First things first

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

Sources say

Big media is incredible!

[T]hey continue to violate their own guidelines over and over by indiscriminately using anonymity in the most reckless ways. And they know they do it, because it's been repeatedly documented, even by their own ombudsmen and reporters. Yet they blithely continue. What other conclusion could a rational person reach other than that the publishers, editors and reporters of these newspapers neither care about nor deserve journalistic credibility? Just think about it: in the aftermath of the Iraq debacle, they announced: We know we have lost credibility and here are rules we will follow to win back that credibility, only for them to then systematically and continuously breach those rules over and over, thus replicating exactly the behavior that led to the loss of credibility in the first place.

Or, if you prefer, uncredible.

How I know I'm not an asshole today

A Facebook friend, who wears her conservative Christianity very publicly, asks:

Does anyone know of companies in ... who offer health insurance to part-time employees?

Last summer, this same friend voted NO on universal health care, voted NO again on universal health care, and posted this video.

Today, I am not commenting on her status that the public option is what she needs. Instead, I am hoping that she and her family find the health insurance they need. That small mercy keeps me from being an asshole. Today.

Getting the kinks out

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

Some logic required

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Republocracy

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Fried squirrel brains

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

Consequences

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

GOP just wants to leave its mark

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Good enough for my daddy

Click image for full David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer cartoon.

Taking sides

Ed Hornick of CNN repeatedly casts Republicans in the best possible light, but he covers his complicity in their lies with a pretense of getting the other side. Here's a clear example:

[Karl] Rove discusses the Bush administration's support for the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which Democrats and others have described as torture.

This is just normal amoral media bullshit about whether waterboarding is torture. John Yoo and Jay Bybee covered this question with a thin tissue of bullshit, and they have now escaped sanction for it, but that doesn't alter at all the plain fact that we have sent our enemies to prison and death for using torture, including waterboarding. Bushist apologists, for whom military opinion is fetish, should consider:

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

Hornick thinks he's being objective. He's really siding with the side of bullshit.

[Rove] defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet. He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques.

"When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. ...

He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

But the story didn't end there, despite Hornick's willingness to court Rove by implying that it did. Pelosi acknowledged being briefed on the existence of the torture memos but not on the actual use of torture the Bushists intended.

As for whether the techniques were actually torture, Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."

In sum, Hornick and the big media remain willing to abet the Bushists' claim that a century of settled understanding that waterboarding is torture can still be legitimately disputed. The Bushists dispute it; it must be legitimate. Never mind their self-interested redefinition of the word. Yet Hornick and most of the media accept the word of the CIA, also oft-fetishized by Republicans, based on so-called proof that the CIA itself wrote, that Pelosi is not telling the truth.

Snarkolepsy

Irresistable dream sequence, riffing on this:

Useless journalist: "Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President?"

Romney: "I sure do. ... She's been a mayor, she's been a governor, she's been part of a presidential campaign, she's got a lot of support."

Useful journalist: "Would you hire her to make deals and manage money at Bain Capital?"

Romney: "Hem, haw, to manage my money? She doesn't have a lot of support in that area."

Confidence game

There's a knowledge debt that swamps the national debt:

What this means is that if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels.

But it's condescension for me to call raving lunatic wingnuts, well, raving lunatic wingnuts:

The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”

Y'know, when they actually grapple with reality, I'll stop condescending. Until then (never?), all they deserve is condescension. And they claim they're really big on people getting what they deserve.

Vanishing people

This bears repeating for anyone who's complacent about unemployment.

How can all three of these facts be true at the same time?

1. The rate of unemployment held steady in February (at the awful rate of 9.7%).
2. 36,000 net jobs were lost.
3. Approximately 150,000 people would be expected to join the workforce in an average month.

The obvious expressions of these facts:

jobsFeb = jobsJan - 36000
workforceFeb = workforceJan + 150000
jobsJan/workforceJan = jobsFeb/workforceFeb = 0.097, thus
jobsJan/workforceJan = (jJ - 36000)/(wJ + 150000) = 0.097

Only problem is that this last equation has no solution. The unemployment rate should have gone up a tenth of a point.

The problem with this arithmetic is that workforceFeb = workforceJan + 150000 isn't true. People who need jobs, who want jobs, are giving up, falling off the count.

Unemployment, as officially measured, held steady. That is only true because the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting a bunch of the actually unemployed. How many? Since there are about 138,000,000 people working in the U.S., about 190,000 people had to give up in the single month of February to make the ratio stay constant.

Fifteen million people are out of work. Involuntarily. Not counting people who are working parttime but would like a fulltime job. Not counting people working shit jobs just to keep body and soul together. Not counting people who have given up, more than one percent of all unemployed in last month alone.

In ordinary times, this would be considered a crisis.

Alienation from media

They want to marginalize people like me, the ones they can't bullshit.

Benjamin cites numerous Bachmann statements that demonstrate her penchant for bizarre claims (and there are many he omitted), but points to only one Grayson statement: his famous floor speech in which he claimed: "If you get sick in America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly." One could reasonably object to that statement as unduly inflammatory rhetoric, but Grayson was one of the only members of Congress willing to forcefully connect health care policy to the actual lives (and deaths) of American citizens. There's nothing crazy about dramatically emphasizing that causal connection; far crazier is to ignore it.

If you're nuts and want to speak more than once to the news media, you had better be a right-winger.

Stock in trade

Wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - will believe whatever Karl Rove tells them to extend the lies and the obvious bullshit that led us into Iraq. Wingnuts want to say that they were honorably motivated. They weren't. Ordinary conservatives want to salve the consciences (which wingnuts lack) about the imperial rush to a war of choice. (Aside: Are there any ordinary conservatives left?)

The truth is the Bushists wanted to invade Iraq. Duhbya was no doubt tired of hearing how his father had left Saddam Hussein in power. Darth Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to project American power into a permanent client outpost at the crossroads of the Middle East, in short to implement the neocon PNAC plan.

Republicans lie. Karl Rove lies for a living - and quite a handsome living at that. They do it to get what they want. Because all you have to do to Americans and especially Washington Democrats is wave a bloody shirt, they succeeded. That shame should be on all of us. Instead, the wingnuts revel in it.

Amuse-bouche

Libertarian Jonathan Loya is running for State Rep in the Massachusetts 8th Middlesex, a district I know pretty well. He's running against freshman Rep. Carolyn Dykema (D-Holliston), who's a friend of mine. More power to him for running - at age 19 - even though I wish him a thorough defeat. Still, being involved in politics is important even if he's on the wrong side.

Here's something funny, though. Loya is using my words to describe at least what he claims he is not. Two weeks ago, I made several comments on this MetroWest Daily News story announcing his candidacy. One of them included:

[T]he libertarian response to the financial crisis would have been to let the economy burn to the ground. As big a mess as we're still in, it would be much worse if libertarians like Loya had been in charge.

Today came the news straight from Loya's mouth:

“Some people, when you say libertarianism, think you’re a radical person who wants to burn the economy to the ground” said Loya jokingly before scratching the surface of his ideas about the ideology.

Oh, no, now I'm a speech-writer for the opposition. Heh.

The problem with Bunning

It's not the fact that Jim Bunning (R-No KY) is an asshole that makes him unpopular with his fellow Republicans. Being a scrupulously cruel and unfeeling asshole is very common, even highly esteemed on the right - witness Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Malkin, Robertson, Coulter. In Congress, as well, there are plenty of Republican assholes.

If I might digress for a moment, being an asshole is not a blindly partisan affliction. There are Democratic assholes, that's for sure. From time to time, I catch myself being an asshole. The difference is that we tolerate our assholes, that we try to reform our own moments of assholery, where they are proud of their asshole compatriots and their own petty cruelty and unfeelingness.

Bunning's real sin, in the eyes of his estranged Republican colleagues, is that he has been too visibly an asshole. Bunning has been out front with his cruelty, failing to hide it even behind the usual thin bullshit.

Of course, his real transgression in the eyes of the press, is not that he blocked small care for the unemployed. No, it's that he had the temerity to curse at them. That gave them the middle school news hook they needed to hang Bunning. Mitch McConnell, a Potemkin village of bland over a flinty heart of savage asshole? The press will never notice.

Little red book

Where does power come from?

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Make it till you fake it

The truth hurts. Where we are results from building our economy to bow to - and reward - the often ephemeral paper value of Wall St., rather than the intrinsic value of goods and services.

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