Atlas jerked off

Is being responsible for one's own pleasure what it means to go Galt?

[Atlas Shrugged is] a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. ... Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.  ...

Ayn Rand couldn't even fantasize a world in which her bullshit was plausible.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

Which comes first?

Krugman, as usual, whacks the arationality of the Republican mole:

Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive.

...

[T]he modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.

Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren’t interested in and didn’t need any real policy analysis — in fact, they’re basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we’re having some kind of rational discussion. We aren’t.

Conservatives in America prefer myth.  It's not that reality is too harsh.  Reality would require them to alter their beliefs, and they are constitutionally unable to do that.

I believe you can't know what's right without knowing what's true.  Much of the Teapublican base believes you must first know what's right before you can then determine what's true.  I take the scientific revolution as correctly victorious.  They want to revert to scholasticism that protects ignorance and poverty in a static world where learning outside their one true faith is a crime.

Oh, but they'll take the new gadgets that science and engineering produce, just not the empiricism required to produce the next set of ideas.

B-bu-but that's different!

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Preference for myth

Tennessee teabaggers want to whitewash history by law.  They want to make sure that public school teachers cannot criticize the Founders:

"No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

These teabaggers want the myth they believed as naive children without all those messy non-white people.  They want hagiography unrelieved by any evidence at all that the Founders were human beings like us, that they made mistakes, that they politicked in ways often as hardball as we do.

This conflict is the central conflict of the culture war.  We believe in following the evidence where it leads.  They believe in suppressing any evidence that their beliefs are unsupportable - the pre-Enlightenment view.

(h/t Salon and Huffington Post)

Sic semper insanus

Political assassins are very often loners and losers, alienated borderline personalities on a quest to prove they're not as small as they feel.  And often to die in their attacks and finally to quell their sense of worthlessness.

Jared Loughner is cut from this cloth.  His writings look, frankly, crazy.  They give a whole new meaning to warp and woof.

Is it enough to leave it there?  To alibi that the shootings in Tucson are simply an unavoidable tragedy?

No, of course not.  We have made choices - political choices - that make political murder more likely.  We can unmake these choices if enough of us think it's important enough.

First off, we live in an open society.  I've been struck by Representatives saying in response to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords that they need free access to us, the citizens, and of course we need access to them.  They're not aristocrats.

Maintaining an open society is far too important to surrender, even to a succession of lone wolves.  An open society is what we have democratic politics for.  If we were not going to control movement and public access to our elected officials after 1968 or 9/11, we shouldn't start now.  That doesn't mean we can't provide more security for judges and Congresspeople.

Second, we have decided, both for freedom and to save money, to mainstream people with even large and obvious mental health deficits.  It's not surprising that a few of them span the fuzzy borderline between weirdness and malevolence.

I doubt very seriously that there's any new rule about mental health interventions that would have blocked Loughner consistent with personal freedom for people who are not actually coming apart.  What if we made a national choice to have coverage parity for mental illness in our health insurance system!  Private insurance companies won't cover anything out of the goodness of their hearts, so this would take law-making.

Oh, right, Giffords voted for exactly this sort of requirement in the passage of Obamacare, and that's one of the two major reasons the teabaggers hate her (the other being her opposition to the Jan Brewer profile-a-Mexican act).  Repealing mental health parity is what the Republican caucus in the House wants to do.

Third, we have decided that wide access to guns is a vital political right.  Few places have taken this decision further than Arizona. Loughner could easily buy his Glock semi and, apparently, at least three extended clips, each holding 30 bullets.  He could legally carry it concealed without any vetting of his mental health.  Without any review before the fact.

The Arizona legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer enacted the right to concealed carry in 2010.  In 2007, when Loughner previously attended a Giffords event, had he been carrying his Glock, he would have been subject to arrest long before raising his coward's arm to the back of her head and inflicting a wound roughly the magnitude with which John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln.

Arizona is a place where the law is extremely pro-gun.  A bar or restaurant that chooses to be a gun-free zone must post its ban:

Otherwise, bring your Glock on in with as many extended clips as you can carry.

Last, we choose to protect free speech right up to the edge of incitement to violence and maybe even past the edge.  (h/t Digby)

Free speech is not only a First Amendment right, it's a core value of Americans.  We don't want to be told we can't say pretty much whatever springs to mind.  Loughner, even, holds this value, insanely wanting the right to call the number 6 "eighteen."

Legally, incitement to violence has a high bar and is seldom prosecuted.  That's as it should be.  Nearly all the hysterical teabagger statements have been protected speech, even when they coarsely and immorally revel in fantasies of violence.  (I include Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh among the sick purveyors of political violence porn.  They're not the worst, of course.)

But there are other responsibilities than legal ones.  We live in a society that has grown enured to vicious, ugly political rhetoric, almost all of it from the right wing.  As a society, we need to do something about this.

Not outlaw hate speech, of course.  Sanction it socially as outside the polite norms of society.  Express our disapproval in no uncertain terms.  Make the malcontent cranks and liars look like ... the malcontent cranks and liars they are.  Treat them like a turd in the punch bowl.

Social norms matter immensely.  The reason wingnuts hate political correctness so much is that it constrains the slurs they can use.  They'd never admit it, but they have substituted their own much more restrictive PC for the social consensus that they've been attacking for 25 years.  Suddenly there are rules against cheering at memorial services that the wingers hope will excuse them from listening to the content.  And, of course, every manufactured social norm of the right comes with an IOKIYAR get out of jail free card.

I've been spending a lot of time recently mocking, rebutting, and defending against the usual array of know-nothing wingnuts on the MetroWest Daily News.  It is continually amazing how strongly they prefer to be ignoramuses.

Still, it's important that they not go unopposed.  There are too many others reading who are easily led astray if all they hear is bile and illiberal bullshit.  Roll up your sleeves, pick a site, and start tearing down the haters.

Note:  I wrote nearly all of this on Jan. 9 but didn't think it was finished.  Today, I added seven paragraphs to the end (which really wasn't finished), took out some blank spaces where I had intended to go on longer, and hit Publish Post.

Appease the sensitivities

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Li'l Twain! Real possibilities there. I remember when a single parent complaint got Catcher in the Rye banned in eighth grade.  Let me tell you everyone read that book.

On the day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday with a black man as President, it's good but still uncomfortable that we can speak a little more frankly about race.  Of course, there are still many people who want to speak frankly without speaking constructively.  Yeah, Rush Limbaugh's target audience.

Compare and contrast

Click image for full MStreeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

Stopped celestial clock

Click image for full Nate Beeler/Washington Examiner cartoon.

Even a doctrinaire conservative cartoonist, who's seldom even in the neighborhood of funny, can get one right.  He just has to leave out the politics.

Republicans don't care about the deficit

They just don't.

Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or a fool.

War on memorial services

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Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy are the two stupidest men on television. The belong on Fox.

Smells like Founders spirit

(h/t Digby)

A solemn vow

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

Fun with guns

If Rush Limbaugh doesn't realize that he's been at least up to the edge of the abyss (actually floating zeppelin-like his own gasbag self well beyond the edge), why did he take down this billboard not far from the Safeway where Gabrielle Giffords was shot?

He knows.  It's his job.

Personal responsibility

For conservatives, personal responsibility means they're not responsible for anything:

Though such extraordinary self-pity may seem from the outside depressing to live with, it has its advantages. It gives the sufferer's life purpose and meaning. Since he's always the victim, he never has to step up and accept responsibility for anything. In short, being a conservative means never having to say you're sorry, which makes it ideal for people who are fundamentally incapable of admitting they ever have anything or anyone besides themselves to be sorry for.

Even Katrina, not their fault!!!  (Petulantly...)

Oh, I know the wingers think personal responsibility is not blaming anything larger than the person connected to the trigger finger, and that's a good definition for the rest of us.  But fundamentally they won't ever accept blame for anything.

Something I wish I'd said

Winston Smith of Philosoraptor fame (and deserving of more) limns right-wing responsibility for their own rhetoric:

Many people--including politicians and influential media figures--on the right now commonly say things which, in effect, constitute an argument for the conclusion that violence ought to be used against liberals and Democrats in general and the President in particular. You can deny that you are advocating violence all you want, but if you say that liberals are evil, that they are intentionally ruining the country, that they are trying to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian "socialist" state (and succeeding), then you are building a case for the use of violence against them, intentionally or not. (And this is not to even mention claims to the effect that the President is illegitimate and, perhaps, the Antichrist.) If you say such things, then you are trying to convince people of things such that, were a rational person to believe them, he would have to consider using violence in response. I can guarantee you, were an actual totalitarian movement actually on the brink of taking power in America, I would be contemplating violence against it. You would--and should--do the same. Add to the above some rhetoric about "Second Amendment remedies," and there is no rational way to deny that the right has sidled right on up to advocating violence.

Brilliant, clear, apt.  It's only three paragraphs.  Read it all.

So many lone wolves

You'd think it might be a movement:

For the last two years we have seen a rise in acts, and threats, of anti-government violence. At the same time, we’ve seen an eruption in dangerous, often violent, anti-government rhetoric embraced and mainstreamed by the right-wing media in America.

But it ain't "Alice's Restaurant" they're singing!  Anti-massacree?  Are you kidding me?!

At a time when Republicans are desperately encouraging the media to pretend that the left and the right are equally culpable in fomenting violence, it’s important to look at the facts. And the facts are clear: The violence has come entirely from the right.

There's a reason why the media screamers on the ignoramus right are straining so hard to pretty up their ugly record on threats and incitement:

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right - the mainstream as well as the fringe - has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

They know they're guilty in general even if the Giffords case is more ambiguous.  But they're seeking the cover of false equivalence and busily trying to make themselves out to be the victims.

(h/t Kos)

Anti-democracy of dunces

Digby rides again:

The real problem, in my view, is that there is a subset of Americans who believe that government is illegitimate if their chosen leaders aren't elected. They simply don't believe in democracy. Voting is a ritual for them, something one does, like go to church. But it's expected that their preferred leaders will always win and their preferred agenda is the only one that will be enacted. (In one of the greatest ironies ever, they are undoubtedly the same people who stuck with George W. Bush to bitter end --- the most illegitimate president ever.) They get very, very agitated and angry whenever they are not "in charge." (Sadly for them, they never actually are.)

Update: By the way, Duhbya has significant competition for "most illegitimate president."  See Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and John Quincy Adams in 1824.  But he wins easily for any election of the past 100 years.

You tawkin' to me?

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Marinating in hatred

Jared Loughner didn't get the memo that the threatening rhetoric of the right is all theater.

When the GOP didn't have the votes to stop healthcare reform from passing, their strategy -- and it almost worked -- was to scare Democratic elected officials. That was the point of telling everyone to shout themselves hoarse at the town halls: to terrify House members. Convince them that their constituents were incensed.

Alex Pareene has a lot to say.  Read it all.  I think he's a bit eager to let the teabaggers off the hook, but he's right about this:

Jared Loughner ... most likely is ... some weird politically incoherent amalgamation of extremist beliefs tinged with paranoia.

Violent cultures beget violent acts.  Our culture started off a violent one, and the right wing - yes, including so-called mainstream Republicans - has made it more violent.  Arizona, in particular, has yielded to extremism on guns and eliminationist rhetoric.

Second Amendment remedies?

I don't know whether the shooter of Rep. Giselle Giffords (D) in Tucson, AZ, had political motives.  I hope not, but given the tenor of the times, it's a question that has to be answered - and soon.

Assassin Jared Loughner could have had a grudge against the federal judge that he did kill outright.  He could simply be crazy and in love with the power of a 9mm Glock with an extended magazine - the power to make him less useless and impotent.

A couple of points:  Open carry of firearms, which is the law in Arizona, utterly failed to deter or end this attack.  Eighteen people were injured, and the shooter was not apparently one of them.  Showdown at the O.K. corral did not turn out to be an effective crime-stopper.

The media is making a big deal about the lack of security for Congresspeople.  As if they didn't know before.  Maybe they're just channelling the ignorance of the public, who don't go to events at which Representatives or Senators show up without any security at all.  During this past election season, I saw my Congressman, Jim McGovern, many times - even at a local Tea Party event - and he never had security.

Update (1/10):  Not only is open carry the law of Arizona.  Concealed carry without a permit of any kind is also the law.

Also, the attack was cut short - not short enough - by unarmed citizens.

Articles of confabulation

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Hire calling

Click image for full Bruce Beattie cartoon.

Rules for your Boehner

Republican claims of transparency have nothing at all to do with any principle more noble than their own power:

Republicans have also pledged to have an open rule on all spending bills, which means that members of both parties will be able to offer more amendments and have more debate, which in theory would lead to more scrutiny for each government agency seeking financing.

A big exception will be the bill to repeal the health care law that House Republicans plan to bring up next week. That bill will not be subject to amendments, nor will Republicans have to abide by their own new rules that compel them to offset the cost of new bills that add to the deficit; the health care repeal and tax cuts are not subject to this new rule.

Majoritarian rule is the nature of the House, no matter how much they may dress up a sow's ear.

By the way, many (all?) bills are already on-line at Thomas.  Republicans want to take credit for that - I'd guess they're making some minor extension of what's already there.  Trust the media to point that out?  Why...

A House divided

Elected by voters whose memory couldn't outlast a station break...

The fundamental mission of the G.O.P. is to shovel ever more money to those who are already rich. That’s why you got all that disgracefully phony rhetoric from Republicans about attacking budget deficits and embracing austerity while at the same time they were fighting like mad people to pile up the better part of a trillion dollars in new debt by extending the Bush tax cuts. ...

Have we forgotten already who put us in such grave peril? Republicans benefit from the fact that memories are short and statutes of limitations shorter.

Wearing Daddy's shoes

Neil Swidey makes an even-handed point about Scott Brown (R-Cosmo):

Will Scott Brown go on to become a transformative political figure like Ted Kennedy, a senator whose name keeps company with the likes of Webster and Clay? Before you dismiss the idea, consider how outlandish it might have seemed had the same question been posed about the youngest Kennedy after his first year in office.

One state legislator I know said, "If Scott Brown can be Senator, ..." and trailed off into stunned amazement.

At the same time, it's hard to see how anyone expected much more out of Teddy Kennedy than a reliable vote for JFK, yet he grew into so much more.  At times, of course, that growth was an ugly and halting process to watch.  Even in the 1990s, ardent liberals such as I knew that Ted's strength was not his character or his intellect; it was his staff.

His office truly served his Massachusetts constituents, and we loved him for it and forgave his many personal sins.  His office also brought forward careful, well-crafted proposals and compromises that made him a brilliant legislator.

Could Scott Brown grow in a similar way?  Only time will tell.

I suspect that Brown won't have the chance.  I suspect that he will never win a full six-year term in the Senate.  The Massachusetts Democratic Party proved its strength in 2010, and we will be out in force for the 2012 Presidential election, striving to win back the sporadic voters who don't always turn out in mid-terms.

Brown has serious problems walking the fine line between his teabagger base and a liberal electorate. Conservatives dominate the Republican Party in Massachusetts.  They haven't always, but for the past twenty years, they have only paused occasionally to nominate moderates.  Mostly, they have chosen again and again to be satisfied with staying pure and getting whipped. 

Many Massachusans would like to have more partisan balance, but they're not willing to mimic the national picture, which requires so-called balance by going halvesies with batshit insane Confederate conservatism.  The marketplace of political ideas has spoken here, and Republicans, failing to listen, have steadily gone bust.

Not that Massachusetts doesn't have checks and balances still in place.  There are persistent factions within the Democratic Party.  It's just that the dividing lines are much more blurry between the Dukakis-heritage good government liberals, the urban coalition Dems, and the shrinking traditional conservative faction who are only Dems because the Republican Party is so hostile to both the center of the political spectrum and the center of the class spectrum.

Swidey talks about the strengths that may continue to help Brown - and they are practically all superficial.  Brown's handsome.  His family is attractive.  His daughter can sing.  (And that helps us how?)  His image has a pickup truck and a barn coat Photoshopped into it for our media narrative.

Swidey's not the first reporter to dwell on the surface.  In the modern hopeless political media, it would be exceptional if he didn't.

I would at least hope that Swidey would get the surface right.  He calls Brown pleasant and affable.  Not my experience.  I tried to be friendly, though I was obviously not a supporter, and Brown went off on me.  I wouldn't want to have a beer with the guy - not that that matters one whit.

Led by the media and our own laziness, we Americans have become more and more vacuous in our politics.  You think Christine O'Donnell would have gone beyond Bill Maher's show if she weren't cute?  You think Nikki Haley would be governor of South Carolina if she weren't pretty?  You think the nude pose in Cosmo hurt Scott Brown?  If only Joe Miller had had one of those!

Michael Deaver knew in the early 1980s that pictures are more important to politicians than words - and especially more important than thoughts.  All those happy pictures of Scott Brown are his greatest hope for re-election.

You do know what that means for Sarah Palin, don't you?

Life of the party

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Slap on the ...

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

What if Rodney King never asked a rhetorical question?

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Is she a $100,000 granny?

The Republican ideology of health care is clear evidence of the GOP's lurch even harder to the right.  They no longer support universal health care.  That just encourages people who really can't afford it to get sick!

The clearest evidence for this is that Obamacare was born in the 1990s as a proposal from the Heritage Foundation, once upon a time just about the most ultraconservative bullshit factory that big media would quote.  Less than two decades later - like Mitt Romney, who proposed and signed an individual mandate here in Massachusetts - Heritage is running far far away from its disowned child.  Far to the right, to the Confederate theory of the Constitution.

The whole vast right-wing cabal that fantasizes a return to feudalism - though without the noblesse oblige - wants to kill any program that buys something the rich have and that would otherwise be hard or impossible for the rest of us to get.  If we die in the process, too bad.

Observing Republicans gear up to try to undo "Obamacare," I suspect the only thing that will satisfy some is to make medical care in the United States work like veterinary care. You get what you can pay for. Otherwise, tough luck.

If it costs too much, conservatives will let Granny die like Gene Lyons' horse Lucky.  But Lucky will still be aptly named.  At least he got the mercy of being put down.

Since religious fanatics dominate the GOP and they have perverted the gospel message of mercy into, "Tough luck.  Suffer," you won't even be able to offer Granny enough morphine to ease her going when you can't afford to replace and rehab her broken hip.

They accuse us of enacting death panels!  They would let the profit motive determine who lives and who dies.

Infotainment, not information

Mediamatters tries mockery to tarnish Princess Sarah, and that's good as far as it goes.  But mocking her as a misinformer is weak tea.  The teabaggers and indeed most Americans have already shown that they decide their votes based on infotainment, rather than information.

And the Princess excels at vain displays of a neck-snapping blend of self-entitlement and victimhood. 

It's puzzling that so many self-described real American men can't tell that yet another pretty, self-centered high school cheerleader is using them.  Even at the huge distance between their loungers and the set of Fox News, they're thinking with their dicks.  About which she'd say to herself, "You are never getting near me with that wrinkled piece of past-dated vienna sausage."

What do you think, video-pheromones?

More Republican insincerity

When I say Republicans don't care about the deficit, this is what I mean:

This is just one key feature of the GOP's playbook: CUT/GO. Under CUT/GO, all new spending has to be paid for, but tax cuts do not. Additionally any new spending must be paid for with parallel spending cuts elsewhere in the budget -- not with tax hikes. So unemployment benefits couldn't be paid for by closing a corporate tax loophole. But a corporate tax loophole could be widened without requiring any offsets.

You think the teabaggers will scream about this?  Of course they won't.  They are just as insincere as the Republicans, for whom they are the extremist wingnut base.

Update: Krugman (and dozens more, probably) beat me to this.

Snookered

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

What's the punishment for heresy?

Pat Robertson (R-another planet) slipped off his usual Calvinist orthodoxy - and his spokesman had to correct him:

Chris Roslan, a CBN spokesman, insisted Thursday that Robertson "did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana. ... Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs."

But he should not feel so all alone.  Everybody must get stoned.  It's the mandatory minimum!

Republicans lie

... much more than Democrats do.

Now, of course, the GOP will have to accuse the fact-checking sites of liberal bias.  Even though the fact-checkers are much harder on Democrats than they are on Republicans.  If they were evenhanded, the tilt to conservative bullshit would be even more obvious.

Everyone knows Republicans have to lie.  They couldn't get elected with the truth.  Even Republicans know this.

Socialist gift redistribution complete!

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On to New Years

Redemption means more than a quarter back

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

What Tiny Tim said

You know Krugman wanted to use the word bullshit:

[T]he production of humbug — which was still a somewhat amateurish craft when Dickens wrote — has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.

Conservatism in America is built almost entirely on lies.  Consciously and intentionally.  It's deeply un-Christian and wholly uncharitable.

At Christmastime, Tiny Tim said, "God bless us, every one."

Conservatives to the contrary say with their actions, Devil take the hindmost.

Orwellian conservatives

Fox, like its Republican Party fellows, is actually radical in conservative clothing.

Even compared to the manifest swindles and perversions of the past 20 years or thereabouts, the United States has never seen anything like Fox News. The closest comparison to what Fox does daily would be the party-line propaganda sheets of the far left and extreme right that made Orwell worry "that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

Fox doesn't care what's true, only what it wants to be true.

Orwell describes the corrosive effect of politicized mass media. In Spain, he wrote, "I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.' "

More please!

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It's called the Daily Show. Is there a reason that good sense can't prevail every day?

Oh, right, Republicans...

Bullies

Reading up on the material in the Fox ignoramus effect, I found some really fun facts from 2008 about Fox's bullying of the rest of the big media (poor widdle babies!).

I had thought that reporters shied from taking on Fox because it might hire them some desperate day when the News Corporation owns all the big media.  Turns out, like Elisabeth Bumiller whose heart went pitty-pat when confronted by the hugeness and brilliance of Duhbya, reporters are mostly scared off.

Even those who will stand up have been bullied enough to hesitate:

Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead.

Fox is like a middle school punk on the street corner when the elementary school lets out.  (h/t mistermix at Balloon Juice)  This is their offense in defense of the ignoramus effect:

In a statement, Michael Clemente, who is the senior vice president of news editorial for [Fox News], said: “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.’”

...

For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the “Best Northeastern Colleges.” It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of “Best Party Schools.”

But back to 2008...

Can you imagine any other network than Fox digitally altering the appearance of journalists, Steven Reddicliffe and Jacques Steinberg, whom they're attacking?

The Fox attack dogs making this attack are Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.  Yes, those two who show the value of competition by competing with each other to be the stupidest man on TV news.  They have the unmitigated gall to call Reddicliffe and Steinberg "attack dogs."

Fox is dangerous to American democracy.

Only you can cause forest fires

If the global temperature trend were headed downward instead of upward, what would we do to forestall another ice age?

We'd burn every bit of slash and plant scrap we could lay our hands on to pump up the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Turning that into policy would be as easy as falling off a (burning) log, except that perhaps the oil industry would lobby for a cut of the burning program.  Hey, something for Republicans to do to gum up the works in favor of their corporate sponsors!  Even ethanol producers would start to ballyhoo the carbon footprint of their fertilizers, cultivation, and product transport in hope of having it both ways.  Bipartisan subsidy too!

No doubt someone - maybe me - would whinge about the disproportionate Chinese contribution to solving global cooling.  Why do they get to have all the campfires!?  I remember when America led the world accidentally sparking forest fires!

Bonus graphic:

When I first saw a graph like this in the late 1970s, it wasn't even called the Keeling Curve, but it was already cause for worry.  In the meantime, propaganda, not science, is the only force diminishing that concern.  CO₂ keeps right on trucking.

Against ethics before he was for it

John Boehner (R-consistent hypocrite) decides that ethics might be useful in the House.  Finally.

His plan, I'm sure:  Take credit for the investigations that Democrats started of other Democrats.

Whitewashing

Nothing else to call it...

Haley Barbour (R-nostalgia for the white experience of Jim Crow) climbs down from his nostalgia:

When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

But by no means far enough.  The White Citizens Council was actually coercing other people, uppity black people:

"Look," said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, "if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you — of course you don’t."

In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.

Bless ol' Haley's heart. At least his esteemed bigots didn't lynch anyone. They had such high standards!

Why we should have hanged Jeff Davis

Secession was treason and should have been treated as such.

One of America’s worst traitors, a man who had committed or condoned far worse acts against his country than Benedict Arnold, was allowed to go home after his brief detainment in Virginia. But even that lenient punishment was enough to elevate [Jefferson] Davis to Southern martyrdom. Rumors were spread throughout the South about his mistreatment at Fortress Monroe, although Davis himself said the stories were untrue. Until his death in 1889, he found a stronger voice in passionately defending the right of secession and extolling the nobility of the Lost Cause. He became, like so many of his fellow Confederates, an unreconstructed rebel. As one might expect, he never believed that he had committed a single traitorous act; in fact, he boldly, even arrogantly, affirmed that every one of his actions was legal and constitutional. Unlike Lee, he never sought a pardon, which is just as well because he probably would not have gotten it (although President Johnson, who was courting the Democratic Party at the time, could have easily caved in on this issue). But he also never uttered a single word of regret or remorse for the bloody revolutionary war he had willfully led against his country.

It was and is unpatriotic to adhere to the Confederacy.

Fox ignoramus effect

What went wrong in 2010?

The good news is that Americans realize that the media is bathing them in bullshit bubble-bath.


The bad news is that most of us apparently have no freaking idea how to distinguish shit from shinola.

The New York Times buries its lead (lede to the kool kidz). It wants to shout out - as it should - that Fox News makes its viewers more ignorant, not less. But it has to dither first, nicking MSNBC for the mote in its eye before proceeding to the log in Fox's.

The simple fact is Fox News infects its viewers with lies. Here's the proof Fox is a vector for bullshit:
There's an unmistakable Fox News ignoramus effect. The percentage of misinformed viewers goes up as their viewing peaks. Watching Fox daily disinforms viewers on 10 of 11 topics and disinforms them badly on 8 of the 11!

Note that Fox can get the facts right when those facts support Fox's political bias. The single topic on which Fox viewers became steadily better informed the more they watched: whether Democrats had proven the Chamber of Commerce used foreign money to finance its ad campaign against them.

Even after getting to their justified smackdown on Fox, the Times misses a much more dire story. No matter what medium an American prefers for news, there's a whole shit-load of ignorance out there. Fox is worst, CNN is pretty bad, but MSNBC is only good by exceedingly low standards. Newspapers in general are worse than MSNBC.

All of which is why we suffered in November a triumph at the polls of the refuted economic doctrines of the right wing:

Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.
Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

Zombie lies, kept alive by Fox and other right-wing propagandists, including the entire Republican establishment. Until we as a people become more discerning of the truth, we'll only get more politics of dogma, in which conservatives feel entitled to their own facts, no matter how contradicted by reality.

Update (12/21):  Fox misleads again - successfully! - though only the second sense of lie, not the stronger first sense.

Truth will set you free

Click image for full Ruben Bolling/Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon.

A spectre haunting Europe

Soon the senescent secular Europe will be overrun by Muslim immigrants and the unassimilated progeny of their oppressed, veiled women. They'll move in, have as many babies as a renegade Mormon living on welfare in Moab, take the public dole, and spend every night plotting the violent downfall of the foolish system that makes their conspiratorial leisure possible.

Right?

Uh, no.

Slightly more than 4 per cent of Europe's population is “Muslim,” as defined by demographers (though about 80 per cent of these people are not religiously observant, so they are better defined as secular citizens who have escaped religious nations).

In our putrid excuse for a national conversation, every time some fearful trope turns out to be a bullshit lie, it came from the right-wing propaganda machine.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

Party of no labels

In general, I'm in favor of a center right political party to replace the now-extremist Republican Party. The remnants of sanity on the right need a place to go where they don't have to believe the consensus absurdities of the GOP - science is a hoax, economics other than feudally inspired laissez-faire is a hoax, the corporate media is liberal, anyone who needs help is a lazy bum (except for the mostly white true believers), President Obama and the Democrats are socialists if not communists, etc.

No Labels, on the other hand, has problems. It's mainly Republicans and conservative Democrats who probably still admire Joe Lieberman's sanctimony, yet No Labels poses as the center. The big media, as always the handmaiden of power and especially corporate power, laps up this center-right pose of moderation.

It would be no surprise at all if No Labels turned out to be Michael Bloomberg's stalking horse for the Presidency in 2012. The problem of course is that, post-Citizens v. FEC, we mere citizens can't tell.

No Labels has no platform other than the one it rents for its luminaries to shine from. It's a "Truman Show" of politics, all manipulation and entertainment.

In short, there is no reason whatsoever for real Democrats to allow themselves to be cannibalized into an organization that reasonably ought only to pull sane conservatives out of the irredeemable GOP.

It always bears saying: Civility is not as important as the truth - nor as important as effective policy.

Goebbels warming

Always remember that Fox News exists to unbalance any factual discussion in favor of Fox's hard-right, anti-environment, pro-corporatist, pro-wealth politics:

Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data...

...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

Who said this?

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

(Wasn't Godwin's Law repealed?)

(h/t Atrios)

Politician

Lincoln was well known to oppose slavery vehemently, yet he said his first goal was preservation of the union. He was a politician - that's always important to remember about our sainted former Presidents. They weren't actually saints, just people trying to accomplish something, often against tall odds.

I think Lincoln might have considered carefully what his nation would actually go to war far. He might have found abolition wanting as a popular cause, even if it was in fact his real cause.

Marked “Private & confidential,” the letter instructed Kellogg to “entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over. … Have none of it. The tug has to come & better now than later.”

I wish I were confident that President Obama were flawed enough to do political battle for his beliefs.

Principal over principle

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Lame-as-F@#k Congress
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Media comment: Well, the Republicans may all be assholes, but they're really really good at all saying the same thing.

Let the cake-eaters pay my Social Security

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Government too limited

[I]t's not up to criminal law to stop every morally reprehensible aspect of behavior. Rather, the law should be for punishing behavior that's particularly socially damaging.

This proposal limits government too much for me.

Still too complex for the Teapublicans

Paul Krugman, as always, gives us the gift of simple proof. High unemployment is due to a lack of demand, not a temporary dislocation that requires no intervention in the so-called free market.
There are no jobs, hence the need to extend unemployment benefits.

The Teapublican alternative: Stop benefits, tell the longterm unemployed that they're on their own, and necessarily reduce aggregate demand in the economy as a whole. This is a perfect way to continue to reduce demand in the labor market, leading to even more unemployment and exhaustion of benefits.

Who wins in a persistently deflating labor market? Not people who work for a living, that's for sure.

The 1970s were so socialist

How much has trickled down? Hardly any of it.

What we got by electing Ronald Reagan: We confirmed and made much more extreme previous policy choices by Congress and Jimmy Carter that put investment interests ahead of national interests and certainly ahead of the interests of the middle class.

Why Jim Crow was necessary

Race-blind democracy in the vanquished South after the end of the Civil War would have completely changed the last century and a half. Mississippi and South Carolina were majority black.


Can you imagine those two states leading the civil rights movement! Louisiana and Alabama weren't far behind, either.

Jim Crow - and the Ku Klux Klan for that matter - were necessary to prevent the permanent loss of political power by the landed white aristocracy that had wanted and lost the war. Enfranchised black folks would not have voted for the bullshit that white folks voted for.

Nowadays, disenfranchisement is done by dipshits attacking ACORN and by voter intimidation efforts. These are mainstream Republican activities.

The aristocrats and oligarchs never stop fighting to own everything.

Victory in class warfare

There was a class war. The rich won.


Felix Salmon says:

If you were structuring a tax code from scratch, it would look nothing like this. But the problem is that tax hikes seem to be politically impossible no matter which party is in power. And since any revamp of the tax code would involve tax hikes somewhere, I fear we’re fiscally doomed.

Digby says:

If I were you, I would print out this post by Felix Salmon and pull it out whenever you confront some bozo who's railing about the deficit and insisting that we have to put old ladies on a cat food diet to fix the problem.

Specific policy proposals in addition to letting Duhbya's tax cuts expire above $250,000 of income:

• Once unemployment is below 7%, make the income tax more progressive with a 50% marginal tax rate on incomes over $1 million, to be lowered to 40% when the deficit (not including any surplus from Social Security) is lowered below 2% of GDP (currently, it's about 10% of GDP).
• Make the payroll taxes less regressive immediately by removing the income cap on taxes subject to FICA, Medicare, etc.
• Reinstitute the Paris Hilton tax at 50%, closing the loopholes that have allowed the lazy children of extreme wealth to escape taxes on their parents' estates, but raise the estate size floor to $4 million and index it for inflation.

But of course, President Obama has no taste for a fight. We needed FDR, not Mr. Rogers.

Circles and arrows

Click image for full Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News cartoon.

Class warfare

Hedge fund managers spent millions - that we know about - to protect their 15% tax rate. Yes, you read that right. They pay the same rate as someone making $35,000 a year.

And we guarantee the risks they take.

This is totally unjust.

Control of the Internet

China's no longer so concerned about separating their people from freedom of information:

The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.’’

“But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: The Web is fundamentally controllable,’’ the person said.

The U.S. security apparatus is working on control, too:

The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, told NZZ am Sonntag that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone [Julian Assange] who is on the run from the law."

Then there's Internet neutrality, which is doomed in the current environment in which corporations can buy the government they want.

Let's pretend

The Department of Defense and the rest of the government to employees: We prefer you to be ignorant even if it means not reading something potentially embarrassing to your management that everyone else in the world has access to.

"Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority," said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.

The strange thing is that doing something stupid like sending this notice is not embarrassing to the White House.

Wise guys

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.

Too big to fail

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

There goes the neighborhood

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

Massive epidemic of laziness

Despite their having launched us into "by far the worst post WWII employment recession," Republicans don't want to extend unemployment benefits. Those benefits have to end sometime, they say, why not now?

Do they want to condemn all the willing workers represented by the red line to life-long penury?


With so many people out of work and so few jobs available for them to fill, the Republican answer is tough shit. Penury for the unemployed? Sure, sign me up. It's the libertarian creed.

Even though there are thousands of jobs where millions are needed, the Republicans pretend that the unemployed are being justly punished for laziness. Those malingering bums would rather scrape by on a few hundred dollars a month than work for a few thousand. They'll never learn to take care of themselves until they've spent a long time in a soup line. Which the GOP will make sure won't be there anyway.

The unemployed layabouts have to do more than send hundreds of resumes for every job opening.

(h/t Atrios at Eschaton)

Serbs and Croats

Hard as it may be to believe, the South still harbors people who believe the Civil War ended with the wrong victor. These pro-treason neo-Confederates blame the Union for its unprovoked attack on their peaceful secession (cough, Ft. Sumter, cough). They blame a tariff that didn't pass until after they seceded.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans don't blame their forefathers for holding other humans in brutal bondage. Their ancestors were fighting for liberty! Well, liberty for the landed white male gentry, anyhow...

Defense of slavery is still - publicly - a bridge too far even for these historical revisionists. So they deny that it was an important cause of the war. The overwhelming historical record that proves otherwise? Their heads are too far up their asses to see that.

'Tis the season

Click image for full Paul Fell/Artizans Syndicate cartoon.

Lying to you

I surely can't be the first person to notice this. (Don't call me Shirley. RIP.)

Paul Steinhauser of CNN completely misrepresented a McClatchy-Marist poll.

The actual poll asked whether voters think Republicans ought to compromise with Democrats to get things done:

The Republicans have control of the House of Representatives. Which statement comes closer to your view about what you think should happen:

• The Republicans should compromise with the Democrats and President Obama to get things done
• The Republicans should stand firm on their positions even if it means things don't get done

Steinhauser dishonestly portrays the results as showing that the voters want Democrats and Republicans to work together.

One day before a White House meeting between President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders from both political parties, a new poll suggests most Americans want Democrats and Republicans to compromise.

The actual poll is about what Republicans should do. Steinhauser spins it into a bullshit balance, portraying the voters as saying something they didn't say.

Some liberal media! In my newsroom, this would be a firing offense. If I only had a newsroom.

Why does it matter if the media lies about polls? Those lies can actually push people toward different positions. That's why candidates and parties pimp their biased partisan polls during election season.

What Republicans really care about

Lower taxes for rich people outweigh all other issues.

The deficit? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

A reduced risk of nuclear proliferation or war? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Citizenship for immigrant soldiers? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Extension of unemployment benefits? Of course, not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Repeal of don't ask, don't tell? Oh, right, they're against that anyway.

The core Republican view of the world holds that, if rich people are even better off, everyone else is either better off or doesn't deserve to be better off. Mostly the latter. Peons.