Enthusiasm abyss

In politics, as in any genre of entertainment, you always want to size the room so that your crowd just overflows it. That shows you're popular and yet realistic and leaves your audience demanding more. Mitt Romney in Detroit? Epic fail - a whole domed stadium for a few hundred people at most.



This is what a campaign looks like when it has more money than people. This is doom. Even in that tiny audience in that huge venue, the smell of flop-sweat must have been pungent. This is an off-off-off-off-Broadway show whose financial backer is so in love with the star that he can't grasp that there's no audience beyond the one-percenters interested in seeing this flip-flop revue.

Even if Rmoney gets the Teapublican nomination, the only campaign he'll be able to run is a B-52 campaign - scorched earth from 50,000 ft. at tremendous expense. Knowing Rmoney, he'll keep running the TV and radio and Internet ads until even his handful of ardent supporters are nauseated by their noxious smarmy gee-whiz omnipresent ugliness. The rest of the Teapublicans, less enthused to begin with, will depressively resign themselves to four more years of impotent misplaced anger for President Barack Hussein Obama.

Update: A still-shot comparison that's even more graphic:

Thumbnail used under Fair Use, but if you own this image and object to my use, I'll shrink the thumbnail further.

Moral consequences

Actual moral consequences, rather than the orgasm someone might have in a way that offends Rick Santorum:

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

Save the jets

Of course, Ann Coulter interrupts to bullshit that "they were all Democrats." (Maybe the rich never serve their jury duty either.)

Four words, ideological edition

The handful of you who are still tuning in to the endless purgatory of Republican (non) Presidential debates no doubt noticed when John King vacuously asked the four horse's-ass-men of democracy's apocalypse for a single word to sum themselves up. King of course gave enough forewarning that they were able to come up with self-flattering, thematically aligned, bullshit marketing.

That is not what I do, so...

• Newt Gingrich - megalomaniac
• Ron Paul - mammon-worshipping
• Mitt Romney - wealthy
• Rick Santorum - theocratic

The revolution will be televised

Video keeps protest peaceful, as it should be, on both sides.

Where's Newto?

Republican primary voters do have a bit of discernment every now and then.

They know Mitt Romney's core principle is Mitt Romney, that he'll say whatever he thinks they want to hear.

They almost fell for Newt Gingrich (again!) because, even though Gingrich's core principle is also Newt Gingrich, he can pander to wingnuts with much greater certitude and vehemence than Milquetoast Romney. Then he started up all that moonbase bullshit, a future-oriented idea, although daft as nuthatch on moldy seeds. The fond, vicious wingnuts are oriented to the past - yes, a golden ideal theocratic past that never was. They've got no use for inspiration. The King James doesn't say anything about a moonbase!

Rmoney didn't kill off Gingrich (again!). The Republican base had a terrible shudder go up its (anti-)collective spine at the thought that maybe we libs are right about Newt, and he's grandiose, unreliable, and probably clinically manic. Not that they would want the last covered by health insurance...

So, Rick Santorum or Ron Paul? Or door number 3? If Jeb Bush rushes to the rescue, will Republicans even acknowledge that he has an older brother?

Shit Santorum says

Changey to hopey

I'm not sure I believe this - because I want so badly to believe it:

The latest national survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner ... shows a Republican Party in deepening trouble and emerging underlying trends that may have shifted the balance for 2012.[1] Barring sudden economic shocks, there is accumulating evidence that we have entered a new phase in the political cycle, substantially more favorable to the Democrats.

It's also not from an unbiased source, though of course pro-Democratic sources are always more reliable than pro-Republican sources.

(h/t Taegan Goddard)

Gonna leave a mark

More smack-downs please!

Liberals subsidize the economic fallacies of red state conservatives

It has been well known for some time that liberal states such as my home state of Massachusetts subsidize conservative states such as my original home of Tennessee. The idea bubbled up recently from Aaron Carroll to Paul Krugman to Matthew Yglesias. Krugman explains the graph best, but this point of Yglesias's is key (though badly written):

[H]igh-income people living in low-income states are generally very conservative in their political ideology but probably benefit more from federal income support programs more than they realize. If you own fast food franchises in the Nashville area, for example, you're going to form a self-perception as a self-reliant businessman but the existence of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit are helping to ensure that your customers have adequate income to sometimes eat at your Taco Bell.

Hard to understand why he didn't say Godfather's Pizza instead of Taco Bell.

Conservatives imagine themselves as heroes in Ayn Rand's fantasy novels, and liberal aid to the poor is one reason they are not confronted with the sheer vanity of their imaginations.

Productive reasoning

Despite a wealth (heh) of economic statistics, American economists cannot fully and precisely characterize everything we need to know to make policy decisions about the structure of our economy. We have a number for worker productivity, but it's too uncertain to be useful:

[H]ere’s the rub: both of these corporate strategies— domestic productivity improvements and global supply chain management—show up as productivity gains in U.S. economic records. When federal statisticians calculate the nation’s economic output, what they are actually measuring is domestic “value added”—the dollar value of all sales minus the dollar value of all imports. “Productivity” is then calculated by dividing the quantity of value added by the number of American workers. American workers, however, often have little to do with the gains in productivity attributed to them. For instance, if Company A saves $250,000 simply by switching from a Japanese sprocket supplier to a much cheaper Chinese sprocket supplier, that change shows up as an increase in American productivity—just as if the company had saved $250,000 by making its warehouse operation in Chicago more efficient. 

I've previously taken productivity statistics at face value. Now I know they can't be. The essential argument I made at the link remains the same, but the magnitude of economic gains I can ascribe to labor is smaller.

Does this mean that I would now agree that corporate management deserves at least part of what they've creamed off the top of the nominal productivity gains of the past 30 years? Hell, no. The hollowing out that they have done accomplishes short run profit and big bonuses for them, but it's very very bad for the long term U.S. economy.

We need industrial policy that drives jobs back to the U.S. with competitiveness. That's the long run path to continued health, something the financial markets cannot possibly account for with a quarter-to-quarter mentality run amok. Every government policy that encourages hollowing out needs to be revisited.

No vagina dialogues here

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The inability to talk to women as people may be why Teapublicans need to reduce them back to reproductive chattel.

How do ya like me now?

Click image for full Scott Santis/Chicago Tribune cartoon.

GOP objection, as I understand it

Click image for full Brian McFadden/New York Times cartoon.

Peristalsis

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Exception for rape

No, not the one you're expecting.

Virginia Republicans want to mandate rape in one exceptional case. They want to force penetration of thousands of women with a foreign object. Not only will the woman not consent to the procedure except under duress, the doctor who performs it won't be willing either.

These so-called small government Republicans want transvaginal ultrasounds precisely because 88% of abortions are performed so early in pregnancy that the fetus is not clearly visible on transcutaneous ultrasounds. The first attempt to use shame and sin to push women back into barefoot-and-pregnant failed, so they'll go the next step.

These same all-your-vaginas-are-belong-to-us Republicans worship Ken Cuccinelli, who claims it's unconstitutional to mandate you purchase health insurance. Heaven knows it's terrible if you can't mooch off the rest of us and evade insuring yourself. These GOP misogynists nonetheless think (term, advisedly, etc.) that they have the power to insert an ultrasound wand inside a pregnant woman (non-virgin!) who seeks an abortion.

Anti-abortion ideologues - practically all of the Republican Party willing to speak for the record - despise the reasoning about reserved and implied penumbral rights in the Constitution that Roe v. Wade extended from Griswold v. Connecticut. They are willing, despite often claiming all sorts of rights from the Tenth Amendment, to treat every stray vagina as freehold of the state. Contraception? How dare you!

Everyone should fear this expansive Republican view of state power over the bodies of the powerless. You're next, asshole.

You want to be gay? You must undergo an anesthesia-less colonoscopy. All in the name of being better informed about your choice, of course. The GOPers are so generous with information (so long as it's not science). So you can get a good look at those AIDS-spreading rectal tears - and then some. Betcha an adenoma will look pretty damn good by comparison.

You want a vasectomy? First, we'll mandate the surgeon crush your testicles between bricks. So you know what's it's like to be a poor little dying swimmer.

You want higher education for your daughter? First, you have to watch one of us - no, all of us! - fuck her, 'cause you know that's what will happen in those godless secular humanist university dorms. So you'll be well-informed and won't make the same mistake with your next daughter.

These Republicans are sociopathic cultists in the throes of power-mad mania. Salem witch trials, ha! They'll be tattooing a scarlet A on every liberal harlot until they run out of red ink on I-95 entering Massachusetts. Where it really hurts. They want culture war.

The hot breath of doom, is that what I feel on my neck? Or just embarrassment that these useless fucks are the same species as me?

Fatcat lines up for the meal ticket

Willard "Mitt" Romney brings the rodents.  Yum!

Click image for full Charlie Daniel/Knoxville News Sentinel cartoon.

Why liberals think wingnuts are racist bigoted vomitous jerks

Because many of them are.

There are almost 5000 comments posted in the thread — these are from the first few pages. Notice that the racist bastards deliberately misspell their slurs or insert random spaces, so they aren’t caught by word filters. And many of the worst comments have numerous “likes” from other commenters.

Fox has sanitized the ugliness of their core demographic, but Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs has a sampling of the sewage.

(h/t Balloon Juice)

Political bankruptcy

Republicans want to return to disastrous policies because they would then have to admit the emptiness of their ideas and their own uselessness in solving any national problem bigger than changing the diaper of some busted Wall Street institution:

The economy didn't just crash under a Republican president, it crashed under Republican policies. It crashed with low taxes. It crashed with deregulated markets. It crashed with huge restrictions on union activity. It crashed with massive cuts in environmental regulations. It crashed with lowered trade barriers. It crashed with big fat Pentagon spending.

They got what they wanted. They got CEOs with no limits on their wealth. They got banks with no limits on their "creativity." They got trade agreements that guaranteed manufacturing could be moved to the dirtiest, cheapest, most desperate source available. They got massive cuts in capital gains taxes and equally large boosts in the wealth they could pass along in estates. They got everything they said would make us all wealthy. They got record oil and gas drilling. They got record giveaways of public land. They got everything they said would create jobs. They got the middle class to shoulder more, more, more of the burden so that those beautiful job creators would be free to work their magic.

They can't say the economy crashed because taxes went up, because they didn't. They can't say that the economy crashed because there was a raft of new regulation, because there wasn't. They can't blame it on "union thugs" or Saul Alinsky or the guy who writes Happy Holidays cards at Hallmark. They can't blame it on a president who was elected when the world was already in free fall. Only, of course they do. They say it because they have no choice.

I've hit some of these themes for a long time, but I don't think I've ever hit them as well as Mark Sumner on DailyKos. Go read the whole thing.

Subliminal

No prosaic proles for Mitt! Only the sublime life of creaming off the best from actual productive enterprises...

I wonder why the Republican voters in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado didn't find this blast from the past appalling. Instead, Mitt Rmoney is not catastrophically extreme enough on abortion.

So, the primary clusterfuck goes on. Win!

Truth to power

In large organizations, whether governmental and corporate, the lone conscientious person who speaks up often pays a terrible price for telling the truth and especially if he then doesn't acquiesce when power wants to cover it in bullshit. Roger Boisjoly was one such man.

Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.

The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.

The exact reason it's important to protect whistleblowers is so that those of us who are interested can hope to learn the truth.

Note perfect

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

Hair to the throne

Click image for full J.D. Crowe/Mobile Register cartoon.

The proper role of envy is to make the unemployed dream of being the chauffeur, not to dream of government making a better life for them.

Workers didn't suddenly get lazy just because the banks burned down the economy

Rewards in the American economy do not come from effort or from deserving them. Money begets money, now more than it has at any time since the 1920s. Our aristocracy is just as entrenched as that of Europe in the 19th century, except that ours doesn't give itself the titles of nobility. Instead, they call themselves job creators even though most of them aren't. They call themselves entrepreneurs, even though most of them aren't. They call themselves capitalists, even though most of them are oligopolists instead.

But they have enough spare cash to buy media and politicians. The propagandist and Republican lies are incredible to anyone with a working bullshit detector - unfortunately, not nearly enough Americans to make a reliable majority.

Billionaires inevitably are bullshitters

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The free market that teabaggers and wingnuts want us to have is a market so free that billionaires can execute a hostile takeover of government.

Leaky bucket

Those worries that government aid gets delivered in a leaky bucket that Mitt Romney heard about in Econ 101? Not so leaky after all.

More efficient than many private sector organizations, health insurance companies for instance.

Mitt Romney (R-job destroyer) gets away with an incredible amount of bullshit because he has a reputation for knowing something. If he does, he's lying. That's my belief.

(h/t Jared Bernstein)

Not when the facts have a liberal bias

House Republicans: "We'd rather live in a fantasy than deal with facts."

The Peters Amendment would not have altered H.R. 3582 in any functional manner, it simply would had added the following factual findings section:

(1) On January 8, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that President Bush believed that the tax cut package enacted in 2001 and expanded in 2003 would “create additional revenues for the federal government and pay for itself.”
(2) Before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were enacted, the Congressional Budget Office projected gradually rising surpluses, from 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2001 to 5.3% of gross domestic product by 2011, with the federal government operating debt free by 2009.
(3) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have added over $2 trillion to budget deficits from 2002-2011.
(4) Despite signing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 into law, President George W. Bush’s administration had, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records” in 1939.
(5) From 2001 to 2009, gross domestic product grew at the slowest pace for any eight-year span since 1953.
(6) Median household income declined during the Bush Administration for the first time since 1967, when this data began to be tracked.

Which is more embarrassing, denying brute incontrovertible facts or acknowledging them when your entire
platform depends on ignoring them?

Duh.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Shoring up support from the asshole faction

Donald Trump (R-Donald Trump) endorses Mitt Romney. Ho hum. A month ago, Trump was threatening to jump back into the race, maybe as an independent.

This is pretty funny however:

A Pew survey last month found that 64% of definite and likely GOP voters said an endorsement from [Trump] would make no difference to them.

In the survey, 13% said it would make them more likely to back a candidate, while 20% said it would actually make them less likely.

I'm in the 64% - only because there's no way to get below my previous zero likelihood of voting for Mitt. But I'm proud to see that even Republicans can't stand Trump.

Idly, why would Trump go against his natural match, Newt Gingrich? Answer: Trump wants to be the biggest asshole in the world - BIG! - and Newt is standing in his way.

The Newtist colony

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Never give up a lie

The bullshit continues, this time in Georgia, where an administrative judge believes he has the power to compel the President to appear and prove the birthers wrong. Even though he has done this over and over and over again.

It's time to start fucking these people up, by which I mean ruining their fucking lives, not injuring their bodies. The judge, the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney (Orly Taitz, the Fred Phelps of birtherism, rebuffed at every turn and even sanctioned for it but still insane enough to continue her abuse of the legal system), and anyone who funded this nullificationism. It's time to find out what they've done wrong and make it known - to their wives, to their creditors, to the press.

It's long past time to stop being nice, to start taking no prisoners. Figuratively.

Start with Orly Taitz. Find the lies in her naturalization record - maybe she's a planted late Soviet era sleeper - revoke her citizenship, and deport her worthless insane ass back to Russia.

Yeah, it's going on in Alabama too. Neo-confederate assholes.

Republicans can only win in the long run if they lie and cheat.

Too bad to be true

There's a story going around on the net that Rick Santorum's wife had an abortion. I heard it from a friend on Facebook. But it's not true.

Of course, I think the Republicans are frequently terrible hypocrites, but something about this claim rang alarm bells of skepticism for me. If this episode from the fall of 1996 had really been known and covered in the press since 1997, wouldn't it have been well aired earlier? Santorum didn't become a first tier candidate until Iowa, true, but it's a perfect juicy story that our dysfunctional media would have loved to gossip over incessantly.

Turns out Karen Santorum had a second trimester miscarriage in a pregnancy that was doomed by a deleterious birth defect:

Karen was in her 19th week of pregnancy. Husband and wife were in a suburban Virginia office for a routine sonogram when a radiologist told them that the fetus Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and was going to die.

After consulting with specialists, who offered several options including abortion, the Santorums decided on long-shot intrauterine surgery to correct an obstruction of the urinary tract called posterior urethral valve syndrome.

A few days later, rare ``bladder shunt'' surgery was performed at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The incision in the womb carried a high risk of infection.

Two days later, at home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Verona, Karen Santorum became feverish. Her Philadelphia doctors instructed her to hurry to Pittsburgh's Magee-Women's Hospital, which has a unit specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

After examining Karen, who was nearly incoherent with a 105-degree fever, a doctor at Magee led Santorum into the hallway outside her room and said that she had an intrauterine infection and some type of medical intervention was necessary. Unless the source of the infection, the fetus, was removed from Karen's body, she would likely die.

Rick and Karen Santorum were willing to choose a medical path that nearly killed her. We can never know whether craven political calculation entered into their decision - well, his decision, since she was not cogent when the decision was made.

There's a whiff of hypocrisy here, but only a whiff. The Santorums, despite their ardent beliefs about proper behavior from the rest of us, were willing to consider inducing labor to save her life at the expense of the fetus:

"If that had to be the call, we would have induced labor if we had to," the senator said as he sat in his Washington office. "I consider it a blessing that we didn't have to make that decision."

While I give Rick props for admitting this, his inability to learn a bit of humility on the subject despite his open suggestion of god's hand in sparing them a hard decision is troubling. It doesn't sound moral to me to find a narrow exception that just happens to fit one's own principles without considering whether those principles are sound or, after this experience, merely convenient.

(h/t Salon)

The meta-message: One of the most damaging aspects of the wingnut approach to national narrative is their complete unwillingness to give up stories they like because those stories are false. Those of us in the reality-based community are obligated not to follow their dishonest example and instead to abjure any propagandist's propagation of this bullshit.

When Fox commits journalism

CNN continues its slide into Republican-sanitizing irrelevance. Its politics front page looks like:

Newt Gingrich's "fiery rebuttal" of second wife Marianne's allegation that Newt wanted an open marriage floats way up high, but the allegation itself is waaay down in the inverted pyramid, and the so-called rebuttal article doesn't even link to it, despite linking to everything else.

CNN also fuzzes the soft-focus edges of Mitt Romney's biography. Romney has family in Mexico - hey, maybe those displaced blonde gringos will help Mitt with voters whose primos would have to climb over Mitt's wall.

Why are there Romneys south of the border?

Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather led the first group of Mormons to the state of Chihuahua to flee religious persecution.

 The so-called persecution they fled was American laws against bigamy! But you won't hear that from CNN.

Nope, CNN readers need Fox to fill in the details:

Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.

"When you read the family's history, you realize how important polygamy was to them," said Todd Compton, a Mormon and independent historian who wrote a book about the polygamous life of the church's founder, Joseph Smith. "They left America and started again as pioneers, after they had done it over and over again previously."

Of course, the AP did that reporting in 2007, and Fox only published it then, when they were anti-Romney. Report honestly on everyone? Na ga happ'n.

Even so, you'd think CNN would be embarrassed by it obvious glossing over of known facts. But no...

Conservative standards and standard-bearers

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Unfinished business

Where would we be but for the murder of our liberal leaders?

I may not get there with you

Update (1/20): Corrected my cut-and-paste error. Didn't mean to put Nina Simone in twice.

The last piastre

Emboldened by the prospect that SOPA will pass and bring with it copyright vigilantism, the Grey Lady is ready to make us all pay:

(Aside: Is anyone considering anti-trust proceedings? The dead tree media suddenly and coincidentally all got serious at once about squeezing some piastres out of their freeloading Internet readers.)

The Times hints condescendingly that it might restore actual fealty to facts in favor of its current wingnut-fearing neutral view of bullshit and the faux balance that results. (Although, isn't a blogger pretty much the definition of truth vigilante?) But then Jill Abramson defensively quashes that hint much more swiftly than any reporting error.

We foolish readers misunderstood!

First, though, I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

At least the condescension is consistent.

If the Times doesn't demand a factual basis for the dialog in its pages, it fails utterly to do journalism. Maybe its editors don't care about that, but they should care that reality-based, skeptical reporting is the only function they have that can't be performed more cheaply and almost always better on the Internet.

Maybe they're just going to shut down every blog that links to them, once SOPA passes. That would be a whole different kind of truth vigilante. Still...

Romney lies, you can see it in his eyes.

Mass debates

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Never before has so much free media been spent on so many useless wingnuts. There was nothing like this in 2004, when Democrats competed to take on a Republican incumbent.

Battle for second

Can anyone tell me how it is that CNN's alleged liberalism allowed the headline Romney, Huntsman tie in midnight New Hampshire vote, when President Obama actually out-polled them in Dixville Notch, NH?

Riiight, not the liberal media.

The prudent along with the gamblers

What they show us

Lazing on the sofa, idly watching a third rate college football bowl game that I don't care a whit about and never heard of before - the BBVA Compass Bowl. After a Pitt kick-off return, as ESPN went to commercial, I noticed the long shot of the Birmingham skyline had an area of soft focus, obscuring lettering on the parapets of two office buildings.

Here's what ESPN was hiding on behalf of their sponsor:

Competitors. As expected.

Moral of the story: Don't outsource your bullshit detection. Know when the content you see and hear is advertising.

College bowl games are and have always been about brand-building. This one? Same reason Toronto Dominion Bank bought naming rights to the Boston Garden - to fit in with the locals. Both have also disguised their nation of origin by using their initials. Toronto might not have been so bad, but Dominion, well, na ga happen. Can you imagine Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Birmingham!? Every deputy sheriff would be asking for their papers.

In fact, nearly all TV is captured by its sponsorship. Media is a product, and it carefully shows us just what its sponsors want us to see.

Attack of the killer caucusoids

So Iowa voted? Who won?

Rick Santorum won, any idiot can see that. Romney got his 8-vote plurality, but it's tainted by the fact that Karl Rove announced it before official release of the alleged numbers. Romney really finished third in the expectations caucus, though number two Ron Paul looks poised to flame out in a bout of hobgoblinish consistent insanity. (Plus the media can't handle a three-way race - only a single, deeply buried mention of Paul in the CNN story and then only as the unrebutted subject of a Santorum accusation.)

I say alleged numbers because this was clearly a Republican voting process from the get-go. It was past 2:00 a.m. local time before the final precincts reported to the media. Iowa Republicans cast about 122,000 votes in 1774 precincts. How much time does it take for each local chair to count up 70 votes?

A caucus can't even be recounted. It's not a primary. The local professionals (Auditors there, Town Clerks here) who know how to safeguard vote records don't run caucuses. The media and even some of my liberal friends on Twitter tut-tutted about that. But the Massachusetts Democratic Party will caucus in February (go, Elizabeth Warren!), and those votes won't be recountable either.

Recounts can't explain the delay. Once the voters leave the caucus, it should be a matter of minutes before the results are posted, not hours and hours.

Voting integrity is supposed to be guaranteed by openness - there's no secret ballot at a caucus - but usually nobody disinterested is paying close attention. And the Republican Iowa caucuses looked very much manipulated by the party fathers. Fundies should view Romney's "win" as yet another illegitimate theft from them, the god-anointed true conservatives.

There may even be a schism between the Teabaggers and their plutocratic organizers. The point of Teabaggism, it seems to me in light of Iowa, was for the wealthies to co-opt fundie paleo-conservative outrage in service of - natch! - tax cuts for the wealthy funded by destruction of the social safety net (for all those undeserving urban brown people). The wealthies had previously done their co-option over and over again by making empty promises, but their economic agenda has become so feudal that it calls for more circus to cover the absence of bread.

Iowa proves that the culture of a forced choice between abstinence and pregnancy is not dead yet, even if the wealthies don't want to have to campaign on it. History suggests that the wealthies will win their perennial internecine war anyway and that they'll bring nearly all of the fundies along for the ride, but for now, Santorum and the bitter old anti-sex wing of GOP has had a shot of Viagra that they have no outlet for other than paranoia, delusion, and outrage.

There's blood in the water, Newt Gingrich's. Romney's slush fund pals put it there. But that blood is attracting other sharks, and no amount of Romney's friends' Citizens v. FEC funding can quell those other sharks' lust to take a bite out of Mitt. Oh, sure, Mitt's sharks will turn their teeth on Santorum. They'll do anything to win, but the connections are clear enough now, even for wingnuts to see, and Romney will suffer more and more for the help he gets from attack ad slush funds held by "independent" sole-purpose corporations.

Mitt has gone negative in the past. In 2004, armed with a hand-picked slate of Republican CEOs, then-Gov. Romney tried to make major inroads into Democratic dominance of the Massachusetts state legislature. My Senator was one of his targets, and the Republican Party, then a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitt, Inc., funded half a dozen direct mail hit pieces on her in the last week alone. Problem was, voters knew her, and they knew she wasn't evil even if they didn't always agree with her. They also knew Mitt, and the upshot was that we Democrats made net gains in both houses of the legislature. Mitt the chameleon is not convincingly principled, so it's hard for him to make attacks stick, given his own lack of credibility.

Romney's in a tough place. He has to go negative to win the nomination. In fact, he needs to smack Ron Paul immediately in New Hampshire, where the idiosyncratic Paul should be much more appealing to the local culture of iconoclasm and a bigger threat than Santorum's iconophilia.

Money is the greater of Romney's chief advantages, and it buys a lot of bile. But going negative - even if most of what he and his minions said about Newt Gingrich was accurate - is going to stain Romney again.

Deservedly so. He may look like a nice guy with his hair, his teeth, and his suit. But he's as mean and selfish as he needs to be. The more he rips chunks out of his opponents, the more he sacrifices electability, and that's all to the good.

Update (1/6):  Not that it matters one whit to my political analysis, but it's completely obvious that an 8-vote margin in a process as sloppy as this is not statistically significant enough to distinguish a winner:

I had been downloading versions of the state’s vote tally at various points on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning. The first version I downloaded reflected the state’s count as of 11:14 p.m. Iowa time on Tuesday, at which point results from 1,723 of 1,774 precincts had been tabulated.

In 10 of these 1,723 precincts, the results in the spreadsheet changed between 11:14 p.m. and 2 a.m., reflecting additional verification and validation efforts. These changes added a net of 11 votes to Mr. Romney’s total while subtracting a net of 33 votes from Mr. Santorum’s count. If not for these changes, Mr. Santorum would still have led the vote count on Wednesday morning.

You'd think he said f*ck on air

The odd thing about CNN's response to Newt calling Mitt a liar is that they're so aghast. Our public conversation is filled with lies, and yet journalists have no interest in anything other than excusing them and pretending they don't exist. It violates their bizarre politesse to point out blatant falsehoods.

Poor Gingrich doesn't like being swift-boated. Although, actually, the Romney slush fund ads are much more truthful than anything the Swift Boat Liars ever said. It is really really rich to hear Romney supporters attack Gingrich for flip-flopping and for supporting an individual healthcare insurance mandate.

Opus Dei of America

It looks as though Rick Santorum (R-pre-Vatican-II) may luck out in Iowa. He was so far below the radar no one thought to gin up massive attacks of killer ads against him.

His particular conservative Catholic nullification - to go with Ron Paul's opposition to basically all civil rights legislation - is to deny Griswold v. Connecticut, which established our right to keep the state from interfering in our sex lives. You don't want Santorum in your bedroom? Don't have sex of any kind unless you're willing to play procreation roulette.

Earth to Ron Paul

In the continuing GOP contest to out-wingnut the other wingnuts, Ron Paul (R-wacko) offers that Rick Santorum is "very liberal."

And the wingnut who didn't fall far from the tree, son Rand, flies in from the Starship Free Enterprise in the galaxy Trekistan to offer still more spin points.

Let's get the lead back into paint and gasoline

After all, anything that contributes to stupidity is good for Republimerica.

All the Republicans are extremists

Every single Republican candidate for President is an economic extremist:

(This material was created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)

Reused under license.

Start making sense

Found this interesting:

In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organized enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. ...

Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. “This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighborhood context,” Dr. Campbell said.

The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines, girls playing with girls, boys with boys. They have an avid appetite for learning the local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behavior. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.

For me, the years between toddlerhood and puberty were filled with growth.  My mom taught me to read at 5, which opened the world to me.

She and my dad also inculcated fairness in me, although I think I had been born with a strong streak of it. The central issue of the time and place - Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-1960s - was race, and they were rare white liberals in our all-white neighborhood.

I ruefully remember telling my friends "that's illegal" a lot. I didn't know much about the law - how could I at that age? But I had a well-taught but still precocious grasp of the golden rule to compensate for my poor ability to keep track of the complicated rule-based codes of Christianity and etiquette. Forks and graven idols didn't matter to me a whit, but my vocabulary-challenged view of legality was really a sense of justice that I carry to this day, albeit more developed.

We moved several times, so I had new starts in which I could experiment with my social position. I was never an alpha (except in the classroom), but I could hold my own, and eventually I found sports as a path into kid society. At Little League try-outs, a schoolmate gibed, "Science and baseball don't mix." He had a forgettable Little League career; I became the best hitter in the league.

To fit in even better, I learned to identify the make and model of many cars - somehow important in elementary school - learned to bullshit from what little I knew of the automotive world into more. What does it mean to wind it out? I learned from the sound effects of other boys without ever having driven anything faster than a 3-speed spider bike.

Steeped in Darwin, also through my mom, I had that sudden aha moment when I realized the mythic nature of Christianity, at least the Bible Belt Christianity that surrounded me. Jonah and the whale, heavenly streets of gold, Noah's ark? All fanciful, just like Loki's liver or Athena's birth or Santa Claus. By the time I was confirmed, with puberty no doubt already well under way, I made reservations from doctrine at the altar. I was a cafeteria Methodist!

I also remember how different rich people were from poor. Boys in the richer neighborhood cared about cars. Boys in the poorer neighborhood had seen education as their meal ticket.

By the time I was 12, my identity was formed. There were many gaps to fill in, but the boy I was then is clearly the same as the man I am today.

(And I love the A.A. Milne reference in the page URL.)

The fraud of Republican debt hysteria

On their watch, they didn't give a shit about the deficit:

The money quote:

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.

A tough time to be sane, 2011

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/DailyKos cartoon.

We just socialize risk

Back to the ... past

Click image for full Charlie Daniel/Knoxville News-Sentinel cartoon.

The year in deja vu

American and European elites fucked up 2011:

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

Of course, moronic teabaggers - members of the 99% fighting for the 1% - aren't elite. They may think of themselves as elite. After all, they're white and old, so they expect to be elite as their birthright, as their due of Confucian filial piety Ten Commandment Christian honor. And the teabaggers contributed with every vociferous shout-down and reactionary vote to the total fuck-up that was 2011, due to the completely irrational mindfuck of the 2010 midterm elections.

The elite central bankers took care of other bankers and told the rest of us that our dire straits were our own damn fault, never mind that the very same profligate bankers crashed the world economy. But they went to Harvard and the Sorbonne and Heidelberg, so we have to take care of them and their vacation homes and their taxpayer-funded bonuses, even if it means they have to sacrifice - oh, the humanity - by witnessing with their virgin eyes the homeless living in refrigerator boxes - how gauche, how outré, how lacking in fellow feeling toward their noble betters. Where's a Potemkin village when they need one for their refined sensibilities!

I am really fucking sick of the blind selfish wealthy, tired of being an upper middle class peasant with a white-knuckle death grip on my job, destined for Ayn Rand penury in old age, blamed for my own laziness, when in fact I work much harder than the shitheads who cream off an ever-larger proportion of the GDP.

Let me say this right now: If I find myself broke and hungry in old age, screwed out of Social Security and Medicare in a giant profit-making game of three-card monte, discarded by craven plutocratic feudal elites, I will not go gentle into that good night.

Is that a threat? You're goddamn right it is.

The Times deigns to permit the L-word

The American Enterprise Institute, which calls its employs scholars but pays them to create propaganda, created the bullshit lie that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial meltdown.

 Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, [has] almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.

Allies? Start with Congressional Republicans, who have vowed to eliminate Fannie and Freddie — because, after all, they caused the crisis! Throw in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which, on Wednesday, published one of Wallison’s many articles repeating the Big Lie. It was followed on Thursday by an editorial in The Journal making essentially the same point. Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.

AEI and the Wall Street Journal know they're lying. They know that Fannie and Freddie were late to big profitable rape and pillage started entirely by private, market-based institutions.

But they lie repeatedly just the same. Oh, yeah, the Republicans too.

Why not call it lying?

They're coming for everything you have:

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government.”

Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Mitt Romney is supposed to be the sane one, yet he has more than doubled down on the socialist/communist/leveller lies and slander.

(h/t Zandar at Balloon Juice)

Imagine even better

Another case where tepid Democratic insurance reforms are nonetheless vastly superior to Republican plans, which in healthcare, amount to, "Kill the weak!"

Radio Rwanda, c. 1994

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fox is blatantly and explicitly dividing its viewership from anyone with the slightest taint of liberalism. They are dehumanizing us with the goal of making us conscience-free for their soldiers to kill. In a Christian way, of course.

The entire War on Christmas trope is a propaganda tool intended to divide Americans. It's working.

You think I'm exaggerating. But the Tutsi never thought their neighbors would hack them to death with machetes.

Update (12/24): Exaggerating?

No coal for you, but a nice oil sand pipeline

Click image for full Deb Milbrath cartoon.

No deal

John Boehner (R-tea-drinker) may have the title and office of Speaker, but no deal he makes is worth the air he wastes in agreeing to it:

Speaker John A. Boehner, who had urged his members on Saturday to support the bill, seemingly [sic] did an about-face on Sunday and said he and other House Republicans were opposed to the temporary extension, part of a $33 billion package of bills that the Senate passed Saturday. In addition to extending the payroll tax cut for millions of workers, the legislation extends unemployment benefits and avoid cuts in payments to doctors who accept Medicare. The measure would be effective through February.

I'm getting strong feelings that America is doomed. Even should the unlikely happen and the Democrats sweep away the teabaggers in 2012, we are sooo divided, and the wingnuts are sooo adamantly determined on a course of fascism.

Fascism? No exaggeration - the Republican option doesn't just tend toward oligarchic rule by wealthy corporate interests. It is oligarchy. They cynically and demagogically fan the nationalism, bigotry, fundamentalism, and hatred of the liberal principles that founded this country. Instead, they off the feudal tribalism in which one aristocrat's peasants fight another aristocrat's serfs, all for the greater glory of the so-called nobles.

Even if Democrats, wishy-washy and thoroughly compromised as they are, win the coming election, Republicans have made the country ungovernable. They did it on purpose because they would rather endanger the country than surrender power, even to a majority. As soon as the 2008 election was called, they set out to take America hostage. And our fellow citizens were too stupid, too easily demagogued, and too irrational to resist.

Yeah, I'm such a ray of sunshine these days.

Stopped by godless New Englanders

Apologies for my cynicism

Secret Santas are sweeping the nation, paying off the layaway accounts of a few random lucky members of the 99%. Wonderful Christmas time story to warm the cockles of even Scrooge's heart, right?

“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” said Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway.

Then why are they for the most part only paying off accounts at Kmart? And how does she know exactly?

Oh, sure, we'll start to hear about copycats (and good for them, unless of course they're from a competing HQ in Bentonville). But this smacks of a purely cynical guerrilla marketing campaign. It's brilliant in its way, but at bottom there's a soul-killing ugliness to the willingness to leverage small money into tremendous free media.

If you want to prove that the problem is in my heart, not in the hearts of the secret Santas, find out who called the press. Acts of generosity that happen when no one is looking don't make good copy unless a writer is tipped off.

I'd really like to be wrong about this. But I think it's not even noblesse oblige, instead fakery.

While I'm on the topic, one more thing about layaway: The need for layaway shows how far the middle class has fallen. You only need layaway if you can't get a few hundred dollars in credit. Layaway terms are one-sided - the poor consumer pays and pays and pays and still has to keep returning to the store. This is the world of widespread penury that Republicans want to return us to. So that we'll be more cowed and leave their sponsors an ever larger share of the pie.

Why liberals know Republicans harbor racists

Because they do.

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Now can we call Newt a racist gasbag?

Henceforth I claim that I am PolitiFact

This doesn't mean I am ending PolitiFact, oh no! Sure, I may be ending PolitiFact as we know it. But that's a whole 'nother beast.

It's true that I will not be staffing PolitiFact beyond my own herculean efforts. It will no longer be run by the St. Petersburg Times. Nor will I be bending over backward to cast a pox on both their houses whenever possible. I won't be neutral either - how could I with the name lovable liberal?


But this will still be the same program we've come to rely on to distinguish fact from fantasy.

Because it has the same name.

If you believe PolitiFact on Medicare, you should believe this.

(Yes, I realize this is from April. Under my new management, PolitiFact will no longer have to be timely either.)

Update: Now I remember. I was on this topic because of BlueMassGroup, so h/t.

Tell me different

What this means: Republicans want to replace Medicare with vouchers for private health insurance, vouchers whose purchasing power is planned to decrease over the years, vouchers to buy something that at some point in everyone senior's life will not be available at any price. If they succeed, bankruptcy and destitution with no possibility of ever recouping independence will be the lot of most people in their so-called golden years.

The simple objective of the Republican Party is to deny any existence to any of us in the 99% that's not as a captive market. I have a hard time seeing how that can be classified as anything short of evil.

Fly, little ones, fly away

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Hair club for GOP

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Kindred spirits

Rush and Newt go way back. Steve Kornacki speculates about why Rush is helping Newt with wingnuts and teabaggers now.

But maybe they both just recognize each other as their kind of asshole. Both these guys are hugely more hypocritical than even the typical winger.

Newt pilloried Bill Clinton while, for the second time, he was having an affair that would lead him to divorce one wife in favor of his new lover. Rush pilloried Clinton while taking Viagra on a trip to the Dominican Republic, unaccompanied by any woman, which looked an awful lot like sex tourism.

Rush and Newt are both law and order conservatives, yet both have run afoul of the law. Rush was a pain pill addict whose possession of pills and prescriptions gained under false pretenses would have meant jail time for a mere mortal. Newt repeatedly violated the lax ethical standards of Congress.

Hypocritical assholes on this scale need each other.

War on Rick Perry

They don't call us satyrists for nuthin'.

Bring it on, bitches

The worst aspect of this is... Wait, how can I pick any single feature of this colon-load of pandering, resentment-filled ugliness as worst?

Perry appeals to the common sense of grievance fundamentalists have that they are persecuted when you disagree with them, when you won't let them force feed their Christianity (subspecies estupidus estupendum) to your children. This imaginary grievance is the fundies' perverse attempt to be Christ-like martyrs. From the comfort of their armchairs.

Perry whips the gays (no buggering in foxholes on his watch!), kisses some military ass, and makes the bullshit claim that children can't pray in schools. Again, keep your stupid beliefs away from my kids. It's bad enough that you've inculcated stupidity in your own offspring. If America is going to compete globally, someone here has to know something about science. You want your children to pray (for rain, maybe?), get them into the pews every Sunday instead of trying to bring the pews into the classroom.

"...Obama's war on religion..." I'm Rick Perry, and I'm a delusional fundamentalist asswipe. He said it! Between the lines...

Don't worry, Rick, in a real war on religion, you'd be fine. You'd be far too useful for showing how dangerous religion and pandering to it can be. Why is it that you and your mouth-breathing followers think that sectarian beliefs should be a matter for majority vote?

The reality of this ad is that Perry is not the anti-Mitt, so he's angling to be the anti-Newt. He - or his political consultant - think Perry's biggest opening is with Fox-viewing fundies without two ideas to rub together. It's probably canny political positioning. Even that fact that liberals like me hate this ad is all good for Perry. The adverse attention from us will help him circle the wagons with the fundies.

But that's all good for us too. Perry may title his ad "Strong," but he's a very weak national general election candidate. The longer he survives the Republican primaries, the better for us.

So...



Rick Perry. Suck. On. This.

Wingnut id

Click image for full August J. Pollak cartoon.

A stimulus Perry can believe it

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

The taste Republicans never tire of

Frank Langella theory of executive authority

Rick Perry (R-Duhbya was a genious) believes - if he could only get elected President - he could unilaterally abrogate standing law. Can we go ahead and make Texas governors ineligible to be President? By Perry's hazy, ignorant idea of the Constitution, Barack Obama could make that happen with the stroke of a pen.

This moron doesn't believe in law. He believes in power, wingnut power.

Truth on employment

The drop in official unemployment is not good news. It only looks like good news. Labor force participation is horrible.

I would guess that the picture for would-be workers between 55 and 67 (the most recent full Social Security retirement age) is even worse.

According to Republicans, all this despair is the fault of the despairing. According to Democrats, there's not much more they can do.

The Occupiers are right.

Failure of understanding - mine

Other cultures have different norms:

The problem for Gulnaz and the other women in the film is the deeply held belief that women uphold their family’s honor. Thus any attempt to expose abuse is so humiliating to the family that a woman who speaks out often becomes a pariah among her relatives, ending up isolated as well as abused.

Gulnaz’s case shows the power of cultural norms. On the one hand, the public campaign for the woman prompted the pardon, which ensures that she will be able to bring up her daughter outside prison. On the other hand, the fact that the only imaginable solution to the situation of a woman with an illegitimate child is to have her marry the father — even if he is a rapist — is testament to the rigid belief here that a woman is respectable only if she is embedded within a family.

Ms. Malpas said that Gulnaz talked to her about why she felt that she had to give in to requests that she marry the man who raped her, even though she did not want to, explaining that not only would she be an outcast if she did not, but so would her daughter, and she would bring shame on her family.

I can't even begin to understand this one. A man rapes one of another man's female relatives, maybe even a daughter, and he blames her for shaming him!?

What the fuck is wrong with these people and their misogynistic religion and society?

Testify, brother, I mean, cousin

Why is it that American big media is so thin on brutal truth-telling such as this?

The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country's reputation.

...

What a nice club that is. A club of liars, cheaters, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites and ignoramuses. "A starting point for a chronicle of American decline," was how David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the current Republican race.

Remnick, even, is late to the party. The starting point of the chronicle of our decline was the Republican scandal-mongering response to Bill Clinton's election in 1992.

Update (12/5): Is help on the way for the redoubtable Paul Krugman? Thomas Edsall joins the growing chorus of those of us sick and tired of Republican lies:

Struggling to justify a recent television spot that reached new heights of deception, a top operative in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign put it plainly, while insisting on anonymity:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Looking for grace

Newt Gingrich (R-dumb idea of smart) handles a question about his health - and by implication his plutocratic girth - with humor, self-effacement, and a hint of grace:



Then, he alibis that god wants him to be fat. He held his huge vanity at bay for 30 seconds, but that was all.

Opposites attract

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Mitt Romney is so two-faced that Republicans are turning in droves to Newt Gingrich, a man whom they know is also completely untrustworthy but who always takes an ultra-conservative position, even if that requires him to lie about facts. The latest not-Mitt has always played fast and loose with money in politics, always in a way that has enriched him, merely the latest being his acting as an obvious lobbyist while never abiding by the laws about lobbying for pay.

Not to mention that everyone despises Newt Gingrich personally:

[T]he overwhelming refrain from the majority of Insiders on both sides focused on Gingrich's temperament and the unpredictable risks it would create in a general election.

"Winning the presidency is all about discipline, focus, and organization," said one Republican Insider, "none of which are strong suits for Gingrich."

"With Newt, we go to bed every night thinking that tomorrow might be the day he implodes," said another Republican. ... A third Republican stated plainly, "Gingrich is not stable enough emotionally to be the nominee - let alone, the president."

"Newt can't take the scrutiny," agreed a Democrat, "and he has the personality of an angry badger."

...

"Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character," quipped a Republican.

"Come on," sighed another GOP Insider, "the White House is probably giving money to Gingrich as we speak."

Run away, run away!

Not really a very large message change from Frank Luntz, but another glimpse of the propagandist's modus operandi.

No wonder they kept it secret

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Wait for the line about bonuses...