There is no deficit

Republicans gave it all to the rich. All of it. Not the slightly rich, the very very very rich. Trillions of dollars. They still have it, spoils of their completely successful class war against the rest of us.

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."

The rich didn't use it for anything the Republicans promised. They didn't create jobs. They didn't invest in anything hard, only in the Wall Street casino. They didn't even trickle it down on us.

The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," [David] Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."

When money is involved, every single Republican legislative action for many years has had as its purpose the enrichment of the already rich. They want plutocracy.

The deal privileged gambling on stocks over working for a living: The tax rate the richest pay on their long-term capital gains was slashed by 25 percent, while their rate on dividends fell by almost 60 percent. The move not only fueled speculation of Wall Street, it further widened the considerable gap between rich and poor. "It was a very destructive combination to have a national economic policy that stimulated debt-financed capital gains and then taxed the windfall at the lowest rate imaginable," says Stockman. "That contributed, clearly, to the growing imbalance in household income and wealth."

And it's a complete and total lie that beggaring the middle class to stimulate the wealthy provides any benefits whatsoever to the economy as a whole or to the beggared - and buggered - middle class.

As with the offshore profits, the banks used the money to line the pockets of executives and investors – while doing little to speed the recovery of Main Street. "We gave an enormous subsidy to these financial institutions, and they have not returned it to the American people," said Warren. "The administration could have said, 'All right, take this and multiply it throughout the economy.' But Paulson never made that a condition of taking the money."

Securitization Excuse Confabulator

We live in a nation where financial crimes are not punished enough to deter them in the slightest:

So to recap: a unit of Citigroup, having repeatedly violated the same laws and having repeatedly violated the SEC’s own cease-and-desist orders and injunctions, is dragged into court one more time for committing a massive fraud.

And what does the SEC do? It doesn’t even bring up Citi’s history of ignoring the SEC’s own order, slaps the bank with a fractional fine, refuses to target any individuals, allows the bank to walk away without an admission of wrongdoing, and puts a cherry on the top by describing the $160 million heist not as a crime, but as unintentional negligence.

And it's not as though Citigroup is the only home of thoroughly institutionalized fraud. All of its competing syndicates do it too:

According to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the biggest financial companies — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America among them — have settled fraud cases by promising that they would never again violate an antifraud law, only to have the S.E.C. conclude they did it again a few years later.

Time to turn this over to the Organized Crime Task Force and pursue a few juicy RICO cases.

(h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)

My hypocrisy knows no bounds

I'm employed, yet I support unemployment benefits.

I'm white, yet I support civil rights for minorities.

I'm a man, yet I support civil rights for women.

I'm not pregnant, yet I support abortion rights.

I'm not hungry, yet I support food stamps.

I'm not retired, yet I support Social Security and Medicare.

I'm not stupid, yet I support education.

I'm an atheist, yet I support freedom of religion.

What a hypocrite!

Seriously?  Conservatives claim Elizabeth Warren is a hypocrite because she has achieved wealth but still advocates for the middle class?!?

“I don’t begrudge her own personal wealth. I begrudge her hypocrisy of trying to play the demagogue against those who have achieved and who have created wealth,” said Rick Manning of the conservative group Americans for Limited Government.

You'd think they would be celebrating her. Instead, they've gone fucking soft in the head and believe they're permitted to redefine words however they choose to score points with their ignoramus base.

They're not so much post-modern as they have all the ethics of the advertising industry and, like it, are paid to repeat lies so long and so often that they start to sound plausible to the weak-minded.

Lying for money

I hear the big lie repeated by weak-minded bullshit-suckers.  This big lie:

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not stopped people who should know better from repeating them.

Situational ethics

Click image for full Rob Tornoe/Media Matters cartoon.

Why not the worst?

Charles Pierce channels my anger:

By any conventional measure, and entirely through their own fault, the Republicans have produced a field of candidates so utterly comical, so completely devoid of conventional political merit, that the field itself is a strong evidence for the elimination of the Republican party. ... This isn't a primary campaign field. It's a condo-board election at the Hell Country Estates. ...

[T]he Democratic party has failed utterly in its duty to the country to force the Republicans to regain their sanity or die as a political entity. It has failed utterly even to try. What we see now in the Republican primary field is a result of that failure. It's bad enough that the Republicans will pay no price for embarrassing themselves this way.

Ain't socialism if there's killin' involved

Deposit, no return

Click image for full Paul Fell/Artizans Syndicate cartoon.

Yet wingnuts think class jealousy is the problem

The wealthy say that spongers, moochers, and leeches are stealing their rightfully huge share of the GDP. Here's the truth: Unless you're in the top 1%, your share of the GDP hasn't gone up. After taxes.

I guess we now know who the spongers, moochers, and leeches really are. In my dreams.

What the graphs don't say: The bottom 80% did see income some growth, but nearly all of it came from the meteoric rise of two-income households.

By the way, don't forget where these quintiles divide.

Poll-tested in every instance

Even Republicans can tell...

Mitt Romney's message people, I would guess, poll-test his convenient position changes. What they fail to poll-test is his credibility after switching yet again.

(h/t Rachel Maddow)

Who do you think I work for?

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Get out your pitchforks

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Corporations - actually, not so much corporations as their plundering executives - are screwing you over. If you don't realize this, it's a good bet you're a middle class wingnut who believes all that Ayn Rand, job creator, the wealthy have it sooo bad bullshit.

The C-level greedheads are so avidly grabbing theirs that they can't think long-term. Eventually, a mob will show up at their gated communities, and it won't be pretty.

Something for the end of net neutrality to stomp out

Ideological purity

Click image for full Angelo Lopez/Tr-City Voice/ Everyday Citizen cartoon.

Taking sides

Click image for full MStreeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

So-called Democrats

The millionaires won again yesterday. Who were the so-called Democrats who joined the Republican filibuster of Obama's jobs bill?

One of them was, of course, Joe Lieberman, who hasn't been a Democrat for...ever.

I hope Barack Obama and Harry Reid regret their failure to send him packing to the Republican caucus when they had the chance in January 2009 - to repay his betrayal with the back of their hand.

The others were Ben Nelson, always reliable voting for a Republican filibuster, and Mark Pryor. I refuse to put a D next to their names.

Meta-question: Why did I have to visit a third site before finding who the turncoats were? Don't journalists find the question who an important question any more?

Running against Castro, when Batista was the villain

Marco Rubio's parents fled Cuba, not because Fidel Castro and communism were too oppressive but because Fulgencio Batista's militaristic crony capitalism failed to provide economic opportunity.

[A] review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than 2 1/2 years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

Yet Rubio is an advocate for the Republican Party's militaristic crony capitalism.

I suspect that Rubio's teabagger views illustrate the power of the social norm he grew up in - a community filled with ideological Cubano exiles. He learned to hate the things they hated and to love the things they loved.

And he filled in his biography with an origin myth to justify those emotions. Factual or not, those emotions are what mattered, not reality.

Fox, F-O-X

Just skimming along in another Media Matters takedown of first degree Murdoch, I found this nugget of bullshit:

The Wall Street Journal's current arrangement with CNBC -- wherein CNBC reportedly receives advanced [sic] access to certain original financial reporting from WSJ and all Dow Jones business outlets as well as other perks -- expires in 2012.

While many observers assumed that Fox Business would inevitably form a partnership with WSJ once the CNBC deal expired -- News Corp. owns both Fox and the WSJ -- Journal managing editor Robert Thomson told Media Matters that partnering with FBN would "not necessarily" happen.

Fox's first priority at all times and in all ways is the Fox brand. Whether or not the medium is the message, the brand is the message for Fox. At every level of the Fox media empire, pimping the brand comes first - witness the constant tie-ins and mentions on sports broadcasts. Pimping the brand comes even before fellation of conservatives.

Why Republicans pack the house

Another Republican doesn't want an open town hall meeting. That's because they understand these meetings as theater for the cameras, not for the attendees. The people who go and ask questions or simply listen are extras in the production of stage-managed news.

Democrats may believe that facing flesh and blood voters of all political stripes exhibits their virtues in a democracy. Republicans know that having nameless people shout down Democrats in public perversely harms the Democrats. Even if those nameless shouters are obvious teabagger wingnuts.

So Republicans pack the house so that they can pack the House. It worked in 2010.

More Republican humor

Trent Franks (R-shoot somebody) has a problem with his mouth:



He can't keep his first thought - guns! - from coming straight out.

Dreams of...

... American greatness.

Escargot cult

I only eat slugs well salted.

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs,” the moderator, Eskild Petersen, said.

Yet it moves

Life will be synthesized from plainly inorganic compounds. Soon.

The genetic material is the harder problem; the chemistry is just more complicated. The puzzle has been understanding how a molecule like RNA can get replicated before there were enzymes and all this fancy biological stuff, protein machinery, that we have now in our cells.

What will the anti-Enlightenment fundamentalists say then? They'll be in denial. Maybe they'll even be in a political position to suppress expression of the truth. But not the truth itself.

Enemies of the state

Democrats may be learning disabled where it comes to the politics of governance. But Republicans spend their entire lives in denial of reality:

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor.

Lessons for Democrats

Hey Democrats! You claim that you're reality-based. When it comes to policy, you have a good argument. Sometimes you're even on top of electoral politics. Well, not John Kerry. Or Al Gore.

But you're definitely on the short bus when it comes to the politics of governance.

"Politics of governance? What's that? I got elected, now it's time to govern."

Don't be a moron. President Obama has completely failed to use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to advance his policy goals. He's not the first. Now that Obama is speaking directly to the people - with one eye on 2012 - lots of us who are really liberals have doubts about his sincerity. We knew he was a moderate. But maybe he's really comfortable with his center-right reflexes. Maybe Tim Geithner and Larry Summers are the real Obama.

Democrats also continue to expect - after three decades of contrary experience - that the media are the least interested in what's true. They're not. They're interested in the game show of politics. They gave up being Alex Trebek years ago. Instead, the narrative drama of "Quiz Show" is the media's target. Reality TV!

How long will liberal pundits have to etch the media's malfeasance into sharp relief? As long as entertainment corporations pay reporters, we'll continue to get infotainment. The reality is:

To make it clear: requiring 60 votes for everything is new, and it is overwhelmingly a Republican tactic.

Today's journalists don't care.

Republican Senators have completely abused the filibuster. Anything they can use to increase their power, they'll use. Custom? Comity? They don't give a shit. They think it's weak not to abuse their opponents. It was total pollyannish naivete that led Democrats to ignore this inevitable reality when they took power in 2009.

Why Democrats have failed to learn that Republicans will smile in your face and stab you in the back is beyond me.

Can't say I blame them

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Booby trap

Herman Cain is an asshole. That's why Republicans are dating him. They won't marry him, but for the American right, being an asshole isn't an unfortunate personality defect. It's an ideological necessity. It's a point of pride.

That's the way it has to be when your economic program is, "Tough shit. You're on your own." Cain goes another step, to wild applause from the fuck you caucus, blaming unemployment on the unemployed as if a sailor becalmed were responsible for the lack of wind, as if there were no larger forces affecting our economic lives.

Oh, and by the way, the middle class aren't paying enough taxes.

Cain also doesn't know much outside the pizza business. He doesn't know what Palestinians mean when they demand the right of return. He doesn't realize that we have no diplomatic relations with Taiwan - and haven't since Nixon. He doesn't realize that the Great Wall of China was an expensive failure.

So it makes perfect sense that Cain would call for fortifying our 2000-mile southern border with an electrified fence that would at least injure and maybe kill anyone trying to get across the border illegally.

[W]e need to secure the border. How? Build a tall fence, make it electrified and a sign on the other side -- in Spanish and English -- warning of injury.

He doesn't realize how easily the fence could be sabotaged - would that bring down the power grid in the Southwest? How many deer would the coyotes have to drive into the world's biggest bug-zapper before Cain realized it wouldn't work?

Maybe that's why Cain backed off and lamely claimed that his mojado-zapper was a joke. Seriously, he knows that wingnuts won't care that "joke" is the all-purpose alibi of conservatives who show their ugly sides a little too graphically. And they claim liberals have no sense of humor. I think they're projecting again.

Update (10/17): Okaaay, not a joke after all. So, in summary, stupid vicious idea, bullshit excuse, no sense of humor, and flip-flop. Cain hits the quadfecta of lame politics.

Cain't git no satisfaction

Herman Cain wants your taxes to go up so that the wealthy - who already have everything - can pay less:

The key point is that each of the nines is a tax that would more or less fully fall on middle-income families, who in addition to paying 9 percent of their income in taxes would find their living costs 9 percent higher and their wages 9 percent lower. That’s a 27 percent tax, way above the average federal taxes now paid by middle-income households.

How to deal with non-negotiable opposition

The Obama administration, based on hope and naivete, neither of which constitutes a plan, missed its chance to make the great recession milder and shorter. Ezra Klein tiptoes right up to the argument that missing the chance is politically inevitable:

The tendency thus far has been to look at these crises in terms of the identifiable economic factors that make them different from typical recessions. But perhaps the better approach is to look at the political factors that make them turn out the same, that stop governments from doing enough even when they have sworn to err on the side of doing too much.

These crises have a sort of immune system. It is never possible for the political system to do enough to stop them at the outset, as it is never quite clear how bad they are. Even if it were, the system is ill-equipped to take action at that scale. The actors comfort themselves with the thought that if they need to do more, they can do it later. And, for now, the fact that this is the largest rescue package anyone has ever seen has to be worth something.

Paul Krugman, commenting on Klein's insightful piece, wants President Obama to start even now to make the case for more stimulus, for his jobs bill, for muscular intervention in the economy:

[T]he White House was weak and confused in the face of a political and economic debacle, when it should have gone all out.

And you know what? It should still go all out.

I think the chance has been missed. Permanently. I think Klein is right:

With something extraordinary that is nevertheless not enough, the economy deteriorates, and the government sees its solutions discredited and its political standing weakened by the worsening economic storm. That keeps it from doing more.

Any use Obama can make of the bully pulpit now would be welcome but would be strictly political. The Republican plan - starting November 5, 2008 - was massive resistance.

There was only one way to deal with that, since the Democrat's nominal 60-vote majority in the Senate was a castle built on sand. That was for Obama to call up Harry Reid and to tell him to tell Joe Lieberman to fuck off, to kill the filibuster, and to ram his program through.

That's what Republicans would have done. No quarter.

Then the President would have needed to stay on the campaign trail to fulfill his ambition to be President of all Americans. He needed to appeal directly, not through the GOP, whose leadership only cared about destroying the Obama Presidency, like the Clinton Presidency before it.

The failure of the Obama administration was not inevitable. It was not doctrinal. They just weren't ruthless enough in the politics of governance. They thought governing would be about rational compromise with loyal but tractable opponents. It wasn't, as they should have been able to see from the start.

There's something happening here

Testify, Paul!

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Plutocrats are so habituated to thinking only a quarter ahead they can't see that their destruction of the American economy and their refusal to lift a well-manicured pinkie toward its restoration leads toward Madame Defarge. Liberals want to prevent revolution, yet the moneyed interests can't even tell how to protect their own long-term interests.

Occupy Wall Street isn't carrying pitchforks. That won't always be true. Can we please step back from the abyss?

Scepter of the new aristocracy

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

Fact-based economic rejoinder - lalalala

Note that P.J. O'Rourke has nothing but lame jokes. Nonetheless, he'll get attaboys from the wingnuts.

Who's not in the 99%

If your household makes less than half a million dollars a year, you're in the 99%. For all the rest of you, congratulations. Now please fire your lobbyists and pay your share.

Everyone helped everyone

Larger than Dunkirk - in nine hours.

(h/t Mario Vittone)

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention

Proof that when Palin said she was reading "all of them" she was in fact reading none of them.

One terrible fate avoided

How many Republicans are still running? Does this cat have enough lives to survive?

Lots more word salad Sarah at Talking Points Memo.

Massive resistance again

The Tea Party "movement" is yet another case of Southern sabotage of American democracy:

[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.

The Fort Sumter movement of course has adherents in all states, but mainly the Confederacy actually elects them.

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.

Knowing our place

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

This is convenient?

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

Information-free bleach-drinking half-wit

Full of passionate intensity

The virtue of faith:

So, sadly, I don't think the execution of Troy Davis will have much effect on the national "conversation" about the morality of capital punishment or the glaring flaws in America's system of justice. Because while it's very reasonable to argue that "we" should only kill someone if we're really, really, really sure they did it, the modern American conservative is really, really, really sure about everything.

As in, not a virtue.

If only lightning strikes would demand photo ID

Then no one would ever be struck by a bolt from the blue! According to Republicans, whose talent at making wedge issues out of tiny little runny streams of bullshit would be a great asset to America if turned toward productive uses...

Nine cases in 400,000,000 votes. In other words, waaaaaay less than the known error rate of voting technologies. So low as to be undetectable in the best measuring apparatus for almost anything other than research laboratory chemistry or physics. Far better than the manufacturing control of any process in any factory in any country in the world - even Japan.

For this, Republicans are willing to put laws in place that will definitely prevent thousands or tens of thousands of legal votes in every state-wide election forever. Ya think they want to suppress voting?

How could higher savings be bad?

Paul Krugman puts the pipsqueak stimulus in context:

[C]onsumers suddenly increased their savings. ...

[Y]ou have a negative shock on the order of 6 percent of GDP.

Against this you had a stimulus bill of $800 billion — except $100 billion of that was AMT extension that was going to happen anyway, another $200 billion was other tax cuts of dubious effectiveness, so you were left with $500 billion of spending, spread over more than 2 years — maybe 1.5 percent of GDP or less.

It just wasn’t big enough to do the job.

The $1.5 trillion stimulus package - the one that Larry Summers refused even to present to President Obama - and it's Obama's fault for appointing Summers, whose foremost attribute is undeserved arrogance (though he thinks it's brilliance) - would have filled 75% of the demand gap. We wouldn't have 9% unemployment if Obama had taken this case to the people:

• It's free to borrow money.
• The best way out of recession is to grow.
• We're going to build useful infrastructure that we and our children will benefit from for the next 30 to 60 years.
• This will heal unemployment, which will take much of the pain - and there will be some pain - out of repaying the debt.

The estimable professor forgets to explain why higher savings in face of a recession could possibly be bad. People are tightening their belts in the face of hard times. Rational, careful, conservative (in the good sense).

The paradox of thrift is the textbook example of the fallacy of composition in Keynesian economics. Behavior that's good for an individual or a family makes a recession worse. Money that's saved - not because people suddenly became virtuous but because they are fearful about the future - is money that's not spent. Since it's not spent, businesses have to contract their economic activity. They may be sitting on big profits (sound familiar?), but there's no reason at all for them to build more capacity, much less to hire unemployed workers.

Only the government, acting on behalf of all of us, can break this vicious cycle with deficit spending. And again, borrowing money is as close to free as it has ever been in history.

Light dawns

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

Working bullshit detectors at SNL

Watch it all!

Sharp elbows

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

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.