A couple of items you shouldn't miss:
Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.How is a mosque or other Islamic institution being built a couple of blocks from ground zero going to practically affect the great majority of Americans?
Not at all.
Hardly any of us will attend it. Almost none of us will work on the construction. Very, very few of us will even pass by it.
Oh, sure, thanks to their complete lack of perspective and toughness, millions of conservatives will have the bejeebers scared out of them at the mere thought of Muslims praying toward Mecca five times a day. But they're scaring themselves by looking at their own shadows.
For the price of reassuring a bunch of lily-livered chicken littles, we stand to risk our already tattered Bill of Rights to gain, in return, absolutely nothing.
It's the perfect Republican proposal, filled with nothing but sound and fury.
It's great and all that the last combat brigade is out of Iraq a couple of weeks early, but:
Scatterings of combat troops still await departure, and some 50,000 will stay another year in what is designated as a noncombat role.Even better than careful gradations of Pentagon bureaucratese, American casualties are waaay down in Iraq. It's still important to keep track of the fact that they were actual human beings with names and not just numbers. The most recent and surely not the last was Jamal Rhett, age 24, of Palmyra, NJ.
The First Amendment packs a lot of power. On freedom of speech, wingers act as though it says:
Yep, they leave all the content of the free speech clause on the cutting room floor.Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.
Ronald Reagan and Congressional Democrats made a good-faith deal in 1983 to put Social Security on sound fiscal footing in the face of retiring Baby Boomers. Now Republicans and even conservative Democrats want to pretend that the FICA tax increase on all those middle class wage-earners shouldn't help them when they retire. Essentially, they've instead cut taxes on the wealthy too much to still keep our national promise to retirees. Oh, too bad about penury among seniors!
Paul Krugman nails it:
So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.Why is it that so few journalists are clear-eyed enough to notice the obvious bullshit from the right? They can't all be idiots. Hell, I know a few who aren't (as well as at least one who is).
If you're still naive enough to think that wingnut Republicans aren't obsessed with race, Media Matters does this public service.
Of course, by the mere act of pointing out the Limbaughite racism, I commit what Limbaugh and his reactionary ignoramus mob call reverse racism. Look, you dopes, I don't want to oppress white people, I don't want to oppress males. I am a member of both of those groups.
I just want to call bullshit whenever one of you bigoted gasbags is a bigoted gasbag and then acts all pitifully victimized because I told you you're a bigoted gasbag. Simple enough?
The Massachusetts Republican Party has fielded such a dismally sparse slate of legislative candidates that its partisans can't dream, even mathematically, of gaining a majority in the state House of Representatives. Despite Martha Coakley's obvious vulnerability, the Republicans have no one to run against her.
How could the Republicans miss such an opportunity to make this election truly competitive? The ground is better for Republicans in Massachusetts than it has been in decades:
How Republicans consider the needs of ordinary people:
Republicans admire the boldness of Mr. [Paul] Ryan’s vision, even if his proposals are a little too bleak for the campaign trail. “He’s not saying the world’s going to be full of butterscotch sundaes,” is how Jeb Bush described the plan to me recently. “He’s saying: ‘Eat your broccoli. And then maybe you don’t get to eat at all for a few days. You don’t get steak — ever.’ ” [emphasis added]More steak for them! More broccoli too.
I've long thought that a key source of sectarian peace in Northern Ireland was the economic boom in all of Ireland. This resurgence of violence suggests I was right.
How does this matter for America, other than engaging our sympathy (and possibly, negatively, our sympathies)?
The perennial avarice of the wealthy class in this country for a larger and larger share of the pie leads to privation, and that eventually leads to violence, as it always has. It won't matter whether the maldistributed GDP is bigger if the people have empty stomachs.
Anchor babies take at least twenty-one years:
[U]nder immigration law American citizen children must wait until they are 21 years old to apply for legal residency for their parents. Also, most of the illegal immigrants who have children who are American citizens have not recently arrived.I didn't know these facts until today. Bullshit is winning in America.
Time was when a journalist dissembling about his own recorded words, for heaven's sake, would have fallen into disgrace and out of a job. At the provincial level, that's still true. I'd expect to be sacked for such egregious misbehavior, which, possessing a sense of honor, I'd never imitate.
For the national political press, those days ended during President Clinton's first term. Much of the "mainstream" media now operates by Hollywood rules: Stardom brings big money and freedom from accountability. So long, that is, as one can avoid offending the Soviet-style propaganda apparatus that's arisen on the Republican far right.
But no, "both sides" don't do it. Berated for years about "liberal bias," many otherwise sensible citizens don't understand that for better and worse, the Democrats have nobody like Andrew Breitbart or Glenn Beck.
Race-baiting is Rush Limbaugh's job. It's what he means when he proudly crows that he's not politically correct.
He knows it, his audience knows it, I know it. Only the big media are so conservatively correct that they fail to notice that the man is a professional bigot.
(h/t Atrios)
Update (8/14): Opening a new front in racist denialism, "Dr." Laura laces her show with "n*****, n*****, n*****." But she's not a racist, oh no, she's just quoting n--, I mean, black people back to themselves.
Here's a bright line test: If you immediately go on the attack when someone mentions racism, you're most likely a racist. If you think black hypersensitivity is the big problem, you're so self-centered and impervious to everyone else's reality that you'll be in denial of your own racism forever. You probably lack enough of the empathy, which you were supposed to have learned in kindergarten, to apply the golden rule.
Watch your wallet if there's a conservative around:
The Tax Policy Center finds that the [Paul] Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.Especially if the big media love the latest right-wing purveyor of obvious smelly bullshit.
"I will not yield."
Words we need to hear from Democrats much more often.
Even a hard right-winger thinks the teabaggers are crazy and bigoted and around the bend:
Instead, he remarks, his party turned toward demagoguery. Inglis lists the examples: falsely claiming Obama's health care overhaul included "death panels," raising questions about Obama's birthplace, calling the president a socialist, and maintaining that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major factor of the financial meltdown. "CRA," Inglis says, "has been around for decades. How could it suddenly create this problem? You see how that has other things worked into it?" Racism? "Yes," Inglis says.(h/t metulj on KnoxViews)
Fox is not interested in anything but propaganda. Anyone who claims otherwise loves the taste of bullshit.
It was obvious that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was much worse than BP's initial bullshit estimate of 1000 gallons of daily seaweed salad dressing. The Obama administration played along like a lapdog with BP's second self-serving guesstimate of 5000 barrels. The media, in turn, stuck with the official story, despite the evidence of their eyes - and of scientific assessments of reality.
Now we're starting to get the truth: worst accidental oil blowout ever.
The complicity of everyone in power is appalling.
Yet another case of the so-called liberal media bending over backward to pretend that conservatives have a valid argument:
[O]rganizers are working to get individual states to join a compact changing the way they select their own electoral votes — an idea that was first floated several years ago based on the conviction that the Constitution gives states the right to determine how their own electors are chosen. [emphasis added]Reporter Stephanie Ebbert is unwilling to make note of the plain language of the Constitution (Art. II, section 1):
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.The unwillingness to state simple, incontrovertible facts if conservatives dislike those facts is a maddening feature of our senescent big media and an existential threat to our nation.
Unemployment is for the little people:
[A] large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.If the American polity were the least bit rational, the unemployed would be marching with pitchforks against their vassals. Krugman says:
[W]hile Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused.Paul is wrong about this. The anger of Americans is focused. It's just focused on the wrong people.
Before Jimmy Carter bought into the deregulation mania of the 1970s, you could book a round-trip itinerary without making sure that both legs were on the same airline. Here in 2010, I just heard an Expedia ad that touts that as a great new selling point.
Is 35 years long enough to prove that the free market is often not efficient?
Update (8/4): The free market seldom takes this long to discover opportunities such as these to screw us, purely as a result of their market power.
Brief history of the Republican betrayal of one of its founding principles:
Certainly not all Republicans are racists, but the Republican Party deliberately exploited and exacerbated racial tensions for political gain for decades. Those Republicans now being shoved to the party's new margins have no standing to complain. Where were they when they and their party were benefitting from the extremism that now is taking control of their party? Where was their sense of civic duty and basic morality?
Now that the Al Gore masseuse abuse story has resulted in ... nothing, it can graduate to being an unkillable zombie story, which wingnuts will repeat as god's honest truth right up to and including the comment thread on Gore's obituary.
By the way, we know for a fact that David Vitter (R-I'll call you Wendy) was well-known to more than one prostitution ring. We've known it for 1125 days. So far, no consequences.
What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is? Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly.
The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction.
Newt Gingrich's signature achievement: To be thought intelligent by stupid people in a way that doesn't make them hate him. It's a living - and much easier than to be thought intelligent by intelligent people, but to overcome his name, his whiny voice, his bloated corpulence, his overbearing ego, and his complification of subjects that his fans all think are totally simple is quite significant.
It's as if the jocks adopted a kid out of the AV club, not just to be their twirly-sodden mascot, but to pick their dance music.
He could really use a few good mockings.
(h/t Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice)
This doesn't pass the giggle test:
Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.Forbes is judging environmentalism by billionaires. Can we load a truck up with that bullshit and compost the hell out of it? Edward Wyatt of the New York Times can't tell shit from shinola:
In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.Yup, a Texan environmentalist, as opposed to the real kind.
I've mocked "for the children" as a political slogan. It's just so touchy-feely.
But of course it's true that Republicans and conservatives enact policies that thin the herd. Even when those in the herd are too young to fend for themselves.
We're not talking about soft stats here, either. This is about living and dying and suffering from poverty.
Newt Gingrich (R-will to power) joins the amen chorus (amen to Jay-zus!) of teabaggers and wingnuts - that is, the majority of Republicans - in opposing the Cordoba House, a proposed Islamic mosque in Lower Manhattan. Once again, they prove that they have no idea of the meaning of freedom of religion. They narcissistically think that the Founders' great achievement was to codify the wingnuts' own special brand of Christianity as protected from who knows who - the great atheist-Islamist conspiracy, I guess. Just as many of them have missed the entire import of the gospels (Jesus was a liberal who ministered of love to the poor), they've missed the entire import of the First Amendment. And everything in between.
Gingrich can't help gilding the lily along with every other right-wing pundit. The mosque is "at Ground Zero." Or, as Newtie says, "overlooks Ground Zero." Most of the so-called straight news reporters give away their sycophant roles in pushing propaganda by adopting the wingy phrasing.
The truth is that the mosque is near Ground Zero - two city blocks away. (Click Google screen capture images for full-resolution aerial views.)
It just works so much better as propaganda to let your eager bullshit swallowers imagine that a mosque is going to rise in replacement of the twin towers. This is the sort of manipulation in plain sight that the Republicans know so well.
In any case, what distance toward the back of the bus would Republican opponents of religious freedom think appropriate? Maybe if the mosque were closer instead, they could think of its members as a human shield. The wingnuts' heads might explode from cognitive dissonance.
Wait til they find out how many other mosques there are in the area of Lower Manhattan!
Aaaieee! We're doomed. They're taking over! There's even an existing mosque four blocks from Ground Zero (though they appear to be having trouble keeping their lease).
Just leave out the context of how many churches there are in the same area:
I bet abortion clinics are feeling mighty nervous now! (Note: That's the wingnut logic of group accountability for the acts of a few other people who are superficially similar in some way.)
(Did I just commit journalism?)
Update (8/6): There's already a mosque inside the Pentagon! (h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)
Update (8/22): Updated in new item, When is a mosque not a mosque?
Update (8/22): I'm no New York Times, but I had the story of other nearby mosques almost three weeks before they did. In Manhattan, their own back yard. (h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)
I'm reading, American Lion, Jon Meacham's biography focused on Andrew Jackson's two term as President, and Meacham's writing about pre-Civil War America unmistakably echoes the present day polarization of America. Here's one example (p. 58):
The rise of a nation with a large number of voters..., dependent for infomration and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who ... had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader's political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician's message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson's political appeal came out of the same tradition - a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance.We of course have only recently emerged from a period when having a beer with a recovering alcoholic was the perverse standard of our selection of a president. Maybe we haven't even emerged, given the continued prominence of beer diplomacy.
If you're interested in me defending a Republican against the scurrilous bullshit attack of a wingnut, see this blog on KnoxViews.
The actual funding appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $1,000,000,000,000. That's a whole shitload of zeroes. That's more than $3,000 apiece that we owe on our credit cards from China Bank. Over and above Duhbya's tax cuts for the rich.
The trillion dollar tab doesn't include any planning whatsoever for anticipated long-range costs such as health care and other earned perks for veterans. Linda Bilmes has in the past carefully estimated those as costing additional trillions. And of course, we're still running up the tab.
It's stunning that only World War II is still "ahead" in costs. It's stunning that the margin is less than a factor of four:
Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars.My question, which the big media absolutely has refused to look into since these wars began in 2001, is why? WWII saw millions of men under arms, a huge output of materiel, a vast and expensive air- and sealift. What's different about these modern wars that make them so much more costly?
Most people choose their beliefs. They don't reason to them. Many won't even reject their cherished beliefs just because they've learned something new.
In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.Social norms matter immensely in the choice what to believe. The norms of society as a whole are important, though they may not be as strong for a person as the norms of a particular group that is central to that person's identity. My sixth grade teacher told me that evolution wasn't nice; she wasn't even willing to engage on the facts.
The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire.Liberals as always are better, but we don't have that much to be proud of either.
The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.The Boston Globe story chalks our irrationality up to the wiring of our brains. That's a pretty lame shrug of the shoulders. That wiring hasn't changed, but the degree to which we are polarized has. Yes, it's normal for all people to resist changing their beliefs, to be skeptical of new facts. But it hasn't until the past few decades been normal for conservatives especially to refuse to accept new information.
Unless you're savagely inconsiderate of a major multinational corporation's feelings, don't go to this page.
(h/t Essays and Effluvia)
As with many wonderful ideas, this one is not mine: If you're unemployed, call your Congressional Representative and both your Senators and ask for help finding a job. While you're at it, call the White House, too.
Our political leaders are the real malingerers. Unemployment is persistently above 9% in the standard, minimizing way we talk about it, U3. In a more accurate way, U6 - including discouraged workers, who've finished their unemployment compensation, and underemployed workers, who are lucky enough to be making lattes at Starbucks after long careers as middle managers - it's above 16%.
Call the complacent bastards once a week until they understand. Really. I'm not just blowing smoke.
I wouldn't pay Rachel Maddow for sex.
Sorry to break it to you, asshole. Rachel Maddow couldn't care less if the scurvy likes of you is attracted to her.
Oh, yeah, it's David Vitter watch, day 1101. I would have thought that Republicans could have gotten their most prolific consorter with whores out of the Senate by now. Could it be that they recognize their caucus's own activities as prostitution, merely without all the messy fluids? Nah, no way they have that kind of self-knowledge.
Is it senility or willful forgetting?
Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.The evidence suggests that Republicans don't care about the size of the economy. They care about income inequality. Unlike Democrats, Republicans favor more inequality.
On behalf of the big media, Dana Milbank reports the complete and total bullshit coming from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R-pearls of a swine) - with a dollop from Sen. John McCain (R-not a maverick). (Of course, he doesn't credit the liberal blogosphere, which has been on this story for a while.)
But tomorrow or the next day, she'll be on TV again, and no one will impugn her credibility despite her repeated willingness to justify her policy on the basis of lies.
This media laxity, not ever extended to a Democrat, is why Democrats must every day call out Republicans for their lies. The media won't help. They're too busy protecting their sources and proving they're not liberal. Democrats have to stop being polite in the face of unregenerate, unremorseful liars.
"You're well known, Gov. Brewer, to state the most breath-taking falsehoods as the basis for your immigration policy. Why should anyone believe a single word you ever say?"The only alternative is to accept that American politics will continue to be driven by unrebutted lies.
This week I'm tied for first in influence among Massachusetts political blogs. Ah right.
Look, any ranking that puts me ahead of Blue Mass Group has, uh, an idiosyncratic algorithm for determining influence.
But, hey, doesn't this again make me an award-winning blogger?
Since the rich run things, there's no expectation that they must live up to their commitments even when their debts overwhelm them. The middle class? Bankruptcy is not for them, nor even abandonment of their underwater mortgages.
Our creative muscles have gone soft and slack too.
The American experiment with effective democracy and liberty is in grave danger of senescence and death from multiple sources - deep tolerance for bullshit as a cultural norm, ideologically driven refusal to admit contrary facts, conservative ossification enabled by media whose purpose is to excuse ignorance, and a great willful forgetting of hard lessons we learned in the 20th century.
What are we going to do about it?
Update: In the gallery of images, I really like the concept of "resistance to premature closure." I need to live with that idea and muse on it...
I get letters. They ask for money. I throw them away recycle them.
But for yuks I sometimes pick out a good wingnut letter and read it, just to see what's making them piss their britches. Or at least what they think will make their supporters piss their britches - and open their wallets.
Socialism, usually. Obama and his "loony left agenda." (Where? Would love to see that in action.) The conservative fundraisers almost never call Obama President Obama. I guess their heads would explode. Nancy Pelosi is another boogeyman of the right. OK, boogeywoman!
Most of the letter I got yesterday from Sharron Angle (R-lunatic fringe) is standard Republican boilerplate. Since I'm not in Nevada, the letter tries really hard to nationalize Angle's contest with Harry Reid so that I'll supposedly be convinced to sign up as a "Friend of Sharron Angle." Yah, sure.
It's odd that she thinks a potential contributor would need to be convinced that the Nevada Senate race has national implications. Maybe the mailing list is supposed to be for, um, less engaged (o.k. stupid) conservatives. The fact that she's trying so hard suggests to me some desperation.
Angle does depart from one commonplace in conservative fundraising. Rather than edging up to the libel cliff and peeking carefully over, she goes for it full bore:
Reid doesn't just use his tremendous power as Senate Majority Leader to ram through Obama's agenda...Yeah, sounds as if actual malice wouldn't be hard to prove. She's accusing him of extortion and accepting bribes, not to mention abuse of his position.
...he also leverages it so that millions of dollars in Special Interest money flow [sic] into his campaign coffers.
Every Special Interest that wants a favor, [sic] must first toss some money into Reid's tin pot.
Not much political content, but I couldn't resist the pun in my title.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.Obligatory political jibe (because that's what I'm here for): If Sarah Palin had a small, tasteful tatt (as if!) on her hand to hide her crib notes, how many of her conservative followers would suddenly decide that body art is fine with them?
I always get a good laugh when one Republican accuses another of character assassination. What else do they have?
Campaign finance reform - the body of law to keep wealthy interests from trying to buy elections - is over. Be ready for what's coming this fall: constant fusillades of deceptive, right-wing, corporate-funded, pro-Republican ads.
Despite Barack Obama's success raising money in 2008, we liberals will not be able to compete dollar-for-dollar. We also have no history of successfully labelling bullshit as bullshit. No matter how frumious, we keep engaging it as if it deserves serious consideration.
The only response that might plausibly work is to speak bluntly, to call the Republican corporate propaganda what it is: rank bullshit. And then we must use their obvious bullshit to impugn their credibility about everything.
In other words, we have to drop our politesse and tell the truth: They are liars, they'll always be liars, their luxurious livelihoods depend on it, and the only consequence they'll understand is to be defeated.
I doubt the American bullshit detector can handle the coming avalanche.
The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country. Yeah, I'm damning with faint praise.
Bill Keller, executive editor of the gray lady, has been a defender of official bullshit from the time I first took notice of him in the late 1990s, when the Times's thrusting of Republican bullshit about Bill Clinton needed his defense. For Keller, it hasn't mattered whether the official bullshit is the Times's own or comes from Republican political operatives and their business interests. Keller will have no part in calling bullshit bullshit. He'd rather add more onto the compost heap.
Now, true to form, his spokesperson claims that calling torture torture would have been inadmissably biased:
When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.Words have meaning. Waterboarding has always been torture. The special pleadings of the torture-advocating war criminals of Duhbya's ugly administration don't change those meanings.
[When the Washington Post and the New York Times] defended their acts of cowardice and dismissed criticism as tendentious, they went beyond harm. Their pride in subservience was a disgrace.
No surprise, Republican Senators are lining up against Elena Kagan.
President Obama nominated Kagan, clearly a moderate, to replace the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, but there's no satisfying the Republicans. They're so devoid of perspective, they think the responsible left is Joe Lieberman - or even Olympia Snowe.
This is what Republicans do: No matter how conciliatory or centrist a Democratic proposal, they push it hard to the right. And then they won't support the result.
It's time to stop negotiating with these bad faith assholes, kill the filibuster in January (or sooner), and make the majority's platform happen.
Digby on the elite consensus that the national debt is more important than the worst employment picture in eighty years!
What a beautiful message of unity on our Independence Day it is to tell close to 20 million citizens that they are on their own in the worst job market since the Great Depression purely to make a cheap political point. It would make King George proud to see his aristocratic heirs flexing their muscles two centuries later in the country that once proudly proclaimed that it didn't have a class system.Yet somehow it's the teabagging morons, on their platform of even more neglect, who have the fervor of revolution.
So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.Tsk-tsk, they say, it may hurt, but that's life.
Big media dysfunction in microcosm...
Dwelling on inconsequentialities such as the little witticisms of a confirmation hearing is no accident. It's how the media avoids taxing its middle-schoolish audience with philosophical conversations about the substance of liberty under law. (Snooze!)
Once CNN is on an inconsequentiality, however, they bring to bear the serious principles of balanced journalism. Lest anyone carp from among the perennial right-wing whiners, CNN offers equal emphasis:
If confirmed, Elena Kagan may or may not turn out to be that intellectual counterweight to conservatives Justice Antonin Scalia or Chief Justice John Roberts.Except of course that the supposed intellectual depth of conservative ideologues is axiomatic!
To be fair, the members of the court usually labeled liberal - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, and the retired John Paul Stevens - all display great legal minds but not much sharp-edged humor or the willingness to engage in spirited debate for which Kagan is known. Justice Stephen Breyer is equally smart and he too shares a sense of humor, but that tends to fall on the quirky, self-deprecating side.If Robin Williams, referring to the Nazis, asked a German, "Did you ever think maybe you killed all the funny people?", CNN would be obliged to find, yah, haha, a stormtrooper who side-lined in stand-up. You vill laff, and you vill like it!On the conservative side, friends of Justice Clarence Thomas - who almost never speaks at arguments - note he has a great wit and a hearty laugh. Colleagues call him the funniest justice you never hear about.
Questions about an undergraduate term paper! Can high school be far behind? How about kindergarten? "Ms. Kagan, I am reliably informed that at age five you called a prominent conservative classmate a poopy-head. When did you stop being a red-diaper baby?"Grassley had asked the nominee about a paper she wrote as a college student that took a critical look at how judges decide cases.
"Is it appropriate for judges to mold and steer the law?" Grassley asked.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol raided a cockfight in rural southeast Tennessee. Naturally, the AP doesn't say where in Polk Co., but one look at Benton, TN, the tiny town listed in the dateline, tells me that AP doesn't have a stringer there:
This is really a dog bites man story - happens about once a year. In fact, googling cockfighting benton tennessee shows some signs that this ho-hum news has taken at least a month to travel the 70 miles to Knoxville.
This story is only worthy of comment because of the reflexive bigotry it elicits from at least one commenter on Knoxnews:
Surprised there were no illegal immigrants retained in custody. --ccjs (June 27, 2010 11:24 a.m.)Yes, many of the Latin American illegals come from cultures that still permit cockfighting, but that may be one thing that makes them feel right at home in East Tennessee. Thirty years ago, I worked for a guy who spent every weekend fighting his "chickens." Word was that he had good sources in local law enforcement, so that he never showed up to a cockpit carrying his stake and his roosters if it was going to be raided.
It's pretty clear that the local authorities in Louisiana are in bed with BP. The federal government should be there enforcing the U.S. Constitution. At gun point, if it's necessary to arrest some of the LEOs for civil rights violations.
Major Malcolm Wolfe of the sheriff's office [of Terrebonne Parish] says the deputy's pulling someone over in his official vehicle while working for a private company is standard and acceptable practice, because Wheelan was acting suspicious and could have been a terrorist.Update (7/5): I can understand why the local authorities could be bought and paid for many times over by BP, but I don't understand how the Obama administration can find any reason whatsoever to be seen working fist in glove with BP.
