning vets.

Here's the principle: If you have to choose your words very carefully to permit listeners to take away a wrong impression, an impression that you want them to retain, you're lying. Never mind that advertisers do this all the time. They're lying too. It's just that your lie while seeking a Senate seat is more corrosive and damaging.

This is especially true of living a lie about being at risk of dying in the service of your country. That's just something that no one should ever fake - or acquiesce in faking.

Even Duhbya didn't try to get away with morphing his defense of Texas and Alabama against the world-wide threat of the Viet Cong Air Force into service in country in Vietnam. Like Blumenthal, he did try to get away with claiming he received no special treatment, also false but on a much smaller scale.

It was John Kerry who put aside offers of special treatment and actually served in Vietnam. That didn't win the Presidency for him, but he at least still has his honesty intact about that very important touchstone of recent American history, no matter how hard Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Liars tried to steal it from him by their own campaign of lies.

Blumenthal should go. But he's obviously too vain to give in to that inconvenient truth.

(h/t to this great post on No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update (5/19): More feet of clay on the Republican side. Lindsay Graham (R-wingy but not wingy enough for teabaggers) repeatedly and persistently claimed to be a veteran of Iraq I, despite never serving in country. (h/t Atrios)

Your pitiful little band

Karl Rove arms the next death star.

Hey! Maybe he did have something to do with the Swift Boat Liars. (Ya think?)

This man is strictly about manufacturing the consent of the governed. Offering a choice to be made rationally? Why would he choose in advance to lose?

Privatizing justice

Looks just like Widener to me..

Click image for full Jack Ohman/Oregonian cartoon. Or here in color.

Topless

The White House is doing its level best to make sure that everyone has seen the bikini chart:


Now the next spin point is out: If job creation continues at the same rate for the rest of 2010, Barack Obama will have presided over the creation of more jobs in this year alone that Duhbya did in his entire eight-year maladministration.

Unlike Republican spin points and cherry-picking, this one comes with explicit caveats to help readers understand it fully. Whether the trend continues is one, and the future is always speculative. Another is the huge job loss that continued from the Bush recession throughout 2009, when Obama was in office and the best you could say was that job losses were slowing.

More important, we can't forget the sheer size of the need for jobs, left from the Bush disaster, which was relatively jobless even in its best times, and from Obama's first year in office.

Employment is better, that's true. But we have a long way to go before it's good.

Sins of the mommies

Long-lived institutions have a choice: adapt or die.

The path of rigidity - the conservative path - can work well, sometimes for quite a while, especially if the institution is willing to change by small degrees. But the path of absolute rigidity - saying no to everything, for instance - is the path of senesence and death. Just ask the Shakers, and they were only rigid about a few things.

The Catholic Church right now is in an existential crisis. With a billion adherents, the church might seem safe from doom. After all, it has survived previous crises - non-sexual child abuse in its schools and orphanages, acquiescence to fascism, the commonplace selling of absolution, the Inquisition, to name a few - that would have killed a less persistent, poorer, or less canny institution. Of course it doesn't hurt that the church claims every Sunday to have god on its side.

But buggering children and criminally covering it up practically everywhere is a different matter. It impeaches every claim to divinity or infallibility. And that billion already includes many who are one generation more away from merely having Catholic ancestors.

Even now, there are Catholics, both lay and priest, who apparently believe that the anti-gay passages of their bible are some of its most important. These doctrinaire Catholics still react to the idea of admitting to parochial school a child of a lesbian couple with statements like this:

“The real question here is why two people who radically repudiate the moral teachings of Catholicism would want their child educated in a Catholic school,’’ [C.J. Doyle, executive director of Catholic Action League of Massachusetts,] said in a statement.

“It would seem that they are either looking for an excuse to litigate or an opportunity to embarrass the church in the court of public opinion.’’

Doyle actually took the trouble to write this bit of unsubstantiated attack down! He didn't deliver it off the cuff and accidentally reveal his fear of attack. Instead, he made two bullshit claims for which he has no justification.

This sort of defensive reaction matches the tenor of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The inability to address one's own shortcomings when they're plain as day to ordinary people can be fatal to credibility.

People like Doyle imagine that the dogma of the modern church is the identical doctrine that the church has always advocated and lived under. But this is not true, and how he can escape knowing that is an object lesson in denial.

Doyle is not the only voice on the subject. The archdiocese of Boston has tried to make amends and deserves credit for that even if it's PR, and prominent business Catholic Jack Connors has this plaintive comment:

“But,’’ he said, “I am disappointed that . . . this faith that I love seems to find new ways to shoot itself in the foot.’’

Despite the willingness of some parishoners and priests to adapt, it's an open question whether the church hierarchy can change fast enough to retain its believers. How they've done it so far is beyond me.

Bury the boring lead

Given the choice between pumping up a continuing narrative or writing a one-off but accurate story, which will big media do? The Globe today buried the content of an actual lead paragraph of the State Senate special election story:

The results in the two races won’t alter the makeup of the state Senate, since a Democrat succeeded a Democrat and a Republican followed a Republican. Nonetheless, coupled with Brown’s stunning victory in the US Senate race this year, the Massachusetts Republican Party immediately seized on Ross’s victory as a harbinger of more wins in the fall.

Even this spins the Republican way. The second sentence could as easily have been, "Nonetheless, we'll tell you that this tie is good news for Republicans, when they didn't even have a second candidate to compete for a sweep." (And for fellow grammarians out there - not including the Globe staff who missed it - the mere thought of Mass Republicans coupled with anything stunning means that a modifier is dangling, at least!)

The actual lead paragraph was:

Giving the state GOP another boost as November elections approach, state Representative Richard Ross, a Wrentham Republican, last night won the state Senate seat recently vacated by US Senator Scott Brown.

The race the Democrat won? Repeatedly referred to as "the other race".

This is not an ideological bias; it happens in the other direction, too, as it did with the compelling Barack Obama narrative. It's a bias to tell a larger story, rather than to stick to factual reporting if it detracts from that story.

Dog bites woman

Is it really "trending" news that Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-wingnuttiest) opposes Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court? Ho hum.

If he stopped mid-tantrum, admitted that he was tired of advocating for a return to the dark ages, ripped the mike off his lapel, and walked away from the cameras, now that would be news I could use!

Smashed, stoned, and burnt

Montana reactionaries firebomb a couple of marijuana dispensaries. Yeah, Montana has medical marijuana! Who knew?

No one was hurt, like an ELF political arson. When ELF burns down a real estate development to make a political statement, the right-wing goes even more hysterical than usual.

I wonder (only rhetorically) whether they'll piss their pants over this similar piece of political terror.

Of course not. Consistency is not something the wingnuts even recognize could guide their behavior.

Neo-Confederate insurrectionists

A compendium of Republican radicals...

A sample:

[Minnesota State Senator Tom Emmer, the Republicans' choice to succeed Governor Tim Pawlenty,] has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.

The Republican solution to the fact that the American Constitutional republic is not going their radical way: Quang Tri it.

Give two-year-olds the vote

They couldn't throw any more tantrums than the Republican Party:

"Even if it's a nominee that we can't seriously stop, we can accomplish several things, and so a hard fight is worthwhile," [Curt Levey, director of the conservative Committee for Justice,] implored. "Certainly it can be to the political advantage of Republicans.... There's everything to be gained from making the Supreme Court vacancy a campaign issue in 2010."

"There's broader goals such as just distracting Obama from other items on his agenda," Levey added. "The tougher the fight the less capital and time and resources and floor time in the Senate there is to spend on immigration and climate change, etc."

Elections have consequences - where have I heard that?

(h/t mcjoan at Kos)

New look

After nearly three years, I was ready for a new look. There may be further changes to come.

What do you think?

Head up BP's ass

If you for some odd reason still need to see more of a certain common type of conservative stupidity heavily leavened with hypocrisy, you can seldom go wrong with the flagrantly doctrinaire and unfunny cartoons of Chuck Asay. Here is today's.

In one cartoon, Asay - his head firmly in place in BP's ass - tries all of the following:

• lets BP off the hook for the worst oil spill in history
• evades every claim conservatives have ever made to be the party of personal responsibility
• fails utterly to understand that competitive price pressures of the market should exact a profit penalty from BP - under the conservative theory of the market
• imputes to liberals his own failing - stupidity
  

Fortunate, son

Click image for full John Trever/Albuquerque Journal cartoon.

Dishonorable discharge

Under UCMJ, desertion carries the death penalty. But reduction in rank and 25 years in the stockade ought to be enough.

By the way, even though it's clear that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I would assert that he is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born because his mother was a citizen at the time of his birth. And there's no explication of the phrase nor any case law to contradict me.

Mary Whitehouse has just taken Umbrage

Amusing and instructive when other countries also have trouble sorting out just exactly how they prefer to manufacture the consent of the governed...

Best to remember that there are many different ways to build a democratic election. Here in the US, picking a different way to decide winners decidely takes a back seat to the need to fix our ability to count votes honestly, transparently, and accurately.

Masturs of the universe

More proof, if any were needed, that Wall Street doesn't know your ass from a hole in the ground.

[M]addeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.

These are the people we've left without adult supervision, despite the fact that they might at any moment hoist our living economy up on the mortuary table and drain its blood out in preparation for embalming.

Why would Skynet need a nuclear launch?

Give me liberty or...

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.

AK-47 won the American Revolution

Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:

[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”

Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.

Valley Forge? George Washington was just an SOB, holding back the AKs so he could get to know Lafayette better.

You mean the founders didn't consider automatic weapons either when they wrote the Second Amendment? Unbelievable! Where was the NRA?

If Democrats had any sense of reciprocity, they'd be on all the talk shows saying, "Republicans want to arm terrorists." They wouldn't even be lying.

Slightly more fair-minded: Republicans would rather kiss the NRA's ass than keep automatic weapons and high explosives away from car bombers and other terrorists.

Give Graham the last word in poseur tough-guy security against terrorists:

“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

The front door is closed

This week, the Supreme Court closed its front door. Over the door is engraved in Vermont marble one of the fundamental aspirations of America, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

The court took this step because it fears terror. Never mind the symbolism.

This week, evidence led to the arrest of a Pakistani, naturalized to be an American citizen, for what was, by all appearances, his plot to blow up Times Square. Front door, back door, side door, it didn't matter to him.

But he understood how attacking a symbol instills fear, the strategic purpose of the tactic of terror attacks.

Republicans, true to form, think that this alleged citizen terrorist, arrested for a crime on American soil, should not have been read his Miranda rights, as our law demands. Instead, they want to exploit the fear of Americans to score the cheapest political points. Never mind that the feds used a public safety exception to Miranda initially to interrogate the suspect.

Republicans in Washington - and a substantial proportion of their voters - do not believe in law. They believe in summary vigilantism. They are dismayed that the defendant has apparently confessed and is cooperating. They were eager to flay the Obama administration for not torturing this man, but now they're all dressed up in leather like a sadist with nowhere to go but home to the missus.

The Republicans are happy to risk the validity of the suspect's confession, happy to let him off the hook under our law. That would give them more political wedge issues to divide the country. Perfect!

It's scary that one of the major political parties in the United States couldn't give the slightest crap about the legal foundation of our country. They are in fact not the literal definition of conservatives. They are radicals. Their promise is coup d'etat in slow motion.

And yet they're not a marginal splinter group. They're the second largest political grouping in America.

Pride's not power

... but this man has professional pride.

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Commitment

... to each other.

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Roaches scurry

Political junkie though I am, I had not previously realized that the Senate requires a supermajority vote* - usually dispensed with by unanimous consent - to start debate.

But Republicans are nothing if not endlessly creative in finding ways to say no, in this case, of course, to even talking about making Wall Street safe(r) for America's economy. I have to thank them for exposing to me yet another facet of the brokenness of the Senate.

Part of that brokenness I would also lay at Harry Reid's feet. Finally, finally, he exposed us to the plain fact (which many of us already grasped) that Republicans are a bloc of blockheads. I've called for a long time for the Democrats to make the intransigent two-year-olds on the other side of the aisle pay a deep and visible political price for their tantrums.

Reid made Republicans stand up under the glare of TV cameras and defend the indefensible. They caved. Immediately. And scurried for cover.

The filibuster and its less-known cousins (how many are there?) need to die. The Republicans have worn them out.

Jan. 3, 2011, no matter which Democrat is Majority Leader...


* Actually, I'm still guessing. It's possible that unanimous consent is the only way debate can start, that the hoary old Senate not only lacks its own equivalent of the House's discharge petition, it even lacks a way for the majority's leadership to force a measure to floor. But I can't find out for sure, since all the Senate Floor Procedures I've tried to read from the Committee on Rules and Administration are unavailable.

Natural law

One more thing I meant to say about Lindsey Graham's gaseous effluvia about skipping immigration reform ahead of global warming...

“Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,’’ Graham said.

It seems to be a law of nature that Republicans accuse their targets of exactly their own sins. Graham, obviously hurried and panicked, makes a cynical ploy to escape his illicit political relationship with a Democrat, throwing up some sleight of hand in which he vehemently attacks a convenient target - Harry Reid - who is universally despised in Graham's South Carolina.

I'd bet that Frank Luntz (y'know, the nonpartisan pollster) or some other liar-for-pay has actually advised the ignoramus caucus to immunize themselves from accusations by beating their adversaries to the punch - even if the charge barely even makes sense.

Update (4/28): More evidence of Republican projection, at least regarding cynical political ploys:

And because irony apparently can't die too often, I see that Rick Santorum says Democrats's decision to bring up immigration in D.C. is a "cynical attempt to try to further turn Hispanics away from Republicans." And the effort to turn white people in Arizona (and elsewhere) toward Republicans by means of an immigrant-bashing law ... that wouldn't be cynical at all, would it, Rick?

Calling the tune

Krugman identifies another corruption of our vaunted, innovative financial system:

[Debt rating] was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt — which increasingly meant Wall Street firms selling securities they created by slicing and dicing claims on things like subprime mortgages — could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job. It’s all too obvious, in retrospect, how this could have corrupted the process. [Emphasis added.]

Since Enron corrupted Arthur Andersen by applying the leverage of money to built-in conflicts of interest, it has been obvious that it would be impossible for any alleged watchdog paid by the watchees for its watching to resist payment from the same parties not to watch. Free market competition guarantees it.

Krugman's hardly ever slow on the uptake. Maybe he just didn't have any public statements to point out, proving that he had noticed long ago.

(h/t Atrios)

If he filibusters, make him pay

I've long advocated Atrios's program: Force feed the Republicans their own bullshit by making them filibuster in the Senate well on C-SPAN, with press releases from the Leader's office that pick out juicy and wingnutty quotes for the easy consumption of our perennially lazy big media organizations. Cut Youtube clips together for stinging ridicule? Duh.

Then, on Jan. 3, 2011, kill the filibuster.

This climate did change

Lindsay Graham (R-what passes for semi-reasonable, especially in the lunatic politics of South Carolina) didn't bolt from his work with John Kerry on carbon emissions and climate change because of some poisonous and high-handed change in the Senate calendar by Harry Reid. (Note to journalists: The fact that Graham claimed that is, ahem, a lie, though you're all far too whipped to say that.)

Graham found the excuse he needed to go full metal wingnut to appease the ignoramus caucus, now the dominant Republican faction. He had previously pushed to speed up on immigration reform. What he really wants is to regain the good graces of his teabagger constituents. Absent Reid's own electoral need to respond to his neighboring state's new law on driving while Mexican, Graham would have found something else - "Your necktie, Mr. Majority Leader, is an obamanation, uh, abomination up with which I shall not put!"

None of this flanking right will work for Graham. Not only did he once say something agreeable to a Democrat - and you know the Democrat Party is bent on the satanic destruction of the Holy United States of Neo-Confederate America - Graham also isn't married to an acceptably deferential Southern Baptist woman with whom to play hide the salami. Instead, he's a bachelor, so there are three choices, none of them acceptable to the ig-caucus:

• He ain't gittin' none.
• He's a goddamned fornic-, fernicat-, furni-, aw hell, playboy, and that means he ain't p-whipped like me.
• He's one a them other kinds a teabagger, the kind that oughta be stoned - and I don't mean on no pot - stoned according to our lord Jesus Christ the prince of peace's dad, who sure as hell wasn't no damn hippie freak believer in not castin' the first stone at them types a folks.

What changed for Graham was Doug Hoffman, Marco Rubio, and now - incredibly - three even wingier candidates who find Utah's Bob Bennett to be not frothingly extreme enough, at least in part because they would prefer to be living through the Second Great Depression right about now. Hey, they have a year's food stockpiled, right? Graham doesn't want to follow Dede Scozzafava, though she is far more moderate than he is, nor especially Charlie Crist.

Teabaggers and the Republican right - you couldn't pry them apart with a crowbar - want fire and brimstone from their pols. No more laws! The Ten Commandments are enough (even though there are actually 11 or 12 of them, but who's counting?). Not even laws based on Republican proposals, and especially never any real liberalism.

What they want is more of the aptly named Jim Dement, sorry, DeMint. And Republicans everywhere are falling all over themselves to give the crazy extreme wingnuttitude to them.

Outsourcing to Jon Stewart

Hardly anyone in big media has the guts to criticize the bullshit of Fox News. I guess journalists all fear some future job interview after Sarah Palin privatizes her Minitru into the capable hands of propagandist Rupert Murdoch. A job interview, they hope. That cage of rats around the face, ugh, almost as disgusting and painful as Glenn Beck!

So the New York Times outsources its critique to Jon Stewart by pretending to merely report what he says:

[Stewart] said on the show this week that he criticizes [Fox] a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

Evidence for Stewart's assertion, if anyone is obtuse enough to still need it, is Fox's drumbeat that the logo of the recent nuclear summit is derived from the characteristic Islamic symbol of the evening star at new moon. The logo, which the Times unaccountably neglects to show, is:


Hydrogen! Oh my Lord Jesus Christ! (No, not Allah. Never Allah.)

Just say for sake of argument that the logo is a reference to Islam. If so, it would only serve as a stark reminder that radical Islam and nuclear proliferation are indeed a serious threat that we in the liberal west are rightly working against. Would that concern be unpatriotic? Hardly.

The whole logo controversy only works as propaganda if its recipients are already in thrall of delusions about President Obama. It only appeals further to their unreasoning beliefs and, mostly, to their tribal, often bigoted mistrust of him.

Nor is this the first time the wingnutosphere has made mountains (for Mohammed!) out of graphical molehills. They actively search for invidious touchstones to enrage their easily manipulated flock of dittoheads.

The obvious purpose of Fox's logo-rrhea (hyphen signals scatological joke) is to keep its audience in constant angry arousal for electoral purposes. Many of them are armed, and quite a few of those gun owners are clinically insane.

Fox doesn't care. The coming violence - coming further violence actually - will only drive ratings up, and Fox's large stable of provocateurs will piously declaim that they had nothing to do with the violence, that it was of course liberal words and government that forced the neo-Confederates off the deep end. Because, God save us, the Muslims have already taken over Microsoft!


Still don't believe me? Fox and the neo-Confederates didn't object to this far more Islamic logo:

Crescent moon, stars! But it's a Republican logo. IOKIYAR. And we know that Saudi Arabia's party in America couldn't possibly have anything to do with Islamic symbolism.

Who you calling Anglo?

Click image for full John Branch/San Antonio Express-News cartoon.

Sacked

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

Beast with two backs

When the economy goes tits up, it's not Wall Street that gets screwed.

Click image for full David Brown/Los Angeles Sentinel cartoon.

Waking up

The good news is that even a reflexively centrist conciliator such as President Barack Obama has limits to the bullshit he'll tolerate from the ignoramus caucus of the Party of No:

"It doesn't matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big 'ol fight over it. So he doesn't have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns," the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct "anything of consequence" put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. "The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right," the official added.

My recommendation:

• On John Paul Stevens's replacement, fight visibly and without bending with the Senate Republicans, win or lose.
• If they succeed at their filibuster, no need to go nuclear. Make a recess appointment at the first opportunity.
• On January 3, 2011, get whoever is the Senate Majority Leader to kill the filibuster, not to mention the unconscionable system of secret holds. Through overuse, they've outlived their function of caution and become the obstructive tool of a bunch of two-year-olds throwing tantrums.
  
• Gain Senate confirmation of your recess appointee with fifty-whatever votes you have.
• Call Mitch McConnell and sweetly tell him to go fuck himself. With a chainsaw.
  

Worked for Doc Hollywood

Let's enact a sweet piece of nostalgia as if it could possibly be good public policy in a predominantly urban and suburban nation. Barter chickens - or a pig or Vialula's reputation - for an ACL reconstruction, and let the orthopedic specialist, with a quarter million dollars in loans to repay, slop the hawgs.

As Anonymous Liberal says, it's hard to have any kind of conversation with a movement and a party so determined to shout la-la-la-la whenever reality rears its ugly head and proves not to be the perfect place for the ignoramus caucus that they fervently desire it to be.

The reason that violence from the right is coming is that the wingnuts have built a humongous P3 containment to protect their stupidity from the world. The world is at negative pressure, so the virulent wingnut pathogens leak into it, yet the nuts never have to learn anything but the profitably fomented rage that comes so naturally to them.

They are going to view us as vermin to be exterminated. Or converted. Our choice.

Make the earth move, baby

Like American conservative Christians, Iranian Islamic clerics can't be in the same room with female sexuality. Showing a little ankle under their chadors, Iranian women make the ground move for the righteous mullahs. And it's the women's fault - or Allah's - that a few square centimeters of bony flesh give them such wood that they can no longer control themselves.

What is wrong with these freaks? And how did any people allow themselves to be under their control?

Typical wingnut shit-fit

If it's not obvious to you, Republicans are nasty sore losers. They don't believe in democracy. They believe only they can govern.

Democrats, by contrast, are much more even-tempered and stable.

Dust in the wind

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Opportunity breaks the door down

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.