If you have to explain it

Chuck Asay has a cartoon up that says not only is he an idiot, he's an asshole. No surprise there, I guess. After beating up President Obama for his completely ordinary use of a teleprompter (say, here), he now excuses Sarah Palin's palm pilot by comparing it to Obama's speech-making. So the teleprompter is suddenly o.k.? (No, are you kidding?)

Conservative pundits like Asay have to pretend to believe that Palin's inability to remember three points without notes (including a cross-out that suggests someone told her at the last minute that tax cuts are more popular than budget cuts) is actually more reasonable than Obama's use of a teleprompter for a full-length speech. Not just equally reasonable, because they want to be able to continue to flay Obama.

A double standard would at least be a standard. This is nothing better than IOKIYAR.

The teleprompter meme has got to be the stupidest conservative talking point ever. Anyone who has ever seen Barack Obama respond to uncanned questions can plainly see that he has mastered the material in a way that Ronald Reagan and Duhbya never did - and Palin just as plainly never will. (Dick Cheney, the most dangerous authoritarian to hold high office in my lifetime, did have mastery of his talking points, so maybe I should be careful what I wish for.)

Yet wingnut TV pundits look straight into their teleprompters and give their soundbites about Obama's reliance on ... the teleprompter. You'd think they think their audience is too stupid to know.

Shouldn't attempts at humor at least have to make sense?

Anyway, here's a better way to fight back:

Click image for full Steve Benson cartoon

Another day, another Republican lie

It's what they do. Dana Perino (on Fox, natch) claims:

• The shoe bomber in 2001 and the penis bomber in 2009 are "apples and oranges" even though both were goofball al Qaeda terrorists who smuggled explosives on board airplanes in their clothing, only to be subdued by passengers, Mirandized, and tried in civilian courts.
• If only the Bushists had had their military tribunals set up, they would have tried the shoe bomber in one of them. They learned their lesson on José Padilla, never mind that he wound up back in a civilian court too, insane to boot.

If there's a more obvious case of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, I'd like to hear about it, so I can call it bullshit, too.

Perino has a smooth pink complexion, blue eyes, and blond hair. She lies for a living. She's packaging - a spokesmodel. She and Fox are a perfect fit.

Update: Glenn Greenwald had another case of Republican bullshit yesterday. Don't you dare do as I did! says Michael Mukasey.

Legacy of impunity

Republicans lie. It's the only way they can continue to win elections, given that their programs center on beggaring their neighbors in favor of the wealthy and the corporations the wealthy control.

Today, as they have been for months, the lies are about Medicare.

Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare...

[W]hat’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program.

Tomorrow the lies will be about ... whatever subject the Republicans speak on.

Democrats have utterly and completely failed to make the case that no one can trust a single word the Republicans say. The Democrats need to say that Republicans are untrustworthy - and provide examples - every time they're within range of any microphone, no matter how large or small.

Instead, Democrats natter on politely, pretending that there is some deal possible with their adversaries, as if the Republicans would ever negotiate in good faith toward a responsible solution.

Republicans are in this for blood, and we play patty-cake. I'm sick of it. On the short ride home tonight, I imagined speaking up to John Kerry should he run into me at the Massachusetts Democratic Party convention this spring:

You can be my Senator and reform the filibuster, or you can be Richard Shelby's Senator and Tom Coburn's Senator and Jim DeMint's Senator. You can't be both.

Well, that was the most printable thing I imagined saying.

There are three possible reasons for the Democrats' failure to do to the word Republican what conservatives have done to the word liberal:

• They don't understand the power of repetition.
• They're too spineless to tell the truth.
• They're afraid of the 30% of this country that believes things that in a normal world would get them labelled batshit insane, and they don't want to risk another civil war.

I lean to the second with a dollop of the first. The third is also true, but it's far too insightful. Besides, if they realized that we're in a slow motion slide to authoritarianism that could put them in jail, I think even they would man up and defend something, anything.

The only way to win for America's sake is to tell the truth. The teabaggers believe the lies they hear repeated so often. The truth repeated just as often would eventually win over many of them.

This in turn would push conservatives - and of course there are honest and truthful conservatives - back to the truth as something that matters. It would retire the current set of dishonest Republican propagandists, but it would replace them with people with whom compromise would be both possible and useful.

That'll be the day.

Don't bother to read this

It's in TAPPED. Atrios linked to it. It doesn't need my small propagation to gain an audience. But I just have to quote this, apropos of the Washington Post hiring yet another neocon torture apologist:

There's really no limit to what you can achieve in Washington as long as you leverage your efforts towards helping the powerful escape culpability for their wrongdoing. It's like the mob. You show loyalty to the right people, eventually you get made.

Liberal media. No amount of repetition can make that particular forkful of bullshit true, and yet Palindrones still think it forward and backward.

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Untouchable

A health insurer in California just raised rates on individual purchasers 30 to 39% and promised more hikes, oh, whenever they damn well please. Not our fault, says Anthem Blue Cross:

"We understand and strongly share our members' concerns over the rising cost of healthcare services and the corresponding adverse impact on insurance premiums," the company said in a statement.

"Unfortunately, the individual market premiums are merely the symptoms of a larger underlying problem in California's individual market -- rising healthcare costs."

Here's what they edited out of their PR:

Our industry's lobbyists and advertising, not to mention the subscribers we suckered into helping, beat back any reform at all. We don't think we have to worry in the least about the government helping you sick people.

Anthem is probably ticked that their profit is capped at 30% of revenue.

Update (2/13): h/t MoveOn

Wrong kind of crazy

Republicans don't embrace all kinds of conspiratorial crazy - not even Texas Republicans. Birther? No problem. Black helicopter paranoid? Come on in. Socialist takeover? You're our guy!

Truther? No way! That's nutty (true!), but more important, it makes a Republican look bad.

Underdogs

I grew up rooting for the underdog. This was part of my dad's teachings many a Sunday afternoon: If you don't have a strong prior loyalty, hope for egalitarianism. This, I thought, was a basic American value. Anyone can get ahead here. Pedigree is not destiny, not in America.

I didn't have a strong loyalty in Super Bowl XLIV (last holdout of Roman numerals!). Unlike much of the rest of the country, I don't despise Peyton Manning, and the Colts' departure in the dead of night from Baltimore hadn't left any of my nerves inflamed after all these years. But the Saints had been the Ain'ts for so long that, when the whistle blew, I took their side.

For this, I am derided as insufficiently capitalistic:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

All I can say to that: Goddamned Tory courtier to power. Root for the Yankees all the time? I don't think so.

(h/t Alicublog)

Snowed on your watch, buddy

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

Crib notes

Don't even think of not clicking this link to No More Mister Nice Blog.

Queen and Carrie

Maybe there's hope yet for our great and challenging experiment in democracy. Or maybe my third glass of cabernet is exposing my usually suppressed naive optimism...

Queen Latifah, by the way, can sing "God Bless America" for me any time she wants to. She is a woman of immense talent, and she has made it big without being an anorexic, silicone hottie.

Strategically placed

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

Don't think, Meat

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

In the long run, we're all dead anyway

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Free mock-it

Click image for full Mark Streeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

Spitting into the wind

In an age of hype, bullshit, and willed credulity toward incredible claims, some people resist, among them David Aaronovitch. I'm not sure there will be enough of us.

This is telling:

There are entire societies where the default position is to believe in conspiracy theories, like in Pakistan or Iran. There are very few people in the Pakistan military, for example, who don’t believe that Bush was behind 9/11.

Our culture has succeeded because it has been willing to grapple with the actual reality, rather than sinking into the temporary comfort of wishful thinking. I often doubt that it still is.

Oppose Social Security

The bald honest truth is that Republicans oppose Social Security. They dress up their opposition in various ways, but they're against the idea of government involvement in the welfare of people. It makes the citizenry to safe to work themselves to the bone on behalf of a corporation! That can't be good.

If you have the bad luck to make a mistake in choosing your parents, you had better be prepared for an old age of penury and suffering.

Kill the filibuster

There's no custom that Republicans won't abuse if it advantages them:

President Obama is correct. There were 39 cloture votes last year, nine more than the combined total for 1949-1970.

The filibuster was built for extremity. The comity of the Senate was supposed to make the filibuster a little-used last resort. Extreme Republicans now view any legislation they disagree with as an extreme case.

CNN is technically correct with this:

Starting with the 92nd Congress (1971-72), cloture votes became more frequent. Part of that can be explained by the fact that the Senate changed the required majority in 1975, making it easier to induce cloture.

The change was from two thirds to a flat 60 votes.

But CNN's interpretation of the ease of voting cloture is backwards. Requiring a two thirds cloture vote makes the filibuster more powerful, so we're all counting the wrong thing.

We should be counting how many bills and amendments never got voted on because they couldn't muster a supermajority.

Pander with the best of them

Arlen Specter is now an ardent advocate for labor unions.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, fighting for his political life in Pennsylvania, kicked the session off with a question about the "trade imbalance" with China and how that hurts union workers.

Oh, bullshit. From RINO to DINO in one election cycle. Specter's stock in trade for years has been pandering. I don't think it'll work this time. What Pennsylvania gets may be much worse.

Originalist poser

Just how is it that the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court can grant the First Amendment to corporations, when the modern limited liability corporation wasn't even legal until decades after the ratification of the Bill of Rights?

Could it possibly be, as with federalism, states' rights, and especially Bush v. Gore, the right-wing activist judges who claim to be originalists are not really acting on principle at all?

I dare question the sincerity of Their High Honors the Supreme Justices! Off with me 'ead!

For anyone who thinks borking has bad connotations, check Robert Bork's further career as a rigid ideologue, willing to rationalize almost any extremity of wingnuttism (who knew that word would be in the Firefox spelling dictionary!). We Democrats and liberals should have borked Scalia, Thomas, and Alito too. The world would be a better place - and especially America would be better without ever having suffered the maladministration of Darth and Duhbya - if we has seen the importance of keeping the first two of those Republican ideologues off the court.

As for Scalito's objection to President Obama's criticism of the Court's predictable bullshit decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Alito knew the stakes, no matter how piously he may now deny it. Principle? The winner establishes principle, and they won, liberal bitches!

Corporation for Congress

Incredible!

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

Next up, lobbying for a Supreme Court nomination.

(h/t metulj on KnoxViews)