Mitt Romney is and always has been a bullshitter and a fabulist.
(h/t DailyKos)
Monday Message Board
4 days ago
Friday, July 1, 2011
Me or your lyin' eyes?
The trouble with Democrats
Democrats have no clue that we're at war.
Gov. Deval Patrick (D-establishment), whom I helped elect twice, says complimentary things about Grover Norquist:
Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right...Sorry, no, you may know Norquist from the Dunster House dining hall at Harvard, but he's evil. Stop pretending we're all in the same goddamn fraternity. We're not.
He wants to establish a plutocratic oligarchy that would just as soon line you up against a wall as feed you. He's everything that's wrong with elite America, a whore to wealth who enjoys his role.
We need to say so. Time for liberals to understand that pussyfooting in defense of a sane and reasonable America is a vice.
Killing the safety net
Zillions for offense, not a penny for anything else.
Or something...
Even saying fuck, fuck, fuck, which I seem to be doing a lot lately, is not cathartic enough to glide past $3.7 trillion.
Quality of wingnut reason
I know. Debunking Jeff Jacoby is like striking out a kindergartener with a high hard one. It makes you feel like the pre-adolescent asshole who's barely passing 7th grade but gives the short-bus kids a hard time just to feel superior to someone, anyone.
Jacoby's got nuthin'. Well, he has reflexes, sure, I'll grant that. But hardly any higher function.
He hangs his whole column on a thin tissue of thoughts that any intelligent sixth-grader could refute. For example:
No one was a fervent proponent of gay marriage 44 years ago this month when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws barring whites and blacks from marrying were unconstitutional.Hmm. While we're in the argument-by-introspection wayback machine, let's venture back another forty-four years before Loving v. Virginia. No one was a fervent proponent of interracial marriage in 1923. Or, at least, not for very long before they were fucking lynched.
This is the quality of wingnut reason - debunked as easily as falling out of a kayak and hitting water. Yet the Jacobyns will continue their claims that gay marriage doesn't feel like marriage to them. Because they can't do the complicated moral reasoning of the golden rule, so they have to fall back on their stunted, childish intuition of what's icky to their daddy.
Near the end, Jacoby makes a prediction:
The new laws in New York and some other states authorizing same-sex marriage may be destined for a long run as well, but I suspect they too will likely eventually collapse.I suspect Jeff will likely continue to be a reflexive right-wing doofus with a silly boy's scraggly beard. Therefore, he will be. (Yeah, bullshit as reasoning, even if it's probably going to come true.)
Then the capstone:
Marriage — male-female marriage — is indispensable to human welfare. That is why it has existed in virtually every known human society. And why it cannot be permanently redefined.Which of course is why we're so keen to hang onto polygamy - have to keep that permanent definition out of Jacoby's own Torah. Or why the specific, wife-protecting strictures on a just divorce in the Old Testament (reacting to a previous social norm of disposing of menopausal wives, you think?) have given way to fundamentalist covenant marriage. Unchanging? Ask Britney Spears. Ask Henry VIII, for Christ's sake.
This banal crap passes for reasoning in today's ascendant conservatism. Just fucking shoot me now.
Hot breath of doom
America is choosing to slurp up plutocratic bullshit:
[H]ow do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.
If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. ... Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.
If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. ... [A]fter driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.
If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” ...
If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses... You refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.
Societies that fail to learn true and hard lessons from events, fail. Failure is the path that our richers and betters have chosen for us. They have propagandized vast portions of the population into believing that liberals are blame, when we are the exact people who have been most right about how to structure an economy to nurture the middle class and grow the fastest. Instead, like the Russians before us, we are destined for oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the end of the American dream.
I think we're past the tipping point. After the Bushists fucked up everything, and Democrats swept into office in droves, Karl Rove's thousand-year permanent majority for government by wealth is tantalizingly within reach for the forces of reaction. And all Democrats can do is dither and cave.
Republicans will buy the 2012 election, the Supreme Court has put it on the block. They will own all three branches of government. They will kill the filibuster, as we should have, and consolidate their already firm grip on the federal judiciary. They will sweep away the twentieth century to restore the Gilded Age, despite the repeated clear and dismal failures of their economic policies. But this century's Vanderbilts and Rockefellers will be ecstatic. That's what they're buying.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
No sex, lies, and video (digital)
My daughter came home from work yesterday evening and, to accompany Thai food, she wanted to watch "Easy A". Oh, well, I've been the only owner of a Y chromosome in a movie theater. Twice. "Thirteen Going on Thirty" and "The Princess Diaries". One good, one bad, so...
"Easy A" is hysterical. Maybe I laughed too loud. At least I was only embarrassing at home.
It occurred to me about halfway through that our modern media culture is a perfect match for North Ojai High School, all gossip, rumor, and sensation, perception is reality, who cares what's true, image rules.
Typically, Hollywood slaps a happy ending on the triumph of bullshit. Olive's webcast, guerrilla marketing and all, we're supposed to believe, is good enough to shovel it out of her young life. It's a comedy, after all. And Facebook won't follow you all the days of your life.
I suppose I should take some joy from this movie metaphor. If I really can stretch it, it means that media is not channelling middle school pubescent angst and might be mature enough for high school adolescent angst. But I'm not feeling the joy.
Emma Stone's Olive wasn't having sex. We, on the other hand, are fucked. The Supreme Court's wingnut majority continues to hand wealthy people and corporations bigger and bigger megaphones, as if they needed them, to drown out the free speech of everyone who can't go toe-to-toe with whichever billionaire bogeyman is currently most prominent in financing the conservative con-game whose basic message is that we'd all be happier as peons in thrall to their every whim. Because they're so rich, they must be the greatest people who ever lived.
But I didn't let these dark thoughts spoil my viewing pleasure. I've been repressing reality a lot lately.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Wait, you mean torture's a crime?
Apparently, torture is illegal. Who knew the U.S. would prosecute it?
Torres said that if Nezirovic is convicted of the naturalization fraud charges, the immigration office will take him into custody and start deportation proceedings after he serves any prison sentence handed down by the federal judge. ... Nezirovic could then be tried for detainee abuse in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Torres said.Oh, it's not the torture, it's the lying.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Why liberals think bigots prefer the Republican Party
Because they do.
Today at the supermarket, an asshole proud to be an asshole wore a T-shirt that said, "George Bush, Love him or hate him, he killed a ton of Arabs."
This is what the bullies want - not justice, not even law, they want to be the Whitey Bulgers of geopolitics. They want to be vicious, tribal, loyal, and most deadly. The ideals America was founded on? Who gives a shit about ideals? They want the realities - pogroms and genocide against native Americans, enslavement and abuse of forcibly imported Africans and their descendants, extirpation of all linguistic minorities, and elimination of everyone different in thought or behavior.
In short, scoundrels taking their last refuge in sociopatriotism.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Another pro-lifer who's lying
In the sorry state America is now in - perhaps our death-spiral - Teapublicans such as Rand Paul don't really believe in life:
Mary Jane Koren, a geriatrician and vice-president of the Commonwealth Fund, noted that seniors often suffer health problems and are put in nursing homes after falling down. Poor nutrition leads to decreased muscle strength, meaning a higher chance of falling—and weaker seniors are more likely to be gravely injured in such a fall. Koren noted that by 2020, the annual cost of medical care for seniors who fall is expected to reach $54.9 billion—many magnitudes more than the approximately $2 billion per year the federal government spends on nutrition assistance for senior citizens.The simple premise that's missing from Paul's "logic" is that this anti-hunger program saves money if you assume you actually want to save lives. Paul wants to cut taxes so bad that he doesn't care whether old people die. And they voted for him.
Senator [Rand] Paul, however, explicitly rejected this logic. “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money,” he said. “The idea or notion that spending money in Washington somehow is saving money really flies past most of the taxpayers.” Instead, Paul touted the “nobility of private charity” as opposed to government-funded “transfer programs.” He suggested privatizing Meals on Wheels and other government assistance for hungry seniors
Of course, in Teapublican world, seniors should have planned better. If they had just taken care to be more economically viable, they wouldn't have to choose between food and medicine. Losers!
If you vote for Republicans, this is what you get. Good luck with that.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Sex rated R, violence a lovely PG-13
Think of the graphic, frightening violence we permit in our entertainment and our foreign policy. But a penis is out of bounds. That's the wrong kind of first person shooter.
Again, I'm not defending what Anthony Weiner did or the complete foolish narcissism of the way he did it. I just think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that our response to Weiner's peckerdilloes should have been derisive laughter and an immediate move to the next topic. Instead, moving on is what we did on behalf of Bushists who openly admitted doing things that in all previous circumstances had been war crimes. Ho hum, we said.
What the wealthy call socialism, I call a healthy middle class
Update: More from Robert Reich:
The President should advance ideas that work, and go to battle for them.
Supply-side economics doesn’t work. It’s been tried for thirty years, to no avail. And now, when our continuing economic crisis is so palpably being driven by inadequate demand, it’s more bogus than ever.
The last thing we need is for the President to go over to the supply side.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Can't trust Republicans with money
The financial failures alone should have been enough to remove Darth and Duhbya from their locations, disclosed and undisclosed, to Leavenworth. Because they abhor accountability of any kind, $6.6 billion was simply pilfered in Iraq.
Who knows how much of it was five-finger discounted by overpaid mercenaries from the likes of Blackwater (now Xe).
Maybe Ahmed Chalabi is thrilled not to have become President of Iraq. It always seemed as though he was in the whole three card monte with the neocons in order to get rich. Maybe it was just a failure of imagination on his part. By now, he may realize that being President only paints a bigger bullseye on your chest.
Then there are the billions we spent putting coats of paint on rubble and calling it public works. We could really use that money to create a few stopgap jobs right about now.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Why liberals think Fox harbors racists
Because they do.
How else would they pander to the racists who make up a good chunk of their audience?
Tongue in cheeks
I've tried to think of a dick joke subtle enough to be original. But I haven't. Too oxymoronic a quest. So...
Really, what kind of narcissistic prick photographs his own penis? Right, self-answering...
Of course, we all know that every woman in western civilization wants one thing above all else, and that's high-res digital pix of what has to be the least aesthetic visible part of the male body. If you're so in love with your own package that you want to show it to everyone, chances are you're also very proud when you make doo-doo in your diaper.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-putz) could have sent around pictures of his tongue. Take a lesson from Ashley Dupré - she's a pro, after all. From a man, a lingual shot would have been evidence of a sense of humor and an eagerness to please at the same time. That could have brought thumbs up on the online dating sites. (Up where? The P spot? How does that geometry work?)
Look yet again at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. A Democrat commits ludicrous peccadilloes, and that's enough to provoke hissing fleeing abandonment. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich (R-when's Callista's expiration date?) is a serial and ugly adulterer in the party of abstinence, and yet his political people only abandon him because he's mailing it in from a luxurious cruise in the Mediterranean and is too lazy to do the work of touching hoi polloi in Iowa.
Weiner is tweeting his 'nads, while Gingrich wants to tweet his ads. Oh, and Gingrich is fatter than Al Gore, but the media are forbidden from noticing.
Last, I am forced by my contract with the Bloggers' Labor Organization (protector of American BLO jobs) to observe that this is David Vitter watch, day 1441. After getting caught in prostitution scandals twice, which by the way is a crime, unlike tweeting your shlong, however weird that may be, Vitter got re-elected as a family values Republican, and the republic hasn't fallen. Yet.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Palin denies jumping the snark
... no matter how much the snark wants her to:
[S]he saved her most fulsome praise for her favorite American hero, Paul Revere: “In his famous cry, ‘One if by land, two if by sea,’ Paul Revere proved that you don’t have to know how to count higher than two to be a great American.”
Monday, June 6, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Signature madness
The louche douche Lyndon LaRouche has young people circulating petitions at the Massachusetts Democratic Party's annual convention. The first is a call for restoration of Glass-Steagall - not such a bad idea, actually. But it's a lead-in for their call to remove President Obama from office, on the grounds that he's "the same as George W. Bush."
Uh, no.
These are the same weirdos who held signs in 2008 portraying Obama as Hitler. Credible!
Paul Revere, Second Amendment fundamentalist
Just when you think she can't possibly be that ignorant, something like this comes along. Sarah Palin can't even keep track of the mythic legends of American history that conservatives normally love (this one with the added benefit of being true). She just makes up bullshit to suit her own weird inchoate opinions.
Why don't all Americans laugh her out of the room?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Answers in Genesis
Wrong answers of course. There is no way in hell two of every species in the world of bird, animal, and "creeping thing of the ground" could fit on this non-seaworthy three-story tub.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Enough to remember
Is it enough to remember those who have given their lives in service? Is that enough?
How many new war dead before Memorial Day 2012 do we need to accomplish our geopolitical goals? Do we have enough to remember?
The completion of a decade at war is coming in September or in March, depending how you date the beginning. Is memory enough, or should someone in power be bringing peace?
Andrew Bacevich asks...
Waiting for FDR
Through my disappointment, I still support President Barack Obama. I wanted a new FDR. I didn't get one.
Obama has proven time and again that he has been captured by economic orthodoxy that serves first the wealthy and then, if there's anything left, the rest of us. In other words, he's a Republican, although a Republican of thirty years ago, not one of today's current crop of crazy Ayn Randed Republicans, for whom a tax cut is the answer to every question (every question that doesn't involve a chastity belt, anyway).
So unemployment remains viciously high. Persistently, degradingly high. People who've worked hard all their lives are being reduced to destitution that they will never escape except by dying. They may get that final relief rapidly. Republicans want to phase out both Medicare and Social Security in ways that will allow only the wealthy to live their retirement lives in anything other than desperation.
And no one in power cares enough to do much of anything:
Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. ...Elite policy that fails to respond to the legitimate concerns of the population eventually engenders violence. Hopeless people burn down buildings. They riot. They attack other people.
Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. ...
[S]omeone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is ... a grotesque abdication of responsibility.
This violence hardly ever targets the real villains. Voters failed completely to discern the real enemies of the middle class in 2010, and they had time to come to grips with it. It's impossible to expect enraged mobs to think clearly. This easily predicted violence will almost by definition be senseless.
I see the current waste of human beings and the coming even worse waste, and it depresses me.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Limits of sympathy
I was at Boston College Law School's commencement on Friday and was amazed to hear speaker after speaker refer to these "uncertain times." Wow, I thought, I would never have guessed these lawyers would be both so liberal and so insightful that they would see the impact of the Great Recession on the people at large. Or maybe it's the parlous state of American democracy and civil society that they see. Either way...
Then it struck me. They were worrying about lawyers, about their fellow guild members, not about the population at large. Times are uncertain for the employment of lawyers, especially newly minted juris doctors.
What would it take for all Americans to see the peril that now exists to our society in stark and persistent income inequality, in the power equality that permits the wealthy to buy elections, in the waste of human lives in favor of corporate unaccountability, in the vicious vituperation from wingnuts that is the new normal? How many people have to suffer for the rest of us to understand?
Monday, May 23, 2011
Gift of hope
John Quiggin thinks there's hope for us:
The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the US Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years.Then again, he's in Australia, so he may underestimate just how divorced from reality our public discourse really is.
...
A pro-reality journalism will inevitably be hostile to the Republican party and its intellectual apparatus, but that doesn’t mean it should fall into the trap of reflexive support for the Democrats. The point is to report the truth, and report lies as lies, without falling into the equal and opposite traps of ‘balance’ and partisan loyalty.
Taking bullshit seriously
America is filled with ignorant religious nuts (and they're not the only kind). Some of them make a fetish of the end of the world.
That's not news. Or, it shouldn't be news.
Yet the media continues to report the pro-rapture statements of Harold Camping as if he were credible.
Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.Who are the AP's sources? Camping, a disappointed follower, and Tim LaHaye, another pro-rapture voice famous for his bullshit "Left Behind" fictionalization of the fiction of Revelation.
I guess all the atheists they asked for a comment must have sputtered out something with bullshit in it, and they couldn't use that. Yeah, sure.
Usually the media does its false objectivity dance to keep from noticing Republican bullshit, but Christianity is even more completely immune from media critique, no matter how bizarre its backwaters and increasingly its mainstream.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
On the sixth day, CNN caught up
I heard about filter bubbles on Facebook nearly a week ago - and I'm sure I'm not one of the first. CNN scoops up the story and dusts it off today.
And then CNN headlines it as a personal scare story - "What Google knows about you" - instead of Eli Pariser's clear point about what Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, among many others, are hiding from you and what that means for society.
Why is it we need big media? They're late, they don't filter out the bullshit, most of their pundits are third rate purveyors of conventional wisdom (and I'm being charitable), they don't investigate, they print official press releases as gospel, they fan the flames of manufactured controversy, and they have no institutional memory to help bring Alzheimer's/ADHD America back to reality. They expect to be paid for this record of failure?
Sorry, the god ate my homework
Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.
When was the last time a prominent atheist wished for the end of the world?
What will the media do the next time a prominent fundie wishes for it?
Every news site comment thread in America
Ignorant, peevish, narrow-minded, misinformed, livid, intolerant, they are an army of everything that's wrong with America...Yeah.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
On to the next bullshit from the lying wingnuts
Have I mentioned (lately) that I'm totally sick of big media and the D.C. village pretending that purveyors of obvious and contemptible bullshit (cough Jerome Corsi cough) make any fucking sense at all?
We live in a culture saturated with runny uncomposted bullshit. Yet the social norm is to treat vicious nonsense as if it deserves respect and civility. It doesn't.
Birthers, trickle-down so-called economists, and other Republican bullshiters deserve mocking, derisive laughter and a good swamp twirly.
Apocalypse never
Even the teabaggers are tired of teabagging. Once Donald Trump jilted the birthers and other sordid wingy nuts and went back to his shitty, neo-feudalist TV show, even Nimrata "Nikki" Randhawa Haley, the wingnut governor of the wingnuttiest state, South Carolina, couldn't draw more than 10, I mean 8 teabaggers. And who knows how many of them were simply luckless passersby.
Maybe the teeming hordes of blissful idiots all stayed home to wait for Jesus to rapture them. No such luck, though.
Christ stood them up too.
Eight! Though that's still not the single digit I'm offering them...
Bad judgement day
God guarantees President Obama's re-election:
The Rapture will usefully thin out the Republican field, which, since I assessed it in our current Comment, has already been culled by the departure of Trump and Huckabee. As of tomorrow, Palin, Bachmann, Santorum, and possibly Pawlenty (a Lutheran who attends an evangelical megachurch) will be out of the picture, having been bodily swooped up to Heaven (along with, redundantly, Huckabee).Hendrik Hertzberg notices what many liberal pundits have missed. The Rapture will take a big bite out of the Republican base. Obama's approval rating could reach two-thirds!
Back here on Planet Earth, the two Mormons, Romney and Huntsman, will still be in the race, obviously. So will Daniels (mainline Presbyterian), Gingrich (hopelessly sinful), Paul (follower of militant atheist Ayn Rand), Bolton (Lutheran, but no sign he takes it seriously), Johnson (political pothead), and Cain (Baptist, but from the social-justice Dr. King wing).
That will leave eight men scrambling for the support of a very different Republican primary electorate. The religious right will still be a factor, but its numbers will be greatly reduced and those “left behind” are apt to be relative moderates.
But I'm worried. God seems to be running late on Revelation.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Throw papa from the temple
It wasn't the crime researchers' fault. Nothing in their education or institutions should be changed to make them more resistant to being paid to prostitute their credentials in the service of a long train of criminal conspiracies and abuses. Poor little victims of society...
They were surrounded by a culture of bullshit, and they were insufficiently trained to deal with the huge appeal of making shit up and pawning it off on credulous readers as if it were factual. It's not just that 87.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot. They were far more methodologically sound than that. They took in voluminous data from the very hierarchy that protected the perpetrators and accepted it as gospel. And I don't mean that metaphorically.
With everyone around them taking the money to produce a thin tissue of rationalization, why wouldn't they join in? Take the money and run, babeee!
Never mind when secondary sex characteristics become visible. Those altar boys had increasing levels of testosterone - it's scientific! - and the poor entrapped victim priests simply couldn't resist it at a time when college kids were openly lustful and the one true unalterable word of the lord was, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought.
Ten years old? No longer a child! Oral sex with a fifth grader couldn't possibly be pedophilia. Any sensitive man of god could tell he was about to break out in adolescent acne any day now. Isn't that a little peach fuzz in the armpit?
The so-called researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice - what a misnomer! - concocted rationalizations for the very same fig leaf theory their sponsors had made up of whole cloth. What a coincidence! No, they were paid to uphold these despicable lies. Until John Jay College dismisses the authors of this study, it has made itself the Heritage Foundation of boy-buggering, an institution with zero credibility and even less moral worth.
And what could redeem the Catholic hierarchy?
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Privatization of your taxes
First, charter schools cost more with lesser results for a student population that should have had higher achievement.
Now, it's true of prisons too. Privatized prisons in Arizona cost more than state-run prisons. And they don't take the most expensive inmates, which should make it easy for them to have a lower average cost. The libertarian advocates of all things private could then have made a bogus claim that they were saving money, and they would have been able to make a bullshit argument that they had complied with the law that requires cost savings for taxpayers. But, no, they have Republicans to defend their extra costs, so no worries.
Charter schools, private prisons, both ways to transfer money from unionized public employees to wealthy investors, screwing middle class taxpayers. If that's not a perfect microcosm of Republican policy, I don't know any that's better. Winner take all!
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Clearing the field
Lost between the end of Trumpapalooza and Arnold's proof that steroids didn't turn his junk completely to Raisinettes, Mike Huckabee dropped out. Despite persistently polling as a contender.
Why?
Perils of moderation
For three decades now, three facts have been true:
- Republicans have been determined to have no adversaries to their right.
- Democrats have been willing, sometimes eager, to take any shit-ass deal that they can spin as half a loaf, even if it's really just a moldy crust of bread that no one in his right mind would eat, lest he get ergotamine poisoning and suffer Republican accusations of witchcraft.
- The village media of provincial Washington D.C.has made a fetish of calling for bipartisanship.
In response, Republicans have continually moved further and further to the extreme right. If the press is going to call for a Solomonic division of the baby and the Democrats are going to cave and go along, why shouldn't the Republicans stake out an extreme position? It's rational - in the feeble sense that economists use.
Democrats need to stop playing along. Republicans are our adversaries. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bargained with. And they will not stop until they kill the New Deal.
Trump 2016
Four years from now, when Donald Trump needs his undeserving ego stroked, when the asshole vote is up for grabs (unless Chris Christie is in the race), when he has PR to do for a shitty, ritually abusive television show that exhibits all the worst ugly aristocratic features of 21st century American society, will the media once again take him seriously as a candidate for President? Even though he has been through divorces and bankruptcies like trailer trash? Even though he has no experience or organization or policy? Even though he couldn't make money with a casino? Even though he has the personal magnetism of a piece of carrion too ripe for a vulture? Even if he has less control over his own message than the most afflicted, unmedicated sufferer of Tourette's?
Of course they will! They're the media, after all. It's their job to suck up to rich people.
I don't think the TV talking heads are all stupid, though many of them are, but they definitely think we're on average stupid. Trump's polling trajectory proves they're right about that.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Untrustworthy
Republicans are not about reality. They're about sales pitches - and fever pitches.
It turns out the six-month spending bill Congress passed in April increased discretionary outlays through the remainder of the fiscal year by a bit over $3 billion. In other words, total direct spending will be higher by the end of September than if Congress had just set spending on autopilot for the remainder of the fiscal year back in April.and:
Republicans got done in a 10 year time-frame a bit more than they hoped to accomplished by September.Repeat after me:
- You can't trust Republican facts.
- You can't trust Republican analysis.
- You can't trust Republican good faith.
(h/t Tom Levenson)
Balkanizing the net for fun and profit
Business continues to pose a greater danger to democracy (and especially to privacy) than government.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Only encourages them
You can't save old people's or poor people's lives:
"I don't think I can vote for someone like that," Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. "He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?"That's just an incentive for them to get sick more and more. Are we going to have to save their lives over and over again?
"I like Michele Bachmann now," Tolbert added. "Because what this country needs is a president who doesn't give a fuck about helping people.
Democrats blow the media
Democrats once again prove their incomprehension of modern American big media. You would think that, in the past 30 years, they would have figured out that the media makes no judgements whatsoever whether the Republicans are obviously bullshitting. The so-called non-partisan political media is a meeting facilitator. The talk show yappers won't check facts. They don't interview skeptically. They ask what appear to be challenging questions, but they won't follow up to flag obvious lies and lying liars for the audience.
The yappers think that's fine. They view their job as giving the sides the opportunity to make their cases, nothing more.
Their performance reveals this. Starkly. Democrats, who haven't yet cottoned onto it, are slow learners. Or too lazy to show up on Sunday mornings.
Of course, I'm only writing about those talking heads who regard themselves as objective. Everyone on Fox and the other right-wing propaganda outlets does their biased best to make Republicans look good.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Meaning in bullshit
Vanity, thy name is Rudolph. Giuliani...
[I]f Giuliani turns out to be the best Republican for the job, the 2008 candidate for the GOP nomination said, "I could probably be talked into doing it."No one with a normal ego could even consider a run for President. Rudy wants to be talked into running.
Yeah, right, a groundswell of support will prove once and for all that Donald Trump and Chris Christie are mere pretenders to the asshole vote, that they remain not only a potent part of the Republican base but also now and forever Rudy's most gaseously effusive supporters.
Of course, the big media role in all this is clear too. They have Rudy's number in their cell phones, and he'll take their calls. Flattery goes both ways in the elite electronic village. Accountability? Not so much.
There is one small excuse for CNN giving Giuliani a platform. They can tell that there's not a credible Republican candidate yet in the race. Trotting out their old warhorses is just a way to vamp until ready and fill the vast desolate air time with some kind of familiar noise.
Signifying nothing.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
The next wingnut contrive-versy
Sharia burial! Give it a few days... The birthers need a new so-called issue.
Never mind that the consensus seems to be that burial at sea accords with some Muslim customs and not with others. The wingnuts don't care about facts. They have an entire disinformation apparatus to make up any bullshit they need.
And they need to go through the day in a constant state of outrage and alienation from everyone who's not in their tribe.
Yesterday morning, they resented Osama bin Laden continuing to breathe. Today, they resent that President Obama directed the effort to find and capture or kill him. And they're thanking Duhbya, whose every major move and attitude gave punishment of al Qaeda the short shrift in his failed geopolitical game of Risk.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Née to the groin
Coincident to the much televised marriage of another horse-faced Windsor to the lovely commoner Kate Middleton, I've been reading Common Sense. Here's a sweet excerpt:
England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.It's about as sound a basis for a system of government as strange tarts lying in ponds distributing swords.
And then:
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.I'm a little-d democrat too. I have no patience for pageantry at the price the British pay for it. These fantastic leeches need an honest job for the first time in generations.
Just as I have no patience for the divine right of Wall Street...
Thursday, April 28, 2011
No business like show business
Any man who took a casino into bankruptcy has some 'splainin' to do:
In a piece of good news for Mr. Trump, a new poll showed a majority of likely voters agreeing with the statement, “Donald Trump being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake.”Or Idiocracy.
Honestly, isn't it obvious to everyone that America has thrown an even bigger nutty than a John Bircher's previously impotent dream of a wet dream?
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Medicare-less
You're a senior citizen under Republican health care vouchers. The price of medical care has continued to escalate at a rate higher than inflation, but the buying power of your voucher is capped by law, so you're losing ground. For a while you can scrape together enough to buy private insurance, but your needs are greater every year.
Insurance companies are not there to be anyone's friend. Patients? They exist to care for their shareholders, and the mutual companies can't afford your annual costs.
At age 70, you have to choose between cancer treatment and heart treatment. You know your PSA level has increased thanks to the home analysis kit you bought at Walgreen's. At least you think you know; those things have a 30% false positive rate. But most prostate cancers are slow, so you pick the cardiovascular insurance. It only costs you $50,000 a year, which means you need a reverse mortgage and the entire annual payment from the privatized account that replaces less and less of Social Security with each passing year. (And just try to get what you have left invested in a no-load index fund. No one makes any fees off that, and your dwindling nest egg is too small to interest anyone anyway.)
A year or two later, still feeling pretty hale but in need of several medications, you can no longer afford any insurance without a low-dollar lifetime cap. Basically, the only use you get out of your insurance company is to negotiate volume discounts on routine care. Surgery beyond office procedures is out of the question, and even those mean a lean year at the kitchen table and skimping on your maintenance medications. Arthritis? Suck it up and suffer so you can keep taking your blood pressure meds.
With the level of care you're getting - minimal - your life expectancy drops. The closer you get to that last year when the bills really pile up and your ability to promise to repay your debts slides off in the five stages of grief, the less willing any reputable insurer is to cover you. Sure, there are companies that will take your premiums, but their policies have huge on-line PDFs filled with pretexts for denying your claims. It seems as if all they care about is your voucher.
At a time when your life expectancy under the old Medicare program would still have been ten years, the private insurers all expect you to die soon in a way that's very unprofitable for them. You can't get insurance coverage at any price. You're a pay as you go customer. With no money left.
With a touch of pneumonia, you get a friend to drive you to the ER. A course of azithromycin would only cost $200, but the physician on duty won't prescribe it without $1000 in fees for the ER and the exam, so you leave untreated.
You should have planned better.
Instead, the free market is so efficient that it doesn't need a death panel to end your useless, uneconomic life. Those last 10 years you could live that you don't? All profit for America.
The America of deserving titans of business, anyway, not unproductive freeloaders like you.
That's Republican health care for the aged. If you're a teabagger who buys into Paul Ryan's bullshit, there's a certain harsh justice there. You thought that harsh justice was for other people, and it catches you too.
Monday, April 25, 2011
The true freeloaders
It's not the poor. It's certainly not the middle class. It's the wealthy, never mind their bullshit Randian claims to be the god-like masters of the universe and bringers of all good things.
When the government gives away free money, they're first in line with the biggest wheelbarrow.
And none of them ever go to jail for burning down the economy with risk that they fraudulently sold.
More patriotic than Newt
Newt Gingrich (R-cheating for the flag) did two wives wrong because of his overwhelming boner for America. He was working hard and long cheek to cheek with other (younger) women, and he needed sex relief. Right there in the Speaker's office. If Bill Clinton could get some in the Oval Office...
John Ensign (R-much better looking than Harry Reid) had to go him one better and have an affair with a close friend's wife. That personal sacrifice shows just how much Ensign loves America. He was willing to wreck four lives at once and maybe get his own mother indicted for perjury for her involvement in paying hush money.
Top that, Gingrich! Isn't it about time you found someone to cheat with on Callista? She has to be expecting it.
What sweet young wingnut sycophant will be the next last refuge of a scoundrel?
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Goodwill toward men
Republican creed: Jesus didn't die for foster children. He died for deserving Republicans, who will receive his blessing for their ugly, mean, punitive deprivations. You think that's the sort of intentional sin that Christian forgiveness is supposed to expiate?
Neither do I.
(h/t Atrios)
Thursday, April 21, 2011
America's coarse aristocracy
Donald Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, yet all he has to offer is resentment and Galtian ego, despite his avid use of bankruptcy laws to escape his debts and leave others holding the bag:
[E]ven with daddy's millions, the best business education money can buy, and income and capital gains taxes slashed to the bone, somehow, Donald J. Trump still managed to declare bankruptcy several times, and was accused of turning of millions of investment dollars into a pile of junk along the way.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
What Republicans want
Republicans want corporations to be free to pollute, exploit, rape, and pillage. You want clean water, air, food? Those corporations will be happy to sell you your birthright from their exploitation of the common weal. At inflated prices, like what they get for bottled water.
In exchange, you and I might get a few crummy jobs, but they don't care a whit whether we can live a middle class life on what they'll deign to pay us.
This is the same approach they've taken to taxation, whole bakeries of bread for the wealthy, a few moldy crumbs for rest of us.
It did work for them. Moronic teabaggers.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Country club games
Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.
I flipped the image to swap left and right because I thought it more appropriate to have the golfer swinging from the right!
That Kenyan Muslim socialist
I really object to Paul Ryan's objections to President Obama's tone. Did you see the evil ideologue's dead, unblinking eyes in that guy's face? Ugh.
Republicans live in early puberty, where any mild criticism can set off a crying jag. Crank up the tears, boys. We're coming to git ya.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Republicans incensed that Obama calls their bullshit bullshit
The big media is full of co-opted fools. Paul Krugman makes them look bad almost every week, and yesterday he shovelled the covering bullshit off of the so-called work of his so-called colleagues:
Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”The truth is that Republicans have nothing to offer but lies marinated in bullshit to make them, oddly enough, more palatable. Krugman's losing competitors love nothing more than to dish out copious, self-composting dumpster loads of nonsense well-aligned with the Republican marketing of snow to Eskimos. No, stop me, marketing snow to Eskimos would be better than what the GOP does. Republicans market laetrile to men with erectile dysfunction. Or lawn service to gila monsters. Or bicycles to fish.
Clear-eyed as always, Krugman is of course more serious than my arrant dismissal, though no less dismissive:
Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.Again, the Republicans don't give the slightest shit about deficits, except as leverage to reward the wealthy with further spoils of their total victory in class warfare.
On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?
Update (4/16): More from the estimable Dr. Krugman:
It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.Read it all. He also hits our shared point about the misuse of civility.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Republicans don't care about the deficit
When they claim they care about the deficit, Republicans are lying:
Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.Republicans actually care about cutting the taxes of the very rich.
In other words, the spending cuts Republicans would realize in the first 10 years would be outpaced by deficit increasing tax-cuts, which Ryan also proposes.
None of this is a news flash if you've had your head anywhere other than buried up your ass.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Suborning perjury
What Paul Ryan (R-more for the rich) demanded of the Congressional Budget Office: bullshit projections based on fatuous nonsensical assumptions. Normal people call this lying.
We liberals will never ever get heard and understood until job one for us is saying this about Republicans:
- You can't trust their facts.
- You can't trust their analysis.
- You can't trust their good faith.
Organic saffron over the flavor of bullshit
Most of our big media pundits are worse than useless. They are actively contributing to the decay of America into banana Republicanism.
They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!
Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Why liberals think the GOP harbors bigots
Because they do.
We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.The social norm in Mississippi is that it's still o.k. to think integration in the bedroom should be, not even merely frowned upon by white bigots, but against the law.
Of course, they can turn Fox up LOUD and see the stupidest men in television act even dumber by pretending that everyone is as pasty white as they are (except for Michelle Malkin, and they know she'd rather be white).
You know what Fox is doing, right? They now continue, after the so-called liberal media's memories of Martin Luther King, with their thinly veiled racism ("but we never said n*****!") already in progress.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Paid to impersonate wingnuts
If wingnut talk radio didn't pay actors to deliver lines to Rush Limbaugh and his belligerent ilk, there'd be no way to screen out all the obviously incoherent bullshit that teabaggers believe.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Wingnut welfare
Remember teabagger Dale Robertson? A year ago, he was taking incoming rounds for something he had done in the depths of history - 2009 to be exact.
In his defense, how racist could someone be if he can't even spell his slurs correctly? And isn't it a desecration to wear the Lone Star flag over such an, ahem, barrel chest?
So what's this piece of work up to now?
He sends out fundraising surveys from waaay out on the fringes. Yeah, that means smack in the middle of the John Birch teabagger standard fantasy universe. Here's a sample:
The Barack Hussein Obama Administration and the internationalists in our U.S. Department of State are quietly surrendering our national sovereignty to the future One World Government based at the United Nations. Should this surrender of our sovereignty be stopped immediately and the internationalists be removed from office?He also has a web site. It's about as well-designed as his protest sign - none of them effeminate esthetics for him. On the site, he refers to himself in the third person - "Dale Robertson is a man of courage and conviction... Sincerely, Dale Robertson". But he's a founder!
The site sells stuff from T shirts to blast faxes that he says will go to every Senator and Representative. You can get a volume discount if you send the same fax twice. One of those faxes tells the Congress to keep its hands off the Internet, though only in paranoid language, not in any terms that could be consistently translated into policy.
He's a regular teabagger entrepreneur, suckling at the teat (or something else) of the credulous tihadists who no doubt freely send him their money.
Wrestling with pigs
Fighting disinformation and propaganda from Fox is a dirty unrewarding job, and the pigs' ratings go up, but someone has to do it now that Keith Olbermann is no longer knocking the big cow chip off Bill O'Reilly's shoulder.
The Democratic Party doesn't seem able fight the right anywhere outside of fundraising emails, so I'm glad at least Media Matters is stepping up to the plate. This should be leverage to be asked by big media to speak for liberals.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Like Mecca for stupid
The Republican Presidential race, of course, even though that's an awful oxymoron.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Running government like a business
We're only plowing 70% of your street this winter. It's a green program to use less fuel!
We'll give your kids the three Rs, and AP courses or a foreign language are available à la carte so that we can provide you exactly what you want!
No more WIC for you women and your babies! It's a diet plan. Start your baby on the scientifically proven calorie reductions of a lifetime! (Immoral and stupid, the perfect Republican plan...)
That's what business - or a Republican - would do:
“I have never regretted raising prices in the face of significant cost pressures, since we can always course-correct if the outcome is not as we expected,” Heinz’s chairman and chief executive, William R. Johnson, said last month.
But of course he raises prices stealthily by shrinking packages.
Friday, April 1, 2011
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.
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