Taxonomy vs. low taxonomy

You can follow @admstrange on Twitter.

Alternate title:  Master narrative vs. masters of the universe

(Yes, I successfully resisted "vs. master race.")

Between the hedges

Click image for full Steve Greenberg cartoon.

Keeping the suckers poor

In New England and the Mid-Atlantic, you can actually better yourself. In the South, not so much.

Liberalism works - unless what you want is captive, cheap help who won't get in your way.

Still Duhbya's deficit

Duhbya flushed our balanced budget, but on January 20, 2009, Republicans flushed that memory down the toilet.

The GOP cares about deficits only when someone else is spending the money.

Rick Perry as Pontius Pilate

Not that Todd Willingham was Jesus, but he was murdered by the state of Texas after Gov. Rick Perry refused to reconsider debunked evidence and the conviction it led to.

Some of the harshest criticism in Baird's writing is directed at Perry. The governor's role in refusing to postpone Willingham's execution was closely examined by The Huffington Post during his presidential campaign.

"By 2004 there was no doubt that every single indication of arson had been debunked by the scientific community," Baird wrote. "This fact was staring Governor Perry in the face; nevertheless, he refused to grant a reprieve."

Perry has stood by decision when questioned previously about Willingham. His office didn't flinch from the latest criticism.

"Nothing the Austin court could have done would change the fact that Todd Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers for murdering his three daughters," said a statement from his spokeswoman Lucy Nashed. "He had full access to every level of the appeals process, and his conviction was reviewed and upheld by multiple levels of state and federal courts. ... The governor reviewed all of the facts of the case and agreed with the jury, and state and federal courts that Willingham was guilty."

The forms were obeyed - such as they are in Texas - so putting an innocent man to death is peachy. The Republican Party...

No shit, Sherlock

The AP asks, "Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?"

You've been non-comatose for the past three and a half years, and you're just noticing that now!?

Public cervix announcement

Republicans, Get In My Vagina! from Kate Beckinsale

You can tell from the front page that this is NSFW, right?

Wingnut version of truth

James O'Keefe continues to draw media attention with bullshit. He doesn't need facts. Truthiness is enough for someone who lies to the unwary for a living:

[T]he one instance in the video where O’Keefe purports to show that a non-citizen had actually voted, in fact shows that a citizen voted.

The episode does speak to a larger underlying problem with most accusations of voter fraud. It’s what I call the “Scooby Doo routine”. People like O’Keefe make wild voter fraud accusations like non-citizens voting, only to discover a much simpler explanation for the situation.

There's more:

In his newest video, conservative videographer James O'Keefe claims that during his organization's latest inept voter fraud sting in North Carolina, "we found ballots being offered out in the name of the dead." Unfortunately for O'Keefe, the person whose ballot his operative sought is actually alive, as is indicated by the raw video his organization posted online.

No one should ever listen to O'Keefe lie, and that's his stock in trade.

Thanks, liberals

Since it shows their bullshit for what it is, wingnuts will curse this:

Gov. Romney’s candidacy is an opportunity to take a closer look at the state that dare not speak its name. Through all the red mist and flying blue fur this election year, it’s worth reminding voters of a truth Romney probably won’t be emphasizing: The nation’s favorite punching bag is an exceptionally successful state. ...

[I]f America wants to be a healthy, smart, rich, globalized, high-tech powerhouse, we arguably have no better model than Massachusetts.

For many, a steady drizzle of mockery for the state and its “moderates” is the only response to that uncomfortable truth. Still, it’s hard not to dream of a presidential campaign in which a former governor would run on, not from, his associations with Massachusetts. Dukakis, of course, ran on a “Massachusetts Miracle.” But Gov. Romney is already too far from home for that, and probably knows better than to try.

I've hit all these themes, mostly in my obsessive commenting at the MetroWest Daily News (recently here), to the point that I'm sorry I didn't write the Slate piece.

Creative destruction of the truth

Normal people call what Rmoney is doing lying.

Three stupidest people on television

Afraid of their own amygdalas

Wingnut fear is the mind-killer:

That one ideological camp is so consumed with fear also has a lot to do with why conservatives and liberals share so little common ground. Progressives tend to greet these narratives with facts and reason, but as Chris Mooney notes, when your amygdala is activated, it takes over and utterly dominates the brain structures dedicated to reason. Then the “fight-or-flight” response takes precedence over critical thinking.

Fundamentalist agenda

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Fundies think they have a right to impose their backward and bigoted view of the world on the rest of us. They believe we infringe their religious liberty by disagreeing with them.

In short, they don't have the first clue what the First Amendment means.

A single honest Republican

Bruce Bartlett is the sort of Republican we used to have - a well-reasoned and analytical reality-based conservative. He can look at the economy and state without fear:

The reason that unemployment is high clearly has nothing to do with taxes. Consequently, there is no reason to think that reducing taxes further will do anything to raise employment by reducing the tax wedge.

There aren't many of his kind left, and most of them have been abandoned by the Teapublican extremists.

Calvinball

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

Fundamental Republican rule of the game: Republicans win!

Update: The Republicans have finally gone so far into Calvinball that at least America's cartoonists have noticed:

• Ross Gosse
• Paul Fell
• Mike Smith
• Deb Milbrath
• John Branch

Two to tango?

No, in fact, gridlock and extremism are not bipartisan problems in search of bipartisan solutions.

Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

I've been saying this for years. It's no more true now that the Washington establishment is finally getting its head out of its ass. But it's very welcome nonetheless.

The 27%

I was watching the History Channel the other night and learned that the Nazis only won 37% of the vote in the 1932 election. From that beachhead in the electorate, they used violence, suppression, and mass media to completely co-opt and dominate what had previously been a civilized nation.

American has its 27-percenters. My point is not that they're Nazis - they aren't - but that leverage on power, even in a democracy, frequently does not require a majority. Look at the Teapublican willingness to drive Congressional agendas, without regard for compromise, by abusing the filibuster. It was intended as a rare power; the GOP uses is now as a minimum required supermajority.

On this day 67 years ago, Adolf Hitler killed himself rather than face an accounting at Nuremberg for his brutal crimes against humanity. Coward.

But Hitler's death is still cause for celebration, even if I wish an American dogface had double-tapped him.

Bullshitting for a living

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

Life terms

The New York Times has long been arrogant. (Wingnuts and I can agree on that.) If you've ever seen executive editor (now emeritus) Bill Keller interviewed, you know he's completely buried in a Timesman's self-importance. The scenes in The Paper where Michael Keaton's tabloid editor interacts with Spalding Gray's thinly disguised Times editor don't seem exaggerated at all.

The Times has long had a reputation as slow to pay stringers, assuming it doesn't merely assign a staff reporter to your story idea for the price of an insincere thank you. This is a paper that has persistently tried to screw its freelancers out of any share whatsoever of the digital rights to their work.

Still, the Times is the best news provider in America, and it's incumbent on me to read it to stay well-informed. I'll still notice the bullshit that Keller would defend to hair-splitting lawyerly exhaustion - say, Judith Miller on Iraq or Jeff Gerth on Whitewater. Even though the brand is more important to management than the truth, the Times still does reporting and finds the truth often enough to be worth reading - assuming you keep your bullshit detector tuned up.

The new attempt to erect a paywall has been a challenge for me. At first, I had enough computers and enough browsers to read all I wanted, but that window is closing. I've long argued - following many others - that subscribers never paid for the news, they only paid for the newsprint, why should we now pay for pixels? Our subscription fees used to pay for printing and distribution costs alone, and those costs on line are drastically smaller now than they were in the dead tree era.

Yet just as the media need to change their business model, I probably need to change my expectations. Ad revenue, the traditional honey pot of journalism, has shrunk due to the Internet. Keller may think blogs are the problem. Instead, print media companies have utterly failed to notice that their competitive advantage is not opinion - blogs do that free and often without the strange taboos and Village fealties of mainstream outlets - but rather factual news reporting. Those of us who want facts, not the latest bullshit from seldom-right but often right-wing pundits, will just have to buy them. God knows the advertisers have no interest in any truth that might possibly inconvenience them in selling their wares.

Facts are hard. Facts take work to unearth. Facts are worth paying for. Opinions? Shit, I've got way too many of my own to need to pay for anyone's. Except for Paul Krugman's.

All in all, the Times has a quality product, and that justifies some of their arrogance.

But the terms of their agreement are onerous and one-sided:

The New York Times reserves the right to modify the content, type and availability of any digital product at any time.

Only one person may use each account or accounts (user name and password) associated with a purchased product, unless we agree otherwise.

There's an adjustment to a new age! No leaving your iPad on the coffee table as if it were a paper edition.

The Times won't even tell you the price up front. You have to start ordering before you can be sure what it costs:

When you purchase a digital product, the price will be made clear during the order process. You agree to pay the price that is stated at the time of your order, as well as any applicable taxes. You also agree to the billing frequency stated at the time of your order.

Your subscription is permanent:

All NYTimes digital subscriptions are renewed automatically. ...

If your credit card expires or your payment method is otherwise invalid, your subscription or product will not automatically be terminated. You will remain responsible for all charges.

You will be responsible for all costs we incur in connection with the collection of unpaid amounts, including court costs, attorneys' fees, collection agency fees and any other associated costs.

You have to call them to terminate. They, of course, accept no obligation to answer the phone.

The Times incurs no obligation whatsoever:

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your subscription or product for any reason, with or without notice and without further obligation. You will not be entitled to a refund in these circumstances. If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. ...

We reserve the right to make changes to our digital products at any time. If we temporarily reduce or eliminate the charge for content or access that you are currently paying for under different terms, you will not receive a refund.

If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. If we issue a refund or credit, we are under no obligation to issue the same or similar refund in the future.

Included in the terms is a sly attempt to expand copyright protection to prohibit fair use, much as the AP has tried to forbid quoting of their stories:

The Services and Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Services (including software) in whole or in part.

The law guarantees me the right to quote the Times when I comment on it, but the Times wants a more restrictive contract with me. That's legal of course. Let them try to enforce it.

The "privacy" policy requires that you provide information which the Times cannot possibly justify requiring:

Registration for the NYT Services requires that you supply certain personal information, including, in most cases, a unique e-mail address and demographic information (ZIP code, age, sex, household income (optional), job industry and job title) to register. [emphasis added]

And if the corporate structure changes, information about you is an asset - no mention of that asset being constrained to the existing policy:

In the future, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, we may include your information among the transferred assets.

The Times is part of the American oligarchy, which permits them to get away with this sort of one-sided, albeit legal, abuse of the legal system. They can hire the sharpest New York intellectual property lawyers to write tens of thousands of words into an adhesion contract that edges right up to unconscionability in its limits on what customers can do with a simple product, when we as individuals can't even sanely read and understand those terms without hours of investment and hiring our own lawyer.

The law is supposed to be even-handed. Obviously, as O.J. Simpson, Wall St. bankers, and the New York Times know, it isn't.

Newtonian attraction and repulsion

Click image for full Mike Keefe cartoon.

When you reward bullshit

... bullshit is what you'll get:

The dirty little secret about political punditry, that is not actually a secret to anyone who watches and reads it, is that it’s all lies. It requires very little knowledge or skill, and there are no consequences for being wrong. For a major newspaper to fire one of its columnists for getting something wrong would bring down the whole pundit industry, as that logic would necessitate the firing of them all. Every election pundit is wrong about everything, nearly all the time, and there’s usually a direct correlation between a pundit’s frequency of wrongness and his or her status — see the Washington Post’s stable of columnists for a prime example. The entire punditocracy is a sham, but thank you for reading anyway.

I truly wish I could have a well-paid job with no accountability, that I could show up to with tiny preparation, say my piece, and hit the beach. Instead, I'm a junior pundit, a blogger. I steer clear of bullshit predictions for the most part. I try to bring facts and analysis to bear on my subjects. Foolish!

The dire compostability of American punditry cannot possibly be an accident. It's certainly less expensive than the messy business of turning over rocks to find out what's really true in the world. For infotainment executives with column inches or air to fill, cheap is more attractive than accurate is - as long as we keep reading, watching, and listening.

Pundits didn't simply all decide to be media whores because of some conspiracy of contagious stupid. They steered their bullshit freighters into lanes that elicited rewards. First, they got praise, so they extruded more hot steaming drivel. True? Who cares! It was good TV - or radio or print. Then they got to tackle other opportunities to make up bullshit.

For the power elite, the best part of this market dominance in ruminant by-products was that it crowds out the aforementioned turning over of rocks. So there's no accountability for elite crimes - no perp walks to speak of on Wall St. despite a stockyard's worth of excrement all over our economy.

So, the infotainment outfits sell ads, protect their owners and cronies, and keep America in a constant ruckus over faux scandals, while ignoring real and dangerous issues.

Thus every media outlet big enough to try for the journalistic bastardization of balance is guaranteed to have a combination of:

• allegedly liberal concern trolls who spend their punditry iconoclastically telling us how Democrats ought to be more perfect
• and wingnut propagandists who follow the Teapublican line better than Pravda followed the Politburo

 Apparently, this is what Americans want to read, hear, and watch. Why, I have no idea. I hate the taste of bullshit.

When bullshitters can't recognize their own bullshit

Social Security is not in trouble and has never been in trouble:

Medicare is in trouble. The only reform ever to substantially bend the cost curve back to horizontal has been Obamacare, and the Teapublican response is to demagogue that fact - "Keep your filthy government hands off my Medicare" - and to then end Medicare in all but name, replacing it with decreasing vouchers that wouldn't purchase what seniors need in their first year.

Schlerotic Teapublican faith-based economics

The shrill Cassandra does it again:

So how did we end up in this state? How did America become a nation that could not rise to the biggest economic challenge in three generations, a nation in which scorched-earth politics and politicized economics created policy paralysis? 

We suggest it was the inequality that did it. Soaring inequality is at the root of our polarized politics, which made us unable to act together in the face of crisis. And because rising incomes at the top have also brought rising power to the wealthiest, our nation’s intellectual life has been warped, with too many economists co-opted into defending economic doctrines that were convenient for the wealthy despite being indefensible on logical and empirical grounds.

This time with co-authors...

I find it weird and flattering that, with relatively little formal training in economics and that colored by what was once called the neo-classical synthesis, I arrived at pretty much all of Paul Krugman's conclusions. Maybe I chose the wrong field.

My bemused vanity aside, it's pretty clear that conservative economists either chose the wrong field or only chose their field in order to monetize their credentials in the service of a pack of lies.

Uncivil wars

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War on political candidates

Rick Santorum Aborts Presidential Campaign from Ashley Judd

Why I don't call myself a progressive

Because I'm a liberal and proud, goddammit!

Blood money

Wingnuts begetting wingnuts

Abstinence doesn't work. Even the fundies have the fire down below. They can't keep it in their pants - too much desire to get into her pants. Or his.

Almost all of the states with the most teen pregnancy are Bible Belt states. The I'm-on-top ten:

1. Mississippi
2. New Mexico
3. Arkansas
4. Texas
5. Oklahoma
6. Louisiana
7. Kentucky
8. West Virginia
9. Alabama
10. Tennessee

Almost everything Teapublicans tell you is a lie. This one is convenient to sustain the inversion of interests by which so many working class people vote as if they made $250,000 a year.

People who defer parenthood have a chance to get educated, to mature before they have to provide for an infant. This gives them a chance to escape the hidebound system of economic and religious oppression that keeps them reliably voting for plutocrats, when those plutocrats in fact despise them.

Republicans view women

Click image for full David Horsey/LA Times cartoon.

Fox and friends

I've long said that the purpose of right-wing media is to provide cover for indefensible beliefs, rather than to provide information from which to build defensible beliefs. Many studies have borne this out, and Chris Mooney recaps them in Salon:

Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

Different from you and me

Seen on Facebook...

Amen to using corporate tools for good.

Still wandering in the wilderness

I wish he knew that since his death we have searched for the soul of this nation. We have begun to ask questions that have never been asked. We have challenged each other in ways that we have yet to do. We yearn for a post-racial America. Aspirational. Not a reality. We know that. We still have much work to do. Soul-searching.

I'm a few days late, but still, go and read this memorial.

Equal justice under lawlessness

Click image for full Gustavo Rodriguez/El Nuevo Herald cartoon.

When Teapublicans say this is a republic, not a democracy

This is what they mean:

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

Yeah, for them, it's short for they get all the power.

One hour Martinizing

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My racist trolls are sooo not going to find this funny. They are too stunted to have reached the stage of having a sense of humor. Humor for them amounts to outrage posing as irony. See Chuck Asay.

Also, notice how the Fox blatherers are wrongly certain what the world has been like without even bothering to check.

Bodyguard of liars

The conservative establishment and its wingnut foot soldiers have taken Barry Goldwater several steps further: Extremism in defense of ultraconservatism is no vice.

For several years, young conservatives have made a cottage industry of going undercover and trying to goad people working at perceived liberal institutions — like Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood — into saying something stupid. Trained by well-financed foundations, these dirty tricksters pose as pimps, sex traffickers and Muslim activists and record conversations surreptitiously. Then they release videos that have often been heavily edited.

Conservative Congressional representatives call for investigations and try to slash financing. In the case of Acorn, some workers did, in fact, give truly stupid advice to the fake prostitutes. That organization went belly up.

These reich-wing provocateurs will lie, cheat, and pretext without conscience or compunction. Politics has figuratively been blood sport for them for generations, but that figurativeness has drastically lessened. They aren't quite yet out to kill us, but they are aiming to destroy all liberal institutions, no matter the cost. They don't want to contest politics as a struggle of ideas. They want a monopoly - like all free marketeers in the dark depths of their avarice.

New mascot

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

More below the fold >

Life imitates legislation

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

Fixing the game

Republicans don't believe in democratic governance. They believe in ruling us:

In the 30 years since coming to power here, Republicans have used their initial ascent to power to seal themselves into office as tightly as the pharaohs. Smart commentators have noted how lawless the conservatives are in making substantive decisions, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how they use their tenure to make it increasingly impossible to oust them.

Read it all. Depressing as it is, it's better to know and act from reality, rather than some fantasy that they too value self-government.

Depletion allowance

Click image for full Elena Steier/sickworldjournal.com cartoon.

If, out of all the people, guilty of financial crimes, mostly Republicans, a Democrat has to go to jail first, I'm fine with Jon Corzine doing time.

Sweet erasable you

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

Hawaiian like me

Watch the Secret Service detail in the last 10 seconds. The President's joking? There's good humor? They don't care. They're single-focused on watching for a threat. Which will only get worse when Obama is re-elected over Rmoney or Sanctorum.

(h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)

Even Teapublicans can tell that Mitt Romney is a liar

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

Tomorrow Mitt Rmoney will claim that Eric Fehrnstrom is a junior staffer. It's the only way Mitt can stay true to his pattern of dishonesty at all possible moments.

Remember when transvaginal was a good thing?

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

Ignorance is bliss

This cartoon, which attempts irony, explains a lot about the Teapublican view of ignorance as no big deal. How ironic.

Click image for full Rob Smith Jr./Glenn Beck cartoon.

Return of Bircherism

The Tennessee General Assembly passes a delusionally paranoid, anti-UN resolution against Agenda 21. The fact that it's anti-environmental? Bonus!

WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealth

This sounds like the John Birch Society bullshit (h/t @Trace Sharp) I heard growing up in Tennessee 40 years ago, and sure enough it is. Don't any of them wonder how we're still free if fluoridation was a communist conspiracy to drug us all into sheep-like obedience?

Rick Perlstein (h/t Paul Krugman) notes that the crazy conservatives have been with us a long time - longer than we've called them wingnuts.

[A]longside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).

Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.

What we had until Ronald Reagan and talk radio brought them out of the darkness was a social norm that scoffed at the fever swamp of ultra-conservative imagination. Well, nationally, not in the South. We no longer have that moderating national norm, which is really depressing, and the continuing reason wingnuts are so sensitive to any norm that limits their various and sundry bigotries.

Still, it's hopeful to look back with a gimlet eye and see that we liberals have overcome the wingnuts before. Now, to do it again.

Update: Lest I get too optimistic, more lunacy on Agenda 21.

Bracketopathy

Click image for full Bob Gorrell/Creators Syndicate cartoon.

Republicans prefer opponents who don't fight back

Too bad about that.

Goddamn America

Republicans in Congress didn't say, "Goddamn America." They acted on it.

The Republican Party prefers to damage America if it can damage a Democratic President at the same time. This was so for Bill Clinton and is even moreso for Barack Obama.

Goldman sacks

Rape and pillage is the order of business at Goldman Sachs, says a now former insider. But we all knew that already. This company, to which both parties cravenly outsource the Department of the Treasury, was thoroughly exposed as double-dealing and untrustworthy in the aftermath of the Bushist financial crisis. The SEC:

Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement [at the SEC, said,] "Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party."

That privatization of a Cabinet post, until proven otherwise, is why no one - no one! - went to jail over this allegedly legal billion-dollar fraud, for which Goldman Sachs's contracted vig was a paltry $15 million.

Investors in the liabilities of ABACUS are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion.

The SEC's complaint charges Goldman Sachs and Tourre with violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5. The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.

If you're going to lead a life of crime, white collar crime is the way to go, and the rigged game of Wall St. has the highest reward-to-risk ratio. Hell, if your fraudulent investments go sour in a big enough way, the Secretary of the Treasury will insist the middle class bail you out - without clawing back your immense and undeserved bonuses.

The SEC didn't even seek prison, only civil penalties. The Wall St. billionaires have written the securities laws so that their fraud is often only moral, not legal.

Now to Greg Smith's conscience. Where was he when it mattered? Raking in the dough that he's probably planning to retire on...

If you read his claim of conscience, the first thing you'll notice is what a piece of self-serving bullshit it is, even if its headline is true. I don't know about you, but I was not in need of reading a puffed up resume of all Smith's selections and glory and value. He was almost chosen to be a Rhodes Scholar. Whoop-de-doo.

It sounds to me as though the fundamental problem of Wall St. is overweening self-regard that leads to smash and grab ethics and short-termism. Masters of the universe, bitches! That's how they view the world.

Smith is a terrible writer who won't put himself at risk to do more than generalize. He'd have to violate confidentiality to illustrate his piece with names, dates, and deals, and that would put his retirement at age 33 or so at risk. No way!

He's not so much whistle-blowing as horn-tooting.

Update: Satire!

Metaphorical wanking only in the anti-sex GOP

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

Socialists agree Obama not one of them

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Telling fortunes

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Where've you been the past three years?

A lot of people hate politics, but politics is how we get decisions made without guns. The President is never above politics. The President is always a politician and should embrace the role. Here, Barack Obama does. I'm glad he's back. I've missed him.

Who is Mitt Romney for?

Repeal the Enlightenment

Andy Borowitz reports on Rick Santorum:

At the first stop of his ambitious journey, Mr. Santorum restated his reason for seeking the White House: “I am running for President today because the position of Spanish Inquisitor is no longer available.”

There is no Vatican number higher than I. Latin Mass, yea!

Four words, cartoon edition

Click image for full MStreeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

Four words, medical edition

What medical procedure most represents your promise to the American people as a governing principle?

• Rick Santorum - clitoridectomy
• Ron Paul - self-service colonoscopy
• Mitt Romney - plastic surgery
• Newt Gingrich - penis aggrandizement

What, you can't take a joke?

What Romney learned at Bain

To pander to his audience without meaning any of it.

He's of course applying that to politics, and even the Teapublicans can tell, despite having turned their bullshit detectors so low they can't see the arrant bullshit of the other candidates. Krugman on Rmoney:

Should those who don’t share the right’s faith be comforted by the evidence that Mr. Romney doesn’t believe anything he’s saying? Should we, in particular, assume that, once elected, he would actually follow sensible economic policies? Alas, no.

For the cynicism and lack of moral courage that have been so evident in the campaign wouldn’t suddenly vanish once Mr. Romney entered the Oval Office. If he doesn’t dare disagree with economic nonsense now, why imagine that he would become willing to challenge that nonsense later? And bear in mind that if elected, he would be watched like a hawk for signs of apostasy by the very people he’s trying so desperately to appease right now.

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.

The difference between Bain's takeovers and a political campaign is that takeovers end quickly. The affected workers and executives learn by the end that you lied to them, but you don't have to convince them of anything further, since you already own their asses. Not so the Teapublican nomination.

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.