The bullshit outrage machine

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Republicans refuse to hold themselves to the standard they hold others to. Morally, their development stopped at age two.

I'm running for office, for Mitt's sake

Mitt's core value: whatever's good for Mitt. The business world trained him for that. He's used to lying for money.

We need more Barney Franks

... especially if Newt Gingrich (R-stupid person's idea of a smart person) wins the Republican Presidential nomination.

Why tax the lord of the manor when so many serfs love him?

Jon Kyl (R-vassaline) simply captures the Republican way: If you're not wealthy, they don't give a shit about you. I don't mean 1% wealthy, I mean 0.1% wealthy.

These men in the Republican Party are bad. They're not just sincerely mistaken. They want a society in which all rewards flow to those who already have more than enough. They think this is not only the efficient way to organize the economy, they think it's the moral way. And they're dead wrong on both counts.

They're the kind of people who have deserved revolutions. They're the kind of people who hold up The Road to Serfdom, unopened, and who fail to realize that they are advocating literal serfdom, rather than the figurative kind Hayek feared.

Missouri loves company

Alabama would rather be poor than brown. Again.

Alabama’s competitors certainly won’t waste any time. After the Tuscaloosa incident, the editorial page of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited Mercedes to Missouri. “We are the Show-Me State,” it said, “not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

Of course, the people who suffer from this sort of draconian response (to a real problem) are those who are already marginal, those for whom this exhausts their margin. Republican political consultants? They have life tenure, assuming they never think outside their ideological constraints.

The New York Times is off-base on one thing. Americans will fill jobs that pay a fair wage. If an economic habit - cheap food - requires penury of its workers, there's something wrong with the habit, not with the potential workers. A previous highly economical agricultural system - holding cotton-pickers in human bondage - didn't argue for the status quo.

Pay the workers better, and they'll show up for this back-breaking work.

Wingnut emails are total bullshit

If you get a derogatory email about any Democrat or liberal, chances are good that its content is made up bullshit.

Will Americans be subjected to international gun-control laws under a new U.N. treaty signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton? Is the president honoring Jane Fonda as one of the “women of the century”? Was suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan an adviserto the Obama administration?

Like the Medicare story, these claims are demonstrably false, too. Nevertheless, they are popular on the thriving underground e-mail circuit, a carnival of nonsense whose star attractions have included the canard that Obama is a secret Muslim and variations on the “birther” claims about his origins.

Normal people call this lying. Why are conservatives so eager to be taken in? For them, faith and obeisance to their tribe are more important than reality.

This is why many of them still believe that:

• Darth and Duhbya were right to invade Iraq.
• Global warming is a conspiracy of scientists who are too ideological to be paid off by fossil fuel industries but who are too greedy for picayune government research grants to give up their spartan labs.
• The economy, which was just torched by the free market assholes at the top of the income and wealth distributions, only needs more transfer of income and wealth to the very same rich assholes and then everything will be hunky-dory for all of us.
• President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist.

Information cannot argue with a closed mind.

The log in conservatives' eye

Republican economics is total bullshit

The puzzle remains why so many otherwise sane middle class Americans still shill for the wealthy, even the very, very wealthy who do nothing more than skim off the cream:

[W]ho are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”

They must watch a lot of stupidity-inducing Fox. A lot...

What John McCain means

When John McCain praises Jon Kyl as "a decent & principled man," he means that Kyl is not a bigger asshole than the usual run of unreasonable, unreasoning, and impossible-to-reason-with Republicans.

Uncle Duke monetizes chaos

The vulture feeding off a carcass fills a vital ecological niche.

Even as NATO bombed Libya, the Americans offered to make Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi their client — and charge him a hefty consulting fee. Their price: a $10 million retainer before beginning negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi’s representatives.

And how is it that Republican Montana gubernatorial candidate Neil Livingstone is initially identified in the blandest terms as a "Washington terrorism expert"?

This sort of capitalist is loyal only to the almighty dollar. (Note: They're not all Republicans.)

Exhibit A, Darth Cheney

Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice:

[T]he Republican Party has not recently been stolen by a batch of half-witted bigots, xenophobes, authoritarians, and garden-variety grifters. They’ve had control of the GOP wheel for more than 40 years, at least since Nixon’s triumphant accession to the Oval Office with the help of many of these same fine Heritage Institute ‘statesmen’. They were bad people when they were interning during Watergate, they were bad people when they used Reagan as a figurehead to start the full-scale authoritarian takeover and banana-republic-style looting of our national treasury, and they remain Bad People in Charge even unto this very day.

It's just that the vicious racists who used to be Southern Democrats have joined their particular brand of reactionary wingnuttery to the GOP.

Margin of victory

When you're fighting a class war against freeloading workers, this has to warm the cockles of your heart:

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent ($66,384 compared to $58,506).

Dangling modifier

Hope and change come in fitful bursts, followed by reaction and retrenchment. As it is with Occupy Wall Street, so it is in Bahrain:

Of all the uprisings in the Arab world, Bahrain managed to end the unrest, largely by using coercive force. Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites flared, and a country that was once one of the region’s most cosmopolitan is now one of its most divided.

and in Egypt:

[T]he military council began spelling out plans to carve out permanent political powers and protection from civilian oversight under the next constitution. Those efforts exploded after the government used force to clear a small protest camp from Tahrir Square last Saturday, amid mounting unrest across the country.

A few observations, not too taxing for those of you just in or headed for another tryptophan coma:

• Our reporters know to cheer for the Arab spring protesters and against the Occupiers. Why is that?
• Go back three centuries and substitute Protestant and Catholic for Sunni and Shiite, and you get Christian Europe with all it sectarian conflict - and the motivation for our separation of church and state.
• A despotism's power grows out of the barrel of a gun - or the nozzle of a can of pepper spray.
• Monarchy is never legitimate.
• I'm a liberal, so it's not nearly as easy to scare me as your average Fox-watching conservamaton, but Islamist co-option of the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Arab spring scares me.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Palace guard

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

Wall Street two-step

So often, a Democrat will be suspected of a crime, and wingnuts will appear to say, "Na na, what do you think now?" As if to say, see, you say Republicans should be locked up, but now it's one of yours!

My answer, which they routinely ignore, is that it's fine with me to prosecute guys like Jon Corzine, irrespective of the fact that he's a Democrat.

This disconnect between some wingers and me is that I don't have double standards for members of my tribe. Because they do, they expect me to.

They project every one of their own immoralities onto liberals. We've learned enough not to project our decencies onto them.

The Tiffany's of historians

If it looks like a bribe, it probably is. With Newt Gingrich (R-money-grubbing), who's spent his entire career in corrupt self-enrichment, that probability is even higher, approaching one. Freddie Mac paid him more than $1.6 million as a historian? You've got to be kidding me. Here's a guy who couldn't get tenure at a third-rate rural state college (for which I'm sure he blames liberals, but which I regard as proof the tenure system can work).

Gingrich "explains" this obvious influence-peddling gig:

“I offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do,” he said at the debate. “My advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, ‘We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that’s what the government wants us to do.’ As I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.”

What a load of bullshit! He even walked back the lie the next day:

“I have no idea what the dates were,” he said, according to the Web site. “I offered strategic advice over a period of time. I did no lobbying of any kind. And I’m very happy to offer people strategic advice if they come and ask my advice.”

He's simply manufacturing lies to cover his corpulent ass. It's a lot easier to give glib answers if you can just make shit up. Hired historians don't get to make policy recommendations. They don't even meet the leadership.

Gingrich claims Freddie Mac needed his strategic advice and, lo and behold, that advice perfectly anticipated today's Republican claim that private lenders making the bad "innovative" loans couldn't possibly be at fault - since the market is purr-fect - so it had to be 30-year-old anti-redlining law that caused the meltdown. Yet now he doesn't know whether he gave that advice before or after the meltdown.

Even beforehand, the advice would have been worthless in wingnut fantasy land. If the big bad government was really forcing bad loans, Freddie would have been fully aware of that fact - and of Newt's inability, as a historian, to change it. Unless of course he was lobbying...

Gringrich is a sociopathic pig grown fat at the right-wing hog trough. At least Michele Bachmann has principles.

A level playing field is too much to ask

Mayor Orwell

Michael Bloomberg (I-Wall Street) has cleared Zucotti Park with the following bullshit rationale:

“The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” the mayor said in the statement. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with” because the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

In other, less Orwellian words, the wrong people were availing themselves of the park. Further, they were using all of the park, and of course the terms of the law require using less than all of it. It's right there in black and white!

Plus, up is down.

Multiple guess

One of these candidates will be the Republican nominee. That alone should fill us all with existential dread.

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.