The professional Republican's view of the Republican base

Rick Scott (R-asshole) is the latest of a long line of Republicans to snark about President Obama's use of a teleprompter while making speeches themselves from teleprompters. Hey, it's a reliable laugh line in a party whose jokes usually involve the death penalty or sneering at someone else's misfortune.

But what does it mean when a Republican like Scott mocks someone else for doing exactly what he's doing himself? One of these two things:

• Either Scott thinks his base is too fucking stupid to notice the hypocrisy, or...
• the base is in on the joke but is utterly incapable of the fundamental moral reasoning required to expect of him the behavior he expects of Obama.

Either way, Scott knows his base is filled with blithering dolts.

Winning the class war

How is it possible that the Koch brothers believe President Obama is a socialist when they're raking in such huge stinking piles of money hand over fist?

If I had to guess, I'd guess that greater income and wealth inequalities are more desirable to the Kochs than mere greater income and wealth. To feel good about themselves, they need to be able to lord it over the common people.

Who's interested in the truth?

I've recently read Merchants of Doubt, and I'm in the middle of The Republican War on Science. The clear moral of both is that independent scientists seek truth, while corporate and Republican lobbyists seek to protect profits.

Today, there's a case in which a corporation completely screwed up their maps of the Greenland ice sheet, hugely over-stating how much of it has melted - by a factor of 150, by an amount that would have increased sea level by a meter or more. Harper Collins, the publisher, touted this falsehood in a press release accompanying their atlas, but now won't even admit error.

On Thursday, Ms. Barclay said on a BBC radio news program that the Greenland map in the atlas would be reconfigured with the help of scientists, although she did not say the current one was wrong. She promised a new, “much more detailed map of Greenland that will represent more effectively the ice cover as it is.”

Asked if by “effectively” she meant “accurately,” [Sheena Barclay, the managing director of Collins Geo] replied, “It’s a case of actually how you define the ice itself, and at the scales at which we show Greenland it’s actually quite difficult to achieve that.”

I can't imagine having enough tolerance for obvious bullshit to ever say anything so fancifully and obviously stupid and wrong.

The scientists, on the other hand, are telling the truth.

Gravity is only a theory

Pat Robertson intentionally misquoted:

“We have to remember that the heavens are where God lives,” Rev. Robertson said during the broadcast. “If we launch something into outer space that God thinks is gay, He’s going to kick it right back to us.”

Turning them into assholes

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Never mind arsenic, what about new lace?

Elizabeth Warren

I wasn't at this particular party, but I did hear Elizabeth Warren speak. I'm impressed, and I walked away inspired again, in a time when mostly our political and social culture depresses me with its ardent slouching toward idiocracy.

More lies from a Republican, ho hum

Why I know Fleming's lying:

• If he's really taxed at his personal tax rate on his LLCs, he has nothing to fear from President Obama's Buffett rule.

The problem is rich assholes who think they should continue to pay a lower rate of taxes than the little people. I'm really sick of these pathetic plutocratic pillagers of the economy.

Non-consummation devoutly to be wish'd

Republicans don't want women to have control over any aspect of their reproductive lives other than abstinence:

“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that’s what family planning is supposed to be about,” [Wayne] Christian said.

Change one letter, and the solution is clear: wane Christian.

Does Bachmann count?

If there's anyone retarded from the HPV vaccine, Michele's the one.

Though I suppose that's a pre-existing condition...

Unemployed, tough luck

The Republican view is that unemployment doesn't matter at all:

“We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy,” said the letter, signed by four of the top Republicans in Congress: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader; Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate Republican whip; House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

As they were during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, all the Republican "leadership" is willing, eager, even happy to sacrifice America for the sake of their power.

And they call stimulus treason.

But keep your government paws off my Medicare

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Turn back the clock

I do agree that the status quo is unacceptable. But if we switch to this guy, we only increase the peril we're already in as a nation, a society, a civilization, a people.

Where they keep the money

From the New York Times:

The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

What never seems to occur to the numbskulls of the right as they pander to their ignoramus base is that climate scientists are smart people, not just highly educated people. If these scientists were really conniving world wide for a couple hundred thou a year, wouldn't they whore out to interests with a little more money than the government? Wouldn't you, if you had a Ph.D. just lying around waiting to be monetized, think about getting paid maybe a mill instead? As long as it's going to be dirty money, why not hit up the American Petroleum Institute? Or, the coal industry could really use a friend.

This story that Republicans tell each other tries to assuage their own knowledge that they in fact are the bought and paid for assholes, not the climate scientists. It's another false equivalence. Industry's in the global warming fight strictly for the money, so the other side - the side of reality - must be in it for the money too. Yeah, that's the ticket.

There's no explanation for wingnut credulity on this except that they want to believe it so badly that they choose to ignore its and their own stupidity.

Free market wanking

In the U.S., a fertility clinic may use a single donor's sperm to fertilize a large number of eggs in vitro:

Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way.

Mel Brooks, please make a new movie, "High Motility." Yet another chance to use the line, "Great knockers." (Yes, I know that was in "Frankenstein.")

Imagine, though, the strange inner life of the donor. He's as reproductively fit as kings and khans of old - with no commitment beyond, presumably, pornography. Does the clinic call him and plead for more whenever they have a tough case of infertility?

There's a product here, there's unrestricted economic activity, many people are happy. But... there is no conceivable and credible just-so story by which the free market can definitively solve the problem of potential incest. A free market requires full information, exactly what is not available in this market for semen.

Regulate or risk half-sisters marrying half-brothers?

Birds of a feather

"Keep busy or you'll go nuts."

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution cartoon.

But I'm right about everything

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Come again another day

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

Everyt'ing dat guy just said was bullshit

Darth Cheney ran America for six years, and he's an evil man, quite happy to admit his commitment to torture, among other proven lies.

Perhaps the fact that we survived the Cheney regency is cause for optimism. Or, more likely, maybe the other shoes just haven't finished dropping.

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Rim job regret

Floridians voted for Rick Scott (R-nasty) because he's an asshole. Now they've awakened to the new enormity of their hemorrhoid problem:

"The first-time governor -- less than a year into his term, typically a honeymoon period for newly electeds -- now has an approval rating of 27 percent," Maxwell writes. "That makes him one of the least popular politicians in the United States and only slightly more popular than a hemorrhoid."

I have no sympathy for Scott's regretful voters. Under the assault of greedhead political ads, they turned off their bullshit detectors at exactly the wrong time.

From tough shit to fuck you

Memo from Republican Eric Cantor to Americans:

Your suffering and need is leverage that conservatives can use to make life even more insecure and bitter.

And if you've been saving the little people without demanding payment for services, well, screw you. You're probably the type would would run into a burning building without regard for your own safety. You don't need radios that work in an office tower; you're obviously a soft-headed schmuck.

These people are completely immoral assholes. Why is it that we don't make them ride the stang out of Washington?

Update: Note to Barack Obama: When hostage-takers get a good deal out of it, they take more hostages. Duh. When the hell are you going to act as if you've figured out the fundamental fact about Republicans: They'll do whatever is necessary to win. They don't give a crap what a sweet, reserved personality you have. In fact, that will only encourage them to think you're a pushover. I only wish you would bring Chicago rules from "The Untouchables" to bear here. Time to start putting their political careers into the morgue.

Cow chip on his shoulder

Because there's no place in the modern world for a talentless hack who's had a succession of high-paying jobs with zero accountability. Because there's never been any lasting accountability for all the times his view of the future has turned out to be - predictably - total unalloyed bullshit. Because he can say anything that comes to mind and not be fired.

That's why Pat Buchanan has such a massive inconsolable grievance - because he's white and male, and that's no longer a complete guarantee that every blithering moron can find a sinecure just because he's melanin challenged and the proud owner of a Y chromosome, even if he needs pharmaceuticals to get it up.

Debasing the brand

It's an inevitable result of capitalism that every quality brand is doomed eventually to debasement. (In Boston, Filene's De-Basement.) The reputation one entrepreneur has built will, in the depth of some business downturn, become the easy asset that some lazy bastard can exploit. This B-school grad will work the numbers and think he's an entrepreneur.

Fox owns National Geographic TV, which for no apparent reason from its origins is reporting on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, exploring the execrable Duhbya's memories of that day and time. The teasers for their show bear all the marks of soft propaganda.

I knew from the day I learned that Fox had bought Nat Geo that it too would become a propaganda vehicle. We'll see for sure tomorrow whether that has indeed happened.

Freedom to starve

America's favorite face of Ayn Rand libertarian bullshit:

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

Sane people notice when their slavish adherence to ideology leads them into insane positions. Ron Paul is not one of those sane people. He doubles down on bullshit and calls it principle.

Insane, batshit insane? Sociopathic? Or just a fucking moron? Ron Paul...

The single common thread of radical Republican conservatism is that you're on your own.

Update: Paul is not alone as a batshit insane sociopathic moron. Fox gives space to laissez-faire dipshits from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to argue that we don't need publicly funded weather data. They report as an article of faith that private reports are better. What they omit, relying on the steady ignorance of Fox readers, is that all private forecasts, other than your finger in the wind and their fingers up their asses, are based on free data they receive from the National Weather Service.

"You're on your own" is far too mild a summary of Republicanism. Really, their guiding principle is, "Fuck you."

And it totally beggars belief that these assholes are so willing, over and over and over again, to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, just as long as the penny goes to the wealthy in corporate profit and the pound of costs comes out of the hide of everyone else.

Kills at HuffPo conventions

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Class warfare - the winners

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Right-wing bunkosphere

Global warming is real and well-correlated with the dramatic increase in atmospheric CO₂ caused by the Industrial Revolution.

But information cannot argue with a closed mind. And that's what the teabaggers have.

Idiocracy, the sequel

If enough idiot voters once again form a majority in 2012 and elect this weak echo of Duhbya, I'm seriously going to get to work on that exit strategy. Belize, I think, or Costa Rica. I had a little Spanish in high school decades ago.

(h/t mistermix on Balloon Juice)

Glimmer of hope?

Nate Silver gives reason for hope in the Democratic lead on the generic House ballot.

Last year, Republicans won the popular vote for the U.S. House — essentially what the generic ballot is trying to measure — by 7 percentage points. So a poll showing Democrats 7 points ahead instead is a pretty significant swing.

Of course it's waaay too early to count on, but we need hope to gird up for the arduous campaign ahead. Imagine the difference:

• President Perry, Vice President Bachmann, Senate Majority Leader DeMint, House Speaker Cantor
• President Obama, VP Biden, Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Warren, House Speaker Pelosi

Imagine even further that Majority Leader Warren reforms the filibuster (to death).

Of course, this is total fantasy. No freshman Senator is ever going to be elected Majority Leader.

But I have to say that meeting Warren yesterday has me daring again to dream.

Warren Buffett, Fox's most hated socialist

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Why does the mere phrase class warfare end all debate?

Time to say, "Class warfare? You fat cats don't want the middle class to defend itself in a war that you've been winning unopposed for thirty years."

If the wealthy continue to get their way on everything, the time will come when class warfare won't be a metaphor. That's when liberals yield to radicals and there's bloody revolution.

Of course the idiot conservatives can't see that coming, just as they can't see that liberals in the 1930s saved them from the communist tide. Ungrateful bastards! Yet I still want to save their hides again - because America is a better country as a liberal country than it would be as a tyranny of either extreme of the political spectrum.

Could Rick Perry do for America what he did for Texas?

Total effing boatloads of government jobs:

Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47% of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas.

I'm for it.

Less popular than atheists

Less popular than Muslims!

 [T]he Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Of course, those of us who were not performing daily self-service colonoscopies also knew this:

Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born.

Care to revise your statement? Want to change your bullshit story?

Wonder if anyone on Fox will claim that it's not the phone hacking, it's the cover-up that matters.

In Mr. Goodman’s letter, dated March 2, 2007, Mr. Goodman challenged his dismissal, saying that his actions “were carried out with the full knowledge and support” of other senior journalists. He also said another senior journalist arranged for payments to a private investigator who carried out the hacking.

Mr. Goodman also asserted in his letter that the practice of phone hacking was “widely discussed in the daily editorial conference” at the newspaper until “explicit reference to it was banned by the editor.”

Mr. Watson said the committee had seen two versions of the letter, one more heavily redacted than the other. One version sent to the committee by News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of the Murdoch family’s News Corporation, had been redacted to black out references to “editorial conference” and “the editor.”

The News of the World had long insisted that the phone hacking was restricted to Mr. Goodman, a single rogue reporter.

Look, News Corp. and all its properties lie early and often. I wonder just how Clintonesque they'll become in their denials that they've perjured themselves before Parliament.

“We have written to Andy Coulson to ask him whether he would like to amend his previous evidence,” Mr. Watson said. “Clearly if Clive Goodman’s account is accurate, it shows the evidence he gave us was at best misleading and probably deceptive.”

What's really odd: no investigative follow-through on this side of the Atlantic.

Lying without consequence

"Obama inherited unemployment of 5.6%."

This is of course a lie, only one among many.

Conservatives...

• You can't trust their facts.
• You can't trust their analysis.
• You can't trust their good faith.

Our culture has been debased by bullshit. There are no longer any consequences for publicly and repeatedly lying. At least not if you're a conservative.

In past eras, even those dominated by assholes, Americans were able to see what was true and act on it. We no longer are - because an industry that is Constitutionally charged with showing the truth is dominated and steered by bought and paid for by right-wing corporatists.

This ain't Israel in 4 B.C.

No time for fundamentalist imperryalism:

God said He would not be present at Perry’s much-talked-about Christian day of prayer on Aug. 6, calling the governor’s use of his public office to endorse a religion both “irresponsible” and a violation of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who claim god talks to them hear their own desires as the voice of god.

House advantage

Click image for full Mike Smith/Las Vegas Sun cartoon.


Also available here.

But conservatives deserve help

At least that's what they think. The rest of us - y'know, Americans? Just a bunch of sponging weasely freeloaders who can't make it on our own without taxing success to death...

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The George Carlin clip starts at 2:12 or so here.

Stand-up on the Titanic

If there aren't enough lifeboats again this time around to save the entertainment, instead of small string ensembles, maybe we'll get to swim in the bracing North Atlantic to gallows humor:

Calling the results of today’s Iowa straw poll “alarming,” Standard and Poor’s took the unprecedented action of downgrading Iowa’s IQ.

We've already hit the iceberg. How long till we go down by the head? Carpathia, are you out there?

Ask not what the teabaggers can do for you

... ask what you can do for your teabagger's sponsor.

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

Twilight in America, thunder on the right

It's wicked hot all across America. Massachusetts is having torrential rainstorms that would seem like monsoon even in Memphis, where they would at least be more familiar. There are enough goddamn moths here in New England to carry off a flock of sheep, and no more pecorino romano for us.

Fox has intentionally effaced the difference between weather and climate, but even Fox's viewers have to be starting to wonder if maybe there is something to this global warming shit after all. Call out the big guns! Gotta keep those dollars flowing into fossil fuels! Most of all, can't let those liberals with their smug reliance on facts win.

Fox brings on Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist of AccuWeather. Oooh, impressive. He reassures viewers that, not only is global warming wrong, it's transparently, obviously wrong. Bastardi is airily confused how such a theory could possibly have achieved such popularity. He leaves it to the hosts to introduce (in-traduce) slanders against scientists, and they do. "Poll shows Americans think scientists lie, the dirty egg-headed SOBs." (O.K., not quite.)

What are Bastardi's arguments?

First, conservation of energy, which he dresses up in its tuxedo as the first law of thermodynamics to make it sound as complex and authoritative as possible for the great unlearned. Bastardi is claiming that greenhouse gases would have to create energy to warm the earth. This claim immediately proves that he deserves nothing more than total mocking disdain. By the same argument, a greenhouse couldn't work either. Maybe Thelma and Delbert, sitting on their barcaloungers suckling the bullshit teat of Rupert Murdoch, have never been in a greenhouse, or maybe they think the gas bills must be immense to keep one of them so warm with all that single-pane glass.

This thermodynamic argument is the anencephalic descendant of the second law argument against evolution. (Yeah, I'm sure that one's been advanced with a straight face on Fox, too.) Only god can violate thermodynamic laws! More complex organisms couldn't possibly occur naturally in a physical environment of never-decreasing disorder. As if there were no sources of energy available to overcome entropy. Hint to convinced Fox viewers and other ignoramuses: Don't look up when you go out during the day. Oh, and don't think even a first thought, much less a second one, what makes it daytime. You might have to change your mind.

The sun, implicated in both evolution and global warming! Fox-aholics can't even believe in the sun anymore. The sun can be the energy source of global warming and global warming's cause can still be human because gases we've put into our atmosphere in huge amounts retain more of the sun's heat, rather than allowing it to radiate back into space. Where it has no effect on climate. But where it still exists. This is the first most basic scientific explanation of the warming data. It's almost as if half the population is immune to learning.

Second, Bastardi claims that LeChatelier's Principle prohibits this kind of change. Oooh, another fancy name - did I pronounce it correctly? It must be good stuff! Of course, Bastardi makes a total and elementary misconstruction of the real science. Sure, any chemical reaction becomes less responsive to an increase in one reagent as that increase grows further.

But that doesn't mean there's some magic fairy keeping the addition of a reagent from changing the final chemical concentrations. (If you believe there is a magic fairy, what's its rate constant, dickhead?) You may have more trouble dissolving that sixth heaping tablespoon of sugar into your iced tea, but until you get the solution saturated, you're making your swee' tea sweeter. Or you could just eat it out of the bowl.

Somehow, more and more CO₂ has dissolved into the atmosphere, and while there it continues to have all its expected effects.

The fact that the oceans are also absorbing CO₂ doesn't change the measured atmospheric concentration, it only means that if we reverse the trend, the oceans will release some of their CO₂ as gas, and that will slow improvement.


The rest of Bastardi's so-called science is a complete muddle of discredited bullshit. But for Fox...

That ought to hold 'em until fall brings a breeze and relief from uncomfortable reality. Oh, heterodoxy, the confusion, the pain. Let them get back to loving Big Brother.

Bastardi may call himself a meteorologist, but he isn't. He has an undergraduate major in meteorology with no advanced training. He's a weather girl who lifts weights and probably caps his teeth. He's a storm-chasing celebrity. He's willing to whore himself out to Fox for the money, the hell with the truth.

Conservatives:

• You can't trust their facts.
• You can't trust their analysis.
• You can't trust their good faith

Their stock in trade is bullshit, perfumed just enough that ignoramuses will be satisfied by the pablum they take to be plausible mumbo-jumbo.

There's a little coda on the bullshit symphony: At around 3:08 in the linked video, Bastardi blames environmentalists for claiming that the winter's snows could have been caused by climate change. At least we should have waited for hurricanes and heat waves. This slimy putrescence knows quite well that any such claim merely of possibility, not of fact, was made in response to the massive conservative propaganda that the mere existence of winter disproves warming is happening at all.

Oh, but this all happens on "Fox and Friends", and that's an opinion show. Defenders of Fox will tell you this and claim it's exculpatory. It's just the opinion segments on Fox that lean right. The news is fair and balanced. Yet the Fox News logo keeps right on spinning (how apt!) in the lower left corner, whispering, "This is news. You should believe this. You want to believe this."

Anyone who tells you that Fox is not pure propaganda likes a steady diet of bullshit, wants confirmation of their stupid and venal prejudices, can't find their ass with both hands even while their head is doing self-service colonoscopy. (And yeah, that sadly includes friends and family I love, much as I hate the sin of their willful ignorance.)

The stupid is winning, and that drives me up the fucking wall.

The bleak news for liberals, nostalgic for a time when journalism was about what had happened and why, is that the revolution will be televised. The revolutionaries will be reactionaries hunting liberals, nostalgic or not, and Fox will be their Radio Rwanda.

We thought Nixon was extreme. Then we thought Reagan was extreme - and he courted the far right. Then we knew Gingrich and his bomb-throwers were extreme. Then the Bushists implemented extreme neocon foreign policy, a muscular foreign policy to grasp empire openly. Now the Teahadists, having already re-achieved the 1920s, want to go back to the Robber Baron era.

No doubt as a stepping stone to neo-Confederacy.

(h/t Atrios)

Fever swamp

See, it's a rising tide!

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

We can black male him, get it?

Republicans are not trustworthy partners in any negotiation.

[W]hat makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

These days, the GOP and their oligarchic allies are about the only force in American politics that can make President Obama and the Democrats look good.

Big media dies while we watch

For some reason, the big media represented by CNN continues to pay worthless blowhards like William Bennett to write up their vacuous opinions. This column amounts to "bring back the Lennon Sisters and Lawrence Welk."

Let's go back to jazz. None of those players took drugs. Suuure.

Oh, right, Bennett would only be schlerotically nostalgic for Big Band, and we know... Oh fudge.

Look, musicians such as Amy Winehouse are human. Some of them are fuck-ups just like the rest of us. Some of them die tragically. That's no reason not to recognize their work.

Take Bennett for example. He has a gambling problem. Everyone who claims they win at slots has a problem - with the truth at the very least. And this credibility-free button-presser ran up hundreds of thousands of debts playing slots like a lab rat with a pleasure electrode inserted in his rat brain.

Yet wingnuts still lap up his stuffy bullshit, so he can pay his gambling debts. Despite the fact that he's a talentless hack...

If Bennett had any talent, we should celebrate it even if he's an addict. His problem is that he has nothing to say that's worth saying. I'd say he should try taking something, but his face suggests that already alcohol hasn't worked.

They'll be coming for my dual citizenship

Michael Lind, whom I first read in Up from Conservatism, is always thought-provoking, even when he and I disagree.  But I can't find anything to quarrel with in this:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

Nor in this:

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and their sidekicks from the Midwest and elsewhere to destroy America's credit rating unless the federal government agrees to enact Dixie's economic agenda of preserving defense spending while slashing entitlements is simply the latest act of aggression by the Solid South.

We have a real national political problem that dates from the very beginning of our nation. One part of it, the part I grew up in, doesn't want to be American if that means it doesn't get its own way.

And its way is backward, reactionary, aristocratic, and often violent.

First degree Murdoch

When they say bare-knuckled, this is what they mean:

The real transgressions of the Murdoch empire are not its outré partisanship, its tabloid sleaze, its Washington lobbying, or even what liberals most love to hate, the bogus “fair and balanced” propaganda masquerading as journalism at Fox News. In fact, these misdemeanors are red herrings—distractions from the real News Corp. corruption that now threatens to bring down its management and radically reconfigure and reduce its international corporate footprint. The bigger story is this: An otherwise archetypal media colossus, with apolitical TV shows (American Idol), movies (Avatar), and cable channels (FX) like any other, is controlled by a family (and its tight coterie of made men and women, exemplified by the recently departed Rebekah Brooks) that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and power and to punish perceived corporate, political, and personal enemies. And, as we now know conclusively, some of this behavior has broken the law.

It's about money and power - and the ideology that places all power in money, with the sleazy propaganda it takes to achieve power with money in what once was an open society.

Who steals my purse steals trash

Now that the world can no longer deny America's willingness to blow off our debts, who'll put money in our purse?

Of course, [China's moves into the euro, South Korea's into the renminbi and gold, and other nations' into gold] are all minor moves in a currency market still dominated by U.S. dollars. That's good news for the U.S. economy in the short-term, because it lessens the threat of a massive sell-off and keeps borrowing rates relatively cheap. But the recent pileup of central banks and sovereign wealth funds into gold (according to the FT, central banks are on their biggest bullion buying spree in 40 years) is a warning signal that global esteem the almighty dollar (and the U.S. economy's strength) is already eroding.

There's a huge and growing overhang of dollar positions that other countries want to unwind. Whenever the race for the exit starts, it's going to get ugly for us. Uglier.

Liberal economic devastation

Even the Boston Herald has noticed that, compared to the rest of the U.S., the Massachusetts economy is growing well:

The University of Massachusetts’ quarterly MassBenchmarks report yesterday estimated that the state’s economy expanded at a 4.3 percent annualized clip between April and June. That’s way above the 1.3 percent second-quarter growth rate that the Commerce Department reported yesterday for the U.S. economy overall.

The wingnuts are all flushing this down the memory hole ("does not compute"), but they'll be raving when the double-dip recession starts. They will of course blame so-called liberal economic policies, instead of the Republican gutting of those policies.

Just wait for the sequel

Click image for full Tim Campbell/Current Publishing cartoon.

The way they were

Click image for full Jen Sorensen cartoon.

Why were they so afraid of a slave uprising?

Conservatives believe what they choose. They choose whatever exculpates them:

Why does the ugly resuscitation of the myth of the happy slave family matter? Because it is part of a broad and deliberate amnesia, like the misleading assertion by Sarah Palin that the founders were antislavery and the skipping of the “three-fifths” clause during a Republican reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The oft-repeated historical fictions about black families only prove how politically useful and resilient they continue to be in a so-called post-racial society. Refusing to be honest about how racial inequality has burdened our shared history and continues to shape our society will not get us to that post-racial vision.

Who are the revisionist historians? Not those who continue to learn, those who cling to their flattering myths.

What the debt hostage crisis told the world and the markets

There's no longer a consensus in American politics, particularly on the ascendant insane right wing, that the U.S. should pay its debts.

You'd sell your stock - and your dollars - too.

Of course, the fact that we're beginning a double-dip recession and the debt deal is contractionary should drive the stock market down.

Dr. Strangelove for racism

You just can't make this stuff up it's so stupid.

Republicans can't help themselves when it comes to showing, without intending to, that they're throwbacks to the 18th century. Offensive shit just rolls off their tongues.

If he follows pattern, tomorrow, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-wha? what'd I say?) will get all passive-aggressive that he's the victim of reverse racism or some such bullshit.

Would you buy a used T-bill from this man?

Licensed by Keith Allison under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.


Click image for details.

Honor killing

Click image (or here) for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Taking on the grifters

Republicans despise Elizabeth Warren because she is vigorously opposed to their kleptocratic conspiracy to make the financial markets completely safe for unscrupulous manipulators to cream off huge dishonest and coerced profits:

An honest market will give companies that provide fair value to their customers a chance to flourish, free from competition with cheaters. And an honest market will give American families better information, better prices, and better products — and a chance to achieve real economic security.

Sectarian laws

Granted that the well-fanned flames of anti-shariah panic spring from bigotry in almost every instance.

The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam.... The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.

The loons who oppose any mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, don't do it because they are in fact in any danger at all. They do it because they hate Muslims, don't want them living next door, and don't want them worshipping any god but theirs.

They've reached the point where most of them will grudgingly give Catholics a pass, at least until they get the Southern Baptist theocracy they want established. And this will differ from shariah how exactly? I am the lord thy god, and thou shall have no other gods before me. It's such a huuuge difference to smite a heretic in the name of god, instead of the name of god in Arabic.

But I digress.

The truth is that, despite anti-shariah's genealogy of bigotry, I don't want any ecclesiastical law - not canon law, not rabbinic law, and especially not shariah - to determine the outcome of cases in American courts. I want secular law to dominate. I'm happy to have diverse ethnic and religious people in America, but America is a shared political idea of common liberty under law. It shouldn't be a place where one neighborhood has rights for women and one neighborhood can treat them as chattel.

Sure, we have only attained this enlightenment ourselves recently. That only means we shouldn't draw self-flattering conclusions about how wonderful we are, not that we should surrender the real progress we've made as if it weren't really progress after all.

One actual case I've heard of in which shariah was considered (in Florida, of all places, if I remember correctly) was a family law case submitted to an Islamic arbitrator by mutual consent of the parties. Since both the man and the woman were represented by American lawyers, that sounds pretty reasonable. Still, think of the social pressure on the woman to accept her lesser legal standing and thus to achieve a lesser outcome. A Muslim woman who immigrates to America should (and does) gain all the rights of the American woman she has become.

Here's another case in which justice was delayed, though not denied:

Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.

The decision was reversed on appeal.

America is in no danger whatsoever of the establishment of widespread shariah. None. The anti-shariah movement is built to frighten and manipulate credulous wingnut fools. Keeping them in a constant state of uproar and fear - so typical of conservatives - is an electoral strategy designed as red meat for the bigoted, nativist base of the Republican Party.

The correct political reply from the left is not to defend shariah. We don't want to own this sort of statement:

“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”

Islam is not a universalist religion. It's not inclusive. It's absolutist. Its social and political incarnations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa practice by and large only the barest religious tolerance - if any. Speaking of propaganda based on half-truths...

Perhaps our political response should start by mocking the silly fears of ignernt teabaggers. But mainly it's to say quite calmly and directly that we all live under the Constitution and English Common Law, and that we don't need any precedents, statutes, or case law from any religious legalisms. For example, we don't need Michele Bachmann submitting to her husband like a good little religious wife - fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, take your pick, we don't want either.

Update: Outrage piled upon outrage, so thick and high I could quote almost any single paragraph. Here are two short ones:

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

Do we actually imagine in a century we could fix this lawless backward society? It would take a mythic race of avenging Amazons killing every uncle who murdered his niece and every father who acquiesced. As brutally and publicly as possible.

Conscience of journalism

Rupert Murdoch's sterling reputation at risk!

As news of the scandal continues to blemish the tradition of journalistic excellence and dignity exemplified by News Corp.–owned outlets such as the New York Post and the Fox News channel, Murdoch himself has remained focused on rectifying his missteps, starting with paying those affected out of his own pocket.

“Look, anyone who knows me knows that I have never cared about money,” said Murdoch, explaining that his distress over invading the private lives of citizens far outweighs his concern for his company’s quickly falling stock prices. “While some of my competitors focus on sensationalist or partisan headlines to sell papers, I’ve always been willing to do whatever it takes to ensure my products are as fair and committed to the truth as I myself am. After all, truth and fairness are what people have come to expect from Rupert Murdoch.”

“You don’t get to be the world’s most successful media mogul by being unscrupulous,” Murdoch added.

Or at least his sterling...

Sleep of reason

Robert Reich has it right:

Why is Obama not using the bully pulpit? Perhaps he no longer trusts that Americans will hear him. Whatever the reason—that he’s embroiled in the tactical maneuvers that pass for policy-making, or intent on preserving political capital for the next skirmish, or cynical about how the media will relay or distort his message—he doesn’t try. ...

[H]e allows himself to be trapped by situations (the debt-ceiling imbroglio most recently) within which he tries to offer reasonable responses, rather than be the leader who shapes the circumstances from the start. He cannot mobilize Americans around the truth, in other words, because he is continuously adapting to the prevailing view. That’s not what Americans thought they were getting when they elected Obama president.

Politics is always disappointing, always filled with compromise. But it's not always like this. Barack Obama and Harry Reid wasted 2009. They should have killed the filibuster, told Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to go fuck themselves, and passed a truly Democratic program - $1.5 trillion in stimulus with a much higher proportion of public works and infrastructure spending, a much more progressive income tax, an end to hedge fund managers only paying 15% on their income, inheritance taxes, major banking reform (motivated by a drumbeat of prosecutions, perp walks, and prison for the Wall St. abusers), health reform that at least included a public option and started right away, faster withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and more.

We need more Democrats who'll stand up to Republicans and their teabagger mainstream. Extreme conservatism is not sweeping the country. It swept the 2010 mid-term election because American voters lashed out stupidly in the wrong direction - or stayed home while the wingnuts voted their favorite  ignoramuses into office.

If you're going to be a one-term President - a fate that I think awaits Obama in 2012 - you should at least govern on behalf of the people who elected you.

Timeout for overstimulation

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

(h/t AAEC)

Thank god

Thank god we don't have any armed lunatic wingnuts here in America.

Police identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

Hmm, lots of familiar grievances... Unemployment, however, is below 4% in Norway and not part of Breivik's grievance list. Damn socialist economy!

Will this attack damage Norway's social democratic consensus, as 9/11 and the Bushists' exploitation of it did ours?

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

It's worth noting that 93 dead (known so far) from a total population of under 5 million has close to twice the demographic impact of 9/11. In their awful grief, Norwegians now have the chance to show resoluteness or panic, just as we did ten years ago. Most likely, they will show a mix, just as we did.

Shorter Boehner

It's the President's fault that the House Republican caucus won't compromise on anything.

In a letter sent out earlier to House lawmakers, [Speaker John Boehner] blamed Obama for the deterioration of the talks, saying that the president insisted on including tax increases.

“It became evident that the White House is simply not serious about ending the spending binge that is destroying jobs and endangering our children’s future,’’ Boehner wrote. “A deal was never reached and was never really close.’’

“In the end, we couldn’t connect,’’ he added. “Not because of different personalities, but because of different visions for our country.’’

Holding one of our federal government's three main political institutions, the Republicans want to make radical changes in an 80-year-old vision of the country. And they'll hold their breath until they turn blue to do it, ignoring the damage to the economy that they will do.

Of course, it has been obvious to me for three and a half years that they were willing to sabotage the economy for political gain. The oblivious voters rewarded the screaming infantile Republicans in 2010. Why would they be measured, mature, and responsible now?

It's going to be a long downhill ride.

News of the microcosm

News of the World displays almost every feature of the business environment that robber barons, plutocrats, and teabaggers want:

• Disposable employees pitted against each other
• Almost all power and reward at the top
• No accountability at the top for anything but money
• Management by fear
• The right to be completely arbitrary, chiseling, and ruthless
• Relationships dominated by force
• Money the only value

This is what they want for all of us. No unions, no labor law, double standards for the rich, in short a return to Dickens.

No rules, just right-wing

Rupert Murdoch has done one of two things:

• Built a far-reaching multi-national criminal and espionage organization intentionally, or
• Been duped over and over again by malicious and unprincipled executives.

You've no doubt heard of the outrage in the UK. Here's the tale on our side of the Big Pond:

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmelt testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Either way, it's Murdoch's responsibility.

Why Republicans whine it's the Democrats' fault

Because they're so damn delusional from the constant intake of their party's official bullshit that they can't remember who really screwed up.

Dy-nasty!

Click image for full G. B. Trudeau cartoon.

Interesting, frank, honest

Gay marriage isn't all sweetness and light:

At the end of the morning, Justice Sunshine lived up to his name and granted us relief from our bond. My ex and I, after not having spoken for several years, jumped for joy in the hallway of that court, weeping with relief. She flung her arms around Allen and shook Todd’s hand. Then she capped six and a half years of waiting with a classy punch line: “Now don’t you kids rush into anything.”

Just like any other marriage.

My trickle won't reach that far

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.












Update: Trickle-down cruelty:

All told, President George W. Bush added $4 trillion to the national debt - and there was no debate about raising the debt ceiling at that time, which was raised seven times. What is often missed in these discussions is that deficits have always been the objectives of hard right-wing Republicans and some equally conservative democrats who see them as an excuse for cutting social benefits and generating massive amounts of inequality that benefit the rich

Mitt Romney, NASCAR fan

He's self-employed. Why shouldn't everyone else be?

If President Obama were a liberal

He would have made this case forcefully and pointedly for his entire presidency.

Some people ... are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable. ...

Those are the choices that our right-wing Republican friends are giving us. Default with horrendous economic consequences for working families in this country and for the entire global economy or massive cuts to programs that working families desperately need. ...

In my view a group of people in the House whose views represent a small minority of the American people are holding this Congress hostage. It is time for the American people to stand up and say, enough is enough; the function of the United States Congress is to represent all of our people and not just the wealthy and powerful.

If Barack Obama had made this case instead of trying to please everyone - something Republicans chose never ever to permit anyway and damn the consequences for America - the teabaggers and wingnuts would not have won in November and would not be holding everything good about American government hostage to their neo-Confederate agenda.

Obama would have said, as I'm saying, You wanna call me a socialist? Whoop-de-do. You would anyway, you goddamned aristocrats and robber barons.

Nice credit rating ya got dere

... shame if anything happened to it.

Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.

Look, the damage is already done, with or without a default. The Republicans from teabaggers to alleged mainstream conservatives have clearly demonstrated that the consensus that has held since 1776 - that we're good for our debts - is over. It's not safe anymore for other countries to treat the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Ya think China is happy or sad about this?

Occasionally I worry

On general principles - that knowledge and insight are dispersed widely, that any organization large enough to be a coalition of interests is bound to make compromises against what's right for the benefit of what's possible, to name two - blind orthodoxy is almost always wrong. When you see Republicans who routinely passed debt limit increases under Duhbya hold the nation's credit-worthiness hostage under President Obama, you know they're rank hypocrites whose principle is not knowledge much less wisdom, but instead only what power they can derive from a political position.

How then can I claim that the Democratic Party and its interest groups are consistently right on every issue?

I can answer this question in three ways:

1. The Democratic Party is not consistently right on every issue. In fact, it's often badly wrong and compromised not just for practical gain but also morally. The Democrats are in bed with corporate lobbyists and the wealthy, just as the Republicans are. The difference is one of degree - Dems are bad, Repubs are actively evil.
2. The Democratic Party is in fact not liberal enough, and I've criticized it many times on that score.*
3. Democratic policies, politicians, and interest groups are reasonably often wrong. Republicans are decisively wrong in their platform. Democrats, like all humans, are subject to excess both personal and political.

To illustrate answer 3, I give you this municipal labor union overreach.

“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”

The purpose of labor unions is to gain a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, not to featherbed. Detailing five guys to walk along behind an asphalt paving machine with hand tools is a day's pay for a smelly stroll. I've heard conservatives use the phrase "unsustainable model" about all labor work rules, but that phrase surely applies to this.

Of course, it's a Democrat who's trying to reform his fellow Democrats.

* A second introspective question: Given answer 2, how do I differ from conservatives who said that Duhbya's greatest fault was his lack of sufficiently extreme conservatism?

Those teabaggers who started during the 2008 campaign to disclaim Duhbya on grounds that he was a moderate (oh, what bullshit) only did it when he was no longer useful to them, when they were facing loss of the government. I've been criticizing President Obama right along. Sure, I was euphoric that he had been elected, but I had believed him to be the least liberal candidate in the Democratic primaries, and I think events since his election - particularly putting Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of economic policy - have proven Obama to be a tepid centrist.

Conservatives march in lockstep when they hold power. Democrats and liberals debate, dissent, and compromise.

Why conservatives think liberals found a messiah in Barack Obama

Psychological projection. A messiah is what fundie wingnuts want, and they assume we reason as badly as they do about how the world should be.



Michele Bachmann has the overwhelming narcissism to think that God wants her to be President. Because her husband says so. Oy vey.

Fortress America

Republicans often accuse Democrats of the politics of personal destruction. This is obviously ridiculous

If Democrats actually had any grasp at all of destroying a public persona, Newt Gingrich would be living in obscurity. He'd still be paying off his Tiffany's debts by skimming tax exempt contributions into partisan accounts, which he has always done with wild abandon. He'd be slushing up other, more palatable reactionaries, but no one would listen to him on TV about any organization he fronted.

Being out of the limelight would doubtless vex a man with such outsize appetites and ego, but he made his bed. More than once. And Democrats can barely even make him lie in it!

George Allen should be an embarrassment even to his fellow Republicans. Except that they are beyond embarrassment. Macaca moment? His would be a macaca  life. Instead, he's leading the pack to return to the Senate as Jim Webb retires. He couldn't even destroy himself.

David Vitter! Vitter didn't get caught with a dead girl or a live boy, but somehow the Democrats have been unable to make him vanish into the world of wingnut welfare. With his Harvard education, he should be fabricating bullshit Heritage Foundation studies that show how only conservatives deserve redemption from requiring hookers to go by the name Wendy when they were doing things his actual wife Wendy no doubt would not do. Instead, re-elected to the Senate on family values and no doubt trying to be more discreet.

If Democrats actually practiced the politics of personal destruction, they would at least be following these morons around getting their peccadilloes on digital video. Vitter's a two-time loser. How likely is it that he'll be able to give up the call girls? Allen actually needs his racism in southern Virginia. Gingrich? Another two-time loser whose third wife is well past Newt's historic limit of fidelity.

These are Republicans who deserve to be outed. They're rank hypocrites or bigots. They'd be bringing their personal destruction on themselves, with only a nudge or two from us. Larry Craig's bullshit wide stance - that's some stretchy tighty-whiteys - doesn't concern me much. Even Paul Ryan's plutocratic taste in lobbyist-purchased wine is a dust devil among hurricanes.

Meanwhile, conservatives are constantly busy trumping up scandals against Democrats and our institutions.  The #bornfreecrew was searching Anthony Weiner's life on the web for solicitation of underage sex. When they didn't find that, they settled for a photo of the shape of his semi-erect penis, clothed in underwear. Weiner didn't show his junk and didn't get laid, but the conservatives - who do actually practice the politics of personal destruction - laundered their hit through Andrew Breitbart and hounded Weiner into resigning.

Laundered? The very idea that Breitbart could clean anything is absurd. He's a known liar and propagandist, yet even that has not destroyed his credibility with big media. They still provide faux balance and write stories that sanitize his defenses as if they were plausible. They still give him a platform to defend his dishonesty with more dishonesty.

It was one of Mr. Breitbart's Web sites, BigGovernment, that highlighted the heavily edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod, a black official at the Department of Agriculture, apparently saying that she had been biased against a white farmer she was supposed to help. Ms. Sherrod's full speech actually demonstrated the opposite, but do not expect Mr. Breitbart to be embarrassed.

He says there is an election-year strategy under way to ''falsely malign opponents of the Democratic party as racist'' and that he will continue to fight it.

An operative who falsely maligned a Democrat by airing a deceptively edited video clip to make a racist point still gets to call Democrats racists on the thinnest pretext. Without the reporter noting even in objective-speak that Breitbart is full of bullshit. Without editorial smirking. Without consequence. In fact, Times reporter Brian Stelter gives much more space to conservative sources than to liberal ones. He even outsources his objective analysis to David Frum:

David Frum, a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who now edits FrumForum.com, said some conservatives argue that the ends justify the means in cases of faulty journalism.

''Many conservatives have worked themselves into such fear that Barack Obama is not only wasting our money but actually trying to overthrow the Constitution that those fears can justify almost anything,'' he said in an interview on Friday.

Frum is well known to play it straight down the middle since he wrote speeches for Duhbya and then was a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.

Well, someone had to say that. After all, Stelter had just quoted two other conservatives with their slightly negative takes on the scandal of falsehoods. Of course, both Shep Smith of Fox (the best journalist there, and that is damning with faint praise) and Glenn Lowry of NRO (one of the black loonies that wingnuts look to for reassurance that they can't possibly be racist since they like a few good ole black fellows) try to paint Breitbart's dishonesty as part of a larger problem.

It's almost as if the Times is afraid of the wingnut propaganda machine's ability to sustain permanent campaigns to damage their opponents.

Sure enough, if the Atlantic fucking Ocean buffers them, the New York Times will report on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda empire. They'll investigate the climate of fear and retribution of Fox-across-the-Pond:

“ ‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn” was The Sun’s headline in response. Its editor, Rebekah Wade (now Rebekah Brooks and the chief executive of News International, Mr. Murdoch’s British subsidiary), sent a busload of semi-dressed models to jeer at Ms. Short at her house in Birmingham. The paper stuck a photograph of Ms. Short’s head over the body of a topless woman and found a number of people to declare that, in fact, they thoroughly enjoyed the sexy photographs. “Even Clare has boobs, but obviously she’s not proud of them like we are of ours,” it quoted a 22-year-old named Nicola McLean as saying.

So the Brits are coarser than we are. Or at least they print coarser stuff. We leave it to hate radio and web propaganda that pretends to scoop journalists.

When Fox comes up over here, our journalists are about as brave as British politicians over there. In other words, not at all. Remember when the White House attacked Fox as not a news outfit? Our chickenshit media rushed to defend the indefensible. I think they did out of fear. A reporter never knows when he'll need to whore out to sustain his lifestyle, and the web looks a lot more like small time street hustling compared to sucking up to Roger Ailes, however distasteful that no doubt is.

Something Breitbart said to defend his character assassination of Shirley Sherrod is a confession:

It's warfare out there.

He's the one making war. Until we on the left cotton onto that fact, we'll continue to be hounded from office. We'll continue to cave in the face of the wingnut noise machine. We won't win many elections.

They're fighting with stilettos with poisoned blades and attack sinister. We're being reasonable and taking adult positions. We've been thinking it can't get worse for three fucking decades. Yet each crop of radical conservatives is worse than the one before it. Because there are no punishments for their craziness.

The Republicans already give us blame for Chicago rules. "They put one of ours in the hospital; we put one of theirs in the morgue." It's long past time for us to start destroying some of our enemies.

Because this is a war for the soul of America. And we're losing to a bunch of plutocrat haters whose policies are very unpopular. It's time we showed up on the real battlefield and fucked a few of them up. Oh, they'll still draw their wingnut welfare from some Koch brothers foundation, but they'd at least have to keep their respective Callistas past their expiration dates. And eventually even billionaires will get tired of servicing a thousand oily egotistical needy assholes.

I don't have high hopes. If thirty years of decline haven't convinced our tepid Washington Democrats that there are no referees, that self-help is the only way to go, I'm not sure they're capable of waking up to the conservative party commissars now.

Free range advocates

If the world is their pasture, it must also be their toilet, right?

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution cartoon.

It Toles for thee

Click image for a gallery of Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoons.

Getting us out of the ditch

Click image for full Milt Priggee cartoon.

Like leeches for anemia

America, incredibly, has fallen again for the same old Republicans and their same old bullshit:

[M]y mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

There are two possible outcomes of the debt ceiling negotiations. Either President Obama gives the insane Republicans everything they ask for in their worst temper tantrum, or America will default.

Why would the results be any different? Republicans already know that they can kneecap the economy and not only escape all blame for their irresponsibility but in fact they can pin the blame on Democrats. For the simple reason that the American polity is sick, probably mortally wounded. The voters are balky, panicky, irrational. The media are by and large stupid and determined to pretend that stupidity has an equal call on our attention and respect, while intelligence and information are as despised as they were by jocks in middle school.

A default would shake our economy to the core. America derives huge benefits from the dollar and the T bill being the world's reserve. A reckoning on that score is coming anyway, but this would accelerate the world's departure to a broader basket of currencies, including the renminbi. Since the wealthy investor class would be inconvenienced (in their net worth if not in their daily lives), Obama will probably cave.

Thus again the middle class will suffer, the plutocrats or their lobbyists will buy $350 bottles of wine for the likes of Paul Ryan (R-austerity is for others), and the economy will go to hell.

Yet Americans, misinformed and goaded toward the right by a bought and paid for media, will vote for and scream for more Republican bullshit.

Lying to gain teabagger cred

Orrin Hatch (R-say anything to stave off an even more extreme wingnut) joins the Limbaugh lying liars:

"The top 10 percent are paying 70 percent of all income taxes. The top 50 percent pay something like 98 percent of all income taxes. Fifty-one percent don't pay anything," Hatch said.

"Democrats say they [the 51 percent] pay payroll taxes. Well, everybody does that because that's Social Security. They pay about one-third of what they're going to take out over the years in Social Security," Hatch said.

He knows this is intended to deceive. He knows the Democratic rejoinder is true. Still, he says the lie anyway.

Why liberals think the Teabaggers harbor racists

Because they do. By their own proud admission!

Yup, they're douchebaggers.

You're just noticing this now?

Another feckless Democrat only now realizes the bad faith and bullying of the dark side:

[New Jersey Senate President Stephen] Sweeney’s beef with the governor goes much deeper. He feels the governor [Chris Christie (R-ya wanna make someting uv it?)] has acted in bad faith.

The governor’s budget, he says, is full of vindictive cuts designed to punish Democrats, and anyone else who dared to defy him. And he is furious that the governor refused to talk to him during the final week.

"After all the heavy lifting that’s been done — the property tax cap, the interest arbitration reform, the pension and health care reform — and the guy wouldn’t even talk to me?" Sweeney asks.

Sweeney's lack of the most basic ability to discern the willingness of a Republican adversary to screw anyone for political gain completely disqualifies him from national office. We already have enough naive Democrats in Washington.

(h/t Eschaton)

Aztec sacrifice

Chickenhawks fail at the fundamental moral task of putting themselves in the place of those whose lives are at risk:

For chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney who grew up during Vietnam conscription, deft draft-dodging provided them safety and psychological distance from bloodshed. As the data show, compared to draftees, that distance likely made them feel comfortable demanding other people face death on the battlefield, knowing that they wouldn't face such a fate themselves. Put another way, having avoided the draft, there was no "self-interest" in opposing war -- indeed, there was only self-interest in promoting wars in a media and political environment that increasingly rewarded rank bellicosity.

It's no wonder they can't put themselves in the place of the needy. They have no familiarity with the golden rule, the foundation of morality.

Someone else always gets his heart ripped out, not them.

Dreams of electronic sheep

Only these sheep are as bare-toothed angry as they are ill-informed and illogical:

Without exception, however, every reader objecting to my criticism of talk-radio ethics mentioned Soros. It was like being scolded by parrots. Most called Soros a commie -- highly unlikely for a billionaire financier and philanthropist -- although I know very little about his views.

It's called the straw man fallacy: refuting arguments nobody's made.

Then there's the argumentum ad populum, another favorite of talk-radio fans: somebody with a big audience must be correct. Furthermore -- motive again -- I must be jealous of their success.

That's pretty much like saying Rush Limbaugh's jealous of President Obama. You buy that?

Look, these guys are playing you for suckers. They're reading scripts written to trick you into believing that the bigger Scrooge McDuck's bullion pile is, the better it is for you. Take away the call screeners and the mute buttons, and most of them wouldn't last two weeks. Talk radio is the political equivalent of wrestling.

The new new deal

Click image for full Matt Bors/DailyKos cartoon.