Ayn Rand wouldn't have helped

This 2008 ESPN video has been coming 'round on the git-tar again:



I saw this on Facebook.  Actually, I saw a similar vidlet on something called Godvine, edited to hide its origin.  Google helped me find this version, which at least is clear about its origin.  I'd embed something from ESPN itself, but all it has is this print story.

I can see why Godvine would want to claim the story, even though none of the fine sportswomen mention God, at least on air.  It is a heartwarming story of virtue and altruism, just the sort of values that Jesus honored.  Those who aspire to godliness should want to set a social norm of generosity and helpfulness toward their fellow humans.

The radical capitalists don't live this way.  They don't put their character before their profits.  Wall Street defends its profits as deserved, even as it denies that deserving matters.  The very accrual of wealth is self-justifying to the moral midgets of the plutocratic right wing.

They'd look at the young women who helped their opponent to their own detriment as willing losers.  They'd scoff at their sacrifice, at altruism in any sense.  They'd deny even the possibility of altruism and assert that Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace must have derived value from their act, even though they lost the chance to reach the playoffs because of it.  Of course, the selfish, Rand-inspired capitalists would also sneer at anyone so naive as to put sportsmanship above profit.  Those softball players need a good capitalist re-education camp to learn the value of having no values other than mercenary ones.

This contrast between wealth and Christianity is a tension among conservatives.  They've tried to spackle the fault line with the prosperity gospel, a totally ahistorical and patently laughable attempt to claim the divine right of wealth.  If those people are going to heaven, it's hard to see the meaning of Jesus' ministry to the poor and powerless.

In Congress and state legislatures around America, wealth is attacking anyone who is weaker.  The social consensus that this bleak greed is ugly and wrong seems to have died in our age of selfishness and bullshit.  But there may come a reckoning for the wealthy class warriors, when at last people understand that Republicans will take food from the disabled so that their kleptocrat corporate cronies can sneak a hundred more Havana cigars across the Gulf of Mexico for their smoking parties.

All those shabby middle class Goliaths

Pity the poor Koch brothers out on the field of battle in the Valley of Elah, armed only with their Galtian superiority and $20 billion between them.  They are the oppressed, not those whom they would reduce to (deserved) penury.

Some of these trends pre-date Obama, but few have been retarded during his presidency, while many have accelerated.   Whether one finds this state of affairs desirable or not, no rational person can describe them as the by-product of a Marxist, business-hating egalitarian.  Quite the opposite.  The political power of America's richest has never been greater, and the level of their responsibility and collective burden has never been less.  Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the remaining remnants of their financial security and middle class comforts rapidly erodes.  It's true that the U.S. Government has little regard for the free market:  they intervene constantly in the free market on behalf of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful business interests; it's crony capitalism, corporatism:  government run by corporations (or, as Dick Durbin said of the Congress in which he serves:  "the banks own the place").

For billionaires to see themselves as the True Victims, to complain that the President and the Government are waging some sort of war against them in the name of radical egalitarianism, is so removed from reality -- universes away -- that's it's hard to put into words.  And the fiscal recklessness that the Kochs and their comrades tirelessly point to was a direct by-product of the last decade's rule by the Republican Party which they fund:  from unfunded, endless wars to a never-ending expansion of the privatized National Security and Surveillance States to the financial crisis that exploded during the Bush presidency.  But whatever else is true, there are many victims of fiscal policy in America:  the wealthiest business interests and billionaires like the Koch Brothers are the few who are not among them.

These self-pitying billionaires are different from you and me.  Their underlings and loyal retainers have deferred to them as corporate aristocracy for so long that they are ready to be corporate royalty who can have your head cut off for saying something critical of them.

Give them time.  They're coming for every liberty we have.

Make a goddamn difference

Republican paradise

The world Republicans want to live in:

• makes birth control harder to get
• makes abortion impossible to get
• funds ultrasound machines to convince pregnant women - by lying if necessary - to birth their babies
• provides no medical care to those who can't afford it
• abandons all concern for the welfare of the fetus as soon as it becomes a baby

And this is how they expect to get to their version of seventy some-odd virgins.  Though for these fundies, heaven won't involve something so base and corrupting as sex...

All the bear shit the market will bull

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

No learning from furriners

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Teabagger meaning of socialist

A teabagger who uses socialist or any other form of the word doesn't mean any specific, well-defined economic or political doctrine.  He simply means to express intense emotion about whatever attempt our government might make that he opposes.

In this story, socialistic acts as a meaningless intensive.  Basically, it has the same meaning as fucking, as in "that fucking policy," only you can't say "fucking" in a fundamentalist church.

Gov. Bill Haslam (R-how right-wing do I have to be?) has thoroughly pandered to Tennessee's predominantly wingnut political culture.  But for Tennessee's teabaggers, no amount of movement right is enough until every impoverishment possible is inflicted on any institution that might provide anything universal.  Next up:  Repeal compulsory education!

Bigotry, core Republican value

President Barack Obama (D-tepid centrism except in support of the imperial Presidency) has inspired incredibly frenzied outpourings of anger and hate.  Bill Clinton (D-tepid centrism except about sex) inspired what for its time was similarly frenzied.

The frenzy of delegitimizing the 1992 election worked so well for Republicans that there was no way they'd abjure it this time around.  Sure enough, given the sharp limits on the intelligence, memory, and discernment of bullshit from reality of the American electorate, it worked again in 2010 for the GOP.  Now it will take many Republican electoral failures of much greater depth than 2006 and 2008 to convince them not to be petulant 2-year-olds again every time they lose.

Any Democrat who won the Presidency in 2008 would have faced the refusal of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of the election - no matter how comfortable the margin, and remember that Obama completely kicked John McCain's butt from sea to shining sea.

Hillary Clinton, whom many would now retrospectively elect, would have been trashed again.  Doesn't anyone remember what the wingnuts said about conspiracies to murder, distribute drugs, and corruptly enrich herself?  Wingnuts right in the middle of the GOP.  How could anyone forget their politics of personal destruction?

In the alternate universe where she did get elected, people are wishing that fresh young Illinois Senator had gotten the nod instead.  He has such a sweet personality and such a message of non-partisan comity that surely no one, not even a Republican Party built from the ground up on the model of Lee Atwater's scorched earth politics (with a secret handshake in honor of the failed potential of Joe McCarthy), not even that Republican Party could have put him through the vicious attacks they've put Hillary through.  Yeah, don't call me Shirley.

There's one difference between the way Barack has been calumnied and the way Hillary would have been.  That difference is the birther movement.



Sure, Republicans would have found sex-related ways to attack her, as they did when she was the wrong kind of wife to Bill - no cookie-baking, no juicy divorce suit from the woman scorned, no willing smiling silent deference to men.  They would have attacked her for menses and hot flashes at the same time.  It would have been ugly.

But the birther movement is about Obama being the wrong color.  He's brown, and he has foreign heritage that's not European and not Christian.  How could he possibly be American?  He's not from the right tribe.

No, it's not only race that matters in the Republican platform of bigotry.  They assert religious correctness too.  Catholics (finally!) are o.k. now.  All Irish may apply.  But no Muslims.  They might bring their religious values to the public square, and that means they'll try to enact scary-a, I mean, sharia.

The framers of the Constitution had this to say in Article VI of the Constitution:

[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Republicans, even rabbit front-runner Mitt Romney, are happy to promise a religious test as long as it appeals to their bigoted party (as proven by its birtherism):

Republicans don't love religious liberty; they love religious liberty for people who think as they do.

Again, one party in American politics is tepid, easily bullied, and often won't stand up for its own views.  The other is actively evil and opposed to the founding ideas of our nation.  So of course the Republicans project their own opposition to liberal democracy, as framed 225 years ago, onto the Democrats, and the Democrats fail to call them the scurrilous, opportunistic, authoritarian liars they are.

The robber barons are back

In service of their out-sized greed, the titans of American capitalism want to consolidate their choke-hold on the government that once belonged to all of us.  Already, it's no longer ours.  They want to buy for short money all the rest.

They don't care whether there are any crumbs left for the rest of us.  We'll be more docile if we have to live hand to mouth and the only path to a secure old age is to become their loyal, silent retainer.

Embarrassment of riches

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Times they are a-changin'

To every hypocrisy, there is a season.

"That was totally different."

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

Who killed Tiny Tim?

Not only habitual liars, Republicans are willing to use children's hunger as a weapon against unions.

Despicable bastards.

(h/t Atrios)

Hizbull-lie

There are two political parties that matter in America.  (Note to John Birchers: The Communist Party is not one of them.)  One of them gives a pale imitation of its former full-throated advocacy on behalf of the middle class and the poor.

The other - the GOP - is a party of lies.  They may fetishize the Ten Commandments, but "thou shalt not bear false witness" is not a principle they honor by observance.  The leaders of the Republican Party - not just a few but all of them - pander to their fact-averse base of ignoramuses by lying:

It really does not matter anymore what the issue is or who the spokesperson might be. From the budget to unions to world events to brackets for March Madness, it doesn’t matter what the latest word string is—time and time again it has become quite safe to assume that anything these weasels say is a lie. Yes, it is a lie boldly told, but it is still a lie nonetheless.

Billions for defense, not a penny for public unions

Click image for full Richard Bartholomew/Artizans.com cartoon.

Cools melting fuel rods too

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

The next wingnut crush

I don't mean Michele Bachmann will be taking over for the tanking Sarah Palin, as even the undiscerning underbelly of clueless teabaggers tire of her.  No, I mean to speculate wildly.

The perfect candidate for the base Republican base is a porn star who has found Jesus - right after aging out of the biz, conveniently.  Can you imagine a 35-year-old silicone marvel distracting the mouth-breathers from the clever, behind-the-scenes ministrations of the gray eminences of the right, say Newt Gingrich?

Impossible, you say.  Even they couldn't sink so low.

Ha.  In the race to the bottom, there is no bottom.  As low as their base voters will let them go, they'll go.  The Republicans don't care what their pandering might destroy.  Look at all the institutions they're gleeful about trying openly to kill.  They believe that destruction is positive - as long as they're doing the destroying themselves.

After Scott Brown, someone attractive who shows more than he did is the natural next step in a long line of ever prettier, ever more vacuous figureheads.

You thought the company town was great

You had it wrong.  Those Appalachian mining towns?  Paradise on earth.  Only the occasional case of rickets.  Wait till you get the inestimable privilege of living in the company nation.


Hans Gruber had it wrong.  Steal $600,000,000,000 (wild guess) and not only will they not find you, you'll have open advocates in the Senate and of course the Wall Street Journal excusing your manifest and continuing racketeering.

[W]e’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

Richard Nixon had it wrong.  It's not against the law if the Chamber of Commerce says it isn't.

Alvin Toffler had it wrong.  Corporations won't need their own armies once they've consolidated their hostile takeover of government.

Oh, yeah, I guess you're already privileged.  Though of course your four legs are merely good, not deserving of the rewards that come to your betters climbing over you on two legs.

Moron that story next

Click image for full August J. Pollak/CampusProgress.org cartoon.

How America dies

Anti-democratic Republicans, this time in Michigan, vote it out of existence:

In a party line vote, and despite impassioned speeches of protest by the body’s Democratic minority, the Michigan Senate approved legislation that threatens to take over and even dissolve local governments that refuse to balance their budgets by breaking labor contracts.

According to the law, which has already been approved in the House, the governor will be able to declare “financial emergency” in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services.

Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.

An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education.

Gov. Rick Snyder (R-lust for all the power) will sign this.  It's his bill.

If a Democrat ever did anything as radical as this, wingnuts everywhere would be talking about their Second Amendment remedies.

Trying to provoke violence?

Not content to have passed the union-busting legislation he rammed through, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-my way or the highway) has turned to party-busting.  He now arrogates to deny Democratic Senators their lawful votes in committee.  Republicans all over America look for ways to rule by fiat and to deny the vote to those they dislike.  The authoritarian Fitzgerald has combined the two.  Next he'll form an exploratory committee to run for President.

You might think that this won't change the outcome of any votes.  The committees all have Republican majorities.  But this tinpot ruling means that Fitzgerald only needs the votes of half his caucus to move legislation out of committee.  That means the most extreme 30% of Wisconsin citizens effectively run the State Senate.  The teabaggers, in other words.

This means that any moderate Republicans who might make overtures to the center have no one to make overtures to.  In the long run, this may help the recall efforts, the righteous campaign to turn these anti-democratic thugs back out into the streets.

Fitzgerald isn't even pretending that republican government matters.  You citizens who elected these Democrats, your votes are meaningless.

What is to be done?

Don't get mad.  Get even.

• Continue the recall, and get these thugs out of office.
• Occupy the capitol building.  Peacefully.  But expect mass arrests and manufactured or provoked riots.  Gov. Walker was contemplating it.  He'll do it.  These men have no conscience.  They only understand power.
• File an emergency lawsuit in U.S. District Court.  If this isn't an equal protection violation, the words equal and protection are meaningless in Republican bizarro-world.
• Call President Obama. The U.S. Constitution, supreme law of the land and superior to any pipsqueak tinpot Republican legislative capo di tutti capi, states in Article IV, section 4:

  The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.

  Time to get to guaranteeing, Mr. President.
  

(h/t Jed Lewison at DailyKos)

Riding that train

All aboard!

Click image for full Jack Ohman/Oregonian cartoon.

Nostalgic for a past that never existed

Conservatives used to wax nostalgic for the1950s, a quiet, industrious society in which women knew their place and black people were invisible or didn't last long if they didn't say their best Jim Crow yassuh.  But at least those reactionary conservatives could remember what they wanted to return to.

At least, that fantasy golden age was real.  Not that golden in many ways, but it did exist, and the conservatives of the time following could remember it.

Today's teabaggers pine for a time and a country that never existed.  Michele Bachmann's dislocation of the birthplace of the American Revolution is the least of it.  She just shows herself to be ignorant, and isn't that part of her attraction for the teabag reactionaries?  For her idiocrat ilk to own the Revolution, she needs to move it from undeserving blue Massachusetts to (formerly) red New Hampshire. Voilà.

This wasn't just a slip of the Bachmann's shrill and blistering tongue.  She said it more than once.  It was part of her prepared remarks even if it never reached her teleprompter or her paper text. 

Wingnut commenters everywhere defend Bachmann by claiming equivalence with Barack Obama's 57 state slip.  Since they obviously reason poorly, it's not surprising that they would falsely equate a slip of the tongue with persistent ignorance.  They themselves are too ignorant to tell the difference.

Teapublicans pine for a world of their own devising.  They create memories out of their dreams and claim for them truth.

• The Founders were conservatives.
• America is a Christian nation.
• The Constitution frames a federal government only slightly stronger than the Articles of Confederation did.  (What's the Articles of Confederation, 'twingers ask...)
• The Founders worked to abolish slavery (another Bachmann special).
• Most slaves lived happily in bondage.
• The Civil War was a war of northern aggression.
• The Robber Barons were nice men who employed millions and should have been praised, not prosecuted.
• The League of Nations was a terrible idea.  Actually, they've never even heard of the League of Nations.
• The Great Depression was caused by lazy, no-account spongers.  No wait, that's the Great Recession.
• Anyway, nothing FDR did (other than getting us into WWII) helped the economy.
• Vietnam was a righteous war.
• The 1960s were a horrible time in which everything worsened.
• Richard Nixon was framed.
• Ronald Reagan never raised taxes.
• Star Wars can work.
• Who needs the State Department?  We've got DoD.
• Social Security is demographically doomed (even though one of Reagan's tax increases solved the problem in advance!).
• The Iraq war was righteous.  Is righteous.  After all, they attacked us on 9/11 and they had WMD.
• It's o.k. to turn any Islamic country into a glass parking lot if they say something we don't like.  Collateral damage to the innocent?  Deal with it bitches.  The U.S. is exceptional.
• Torture is good when we do it, an act of war when they do it.
• Due process is for babies, and we don't need no stinking habeas corpus.
• Obamacare is free (and socialist).
• Despite consistent and incredible successes, environmental law is destroying the economy.
• Science is a conspiracy to turn the world oppressive and socialist.
• White people, especially men, are massively discriminated against in our society.
• Sharia is coming.
• No other country has anything to teach us, now or ever.
• The free market can exist and it can solve every problem of resource allocation perfectly.
• Rich people deserve ... everything.

The Teahadists long for a world in which they can believe all these absurdities (and more) without elitist liberals pointing out their errors.  Never mind that they've worked over the media so that their most ridiculous claims get treated equally to actual facts.  They are looking for a world in which we have to hear their bullshit but in which our counters to it infringe their free speech rights.

They're ahistorical morons.  And they're winning.

Flipping the bird

Click image for full MStreeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

None dare call it fascism

Except maybe me...



(h/t Balloon Juice)

Shared sacrifice

(h/t DailyKos)

One white, one black, one non-blonde

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

So many funny lines...

Daddy's money too

Can anyone give me a reason why Abigail Johnson, gifted with every possible opportunity and leg up, should not pay an inheritance tax when she eventually inherits her father's multi-billion dollar fortune?  She's already richer than he is, $11.3 billion to $7.1 billion.

Other than middle class conservatives who defend this permanent aristocracy of money, is there anything more ridiculous than the structure of investing, which permits people like the Johnsons to cream off billions, when they can't even consistently beat index funds? 

If you're not an investment professional, don't try to compete with these lawful thieves.  But also don't let them take a cut of your money.  Put it in a no-load index fund and step back.  Or be a pigeon, your choice.

Rehab

Click image for full Jimmy Margulies/Record cartoon.

Another bullshit Republican crisis

We've all heard how desperately underfunded state pension funds are.  It's a scandal!  A trillion dollars those lazy, entitled, gold-plated, union leeches want out of your long-suffering, tax-paying hide!

No, actually, it's another zombie lie of the Republican Party and the Blue Dawgs (PDF), eagerly abetted by the elite media:

Most of the [$1 trillion] pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today. This is by far the major cause of pension funding shortfalls. While there are certainly cases of pensions that had been underfunded even before the market plunge, prior years of under-funding is not the main reason that pensions face difficulties now. Another $80 billion of the shortfall is the result of the fact that states have cutback their contributions as a result of the downturn.

Leaving $70 billion to make up nationwide, in addition to the $80 billion in deferred contributions.

Why would conservatives get their undies in a twist about this?  It's what they do.  More to the point, though, they're opposed to all domestic expenditures with the possible exception of law enforcement.  They don't care if their public rationale to cut spending on people is a lie, only that it works.

But the most important reason is probably the plutocratic one:

[I]f pension funds stop investing in equities, as some have advocated, this would imply higher taxes and/or lower benefits for public employees. It would also mean that other investors could expect to see higher future returns on their stock holdings.

Without the pension funds chasing high rates of return in equities markets, Republican fat cats' capital will be scarcer, thus more valuable and due higher returns.  There is no better outcome for GOP politicos than to sucker a Democratic constituency at the same time it succors a Republican constituency.

(h/t the estimable Paul Krugman)

(Massachusetts, truth be told, is not very good on pension funding.  Our unfunded liability is larger than it should be.  Not a crisis, as GOP Chicken Littles would have you believe, but a debt that should be handled responsibly.)

Bracketopathy

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Only my tribe is deserving

Digby nails the teabaggers:

I'm wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm ... racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It's not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don't like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don't like.

Emphasis in the original.

Zuckerberg lives

I just watched "The Social Network".  (Why didn't they call it "Social Network"?  Cleaner.)

Mark Zuckerberg is still alive, despite being (portrayed as) a conscienceless user asshole.  No, I didn't believe the young associate putting a sweet Hollywood bow on him at the end.  Although it did look as though she might be trying to cheer up the poor little rich boy with a little white lie...

The apparent fact the Zuckerberg is such a creep and is still alive is actually good news.  Not for the business world, which is full of similar successful self-centered sociopaths, but for the political world.

Movies come out every year in which the entire government is run by venal conspiracies that would just as soon kill you as frame you for a crime you didn't commit.  "Enemy of the State" had both.  The Bourne abstraction movies have a shadow government immune from democratic control.  I'm sure I'll enjoy the matrix-y paranoia of "The Adjustment Bureau".

For me, the question has lately been, with trillions of dollars at stake and with humans' obvious willingness to kill over paltry amounts, is our government subject to even worse than the obvious perennial purchase by moneyed interests.  Goldman Sachs has run our economic policy, irrespective of the party in power, for decades.  They got to the top the old-fashioned way; they stole, uh, sorry, creamed off huge proceeds and bought power by contributing to both parties.

Yet if push came to shove and a less wishy-washy reformer than Barack Obama won the Presidency against all the elite cultural factors stacked against him (or her - but not Hillary, she's too DLC), how far would the interests of wealth go to retain their control?  Yeah, this sounds paranoid even to me, its thinker.  But...

Zuckerberg lives.  Maybe popular democracy remains possible, despite the current overwhelming dominance of the wealthy elite.

And I did really enjoy seeing Larry Summers portrayed as an arrogant, short-sighted, ignoramus asshole.  Too bad the filmmakers couldn't prevail upon him to play himself.

Harvard is everywhere in this movie, and it doesn't come off well.  But now Harvard has Drew Faust, and the federal government has Elizabeth Warren.  Maybe the problem all along has been Harvard men, and what we really need is Harvard women to save us.

(Shhh.  Don't tell the wealthy.  Let them get comfortable with Faust's and Warren's admission to the club.  Then bust up the club good and proper.)

Revolting

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

We should be.

Back in the day

Sir Michael Tyson!

Suffering must end

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Your life should suck

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

A good paragraph

Some writing deserves to be blogged just because of what it does:

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

Vain to ask, What if?  But also compelling, as with the Kennedys and King and Joplin and Hendrix and Challenger and Columbia and Grissom and the girl I loved but never spoke of it to.  And...

Bondage and DOMAnation

DOMA is bad law.  It was bad law when Bill Clinton pandered to the Dick Morris crowd and signed it.  If marriage needs defense from gays and lesbians, it's only because it's been damaged by a long series of trailer trash.  Cheating and divorce does make a hell of a country song, however, proving again that it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

Eric Cantor (R-coiffed to look reasonable without actually being reasonable) is "taken aback" at President Barack Obama's order to the Justice Department to stop arguing for DOMA in court.  Gee willickers!

On the other hand, there is something odd about the government of laws deciding to leave a duly, if venally, passed law to fend for itself.  It's not as though it can hire its own lawyer.  After all, the President and his Cabinet swore (Art. II, sec. 1):

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I'm sure wingnuts everywhere are spitting at their screens to demand Obama's impeachment.  (Uh-huh.)  Even Newt Gingrich, in his continuing campaign to get out in front of the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing mob of teabaggers...

Two thoughts to consider:

• Clearly, the Constitution comes before a law.
• It's much more honest to step away from backing a law.  That allows those who do believe in it to defend it and those who don't to avoid the temptation to mount a vacuous fake defense.

No doubt that last would be the Republican Teapublican approach in similar circumstances.

Update (3/6):  Turns out Republican Justice Departments have abandoned appellate defense of federal laws, so I've fixed my claim that they would instead mount a fake defense.

Good to have allies

From Mother Jones:

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Kevin Drum asks the key question, "How did we get here?"  It's a question near and dear to my heart, one I first wrote about here in 2007 under that exact title.

Drum and I agree that the Democrats' surrender of social class has led to rampant plutocracy and to government policy that encourages huge growth in income disparities. We even agree in part about why.  Drum says:

Parties need money. And parties need organizational muscle. The Republican Party gets the former from corporate sponsors and the latter from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the '70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community.

I say:

Democrats gave up their unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthy ideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Obviously, we find different causes.  Drum emphasizes the decline of organized labor.  I point to an unintended consequence of post-Watergate reforms in campaign finance.

One reason I doubt the union decline as the main cause - though any big change in society is bound to have many causes - is that unions remain to this day influential in Democratic Party politics, at least in states where unions have influence at all.  Their members are less reliable (ask Martha Coakley), but their leadership is not, and it's true that the disaffection of membership began during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, exactly the right timing to help explain America's political degeneration.  So I'd have to concede that the union decline does figure in the decline of America as a liberal and forward-looking country.

Another cause I hadn't thought enough about is the retirement of the World War II generation.  Men and women who had been 30 years old at the end of the war were leaving the work force in 1980, just in time for the Reagan retrenchment.  It didn't hurt that he, as one of them, could co-opt them with his neo-1920s economic ideology and his sunny disposition.

Reagan said that government was the problem.  But he smiled.  And his age cohort, who had seen muscular government succeed at many things, could stop thinking about complicated problems and let go of the responsibilities that they had borne so well.

In any case, it's good to have Drum working this beat - strength in numbers and all.  Of course, that has been the promise of unions, a promise now forgotten along with the history of dire worker exploitation by the mercenary corporations of a century ago.

Judas Oscariot

 I have no idea whether "The Social Network" will win the best picture Oscar.  Maybe it already has.  I don't watch award shows.  The producers have the gall to broadcast a 3-hour ad for Hollywood and still to lard it with ads for cars and beer and boner pills or whatever.  Awards shows are tedious, besides.  If they'd just show the 100 best trailers and the 100 sexiest stars, then I might watch.

I don't know whether Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook, but I do know that he is a villain.  Practically everything he has ever done with the site proves that.  Repeated privacy violations, followed by insincere apologies (as evident from the next violation/apology cycle), have steadily removed privacy.  At this point, I assume that anything I ever do on FB is recorded and available to FB's marketing partners.  They've already been caught targeting users based on their private messages.  They've already been caught posting chat sessions for the world to see.  Do you need to be smacked with a 2x4 to get the message?

FB is selling you and your demographic attributes to the highest bidder.  That's why "Harvard" shows up on my thumbnail despite my efforts to get rid of it.

Zuckerberg likes to wrap himself in the mantle of free information.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He only wants to liberate your information from you for the benefit of access to your wallet.  Those of us on FB are just marks, succumbing to a con because we like hearing from our friends.  It's exploitation.

Facebook continues to allow virus writers to spread their crap.  Click on a video a friend has posted, and you can never tell whether you'll see a video - or post the same video to all your friends, as if you'd clicked Like.  It's an abuse, and FB won't stop it.

Here's what I want to think about:  How can we build an open source, decentralized social network with the benefits of Facebook and without the soul-selling drawbacks?

Why truth is more important than civility

I don't give a shit if Glenn Greenwald is a rude bastard.  I don't fucking care if Michael Hastings is an arrogant asshole.  What I care about is whether they're telling me truths that I need to know to be a well-informed, effective citizen of a democracy.  Greenwald:

Granting anonymity to powerful political and military officials to attack journalists, watchdogs and whistleblowers is about the lowest and most journalistically reckless act a reporter and their editors can undertake -- recall this recent anonymous attack on departing TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky by a Treasury official and enabled by The Washington Post -- as it turns these media outlets into nothing more than protectors of those officials and mindless amplifiers of their attacks, which, thanks to the anonymity, can never be engaged. But that's what they want to be; it's what they are; and that's why these officials tell them they will comment only under the cover of anonymity: because they know it will be immediately granted the minute it's demanded regardless of whether there is any journalistic justification for it.

Anonymity does have a valid purpose in journalism: its legitimate purpose is to protect the vulnerable and powerless when they expose wrongdoing by those who wield power. But most establishment journalists have completely reversed that, so that anonymity is used to protect those with the most power: to enable them to make all sorts of public claims and launch all kinds of attacks on critics without being accountable. When anonymity is used for those purposes, it is inherently and incomparably corrupt (that, of course, is the dynamic that led to public acceptance of patently false claims justifying the Iraq War). But this perversion of anonymity from what it was supposed to be (a means of holding the powerful accountable) into a power-shielding weapon is simply a microcosm of the broader reversal by establishment journalists of the old dictate to "afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless." Most establishment journalists -- by definition -- do exactly the opposite, and their eagerness to indiscriminately grant anonymity to the nation's most powerful officials is simply one manifestation of that power-serving mindset.

What I want is to avoid the big media's serving me bullshit, calling it foie gras, and expecting me to like the fucking taste.

The use by the military of psy ops on elected officials is not treason, but it's a crime.  I'm not disposed to treat that lightly.

"My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. "I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line."

I'm guessing the only bird Holmes will ever see won't be very goddamn polite, but even so, a Lt. Col. is not exactly a wet-behind-the-ears OCS graduate.

One true exceptionalism of America has been our unwillingness to sit still for official bullshit.  When did we lose that?

My chauffeur agrees with me

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Ladder to personal prosperity

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Sanity goes tits up

Click image for full Matt Bors/United Media cartoon.

Mercy for me and not for thee

Yesterday, Scott Brown (R-lip service to teabaggers and blue collars alike) owned up to his teenager punk years, and to how welfare subsistence helped his mother raise him.  The juvy judge he had to appear in front of spoke sharply to him and made him write 1500 words!

Today, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-reformed sinner for the cameras) is caught, having told a similar story (in 1989).  He was caught (at Princeton) with a kilo of marijuana, some LSD, and prescription drugs.  Any idiot can tell he or his roommates were selling, not just getting stoned to make the dining hall food more palatable.  A kilo!  He could have smoked that for a school year.

The judge spoke sternly to him and fined him $350, probably less than the value of the pot, not to mention the acid and the uppers and downers.

Both these men broke the law.  Both received mercy from liberal judges, who nonetheless expressed their disapproval.  Both of them reformed (eventually - a triumph for soft-headed liberalism!).  Both now refuse to show mercy to youths who have similar failings.  Both are Republican hypocrites.

Or is that redundant?

(h/t Atrios)

Hard to understand

How is it that Scott Brown can forget the subsistence the government provided in his childhood so that he can now deny other children the same help?  What kind of person has more sympathy for wealth than for himself?

Is he utterly morally blind?  Other people are not deserving.  He was - despite acknowledging that he was a punk.

Is he a raving narcissist?  The world is entirely for his benefit.

Is he bought?  Keeping the good things he has obtained (creditably, I might add) is so important that he can suppress his conscience.

Is conservatism a disorder of sympathy?

I can't see how fear of deficits can prompt Brown to inflict permanent deficits on children when he knows what their lives are like.  I just don't understand this.

Both sides of his mouth

Did no one at the AP notice this:

Governor Scott Walker predicted yesterday that Wisconsin would lead states across the country in weakening unions.

contrasted with this:

Walker denied the bill was an attempt at "union busting."

Was the headline Wisconsin governor shows open dishonesty?  Nope, not at all.  Wisconsin governor shows optimism!  The headline's the Boston Globe's fault, but where the hell did it come from!?

Marginalized

It's true that so-called progress is not an unalloyed good.  There is something gratifying about a bound paper book, and those will become rare specialty items and nostalgia pieces.

But marginalia are not vanishing - my Kindle can add notes.  Other chances to comment on a writer's work are vastly increasing.  The Internet's not bound in leather, but it's everywhere, and everyone can comment.

Maybe it's democratization that the scolds are worried about.  (And they have some reason to be.)

If deficits really mattered

Someone in government would make a credible plan:

First, spending on high-return public investments should be increased. Even if this widens the deficit in the short run, it will reduce the national debt in the long run. What business wouldn't jump at investment opportunities yielding returns in excess of 10% if it could borrow capital – as the US government can – for less than 3% interest?

Second, military expenditures must be cut – not just funding for the fruitless wars, but also for the weapons that don't work against enemies that don't exist. The US has continued as if the cold war never came to an end, spending nearly as much on defence as the rest of the world combined.

Following this is the need to eliminate corporate welfare. Even as America has stripped away its safety net for people, it has strengthened the safety net for firms, evidenced so clearly in the great recession with the bailouts of AIG, Goldman Sachs, and other banks.

...

Creating a fairer and more efficient tax system, by eliminating the special treatment of capital gains and dividends, is also needed. Why should those who work for a living be subject to higher tax rates than those who reap their livelihood from speculation (often at the expense of others)?

Finally, with more than 20% of all income going to the top 1%, a slight increase, say 5%, in taxes actually paid would bring in more than $1tn over the course of a decade.

Instead, it's left to the fantasy of liberal economists who have zero power.

Lady chattels lover

The GOP loves them some women, barefoot and pregnant.:

5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.

Priorities

Click image for full August J. Pollack/CampusProgress.org cartoon.

Even if it hurts their feelings

How to get bullshit out of our discourse?  Mock, rinse, repeat:

Mock. Point. Laugh. State facts. Satirize. Call a lie, a lie. Mock again. Laugh again.  Point to facts again. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat yet again, until everyone thinks twice before ever uttering anything so destructive, ignorant and idiotic in public.

How more people skewering right-wing falsehoods would not lead to a better world escapes me.

Michael Lind is a good guy, but he's just wrong when he calls on liberals not to mock Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann.  Mockery is one of our most potent weapons. 

We need to raise the price to be paid for stupid bullshit.  We ought to be embarrassing them with their own lack of good sense.  Every damn time.

The Teapublican brand should mean stupid, illiterate, lying tripe.

(h/t Pharyngula)

Excluded middle ruled unconstitutional

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Well, the law of the excluded middle would have been overturned if Jeff Sessions had been confirmed to the Federal judiciary.  My friends in Georgia are embarrassed to be represented in the Senate by this purveyor of iced bullshit tea, but there aren't enough of them to retire him to the Rest Home for Shameless Doublespeakers.

Fisted by the Invisible Hand

John Cole at Balloon Juice has the outrage:

[T]his is the model for the future foisted upon us by our Galtian overlords (who fight any attempts to regulate the looting on Wall Street), and the austerity mobs are busy making sure that the pension you were promised is hatcheted and your social security is whittled away because we can’t afford it after lavishing all the social security proceeds on the rich in the form of the Bush and Obama tax cuts.

Continuous partial inattention

A certain amount of speed is good for news coverage.  But there's no constraint on news organizations to keep them from exceeding the need.  The jury's in, and the current speed of communications technology has proven much better at spreading bullshit than spreading facts.  Yet I too refresh news sites when I should be working or reading a book.  What's the next argument?  I've gotta jump right on it!  Yeah, sure...

The financial markets have a similar demand for unlimited speed, and they also reach a point where speed only helps the fast, not the facilitation of sound deals.  The downside is that haste makes every trader prone to market momentum, and the feedback loop in price moves can destroy perfectly healthy assets or inflate bubbles of bigger and bigger shitpiles (™ Atrios).

Information has to remain free at any speed.  The First Amendment guarantees it.  The only solution I can see is for those of us who read and react to become more immune to bullshit.  Frankly, I'm not that optimistic.  Our culture has become so dizzily fond of bullshit that our grandchildren will look back and wonder how we could possibly have accepted as plausible the obvious lies we ate up.

Financial markets are a different story.  We could slow them down without violating anything other than Ayn Rand's financio-sexual fantasies.  The easiest way would be a tiny transaction tax - and I mean tiny.  I want rational transactions (in the normal sense, not the arbitrageurs sense) to take place.  I want prices to reflect fundamentals.  What I'm tired of watching is investment "professionals" creaming off billions by mastering the psychology of the markets.

I could be talking out my ass on this.  If so, prove it to me.  I'm educable...

Blame the unions!

They made too many wage concessions:

In 1988, the income of an average American taxpayer was $33,400, adjusted for inflation. Fast forward 20 years, and not much had changed: The average income was still just $33,000 in 2008, according to IRS data.

Meanwhile, the richest 1% of Americans -- those making $380,000 or more -- have seen their incomes grow 33% over the last 20 years, leaving average Americans in the dust.

Say this for the teabaggers:  They know they're getting screwed.  But they blame exactly the wrong people.

Sacrificial lamb

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

Orangutan piss

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Brian Kilmeade is still one of the shallowest people on television, but notice how he asks his barrage of sycophantic questions to Tony Blair so that the final one - "What do you say to those people now?" - assumes that Duhbya and his poodle should get credit for Egypt's deposing of Hosni Mubarak.

So Kilmeade is smart enough to deliver lines of propaganda.

Can see Wasilla from her house

There's a Russkie on the cover of Sports Illustrated's famous or infamous swimsuit edition for 2011!  Not only that, she has a Mooslem-y name!  Call out the National Guard!  All the wingnuts' fears rolled up into one bikini...

The point of this nonsense is that Republicans have taken to heart Teddy White's thesis, except that they've moved beyond selling soap to marketing near beer.  How better to do that than with a bunch of babelicious babes to distract from the fact that their ideological product is really awful stuff.

Thus we have the continued, otherwise inexplicable popularity of insufferable, annoying, bitchy-ditz Sarah Palin.  I'd say that men really can be led around by their dicks, except that all it takes is their eyeballs.  And she can't hold a candle to Irina Shayk.

Women, don't feel too proud.  You should have Scott Brown and Marco Rubio on your consciences.  At least we guys managed to stop short of Christine O'Donnell.

It's my custom to mock big media and to show a picture whenever I snark about a beauty greater than Palin's.  Plus, hey, I want readers, too.  This time, though, I couldn't find one with a reasonable license, and the SI cover itself is defended for the five minutes I have against even thumbnailing.  Amateur paparazzi, Wikimedia Commons needs you!  Still, you can Google your own favorite images of this year's multi-culti it girl.

Just a lone wolf

Crazy wingnut convicted of first degree murder...

Oh, not a lone wolf.  She had a gang of crazy wingnuts.

But they delivered summary justice to a drug criminal (alleged).  His 9-year-old daughter, also murdered?  Collateral damage.

Yet there's no conservative thirst for violence.  We all know that if we listen to the media apologize.

(h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice)

Truth before civility

Sometimes the truth hurts people's feelings.  Tough shit.  Glenn Greenwald:

Rainey, Kurtz and Dickey all have this exactly backwards.  Identifying lies told by powerful political leaders -- and describing them as such -- is what good journalists do, by definition.  It's the crux of adversarial journalism, of a "watchdog" press.  "Objectivity" does not require refraining from pointing out the falsity of government claims.  The opposite is true; objectivity requires that a journalist do exactly that:  treat factually false statements as false.

Dump button

Watched two TV shows today of types that I often avoid - the Celtics vs. the Heat and the Grammys.  Both have made extensive use of the dump button.  Yep, those audio gaps are censorship.

The NBA broadcast nixed the word bullshit (my favorite!) but only with mixed success.  That Boston crowd, what a bunch of scamps!  Personally, I think people need to chant "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" much more often than then do.  NBA officiating should be a constant source of outrage, though far from the most important.

Mainly, we should chant "bullshit" whenever a Republican opens his mouth.  This is what I mean when I say that truth is more important than civility.

Rappers on TV have a hard time getting out their lines.  How prominent does n----- have to be to get Eminem dumped?  It came through once that my busted old ears could parse.  "Kiss my ass crack" elicited no dead air at all.  Whoo-hoo!  Edgy!

Valentine Michael Smith not allowed to dream

Click image for full G.B. Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Forty-two years

Since Richard Nixon took office in 1969, Democrats and liberals have failed to call lies and bullshit what they are.  This is why our public conversation is so filled with bullshit and lies:

[T]his aggressive stupidity politically props up the arguments of the anti-government right. With so many Americans evidently not knowing they receive benefits from the government, it's easy for opportunistic politicians to seize on our "me-first, screw everybody else" culture and misleadingly deride the government as some distant entity that exclusively benefits the "other." And if you don't know that, in fact, you are "the other," then you are more likely to conclude that that opportunistic politician is correct, and more likely to cheer on that opportunistic politician as he/she slashes the programs you directly rely on.

(h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)

Social Security doomed, doomed I tell you

There is no government program on as sound a financial footing as Social Security.  It's fully funded through 2037!

The annual deficits will be made up by redeeming trust fund assets in amounts less than interest earnings through 2024, and then by redeeming trust fund assets until reserves are exhausted in 2037, at which point tax income would be sufficient to pay about 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2084.

As Paul Krugman always asks, why would we cut benefits now in order to forestall cutting benefits later?

No private enterprise comes close to a projection of solvency until 2037.  Still, Republicans and their enablers want to gut Social Security, mainly because they're against government programs, not because of real financial straits.  The reform of 1983 that prepared it for the bulge of retiring boomers worked.

Granted, projections flow from their assumptions:

Any projection which goes out 27 years is so incredibly reliant on the embedded assumptions about growth, employment and lifespans that it amounts to a fiction. It is, at best, a guess.

Increase growth by just a little bit and the entire "problem" goes away. Get rid of the taxation cap so the rich are not capped in what they pay and the entire problem goes away. Assume higher employment, and the entire problem goes away. Assume a reduction in inequality, and the problem goes away.

The US has a number of problems which are at or near crisis, such as employment, inequality and healthcare costs, to name just a few. Social Security is not one of them. It isn't even close, and politicians and billionaires like Pete Peterson who are trying to gin up a crisis should be ashamed of themselves.

There is one thing that could cause trouble for Social Security.  People could start living forever.  Harvard says its researchers have found "the core pathway of aging."

By unifying several major pathways of aging under the umbrella of telomere dysfunction, he said, the findings may yield new targets for therapies. The discoveries also may underlie the relatively sudden and rapid failure of the body leading to the end of life.

“Because telomere dysfunction weakens defenses against damage by free radicals, or reactive oxygen species,” DePinho said, “we think this exposes telomeres to an accelerated rate of damage which cannot be repaired and thereby results in even more organ deterioration. In effect, it sets in motion a death spiral.”

These therapies would be a great problem to have!

But note that university publications almost always oversell the results of their research scientists.  Programmed cell death has been known for a long time, as have the role of telomeres in it.  This research merely found a more extensive role for telomeres.

Sure would like to get my hands on some telomerase though!

When people routinely live to be a hundred, you can talk reasonably about significantly raising the Social Security retirement age.

Still more Republican insincerity

Republicans don't care about the deficit.  They only care about cutting taxes, not about balancing the books.  Any other claim is ignorant or a lie.

Republicans have already voted for tax cuts that will add nearly fifteen times more to the national debt as they are proposing to cut on the spending side.

Yeah, I know, bullshit from Republicans is not exactly news.

You do have a motive, don't you?

Click image for full V.C. Rogers/Independent Weekly cartoon.

Corporate utopia first, jobs whenever

Eric Cantor (R-pander to business, school the President) puts responsibility-free corporate fraternity above all responsibility to America. 

Obama told the business leaders. “Ask yourselves what you can do to hire more American workers, what you can do to support the American economy and invest in this nation.”


“That’s not how it works,” Cantor said.

Does the economy work for the middle class?  Who cares, as long as the plutocrats can evade all responsibility for reinvesting any of their huge and growing profits back into American society.

This is a Republican core value:  Corporations - legal fictions and hence presumably within the purview of democratic government - don't exist for our benefit.  To the contrary, we live to serve corporations.

(h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)

Someone else notices

Alex Pareene in Salon:

The DLC model undoubtedly helped Democrats win national elections, primarily by allowing Democrats to fundraise as effectively as the more stridently pro-corporatism party. Unfortunately, that money came with a price, and that price is "adopting a whole bunch of positions that are popular with money but not with people who voted for Democrats for a hundred years," like the "partial" privatization of Social Security.

I've been flogging this theme for a while now, as one of four reasons American politics is so screwed up and in detail about the connection between fundraising and Democratic abandonment of social class as a defining principle.

Hobgoblin

GOP calls Democrats "Chicken Little":

In support of their position, Democrats have pointed to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that show repealing the law could result in a loss of up to $14 trillion in the nation's GDP.

Everyone knows you can't trust numbers, much less the CBO.

Or the Onion, for that matter.

Craven idles

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Jesus spoke the King's English

As long as I'm on an atheist's tear this Super Bowl Sunday, here's something that would be funny if it weren't so scary:

MediaMatters has the story:

Somewhat ironically, while Fox Nation appears to be positioning themselves as the arbiters of authentic Christianity, they seem unfamiliar with the fact that there is more than one version of the Bible. ...

Most likely, they won't bother to correct their story, and their goal will be accomplished: the readers that trust them will remember the time Obama "misquoted" the Bible, some more people will question the authenticity of Obama's faith, and the smear machine will move on.

Fundies think that the verses they memorized in their particular churches are the literal word of god, even though they've been cobbled together out of many sources long after the death of Jesus (if he even lived), winnowed down to a canon (actually, several canons), translated multiple times since the original texts are often lost, and frequently mistranslated at that.

Yet the slightly modernized King James Version, with only selected remnant uses of saith and goeth to remind us that we should all be happy as filthy, oppressed peasants, is gospel.

And fundamentalism is a great force in our politics.  Argh!

Something god can't do

This is an incredible result, even if it is preliminary.

How to make this technology cheaper:  Find a way to apply it as a cosmetic procedure.  That new skin looks young.  Economies of scale - driven by vanity or appetite - often end up helping those in dire need, such as burn patients.

Then, please, miniaturize this so you can spray stem cells onto my menisci.  They've been getting more and more torn up for the past 40 years, but I still think cartilage beats teflon and titanium.

(h/t Salon)

Argument from ignoramus incredulity

It's easy to see why Bill O is so popular in the ignoramus caucus. His basic message is that anything he's ignorant of isn't cause for learning since it proves that god exists.

This use of god as a safe container for ignorance is actually a basic philosophical problem of many arguments that claim the world shows the existence of god.  The more we explain naturalistically, the smaller a sphere remains for a god.

When Intelligent Design creationists claim irreducible complexity, they are trying to dress this same principle in sciency truthiness.  In their logic, the science is unable to explain something (undeniably true in many cases), therefore, ahem, mumbo jumbo, bafflegab, there is no explanation other than god.

Of course, so far, every so-called example of irreducible complexity the ID creationists have raised has been shot down by real scientists.

The forces of ignorance can't win in science.  They should stick to politics, where they completely dominate the Republican Party, especially its base of religious and free-market fundamentalists.

(h/t Salon)

Agile sprint planning

 

Click image for full Steve Kelley/Times-Picayune cartoon.

Bigger, better bullshit, Egypt edition

Conservatives may not be able to agree whether the unrest in Egypt is a good thing, but you can be sure they'll all eventually jump on the Duhbya/neocon vindication bandwagon:

"We might be in a better position if we had more closely followed President Bush's prescription for support of greater democracy in all parts of the world," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, said as he stepped off the Senate floor Monday. "If we had maintained that position and had that reputation in the world….then our calls today for restraint would have more credibility because the people of Egypt would know our heart was with their desire for greater representation."

Kyl (R-sow's ear) is saying that Egyptians would luuuv us if we had just remained fully committed to killing hundreds of thousands more of their fellow Arab Muslims, if we hadn't stopped there but had proceeded to attack Saudi Arab and Persian Muslims.  Then we would have credibility when calling for restraint, whatever the hell he means by that.  He's blithely relying on the complete captious ignoramus stupidity of his base and the vast wasteland of American media (o.k., no longer so vast).

Of course, Duhbya did convince a majority of Americans to go to war in the first place because his advisers from the PNAC thought we could swoop into the crossroads of the Middle East and impose Western democracy without the least goddamn bit of nation-building.  Hell, god was just going to show up, kick allah's ass, and everyone would kiss his ring.  Does Disney have the rights to that bullshit?  Better aim that animated nonsense at preschoolers - everyone old enough to disbelieve in Santa Claus would know better.

So maybe Kyl's not an idiot for supposing he can get away with this malodorous bullshit.

Republicans are confused by the obvious doom that faces the Mubarak/mukhabarat regime.  The protesters are showing him their shoes, but at least they aren't winging them at him.  When Mubarak concedes to his own term limits, he thinks he's compromising.  Moron.  Rulers don't win by saying they'll go away at some future time.  He's toast.

Still, Republicans want to know how can they bend the facts to their advantage.  (Hint: Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin!)  Mohamed ElBaradei, whom they despised when he was pursuing inspections and non-proliferation with Iran, looks o.k. - not too-too Islam-y - but what if the Muslim Brotherhood is the real power?  What if self-government in Egypt is anti-American?

(Republican note to self:  Be of good cheer.  Remember that Americans don't remember shit.  If it stops being on TV, well, outta sight outta mind.)

The aspiration to self-government is a good thing (except in poor people who might like ACORN).  While the panicky and mercurial two-year-olds who compose so much of American society these days still like Egyptian rebellion, here's the bigger, better bullshit that kneecaps Jon Kyl's thin luuuv for Duhbya:

• Duhbya and the Republicans made war in the Middle East, which inspired zero popular movements to depose autocrats.
• President Obama has taken only a few steps toward peace, and, voilà, the yearning for self-government has broken out all over the place!
• QED, bitches!  (Just please skip that French word in the previous bullet.)

But, of course, buy on rumor, sell on news.  The dream of Egyptian (and Tunisian) self-government is everything in the world you could possibly imagine.  The reality will be difficult even if it overcomes its poor odds and winds up a net positive.  The Arab street hates Israel - and America.

We are in bed with local authoritarians precisely because they can be bribed to suppress the street.  Whole peoples are hard to bribe - for a reasonable price, anyway.  Mubarak could cream off his cut of our foreign aid every year and build a fine set of overseas investment accounts.  (Dictator 101 - it's right there in the handbook: In case of revolution, you'd better have some swag somewhere else.)

Half a billion dollars a year (wild, unsubstantiated guess) can pay for one very decadent family - just ask Paris Hilton - but it doesn't go that far when split 80 million ways.  We can't pay them all off!  (That would be socialism anyway!)

I'd reckon Mubarak's presidency less than a week to survive.  Then there will be a caretaker, then who knows?

The Republicans will attack Obama at every turn.  When Mubarak flees, Obama will not have stood by a stalwart ally.  When the caretaker comes in, Obama will not have steered another sovereign nation well enough to get our boy into office. (The Republicans use the word sovereign situationally.  For us, it means absolute unfettered authority.  For other countries, it means absolute unfettered authority - for us!  We win!)

When the caretaker is ousted (anyone remember Shahpour Bakhtiar?), Obama will not have stabilized his government enough.  When there's any hint of Islam, even an innocent hint and the hints are not likely to be limited to innocent hints, it will be Obama's fault that he didn't cast a nationwide spell over every Egyptian first-born in order to get America's interests looked after first and foremost (sovereignty).  If we object to that expectation, the GOPers'll say that we thought all along that Obama is the messiah.  Never mind that they projected that on us, the media will run with it.

Because it's just stupid enough to have universal appeal.

Tip of the spear

When Republicans tell us that they're going to bayonet us, we ought to believe them:

I’m not happy about the pain and suffering and lost dreams and betrayed children that could flow from all that folly, of course.  But I do think it is extremely valuable to  see what it looks like when GOP true believers start to exercise real power.  Each time you get a clear statement of intent:  rapists outrank rape victims; vets are less valued than Wall St. executives—it becomes that much easier to shrink the Republican coalition as we go forward.

And, accordingly, we should make them pay the electoral price for their extremism.