Biased observation

On the campaign trail in the early hours this morning, I saw yet again that conservatives are churlish. Not all of them of course - like John Stuart Mill on Conservatives and stupidity, I'm far from tarring conservatives as universally churlish.

But if you meet someone on the campaign trail who gives you the finger or who speaks harshly to you, it's almost always a conservative. And the teabaggers are the worst. Civility is a virtue that they wish to be practiced by the other side.

In 2010, there's more bile and anger around than at any time since the last time the right wing organized massive resistance.

Hobbeson's choice

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

Bill about Monica, Duhbya about cocaine

On day 1216, an incredibly smarmy, lying asshole...

Note which two of these liars committed a crime - and which party they belonged to.

(h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)

Mordant laughter

"The next time a Republican tells you anything about 'fiscal responsibility,' laugh at 'em, just laugh at 'em," Biden said.

It's bullshit. Republicans only care about the deficit if we're going to spend money on people, y'know, socialism.

Antidote

(h/t EricLykins on KnoxViews)

Stupid and ugly election

Linky love...

As for us Democrats, in the last two cycles we elected the first female Speaker of the House, had the first competitive female presidential primary candidate, and elected the first black president. We saved our country from Great Depression 2.0, began winding down a senseless war, passed sweeping reforms that will begin the long overdue process of overhauling our health care and financial systems, made college more affordable for millions of students, and passed the largest middle-class tax cut in U.S. history.

So we got us some progressive change - some of it half-assed but change nonetheless - in spite of the just-say-no obstructionists who want to stop all progress and angry mobs who want to "take our country back." To 1861.

Go. Read.

Ignorance is truth

This is only a freeped on-line poll, but:

[E]ven if you grant that the poll was the victim of an organized attack, I'm still amazed by what we can learn from it. In response to the question "Which policy options do you support?" 42 percent of the respondents chose the answer "keeping science out of the political process."

Conservatives have embraced their schlerotic ignorance as a badge of honor. This is not a good thing for American society. Andrew Leonard could be channelling me (if channelling were real):

We need more science in the political process, not less. The countries that understand that will thrive and prosper. The ones that don't will undoubtedly fail, if they haven't already doomed themselves.

Lies, damned lies, and Republican propaganda

The GOP and its Tea Party allies have deceived the American people:

The Congressional Budget Office's projected budget deficit for FY2009, beginning four months before Obama took office, was already in excess of $1.3 trillion. Indeed, the 2011 budget deficit is projected to be ever-so-slightly lower than the one Bush left on the White House doorstep. Despite the one-time $787 billion economic stimulus (spread over three years), no huge growth in government spending has taken place on Obama's watch.

Yet it's an article of faith among wingnuts that spending is out of control. What's really out of control is lying.

My country won't be able to make better choices until its citizens learn enough not to trust Republicans ever again.

But they're not coordinating

The Republican web of lies and smears is sustained by a web of so-called independent groups. They even have the nerve to call themselves "non-partisan."

Yeah, like the Swift Boat Liars were in 2004...

(h/t Mark Sumner on DailyKos)

It is what it is

Like it or not, election day gives an answer. It did in 2008, and belligerent wingnuts never accepted the result. In six days, it will in 2010, and I'll accept the result, though not for a femtosecond its wisdom.

Nationally, voters are poised to bring back the jackass Republican policies that in 8 years screwed America up completely - unjustified war on lying pretexts in Iraq, torture as an instrument of policy, financial deregulation that led to the meltdown, huge spending and tax cuts for the very wealthy that turned a surplus into a raging deficit.

We Democrats only had 2 years to fix that legacy of complete failure, which is incredibly unfair (but fair don't goddamn enter into it). We failed because we were too timid. We should have rammed the whole package of liberal reforms down their throats. We should have mocked their screams and smacked around their immense lack of insight.

But the revenge of the morans [sic] will be a fact. And, as a liberal, I deal with reality, rather than bullshit conservative fantasy.

The TV-driven fad of angry stupidity will bring back exactly the same Republican Bushist policies that created our serious problems. Still, wingnuts are going to win nationwide. Congratulations, idiots, you will win.

The returning Republican policies are based on obviously idiotic principles.

• The wealthy don't get enough rewards to keep them working (if you can call creaming off all the best tidbits working), even though their share of the pie has grown to the point where the top 20% own 84% of America.
• Public borrowing, even at microscopic interest rates, can never lead to a larger economy - even though private borrowing to advance private interests is a common and orgasmic fetish of the right.
• The only positive thing that government can do is to lower taxes and reduce the deficit (yes, two contradictory thoughts at the same time), even if conservatives are never willing to name spending cuts that they would make to balance any budget.
• Financial institutions that have just brought America to the edge of the precipice of depression can be trusted - constrained by the "free" market - to not do it again. Because every John Galt is perfect. (Though egoistically amoral in the original...) Never mind the experience of 2008, which would make wingnut heads explode if they didn't have Barney Fag to blame.
  
• America is a Christian nation, never mind that the Constitution says, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States," and the Bill of Rights says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."
• Freedom means liberals can't make snide comments about wingnut bullshit.
  
• IOKIYAR!
  

Keeping the Senate in Democratic hands hardly even matters, though I believe it will happen. The cowed remnants of a 60-seat, then 59-seat, majority that couldn't even pass a public health care option will not kill the filibuster, no matter how richly it deserves to join legislative appointment of Senators in the ashcan of history. Republicans will filibuster any judicial appointment who even hints of the center, much less the left, never mind two-plus centuries' precedent of advise and consent.

These so-called conservatives are actually radicals. Their rank and file don't realize it, but their objective is no less than the return of aristocracy.

So the wingnuts will have a lot to celebrate, even though the triumph of ignoramus Teapublicans that they celebrate will be a disaster for America. Check back in two years, six years, ten years. It may be too late for the noble American experiment in liberty and self-government.

On a smaller scale, I'll have some wins to celebrate too. At least half of the various districts for which the Venn diagram includes my small precinct will choose good judgement over inchoate outrage at sincere and well-reasoned Democratic efforts to help, most of which have succeeded, even if they were not successful enough.

But then, I live in Massachusetts, where reason, though not ascendant, still has a fighting chance.

The coming bloodbath

Paul Krugman, in the continuing role of Cassandra:

The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect be voting to make things even worse.

The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis, except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega of their economic vision.

And if they take one or both houses of Congress, complete policy paralysis — which will mean, among other things, a cutoff of desperately needed aid to the unemployed and a freeze on further help for state and local governments — is a given. The only question is whether we’ll have political chaos as well, with Republicans’ shutting down the government at some point over the next two years. And the odds are that we will.

Imagine if the Democrats, long-term, were to learn the Republican political lesson of strident opposition regardless of any merits. Wouldn't that be a great way to govern.

Steamy sex and righteous violence

Did my headline grab you? That's the function of headlines. Especially in big media, headlines exist to tease, not to inform. Like much of the rest of their content.

So a story titled New Mexico candidate for governor says Republicans 'outnumbered' sounds pretty dull. What, is Susana Martinez trying to paint herself as the underdog, striving nobly against all odds like some Ayn Rand heroine?

No, it turns out that CNN took a dive on hooking readers into a sensational story. Martinez wore her concealed weapon to a media appearance! Apparently more than once, probably all the time.

Couldn't CNN think of a better headline?

Armed New Mexico Republican feels 'outnumbered'
or
Republican for N.M. governor: 'Outnumbered' but never outgunned

The gun has got to be in the headline. Unless someone wants to hide a little teabag craziness...

Don't tread on me

Talking Points Memo has the story.

Don't ya love how the media is forcing an ad onto this clearly contributed video? Making money off the work of others, it's the lazy-fair way! Not just the local Fox affiliate, CNN, too.

(h/t Thers on Eschaton)

Since you asked

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce need not disclose its multi-million dollar corporate contributors to the wingnut takeover. Not even to identify the financiers of beggar-thy-neighbor bullshit.

Yet as the treasurer of a tiny grassroots PAC that had less than $1000 in activity during the reporting period, I had to file a report Monday under penalty of perjury with a personal fine of $25 per day had I been late.

That's why I'm pissed.

Return of the zombie lies

No wingnut article of faith is ever surrendered. WikiLeaks did not reveal that Duhbya was right about WMD, but that won't stop Fox from lying to its viewers and claiming that it did.

The existential danger to our country is not from al Qaeda. It's from our own schlerotic inability to break through denial and accept reality.

(h/t Atrios)

Don't we get at least four years?

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

If we can't win the election, maybe we'll start shooting

A wingnut offers his plan for electoral defeat:

Republican congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not produce a change in leadership.

It's not just the lone nuts who lust to refight the Civil War.

Dying for principle

Gun rights and the Second Amendment are not as simple as either side of the gun control debate pretends. There's no hope of getting the conservatives to acknowledge that - they don't do complicated - but liberals should be willing and able to learn.

Here's a case where a concealed carry permit seems like a good idea - assuming enough safety training to go with it. If you're being stalked by a weirdo or an old boyfriend, 911 may not be fast enough if the stalker has also availed himself of America's NRA-driven permissive gun culture.

I assume that Jennifer Willis must have chosen the double-action revolver over a semi-automatic for its added protection against accidental discharge. Gun nuts should acknowledge the danger every muzzle poses to its owner, as Willis appears to have done. Many of them won't, of course, and more of them - and their family members - will die in preventable accidents.

I still believe that government has a just and Constitutional role in the regulation of gun possession, but I no longer think an unarmed populace is the immediate answer. In any case, it's not politically possible, and we all need to deal with reality instead of pretending we live in an ideal society.

Duh!

President Obama thinks in retrospect that he should have spent more time convincing Americans of the rightness of his policies!

"I think that one of the challenges we had two years ago was we had to move so fast, we were in such emergency mode, that it was very difficult for us to spend a lot of time doing victory laps and advertising exactly what we were doing, because we had to move on to the next thing," Obama said. "And I take some responsibility for that."

How can the man who built such a stunning 2008 campaign admit to such mind-blowing naivete? Governing is not an abstract policy exercise. You have to sell, sell, sell, and when you win, you have to keep selling. You have to constantly show the citizenry the benefits of your policies so that they'll give you a chance to enact more of them.

Obama lays out the puerile contradictions of Republican policy oxymorons in the CNN article, but he lays them out as argument. He needs to learn to go the next step: Assail their good faith directly.

The biggest problem that Republicans pose to the American polity is not their frequent (but not universal) bigotry. It's their dishonesty. You can't get there politely, but a successful future requires that we go there.

Oppressed by facts

Teabagger rejoinders to the science of global warming:

“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

God and Rush tell him what he wants to hear. They couldn't both be wrong.

“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”

No comment!

“They’re trying to use global warming against the people,” Ms. Deaton said. “It takes away our liberty.”

“Being a strong Christian,” she added, “I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”

Pesky facts take away her right to believe whatever the hell she wants to believe, no matter how little evidence she might have for her infantile denial.

A pause in politics for dream time

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

(h/t New York Times)

Citizens disunited

When the Supremes ruled that the FEC could not violate the free speech rights of desperately needy and self-expressive corporations (we just gotta be it!), many of us who are actual flesh and blood citizens and not mere legal fictions written on paper were sure that the 2010 mid-term election would be flooded with a river of dirty money, almost entirely from the corporatist right. I would rather have been wrong.

Defenders of the Citizens United decision took two tacks. Many argued that of course corporations should have First Amendment rights. After all, the New York Times has First Amendment rights, and it's a corporation. (And, frankly, that's a fairly persuasive argument.)

Other defenders of Citizens claimed it wouldn't make a difference anyway. How does the crow you're eating taste?

The Court has neutered all campaign finance reform. But don't legal limits still apply to candidates and parties? They're acting like it, but no. There's no hindrance to them incorporating and claiming the protection of Citizens United v. FEC. In fact, many of them are already incorporated. Republicans are holding back because they have so many well-heeled allies. Democrats are holding back - why is that?

President Barack Obama has tried to score political points against the anonymity of corporate contributions to the Chamber of Commerce's right-wing slush fund. We know that the Chamber takes foreign contributions in other areas. How do we know that none of that finance assists or is included in its political activities?

The answer: We don't.

A better issue, though, would be that the banking sector is undoubtedly contributing. We bailed them out, allowed them to return to major profits, and they're making common cause with the very people who insanely think that nothing should have been done to allay the credit crunch. They have theirs; now they want everything in the world you could possibly imagine.

Word to Obama: Tell the country that the bankers are trying to consolidate their ownership of the government and that you'll stop it. Of course, you'd need to fire Tim Geithner to look serious about that.

Sea to shining sea

Why liberals think conservatives harbor bigots

Because they do:



Fox's Brian Kilmeade has never been the sharpest tool in the shed - but conservatives also get really pissed when you find them to be a few bricks shy of a load. Kilmeade was trying to be profound, but all he attained was profound stupidity.

(h/t HuffPo)

The Loscocco effect

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Translating teabonics

"I'm not politically correct" means I reserve the right to be an asshole anytime, anywhere.

Face of royalty

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

You lie!

Surprise, surprise, surprise! You'd have to be a gomer not to know that Karl Rove is leading a bunch of deep-pocketed Republican shills to lie, cheat, and steal Congress - oh, and to buy it. But with the media AWOL, there are plenty of gomers:

[T]he sheer scale and dimension of dishonesty and distortion coming from the conservative side of this debate is a very big part of the story. And it's largely going untold.

This is why Democrats have been foolish since at least the political maiming of Bill Clinton not to attack Republican credibility at every turn. We need to man up from the bullshit Washington politesse and call a lie a lie - even if we share the cloakroom with the liar. They're not polite to us. Civility that's not a two-way street is not civil.

The truth matters, and we haven't been strong enough in exacting a stiff price from Republicans who are full of shit. Which to a first approximation is every one of them in any position of power.

(h/t Joan McCarter on DailyKos)

Who's paying for this?

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

A better answer to the NFL

Why do Democrats cave so easily?

When the NFL objected to Russ Feingold's use of a few seconds of NFL video in his campaign ad, he should have politely responded, "That's fair use, never mind the adhesion contract you're attempting to enforce without ever gaining consent to it."

If nothing else, standing up for himself would bring free publicity, and that ain't bad. But it also sustains a principle of law and the public sphere that's under siege from private interests who want us all to pay more for things we already have a right to.

Even Republicans prefer socialism

Two college professors, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, surveyed American beliefs about current and optimal distribution of wealth. The vast majority - 92% - preferred the distribution of Sweden (unlabelled in the survey) over America's own hugely unequal distribution.


From the abstract:

All demographic groups – even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy – desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

I wonder what the teabaggers would say.

(h/t KnoxViews and GOOD.is)

Running government like a business

Even when your house is burning down, you're on your own.

Yes, had the South Fulton fire department put out the fire, no one else outside the city limits would have ever signed up for the subscription again, and bye-bye additional revenue. That's why a government body shouldn't set up its revenue stream in a way that requires profit and loss calculations, rather than cost-benefit calculations.

(h/t KnoxViews)

Before HUAC

That's the (as yet mythical) House Un-Christian Activities Committee...

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a coven?

The truth is that Christine O'Donnell's teenage flirtation with witchcraft should not be an issue. It has no bearing at all on the votes of liberal (who won't vote for her anyway). Only the fundamentalists, who believe the so-called dark arts are real, and other social conservatives care.

Having once been so unrational as to cast spells means that O'Donnell is of questionable purity and puritanical character. She could be a sleeper for Satan! Call the Church Lady!

On the other hand, they could forgive her. Duhbya had been a drunk and a druggie, and he himself stated to a reporter at the 1988 Republican National Convention that he talked about "pussy" with his father. Though reformed from the booze at least most of the time, he plainly remained completely egotistical, yet his mere claims to be born again were enough to win the blind faith of many of his followers. They still think he's a godly righteous Christian man even after all the people he killed needlessly.

Still, witchcraft could be a bit too out there.

Freedom of my religion

Jim DeMint, like fundamentalists of a certain stripe, doesn't believe in the freedom of each person to make religious choices unhindered by government. This is what we mean when we call these people the American Taliban:

Speaking at a church rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, DeMint told attendees people quietly told him he should not back down from a position he took in 2004 that openly gay individuals and single mothers who are involved in a sexual relationship should not be allowed to teach. He did not weigh in on whether unwed men should be allowed to teach.

"(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense," he said, according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. "But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion." [emphasis added]

DeMint argues here that the government abrogates his rights by permitting someone else the free exercise of religion. It's an astonishingly stupid point of view, yet one that's very common among religious conservatives. (Conservatism, bad for you!)

And what the hell is a "church rally"? Sounds as though the IRS should be revoking more tax exemptions...

Wages of sin

For Republicans, the wages of deceit is renewed power. They've offered nothing for the past two years but hypocritical, unyielding opposition to anything of benefit to Americans.

Iin a month, Americans, who have become so easy to scare and buffalo, will probably reward the GOP for their intransigence. We will get the government we deserve for our foolish inability to distinguish reality from bullshit and for our inability to stay the course in the face of furious and obviously unhinged opposition.

Bullshit deficit

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

BREAKING: Palin not booed

It should be a rare event and thus newsworthy for Sarah Palin not to be booed. So I can see why CNN is paying so much attention to this story of great social and political import.

Too bad should and is bear no relation to each other in American politics today.

Another double standard

Conservative Christianists organize to endorse Republicans from the pulpit and dare the IRS to enforce the plain law that this is political activity incompatible with tax exemption. Yet when a liberal church advocated John Kerry's policies in preference to Duhbya's, the IRS investigated and revoked its tax exemption.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Teaching casual lying to kindergarteners

Right-wing lying is so utterly routine that it ordinarily passes by unnoticed, no matter how extreme.

[Ann] Coulter also made a forceful case against sex education in schools, accusing liberals of attempting to teach kindergartners about "fisting".

Neither Talking Points Memo nor the Huffington Post (h/t) bothers to yell bullshit!

Truth will out

For some reason - naivete, stupidity, laziness, or whatever - Democrats think their truths will sell themselves. Are they fucking soft?

Click image for full Mark Streeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

Conservative Alzheimer's

The 1990s? The insane attacks on Bill Clinton? We conservatives can't remember anything since the 1950s.

If you must, click image for full Terry Wise/Ratland Ink Press cartoon. But it's ignoramus bullshit.

Product and propaganda

The single unifying principle of the Fox media empire is that they're selling product. Watching the NFL...

• Michael Vick was in Atlanta and then (memory hole) he came to Vickadelphia. Yay! Redemption from "whatever problems off the field." And respect. You have to respect his talent (which is true).
• The announcers constantly hype one thing or another. The action can never speak for itself. Like Sean Hannity or Megyn Kelly, they must give it meaning - the meaning that Fox needs for the action to have. Viewers are expected not to notice how often the announcers miss what's plainly in front of all of us, and most viewers are all too happy to accommodate.
  
• Injured Denver Broncos receiver Kenny McKinley "passed away." We can't have suicide intruding upon the circus of our modern imperium.
• Even when obviously selling, media recognizes this about itself. Audi's ad tells us that we've been propagandized - "I've been told." Then it in turn and by definition tells us its own propaganda.

In fact, selling is not at all restricted to Fox. I stopped watching CNN because of the constant product placements. But Fox is relentless in the expression of its singular point of view.

I am thankful that my father taught me on many weekend afternoons that TV constantly purveys bullshit. He did this by mocking both ads and sports announcers. I only hope I've passed this on to my daughter.

American families everywhere need this lesson.

Death Nell, or Tied to the Tracks

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

Rich fantasy life

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

The way-back machine

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Postcards From the Pledge
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Not even that funny, just a rare commodity these days - journalism with context.

Fool me twice

Click image for full Elena Steier/Center for American Blogress cartoon.

Citizens united - some of them anyway

Click image for full Ed Stein cartoon.

Right-wing dilemma

With abortion illegal and punished in many Mexican states, if a Mexican woman crosses the border to the United States while embarazada to have an abortion, is her fetus in the eyes of the wingnuts just another undeserving mojado and a danger to our national security, or is it a citizen deserving the full rights of a person?

Update: My 3,000th published post! Think I'll have a Tanqueray and tonic to celebrate.

Afghan cross-dressing thought experiment

Girls playing boys for their parents, o.k.

Can you imagine an Afghan boy dressing as a girl? What would the "honor" killers do with that?

(Note: The subject is yet again a phrase like nothing I ever imagined writing.)

Not ready for prime time

Over and over again, teabagger candidates - even those who have appeared on TV professionally - are unable to answer easy questions from the media. Shortly after, they become unwilling to take those questions for fear of tripping over the truth and sprawling headlong into ridicule.

Is it too much to ask that these candidates have some freaking idea what they're talking about?

No doubt the right-wingers will alibi that the so-called liberal media is just out to get them. That's tripe and nonsense, a ready-made excuse for moronic performance.

Good news on the economy

For a change.

Larry Summers fired and sent back to Harvard, gently but firmly. At the Big H, his opportunities to damage the nation will be fewer, though still non-zero. I only hope no future President takes him half as seriously as President Obama has.

Is there any way Drew Faust can assign him to a seat by the window?

If you think ignorance is expensive

... try some more of it.

Click image for full Tim Jackson/Chicago Defender cartoon.

Triumph of packaging

I was going to write a longish screed on the right's embrace of looks over substance - Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Scott Brown, and now Christine O'Donnell. But this sums it up much more succinctly.

Click image for full Jen Sorenson/C-VILLE Weekly cartoon.
The tagline can't be an accident regarding the anti-sex O'Donnell!

Misunderestimating the intelligence of the American public

Click image for full Rex Babin/Sacramento Bee cartoon.

Making the O face

As in O'Donnell - but in opposition:

Harley Farger, a leading Delaware masturbator and planner of the Million Masturbators March, said it was difficult to organize masturbators “because they’re used to acting alone.”

(h/t DailyKos to Digby to DownWithTyranny)

Fiscal priorities

Deficit! Deficit! Deficit!

(whisper, whisper)

We can't raise taxes on the wealthy!

When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”

The insincere so-called deficit hawks won't actually speak the pseudo-quote at the end of the block quote, but their actions speak very loudly. They are not willing to raise taxes, even on the wealthy, the very same people who have gained every significant advantage written into tax law over the past thirty years, the very same people who gained virtually all of the financial bailouts, the very same people whose incomes have skyrocketed while everyone else's have stagnated.

Conservative Democrats are not on your side any more than the whole lot of Republicans are.

Thumb on the scale

CNN and Money tout a consensus of economists in favor of leaving the rich their huge tax cuts so that the middle class can continue with its usual crumbs. That settles it, right? They aren't teabaggers. We have to listen to the experts...

But.

Like big media everywhere, Money has stacked its lineup of thirty-one economists. Bank-owned economists are well represented. Investment and insurance have their guys in the list. Even real estate and retail are there. These people work for institutions who utterly and completely failed to foresee the current crisis.

These are also people whose paychecks depend on how well they serve the interests of wealth. It's not surprising to find that they find brave new ways to rationalize even more trickle down economics.

Has trickle-down abjectly failed for the past thirty years? No problem, they can find more rationalizations that sound good. It's only coincidental that they're defending policies that help their clients. They're really doing it for small businesses that are too marginal to have bothered to incorporate. I shit you not:

The 'why' behind extending tax benefits - The reason for this idea is to shield small business from tax hikes. Many small businesses are not incorporated so their owners pay the personal tax rate. This means that if the personal tax rate goes up, the tax on business goes up and that will restrict activity. Congress has known about this for some time and has done nothing to solve the problem. It’s back! A tax hike on high wage earners is one thing; a tax on business is something else. That is what is really at stake and Mr Summers wants to hide that and prefers to sell policy on the basis of ideas rooted in class warfare which can never be good but do get the blood flowing.

This Ph.D. moron, Robert Brusca, is calling Larry Summers a class warrior! And he's serious about it - or pretends to be. So much for the intellectual honesty he finds lacking in Summers. (I do too, but for completely different reasons. Can we please get Summers out of any institution that matters to the common weal!)

Money salts the list with a few academics, four by my count. But even three of them are business economists. Three of the four teach at small California colleges that I had never heard of before - Cal. State Channel Islands?

Any Nobelists? Anyone paid by a labor union? Any balance whatsoever? I know the business press doesn't have any balance in its Rolodex. Isn't it time to do a little research?

Evidently not. Better to let CNN run with the bullshit that makes all its owners and upper management happy...

Still, the totally scary news is that these business economists predict a jobless recovery through the end of 2011, despite raging unemployment between 8 and 10 percent. To prove their complete bias, most of them oppose any further help for the unemployed.

In summary, CNN/Money, through their bias says, Hurting? Fuck you. Rich. Free money!

Assholes.

He cut down the cherry tree

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Some of the people all of the time

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Name your poison

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Anti-anti

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

Wingnuts correct the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion

The Founders cared so much about the free exercise of religion that they put it first in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The wingnut's imagined text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any particular Christian denomination, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Oh sure, they'll let the Jews practice their religion freely too. They haven't killed Christ in like 2000 years, and besides, the fundies need them to help the End Times arrive.

But Muslims? No way. Cal Thomas tells his wingnut audience at Townhall:

We won't win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques.

Then he says that we need to be more like Syria, that well-known beacon of religious liberty. I kid you not!

[T]he Syrian government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and has begun closely monitoring what is taught in religious schools. ...

What does Syria know that we refuse to acknowledge out of fear of offending "sensibilities"?

We must purge the evil from among us, or else.

Could we please start that purge with Cal? (Kidding of course.)

(h/t Mediamatters)

Cream DeMint

CNN abuses anonymous sourcing to cream a Republican for a change.

One unnamed senior GOP aide told CNN's Dana Bash: "I wonder who Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer are calling first tonight - Chris Coons for becoming the next Senator from Delaware or Jim DeMint for helping to make it happen.

This anonymous Republican aide is making a valid point, but it's still bad journalism for CNN to permit this aide to remain nameless, even if Dana Bash did launder her failure to name names through Peter Hamby.

Impotent op-ed

"Republicans must end partisanship"

Past nuclear arms control treaties have won broad bipartisan support, and it should be no different for this treaty.

Where has John Rhinelander been for the past twenty years? Republicans don't do bipartisan. They fight using every means they can lay their hands on until Democrats concede or fail.

In the past, as bad as it often was, the Republican Party wasn't led around by the nose by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, with Jim DeMint trying desperately ("pick me, pick me!") to get out in front of the frothing wingnuts.

Now it's Republicans, making the world worse one obstruction at a time!

Might as well ask a two-year-old to please stop throwing tantrums. The difference of course is that a two-year-old will eventually become three, while Republicans will only get more extreme, as they have through all of the last fifty years.

Book of Jon

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Team Mohammed vs. Team Jesus - Religious Conflict
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Why liberals think conservatives harbor racists

'Cause they do:

[T]here's no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama's parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don't want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black. It has been two years since a black man was elected president of the United States, and for a group of conservatives clinging to their cultural superiority, this was a moment of apocalyptic existential crisis, a moment that refuted all they had come to know and understand about themselves, about black people, and about this country. [Dinesh] D'Souza is writing for them, the same kind of audience he has always written for.

Conservatives deeply resent being called racists over claims such as D'Souza's, thrust forward by Newt Gingrich. Their logic appears to be:

• D'Souza has pigmented skin and therefore cannot be racist - or even say something racist.
• A conservative white guy can - and eagerly will - repeat anything a black (or brown or any other non-pale shade) person can say. (Digression: which is why it's no longer racist in wingnuttia for 50-year-old white guys with Confederate flags to say n***** as long as it's in rhyme.)
• Liberals are the true racists for not agreeing to this so-called logic.
• Pbbbt!!!

(h/t Atrios)

Fox asks - innocently

Is the President avoiding CHURCH for political reasons?

Fox just teased that bullshit during the NFL game between Philadelphia and Green Bay. They know how to get their message through to the credulous idiots who are the centroid of American politics.

Fox is a propaganda outlet and deserves exactly zero credibility.

Legend management

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

All the rules change for war

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Nine years

Too long. Not long enough.

I remember.

Update (9/13): Go and read Tom Levenson. You'll be glad you did.

Disappointing vs. batshit insane

Krugman is somewhat more polite than my headline:

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.

A shared reproach

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

Fix the facts

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Are You Ready for Some Midterms? - MSNBC's Political Narrative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Is there anyone more dishonest than Sean Hannity?

Only path to responsible conservatism

[Retiring Sen. George] Voinovich said he could no longer support efforts by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to delay the measure in hopes of winning the right to offer additional GOP amendments. Most of the proposed amendments "didn't have anything to do with the bill" anyway, Voinovich said, and amounted merely to partisan "messaging."

"We don't have time for messaging. We don't have time anymore. This country is really hurting," Voinovich said. If a single amendment to reduce paperwork for business owners is considered on the floor, Voinovich said he told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he would add his vote to that of 59 Democrats.

Retire. There's no place for you in today's radicalized teabagger and wingnut Republican Party.

Not a baby bird

Using a cell phone while driving is clearly risky. I've been put at risk repeatedly by commuters who can't seem to get out of their parking lots without holding a phone to their ears and tuning out every other driver, whom they then threaten to send off to the body shop - or the body farm.

Good, careful studies have shown that merely talking on a cell phone impairs a driver more than being drunk and subjects that driver to greater risk of accident. Talking on the phone is distracting, and distraction is a great enemy of careful driving.

And yet...

Thirty-four thousand people died on the roads last year. (Osama bin Laden, eat your heart out.) Drunk driving was implicated in a third of these deaths - more than 11,000. (h/t Atrios)

Yet, while cell phones have exploded in popularity and common use on the road, there has been no corresponding surge in traffic fatalities. If cell phone use is really as bad as drunk driving, NHTSA should be calling it out as a separate category of distraction, and I'd expect to find another 10,000 dead in the stats. But no.

Now the meta point...

Teabaggers and other wingnuts believe lots of things that the media feeds them. They also disbelieve lots of other things that the media feeds them.

I have no problem in general with skepticism of official sources, which frequently bullshit all of us. I'm not a baby bird, swallowing whatever mom and dad regurgitate into my avid little gullet. No one should be, not teabaggers, no one. I'd just like to separate truth from fiction rationally.

OK, so how to explain the difference between the studied and proven risks of drivers on the phone? Could the problem be a binning defect in our definition of drunk driving? Is it possible that we've reduced the legal standard of drunk driving (0.08% blood alcohol by volume in most states) well beyond the point at which diminishing returns have set in? I thought so until I did a few sample blood alcohol calculations (here). Using my own experiences and perceptions as a guide, there's no doubt that significant impairment begins below the legal standard. (I tested my perceptions, too. One drink per hour for four hours yields almost no blood alcohol at my weight, and that matches my self-assessment of impairment.)

Could there be a huge number of drunks on the road at all times? I don't think that explanation works. The visible rate of cell phone use is significantly higher than the percentage of the population who are problem drinkers. (Yes, both of those stats are proxies for what we'd really try to measure.)

Maybe the problem of alcohol is not the skill impairments at all but, instead, the impairment of judgement. Poor impulse control, found in cell users only at background levels, is rife in drinkers. Interestingly, stoners behind the wheel have impaired skills, too, but they don't pose increased risks because they're blessedly cautious.

Poor impulse control could push drunk drivers beyond the threshold of speed and recklessness that causes more fatal accidents, while cell phone users are so distracted they are at greater risk for non-fatal accidents.

Is this theory true? It's plausible, but I don't know that it's true. In the media, I'd settle for plausible, with the truth to be refined and worked out over time, as it always must be.

Yeah, I'm aware after five decades of life that that's too much to ask for - waaay too much.

Not dead yet, I'm feeling better

Last week, Gallup polled the generic Congressional ballot and found the Republicans - even these Republicans - ahead by ten percent, their biggest margin ever. Teabaggers everywhere cheered. Loudly, angrily. Of course. See, they said, we're gonna git you, suckas.

My side, those of us who are merely disappointed by the Democrats, but who recognize that the alternative is batshit insane, responded with keening, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. We're good that all three.

This week, Gallup has the gap at zero, and even they can't explain it. That thing about the greatest margin ever might have been the first hint that called for a little skepticism.

I heard about the new poll in a DCCC blast email on Wednesday, and it reached the media as early as Tuesday evening, but there's been very little ballyhoo. The media seem unwilling even to consider that their dominant narrative - Republican sweep! - might be reconsidered by the voters.

No, I don't believe we're even, just as I didn't believe there was a 10-point gap. Damn nuance! How do you fit that into a narrative simple enough for TV news simpletons?

The good news for the media: Gallup is already at work on the next weekly tracking poll. Maybe that will help them bring their chosen narrative back to credibility!

Wrong for Duhbya, wrong for Obama

An unchecked power to shield torturers and rendition to torturers - and potentially anyone else - from judicial review is bad in the hands of any President, right, left, upside-down, or sideways. Duhbya was wrong to assert it, Obama was wrong to defend that assertion, and the 9th Circuit en banc was wrong to overturn a prior 3-judge decision to nullify the current sweeping scope of it.

This is bad for legal precedent, it's bad for accountability of the executive branch, and it's also bad for the informed electorate that is vital to the citizens of a democracy. Got an embarrassing or criminal act you don't want to answer for? Call it a state secret.

These are clearly activist judges. I wonder when teabaggers and wingnuts will object. Oh, right, they're for torture, so it must be in the Constitution somewhere, probably in Tenth Amendment. Yeah, that's the ticket - the CIA is people!

Just win, baby

Another Republican who couldn't give a shit about the actual consent of the governed:

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative, [Steve May,] who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats.

This is why Democrats are also suspicious in South Carolina.

Threats from the mainstream right

A successful Republican political consultant adds his twitfulness to the wingnut chorus fantasizing about violence against their political opponents.

Later, they'll claim that they had no idea their words could incite actual violence.

Too foolish

Why is it that Americans can't tell that the huge political spending of the Chamber of Commerce, among other plutocratic groups, is not to benefit citizens but rather to benefit their secret contributors? No bullshit detectors.

Where's the pro in all the con?

The optimistic view:

[T]he inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

Then there's the pessimistic view:

There is one big difference between today and the 1930s, however. Once there was a political party in America - the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society - that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor. But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different path. Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP's plutocracy protection service. And, seemingly, for getting its face bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture.

We may have a long, hard slog of privation and national diminishment ahead of us. Democrats, who are merely disappointing, are taking the blame. Republicans, who offer nothing more than "you're not rich, screw you" - and who really are to blame - stand to regain power.

Fairness doesn't enter into it remotely. Or maybe, as David Michael Green says, this bitter outcome is just what we've earned by being repeatedly stupid.

Teabonics

Go. Read. Politics has to be fun.

Easy!

Easy as a Chamber of Commerce attack ad!

Click image for full Paul Fell/Artizans Syndicate cartoon.

Nostalgia for past economies

From Wikipedia, lightly edited in a highly prejudicial fashion:

During that time, the Great Depression reached its low point. In line with conservative economic theory that less government spending would spur economic growth, [Republicans] drastically cut state expenditures, including in the social sector. He expected and accepted that the economic crisis would, for a while, deteriorate before things would improve. Among others, the [conservatives] completely halted all public grants to the obligatory unemployment insurance ..., which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.

85 IQ points

You need very little intelligence and no knowledge whatsoever to have an opinion about the new Oval Office decor, but Candy Crowley and CNN will pander to the stupid, moronic lowest common denominator by pretending it matters. In a balanced way.

This is why there's hardly any useful news on TV. It's an entertainment medium for the terminally dumb. Crowley even reads her teleprompter with the same air of frowning bafflement as Duhbya used to.

No wonder we seem to be on the edge of moving from disappointing results from two years of national repair back to the people who took eight years to fuck us up beyond recognition - and then even further into teabagger extremeness. As a nation, we appear to be too stupid to notice that we're getting fooled again by all the same bullshit.

Rent to own?

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Full-throated liberalism?

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

No lie too base or too obvious

For three decades or more, Republicans have needed to whitewash the racism of their Southern base, and they appeared to have settled on how to do that. Their hands were clean. It was segregationist Southern Democrats who passed and defended Jim Crow, not Republicans.

Now Haley Barbour (R-wherever bullshit is lily white) goes even further. He blames all Democrats now for the acts of long-dead Southern Democrats. His rationale is this:

• The transformation of the solid Democratic South into the mostly Republican South roughly coincided (very roughly) with the rise of civil rights for African Americans.
• Therefore, it was a new generation of Southern Republicans who brought about desegregation in their triumph over those eeevil Democrats.
  

Ne'mine' all that stuff about Nixon's Southern strategy offering a home to Southern racists who fled the Democratic Party because they didn't want to be desegregated. Definitely don't pay any attention to who it was who called out the National Guard in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama to integrate schools, who presided over passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, who sent the FBI into Mississippi to break the Ku Klux Klan. (Democrats!)

Don't believe that even a Republican would try such a big-balled, outright lie? Here's a direct quote from the vidlet (about 4:00 in):

My generation, who went to integrated schools - I went to integrated college - never thought twice about it. And it was the old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard. By my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, wadn't gone be that way any more. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.

Barbour went to Ole Miss starting in 1965 at a time when, it's true, James Meredith had graduated, though his mere matriculation had led to a white race riot that left two dead and dozens injured. What stopped the violence? Thirty-one thousand federal troops sent by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

When Barbour arrived two (loooong!) years after Meredith graduated in 1963, I'm sure there were a handful of black students amidst a hostile white student body. In Barbour's three years in Oxford, did he attend even a single class that included a black man?

Of course, Barbour's claim that he and his generation never thought twice about integration is patent bullshit. The civil rights movement and the white racist backlash were in full swing all around him.

Trent Lott (R-Dixiecrat-lover), who would later be a high-ranking Republican Senator, had been busy in 1962 defending his all-white fraternity against membership for African-Americans. Even now, a few years after Lott resigned for lauding Strom Thurmond's openly racist 1948 campaign for President, Barbour still praises him!

Medgar Evers had been assassinated in 1963 in Jackson, 50 miles from Yazoo City, where Barbour was going to high school.

Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered in 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, about 90 miles from Yazoo City and 125 miles from Oxford.

James Meredith was shot in 1966, while Barbour and his generation had supposedly put segregation behind them. Did one more in a long succession of white race crimes make racial integration seem fully settled in Mississippi?

Barbour was a junior at Ole Miss that April day in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. Didn't he think about that? In his past carefully built out of bullshit, how did that even happen after his generation had determined that its heritage of white supremacy was "indefensible"?

Even now, African-Americans are about 13% of the student population at Ole Miss, while they're 37% of the population at large. How successful is desegregation even now if Brown v. Board of Education still hasn't provided a more even preparation of high schools students?

These Republicans were the successors of the Southern Democrats. Trent Lott was endorsed for Congress by his nominally Democratic predecessor. These Republicans played no role whatsoever is the overthrow of segregation, such as it has even happened in Mississippi. They weren't even mere spectators. They played to the same racist white voters as the Dixiecrats had for generations. Only the label had changed.

Trying to pass the lie that Southern Republicans are liberals on race disqualifies Barbour for any office in the United States.

The Duhbya model

Never explain, never apologize, never recant, never ever admit you're wrong even if it's completely obvious that you're bullshitting:



Immense props to Christina Boomer of the local ABC affiliate in Arizona for doing actual TV journalism (which is ordinarily an oxymoron). Salon's This Week in Crazy is also doing good stuff - in fact, it's becoming a must read that I'm going to add to my blogroll.

Mission accomplished

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

I do not think that word means what you think it means

The Iranian state press has fired back at Carla Bruni for daring to say that adulterers should not be stoned to death. The nerve! The mullahs' pet editorialists have pointed to Bruni's non-medieval sexual history and called her a hypocrite and a prostitute.

Bruni even deserves to die for having had sex (presumably) with more than one man. You can't say they're not consistent.

Uh, guys - and you know they're all guys, and they probably all have some secret shame, maybe even scantily clad pictures of Bruni herself - she'd be a hypocrite if she were a prostitute who favored stoning the adulterers.

There must be a deep human need to tamp down sexuality. Or maybe it's just a deep masculine need to control female sexuality. All the world's major religions stock some of their strongest taboos for sex, especially those dominated by men.

Our own founding Puritans put scarlet A's on women's clothing and locked randy people in stocks. Current fundamentalists think the word moral is solely about sex; Bill Clinton was immoral for his sexual transgressions, but Duhbya is moral despite raining death from the skies on the thinnest of pretexts and despite torturing hundreds.

Orthodox Jews are forbidden to touch their wives in their time of "uncleanness."

Conservative Muslims hide their women in shapeless bags that are even worse than the traditional habits of Catholic nuns. But note how similar the hijab and the wimple are!

Even randy adolescents have their secular ways of enforcing sexual mores on girls: Is there anything worse you can call a girl than slut?

I'm just not sure I understand what this deep-seated need is...

Please sir, I'd like some more

The residue of thirty years of trickle down economics:

The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

...

In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

Wealthy elites pushed this, first via their wholly own subsidiary, the Republican Party. They found a way, paradoxically and utterly without conscience, to make their desire to escape fair taxation appear populist to today's teabag types.

Then Democrats, by and large, meekly and weakly acquiesced - the buffet they could now get into was so sumptuous. I used to think that the pressure of post-Nixon campaign finance reform drove Democrats into the eager and mercenary arms of Goldman Sachs and friends, and I still think that had some effect. But the full story is more complicated, as it usually is.

Liberals triumphed over labor and conservative Democrats in 1972, and the party focused more on race and sex than on class. Actually, we focused on the poor, too, just not on the middle class, where we had traditionally been strong defenders of a fair share for wage-earners (even when that bled into racism in the South and ethnic discrimination in the North).

We liberals brought better education into the fore of the Democratic Party, but we also brought less staunch willingness to call bullshit on the elite consensus about economics, which was the wolf in sheep's clothing of the neo-classical synthesis. I almost bought into it myself as an undergrad. Almost. Then I saw how convenient it was for the elites to believe that the invisible hand of the market had magically selected them (to be born well!), and I'm always skeptical of the use of so-called knowledge to reinforce entrenched power, especially if that knowledge comes with a willingness to ignore glaring contrary facts.

Other people's money

In the 2012 version of the Republican Party, merely conservative is a big loser when the baseline is batshit insane. Since Tim Pawlenty looks mild and, whisper, whisper, sane, he has to double down on the teabag insanity:

The possible contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination issued an executive order Tuesday that directs Minnesota state agencies and departments not seek federal grants under the health care measure, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama this spring.

The key to understanding Republicans: They're not looking out for you.