Owing our soul to the Bain Company store

Mitt Rmoney is exactly wrong for a democratic America, and nominating him was an act of supreme hubris. Why won't Democrats make the Republicans pay?  Robert Reich explains:

Romney is the only casino capitalist who is running for president, at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

[W]hy don’t Democrats connect these dots? ... Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism. 

I've been working this theme for a while:

Democrats gave up their [class] unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthyideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Go and listen to Reich, as well.

No spiking the ball

When you win, drive home your points, then celebrate in private. Check.

Forward!

Speaking the truth to oligarchy

How can one man speak for 25 minutes and not be wrong about anything, while dozens of so-called leaders can't get a sentence out of their mouths without bullshitting?

Why Republicans want to end academe

They don't control it:

The U.S. Supreme Court should uphold a law requiring most Americans to have health insurance if the justices follow legal precedent, according to 19 of 21 constitutional law professors who ventured an opinion on the most-anticipated ruling in years.

For now, anyway...

More bleeding by leeches

Joseph Stiglitz shows how the Wall Street masters of their domain - who esteem themselves as supremely rational - set up the entire economy to fail:

The country faces enormous inequality, the largest among advanced countries. Since those at the top consume a much smaller fraction of their income than the rest, when money moves from the bottom to the top — as has been happening in the U.S. for the past three decades — total demand is weakened. The weaknesses in the economy today arise from lack of demand; firms won’t invest if there is no demand for their products.

It’s not only inequality in income and wealth that is making us frail, but inequality of opportunity. We think of our country as a land of opportunity. In fact, the life prospects of a young American are more dependent on the education and income of his parents than in any of the advanced countries for which there is data. The American Dream has become a myth. 

The one thing ever Mitt Romney won't flip-flop on

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

The fairy tale Senator

 I'm sure the Herald will be all over this one, especially Howie Carr. Right?

Virulent ignorance

Why is it that the angriest anti-immigrant blatherers can't bother themselves to learn the most basic facts about immigration, illegal or legal?

Dobbs repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants should just come out of the shadows and apply for citizenship. He failed to understand that the point of the current debate is that they can't.

(h/t Atrios)

Sean Hannity, lying douchebag

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There is simply no explanation for this other than the one I've been asserting for years: Fox is a propaganda outlet with no interest in the truth.

Decadence of falling empire

The Teapublican public, acting through its minions in Congress, would rather risk killing pilots than to tax us and their wealthy sponsors to put out fires:

Modern airplanes are available, some able to skim up a bellyful of water from a lake without even stopping to land and thus to conduct dozens of drops a day, but these are too expensive for the private contractors who fly the forest missions.

Instead, we're using 60-year-old planes and blaming pilots for their own deaths.

GOP priority couldn't be more obvious

It sure as hell isn't the deficit:

The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.

If the Teapublicans came right out and admitted that they want whatever benefits the wealthy and the huge corporations they own, would that be enough to dope slap the teabagger base off its stupid self-abuse?

Of course not.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Inanimatronic economics

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Rude and a liar

Heckle the President at a White House press briefing? Only a Democrat. If a reporter did this to a Republican, the entire Mighty Wurlitzer of blithering right-wing special pleading would not merely note the rudeness but accuse the reporter of treason or worse.

Here's the interruption:

Mr. Obama had only been speaking for about five minutes when Mr. Munro first shouted. He continued speaking for another five minutes afterward. ...

Mr. Munro did not specify what he shouted, but other reporters who were present said the initial question was, “Mr. President, why do you favor foreign workers over Americans?”

Here's Munro's lying alibi:

I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States.

For conservatives, rules to live by apply only to Democrats.

Chinese water torture

If the U.S. government waterboards suspected terrorists - or someone unlucky enough to have alienated the wrong people in Pakistan's ISS - the New York Times won't call it torture. There are memos defending it!

If the Chinese government waterboards suspected grafters, suddenly the Times finds the word torture in its vocabulary - and not just the lawyered up extreme definition that the Bushists put forward in John Yoo's bullshit memos. (Those memos alone are war crimes.)

When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.

Why they hate unions

Click image for full David Horsey/LA Times cartoon.

Rare good news

... that's not really so great.  Gabrielle Giffords's aide Ron Barber won a special election to serve out her term.  This doesn't change the balance of power in the House one whit, so it's merely emotional solace after the defeat in Wisconsin.

Emotional solace matters, though. I have a strong feeling of doom about 2012, and I know that foolish adoption of the Teapublican agenda would be disastrous for America. A win, even a small, brief one such as this one by a Blue Dog, replacing another Blue Dog, is still a win, especially in a place as wild and woolly as Arizona.

So what's next?

West Virginia apologizes to the Confederacy

If they'd prefer a white felon to wunna them freed darkies - and 41% of West Virginia's Democrats did - they'd also have their druthers in favor of the treason that their forebears resisted. We can also put the lie to the wingnut alibi that President Obama's voters are racist:

Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.

Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

Even this is based on the most extreme racists, the ones who type n----- into Google. The others don't even appear on the list. They just vote and rant and teabag with additional hysteria - which we don't need - because Obama's black, not white.

Woolly mammoths in Escalades

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Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do:

Even presidential pets were viewed through the same lens. Tesler showed 1,000 YouGov respondents a picture of a Portuguese water dog and asked how favorably they felt toward it. Half saw the dog introduced as Bo Obama, and half as Ted Kennedy’s dog, Splash. (Both political dogs are the same breed, but the picture was of Obama’s.) Those with negative feelings toward blacks thought less of Obama’s dog.

The bigots can't even keep their racial animus from infecting their view of a pet.

GOP wants you ignorant

... and they're succeeding:

[T]he House Appropriations financial services subcommittee voted along party lines to prohibit the FCC from implementing their proposal to add another layer of transparency to the political ad process. Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) argued that fiscal matters are private and should remain that way.

Fie on peasant resentments

Click image for full Matt Wuerker/Politico cartoon.

Attack of the killer transformers

Steve M. sez:

[M]ainstream coverage of campaigns is hopeless: the reporters seem incapable of maintaining critical distance, so they inevitably regurgitate spin -- and that just gives the spin a patina of objectivity.

For our political press, campaigns are good for one thing only:  Road trip!

If there's a movie on the press bus, so much the better:

Veterans of past presidential campaigns know very well that neither team has yet to fully engage the billion-dollar campaign machines that will clash in spectacular fashion in the fall.

Plus, all the better if the big media stenographer can pretend that financial resources for this campaign will be anything close to equal in the aftermath of Citizens United v. FEC.

Who's the Autobot? Who's the Decepticon? Big media won't help you figure that out. That wouldn't be "objective."

Go for the jugular

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Cassandra had it easy

Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.

We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)

So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!

In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:

[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.

The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.

One thing that has changed in the past three decades: The profusion of fools in media has increased the ability of fools to assert they know things that just ain't so. Their tribe tells them to know nothing, and they do, not quietly, not ashamed of their ignorance, but ardently asserting it. They aren't stupid. But they willfully deny confirmed truth. They choose to bear the tribal markers of that chosen ignorance with pride.

It's not our intelligence that has made us successful, not in the sense of our ability to do science. Science is extremely recent, too recent to have been the evolutionary goal of our intelligence. Not many people can do it - or even understand it.

The big brains that permit us the pre-scientific intelligence to dominate the world, to proliferate across it, to alter the landscape and the atmosphere, evolved because social cooperation was so important to a weak and slow primate - perhaps the least physically imposing large primate. Weapons were (and are) important, but we needed language most of all. No one of us could bring down a mammoth. We needed a tribe. It took a village.

Tribalism has been very successful, and conservatives try to sneak it back in even when we've excluded it:

 In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.

Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.

South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:

I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”

When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.

In the immortal words of Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.

Cassandra had it easy.

Free market fundamentalist

Curt Schilling suckled at the public teat and now blames the state of Rhode Island for his own failure to live up to his obligations:

38 Studios, which was lured to Rhode Island from Massachusetts in 2010 with a $75 million loan guarantee from the EDC, laid off its entire workforce last week, including about 300 employees in Providence and more in Maryland. The state would likely be responsible for some of 38 Studios’ debts should it collapse.

The firm’s financial troubles came to light this month when it defaulted on a $1.1 million payment to the EDC that was due May 1. The company later paid — but only after first delivering a check that it acknowledged soon after would not clear.

I enjoyed his pitching - on the diamond, not when it turned to shilling for products or conservative politicians. Now we can expect many more curt statements in which his ideology and his self-interest trump consistency.

Good for Massachusetts, again. We didn't give into his pressure for a sweetheart deal.

A tight grip on your money

Mitt Rmoney's only objective is to serve his fellow plutocrats. If he had any other goal, he would have learned from his failure to deliver on his promises in Massachusetts.

Update (6/1): One upside for Rmoney about this. At least he's been consistent, which for him is miraculous. Consistently bad, but not flip-flopping on the bullshit, anyway.

The wrong people

Americans favor legalization of pot, but still:

According to the Rasmussen poll, just 36 percent of respondents say they are opposed to such a measure.

Unfortunately, it's exactly the same people who would never smoke it, who need to, so they can relax and let go of their overwhelming fears of brown people, secularism, and pleasure. Although psilocybin would probably be more mind-expanding for them (and they and we need for them to expand their minds)...



Given the workings of fear and the non-working of our political system, don't expect the time to come soon.

What they fear is true

Wingnuts have an emotional commitment to falsehood. Their heroes have implanted it by daily repetition.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, ...

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Wingers are also certain their taxes went up.

Fear is its own perverse logic. If they fear it, it must be true. The bogeyman lives!

But he knows Horace!

Hope "Lord Monckton" finds someone with scientific credentials to treat his Graves' disease.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

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.