Suicide by central bank

Most analysts continue to parrot the wrong prescription for economic woes, at home and abroad:

The fact that Spanish public pensions are not only off limits to the budget knife but also are being enhanced, is a reminder of one reason that European debt and deficit problems have proved so difficult to resolve.

Only Greece, under duress and at a point where the move may be coming too late to salvage the government’s finances, seems prepared to risk the consequences of severe pension cutting.

The real crisis is not debt - although it's a long-term problem. The real crisis is:

In Spain, pensions have become a lifeline. With unemployment at 25 percent, and even higher among young people, many Spaniards now rely on pension-drawing parents and grandparents to support them. Economists estimate that up to 1.7 million of Spain’s 16 million households have no salary earners.

and:

Of course, as many economists would note, such a reduction in Greek public spending is likely only to compound an economic decline in which gross domestic product shrank 25 percent over the past five years.

These countries are in full-blown economic depression, yet their governments and their bankers continue to urge penury and worse on people who did not cause the debt crisis.

Europeans should be in the streets, should topple their governments. Americans should choose a better path, one that grows first, then reduces debt. Paul Krugman gets it, why not the rest of the New York Times?

(Note to American conservatrolls: You think Fannie and Freddie caused the mortgage loan debacles here in the U.S. Does their legal power over the market reach Europe? Of course not, you stupid twerps.)

Boxed in

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Gee whiz liar

I've been saying for years that Republicans can't win elections without lying. It's sooo lovely to have Mitt Rmoney proving my point again and again.

(h/t Maddowblog via Balloon Juice)

Old media won't tell you this

(h/t MoveOn)

Forewarned is fore-armed

Fuckin'-A.  NSFW.

Jennifer Granholm flushes a GOP myth

For wingnuts watching from their moms' basements, since you make your decisions below the waist, please note that Jennifer Granholm is more attractive than Sarah Palin. Not eligible to be President, since she was born in Canada of Canadian parents.

Didn't build that

Just came around for the harvesting...

(h/t Robert Reich)

No regrets

Hilarious. And true.

Forty days to go. Forty days to help your family, friends, and neighbors decide between neo-feudalism and the social compact that has been America since the Great Depression.

Wake the fuck up!

Sewing up the asshole vote

Scott Brown (R-smallpox blankets) has always been arrogant in the way that good-looking people of both sexes can be. They're ornamental - and in his case athletic - so not much more is expected of them. Intelligence? Who needs it? He looks nice, so he doesn't have to be nice. That came through loud and clear in last week's debate.

And I thought the Republicans already had the asshole vote almost completely locked up.

Throw him an anchor

Rmoney takes a dive

Hilarious ineptitude:

Mr. Rhoades also credited the addition of Rep. Paul Ryan to the ticket for being “invaluable” in scaring off potential voters: “Mitt knew he could get booed off the stage at the N.A.A.C.P., but it takes someone special to get booed off the stage at the A.A.R.P.”

We Democrats and liberals need to aid and abet Rmoney's implosion. The Republicans are showing us who they really are, but it's up to us to let everyone else know.

You don't need a weatherman

... to know which way the wind blows.

Tommy Menino (D-mostly) jumps on the Elizabeth Warren bandwagon just in time to make himself out as the kingmaker on Nov. 7.

Welcome, Mistah Mayuh.

Bullshit coming and going

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The honest truth is that Mitt Rmoney's latest blithering gaffe is exactly what the Republican base voters believe. No matter how many times you show them that federal taxes don't begin and end with the income tax, that our federal tax system is not very progressive, that almost everyone with a good job pays taxes, that members of the 1% of the 1% (the 0.01%) often pay a far lower rate than anyone but the very poor, even the middle class hard-working white guy pulling down a median income around $50,000 a year thinks he's one of the makers and that other guy is a manipulative taker. I've tried to expose this bullshit, to little avail. Even though Rmoney claims this middle class guy needs another $150,000 a year to join the middle class at all...

I think this comes from the shriveled greedy coal-black hearts of the right wingers. They aren't motivated by anything but money, and they don't have any generosity of spirit (outside very narrow tribal boundaries) nor any ability to evaluate a picture larger than their own wallet, so they assume no one could possibly be a Democrat or a liberal without being paid off. They can't believe a member of the 5% like me could possibly believe the country is better off as a whole with a fairer distribution of taxation, income, and wealth. (Note to moron trolls: fair does not mean equal.)

So Republicans will wonder what all the fuss is about, because they lack basic human sympathy. They've got theirs, devil take the hindmost.

$50,000 video

Without the checkbooks of billionaires, this man would be struggling to see nowhere. They're simply trying to buy the election for this dope.

Not his job

Hopefully, not Mitt Rmoney's job forever.

Bad news in Ayn Rand's vintage haberdashery

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

Anyone disagree?

Clearly, the locked-out NFL officials - union members - are better at their jobs than the scab referees who are trying to call the games. And failing.

Update (9/19): Everyone knows they suck:

Two weeks into the regular season, with the N.F.L.’s lockout of its officials going strong, replacement officials have awarded a team an extra timeout in a close game, ruled multiple incomplete passes as fumbles, missed an array of pass-interference and unnecessary-roughness calls, and in one game took six minutes to review a play that they subsequently determined was not reviewable. One referee was removed from the crew of a New Orleans Saints game after publicly proclaiming himself a Saints fan.

I'd like to see stupid personal fouls be reviewable so officials could catch the instigators instead of just the retaliators.

Right, he'll tax our patience

Asleep at the switch

Bushists and neocons might have given their best efforts and still not prevented 9/11. But they didn't even try, despite many warnings:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous.

Unconscionable.

Massive resistance

Republicans have withdrawn their consent of the governed in favor of massive resistance. Elections only have consequences when they win, in which case they govern as if they won a mandate. When they lose, they'll obstruct all implementation of the majority's plan.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

Even those 60 votes included several closet Republicans - not of the Teapublican strain, to be sure, but nonetheless often not willing to side with President Obama. Ben Nelson was probably the most Republican. Joe Lieberman, Kay Hagan, Blanche Lincoln, and Mark Pryor were a few of the other Senators in the 111th Congress who often wouldn't vote cloture.

Nothing the Republicans have done about the economy makes any sense at all unless they are motivated by lust for power more than by the prospect of prosperity for the nation as a whole.

Shut up and watch, wingnuts

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Wealth of bullshit

The wealthy and their lobbyists and media propagandists want us to believe that they are essential to job creation. Bullshit!

With cunning and contempt and catechismal fervor the super-rich have argued that all money should move to the top, where it will be used to stimulate the economy and create jobs. But they ignore the facts that prove them wrong.

Cranks and malcontents

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

More liberal bias

Arithmetic.

[D]oes Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.

Too boring for Republicans to make it add up.

Republican warming deniers will now cut NASA

V for victory

Better off

Fortunately for Mitt, he doesn't have a reputation for telling the truth.

It's pretty clear Rmoney is going to rely on an incredible barrage of negative ads from superPAC billionaires.

Update (9/27): Finally had time to relocate the video that I somehow didn't get inserted when I first posted this.

No liability for lying

Mitt Rmoney (R-safe harbor from lies) has spent much of his life approving statements that may or may not be true but which excuse themselves from liability if they turn out to be true. Here's an example from current Bain dealings:

These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements.

Here's another:

This release includes forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.  These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as TI or its management "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "foresees," "forecasts," "estimates" or other words or phrases of similar import.  Similarly, statements in this release that describe the Company's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals also are forward-looking statements.  All such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.[emphasis added]

A third:

Because such forward looking statements contain risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward
looking statements.

There are many, many more, of course. Bain's various companies are involved in a lot of deals.

Since Mitt never worked under Sarbanes-Oxley (that we know of), he didn't actually sign these statements, but his cavalier attitude toward making shit up shows in practically every statement he ever makes, for example, this piece of pettifoggery:

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

Mitt is a gee-whiz liar to the core. He believes his business and his god entitle him to say whatever he needs to say.

Age of reason

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The Democrats' problem is that reason only works with a narrow demographic these days. We didn't always have a culture of bullshit, but we do now. Republicans believe they're entitled to their own facts, whatever they make up on the spot to avoid having to deal with actual reality. The radical right-wing media feeds this irrational belief constantly. That's its purpose - keeping the ignoramuses fooled, with their willing, even eager, participation.

Lowest common denominator

Mark Leibovich is killing democracy, and he doesn't have a clue to his own culpability.

His multi-thousand-word extended fantasy in today's Times is everything wrong with big media political journalism. I guess he had a news hole, and the early washout of the Republican National Convention left him with nothing much to write about other than himself and his feelings.

First off, his dozens of column-inches are all about him. He's too important to recede into the background and report news as if it were a factual topic:

I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy.

This is his lead! A couple paragraphs later:

This spring, for the first time since I started writing about politics a decade ago, I found myself completely depressed by a campaign. “How am I ever going to get through it?” is not the question you want to be asking yourself as you enter what are supposed to be the pinnacle few months of your profession.

If that's all you have, you could always, I dunno, resign and look for a job as a flack.

Of course, in the best (i.e. worst) tradition of Tom Friedman, every single goddamn ordinary person Leibovich talked to liked the idea Leibovich calls "dumb, naïve, unsophisticated and frankly out of character for me, someone with little patience for the Kabuki pleasantries of politics" when he's talking to us, his callous sophisticates.

This all springs from woe is me, it's all too nasty.

The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

Of course, a pox on both their houses:

As with Romney, you can picture [Obama] grabbing for the Purell as soon as he escapes the rope line.

although there's the obligatory back-of-the-hand nonsense that only suggests the Romney campaign kisses Leibovich's self-important butt with a bit more of a porn star's best fakery.

His retail-politicking chores completed, Obama disappeared behind a thick black curtain next to an empty storefront, into something called the “Good News Center” — a place I was not allowed to go.

Yet, despite all the disdain, there's incredible name-dropping. Hey, ma, look who I rub elbows with!

Why do we have to go into a campaign with the press corps we have?

After all this loathing, I'm going out on a generous limb. Leibovich is filled with loathing, all right. But he misidentifies the reason. He has just enough conscience that it's self-loathing. He must realize, deep down, that he's in the dirty, useless business of packaging politics so that Americans can feel virtuous hating and ignoring and pushing away their own government.

Leibovich's problem is not that politicians are letting down political reporters. It's that political reporters are letting down their readers. It's that their readers sponge up vacuous inside-the-campaign reportage like middle schoolers soak up puberty-fueled catty gossip. It's that reporters then give readers more and more of nothing useful.

Leibovich works for what used to be a craft and a calling and now fancies itself a profession. A profession pays enough to justify the self-esteem of highly educated glorified transcriptionists for the ruling class.

Here's a hint: Stop covering the campaign and cover the candidates. Stop bemoaning the superficialities of American politics while, at the exact same time, channelling them straight to readers. Have some aspirations to make a difference beyond false balance and telling the non-cool kids which clique is cool this year.

Never happen. It's far too easy to file bullshit than it is to separate out reality from fiction.

Itching for another shot at the Union

Neo-Confederates fantasize openly about insurgency against an impossible and bizarre scenario that ends in loss of sovereignty:

“He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked. “I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy."

Judgement-free Judge Tom Head (R-lunatic fringe, Texas - sorry to be redundant) is canny enough to phrase his dark fantasy as a Lexington-Concord revolution, but you know he's really dreaming of Fort Sumter.

And these Americans have guns and want to budget more locally to train the local lunatics against the federal government.

This will not end well.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Shaking the Etch-A-Sketch

Paul RAyn (R-fudge the numbers) gives Mitt Rmoney (R-fudge everything) enough cover from teabagger wrath that he can once again claim parentage of Romneycare and bring it from exile back into the big house.

ROMNEY: Well, absolutely. I am very proud of what we did, and the fact that we helped women and men and children in our state… And then with regard to contraceptives, of course Republicans, myself in particular, recognize that women have a right to use contraceptives. There is absolutely no validity whatsoever to the Obama effort to try and bring that up.

Unbelievably cynical!

Suddenly, Rmoney will be taking all sorts of reasonable-sounding positions. Mitt is completely insincere, and the truth is unimportant to him. He says whatever he thinks he needs to say, regardless of what he's said before. He's the most consistent liar I've ever watched in politics, even worse than Richard Nixon.

Counting on overwhelming us with propaganda

The Republicans can't win without lying. They know they have to lie early and often to make their points stick with the advertising-addled late deciders.

I'm sure we're all eager for the tsunami of bullshit that's coming our way in the next few months.

Who's knocking it down?

Click image for full Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press cartoon.

More Teapublican ignoramuses

You don't have to look far:

Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.

The GOP has embraced stupidity in order to lower taxes for the very wealthy. That's why Mitt Rmoney and Paul Ryan are perfect nominees.

Republican bullshit or your lyin' science?

Congresspeople appointed to the Science and Technology committee don't actually need to understand or rely on science:

In looking for examples of scientifically unsupportable statements by members of the House science committee, every single anecdote involved statements by Republicans.

The goal of Teapublicans is to repeal the Enlightenment.

OK Corral

Even trained police officers couldn't bring down a single shooter in a populated setting without hitting nine bystanders:

The volley of gunfire felled Johnson in just a few seconds and left nine other people bleeding on the sidewalk.

Yet the NRA's so-called solution is armed amateurs meting out hot lead wherever they feel a threat. This idea is unbelievably stupid.

I shudder to imagine a citizen's intervention by the guy next to me at the handgun range last week, belching out bullets by the clip with his .45. He couldn't hit a zombie poster with a tight group at 10 feet.

(Note to those who can't read without assuming things I haven't said: I'm not saying this was a bad shoot.)

Update: Turns out Atrios was waaay ahead of me in shooting this particular fish in a barrel.

What Republicans want

Disaster for America...

American Taliban

Todd Akin (R-vagina dentata) should have stuck his foot - or something - in his mouth. Instead:

[W]hat I said was, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But what I meant to say was, “I am a worthless, moronic sack of shit and an utterly irredeemable human being who needs to shut up and go away forever.”

Well, the first quote is true.

Then, Akin's excuse machine said he misspoke. Ha. Misspeaking is saying "black" when you mean "blah" or something like that. Or not.

Republicans think women get what they deserve.

Teapublicans have to lie

The truth would kill their chance of election:

[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.

Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk.

Once they've increased the deficit yet again (see the maladministration of Duhbya and Darth), they'll be back for yet another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the very, very wealthy.  And the wingnut morons who vote Republican while living in the shrinking middle class will be fooled again.

Another lie

I've been too busy canvassing for Elizabeth Warren to post anything, but...

Here's a backgrounder on Warren that I had a moment to read today.

Mixon, the Houston professor, who often had lunch with Warren and became an early mentor, recalled how Warren made an impassioned speech not long after she was hired about her belief in the “middle-class values” of hard work and honesty.

The wingnuts and other fans of Scott-free Brown (R-McDreamy) will miss that paragraph. After all, it shows Warren as authentic, and they can't get that into their addle-pated thoughts.

I'm looking for them to call her a liar because she so obviously once was brunette and now is blonde.

Although that does make Native American ancestry more credible in their superficial view of the world...

Maybe they'll decide she's vain. Never mind she's up against pretty boy.

A vile and disgraceful act

A man who can brutally suffocate his own daughter has an alien idea of fatherhood than I have. There is evil in every culture. In fact, the evil of treating females as chattel has only recently been extirpated from our social norms - and not entirely from our society.

There is no such thing as an honor killing. Murder of those whom you owe love is an oxymoron, evidence of sociopathy in a social norm.

Ray Flynn's second worst endorsement

Ray Flynn thinks Scott Brown (R-whatever Wall St. wants) is a "regular guy." He also thought that pederast-enabling Cardinal Bernard Law should stay in charge of the Boston Archdiocese.

So... Consider the source.

Laughing at Pakistanis

... when we should be laughing at ourselves.

A Pakistani man has "invented" a way of bullshit-olyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen. Is this a sequel to "The Saint"? (Much as I like Elisabeth Shue, even in this movie, her performance as a scientist was completely free of the slightest credibility.)

As in America, there are qualified Pakistani experts who've spoken out against anti-scientific fraud:

It shows “how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion,” wrote Pervez Hoodbhoy, an outspoken physics professor, in The Express Tribune, a national English-language daily. He added: “Our leaders are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for a miracle; our media is chasing spectacle, not truth; and our great scientists care more about being important than about evidence.”

Hoodbhoy has had about as much impact as scientists in America when they share their knowledge of evolution, global warming, health, economics, etc. - that is, very little.

Remember, we live in an age when people take literally* the metaphorical aphorism that perception is reality. When American conservatives have built an entire media apparatus intended to provide the resolutely ignorant with excuses to remain ill-informed. When one entire major political party is devoted to lying in order to cover up the plain fact that all it really cares about is the continued establishment of oligarchy.

The pit of ignorance and self-delusion. We Americans are right there with the Pakistanis. Sadly for all of us.

---

* So sue me for anachronism, but I'm using the literal meaning of literally, not the currently dominant debased meaning that is its exact opposite.

Truth about biblical marriage

Heterosexual monogamy? Only one of many other possibilities from the bible, all of which treated women as property.

Pinching off another Olympic movement

Click image for full Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader cartoon.

Who are the takers?

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

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

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

Acceptable breakage

The NRA can't honestly evade responsibility for the legal environment in which a known lunatic like Kenneth Roop was able to build an arsenal of 14 weapons and was able to retain his concealed carry permit until he executed someone for the minor civil infraction of trespassing.

Roop's neighbors knew he was unstable. They had little power to keep their children safe from Roop, other than abandoning the public street in front of his house. They walked with a neighbor after Roop began to stalk her.

The local cops knew. They did nothing other than put the onus on Roop's neighbors.

This man should not have been permitted to have guns. At all.

The NRA's standard solution, more guns!, would not have worked in this case, even in the fevered imagination of Wayne LaPierre. Maybe full military tactical gear 24/7!

There will surely be dishonest evasions. Mitt Rmoney is trying one that I see frequently from wingnuts in comment threads: If there's any means of killing that's not regulated, no matter how inefficient compared to gunfire, then guns shouldn't be regulated.

Our rightful place - American exceptionalism

The weirdest thing is that Mitt Rmoney's insult tour is actually attractive to the wingnuts. They want America in first place, especially to be the world's biggest baddest asshole. Rmoney can restore us to that role.

(h/t Raw Story)

Why we're doomed

See the very end...

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Not because Mitt R-money is the most dishonest candidate since Richard Nixon to seek the White House.

Because soft-headed morons still buy into the transparently stupid bullshit that Jon Stewart deftly dissects in a few minutes.

Nutella 2012

Sheldon Adelson is the tip of the iceberg

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

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

(h/t Salon)

Triumph of the nanny state

Rabies in humans is very rare in the United States due to mandatory vaccination of dogs:

Hardly anyone in developed countries gets rabies now because dogs are routinely vaccinated.

In the rest of the world, however, 55,000 people die each year of rabies. The authors of “Rabid,” Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, a married couple who are, respectively, an editor at Wired, and a veterinarian with a degree in public health, write that most of these deaths are in Africa and Asia, a great many are children, and almost all are the result of being bitten by mad dogs.

This of course is an incredibly onerous restraint of the freedom to put yourself, your children, and your society at risk.

Maybe a slight exaggeration

Another limited hang-out from Mitt R-money:

Minutes after PETA’s response, Mr. Romney released an amended statement, saying that Seamus Romney had served as C.E.O. of Bain “posthumously.”

Why did you think I call him Darth?

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/DailyKos cartoon.

Sleeper cell

Rush Limbaugh "thinks" Hollywood liberals planted an evil reference to Mitt R-money back when production started on The Dark Knight Rises, what, two or three years ago:


Rushbo can make such an absurd claim, straight from his vivid but bullshit-filled imagination and in fact impossible, only because his listeners have no critical thinking skills whatsoever. They believe him simply because they want to believe some dark conspiracy of nefarious others acting for no plausible motive is keeping them down.

It's really depressing to contemplate the rank stupidity that passes for the American public conversation these days.

Whenever the history of this awful period in American history is finally written, either some Leni Reifenstahl in the fanatical wingnut media will write its triumph in glorious tones of fascism, or Rush will be identified as a far worse malefactor than Joe McCarthy ever tried to be. Historians will wonder how his ugliness went on so long without reducing his undeserved credibility.

Apologia

I come not to apologize to R-money but to bury him.

Helpless to change

Change is not coming. There's no hope for an end to insane massacres:

"I hate to say it, but we as Americans are basically experts at this kind of thing by now,” said 45-year-old market analyst Jared Gerson, adding that the number of media images of Aurora, CO citizens crying and looking shocked is “pretty much right in line with where it usually is at this point." "The calls not to politicize the tragedy should be starting in an hour, but by 1:30 p.m. tomorrow the issue will have been politicized. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter’s high school classmate is interviewed within 45 minutes."

"It's like clockwork," said Gerson, who sighed, shook his head, and walked away.

The tools for mass killing are readily available to a succession of crazy people, but we staunchly refuse to do anything further about it:

“It’s hard to prevent someone who is really bent on committing a crime from getting them,” [Eugene Volokh, an expert in constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles,] added, and “it’s unlikely that gun laws are going to stop him.”

Make no mistake about this. The social and political choice that we Americans have made about guns is that they should be more or less freely available, even if one predictable cost of this free availability is much more frequent mass killings than other nations have. Not to mention much more frequent murders than in other nations.

Good, bad, or indifferent, that's what we've chosen. And it's why we're so familiar with this that the Onion's satire is so apt.

Update (7/22): Some Teapublican wingers will come right out and admit to the inevitable correlation of mass killings with the easy-access gun rights they favor:

I suppose there's value in getting the issue thoroughly out into the open.

Retroactive retirement

According to Mitt R-money's latest lame spin, he didn't retire from Bain Capital until 2002, but he backdated his retirement to 1999.

What I want to know:

Did he give back the money his ownership of Bain made him after 1999?

Nothing Mitt ever says is trustworthy.

Sixty-four years later

Politics ebbs and flows, but it's depressing that we're still fighting so many of the battles Harry Truman identified so plainly in 1948:

Today the forces of liberalism face a crisis. The people of the United States must make a choice between two ways of living--a decision, which will affect us the rest of our lives and our children and our grandchildren after us.

On the other side, there is the Wall Street way of life and politics. Trust the leader! Let big business take care of prices and profits! Measure all things by money! That is the philosophy of the masters of the Republican Party.

Well, I have been studying the Republican Party for over 12 years at close hand in the Capital of the United States. And by this time, I have discovered where the Republicans stand on most of the major issues.

Since they won't tell you themselves, I am going to tell you.

They approve of the American farmer-but they are willing to help him go broke.

They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing.

They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights.

They favor a minimum wage--the smaller the minimum the better.

They indorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools.

They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them.

They approve of social security benefits-so much so that they took them away from almost a million people.

They believe in international trade--so much so that they crippled our reciprocal trade program, and killed our International Wheat Agreement.

They favor the admission of displaced persons--but only within shameful racial and religious limitations.

They consider electric power a great blessing-but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.

They say TVA is wonderful--but we ought never to try it again.

They condemn "cruelly high prices"--but fight to the death every effort to bring them down.

They think the American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people.

And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

Now, my friends, that is the Wall Street Republican way of life. But there is another way--there is another way--the Democratic way, the way of the Democratic Party.

Of course, the Democratic Party is not perfect. Nobody ever said it was. But the Democratic Party believes in the people. It believes in freedom and progress, and it is fighting for its beliefs right now.

In the Democratic Party, you won't find the kind of unity where everybody thinks what the boss tells him to think, and nothing else. 

Incredible.

Follow the R-money

There is only one issue on which Mitt R-money has a consistent position: lower taxes for himself.

But even on tax transparency - as with everything else - Mitt has taken multiple contradictory positions:

[Emmett] Hayes had filed his taxes separately from O'Brien – and Fehrnstrom, then Romney's deputy campaign manager, demanded that O'Brien come clean about her husband's financial ties to Enron.

Fehrnstrom made the demand even as Romney was refusing to release his own returns.

That drew accusations of hypocrisy from editorial boards, but Fehrnstrom defended the campaign's posture, saying that O'Brien was trying to hide important information from voters by declining to reveal her husband's returns, while Romney was simply acting on principle.

R-money? Principled?

Only the me principle.

Just a little off the top

Click image for full Elena Steier/sickworldjournal.com cartoon.

Loyalty to the lie

Research has supposedly shown that conservatives are more loyal than liberals. I suspect that the problem is a bias in the object of loyalty. Conservatives may be more loyal to their tribe, while liberals are more loyal to their ideals.

In any case, conservatives have certainly proven loyalty to their favored lies and the liars who continue to propagate them long after they've been conclusively refuted:

Not long ago, if you told a whopper like [Sarah] Palin's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them. 

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth. 

That is the lesson of the birthers and truthers, of Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" about Planned Parenthood, of Glenn Beck's claim that conservatives founded the Civil Rights Movement, and of pretty much every word Michele Bachmann says. It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point. 

Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/01/154586/leonard-pitts-jr-on-facts-lies.html#storylink=omni_popular?storylink=addthis#storylink=cpy

The strangest aspect of persistent lying is that it exacts no penalty from the credibility of the liars. In a nation with truth as a social norm, Palin, Beck, Kyl, and Bachmann would long since have been laughed out of the national conversation.

Because wingnuts clamor to be lied to and the media no longer care about anything other than eyeballs on their ads, we are a nation on the path to failure. It may already be too late to rescue the greatness of America from its self-professedly loyal destroyers.

Living a lie will do that to you.

That's no double standard

Obamacare wasn't a tax a couple of days ago, but now it's a tax.

Fortunately, Mitt Rmoney realized that Obamacare could be a tax at the same time Romneycare isn't because the Supreme Court has only ruled that Obamacare is a tax.

“The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax,” Mr. Romney told CBS News. “They have spoken. There’s no way around that.”

Since it hasn't ruled on Romneycare, Rmoney can call it anything he wants. Win!

You think I'm kidding.

Furthermore, Rmoney has enough super PAC money to overrule the appearance that he signed universal healthcare (now anathema to Teapublicans) that included an individual mandate (socialistical attack on the freedom to die free from a strong case of freedom) and is paid for in part by a penalty just exactly like Obamacare's so-called tax (SSSSH!  Look over there!).

Tongue piercing

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

View from the cheap seats

Click image for full Scott Stantis/Chicago Tribune cartoon.

Dog bites

The Boston Globe has the scoop!

The top “super PACs’’ supporting Republicans in the fall elections have raised more than three times as much money as super PACs aligned with Democrats, $158 million to $47 million, a Globe analysis shows.

Ho-hum. About as surprising as bad hair on Donald Trump...

Enjoy your Fourth, and remember

Pity the poor frothing wingnut

Obamacare, take the test.

If you don't get at least 8 out of 10, you need to study the actual law before you pontificate.

Yes, I scored 10 of 10.

Being ignernt was good enough for my daddy

It shouldn't be a surprise that Texas Teapublicans (i.e. the entire Republican Party) prefer ignorance - they've given us Duhbya and Rick Perry, not to mention a host of dismal ignoramus dinosaurs. From their state party platform (PDF):

American Identity Patriotism and Loyalty – We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive. We favor strengthening our common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.

Only white conservatives are allowed to nurture racial and ethnic alienation.

Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. 

We all know their standard is not the truth but the bible and the oil industry.

Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

That last sentence is the repeal of Head Start. They believe their faith-based constituents need more time to turn their children into credulous followers.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

They're not interested in a populace that can think, hell no. Too much ridiculous bullshit in their platform to subject it to the scrutiny of critical thinking.

It's an extremist document, and not just on education. In 22 pages, there are possibly four things I agree with, other than a few completely mom-and-apple-pie items.

(h/t Education Week)

Owing our soul to the Bain Company store

Mitt Rmoney is exactly wrong for a democratic America, and nominating him was an act of supreme hubris. Why won't Democrats make the Republicans pay?  Robert Reich explains:

Romney is the only casino capitalist who is running for president, at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

[W]hy don’t Democrats connect these dots? ... Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism. 

I've been working this theme for a while:

Democrats gave up their [class] unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthyideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Go and listen to Reich, as well.

No spiking the ball

When you win, drive home your points, then celebrate in private. Check.

Forward!

Speaking the truth to oligarchy

How can one man speak for 25 minutes and not be wrong about anything, while dozens of so-called leaders can't get a sentence out of their mouths without bullshitting?

Why Republicans want to end academe

They don't control it:

The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an opinion on the most-anticipated ruling in years.

For now, anyway...

More bleeding by leeches

Joseph Stiglitz shows how the Wall Street masters of their domain - who esteem themselves as supremely rational - set up the entire economy to fail:

The country faces enormous inequality, the largest among advanced countries. Since those at the top consume a much smaller fraction of their income than the rest, when money moves from the bottom to the top — as has been happening in the U.S. for the past three decades — total demand is weakened. The weaknesses in the economy today arise from lack of demand; firms won’t invest if there is no demand for their products.

It’s not only inequality in income and wealth that is making us frail, but inequality of opportunity. We think of our country as a land of opportunity. In fact, the life prospects of a young American are more dependent on the education and income of his parents than in any of the advanced countries for which there is data. The American Dream has become a myth. 

The one thing ever Mitt Romney won't flip-flop on

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoon.

The fairy tale Senator

 I'm sure the Herald will be all over this one, especially Howie Carr. Right?

Virulent ignorance

Why is it that the angriest anti-immigrant blatherers can't bother themselves to learn the most basic facts about immigration, illegal or legal?

Dobbs repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants should just come out of the shadows and apply for citizenship. He failed to understand that the point of the current debate is that they can't.

(h/t Atrios)

Sean Hannity, lying douchebag

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There is simply no explanation for this other than the one I've been asserting for years: Fox is a propaganda outlet with no interest in the truth.

Decadence of falling empire

The Teapublican public, acting through its minions in Congress, would rather risk killing pilots than to tax us and their wealthy sponsors to put out fires:

Modern airplanes are available, some able to skim up a bellyful of water from a lake without even stopping to land and thus to conduct dozens of drops a day, but these are too expensive for the private contractors who fly the forest missions.

Instead, we're using 60-year-old planes and blaming pilots for their own deaths.

GOP priority couldn't be more obvious

It sure as hell isn't the deficit:

The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.

If the Teapublicans came right out and admitted that they want whatever benefits the wealthy and the huge corporations they own, would that be enough to dope slap the teabagger base off its stupid self-abuse?

Of course not.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Inanimatronic economics

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Rude and a liar

Heckle the President at a White House press briefing? Only a Democrat. If a reporter did this to a Republican, the entire Mighty Wurlitzer of blithering right-wing special pleading would not merely note the rudeness but accuse the reporter of treason or worse.

Here's the interruption:

Mr. Obama had only been speaking for about five minutes when Mr. Munro first shouted. He continued speaking for another five minutes afterward. ...

Mr. Munro did not specify what he shouted, but other reporters who were present said the initial question was, “Mr. President, why do you favor foreign workers over Americans?”

Here's Munro's lying alibi:

I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States.

For conservatives, rules to live by apply only to Democrats.

Chinese water torture

If the U.S. government waterboards suspected terrorists - or someone unlucky enough to have alienated the wrong people in Pakistan's ISS - the New York Times won't call it torture. There are memos defending it!

If the Chinese government waterboards suspected grafters, suddenly the Times finds the word torture in its vocabulary - and not just the lawyered up extreme definition that the Bushists put forward in John Yoo's bullshit memos. (Those memos alone are war crimes.)

When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.

Why they hate unions

Click image for full David Horsey/LA Times cartoon.

Rare good news

... that's not really so great.  Gabrielle Giffords's aide Ron Barber won a special election to serve out her term.  This doesn't change the balance of power in the House one whit, so it's merely emotional solace after the defeat in Wisconsin.

Emotional solace matters, though. I have a strong feeling of doom about 2012, and I know that foolish adoption of the Teapublican agenda would be disastrous for America. A win, even a small, brief one such as this one by a Blue Dog, replacing another Blue Dog, is still a win, especially in a place as wild and woolly as Arizona.

So what's next?

West Virginia apologizes to the Confederacy

If they'd prefer a white felon to wunna them freed darkies - and 41% of West Virginia's Democrats did - they'd also have their druthers in favor of the treason that their forebears resisted. We can also put the lie to the wingnut alibi that President Obama's voters are racist:

Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.

Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

Even this is based on the most extreme racists, the ones who type n----- into Google. The others don't even appear on the list. They just vote and rant and teabag with additional hysteria - which we don't need - because Obama's black, not white.

Woolly mammoths in Escalades

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Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do:

Even presidential pets were viewed through the same lens. Tesler showed 1,000 YouGov respondents a picture of a Portuguese water dog and asked how favorably they felt toward it. Half saw the dog introduced as Bo Obama, and half as Ted Kennedy’s dog, Splash. (Both political dogs are the same breed, but the picture was of Obama’s.) Those with negative feelings toward blacks thought less of Obama’s dog.

The bigots can't even keep their racial animus from infecting their view of a pet.

GOP wants you ignorant

... and they're succeeding:

[T]he House Appropriations financial services subcommittee voted along party lines to prohibit the FCC from implementing their proposal to add another layer of transparency to the political ad process. Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) argued that fiscal matters are private and should remain that way.

Fie on peasant resentments

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/Politico cartoon.

Attack of the killer transformers

Steve M. sez:

[M]ainstream coverage of campaigns is hopeless: the reporters seem incapable of maintaining critical distance, so they inevitably regurgitate spin -- and that just gives the spin a patina of objectivity.

For our political press, campaigns are good for one thing only:  Road trip!

If there's a movie on the press bus, so much the better:

Veterans of past presidential campaigns know very well that neither team has yet to fully engage the billion-dollar campaign machines that will clash in spectacular fashion in the fall.

Plus, all the better if the big media stenographer can pretend that financial resources for this campaign will be anything close to equal in the aftermath of Citizens United v. FEC.

Who's the Autobot? Who's the Decepticon? Big media won't help you figure that out. That wouldn't be "objective."

Go for the jugular

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Cassandra had it easy

Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.

We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)

So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!

In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:

[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.

The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.

One thing that has changed in the past three decades: The profusion of fools in media has increased the ability of fools to assert they know things that just ain't so. Their tribe tells them to know nothing, and they do, not quietly, not ashamed of their ignorance, but ardently asserting it. They aren't stupid. But they willfully deny confirmed truth. They choose to bear the tribal markers of that chosen ignorance with pride.

It's not our intelligence that has made us successful, not in the sense of our ability to do science. Science is extremely recent, too recent to have been the evolutionary goal of our intelligence. Not many people can do it - or even understand it.

The big brains that permit us the pre-scientific intelligence to dominate the world, to proliferate across it, to alter the landscape and the atmosphere, evolved because social cooperation was so important to a weak and slow primate - perhaps the least physically imposing large primate. Weapons were (and are) important, but we needed language most of all. No one of us could bring down a mammoth. We needed a tribe. It took a village.

Tribalism has been very successful, and conservatives try to sneak it back in even when we've excluded it:

 In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.

Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.

South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:

I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”

When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.

In the immortal words of Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.

Cassandra had it easy.