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Monday Message Board
3 days ago
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Making the O face
As in O'Donnell - but in opposition:
Harley Farger, a leading Delaware masturbator and planner of the Million Masturbators March, said it was difficult to organize masturbators “because they’re used to acting alone.”(h/t DailyKos to Digby to DownWithTyranny)
Fiscal priorities
Deficit! Deficit! Deficit!
(whisper, whisper)
We can't raise taxes on the wealthy!
When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”The insincere so-called deficit hawks won't actually speak the pseudo-quote at the end of the block quote, but their actions speak very loudly. They are not willing to raise taxes, even on the wealthy, the very same people who have gained every significant advantage written into tax law over the past thirty years, the very same people who gained virtually all of the financial bailouts, the very same people whose incomes have skyrocketed while everyone else's have stagnated.
Conservative Democrats are not on your side any more than the whole lot of Republicans are.
Thumb on the scale
CNN and Money tout a consensus of economists in favor of leaving the rich their huge tax cuts so that the middle class can continue with its usual crumbs. That settles it, right? They aren't teabaggers. We have to listen to the experts...
But.
Like big media everywhere, Money has stacked its lineup of thirty-one economists. Bank-owned economists are well represented. Investment and insurance have their guys in the list. Even real estate and retail are there. These people work for institutions who utterly and completely failed to foresee the current crisis.
These are also people whose paychecks depend on how well they serve the interests of wealth. It's not surprising to find that they find brave new ways to rationalize even more trickle down economics.
Has trickle-down abjectly failed for the past thirty years? No problem, they can find more rationalizations that sound good. It's only coincidental that they're defending policies that help their clients. They're really doing it for small businesses that are too marginal to have bothered to incorporate. I shit you not:
The 'why' behind extending tax benefits - The reason for this idea is to shield small business from tax hikes. Many small businesses are not incorporated so their owners pay the personal tax rate. This means that if the personal tax rate goes up, the tax on business goes up and that will restrict activity. Congress has known about this for some time and has done nothing to solve the problem. It’s back! A tax hike on high wage earners is one thing; a tax on business is something else. That is what is really at stake and Mr Summers wants to hide that and prefers to sell policy on the basis of ideas rooted in class warfare which can never be good but do get the blood flowing.This Ph.D. moron, Robert Brusca, is calling Larry Summers a class warrior! And he's serious about it - or pretends to be. So much for the intellectual honesty he finds lacking in Summers. (I do too, but for completely different reasons. Can we please get Summers out of any institution that matters to the common weal!)
Money salts the list with a few academics, four by my count. But even three of them are business economists. Three of the four teach at small California colleges that I had never heard of before - Cal. State Channel Islands?
Any Nobelists? Anyone paid by a labor union? Any balance whatsoever? I know the business press doesn't have any balance in its Rolodex. Isn't it time to do a little research?
Evidently not. Better to let CNN run with the bullshit that makes all its owners and upper management happy...
Still, the totally scary news is that these business economists predict a jobless recovery through the end of 2011, despite raging unemployment between 8 and 10 percent. To prove their complete bias, most of them oppose any further help for the unemployed.
In summary, CNN/Money, through their bias says, Hurting? Fuck you. Rich. Free money!
Assholes.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wingnuts correct the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion
The Founders cared so much about the free exercise of religion that they put it first in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.The wingnut's imagined text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any particular Christian denomination, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.Oh sure, they'll let the Jews practice their religion freely too. They haven't killed Christ in like 2000 years, and besides, the fundies need them to help the End Times arrive.
But Muslims? No way. Cal Thomas tells his wingnut audience at Townhall:
We won't win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques.Then he says that we need to be more like Syria, that well-known beacon of religious liberty. I kid you not!
[T]he Syrian government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and has begun closely monitoring what is taught in religious schools. ...Could we please start that purge with Cal? (Kidding of course.)
What does Syria know that we refuse to acknowledge out of fear of offending "sensibilities"?
We must purge the evil from among us, or else.
(h/t Mediamatters)
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Cream DeMint
CNN abuses anonymous sourcing to cream a Republican for a change.
One unnamed senior GOP aide told CNN's Dana Bash: "I wonder who Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer are calling first tonight - Chris Coons for becoming the next Senator from Delaware or Jim DeMint for helping to make it happen.This anonymous Republican aide is making a valid point, but it's still bad journalism for CNN to permit this aide to remain nameless, even if Dana Bash did launder her failure to name names through Peter Hamby.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Impotent op-ed
"Republicans must end partisanship"
Past nuclear arms control treaties have won broad bipartisan support, and it should be no different for this treaty.Where has John Rhinelander been for the past twenty years? Republicans don't do bipartisan. They fight using every means they can lay their hands on until Democrats concede or fail.
In the past, as bad as it often was, the Republican Party wasn't led around by the nose by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, with Jim DeMint trying desperately ("pick me, pick me!") to get out in front of the frothing wingnuts.
Now it's Republicans, making the world worse one obstruction at a time!
Might as well ask a two-year-old to please stop throwing tantrums. The difference of course is that a two-year-old will eventually become three, while Republicans will only get more extreme, as they have through all of the last fifty years.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Why liberals think conservatives harbor racists
'Cause they do:
[T]here's no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama's parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don't want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black. It has been two years since a black man was elected president of the United States, and for a group of conservatives clinging to their cultural superiority, this was a moment of apocalyptic existential crisis, a moment that refuted all they had come to know and understand about themselves, about black people, and about this country. [Dinesh] D'Souza is writing for them, the same kind of audience he has always written for.Conservatives deeply resent being called racists over claims such as D'Souza's, thrust forward by Newt Gingrich. Their logic appears to be:
- D'Souza has pigmented skin and therefore cannot be racist - or even say something racist.
- A conservative white guy can - and eagerly will - repeat anything a black (or brown or any other non-pale shade) person can say. (Digression: which is why it's no longer racist in wingnuttia for 50-year-old white guys with Confederate flags to say n***** as long as it's in rhyme.)
- Liberals are the true racists for not agreeing to this so-called logic.
- Pbbbt!!!
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Fox asks - innocently
Is the President avoiding CHURCH for political reasons?Fox just teased that bullshit during the NFL game between Philadelphia and Green Bay. They know how to get their message through to the credulous idiots who are the centroid of American politics.
Fox is a propaganda outlet and deserves exactly zero credibility.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Nine years
Too long. Not long enough.
I remember.
Update (9/13): Go and read Tom Levenson. You'll be glad you did.
Disappointing vs. batshit insane
Krugman is somewhat more polite than my headline:
It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.
Fix the facts
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Is there anyone more dishonest than Sean Hannity?
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