Too thick to be shamed

President Obama hugged Nina Pham. In the Oval Office!!!

All the wingnut chicken littles who've been fanning fear of ebola are probably too out of their minds with cowardice to notice that Obama's message to them is:

I'm not only smarter, calmer, and better informed, I'm much braver than you crybabies.

Right-wing media's purpose is to keep its consumers outraged and afraid so that they don't notice the con and keep swilling the bullshit and voting for its purveyors.

We used to say, "The stupid, it burns." Evidently not. I wish it did, but it wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all be Fox "News" personalities.

Business failures

Businesses and business people frequently think of themselves as rationally self-interested. They used to add the word enlightened, but they don't much any more. That's so retro, an anachronism of a time before shareholder value became everything, before greed was good, before Ayn Rand told them they were virtuous to be bastards.

But, are they even rationally self-interested?

I see a local gas station with a sign supporting the end of automatic indexing of the gas tax to inflation. Is that really in their interest? I remember 1991, the previous time the gas tax went up 3 cents. All - and I mean all - gasoline retailers raised their prices 6 cents. Indexing gives them the chance to gouge every year, not just every 20 something years.

Democrats manage the economy better for growth, jobs, GDP, and the stock market. The Koch brothers have made their vast fortunes tremendously vaster with Barack Obama as President, yet they hate him and all Democrats to the tune of a billion dollars. It's not rational, just their ideology.

The stock market has done tremendously during the Obama administration, yet investment businesses want more. More, more, always more. It's clear the banks won't be satisfied unless every fraudulent, high risk, socialized risk/privatized profit "innovative product" that steals from honest people is permitted. Yet they're making huge profits, just not enough to feed the tapeworm of Randian bullshit economic feudalism.

Export businesses should look at their international competitors and come out for single-payer health care. They need that huge drain off their books and on someone else's. Nope, after supporting Obamacare when it was still Heritagecare, they're looking to dump what coverage they offer - despite Obamacare's early successes at slowing the growth of health insurance costs.

Businesses and business owners prefer weak government because that's their ideology, not because it's better for their businesses. Weird.

More stupid shit

Apparently, I provide tag lines to the White House.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton believes in magic, at least for electoral purposes.

This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

No, it's not an organizing principle.  It's a minimum standard.  One we've been regularly fucking up for the better part of three and a half decades.

Humorless freakout

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

Why do Republicans and other wingnuts hate President Obama's viral Funny or Die video with Zach Galifianakis? I mean, other than their simple hatred of the President...

This video is reaching young people, and scaring them into not signing up for Obamacare is one way the health-free and die crowd now hope to kill universal health insurance.

Left to our own devices?

Click image for full Bado/Le Droit cartoon.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass

The President needs to maintain his exceptional dignity while telling Teapublican assholes like Pete Sessions to hit the road and not come back.  They won't respect anything less.

Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

What the shit is he putting in his tea?

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo New cartoon.

Loyal opposition would care about facts

The Republicans are interested only in their own power. Yet another faux scandal, this time the IRS's so-called targeting of teabaggers, has crumbled:

Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.

It was obvious from the beginning that the IRS personnel in Cincinnati were using search terms - the way anyone facing a large backlog of work would - to screen for high-priority work. If you don't do this, you're not getting the right work done. You're treating every task as equal in priority and equally likely to pay off. In short, you're an idiot piece-worker.

Republicans should have known this before going after scalps. Instead, they contrived exposure of only the part of the story that fit their apocalyptic victimology. I have no evidence whether they knew and deceived us or whether they simply didn't ask. Those are the two options, and either is unforgivable for the House Oversight Committee and its chair, Darrell Issa (R-police record).

It's long past time we acknowledged that their opposition to Barack Obama goes well beyond honorable, time-honored loyal opposition. They are not loyal to Americans, only to their extremist supporters.

Alas poor Yobama

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

Segregation academies

Conservatives are frothing at the mouth (again! You'd think they'd run out of froth) about President Obama's completely innocuous comments about schools and communities separated along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland.

The reason our homegrown American paranoid wingnuts are angry about this - other than anger being what they do - is that they've spent the past forty years building separate institutions parallel to public and secular institutions.

Their building started as a way to keep their delicate little white babies from having to learn with colored chillun. You never know what might happen when children sit next to each other in class. They might become friends! Or those dark boys might deflower innocent Southern girls. Mongrelization, miscegenation, race-mixing, and bastardization of America!

Feh.

After resegregating K-12, of course, the racist wingers needed "higher" education that would permit their smallworldview to go unchallenged all the way through college and even grad school. But you can't say cadres for Christ - that sounds too much like the Bolsheviks. Hence Bob Jones University (BJU, unintended double entendre foreshadowing teabagger) and Liberty University. Too bad Oklahoma's ORU wasn't named for a televangelist named Oral Richards.

Then of course, the conservatives built their own media, intended from the beginning to get their story our, never mind what's true. Fox pretends to be news to pump out propaganda. Rush and his ilk of haters purvey unguested confrontation and won't countenance any response on their bullshit programs.

Well, not quite never mind what's true. Some viewers need a little convincing. So billionaire wingnuts built tax exempt foundations to provide a thin veil of propaganda for the alleged truth of their views. Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Accuracy in Media, and all the various denier "think" tanks on climate change, tobacco, and the so-called free market, etc.

Conservatives hate what Obama said in Northern Ireland because they've graduated from advocating separate but unequal for black folk into advocating separate institutions for themselves - and, oh by the way, the destruction of public institutions for the rest of us.

Whiney wingnut worldview

Hilarious. Thanks, Obama!

(NSFW)

That's not funny!

I can well imagine schlerotic wingnuts railing against the President's sense of humor.

Walking in to “All I Do Is Win,” President Obama joked “Rush Limbaugh warned you about this. Second term, baby. We’re changing things around here a little bit.”

Or maybe they'll wax wroth about teleprompters and other bullshit.

Anyhow, I'm laughing.

Derangement, plain and simple

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We used to mock wingnuts for Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Because they noticed that tag stung, they accused us of Bush Derangement Syndrome, even though CDS (Hillary murdered Vince Foster!) was mainstream in the GOP and BDS (Darth Cheney did controlled demolition of WTC4!) was only in the wacko fringe left.

The truth is that many wingnuts are simply deranged. They can't tell obvious bullshit from something that's in range of plausible. There are plenty of them, too, which is why our politics is so screwed up that a centrist like Barack Obama (bank rescue, Heritage Foundation health insurance reform, chained CPI, no accountability for financial crimes, gradualist war policy, weak on environment) has crazy teabaggers screaming "socialist commie fascist" at him.

Gasbag deflation

How clueless do you have to be to imagine that Bill O'Reilly has a clue?

Pure blame-shifting

It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.

Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.

Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.

Update (3/1): Yep:

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.

Blame game

Click on image for full David Horsey/LA Times cartoon.

Suspicions

Because the Congressional Republicans never acquiesce, I'm suspicious of the debt ceiling deal they've floated and voted. The press, true to its fetish for agreements, no matter how awful, is happy.

Of foremost concern to me, it's not clear what's in the deal. The New York Times has reported it badly, as if it's a standard cooling off move that leaves everything unchanged for three months. To careless readers, the story looks like a debt ceiling increase:

House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.

and, sure enough, past debt ceiling increases are recalled with identical phrasing:

The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling.

But there's no dollar amount anywhere, which ought to make everyone as suspicious as I am.

Turns out, this omission should have been central to the story, as it was in the Washington Post, for the GOP has merely agreed to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling to a specific date:

[E]ven as House Republicans voted to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling through May 18, their budget chairman [Paul Ryan] vowed to use the coming deadlines to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to deliver “a big down payment on the debt crisis.”

Not only did Jonathan Weisman of the Times get the mechanism wrong, he got something as simple as the time frame wrong - four months, not three.

I haven't yet figured out how the House Republicans will use the change to their negotiating advantage, but you had better believe they will. What was once a soft date that the Treasury could maneuver around is now a hard date that the Obama administration has already pledged to respect, when it announced that it would not use the Fourteenth Amendment debt guarantee to abrogate the debt ceiling statute, nor vastly expand the platinum coin authority of the Mint.

Hacks like Weisman will be back on May 17 with pressure for a deal, no matter how bad.

TV nooz

Learning from Sandy Hook

Connecticut had a so-called ban on so-called assault weapons in place in December when Adam Lanza used a legal weapon to kill 26 people in Sandy Hook Elementary School. We should learn from this.

Connecticut has an assault-weapons ban, modeled after a federal law that was enacted in 1994 before expiring a decade later. But it takes more than a dark fiberglass body and a menacing shape to fall under the ban.

The Connecticut law restricts semi-automatic rifles — those capable of firing a bullet with each pull of the trigger — only if they include a detachable magazine as well as at least two of five specific features. One of those features — a pistol grip — is ubiquitous on military-style weapons. But to be banned, an AR-15-style rifle would also need to include a folding or telescoping stock, a bayonet mount, a grenade launcher or a flash suppressor, a device typically screwed on to the end of the muzzle to limit the bright flash caused by gunpowder that ignites outside of the muzzle.

Aware of the restrictions in some states, weapons manufacturers have modified some models to stay within the laws. Bushmaster, for example, offers a "state-compliant" model with a telescoping stock that simply has been pinned in the fully open position, making it legal for sale.

The federal assault weapon ban that we had in place from 1994 to 2004 was useless as anything more than a  statement of social norm. If President Obama is going to the mat for something, it shouldn't be this.

Obama should pursue policies whose results rely on more than luck in reducing mass killings and other gun deaths. Since the federal ban expired, mass killings have gone up, but that looks like a coincidence to me.

It's the power and rapid fire of these rifles that matter, not whether they can fix a bayonet or have a flash suppressor. While addressing muzzle velocity and firing speed is much harder, it would be useful, not mere political window dressing.