Pretending

Yet another case of the so-called liberal media bending over backward to pretend that conservatives have a valid argument:

[O]rganizers are working to get individual states to join a compact changing the way they select their own electoral votes — an idea that was first floated several years ago based on the conviction that the Constitution gives states the right to determine how their own electors are chosen. [emphasis added]

Reporter Stephanie Ebbert is unwilling to make note of the plain language of the Constitution (Art. II, section 1):

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.

The unwillingness to state simple, incontrovertible facts if conservatives dislike those facts is a maddening feature of our senescent big media and an existential threat to our nation.

The road to serfdom

Unemployment is for the little people:

[A] large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.

If the American polity were the least bit rational, the unemployed would be marching with pitchforks against their vassals. Krugman says:

[W]hile Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused.

Paul is wrong about this. The anger of Americans is focused. It's just focused on the wrong people.

The right answers - sufficient stimulus, direct jobs programs, help for people who are not already millionaires - are almost all liberal answers, and no one in the White House is willing to even make the case against the rigid NO of Republicans and the tepid, captious no of Blue Dawg Democrats.

This is not going to end well.

Practical economics

Before Jimmy Carter bought into the deregulation mania of the 1970s, you could book a round-trip itinerary without making sure that both legs were on the same airline. Here in 2010, I just heard an Expedia ad that touts that as a great new selling point.

Is 35 years long enough to prove that the free market is often not efficient?

Update (8/4): The free market seldom takes this long to discover opportunities such as these to screw us, purely as a result of their market power.

Original sin

Brief history of the Republican betrayal of one of its founding principles:

Certainly not all Republicans are racists, but the Republican Party deliberately exploited and exacerbated racial tensions for political gain for decades. Those Republicans now being shoved to the party's new margins have no standing to complain. Where were they when they and their party were benefitting from the extremism that now is taking control of their party? Where was their sense of civic duty and basic morality?

Deserving

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Come in with our ideals and change the world

Click image for full Garry Trudeau "Doonesbury".

... and then we forget - or rewrite history.

You know the drill

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Big break

Now that the Al Gore masseuse abuse story has resulted in ... nothing, it can graduate to being an unkillable zombie story, which wingnuts will repeat as god's honest truth right up to and including the comment thread on Gore's obituary.

By the way, we know for a fact that David Vitter (R-I'll call you Wendy) was well-known to more than one prostitution ring. We've known it for 1125 days. So far, no consequences.

Whipping post partisan

Why indeed?

What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is? Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly.

The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction.

---

By the way, Krugman alludes to Yeats:

1990s nostalgia act Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich's signature achievement: To be thought intelligent by stupid people in a way that doesn't make them hate him. It's a living - and much easier than to be thought intelligent by intelligent people, but to overcome his name, his whiny voice, his bloated corpulence, his overbearing ego, and his complification of subjects that his fans all think are totally simple is quite significant.

It's as if the jocks adopted a kid out of the AV club, not just to be their twirly-sodden mascot, but to pick their dance music.

He could really use a few good mockings.

(h/t Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice)

Credible source

This doesn't pass the giggle test:

Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.

Forbes is judging environmentalism by billionaires. Can we load a truck up with that bullshit and compost the hell out of it? Edward Wyatt of the New York Times can't tell shit from shinola:

In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.

Yup, a Texan environmentalist, as opposed to the real kind.

Security profiles

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

Don't ask, don't tell

Click image for full Bado/Le Droit cartoon.

For the children

I've mocked "for the children" as a political slogan. It's just so touchy-feely.

But of course it's true that Republicans and conservatives enact policies that thin the herd. Even when those in the herd are too young to fend for themselves.

We're not talking about soft stats here, either. This is about living and dying and suffering from poverty.

Plain as the ears on your face

Click image for full Kevin Siers/Charlotte Observer cartoon.

Bipartisan agreement

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

Mosqued bawl

Newt Gingrich (R-will to power) joins the amen chorus (amen to Jay-zus!) of teabaggers and wingnuts - that is, the majority of Republicans - in opposing the Cordoba House, a proposed Islamic mosque in Lower Manhattan. Once again, they prove that they have no idea of the meaning of freedom of religion. They narcissistically think that the Founders' great achievement was to codify the wingnuts' own special brand of Christianity as protected from who knows who - the great atheist-Islamist conspiracy, I guess. Just as many of them have missed the entire import of the gospels (Jesus was a liberal who ministered of love to the poor), they've missed the entire import of the First Amendment. And everything in between.

Gingrich can't help gilding the lily along with every other right-wing pundit. The mosque is "at Ground Zero." Or, as Newtie says, "overlooks Ground Zero." Most of the so-called straight news reporters give away their sycophant roles in pushing propaganda by adopting the wingy phrasing.

The truth is that the mosque is near Ground Zero - two city blocks away. (Click Google screen capture images for full-resolution aerial views.)


It just works so much better as propaganda to let your eager bullshit swallowers imagine that a mosque is going to rise in replacement of the twin towers. This is the sort of manipulation in plain sight that the Republicans know so well.

In any case, what distance toward the back of the bus would Republican opponents of religious freedom think appropriate? Maybe if the mosque were closer instead, they could think of its members as a human shield. The wingnuts' heads might explode from cognitive dissonance.

Wait til they find out how many other mosques there are in the area of Lower Manhattan!

Aaaieee! We're doomed. They're taking over! There's even an existing mosque four blocks from Ground Zero (though they appear to be having trouble keeping their lease).

Just leave out the context of how many churches there are in the same area:


I bet abortion clinics are feeling mighty nervous now! (Note: That's the wingnut logic of group accountability for the acts of a few other people who are superficially similar in some way.)

(Did I just commit journalism?)

Update (8/6): There's already a mosque inside the Pentagon! (h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)

Update (8/22): Updated in new item, When is a mosque not a mosque?

Update (8/22): I'm no New York Times, but I had the story of other nearby mosques almost three weeks before they did. In Manhattan, their own back yard. (h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)

Echoes

I'm reading, American Lion, Jon Meacham's biography focused on Andrew Jackson's two term as President, and Meacham's writing about pre-Civil War America unmistakably echoes the present day polarization of America. Here's one example (p. 58):

The rise of a nation with a large number of voters..., dependent for infomration and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who ... had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader's political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician's message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson's political appeal came out of the same tradition - a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance.

We of course have only recently emerged from a period when having a beer with a recovering alcoholic was the perverse standard of our selection of a president. Maybe we haven't even emerged, given the continued prominence of beer diplomacy.

One big difference between now and the 1820s and 1830s is how thoroughly electronic media worm their selling messages into our lives. Two centuries ago, a yeoman farmer could at least escape the bullshit of so much political image-making for the much more useful and less noxious real cow patties. Now the caf at work plays Fox propaganda all day, and many of its viewers buy it long before all the smears and adulterants can be composted out.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Update (7/30): Of course, big shallow fetid media outlets want to keep politics on the level of beer-drinking. Why not girls in bikinis, too?

Poking my nose into Tennessee's governor's race

If you're interested in me defending a Republican against the scurrilous bullshit attack of a wingnut, see this blog on KnoxViews.

Soylent green is Republicans

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Not cute any more

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

A trillion here, a trillion there

The actual funding appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $1,000,000,000,000. That's a whole shitload of zeroes. That's more than $3,000 apiece that we owe on our credit cards from China Bank. Over and above Duhbya's tax cuts for the rich.

The trillion dollar tab doesn't include any planning whatsoever for anticipated long-range costs such as health care and other earned perks for veterans. Linda Bilmes has in the past carefully estimated those as costing additional trillions. And of course, we're still running up the tab.

It's stunning that only World War II is still "ahead" in costs. It's stunning that the margin is less than a factor of four:

Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars.

My question, which the big media absolutely has refused to look into since these wars began in 2001, is why? WWII saw millions of men under arms, a huge output of materiel, a vast and expensive air- and sealift. What's different about these modern wars that make them so much more costly?

A few possibilities:

• War profiteering is worse. (Is it? There's no Harry Truman to look into it.)
• We've privatized many logistical operations that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We've privatized many security operations (for more than $100,000 a man) that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We're spending millions a pop in modern weaponry to atomize the tents of goatherders.

Any journalists want to look into this? Or is reprinting Pentagon press releases just too much more comfortable than real work?

Sovietization of American business

Once the messianic fervor of the Russian Revolution ebbed back into ordinary life, the economic privations of living in the Soviet Union inspired mordant jokes. "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

I recently saw that one of my Facebook friends here in the U.S. had joined a group using exactly that jibe.

It was well known in the Soviet Union that wave after wave of agricultural collectivization had failed. Stalin killed the bourgeois kulaks, but that only brought hunger. A huge percentage of Soviet food was actually grown on private plots on marginal land, rather than in the huge mechanized fields that stood only to benefit the state.

The neo-classical economic conclusion was that this proved that the socialist man was impossible, that only economic organization of society in a way that appeals to self-interest is viable. Free market conservatives had been saying this all along, and this vindicated their ideology as the economic consensus of the West.

No one would argue that the Soviets had it right. (Well, no one sane.) Yet the logic of the neo-classical economists was transparently wrong. A command economy failed, but there were other options besides a free market economy untempered by government influence. And the command economy did take seventy years to fail fully, which is quite a long time and suggests some ability, smaller than our system's to be sure, but still some ability to provide value.

Even in the 1970s, in the depths of Brezhnev poverty, there were indications that the Soviet failures of central planning were not the whole story. Another jibe was making the rounds: There's no economic system under which Russians work, and to the contrary there's no economic system under which Germans don't work. There was also the joke about Brezhnev's babushka asking him, "What will you do when the communists come?"

Americans culturally work hard. Oh, sure, during the challenge from Japan, we were all lazy, shiftless, no-account buffoons, but that was a lie. We may not work ourselves to death in the acute sense of karoshi, but we expend more time and effort on work than nearly every other culture. Even more than the Germans.

I work for a major American multi-national corporation, and I've been noticing something odd. Senior managers have been responsible for their silos and have perennially acted as self-interested agents, but they've counted on their lower managers and individual contributors to put aside their own incentives and make decisions that help the company as a whole succeed.

In short, they want us to be socialist men, of course in the context of this capitalist enterprise. When faced with a task that we're not compensated for, we're expected to take up the slack and altruistically provide the out-of-scope value to the other organization. As if it takes no time. As if it has no impact on our eventual performance reviews and salary increments.

The real joke is: They pretend to provide rational incentives, and we pretend to respond to them.

The real truth is: On the lower rungs, we act as human beings and mainly give the help we can. We cooperate across silos better than our managers! And much better than the senior and executive VPs.

Choosing our disbeliefs

Most people choose their beliefs. They don't reason to them. Many won't even reject their cherished beliefs just because they've learned something new.

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Social norms matter immensely in the choice what to believe. The norms of society as a whole are important, though they may not be as strong for a person as the norms of a particular group that is central to that person's identity. My sixth grade teacher told me that evolution wasn't nice; she wasn't even willing to engage on the facts.

This doesn't mean that the truth is socially constructed. It means that social groups construct belief systems, often irrespective of observation and outside the truth. Just because these systems are popular (religious fundamentalism, for instance) doesn't make true-for-them a valid supporting heuristic. It merely makes them well-protected.

The Globe-reported studies found that conservatives, true to form, are often ignoramuses. Many don't care what you tell them. Offering a fact at variance with their beliefs immediately makes you biased. They rely on conservative media to package carefully constructed bullshit that protects their notions from contradiction. It's Fox's job to give its viewers shelter from the well-known liberal bias of reality.

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire.

Liberals as always are better, but we don't have that much to be proud of either.

The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

The Boston Globe story chalks our irrationality up to the wiring of our brains. That's a pretty lame shrug of the shoulders. That wiring hasn't changed, but the degree to which we are polarized has. Yes, it's normal for all people to resist changing their beliefs, to be skeptical of new facts. But it hasn't until the past few decades been normal for conservatives especially to refuse to accept new information.

There has been an asymmetry in the past. Conservatives, by definition, resist change. It's not surprising to find more ignoramuses among them. Liberals are similarly more likely to support change for the sake of change, also not a positive trait.

But the asymmetry in teachability is larger now than at any previous time in my life. I think the crucial difference between now and the 1970s, for example, is that there is a diverse and well-organized propaganda operation dedicated to keeping conservatives away from difficult and dissonant facts.

The new social norm, created by talk radio, conservative think tanks, conservative foundations, Christian fundamentalists, and others, values adherence to the conservative creed over finding out what's actually true about the world.

To say that this is a danger to democracy, as the article does, is a vast understatement. But then, the current crop of radicals who call themselves conservative don't actually value democracy. Instead, they believe that any liberal-ish government is illegitimate and should be brought down as soon as possible. That's even more dangerous.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Not all they're screwing

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Might hurt BP's feelings

Unless you're savagely inconsiderate of a major multinational corporation's feelings, don't go to this page.

(h/t Essays and Effluvia)

Idea

As with many wonderful ideas, this one is not mine: If you're unemployed, call your Congressional Representative and both your Senators and ask for help finding a job. While you're at it, call the White House, too.

Our political leaders are the real malingerers. Unemployment is persistently above 9% in the standard, minimizing way we talk about it, U3. In a more accurate way, U6 - including discouraged workers, who've finished their unemployment compensation, and underemployed workers, who are lucky enough to be making lattes at Starbucks after long careers as middle managers - it's above 16%.

Call the complacent bastards once a week until they understand. Really. I'm not just blowing smoke.

Shorter David Vitter

I wouldn't pay Rachel Maddow for sex.

Sorry to break it to you, asshole. Rachel Maddow couldn't care less if the scurvy likes of you is attracted to her.

Oh, yeah, it's David Vitter watch, day 1101. I would have thought that Republicans could have gotten their most prolific consorter with whores out of the Senate by now. Could it be that they recognize their caucus's own activities as prostitution, merely without all the messy fluids? Nah, no way they have that kind of self-knowledge.

Elephant always forgets

Is it senility or willful forgetting?

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.

The evidence suggests that Republicans don't care about the size of the economy. They care about income inequality. Unlike Democrats, Republicans favor more inequality.

That way, their wealthy friends can feel yet greater self-esteem than already oozes out of their pores.

Facts are stupid things

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Priorities

Is that word lardass?

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Invented the Internet

On behalf of the big media, Dana Milbank reports the complete and total bullshit coming from Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R-pearls of a swine) - with a dollop from Sen. John McCain (R-not a maverick). (Of course, he doesn't credit the liberal blogosphere, which has been on this story for a while.)

But tomorrow or the next day, she'll be on TV again, and no one will impugn her credibility despite her repeated willingness to justify her policy on the basis of lies.

This media laxity, not ever extended to a Democrat, is why Democrats must every day call out Republicans for their lies. The media won't help. They're too busy protecting their sources and proving they're not liberal. Democrats have to stop being polite in the face of unregenerate, unremorseful liars.

"You're well known, Gov. Brewer, to state the most breath-taking falsehoods as the basis for your immigration policy. Why should anyone believe a single word you ever say?"

The only alternative is to accept that American politics will continue to be driven by unrebutted lies.

Why would I need a union?

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

No. 1 again

This week I'm tied for first in influence among Massachusetts political blogs. Ah right.

Look, any ranking that puts me ahead of Blue Mass Group has, uh, an idiosyncratic algorithm for determining influence.

But, hey, doesn't this again make me an award-winning blogger?

Different from you and me

Since the rich run things, there's no expectation that they must live up to their commitments even when their debts overwhelm them. The middle class? Bankruptcy is not for them, nor even abandonment of their underwater mortgages.

Kick line, punch line

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Schadenfreude

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Not just our bullshit detectors

Our creative muscles have gone soft and slack too.

The American experiment with effective democracy and liberty is in grave danger of senescence and death from multiple sources - deep tolerance for bullshit as a cultural norm, ideologically driven refusal to admit contrary facts, conservative ossification enabled by media whose purpose is to excuse ignorance, and a great willful forgetting of hard lessons we learned in the 20th century.

What are we going to do about it?

Update: In the gallery of images, I really like the concept of "resistance to premature closure." I need to live with that idea and muse on it...

Yeah, but who's running the place?

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Sharron Angle's libel

I get letters. They ask for money. I throw them away recycle them.

But for yuks I sometimes pick out a good wingnut letter and read it, just to see what's making them piss their britches. Or at least what they think will make their supporters piss their britches - and open their wallets.

Socialism, usually. Obama and his "loony left agenda." (Where? Would love to see that in action.) The conservative fundraisers almost never call Obama President Obama. I guess their heads would explode. Nancy Pelosi is another boogeyman of the right. OK, boogeywoman!

Most of the letter I got yesterday from Sharron Angle (R-lunatic fringe) is standard Republican boilerplate. Since I'm not in Nevada, the letter tries really hard to nationalize Angle's contest with Harry Reid so that I'll supposedly be convinced to sign up as a "Friend of Sharron Angle." Yah, sure.

It's odd that she thinks a potential contributor would need to be convinced that the Nevada Senate race has national implications. Maybe the mailing list is supposed to be for, um, less engaged (o.k. stupid) conservatives. The fact that she's trying so hard suggests to me some desperation.

Angle does depart from one commonplace in conservative fundraising. Rather than edging up to the libel cliff and peeking carefully over, she goes for it full bore:

Reid doesn't just use his tremendous power as Senate Majority Leader to ram through Obama's agenda...

...he also leverages it so that millions of dollars in Special Interest money flow [sic] into his campaign coffers.

Every Special Interest that wants a favor, [sic] must first toss some money into Reid's tin pot.

Yeah, sounds as if actual malice wouldn't be hard to prove. She's accusing him of extortion and accepting bribes, not to mention abuse of his position.

---

(Another typical feature of conservative fundraising letters is, ahem, idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization, not to mention the occasional misunderstanding that a number of dollars takes a singular verb, not a plural one. They are proud to be hide-bound reactionaries, but they can't even do traditional English usage correctly. Say, has anyone seen their identity papers?)

Impunity

They're not the party of big business. Why would I say that?

Tattoo U.

Not much political content, but I couldn't resist the pun in my title.

As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on his arm. He had blended them into his body art.

Obligatory political jibe (because that's what I'm here for): If Sarah Palin had a small, tasteful tatt (as if!) on her hand to hide her crib notes, how many of her conservative followers would suddenly decide that body art is fine with them?

Hilarious

I always get a good laugh when one Republican accuses another of character assassination. What else do they have?

Campaign finance reform is dead

Campaign finance reform - the body of law to keep wealthy interests from trying to buy elections - is over. Be ready for what's coming this fall: constant fusillades of deceptive, right-wing, corporate-funded, pro-Republican ads.

Despite Barack Obama's success raising money in 2008, we liberals will not be able to compete dollar-for-dollar. We also have no history of successfully labelling bullshit as bullshit. No matter how frumious, we keep engaging it as if it deserves serious consideration.

The only response that might plausibly work is to speak bluntly, to call the Republican corporate propaganda what it is: rank bullshit. And then we must use their obvious bullshit to impugn their credibility about everything.

In other words, we have to drop our politesse and tell the truth: They are liars, they'll always be liars, their luxurious livelihoods depend on it, and the only consequence they'll understand is to be defeated.

I doubt the American bullshit detector can handle the coming avalanche.

Multiplier effect

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

Putting his foot down

Click image for full Elena Steier cartoon.

Independence

Eager to please

The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country. Yeah, I'm damning with faint praise.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the gray lady, has been a defender of official bullshit from the time I first took notice of him in the late 1990s, when the Times's thrusting of Republican bullshit about Bill Clinton needed his defense. For Keller, it hasn't mattered whether the official bullshit is the Times's own or comes from Republican political operatives and their business interests. Keller will have no part in calling bullshit bullshit. He'd rather add more onto the compost heap.

Now, true to form, his spokesperson claims that calling torture torture would have been inadmissably biased:

When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

Words have meaning. Waterboarding has always been torture. The special pleadings of the torture-advocating war criminals of Duhbya's ugly administration don't change those meanings.

Torture is torture, no matter who applies it, no matter who suffers under it. It is possible to do evil to evil. Even for Americans...

Our media culture no longer recognizes this, and even mainstream Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani, encouraged by the unwillingness of big media to call bullshit, refuse to deal with the plain truths of our national stains. A culture so debased by lying to itself is in existential trouble, not from al Qaeda but from its own corruption of character.

Update (7/5): More good criticism from Salon:

[When the Washington Post and the New York Times] defended their acts of cowardice and dismissed criticism as tendentious, they went beyond harm. Their pride in subservience was a disgrace.

Starboard ho

No surprise, Republican Senators are lining up against Elena Kagan.

President Obama nominated Kagan, clearly a moderate, to replace the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, but there's no satisfying the Republicans. They're so devoid of perspective, they think the responsible left is Joe Lieberman - or even Olympia Snowe.

This is what Republicans do: No matter how conciliatory or centrist a Democratic proposal, they push it hard to the right. And then they won't support the result.

It's time to stop negotiating with these bad faith assholes, kill the filibuster in January (or sooner), and make the majority's platform happen.

Devil take the hindmost

Digby on the elite consensus that the national debt is more important than the worst employment picture in eighty years!

What a beautiful message of unity on our Independence Day it is to tell close to 20 million citizens that they are on their own in the worst job market since the Great Depression purely to make a cheap political point. It would make King George proud to see his aristocratic heirs flexing their muscles two centuries later in the country that once proudly proclaimed that it didn't have a class system.

Yet somehow it's the teabagging morons, on their platform of even more neglect, who have the fervor of revolution.

There is at present massive class warfare going on in this country. The wealthy and semi-wealthy elites think we all have to take our austerity medicine.

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

Tsk-tsk, they say, it may hurt, but that's life.

Of course, it's much easier for them (including, so far, me, in the semi category) to swallow the bitter pill. For the rich, there's little real loss of living standard, and it's easier to get tickets to the ball game, since demand from hoi polloi is reduced. Plus - bonus! - less need to rub elbows with the unwashed.

The bitterness of austerity really hurts, say, the new-collar breadwinner whose drywall business is making half what it used to make. Or the single mom teacher who has been laid off and has no prospects better than an hourly position at Wal-mart with no benefits. Or the non-union line worker at a food processing plant. Or even the union flagger on a project paid for by the stimulus.

Yet somehow many of the victims of this recession have swallowed the hook of bullshit economics purveyed by cunning liars whose real goal is to advantage the already advantaged. These victims compound their own suffering by taking up the fight for their lords and masters in the propertied class. It's almost as if they're nostalgic for feudalism, in much the same way that citizens of the Republic of Georgia have been nostalgic for Joseph Stalin, one of the most prolific killers in the history of a pretty blood-lustful species.

Even more remarkable, the misdeeds of the wealthy themselves led us into this wracking pain. They've extracted money for themselves out of the economy on the way up and the way down. Our taxes and debt have made them whole for the most part. Now they're telling us we all have to suffer for their debts. And they've gotten the teabaggers to be their shock troops.

There has been a huge forgetting of the lessons of the Great Depression, here in American and in most of the Western world. (European central bankers are just as bad as Alan Greenspan on this topic.) Despite their utter, complete, and contemptible failure, we are still planning our future as if the Republican upper class economic propaganda of the past forty years were in the slightest true.

Media dystopia

Big media dysfunction in microcosm...

Dwelling on inconsequentialities such as the little witticisms of a confirmation hearing is no accident. It's how the media avoids taxing its middle-schoolish audience with philosophical conversations about the substance of liberty under law. (Snooze!)

Once CNN is on an inconsequentiality, however, they bring to bear the serious principles of balanced journalism. Lest anyone carp from among the perennial right-wing whiners, CNN offers equal emphasis:

If confirmed, Elena Kagan may or may not turn out to be that intellectual counterweight to conservatives Justice Antonin Scalia or Chief Justice John Roberts.

Except of course that the supposed intellectual depth of conservative ideologues is axiomatic!

CNN can't even omit balance on the mere possession of a sense of humor - can't leave the wingnuts thinking the reporter thinks that being funny is a liberal trait.

To be fair, the members of the court usually labeled liberal - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, and the retired John Paul Stevens - all display great legal minds but not much sharp-edged humor or the willingness to engage in spirited debate for which Kagan is known. Justice Stephen Breyer is equally smart and he too shares a sense of humor, but that tends to fall on the quirky, self-deprecating side.

On the conservative side, friends of Justice Clarence Thomas - who almost never speaks at arguments - note he has a great wit and a hearty laugh. Colleagues call him the funniest justice you never hear about.

If Robin Williams, referring to the Nazis, asked a German, "Did you ever think maybe you killed all the funny people?", CNN would be obliged to find, yah, haha, a stormtrooper who side-lined in stand-up. You vill laff, and you vill like it!

Meanwhile, they know they have to make excuses for the other empty seat on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. His tiny contributions bear out the claims of those who opposed his confirmation. He's a reliable right-wing vote, never mind how great his anonymous friends claim he might be. Is that funny-ha-ha or funny-strange? Maybe funny-uh-oh...

When finally, Bob Mears of CNN makes a brief digression into substance, it's to report about a question from Charles Grassley (R-grasping at cornstalks):

Grassley had asked the nominee about a paper she wrote as a college student that took a critical look at how judges decide cases.

"Is it appropriate for judges to mold and steer the law?" Grassley asked.

Questions about an undergraduate term paper! Can high school be far behind? How about kindergarten? "Ms. Kagan, I am reliably informed that at age five you called a prominent conservative classmate a poopy-head. When did you stop being a red-diaper baby?"

Of course, no CNN reporter will ever observe that some of Kagan's friends say that it's total bullshit to datamine 30-year-old papers written by a 20-year-old for reasons to vote against confirmation of a judge. That would be unbalanced!

Our big media, even more full of shit than the people they cover.

Land of opportunity

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Gotta be me

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

Quiet, you pissant

Click image for full August J. Pollak cartoon.

How bigotry works

The Tennessee Highway Patrol raided a cockfight in rural southeast Tennessee. Naturally, the AP doesn't say where in Polk Co., but one look at Benton, TN, the tiny town listed in the dateline, tells me that AP doesn't have a stringer there:


This is really a dog bites man story - happens about once a year. In fact, googling cockfighting benton tennessee shows some signs that this ho-hum news has taken at least a month to travel the 70 miles to Knoxville.

This story is only worthy of comment because of the reflexive bigotry it elicits from at least one commenter on Knoxnews:

Surprised there were no illegal immigrants retained in custody. --ccjs (June 27, 2010 11:24 a.m.)

Yes, many of the Latin American illegals come from cultures that still permit cockfighting, but that may be one thing that makes them feel right at home in East Tennessee. Thirty years ago, I worked for a guy who spent every weekend fighting his "chickens." Word was that he had good sources in local law enforcement, so that he never showed up to a cockpit carrying his stake and his roosters if it was going to be raided.

Good old white boy crime is normal, doesn't call for comment. Brown, broken-English crime, though, that's different!

Look no further for fascism

It's pretty clear that the local authorities in Louisiana are in bed with BP. The federal government should be there enforcing the U.S. Constitution. At gun point, if it's necessary to arrest some of the LEOs for civil rights violations.

Major Malcolm Wolfe of the sheriff's office [of Terrebonne Parish] says the deputy's pulling someone over in his official vehicle while working for a private company is standard and acceptable practice, because Wheelan was acting suspicious and could have been a terrorist.

Update (7/5): I can understand why the local authorities could be bought and paid for many times over by BP, but I don't understand how the Obama administration can find any reason whatsoever to be seen working fist in glove with BP.

Living through it

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Better living through Internet

The big media whines incessantly about the perils and depredations of the Internet. Even so, they know they have to publish here, and they bring their art departments - if they still have them - to bear to give us traditional newspaper graphics.

Oh, sure, the New York Times pastes up some cool interactive widgets. Many of them go beyond eye candy and are actually informative. They are also well beyond the budgets of ordinary papers.

There are thousands of stories that will never contend for a Pulitzer, for which the Internet provides freely available tools to make those stories better. Any story about a particular place can put the reader there much more effectively with a clip or a link to Google Maps or Microsoft Bing or one of the other mapping sites. Sure, it might be better to send a news photographer out, but that's too heavyweight and expensive for bread and butter stories that fill out a paper.

Here's a pedestrian story about real estate and eminent domain that shrieks for illustration. In five minutes of googling, I found the Newton Assessor's database and this aerial view with approximate bounds shown:


Google Maps gives a better image, sans plot plan, here.

Imagine what I might find if I were a professional journalist! (Yes, I know there are savvy people who are professional journalists. I even know a few. I just don't get why more of their savvy doesn't find the page.)

Sorry, my wallet's in my banker's pants

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Copping a drill

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

Still slinging it

McChrystal, fired for insubordinately trying to make his biggest boss look bad, again tries to make President Obama look bad.

Good riddance! Take your fired ass back wherever you'd like to retire.

More Truman, less Coolidge

McChrystal fired. No "Heckuva job, Stanley." Accountability is a good thing in all administrations.

President Obama just broadened his range. I'd like to see him apply a little more authority to the Gulf - and then to the backside of the always recalcitrant Republicans.

Mr. Reagan, tear down this economy

When I said a couple of weeks ago that there was nothing Republicans wouldn't screw up for sake of private profit, I had no idea it would be so graphically illustrated so soon. Here's one of the graphs - on income inequality:


No one should be surprised by this. It is intentional Republican policy to make rich people richer.

Ronald Reagan made people feel better as a sop for not making them better off. Just say no.

(h/t Susan Gardner on DailyKos)

Straight from the horse's ass

Orrin Hatch sent me a letter on behalf of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). Here's why they want my help:

[The Democrats] oppose all the values and principles you and I share.

I've said many times that Republicans are against the Constitution and the rule of law. I just never thought they'd come right out and say it. And it's flabbergasting that they have finally admitted that they are opposed to women's rights, minority rights, and equality under law irrespective of social class.

What are these radical Republicans running against? Hollywood, labor, environmentalists, and peace activists! Sure, they throw in some derogatory modifiers, but that's their plan:

• Fascist realist art
• Corporate dominance
• Even more ill-advised deregulation
• War

They are running in favor of:

• Permanent tax cuts that favor the rich
• Anything "tough"
• Ben Tre reform of Social Security and Medicare

Here's part of the NRSC survey:

The highlighted Republican take on the Democratic platform is mostly a tissue of lies.

• The tax "increase" is allowing the awful Duhbya tax cuts to expire, and the GOP exaggerates the amount because the Dems will keep part those cuts.
• Cutting the defense budget has to happen at the end of the wars (though I will concede there is some accuracy to this one item).
• Gay marriage only undermines heterosexual marriage in the fever swamp of the homophobic imagination.
• Republicans are completely untrustworthy on Social Security. They want to destroy it as a social insurance program and give its revenues to Wall St. They also provide no plan to fill the revenue gap for those who are already receiving payments.
• It's Republicans who are blocking U.S. energy independence. Democrats are blocking U.S. oil-ocracy.
• UN control of the war on terrorism? Where do they even get this stuff? Answer: They make shit up to keep their choleric base frothing at the mouth.
  

Ironically, the letter - which the GOP has cannily kept hidden - accuses the Democrats of dishonesty! Par for the course...

McChrystal's gambit

You're running a war. It isn't going well. Your troops are trapped in swirling dust populated by hostile Pashtuns around Kandahar. When the local Taliban need to, they can slip easily across the border into the safety of Pakistan.

Worst, you've agreed to a deadline, you've stated in public that you'll be finished with counter-insurgency by summer 2011.

What do you do?

You either need to be fired, in which case it will be President Obama's fault for nicking the indispensable man (heh) on the threshold of success. Or you need to paint the President and other civilian authorities into a corner so that they'll have to acquiesce to grinding more meat in Afghanistan. You care about your place in history and even project it on your government:

“[Ambassador Karl Eikenberry]’s one that covers his flanks for the history books,” General McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Now, if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

You think Obama can't afford to be a firm manager of the military in the run-up to the difficult 2010 midterms. So you thumb your nose and dare him to fire you.

It's time to reassert civilian control of the military.

Update (6/25): Chan Lowe sees McChrystal's escape too.

Summer of self-reliance

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

Leaves less for them

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Stopwatch for Democrats

If Duhbya had spent less than an hour in Ohio, the big media would have congratulated him on his punctuality, assuming - and it's a big assumption - that they even noticed the time.

Total war

There is no blow too low for a South Carolina Republican when an election is at stake. Really, it was only a matter of time before the fundies there would attack the religious sincerity of Nimrata "Nikki" Haley.

These politicos are thoroughly tribal. They're not allowed to attack her off-white color any more even in the state that originated the great treason of 1861. She is a convert to Christianity, too conveniently they think, but they know that she's still the other.

It's almost enough to make me root for a wingnut libertarian. Well, maybe not almost - but as close as I get.

Certifiable

With Rand Paul, caveat emptor is not merely an empty phrase. He lives it personally.

Paul's only certification was provided instead by something called the National Board of Ophthalmology, which is very convenient because he operates that organization himself.

If you believe the libertarian bullshit he peddles, he might be able to dig up the title to that bridge he's trying to sell.

Joe Conason nails it:

Libertarian ideology rejects most of the modern regulatory systems that protect consumers, because everyone should be responsible for determining whether the hamburger contains E. coli on his own.

Among other odd beliefs they hide, libertarians such as Paul believe they have every right to lie to you as long as they don't commit the lie inside a contract.

Which side are you on?

Republicans are for the corporation:

"It is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown."

These so-called conservatives don't give a shit about the damage BP did and is still doing.

Big media blows dead yaks

It is truly incredible how duplicitous big media is with the statements of politicians:

Mondale and Kerry made this list for accurate statements. Reagan, Bush and Bush don’t appear, despite some famous groaners. In fairness, you can’t entirely blame the editors; their recollections faithfully track the culture of the insider press corps over the past forty years. All too often, groaning misstatements by Major Republicans have been ignored, fudged and wished away, eventually lost to history. Accurate statements by major Democrats have been turned into major scandals which linger in insider memory. Outlook is simply recording the era as it actually has unspooled. But during this era, the culture of the insider press has often turned truth on its head.

Democrats get pilloried for telling the truth. Republican skate despite obvious bullshit.

This is the reason our culture is in existential peril. Al Qaeda is the least of it. We don't care what's true any more, only what the conventional wisdom is - no matter how far nor how obviously it departs from reality.

The Daily Howler still got game! After all this time, Bob Somerby is a blogging stud!

Carlyfornia

Carly Fiorina (R-tonsure) went catty on Barbara Boxer's hair style? When Carly herself wears a nun-boy? And she - I mean, her "friend", whom she was merely quoting - thinks her style is au courant?

Okaaay. We're in middle school...

Joke's on me

Click image for full Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau.

Rhinoplasty

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

National self-interest

Immigration policy is a minefield of conflicting interests.

Corporations want cheap labor to exploit and to keep citizen labor costs down. Citizens would of course prefer to make better salaries with less competition.

Elites want inexpensive landscapers and house-cleaners. Native born workers need jobs too, especially when unemployment is nearly 10%.

We all want someone to help pay our Social Security, but that assumes illegal immigrants are not being paid under the table. Of course, when I say all of us, I should exclude the open racists who don't want Hispanic immigration because the immigrants are brown.

No one wants the crime of immigrant communities who can't report their criminal elements to the police, though it's not clear that illegal immigrants in general have a higher crime rate than good ol' natural born Murkins. No one wants immigrants to drain welfare funding (well, hardly anyone).

Mostly, immigration policy should be framed, not in moral terms, but in terms of national self-interest. What immigration policy best serves Americans? We clearly both gain and lose by immigration. How do we make our society better by adding new people from outside?

In the case of Eric Balderas, it's hard to see how our national interest would be served by deporting a college kid made good. Especially since he'd be eligible for a student visa in any case...

Where

Exactly where a news story happened is often important. The Arkansas flash flood deaths occurred here. You can see how the hilly terrain could concentrate run-off into a flash flood.

Yet big media seldom pins down location. I don't understand why not. The tools are readily available on the Internet. During the Tennessee floods, I was able to locate the site of a photo in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which told me how far the flood was out of its banks - a couple of hundred yards - which might be an important fact needed to understand the story.

There's also the back story of Albert Pike, a relatively minor Confederate general. Most non-Southerners would be amazed how many federal government sites in the South are named for Confederates.

Syncronicity: I happened to learn who Albert Pike was because the second National Treasure movie was on in my house, and it mentioned him. Yep, besides being a Confederate, he was a Freemason. Ooooweeooo.

If other people can say "What Digby said"...

... so can I:

"Deficit reduction" doesn't mean deficit reduction. It means welfare state reduction, period. Military spending is sacred --- like the right to pack heat in church and gas guzzling. It is non-negotiable.

Update (6/18): Yet again, deficit hawks on anything that doesn't benefit their wealthy corporate sponsors...

Of by for

The most incredible thing about John Boehner (R-BP) and the Chamber of Commerce is how openly they side with corporations against the interests of the people. I guess it's the Chamber's job, but Boehner is elected by actual voters.

Then again, they believe in managing incentives so that they get all of them, and there haven't been many consequences at all for corporatists. The media doesn't enforce any, and many Americans are so captive of the pro-corporate narrative that often the voters don't enforce anything.

A good politician could make Republicans pay for their lazy inability to hide their true allegiance.

Update (6/13): Looks as though Boehner wants to walk this one waaay back. Even a corporate hack like him can see the danger of shilling so boldly for BP.

Right to swing your colon

Well, your cow's colon...

I don't worry about the gentle wafting odor of cow shit teasing the scent receptors of my nose, but once your cow's shit starts damaging the commonweal, then you've reached the limit of your freedom and slugged in the nose in a way that matter. You have to clean up, even if you're a walking talking anachronism that romantics who once saw "Witness" fantasize about - just as long as they don't have to give up their cell phones.

The point is that you cannot opt out of society as long as you're interacting with it. All the non-Amish conservatives who plead just to be left alone often want to take what's offered (public roads, schools, criminal justice, a clean environment, common defense, an economy that doesn't crash and burn to the ground every ten years) just as long as they don't have to pay any part of anything they don't use directly.

You can fairly argue about where to draw the line for public actions and the taxes to pay for them. But the radical libertarian position of the likes of Rand Paul is anti-social selfishness, and contrary to Ayn Rand and Gordon Gecko, it doesn't work.

Pluck BP

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Nothing the GOP won't screw up for profit

The Gas and Oil Party of two oilmen, Duhbya Bush and Darth Cheney, allowed offshore oil spills to quadruple. You'd expect them to allow child poverty to get worse. Daddy Bush presided over the previous peak of child poverty, and everyone knows they don't give a shit about that. But they let the oil industry get worse too.

Because it's all about the money.

Note: Yeah, I started my day at 5:00 a.m. in a hotel that provided a free copy of McPaper. But vacation's over after a couple of long plane rides, and I'll be back to my usual haunts as soon as time permits at work.

Sample bias

USA Today reports empathy on decline in college students and waxes Chicken-Littlish about technology. My reading of news comment threads tells me that Claire Raines, at the bottom of the story, is right:

Raines says that empathy is declining in all generations...

Traditional liberals are empathetic (by which I mean New Dealers, not the imaginary rugged individualists that excuse-making posers such as Jonah Goldberg call "classical liberals"). Ted Kennedy was empathetic. Neo-liberals are technically and analytically sure that activism from government makes society better - so long as government is not too too active, but they're not strong on empathy. John Kerry...

Reconciling these two threads of liberalism is an important political problem for the coalition of the left of center.

Austerity is just around the corner

Contracting our economy away from prosperity is what the teabaggers want. They'd rather have more of a shrinking pie than to have ... more.

Now international economists are joining them in opposition to economic stimulus:

[T]he conventional wisdom now is that these countries must nonetheless cut — not because the markets are currently demanding it, not because it will make any noticeable difference to their long-run fiscal prospects, but because we think that the markets might demand it (even though they shouldn’t) sometime in the future.

Shooting fish in a bbl

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

Some are gone, and some remain

Memo to John Boehner (R-Sinatra):

Conservatives fought rock and roll. They lost.

The Beatles may or may not have been bigger than god, but Sir Paul towers over the pipsqueak likes of you. Deal with it.

By the way, do you really think it's smart to tie yourself and your wretched party back to the hopeless legacy of Duhbya?

Light posting for the next week

Having finally reached the pinnacle of writing the number 1 political blog in Massachusetts, I'm going on vacation. It's great to have recognition, but I have to wonder whether my rank this week came straight out of a random number generator.

Maybe I'll drop by here while on vacation. I do have a couple of ideas simmering, and I'm taking the laptop. But maybe I won't. So don't be surprised if your vast and prolific (hint, hint) comments don't get moderated right away.

Nothing to say

The Gores are separating. Anything I might say about that fact would say more about me than about them.

The media ought to consider what they reveal about themselves before they post any further breathless gossipy adolescent maunderings that pretend to be meditations.