Because I'm a liberal and proud, goddammit!
The economic irrelevance of naval power
1 week ago
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
Wingnuts begetting wingnuts
Abstinence doesn't work. Even the fundies have the fire down below. They can't keep it in their pants - too much desire to get into her pants. Or his.
Almost all of the states with the most teen pregnancy are Bible Belt states. The I'm-on-top ten:
- Mississippi
- New Mexico
- Arkansas
- Texas
- Oklahoma
- Louisiana
- Kentucky
- West Virginia
- Alabama
- Tennessee
Almost everything Teapublicans tell you is a lie. This one is convenient to sustain the inversion of interests by which so many working class people vote as if they made $250,000 a year.
People who defer parenthood have a chance to get educated, to mature before they have to provide for an infant. This gives them a chance to escape the hidebound system of economic and religious oppression that keeps them reliably voting for plutocrats, when those plutocrats in fact despise them.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Fox and friends
I've long said that the purpose of right-wing media is to provide cover for indefensible beliefs, rather than to provide information from which to build defensible beliefs. Many studies have borne this out, and Chris Mooney recaps them in Salon:
Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.
But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Still wandering in the wilderness
I wish he knew that since his death we have searched for the soul of this nation. We have begun to ask questions that have never been asked. We have challenged each other in ways that we have yet to do. We yearn for a post-racial America. Aspirational. Not a reality. We know that. We still have much work to do. Soul-searching.I'm a few days late, but still, go and read this memorial.
When Teapublicans say this is a republic, not a democracy
This is what they mean:
Yeah, for them, it's short for they get all the power.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
One hour Martinizing
My racist trolls are sooo not going to find this funny. They are too stunted to have reached the stage of having a sense of humor. Humor for them amounts to outrage posing as irony. See Chuck Asay.
Also, notice how the Fox blatherers are wrongly certain what the world has been like without even bothering to check.
Bodyguard of liars
The conservative establishment and its wingnut foot soldiers have taken Barry Goldwater several steps further: Extremism in defense of ultraconservatism is no vice.
For several years, young conservatives have made a cottage industry of going undercover and trying to goad people working at perceived liberal institutions — like Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood — into saying something stupid. Trained by well-financed foundations, these dirty tricksters pose as pimps, sex traffickers and Muslim activists and record conversations surreptitiously. Then they release videos that have often been heavily edited.Conservative Congressional representatives call for investigations and try to slash financing. In the case of Acorn, some workers did, in fact, give truly stupid advice to the fake prostitutes. That organization went belly up.
These reich-wing provocateurs will lie, cheat, and pretext without conscience or compunction. Politics has figuratively been blood sport for them for generations, but that figurativeness has drastically lessened. They aren't quite yet out to kill us, but they are aiming to destroy all liberal institutions, no matter the cost. They don't want to contest politics as a struggle of ideas. They want a monopoly - like all free marketeers in the dark depths of their avarice.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Fixing the game
Republicans don't believe in democratic governance. They believe in ruling us:
In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.Read it all. Depressing as it is, it's better to know and act from reality, rather than some fantasy that they too value self-government.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Depletion allowance
Click image for full Elena Steier/sickworldjournal.com cartoon.
If, out of all the people, guilty of financial crimes, mostly Republicans, a Democrat has to go to jail first, I'm fine with Jon Corzine doing time.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Hawaiian like me
Watch the Secret Service detail in the last 10 seconds. The President's joking? There's good humor? They don't care. They're single-focused on watching for a threat. Which will only get worse when Obama is re-elected over Rmoney or Sanctorum.
(h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Even Teapublicans can tell that Mitt Romney is a liar
Tomorrow Mitt Rmoney will claim that Eric Fehrnstrom is a junior staffer. It's the only way Mitt can stay true to his pattern of dishonesty at all possible moments.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Remember when transvaginal was a good thing?
Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.
Ignorance is bliss
This cartoon, which attempts irony, explains a lot about the Teapublican view of ignorance as no big deal. How ironic.
Click image for full Rob Smith Jr./Glenn Beck cartoon.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Return of Bircherism
The Tennessee General Assembly passes a delusionally paranoid, anti-UN resolution against Agenda 21. The fact that it's anti-environmental? Bonus!
WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealthThis sounds like the John Birch Society bullshit (h/t @Trace Sharp) I heard growing up in Tennessee 40 years ago, and sure enough it is. Don't any of them wonder how we're still free if fluoridation was a communist conspiracy to drug us all into sheep-like obedience?
Rick Perlstein (h/t Paul Krugman) notes that the crazy conservatives have been with us a long time - longer than we've called them wingnuts.
[A]longside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).What we had until Ronald Reagan and talk radio brought them out of the darkness was a social norm that scoffed at the fever swamp of ultra-conservative imagination. Well, nationally, not in the South. We no longer have that moderating national norm, which is really depressing, and the continuing reason wingnuts are so sensitive to any norm that limits their various and sundry bigotries.
Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.
Still, it's hopeful to look back with a gimlet eye and see that we liberals have overcome the wingnuts before. Now, to do it again.
Update: Lest I get too optimistic, more lunacy on Agenda 21.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Goddamn America
Republicans in Congress didn't say, "Goddamn America." They acted on it.
The Republican Party prefers to damage America if it can damage a Democratic President at the same time. This was so for Bill Clinton and is even moreso for Barack Obama.
Goldman sacks
Rape and pillage is the order of business at Goldman Sachs, says a now former insider. But we all knew that already. This company, to which both parties cravenly outsource the Department of the Treasury, was thoroughly exposed as double-dealing and untrustworthy in the aftermath of the Bushist financial crisis. The SEC:
Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement [at the SEC, said,] "Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party."That privatization of a Cabinet post, until proven otherwise, is why no one - no one! - went to jail over this allegedly legal billion-dollar fraud, for which Goldman Sachs's contracted vig was a paltry $15 million.
Investors in the liabilities of ABACUS are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion.If you're going to lead a life of crime, white collar crime is the way to go, and the rigged game of Wall St. has the highest reward-to-risk ratio. Hell, if your fraudulent investments go sour in a big enough way, the Secretary of the Treasury will insist the middle class bail you out - without clawing back your immense and undeserved bonuses.
The SEC's complaint charges Goldman Sachs and Tourre with violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5. The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.
The SEC didn't even seek prison, only civil penalties. The Wall St. billionaires have written the securities laws so that their fraud is often only moral, not legal.
Now to Greg Smith's conscience. Where was he when it mattered? Raking in the dough that he's probably planning to retire on...
If you read his claim of conscience, the first thing you'll notice is what a piece of self-serving bullshit it is, even if its headline is true. I don't know about you, but I was not in need of reading a puffed up resume of all Smith's selections and glory and value. He was almost chosen to be a Rhodes Scholar. Whoop-de-doo.
It sounds to me as though the fundamental problem of Wall St. is overweening self-regard that leads to smash and grab ethics and short-termism. Masters of the universe, bitches! That's how they view the world.
Smith is a terrible writer who won't put himself at risk to do more than generalize. He'd have to violate confidentiality to illustrate his piece with names, dates, and deals, and that would put his retirement at age 33 or so at risk. No way!
He's not so much whistle-blowing as horn-tooting.
Update: Satire!
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Metaphorical wanking only in the anti-sex GOP
Click image for full Brian McFadden/New York Times cartoon.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Where've you been the past three years?
A lot of people hate politics, but politics is how we get decisions made without guns. The President is never above politics. The President is always a politician and should embrace the role. Here, Barack Obama does. I'm glad he's back. I've missed him.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Repeal the Enlightenment
Andy Borowitz reports on Rick Santorum:
At the first stop of his ambitious journey, Mr. Santorum restated his reason for seeking the White House: “I am running for President today because the position of Spanish Inquisitor is no longer available.”There is no Vatican number higher than I. Latin Mass, yea!
Four words, medical edition
What medical procedure most represents your promise to the American people as a governing principle?
- Rick Santorum - clitoridectomy
- Ron Paul - self-service colonoscopy
- Mitt Romney - plastic surgery
- Newt Gingrich - penis aggrandizement
What, you can't take a joke?
Saturday, February 25, 2012
What Romney learned at Bain
To pander to his audience without meaning any of it.
He's of course applying that to politics, and even the Teapublicans can tell, despite having turned their bullshit detectors so low they can't see the arrant bullshit of the other candidates. Krugman on Rmoney:
Should those who don’t share the right’s faith be comforted by the evidence that Mr. Romney doesn’t believe anything he’s saying? Should we, in particular, assume that, once elected, he would actually follow sensible economic policies? Alas, no.The difference between Bain's takeovers and a political campaign is that takeovers end quickly. The affected workers and executives learn by the end that you lied to them, but you don't have to convince them of anything further, since you already own their asses. Not so the Teapublican nomination.
For the cynicism and lack of moral courage that have been so evident in the campaign wouldn’t suddenly vanish once Mr. Romney entered the Oval Office. If he doesn’t dare disagree with economic nonsense now, why imagine that he would become willing to challenge that nonsense later? And bear in mind that if elected, he would be watched like a hawk for signs of apostasy by the very people he’s trying so desperately to appease right now.
The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.
Enthusiasm abyss
In politics, as in any genre of entertainment, you always want to size the room so that your crowd just overflows it. That shows you're popular and yet realistic and leaves your audience demanding more. Mitt Romney in Detroit? Epic fail - a whole domed stadium for a few hundred people at most.
This is what a campaign looks like when it has more money than people. This is doom. Even in that tiny audience in that huge venue, the smell of flop-sweat must have been pungent. This is an off-off-off-off-Broadway show whose financial backer is so in love with the star that he can't grasp that there's no audience beyond the one-percenters interested in seeing this flip-flop revue.
Even if Rmoney gets the Teapublican nomination, the only campaign he'll be able to run is a B-52 campaign - scorched earth from 50,000 ft. at tremendous expense. Knowing Rmoney, he'll keep running the TV and radio and Internet ads until even his handful of ardent supporters are nauseated by their noxious smarmy gee-whiz omnipresent ugliness. The rest of the Teapublicans, less enthused to begin with, will depressively resign themselves to four more years of impotent misplaced anger for President Barack Hussein Obama.
Update: A still-shot comparison that's even more graphic:
Moral consequences
Actual moral consequences, rather than the orgasm someone might have in a way that offends Rick Santorum:
If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”
Friday, February 24, 2012
Save the jets
Of course, Ann Coulter interrupts to bullshit that "they were all Democrats." (Maybe the rich never serve their jury duty either.)
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Four words, ideological edition
The handful of you who are still tuning in to the endless purgatory of Republican (non) Presidential debates no doubt noticed when John King vacuously asked the four horse's-ass-men of democracy's apocalypse for a single word to sum themselves up. King of course gave enough forewarning that they were able to come up with self-flattering, thematically aligned, bullshit marketing.
That is not what I do, so...
- Newt Gingrich - megalomaniac
- Ron Paul - mammon-worshipping
- Mitt Romney - wealthy
- Rick Santorum - theocratic
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Where's Newto?
Republican primary voters do have a bit of discernment every now and then.
They know Mitt Romney's core principle is Mitt Romney, that he'll say whatever he thinks they want to hear.
They almost fell for Newt Gingrich (again!) because, even though Gingrich's core principle is also Newt Gingrich, he can pander to wingnuts with much greater certitude and vehemence than Milquetoast Romney. Then he started up all that moonbase bullshit, a future-oriented idea, although daft as nuthatch on moldy seeds. The fond, vicious wingnuts are oriented to the past - yes, a golden ideal theocratic past that never was. They've got no use for inspiration. The King James doesn't say anything about a moonbase!
Rmoney didn't kill off Gingrich (again!). The Republican base had a terrible shudder go up its (anti-)collective spine at the thought that maybe we libs are right about Newt, and he's grandiose, unreliable, and probably clinically manic. Not that they would want the last covered by health insurance...
So, Rick Santorum or Ron Paul? Or door number 3? If Jeb Bush rushes to the rescue, will Republicans even acknowledge that he has an older brother?
Changey to hopey
I'm not sure I believe this - because I want so badly to believe it:
The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner ... shows a Republican Party in deepening trouble and emerging underlying trends that may have shifted the balance for 2012.[1] Barring sudden economic shocks, there is accumulating evidence that we have entered a new phase in the political cycle, substantially more favorable to the Democrats.It's also not from an unbiased source, though of course pro-Democratic sources are always more reliable than pro-Republican sources.
(h/t Taegan Goddard)
Liberals subsidize the economic fallacies of red state conservatives
It has been well known for some time that liberal states such as my home state of Massachusetts subsidize conservative states such as my original home of Tennessee. The idea bubbled up recently from Aaron Carroll to Paul Krugman to Matthew Yglesias. Krugman explains the graph best, but this point of Yglesias's is key (though badly written):
[H]igh-income people living in low-income states are generally very conservative in their political ideology but probably benefit more from federal income support programs more than they realize. If you own fast food franchises in the Nashville area, for example, you're going to form a self-perception as a self-reliant businessman but the existence of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are helping to ensure that your customers have adequate income to sometimes eat at your Taco Bell.Hard to understand why he didn't say Godfather's Pizza instead of Taco Bell.
Conservatives imagine themselves as heroes in Ayn Rand's fantasy novels, and liberal aid to the poor is one reason they are not confronted with the sheer vanity of their imaginations.
Productive reasoning
Despite a wealth (heh) of economic statistics, American economists cannot fully and precisely characterize everything we need to know to make policy decisions about the structure of our economy. We have a number for worker productivity, but it's too uncertain to be useful:
[H]ere’s the rub: both of these corporate strategies— domestic productivity improvements and global supply chain management—show up as productivity gains in U.S. economic records. When federal statisticians calculate the nation’s economic output, what they are actually measuring is domestic “value added”—the dollar value of all sales minus the dollar value of all imports. “Productivity” is then calculated by dividing the quantity of value added by the number of American workers. American workers, however, often have little to do with the gains in productivity attributed to them. For instance, if Company A saves $250,000 simply by switching from a Japanese sprocket supplier to a much cheaper Chinese sprocket supplier, that change shows up as an increase in American productivity—just as if the company had saved $250,000 by making its warehouse operation in Chicago more efficient.I've previously taken productivity statistics at face value. Now I know they can't be. The essential argument I made at the link remains the same, but the magnitude of economic gains I can ascribe to labor is smaller.
Does this mean that I would now agree that corporate management deserves at least part of what they've creamed off the top of the nominal productivity gains of the past 30 years? Hell, no. The hollowing out that they have done accomplishes short run profit and big bonuses for them, but it's very very bad for the long term U.S. economy.
We need industrial policy that drives jobs back to the U.S. with competitiveness. That's the long run path to continued health, something the financial markets cannot possibly account for with a quarter-to-quarter mentality run amok. Every government policy that encourages hollowing out needs to be revisited.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
No vagina dialogues here
The inability to talk to women as people may be why Teapublicans need to reduce them back to reproductive chattel.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Exception for rape
No, not the one you're expecting.
Virginia Republicans want to mandate rape in one exceptional case. They want to force penetration of thousands of women with a foreign object. Not only will the woman not consent to the procedure except under duress, the doctor who performs it won't be willing either.
These so-called small government Republicans want transvaginal ultrasounds precisely because 88% of abortions are performed so early in pregnancy that the fetus is not clearly visible on transcutaneous ultrasounds. The first attempt to use shame and sin to push women back into barefoot-and-pregnant failed, so they'll go the next step.
These same all-your-vaginas-are-belong-to-us Republicans worship Ken Cuccinelli, who claims it's unconstitutional to mandate you purchase health insurance. Heaven knows it's terrible if you can't mooch off the rest of us and evade insuring yourself. These GOP misogynists nonetheless think (term, advisedly, etc.) that they have the power to insert an ultrasound wand inside a pregnant woman (non-virgin!) who seeks an abortion.
Anti-abortion ideologues - practically all of the Republican Party willing to speak for the record - despise the reasoning about reserved and implied penumbral rights in the Constitution that Roe v. Wade extended from Griswold v. Connecticut. They are willing, despite often claiming all sorts of rights from the Tenth Amendment, to treat every stray vagina as freehold of the state. Contraception? How dare you!
Everyone should fear this expansive Republican view of state power over the bodies of the powerless. You're next, asshole.
You want to be gay? You must undergo an anesthesia-less colonoscopy. All in the name of being better informed about your choice, of course. The GOPers are so generous with information (so long as it's not science). So you can get a good look at those AIDS-spreading rectal tears - and then some. Betcha an adenoma will look pretty damn good by comparison.
You want a vasectomy? First, we'll mandate the surgeon crush your testicles between bricks. So you know what's it's like to be a poor little dying swimmer.
You want higher education for your daughter? First, you have to watch one of us - no, all of us! - fuck her, 'cause you know that's what will happen in those godless secular humanist university dorms. So you'll be well-informed and won't make the same mistake with your next daughter.
These Republicans are sociopathic cultists in the throes of power-mad mania. Salem witch trials, ha! They'll be tattooing a scarlet A on every liberal harlot until they run out of red ink on I-95 entering Massachusetts. Where it really hurts. They want culture war.
The hot breath of doom, is that what I feel on my neck? Or just embarrassment that these useless fucks are the same species as me?
Fatcat lines up for the meal ticket
Willard "Mitt" Romney brings the rodents. Yum!
Click image for full Charlie Daniel/Knoxville News Sentinel cartoon.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Why liberals think wingnuts are racist bigoted vomitous jerks
There are almost 5000 comments posted in the thread — these are from the first few pages. Notice that the racist bastards deliberately misspell their slurs or insert random spaces, so they aren’t caught by word filters. And many of the worst comments have numerous “likes” from other commenters.Fox has sanitized the ugliness of their core demographic, but Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs has a sampling of the sewage.
(h/t Balloon Juice)
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Political bankruptcy
Republicans want to return to disastrous policies because they would then have to admit the emptiness of their ideas and their own uselessness in solving any national problem bigger than changing the diaper of some busted Wall Street institution:
The economy didn't just crash under a Republican president, it crashed under Republican policies. It crashed with low taxes. It crashed with deregulated markets. It crashed with huge restrictions on union activity. It crashed with massive cuts in environmental regulations. It crashed with lowered trade barriers. It crashed with big fat Pentagon spending.I've hit some of these themes for a long time, but I don't think I've ever hit them as well as Mark Sumner on DailyKos. Go read the whole thing.
They got what they wanted. They got CEOs with no limits on their wealth. They got banks with no limits on their "creativity." They got trade agreements that guaranteed manufacturing could be moved to the dirtiest, cheapest, most desperate source available. They got massive cuts in capital gains taxes and equally large boosts in the wealth they could pass along in estates. They got everything they said would make us all wealthy. They got record oil and gas drilling. They got record giveaways of public land. They got everything they said would create jobs. They got the middle class to shoulder more, more, more of the burden so that those beautiful job creators would be free to work their magic.
They can't say the economy crashed because taxes went up, because they didn't. They can't say that the economy crashed because there was a raft of new regulation, because there wasn't. They can't blame it on "union thugs" or Saul Alinsky or the guy who writes Happy Holidays cards at Hallmark. They can't blame it on a president who was elected when the world was already in free fall. Only, of course they do. They say it because they have no choice.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Subliminal
I wonder why the Republican voters in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado didn't find this blast from the past appalling. Instead, Mitt Rmoney is not catastrophically extreme enough on abortion.
So, the primary clusterfuck goes on. Win!
Truth to power
In large organizations, whether governmental and corporate, the lone conscientious person who speaks up often pays a terrible price for telling the truth and especially if he then doesn't acquiesce when power wants to cover it in bullshit. Roger Boisjoly was one such man.
Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.The exact reason it's important to protect whistleblowers is so that those of us who are interested can hope to learn the truth.
The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Hair to the throne
Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.
The proper role of envy is to make the unemployed dream of being the chauffeur, not to dream of government making a better life for them.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Workers didn't suddenly get lazy just because the banks burned down the economy
Rewards in the American economy do not come from effort or from deserving them. Money begets money, now more than it has at any time since the 1920s. Our aristocracy is just as entrenched as that of Europe in the 19th century, except that ours doesn't give itself the titles of nobility. Instead, they call themselves job creators even though most of them aren't. They call themselves entrepreneurs, even though most of them aren't. They call themselves capitalists, even though most of them are oligopolists instead.
But they have enough spare cash to buy media and politicians. The propagandist and Republican lies are incredible to anyone with a working bullshit detector - unfortunately, not nearly enough Americans to make a reliable majority.
Billionaires inevitably are bullshitters
The Colbert Report
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Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
Leaky bucket
Those worries that government aid gets delivered in a leaky bucket that Mitt Romney heard about in Econ 101? Not so leaky after all.
More efficient than many private sector organizations, health insurance companies for instance.
Mitt Romney (R-job destroyer) gets away with an incredible amount of bullshit because he has a reputation for knowing something. If he does, he's lying. That's my belief.
(h/t Jared Bernstein)
Friday, February 3, 2012
Not when the facts have a liberal bias
House Republicans: "We'd rather live in a fantasy than deal with facts."
The Peters Amendment would not have altered H.R. 3582 in any functional manner, it simply would had added the following factual findings section:Which is more embarrassing, denying brute incontrovertible facts or acknowledging them when your entire
(1) On January 8, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that President Bush believed that the tax cut package enacted in 2001 and expanded in 2003 would “create additional revenues for the federal government and pay for itself.”
(2) Before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected gradually rising surpluses, from 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2001 to 5.3% of gross domestic product by 2011, with the federal government operating debt free by 2009.
(3) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have added over $2 trillion to budget deficits from 2002-2011.
(4) Despite signing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 into law, President George W. Bush’s administration had, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records” in 1939.
(5) From 2001 to 2009, gross domestic product grew at the slowest pace for any eight-year span since 1953.
(6) Median household income declined during the Bush Administration for the first time since 1967, when this data began to be tracked.
platform depends on ignoring them?
Duh.
(h/t Philosoraptor)
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Shoring up support from the asshole faction
Donald Trump (R-Donald Trump) endorses Mitt Romney. Ho hum. A month ago, Trump was threatening to jump back into the race, maybe as an independent.
This is pretty funny however:
A Pew survey last month found that 64% of definite and likely GOP voters said an endorsement from [Trump] would make no difference to them.I'm in the 64% - only because there's no way to get below my previous zero likelihood of voting for Mitt. But I'm proud to see that even Republicans can't stand Trump.
In the survey, 13% said it would make them more likely to back a candidate, while 20% said it would actually make them less likely.
Idly, why would Trump go against his natural match, Newt Gingrich? Answer: Trump wants to be the biggest asshole in the world - BIG! - and Newt is standing in his way.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Never give up a lie
The bullshit continues, this time in Georgia, where an administrative judge believes he has the power to compel the President to appear and prove the birthers wrong. Even though he has done this over and over and over again.
It's time to start fucking these people up, by which I mean ruining their fucking lives, not injuring their bodies. The judge, the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney (Orly Taitz, the Fred Phelps of birtherism, rebuffed at every turn and even sanctioned for it but still insane enough to continue her abuse of the legal system), and anyone who funded this nullificationism. It's time to find out what they've done wrong and make it known - to their wives, to their creditors, to the press.
It's long past time to stop being nice, to start taking no prisoners. Figuratively.
Start with Orly Taitz. Find the lies in her naturalization record - maybe she's a planted late Soviet era sleeper - revoke her citizenship, and deport her worthless insane ass back to Russia.
Yeah, it's going on in Alabama too. Neo-confederate assholes.
Republicans can only win in the long run if they lie and cheat.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Too bad to be true
There's a story going around on the net that Rick Santorum's wife had an abortion. I heard it from a friend on Facebook. But it's not true.
Of course, I think the Republicans are frequently terrible hypocrites, but something about this claim rang alarm bells of skepticism for me. If this episode from the fall of 1996 had really been known and covered in the press since 1997, wouldn't it have been well aired earlier? Santorum didn't become a first tier candidate until Iowa, true, but it's a perfect juicy story that our dysfunctional media would have loved to gossip over incessantly.
Turns out Karen Santorum had a second trimester miscarriage in a pregnancy that was doomed by a deleterious birth defect:
Karen was in her 19th week of pregnancy. Husband and wife were in a suburban Virginia office for a routine sonogram when a radiologist told them that the fetus Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die.Rick and Karen Santorum were willing to choose a medical path that nearly killed her. We can never know whether craven political calculation entered into their decision - well, his decision, since she was not cogent when the decision was made.
After consulting with specialists, who offered several options including abortion, the Santorums decided on long-shot intrauterine surgery to correct an obstruction of the urinary tract called posterior urethral valve syndrome.
A few days later, rare ``bladder shunt'' surgery was performed at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The incision in the womb carried a high risk of infection.
Two days later, at home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Verona, Karen Santorum became feverish. Her Philadelphia doctors instructed her to hurry to Pittsburgh's Magee-Women's Hospital, which has a unit specializing in high-risk pregnancies.
After examining Karen, who was nearly incoherent with a 105-degree fever, a doctor at Magee led Santorum into the hallway outside her room and said that she had an intrauterine infection and some type of medical intervention was necessary. Unless the source of the infection, the fetus, was removed from Karen's body, she would likely die.
There's a whiff of hypocrisy here, but only a whiff. The Santorums, despite their ardent beliefs about proper behavior from the rest of us, were willing to consider inducing labor to save her life at the expense of the fetus:
"If that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to," the senator said as he sat in his Washington office. "I consider it a blessing that we didn't have to make that decision."While I give Rick props for admitting this, his inability to learn a bit of humility on the subject despite his open suggestion of god's hand in sparing them a hard decision is troubling. It doesn't sound moral to me to find a narrow exception that just happens to fit one's own principles without considering whether those principles are sound or, after this experience, merely convenient.
(h/t Salon)
The meta-message: One of the most damaging aspects of the wingnut approach to national narrative is their complete unwillingness to give up stories they like because those stories are false. Those of us in the reality-based community are obligated not to follow their dishonest example and instead to abjure any propagandist's propagation of this bullshit.
When Fox commits journalism
CNN continues its slide into Republican-sanitizing irrelevance. Its politics front page looks like:
CNN also fuzzes the soft-focus edges of Mitt Romney's biography. Romney has family in Mexico - hey, maybe those displaced blonde gringos will help Mitt with voters whose primos would have to climb over Mitt's wall.
Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather led the first group of Mormons to the state of Chihuahua to flee religious persecution.The so-called persecution they fled was American laws against bigamy! But you won't hear that from CNN.
Nope, CNN readers need Fox to fill in the details:
Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.Of course, the AP did that reporting in 2007, and Fox only published it then, when they were anti-Romney. Report honestly on everyone? Na ga happ'n.
"When you read the family's history, you realize how important polygamy was to them," said Todd Compton, a Mormon and independent historian who wrote a book about the polygamous life of the church's founder, Joseph Smith. "They left America and started again as pioneers, after they had done it over and over again previously."
Even so, you'd think CNN would be embarrassed by it obvious glossing over of known facts. But no...
Friday, January 20, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
I may not get there with you
Update (1/20): Corrected my cut-and-paste error. Didn't mean to put Nina Simone in twice.
Friday, January 13, 2012
The last piastre
Emboldened by the prospect that SOPA will pass and bring with it copyright vigilantism, the Grey Lady is ready to make us all pay:
The Times hints condescendingly that it might restore actual fealty to facts in favor of its current wingnut-fearing neutral view of bullshit and the faux balance that results. (Although, isn't a blogger pretty much the definition of truth vigilante?) But then Jill Abramson defensively quashes that hint much more swiftly than any reporting error.
We foolish readers misunderstood!
First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.At least the condescension is consistent.
That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.
If the Times doesn't demand a factual basis for the dialog in its pages, it fails utterly to do journalism. Maybe its editors don't care about that, but they should care that reality-based, skeptical reporting is the only function they have that can't be performed more cheaply and almost always better on the Internet.
Maybe they're just going to shut down every blog that links to them, once SOPA passes. That would be a whole different kind of truth vigilante. Still...
Romney lies, you can see it in his eyes.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Mass debates
Never before has so much free media been spent on so many useless wingnuts. There was nothing like this in 2004, when Democrats competed to take on a Republican incumbent.
Battle for second
Can anyone tell me how it is that CNN's alleged liberalism allowed the headline Romney, Huntsman tie in midnight New Hampshire vote, when President Obama actually out-polled them in Dixville Notch, NH?
Riiight, not the liberal media.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
What they show us
Lazing on the sofa, idly watching a third rate college football bowl game that I don't care a whit about and never heard of before - the BBVA Compass Bowl. After a Pitt kick-off return, as ESPN went to commercial, I noticed the long shot of the Birmingham skyline had an area of soft focus, obscuring lettering on the parapets of two office buildings.
Here's what ESPN was hiding on behalf of their sponsor:
Competitors. As expected.
Moral of the story: Don't outsource your bullshit detection. Know when the content you see and hear is advertising.
College bowl games are and have always been about brand-building. This one? Same reason Toronto Dominion Bank bought naming rights to the Boston Garden - to fit in with the locals. Both have also disguised their nation of origin by using their initials. Toronto might not have been so bad, but Dominion, well, na ga happen. Can you imagine Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Birmingham!? Every deputy sheriff would be asking for their papers.
In fact, nearly all TV is captured by its sponsorship. Media is a product, and it carefully shows us just what its sponsors want us to see.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Attack of the killer caucusoids
So Iowa voted? Who won?
Rick Santorum won, any idiot can see that. Romney got his 8-vote plurality, but it's tainted by the fact that Karl Rove announced it before official release of the alleged numbers. Romney really finished third in the expectations caucus, though number two Ron Paul looks poised to flame out in a bout of hobgoblinish consistent insanity. (Plus the media can't handle a three-way race - only a single, deeply buried mention of Paul in the CNN story and then only as the unrebutted subject of a Santorum accusation.)
I say alleged numbers because this was clearly a Republican voting process from the get-go. It was past 2:00 a.m. local time before the final precincts reported to the media. Iowa Republicans cast about 122,000 votes in 1774 precincts. How much time does it take for each local chair to count up 70 votes?
A caucus can't even be recounted. It's not a primary. The local professionals (Auditors there, Town Clerks here) who know how to safeguard vote records don't run caucuses. The media and even some of my liberal friends on Twitter tut-tutted about that. But the Massachusetts Democratic Party will caucus in February (go, Elizabeth Warren!), and those votes won't be recountable either.
Recounts can't explain the delay. Once the voters leave the caucus, it should be a matter of minutes before the results are posted, not hours and hours.
Voting integrity is supposed to be guaranteed by openness - there's no secret ballot at a caucus - but usually nobody disinterested is paying close attention. And the Republican Iowa caucuses looked very much manipulated by the party fathers. Fundies should view Romney's "win" as yet another illegitimate theft from them, the god-anointed true conservatives.
There may even be a schism between the Teabaggers and their plutocratic organizers. The point of Teabaggism, it seems to me in light of Iowa, was for the wealthies to co-opt fundie paleo-conservative outrage in service of - natch! - tax cuts for the wealthy funded by destruction of the social safety net (for all those undeserving urban brown people). The wealthies had previously done their co-option over and over again by making empty promises, but their economic agenda has become so feudal that it calls for more circus to cover the absence of bread.
Iowa proves that the culture of a forced choice between abstinence and pregnancy is not dead yet, even if the wealthies don't want to have to campaign on it. History suggests that the wealthies will win their perennial internecine war anyway and that they'll bring nearly all of the fundies along for the ride, but for now, Santorum and the bitter old anti-sex wing of GOP has had a shot of Viagra that they have no outlet for other than paranoia, delusion, and outrage.
There's blood in the water, Newt Gingrich's. Romney's slush fund pals put it there. But that blood is attracting other sharks, and no amount of Romney's friends' Citizens v. FEC funding can quell those other sharks' lust to take a bite out of Mitt. Oh, sure, Mitt's sharks will turn their teeth on Santorum. They'll do anything to win, but the connections are clear enough now, even for wingnuts to see, and Romney will suffer more and more for the help he gets from attack ad slush funds held by "independent" sole-purpose corporations.
Mitt has gone negative in the past. In 2004, armed with a hand-picked slate of Republican CEOs, then-Gov. Romney tried to make major inroads into Democratic dominance of the Massachusetts state legislature. My Senator was one of his targets, and the Republican Party, then a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitt, Inc., funded half a dozen direct mail hit pieces on her in the last week alone. Problem was, voters knew her, and they knew she wasn't evil even if they didn't always agree with her. They also knew Mitt, and the upshot was that we Democrats made net gains in both houses of the legislature. Mitt the chameleon is not convincingly principled, so it's hard for him to make attacks stick, given his own lack of credibility.
Romney's in a tough place. He has to go negative to win the nomination. In fact, he needs to smack Ron Paul immediately in New Hampshire, where the idiosyncratic Paul should be much more appealing to the local culture of iconoclasm and a bigger threat than Santorum's iconophilia.
Money is the greater of Romney's chief advantages, and it buys a lot of bile. But going negative - even if most of what he and his minions said about Newt Gingrich was accurate - is going to stain Romney again.
Deservedly so. He may look like a nice guy with his hair, his teeth, and his suit. But he's as mean and selfish as he needs to be. The more he rips chunks out of his opponents, the more he sacrifices electability, and that's all to the good.
Update (1/6): Not that it matters one whit to my political analysis, but it's completely obvious that an 8-vote margin in a process as sloppy as this is not statistically significant enough to distinguish a winner:
I had been downloading versions of the state’s vote tally at various points on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning. The first version I downloaded reflected the state’s count as of 11:14 p.m. Iowa time on Tuesday, at which point results from 1,723 of 1,774 precincts had been tabulated.
In 10 of these 1,723 precincts, the results in the spreadsheet changed between 11:14 p.m. and 2 a.m., reflecting additional verification and validation efforts. These changes added a net of 11 votes to Mr. Romney’s total while subtracting a net of 33 votes from Mr. Santorum’s count. If not for these changes, Mr. Santorum would still have led the vote count on Wednesday morning.
You'd think he said f*ck on air
The odd thing about CNN's response to Newt calling Mitt a liar is that they're so aghast. Our public conversation is filled with lies, and yet journalists have no interest in anything other than excusing them and pretending they don't exist. It violates their bizarre politesse to point out blatant falsehoods.
Poor Gingrich doesn't like being swift-boated. Although, actually, the Romney slush fund ads are much more truthful than anything the Swift Boat Liars ever said. It is really really rich to hear Romney supporters attack Gingrich for flip-flopping and for supporting an individual healthcare insurance mandate.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Opus Dei of America
It looks as though Rick Santorum (R-pre-Vatican-II) may luck out in Iowa. He was so far below the radar no one thought to gin up massive attacks of killer ads against him.
His particular conservative Catholic nullification - to go with Ron Paul's opposition to basically all civil rights legislation - is to deny Griswold v. Connecticut, which established our right to keep the state from interfering in our sex lives. You don't want Santorum in your bedroom? Don't have sex of any kind unless you're willing to play procreation roulette.
Earth to Ron Paul
In the continuing GOP contest to out-wingnut the other wingnuts, Ron Paul (R-wacko) offers that Rick Santorum is "very liberal."
And the wingnut who didn't fall far from the tree, son Rand, flies in from the Starship Free Enterprise in the galaxy Trekistan to offer still more spin points.
Let's get the lead back into paint and gasoline
After all, anything that contributes to stupidity is good for Republimerica.
Monday, January 2, 2012
All the Republicans are extremists
Every single Republican candidate for President is an economic extremist:
(This material was created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)
Reused under license.
Start making sense
Found this interesting:
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. ...For me, the years between toddlerhood and puberty were filled with growth. My mom taught me to read at 5, which opened the world to me.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
She and my dad also inculcated fairness in me, although I think I had been born with a strong streak of it. The central issue of the time and place - Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1960s - was race, and they were rare white liberals in our all-white neighborhood.
I ruefully remember telling my friends "that's illegal" a lot. I didn't know much about the law - how could I at that age? But I had a well-taught but still precocious grasp of the golden rule to compensate for my poor ability to keep track of the complicated rule-based codes of Christianity and etiquette. Forks and graven idols didn't matter to me a whit, but my vocabulary-challenged view of legality was really a sense of justice that I carry to this day, albeit more developed.
We moved several times, so I had new starts in which I could experiment with my social position. I was never an alpha (except in the classroom), but I could hold my own, and eventually I found sports as a path into kid society. At Little League try-outs, a schoolmate gibed, "Science and baseball don't mix." He had a forgettable Little League career; I became the best hitter in the league.
To fit in even better, I learned to identify the make and model of many cars - somehow important in elementary school - learned to bullshit from what little I knew of the automotive world into more. What does it mean to wind it out? I learned from the sound effects of other boys without ever having driven anything faster than a 3-speed spider bike.
Steeped in Darwin, also through my mom, I had that sudden aha moment when I realized the mythic nature of Christianity, at least the Bible Belt Christianity that surrounded me. Jonah and the whale, heavenly streets of gold, Noah's ark? All fanciful, just like Loki's liver or Athena's birth or Santa Claus. By the time I was confirmed, with puberty no doubt already well under way, I made reservations from doctrine at the altar. I was a cafeteria Methodist!
I also remember how different rich people were from poor. Boys in the richer neighborhood cared about cars. Boys in the poorer neighborhood had seen education as their meal ticket.
By the time I was 12, my identity was formed. There were many gaps to fill in, but the boy I was then is clearly the same as the man I am today.
(And I love the A.A. Milne reference in the page URL.)
The fraud of Republican debt hysteria
On their watch, they didn't give a shit about the deficit:
The money quote:
A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.
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