Cigarettes or eggs

Journalists like to think they write the first draft of history. More often, they write the first draft of "As the World Turns" (which in its time was my grandmother's favorite story - no wonder journalists are losing audience). All dialog, no resolution.

The New York Times had a long story yesterday about the possible regulation of salt in prepared foods. Mostly, it's a history of attempts to justify or forestall regulation of the amount of salt that food businesses use.

The article seems sympathetic to regulation, but it never provides its readers with a way to sort out the truth of one claim from another, even provisionally, as empirical claims of this type have to be sorted out. Instead, it spends vast arid salt flats (heh) on what a publisher might call news you can use - dissertations on Cheez-Its and chicken noodle soup and how good salt tastes.

This is really news you can relate to. It's not intended to edify but to draw you into a commonplace domestic narrative and make you feel you have expertise on the subject. Without helping you gain that expertise...

Not that there weren't glaring opportunities:

In 1982, [soup company] Campbell sponsored an American Heart Association symposium that included a study on calcium, which is now seen as having only a small role in reducing hypertension, and another that asserted that only some people were susceptible to hypertension from salt.

Thirty years later, I explain my own excellent blood pressure despite significant salt intake by guessing that I'm merely not susceptible. Still, I would expect something new from the intervening three decades. If there's a genetic link, I'd expect it to be confirmed by subsequent research and probably even available as a blood test by now. Instead, reporter Michael Moss simply drops the ball. Maybe scientists have too, but Moss owes readers the follow-up.

The Times story ran in the Science section. Is it too much to ask that it sort out the state of the science on the connection between salt and hypertension? If that connection really only affects a segment of the population, how can we tell whether we're in that segment? That would be news we could really use.

There are further hints at facts in the story:

Making deep cuts in salt can require more expensive ingredients that can hurt sales. Companies that make low-salt pasta sauces improve the taste with vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh herbs that cost more than dried spices and lower grade tomatoes.

Also dropped. It could be that my b.p. is good because so little of what I eat comes out of a box, highly processed. But you'd have to be a hippie or something equally dismissable to expect Americans to eat real fresh food.

American media consistently fail even to try to distinguish fact from self-interested argument. Is the prepared food industry fighting a fight like the cigarette industry, defending its merchandise of death, or like the egg producers, whose product contains cholesterol but has been shown to be healthy, leading the Heart Association to withdraw its advice to avoid eggs?

The methods that corporations use to defend their income are the same, whether they're scientifically justified or not. Media can't get to the bottom of them by reporting about how the industry is lobbying.

Somewhere, some reporter has to remember - or reinvent - getting to the bottom of the story. Finding out what's actually true...

End of empathy

Classic Republican response, "Tough shit." Here done humorously.

Mediaocre

On a daily basis, big media resolutely fails to pull back the curtain on the great and powerful Oz. The alleged Nikki Haley affair is a case of our credulous media's eagerness to accept bullshit with a bow on it as if it came from Tiffany's.

Will Folks is not a blogger. He is a political consultant who runs a rightwing news site. In any case, calling him a blogger (big-media-speak for pipsqueak upstart, by the way) is not informative. Doesn't everyone have a blog by now?

Folks is also not credible as a supporter of Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, the press dutifully prints his claim in every story. When he says he outed his alleged affair with Haley as a proactive step because the story was being shopped to the media, he can't possibly be credible. If he were really to try "getting ahead of the story," he wouldn't milk it for daily attention with promises of proof and death-of-a-thousand cuts delivery.

Folks has also claimed that he went public to protect the wife he married after the alleged affair. Surely someone in the editorial chain is married or has had an intimate relationship. "Honey, I had an affair with someone before we married, and I'm going to publicize it to protect you." Look, this is bullshit so runny you couldn't even tie a bow on it without first injecting drilling mud and huge amounts of concrete.

I have no idea whether Folks and Haley had sex. In fact, I have no idea what Folks is claiming and Haley is denying.

He says they had an "inappropriate physical relationship." Did she hug him a little too long? Did she spank him like a bad boy? Did he massage her feet with peppermint cream?

She denies having an affair. Well, what does she mean? Would it be o.k. if they necked a little but never did it? I'm sure her husband wouldn't approve, but would such a small dalliance count?

If they weren't both in the anti-sex base of the anti-sex party, I wouldn't care what they did. But I'd still care that the media is less concerned about finding out what's true than it is about repeating what everyone says and then shrugging - with both shoulders for balance.

We Americans have a political culture that seldom rises above the throes of puberty. Part of the reason why is that our media culture is about putting a bow on gossip and calling it news.

Not in it for the sex

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

Doom and gloom

The Democrats are doomed, doomed, I tell you, in the 2010 mid-term Congressional election!

That's the conventional big media narrative, anyhow. Could it be, like so much past received wisdom, wrong?

The Senate was never really in play. It's even less in play now:

• Harry Reid is back from the dead.
• Joe Sestak may be primed to hold Pennsylvania, which Arlen Specter would not have (if you could even call re-electing Arlen Specter a hold).

There's even an opportunity for a Democratic pick-up in Ohio, where Bushist Ron Portman trails his Democratic opponent, although within the margin of error of the poll. In Kentucky, Rand Paul has a lead that's smaller than the margin of error, another opportunity to pick up a seat while Paul alternates which foot is planted firmly in his mouth.

No one expects the Democrats to gain seats in either house, but losing control of either house is much less likely than the teabagger narrative.

Mom in the patriarchy

With Dad off hiking the Appalachian Trail, someone has to keep order.

Click image for full David Cohen cartoon.

Mad as hatters

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times/Tribune cartoon.

Sucking up to wingnuts

Why would a Louisiana magistrate go out of his way to compliment the alleged talents of the Fake Pimp of Wingnuttia?

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III, who cited the defendants’ potential as investigative journalists though he was critical of this incident, sentenced Mr. [James] O’Keefe, 25, to three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

...

Mr. O’Keefe, whom the judge described as “extremely talented,”...

Louisiana elects its judges. Knowles was just playing to the crowd.

That's what you want in a judge, right? No reason to question the justice of a wrist-slap sentence - it's what the people wanted!

Hold your wrist out, young man

Of course, in this IOKIYAR world, the four wingnut lawbreakers who pretexted their way into Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-BP) office got probation and minor fines after pleading to a misdemeanor.

Meanwhile, the Democratic scion who guessed Sarah Palin's password and posted it on the web was convicted of a felony and awaits sentencing that could bring him years in prison.

Then of course, there's the disparate media and legal treatment of Eliot Spitzer (D-ho) and David Vitter (R-ho ho ho).

And of course Rush Limbaugh gives hypocrites everywhere an even worse name.

Free to choose

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

Area 51 revisited

"Take me to your John Galt."

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

The story of an angry reader

Shorter David Brooks: My poor fantasy life with a thin gloss of convenient interpretation justifies my continued living in a fantasy world while you live as undeserving peasants.

In other words, in school, [a character named Ben] labored when others didn’t. At work, he sacrificed when others didn’t. He bought a house he could afford when others didn’t.

Ben, whom Brooks doesn't bother to report, but asks us to imagine! Who gives every indication of being no more than a figment of Brooks's weekend-bound imagination.

Wildlife biologists often have to parse through animal scat to determine diet and health of the animals they study. If I had limitless time, I could peel away the feces Brooks has put on paper to its awful, inane content. Except that he's engaged in coprophagia, and he expects us to eat and enjoy bullshit just as he has.

I'll tell you what really steams me: Brooks gets paid New York shitloads of money to make up bullshit like this. He doesn't even have to pretend to look for what's true. He can write down whatever would be convenient for him - for his weekend plans, for his lazy desire to have an early dinner, for his ideology, for his vanity of deserving.

If I ran the New York Times, I'd fire Brooks's lazy, undeserving, no-account ass. Let him stop pretending to know the pulse of real people. Let him work his contacts for another easy, well-paid sinecure from which he can pretend to stand for working people everywhere - a pretense he makes while defending established wealth.

Greater threat

Newt Gingrich is - or wants to appear - insane:

"The [Obama] secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

Gene Lyons says:

A sane political movement would keep a prating coxcomb like Gingrich off television. Whether Newt actually believes this rubbish, or is merely following the Tea Party fife and drum corps around the bend, strikes me as of little interest. Politically, it's pointless to reason with crazy people -- make-believe or real.

Thirty percent of Americans apparently agree. With Gingrich!

Does that doom democracy?

What's in your wallet?

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon. But show your papers first.

For the wheel's still in spin

I may have spoken too soon.

The New York Times almost certainly went to print with Republican oppo. There'd be no fatal sin in that - if disclosed - but the long habit of Richard Blumenthal's self-description, including the very speech in 2008 the Times is on about, may have been honest. Which would make Linda McMahon the liar, even if it doesn't exculpate Blumenthal completely.

Time will, uh, may tell.

Update (6/1): Added to paragraph 2:

• the parenthetical in sentence 2 with the link to DailyKos
• the dependent clause at the end of sentence 3
  

Safe bet

If wingnut commentators are selling it, chances are good that it's borderline fraudulent.

What's their stock in trade? Outrage, fear, and bullshit. Hard to make a rational investment decision in the throes of even one of those...

Narrative correctness

Why is Rand Paul's Republican Teabagger victory in Kentucky CNN's top story on the political ticker? In the home state of Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning, no amount of ideological extremism should be a surprise, and Paul's victory was so widely expected that it barely qualifies as news.

There was real news yesterday:

• Mark Critz (D-Murtha) unexpectedly beat Tim Burns (R-oops), which CNN gives one line.
  
• Joe Sestak (D-reality) ended the (elective) political career of Arlen Specter (DINO-opportunism).
• Richard Blumenthal (D-Apocalypse Now) ended his own political career.
• Bill Halter (D-semi-reality) forced Blanche Lincoln (D-subsidiary) into a runoff.
  

But CNN is wasting its pixels on teabaggers. It's not that CNN is filled with teabag sympathizers. But the "TRENDING" tag ought to be a clue.

Big media no longer wants to report what happened today. It wants to develop a story arc. That makes writing and editing easier - and laziness is the great inertial force in human behavior. But it also leads to all the really good gigs:

• Slots among the shouters on TV
• Big stories that the Pulitzer Committee might look twice at
• The change to cast a story into book form (or maybe that's just my dream)
  
• Hollywood (in their wildest TV movie fantasies)

Electorally, it was a pretty good day for Democrats. Why couldn't that have been the narrative? Pasting up a new narrative is hard work!

I suppose I should be happy that the media didn't go with its bullshit false equivalence reflex to claim that both Republican and Democratic extremists won. Maybe calling Sestak, Halter, and Critz extremists was too obviously nonsense even for the (non-Fox) media.

Oh hell no

The George Duhbya Bush Presidential Center wants a tax deductible contribution.

I'd contribute to a special prosecutor.

Meanwhile all I can manage is to transfer a small amount from honoring the worst President of my lifetime to the Post Office - the joy of business reply mail.

Buh-bye

Honesty means more than simply not lying, but Richard Blumenthal (D-buh-bye) failed even the easy test of not lying:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. [emphasis added]

During Vietnam would have parsed as true, but even that phrasing would have left room for deceit. During the Vietnam era would have been still better, with the word era flagging the statement for a bit more interpretive analysis.

Blumenthal could claim - and he has - that he simply misspoke. But there are too many instances of self-interested silence in the face of falsehood to credit this as the slip of his tongue.

The root problem, which should be fatal to his candidacy for Senate, is that Blumenthal has shown a life-long pattern of failure to correct the record clearly and forthrightly. He continues his deceit with this bullshit:

“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him.

Bullshit. Politicians care deeply and obsessively how they're covered in the press. They may not see every single article, but they or their staff see all the big stories, especially those in major publications. Nowadays, they all have Google alerts to keep them on top of media all the way down to the smallest blog.

The emotional impact of his reserve service and of seeing the postwar treatment of veterans from in-country could still be true. He could still tell it honestly from the perspective of a reservist. Instead, his claimed experience sounds more like echoing of urban legends than first-hand witnessing to the travails of returning vets.

Here's the principle: If you have to choose your words very carefully to permit listeners to take away a wrong impression, an impression that you want them to retain, you're lying. Never mind that advertisers do this all the time. They're lying too. It's just that your lie while seeking a Senate seat is more corrosive and damaging.

This is especially true of living a lie about being at risk of dying in the service of your country. That's just something that no one should ever fake - or acquiesce in faking.

Even Duhbya didn't try to get away with morphing his defense of Texas and Alabama against the world-wide threat of the Viet Cong Air Force into service in country in Vietnam. Like Blumenthal, he did try to get away with claiming he received no special treatment, also false but on a much smaller scale.

It was John Kerry who put aside offers of special treatment and actually served in Vietnam. That didn't win the Presidency for him, but he at least still has his honesty intact about that very important touchstone of recent American history, no matter how hard Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Liars tried to steal it from him by their own campaign of lies.

Blumenthal should go. But he's obviously too vain to give in to that inconvenient truth.

(h/t to this great post on No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update (5/19): More feet of clay on the Republican side. Lindsay Graham (R-wingy but not wingy enough for teabaggers) repeatedly and persistently claimed to be a veteran of Iraq I, despite never serving in country. (h/t Atrios)

Your pitiful little band

Karl Rove arms the next death star.

Hey! Maybe he did have something to do with the Swift Boat Liars. (Ya think?)

This man is strictly about manufacturing the consent of the governed. Offering a choice to be made rationally? Why would he choose in advance to lose?

Privatizing justice

Looks just like Widener to me..

Click image for full Jack Ohman/Oregonian cartoon. Or here in color.

Topless

The White House is doing its level best to make sure that everyone has seen the bikini chart:


Now the next spin point is out: If job creation continues at the same rate for the rest of 2010, Barack Obama will have presided over the creation of more jobs in this year alone that Duhbya did in his entire eight-year maladministration.

Unlike Republican spin points and cherry-picking, this one comes with explicit caveats to help readers understand it fully. Whether the trend continues is one, and the future is always speculative. Another is the huge job loss that continued from the Bush recession throughout 2009, when Obama was in office and the best you could say was that job losses were slowing.

More important, we can't forget the sheer size of the need for jobs, left from the Bush disaster, which was relatively jobless even in its best times, and from Obama's first year in office.

Employment is better, that's true. But we have a long way to go before it's good.

Sins of the mommies

Long-lived institutions have a choice: adapt or die.

The path of rigidity - the conservative path - can work well, sometimes for quite a while, especially if the institution is willing to change by small degrees. But the path of absolute rigidity - saying no to everything, for instance - is the path of senesence and death. Just ask the Shakers, and they were only rigid about a few things.

The Catholic Church right now is in an existential crisis. With a billion adherents, the church might seem safe from doom. After all, it has survived previous crises - non-sexual child abuse in its schools and orphanages, acquiescence to fascism, the commonplace selling of absolution, the Inquisition, to name a few - that would have killed a less persistent, poorer, or less canny institution. Of course it doesn't hurt that the church claims every Sunday to have god on its side.

But buggering children and criminally covering it up practically everywhere is a different matter. It impeaches every claim to divinity or infallibility. And that billion already includes many who are one generation more away from merely having Catholic ancestors.

Even now, there are Catholics, both lay and priest, who apparently believe that the anti-gay passages of their bible are some of its most important. These doctrinaire Catholics still react to the idea of admitting to parochial school a child of a lesbian couple with statements like this:

“The real question here is why two people who radically repudiate the moral teachings of Catholicism would want their child educated in a Catholic school,’’ [C.J. Doyle, executive director of Catholic Action League of Massachusetts,] said in a statement.

“It would seem that they are either looking for an excuse to litigate or an opportunity to embarrass the church in the court of public opinion.’’

Doyle actually took the trouble to write this bit of unsubstantiated attack down! He didn't deliver it off the cuff and accidentally reveal his fear of attack. Instead, he made two bullshit claims for which he has no justification.

This sort of defensive reaction matches the tenor of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The inability to address one's own shortcomings when they're plain as day to ordinary people can be fatal to credibility.

People like Doyle imagine that the dogma of the modern church is the identical doctrine that the church has always advocated and lived under. But this is not true, and how he can escape knowing that is an object lesson in denial.

Doyle is not the only voice on the subject. The archdiocese of Boston has tried to make amends and deserves credit for that even if it's PR, and prominent business Catholic Jack Connors has this plaintive comment:

“But,’’ he said, “I am disappointed that . . . this faith that I love seems to find new ways to shoot itself in the foot.’’

Despite the willingness of some parishoners and priests to adapt, it's an open question whether the church hierarchy can change fast enough to retain its believers. How they've done it so far is beyond me.

Bury the boring lead

Given the choice between pumping up a continuing narrative or writing a one-off but accurate story, which will big media do? The Globe today buried the content of an actual lead paragraph of the State Senate special election story:

The results in the two races won’t alter the makeup of the state Senate, since a Democrat succeeded a Democrat and a Republican followed a Republican. Nonetheless, coupled with Brown’s stunning victory in the US Senate race this year, the Massachusetts Republican Party immediately seized on Ross’s victory as a harbinger of more wins in the fall.

Even this spins the Republican way. The second sentence could as easily have been, "Nonetheless, we'll tell you that this tie is good news for Republicans, when they didn't even have a second candidate to compete for a sweep." (And for fellow grammarians out there - not including the Globe staff who missed it - the mere thought of Mass Republicans coupled with anything stunning means that a modifier is dangling, at least!)

The actual lead paragraph was:

Giving the state GOP another boost as November elections approach, state Representative Richard Ross, a Wrentham Republican, last night won the state Senate seat recently vacated by US Senator Scott Brown.

The race the Democrat won? Repeatedly referred to as "the other race".

This is not an ideological bias; it happens in the other direction, too, as it did with the compelling Barack Obama narrative. It's a bias to tell a larger story, rather than to stick to factual reporting if it detracts from that story.

Dog bites woman

Is it really "trending" news that Sen. Jame Inhofe (R-wingnuttiest) opposes Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court? Ho hum.

If he stopped mid-tantrum, admitted that he was tired of advocating for a return to the dark ages, ripped the mike off his lapel, and walked away from the cameras, now that would be news I could use!

Smashed, stoned, and burnt

Montana reactionaries firebomb a couple of marijuana dispensaries. Yeah, Montana has medical marijuana! Who knew?

No one was hurt, like an ELF political arson. When ELF burns down a real estate development to make a political statement, the right-wing goes even more hysterical than usual.

I wonder (only rhetorically) whether they'll piss their pants over this similar piece of political terror.

Of course not. Consistency is not something the wingnuts even recognize could guide their behavior.

Neo-Confederate insurrectionists

A compendium of Republican radicals...

A sample:

[Minnesota State Senator Tom Emmer, the Republicans' choice to succeed Governor Tim Pawlenty,] has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if they were consented to by super-majorities of the state legislature.

The Republican solution to the fact that the American Constitutional republic is not going their radical way: Quang Tri it.

Give two-year-olds the vote

They couldn't throw any more tantrums than the Republican Party:

"Even if it's a nominee that we can't seriously stop, we can accomplish several things, and so a hard fight is worthwhile," [Curt Levey, director of the conservative Committee for Justice,] implored. "Certainly it can be to the political advantage of Republicans.... There's everything to be gained from making the Supreme Court vacancy a campaign issue in 2010."

"There's broader goals such as just distracting Obama from other items on his agenda," Levey added. "The tougher the fight the less capital and time and resources and floor time in the Senate there is to spend on immigration and climate change, etc."

Elections have consequences - where have I heard that?

(h/t mcjoan at Kos)

New look

After nearly three years, I was ready for a new look. There may be further changes to come.

What do you think?

Head up BP's ass

If you for some odd reason still need to see more of a certain common type of conservative stupidity heavily leavened with hypocrisy, you can seldom go wrong with the flagrantly doctrinaire and unfunny cartoons of Chuck Asay. Here is today's.

In one cartoon, Asay - his head firmly in place in BP's ass - tries all of the following:

• lets BP off the hook for the worst oil spill in history
• evades every claim conservatives have ever made to be the party of personal responsibility
• fails utterly to understand that competitive price pressures of the market should exact a profit penalty from BP - under the conservative theory of the market
• imputes to liberals his own failing - stupidity
  

Fortunate, son

Click image for full John Trever/Albuquerque Journal cartoon.

Dishonorable discharge

Under UCMJ, desertion carries the death penalty. But reduction in rank and 25 years in the stockade ought to be enough.

By the way, even though it's clear that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I would assert that he is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born because his mother was a citizen at the time of his birth. And there's no explication of the phrase nor any case law to contradict me.

Mary Whitehouse has just taken Umbrage

Amusing and instructive when other countries also have trouble sorting out just exactly how they prefer to manufacture the consent of the governed...

Best to remember that there are many different ways to build a democratic election. Here in the US, picking a different way to decide winners decidely takes a back seat to the need to fix our ability to count votes honestly, transparently, and accurately.

Masturs of the universe

More proof, if any were needed, that Wall Street doesn't know your ass from a hole in the ground.

[M]addeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.

These are the people we've left without adult supervision, despite the fact that they might at any moment hoist our living economy up on the mortuary table and drain its blood out in preparation for embalming.

Why would Skynet need a nuclear launch?

Give me liberty or...

Click image for full Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette cartoon.

AK-47 won the American Revolution

Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:

[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”

Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.

Valley Forge? George Washington was just an SOB, holding back the AKs so he could get to know Lafayette better.

You mean the founders didn't consider automatic weapons either when they wrote the Second Amendment? Unbelievable! Where was the NRA?

If Democrats had any sense of reciprocity, they'd be on all the talk shows saying, "Republicans want to arm terrorists." They wouldn't even be lying.

Slightly more fair-minded: Republicans would rather kiss the NRA's ass than keep automatic weapons and high explosives away from car bombers and other terrorists.

Give Graham the last word in poseur tough-guy security against terrorists:

“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

The front door is closed

This week, the Supreme Court closed its front door. Over the door is engraved in Vermont marble one of the fundamental aspirations of America, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

The court took this step because it fears terror. Never mind the symbolism.

This week, evidence led to the arrest of a Pakistani, naturalized to be an American citizen, for what was, by all appearances, his plot to blow up Times Square. Front door, back door, side door, it didn't matter to him.

But he understood how attacking a symbol instills fear, the strategic purpose of the tactic of terror attacks.

Republicans, true to form, think that this alleged citizen terrorist, arrested for a crime on American soil, should not have been read his Miranda rights, as our law demands. Instead, they want to exploit the fear of Americans to score the cheapest political points. Never mind that the feds used a public safety exception to Miranda initially to interrogate the suspect.

Republicans in Washington - and a substantial proportion of their voters - do not believe in law. They believe in summary vigilantism. They are dismayed that the defendant has apparently confessed and is cooperating. They were eager to flay the Obama administration for not torturing this man, but now they're all dressed up in leather like a sadist with nowhere to go but home to the missus.

The Republicans are happy to risk the validity of the suspect's confession, happy to let him off the hook under our law. That would give them more political wedge issues to divide the country. Perfect!

It's scary that one of the major political parties in the United States couldn't give the slightest crap about the legal foundation of our country. They are in fact not the literal definition of conservatives. They are radicals. Their promise is coup d'etat in slow motion.

And yet they're not a marginal splinter group. They're the second largest political grouping in America.

Pride's not power

... but this man has professional pride.

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Commitment

... to each other.

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Roaches scurry

Political junkie though I am, I had not previously realized that the Senate requires a supermajority vote* - usually dispensed with by unanimous consent - to start debate.

But Republicans are nothing if not endlessly creative in finding ways to say no, in this case, of course, to even talking about making Wall Street safe(r) for America's economy. I have to thank them for exposing to me yet another facet of the brokenness of the Senate.

Part of that brokenness I would also lay at Harry Reid's feet. Finally, finally, he exposed us to the plain fact (which many of us already grasped) that Republicans are a bloc of blockheads. I've called for a long time for the Democrats to make the intransigent two-year-olds on the other side of the aisle pay a deep and visible political price for their tantrums.

Reid made Republicans stand up under the glare of TV cameras and defend the indefensible. They caved. Immediately. And scurried for cover.

The filibuster and its less-known cousins (how many are there?) need to die. The Republicans have worn them out.

Jan. 3, 2011, no matter which Democrat is Majority Leader...


* Actually, I'm still guessing. It's possible that unanimous consent is the only way debate can start, that the hoary old Senate not only lacks its own equivalent of the House's discharge petition, it even lacks a way for the majority's leadership to force a measure to floor. But I can't find out for sure, since all the Senate Floor Procedures I've tried to read from the Committee on Rules and Administration are unavailable.

Natural law

One more thing I meant to say about Lindsey Graham's gaseous effluvia about skipping immigration reform ahead of global warming...

“Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,’’ Graham said.

It seems to be a law of nature that Republicans accuse their targets of exactly their own sins. Graham, obviously hurried and panicked, makes a cynical ploy to escape his illicit political relationship with a Democrat, throwing up some sleight of hand in which he vehemently attacks a convenient target - Harry Reid - who is universally despised in Graham's South Carolina.

I'd bet that Frank Luntz (y'know, the nonpartisan pollster) or some other liar-for-pay has actually advised the ignoramus caucus to immunize themselves from accusations by beating their adversaries to the punch - even if the charge barely even makes sense.

Update (4/28): More evidence of Republican projection, at least regarding cynical political ploys:

And because irony apparently can't die too often, I see that Rick Santorum says Democrats's decision to bring up immigration in D.C. is a "cynical attempt to try to further turn Hispanics away from Republicans." And the effort to turn white people in Arizona (and elsewhere) toward Republicans by means of an immigrant-bashing law ... that wouldn't be cynical at all, would it, Rick?

Calling the tune

Krugman identifies another corruption of our vaunted, innovative financial system:

[Debt rating] was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt — which increasingly meant Wall Street firms selling securities they created by slicing and dicing claims on things like subprime mortgages — could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job. It’s all too obvious, in retrospect, how this could have corrupted the process. [Emphasis added.]

Since Enron corrupted Arthur Andersen by applying the leverage of money to built-in conflicts of interest, it has been obvious that it would be impossible for any alleged watchdog paid by the watchees for its watching to resist payment from the same parties not to watch. Free market competition guarantees it.

Krugman's hardly ever slow on the uptake. Maybe he just didn't have any public statements to point out, proving that he had noticed long ago.

(h/t Atrios)

If he filibusters, make him pay

I've long advocated Atrios's program: Force feed the Republicans their own bullshit by making them filibuster in the Senate well on C-SPAN, with press releases from the Leader's office that pick out juicy and wingnutty quotes for the easy consumption of our perennially lazy big media organizations. Cut Youtube clips together for stinging ridicule? Duh.

Then, on Jan. 3, 2011, kill the filibuster.

This climate did change

Lindsay Graham (R-what passes for semi-reasonable, especially in the lunatic politics of South Carolina) didn't bolt from his work with John Kerry on carbon emissions and climate change because of some poisonous and high-handed change in the Senate calendar by Harry Reid. (Note to journalists: The fact that Graham claimed that is, ahem, a lie, though you're all far too whipped to say that.)

Graham found the excuse he needed to go full metal wingnut to appease the ignoramus caucus, now the dominant Republican faction. He had previously pushed to speed up on immigration reform. What he really wants is to regain the good graces of his teabagger constituents. Absent Reid's own electoral need to respond to his neighboring state's new law on driving while Mexican, Graham would have found something else - "Your necktie, Mr. Majority Leader, is an obamanation, uh, abomination up with which I shall not put!"

None of this flanking right will work for Graham. Not only did he once say something agreeable to a Democrat - and you know the Democrat Party is bent on the satanic destruction of the Holy United States of Neo-Confederate America - Graham also isn't married to an acceptably deferential Southern Baptist woman with whom to play hide the salami. Instead, he's a bachelor, so there are three choices, none of them acceptable to the ig-caucus:

• He ain't gittin' none.
• He's a goddamned fornic-, fernicat-, furni-, aw hell, playboy, and that means he ain't p-whipped like me.
• He's one a them other kinds a teabagger, the kind that oughta be stoned - and I don't mean on no pot - stoned according to our lord Jesus Christ the prince of peace's dad, who sure as hell wasn't no damn hippie freak believer in not castin' the first stone at them types a folks.

What changed for Graham was Doug Hoffman, Marco Rubio, and now - incredibly - three even wingier candidates who find Utah's Bob Bennett to be not frothingly extreme enough, at least in part because they would prefer to be living through the Second Great Depression right about now. Hey, they have a year's food stockpiled, right? Graham doesn't want to follow Dede Scozzafava, though she is far more moderate than he is, nor especially Charlie Crist.

Teabaggers and the Republican right - you couldn't pry them apart with a crowbar - want fire and brimstone from their pols. No more laws! The Ten Commandments are enough (even though there are actually 11 or 12 of them, but who's counting?). Not even laws based on Republican proposals, and especially never any real liberalism.

What they want is more of the aptly named Jim Dement, sorry, DeMint. And Republicans everywhere are falling all over themselves to give the crazy extreme wingnuttitude to them.

Outsourcing to Jon Stewart

Hardly anyone in big media has the guts to criticize the bullshit of Fox News. I guess journalists all fear some future job interview after Sarah Palin privatizes her Minitru into the capable hands of propagandist Rupert Murdoch. A job interview, they hope. That cage of rats around the face, ugh, almost as disgusting and painful as Glenn Beck!

So the New York Times outsources its critique to Jon Stewart by pretending to merely report what he says:

[Stewart] said on the show this week that he criticizes [Fox] a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

Evidence for Stewart's assertion, if anyone is obtuse enough to still need it, is Fox's drumbeat that the logo of the recent nuclear summit is derived from the characteristic Islamic symbol of the evening star at new moon. The logo, which the Times unaccountably neglects to show, is:


Hydrogen! Oh my Lord Jesus Christ! (No, not Allah. Never Allah.)

Just say for sake of argument that the logo is a reference to Islam. If so, it would only serve as a stark reminder that radical Islam and nuclear proliferation are indeed a serious threat that we in the liberal west are rightly working against. Would that concern be unpatriotic? Hardly.

The whole logo controversy only works as propaganda if its recipients are already in thrall of delusions about President Obama. It only appeals further to their unreasoning beliefs and, mostly, to their tribal, often bigoted mistrust of him.

Nor is this the first time the wingnutosphere has made mountains (for Mohammed!) out of graphical molehills. They actively search for invidious touchstones to enrage their easily manipulated flock of dittoheads.

The obvious purpose of Fox's logo-rrhea (hyphen signals scatological joke) is to keep its audience in constant angry arousal for electoral purposes. Many of them are armed, and quite a few of those gun owners are clinically insane.

Fox doesn't care. The coming violence - coming further violence actually - will only drive ratings up, and Fox's large stable of provocateurs will piously declaim that they had nothing to do with the violence, that it was of course liberal words and government that forced the neo-Confederates off the deep end. Because, God save us, the Muslims have already taken over Microsoft!


Still don't believe me? Fox and the neo-Confederates didn't object to this far more Islamic logo:

Crescent moon, stars! But it's a Republican logo. IOKIYAR. And we know that Saudi Arabia's party in America couldn't possibly have anything to do with Islamic symbolism.

Who you calling Anglo?

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

Sacked

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

Beast with two backs

When the economy goes tits up, it's not Wall Street that gets screwed.

Click image for full David Brown/Los Angeles Sentinel cartoon.

Waking up

The good news is that even a reflexively centrist conciliator such as President Barack Obama has limits to the bullshit he'll tolerate from the ignoramus caucus of the Party of No:

"It doesn't matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big 'ol fight over it. So he doesn't have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns," the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct "anything of consequence" put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. "The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right," the official added.

My recommendation:

• On John Paul Stevens's replacement, fight visibly and without bending with the Senate Republicans, win or lose.
• If they succeed at their filibuster, no need to go nuclear. Make a recess appointment at the first opportunity.
• On January 3, 2011, get whoever is the Senate Majority Leader to kill the filibuster, not to mention the unconscionable system of secret holds. Through overuse, they've outlived their function of caution and become the obstructive tool of a bunch of two-year-olds throwing tantrums.
  
• Gain Senate confirmation of your recess appointee with fifty-whatever votes you have.
• Call Mitch McConnell and sweetly tell him to go fuck himself. With a chainsaw.
  

Worked for Doc Hollywood

Let's enact a sweet piece of nostalgia as if it could possibly be good public policy in a predominantly urban and suburban nation. Barter chickens - or a pig or Vialula's reputation - for an ACL reconstruction, and let the orthopedic specialist, with a quarter million dollars in loans to repay, slop the hawgs.

As Anonymous Liberal says, it's hard to have any kind of conversation with a movement and a party so determined to shout la-la-la-la whenever reality rears its ugly head and proves not to be the perfect place for the ignoramus caucus that they fervently desire it to be.

The reason that violence from the right is coming is that the wingnuts have built a humongous P3 containment to protect their stupidity from the world. The world is at negative pressure, so the virulent wingnut pathogens leak into it, yet the nuts never have to learn anything but the profitably fomented rage that comes so naturally to them.

They are going to view us as vermin to be exterminated. Or converted. Our choice.

Make the earth move, baby

Like American conservative Christians, Iranian Islamic clerics can't be in the same room with female sexuality. Showing a little ankle under their chadors, Iranian women make the ground move for the righteous mullahs. And it's the women's fault - or Allah's - that a few square centimeters of bony flesh give them such wood that they can no longer control themselves.

What is wrong with these freaks? And how did any people allow themselves to be under their control?

Typical wingnut shit-fit

If it's not obvious to you, Republicans are nasty sore losers. They don't believe in democracy. They believe only they can govern.

Democrats, by contrast, are much more even-tempered and stable.

Dust in the wind

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Opportunity breaks the door down

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

No business like show business

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

What's David Vitter up to these days?

It's David Vitter watch, day 1009!

A Republican political operative is hiding in the shadows of "performance art" by a Libertarian stalking horse candidate. The obvious purpose is to continue to harp on Eliot Spitzer's consorting with prostitutes. The Libertarian is herself a madam. (Management! Obviously the Republican constituency...) At least she has the courage of her conviction(s), and advocates legalization. As if that would pass.

Meanwhile, David Vitter (R-not caught paying skanks lately) is running for reelection! And a porn star who was twittering about running against him has decided not to - that pole dancing beats poll dancing.

John Ensign (R-Indecent Proposal) also remains in the Party of NO, just not the party of saying no.

The Republicans don't actually need these filly-busters to sustain their perpetual filibuster. Keeping the Dems at 59 is enough. They're just immune to their own hypocrisy.

The Republican way

It's not surprising that a Senator from a tobacco state, Mitch McConnell (R-better keep your KY handy if you're not a corporation), would use obfuscation, denial, and bullshit to fog his true objectives. Paul Krugman:

It’s a truly shameless performance: Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the G.O.P. and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.

And let me assure you, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.

Paul Krugman (and I, here and here) can tell that the Republicans are bullshitting, but the teabaggers go right on screaming that they pay too much in taxes, never mind that their taxes have gone down during the Obama administration.

The teabaggers are the Republicans' target demographic because they're easily fooled into believing nonsense that keeps them serfs to the feudal lords of Republican crony capitalism.

That ain't Monopoly money

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Who's auditioning for Lady Macbeth?

Click image for full Keith Knight cartoon.

But the pension fund was just sitting there

The reason for the narrowly averted banking collapse of 2008:

[E]ven when banks can fail, bank managers and/or owners have an incentive to make risky bets; after all, their downside is limited — at worst, the bank goes under — while their upside isn’t: if they can earn high profits for a few years, they can walk away with a lot. Remember that in the S&L crisis of the 1980s, quite a few people made out like bandits while running their banks into the ground.

The simple fact is that unfettered markets have no reliable mechanism to align the timing of rewards with the timing of risks. That lack leaves inevitable opportunities to profit individually from disastrous debt overhangs that hurt the rest of us.

Updated (8/6/2010) for clarity of the last paragraph.

Conservative bias

Should President Obama nominate a liberal to succeed John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court?

Why is there even a question that the answer is yes? The only question for a Republican President is whether he should nominate a strong conservative or an extreme conservative. He may screw up the choice - Souter - but a Republican's intent is always to get another ideologue onto the court, and preferably a youngish one.

For some obscure reason - couldn't be the self-forgiven hypocrisy of an overweening will to power - the Republican caucus in the Senate never holds itself to its own stated principle of an up-or-down vote if a liberal is shackled in the dock, I mean, giving testimony.

Instead, they shout, "Bork, bork, bork," like a bunch of capons with too much gravel in their gizzards. They claim that the borking of Robert Bork was the original sin of politicizing the court, never mind the Bork's subsequent role as a culture warrior on the extreme right has proven the Democrats were correct to bork him.

Last, take a look at the people CNN asked to comment on the question of a liberal on the court (oh, my, Mildred, such a scary prospect):

• Ed Rollins, a well-known Republican operative
• Douglas Kmiec, a Reagan appointee to the Justice Department (who by the way uses his paragraphs to nominate a friend of Samuel Alito's, someone who defended Alito's dishonest question-dodging to hide his extremism during his confirmation)
  
• Ilya Shapiro, from the libertarian but mostly conservative Cato Institute
• Ed Whelan, former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, the most open extreme conservative on the court

That leaves two slots that could have been filled with someone willing to answer yes. Instead, we get two prominent but not public figures who speak in platitudes and analyze the politics:

• Patricia Millett, who practices before the court and is therefore not going to say anything controversial
• Julian Zelizer, who declines to take any advocacy role at all

Liberal media? Where?

Moi?

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Sarah Palin's appeal

Sarah Palin is only convincing to people who aren't mature enough graduate from middle school. That's why Heathers bullshit like this comes out of her well-lipsticked mouth:

"It's kinda like getting out in the playground, a bunch of kids ready to fight, and one of the kids saying 'go ahead, punch me in the face, I am not going to retaliate, go ahead and do what you want to with me.' "

It deserves every bit of President Obama's condescension, if not more:

"[L]ast I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues."

...

"I would say to them is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin."

Palin's an idiot. No news there. And of course she's forgotten that Ronald Reagan also signed a START treaty with the Russians.

Why doesn't the media do something equally random and ask Obama about Anne Hathaway's opinions? She's much prettier than Palin, and - as a very special bonus - she is undoubtedly smarter and better informed.

Pity the poor white victims of northern aggression

Neo-Confederate nostalgia is a hallmark of Republican politics in the South. Gov. Robert McDonnell (R-1861) somehow forgot that the Confederacy fought for the right of white people to own and dispose of as they would black people whose descendents still live in Virginia.

Read the whole proclamation, now with its slapdash patch. It's filled with curtseys to the poor put-upon white people who long for the day their treasonous ancestors wore gray:

April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse.

War for independence! Concluded! He can't even bring himself to call it a civil war. There's no way he could own up to the real cause of war or to admit the defeat and unconditional surrender that Grant imposed on Lee, who was powerless to resist further.

[I]t is important for all Virginians to reflect upon our Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.

These white defenders of slavery chose their course, chose to make war on the United States, yet Virginians are supposed to reflect upon their so-called sacrifices alone. Pity the poor white victims of northern aggression!

[A]ll Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, ...

Neo-Confederates still take refuge in the article of faith that their heroes were better soldiers than the Union's because they were outnumbered and still held out for four years. But they were on defense, which is always easier and less costly in men than offense.

Instead of starting over, McDonnell shoehorned in an anti-slavery clause, leaving behind all the tropes that serve neo-Confederate nostalgia and excuse-making.

CNN has this, to which I say amen:

"[McDonnell] says the wrong thing, he sends a signal to his base and then he makes an apology," [Virginia State Sen. Henry Marsh III, a black Democrat,] said, "It's a question of whether or not he's sincere or not."

McDonnell didn't forget. He knew exactly what he was doing. He didn't declare Civil War History Month, now did he?

Col. Klink defense

So-called Maestro Alan Greenspan, still pining for Ayn Rand's seductively simplistic rationalization of infantile selfish fantasy, reasserts all the things he "knows" that the Great Recession has disproven. As the Great Depression which birthed him had disproven before.

Only an honest man could abjure the convictions of a lifetime, based on new (to him) experience. Instead, Greenspan quote-mines his inscrutable mumbles for something, anything exculpatory:

He pointed out that the Fed had warned about subprime lending and low-down-payment mortgages in 1999, and again in 2001.

There's no time - or authority - left for Greenspan to redeem himself. He had a run of luck, and then the maelstrom... He can't fix it, so he can't let himself regret letting it blow up.

Citigroup's executives, fat and happy and well-paid to ignore the truth, essay instead the Sgt. Schultz defense.

“No one, including myself, ever conceived we would see real estate prices plunge 30 to 40 percent, with homeowners walking away from homes en masse for the first time ever,” Thomas Maheras, the former co-head of Citi’s investment bank who oversaw its mortgage activities, said.

Lots of people knew there were problems. If educational TV is running "Flip That House" marathons, warning! People with no special training were wondering where all the buyers for million dollar houses would come from. Maheras was raking in too much money to notice.

Brooksley Born gets the last word:

“The Fed utterly failed to prevent the financial crisis,” she said. “The Fed and other banking regulators failed to prevent the housing bubble, they failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, they failed to prevent our biggest banks and holding companies from engaging in activities that would bring them to the verge of collapse without massive taxpayer bailouts.”

The ignoramus caucus

People used to be ashamed of their ignorance. They used to want to learn the truth. No more.

Now, they are coddled in their witlessness by big media:

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. "Number two, you don't know who might end up being in that situation," he said, then carried on explaining further still.

Anne Kornblut apparently can't be troubled to give a shit about government even though it's her job. Well, sure, she reports for the Washington Post, but what she really wants is more gigs in a red dress on Fox. So she gives cover to the proud know-nothings:

For as brilliant as people say this sad excuse for a world leader is he ought to get his word meaning correct. He states that he is going to spend a lot of time cleaning up "misapprehensions" that people have. I think you ment misconceptions mr obama. I don't know what a misapprehension is. Does anyone else? (bcgloveman | April 6, 2010 9:02 PM)

Typical of this Prez. When he don't want to tell the truth or he don't know the truth, he starts stuttering & ranting on & on!! This man has no idea what he is doing!! We will all pay deeply for this mess he has created except for the ones that don't want insurance or to lazy to go get a job with benefits!! Why did a woman go into the doctor the day after Oslima signed this & expected to get a free b00b job? As long as us hard working people keep giving to the ones that won't work, this will only get worse than it is right now! (releggneh1 | April 6, 2010 7:53 PM)

It's like these people give their wives "I'm with stoopid" T-shirts and then demand they wear them.

Never mind that President Obama spoke off the cuff for more than 17 minutes without a teleprompter. The wingnuts are not going to give that malmeme up - ever:

I'm embarrassed for Harvard University......and their alumni.

The guy can't even answer a question without a teleprompter.

ramble, ramble, ramble.....on (analgesic33 | April 6, 2010 11:49 AM)

Late for April Fools

In the up-is-down, black-is-white world of Republican politics, a Republican occasionally strays off message and says something reasonable. But three?

• Karl Rove tells the frothing wingnuts to take their meds and answer the census. (Well, not in so many words...)
  
• John McCain finally concedes that he's an orthodox conservative without any marketing-driven maverickyness. (Well, not in so many words...)
• Tom Coburn declares a jones for Nancy Pelosi. (Well, not in so many words...)
  

April 1st would have been the perfect day for this - one day a year for Republicans to dispense with their constant outlandish distortions and try to make sense.

The real answer is that they would rather be quoted for saying anything other than answering questions about paying to watch simulated lesbian sex. Showing their well-buried humanity was probably the only gambit extreme enough to get the media even partially off of the Voyeur sex club.

One last weird oddity: When a Democrat has a scandal, every follow-up story recaps all the saucy details. ($90,000 in the freezer!) I had to search through the CNN Political Ticker all the way back to March 30 to find the name of the club that the hard right went to to get right hard.

Gray lady catches up

Snopes gets an overdue star turn in the New York Times. It's immensely amusing to me that the Mikkelsons understand the foundational and factual role of journalism when so many of their so-called professional competitors do not. Ironically (itself used ironically), Snopes is profitable.

This also amused me:

“[E]ven when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal,” Mr. Mikkelson said.

Wingnuts really, really want their beliefs to be true - even if they're visibly not. Pointing out to them that they're wrong will get you accused of liberal bias. If you're a journalist who's not regularly accused of having a liberal bias, you're probably a right-wing propagandist.

In lieu of a toaster

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

No excuse too lame

Teabaggers showed their bigotry openly because Nancy Pelosi walked softly and carried a big gavel. When they advocate personal responsibility, they're advocating it for us.

(h/t Atrios)

Three days late

Wish I'd had this on the first...

Click image for full Abell Smith/Kitsap Sun cartoon.

Making shit up

Rachel Maddow (bless her!) calls the Republicans and Fox, their propaganda arm, on their bullshit:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Can you imagine how often she'd have to use the word bullshit if she only could? About as often as I do...

While I'd love to have her as my Senator in 2012, she's more valuable critiquing the debasement of American politics than engaging the bullshitters in debate in the well of the Senate.

Unplug the damn thing

The MGH lost a patient due to warning fatigue. In response, they made it impossible to turn off alarms and they added more speakers.

What's wrong with this picture?

Though I'm sure the nurses can still squelch alarms temporarily, the MGH response only makes the fundamental problem worse. Their equipment has exceeded the bandwidth available from their personnel, and they've added more information to the channel. Good luck with that. Good luck keeping annoying devices plugged in.

A better systems solution would require more precise triage (or n-age) of alarm criticality, rather than having every medical device in the hospital chirp away maddeningly in the hope that a nurse or doctor will hear the right one at the right time.

Top scofflaws

Second only to frankly criminal organizations, the most impactful evaders of the law in America are corporations. Minimum wage? Pfft!

Try to fight back, and they'll lobby with paid-for politicians to deprive you of representation:

“We’re going to tell legislators all over the state, if they want to play hardball by trying to kneecap industry in Baton Rouge,” said the Louisiana Chemical Association president, Dan Borné, “then we should play hardball and kneecap them with their state appropriations.”

Yes, there are many, many corporations in America, so some of them are bound to neglect all restraint on their profit motives. There are stories in the press about them every day. Yet hardly anyone hates corporations universally the way a large minority of people viscerally despise unions, which are corrupt much less often in any time period.

Maybe it's because those of us with rational mature perspective, who judge unions and corporations alike individually for what each does, are all liberals. Certainly, the insane branch of conservatism, which more and more often looks like the predominant branch, commonly lumps members of a category together and prejudges them - unions, minorities, Muslims, liberals, women, crash victims, government officials, and you name it.

If you don't believe me, take a look at the wingnuts in any newspapers comment threads. They're not just misanthropic. They're dysanthropic.

Show me

CNN and the Boston Globe, among many others, are reporting on the wacko militia direct mail campaign to get the governors of all fifty states to resign. But they're not showing us why letters should strike fear into our hearts.

Sure, I think there's violence coming. But why do letters get major coverage, when they are apparently devoid of any threat more specific or less peaceable than "leave office or be removed"? Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) has the right idea:

“We get all kinds of, shall we say, ‘interesting’ mail, so it’s not out of the norm,’’ Pawlenty said yesterday. “It got more attention because it went to so many governors.’’

Of course, it also got more attention because of the alleged Hutaree plot.

Public figures get hate mail. It unfortunately goes with the territory. There are loonies out there who will send ugly letters to the children of public figures, and maybe we should do something about that, but for adults it's real violence not hurt feelings we as a society should concentrate on.

I didn't believe the Bushist case for war in Iraq because they showed no convincing evidence. There's no convincing evidence of a threat here either. Till there is, I'm all for wariness, but this is still a false alarm.

Show me the letters. I'm a grown-up. I can take it.

This is a test

D'ya think regional rump party Republicans, who have been so adamantly opposed to using any statistical methods at all in the census, would change their minds as soon as they find out it might benefit them? I mean, I know they're not big on minds or on change, but they have self-interest perfected.

Click image for full New York Times graphic.

Another Republican scandal

This asshole only wants to handle Republican dicks. (Boehners?)

Git 'er done

Barack Obama is a smart guy and a conciliatory guy. In his quest for bipartisan support, conciliatory has won out over smart.

Despite his exceptional potential, Obama dismayed his progressive base in his first year in office by clinging to an illusion of bipartisanship long after Republicans made clear that their only goal was to destroy him. But since early March, something potentially transformative has happened. The seeker of common ground has metamorphosed into a fighting partisan. Faced with the prospect of a humiliating, defining defeat on health reform, Obama has begun exercising the kind of leadership that his admirers discerned during the campaign.

The lesson of the arduous politicking required to get even modest health insurance reform is that smart needs to win over conciliatory. There is simply no conciliation with the current Republican leadership. They treat every conflict as total war and project that attitude on their adversaries, which is why they only respect force.

Sequel to Groundhog Day

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

Eye of the beholder

Click image for full Mike Lester/Rome News Tribune cartoon.

Colt made 'em equal

Click image for full John Cole/Scranton Times-Tribune cartoon.