How America dies

Anti-democratic Republicans, this time in Michigan, vote it out of existence:

In a party line vote, and despite impassioned speeches of protest by the body’s Democratic minority, the Michigan Senate approved legislation that threatens to take over and even dissolve local governments that refuse to balance their budgets by breaking labor contracts.

According to the law, which has already been approved in the House, the governor will be able to declare “financial emergency” in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services.

Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.

An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education.

Gov. Rick Snyder (R-lust for all the power) will sign this.  It's his bill.

If a Democrat ever did anything as radical as this, wingnuts everywhere would be talking about their Second Amendment remedies.

Trying to provoke violence?

Not content to have passed the union-busting legislation he rammed through, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-my way or the highway) has turned to party-busting.  He now arrogates to deny Democratic Senators their lawful votes in committee.  Republicans all over America look for ways to rule by fiat and to deny the vote to those they dislike.  The authoritarian Fitzgerald has combined the two.  Next he'll form an exploratory committee to run for President.

You might think that this won't change the outcome of any votes.  The committees all have Republican majorities.  But this tinpot ruling means that Fitzgerald only needs the votes of half his caucus to move legislation out of committee.  That means the most extreme 30% of Wisconsin citizens effectively run the State Senate.  The teabaggers, in other words.

This means that any moderate Republicans who might make overtures to the center have no one to make overtures to.  In the long run, this may help the recall efforts, the righteous campaign to turn these anti-democratic thugs back out into the streets.

Fitzgerald isn't even pretending that republican government matters.  You citizens who elected these Democrats, your votes are meaningless.

What is to be done?

Don't get mad.  Get even.

• Continue the recall, and get these thugs out of office.
• Occupy the capitol building.  Peacefully.  But expect mass arrests and manufactured or provoked riots.  Gov. Walker was contemplating it.  He'll do it.  These men have no conscience.  They only understand power.
• File an emergency lawsuit in U.S. District Court.  If this isn't an equal protection violation, the words equal and protection are meaningless in Republican bizarro-world.
• Call President Obama. The U.S. Constitution, supreme law of the land and superior to any pipsqueak tinpot Republican legislative capo di tutti capi, states in Article IV, section 4:

  The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.

  Time to get to guaranteeing, Mr. President.
  

(h/t Jed Lewison at DailyKos)

Riding that train

All aboard!

Click image for full Jack Ohman/Oregonian cartoon.

Nostalgic for a past that never existed

Conservatives used to wax nostalgic for the1950s, a quiet, industrious society in which women knew their place and black people were invisible or didn't last long if they didn't say their best Jim Crow yassuh.  But at least those reactionary conservatives could remember what they wanted to return to.

At least, that fantasy golden age was real.  Not that golden in many ways, but it did exist, and the conservatives of the time following could remember it.

Today's teabaggers pine for a time and a country that never existed.  Michele Bachmann's dislocation of the birthplace of the American Revolution is the least of it.  She just shows herself to be ignorant, and isn't that part of her attraction for the teabag reactionaries?  For her idiocrat ilk to own the Revolution, she needs to move it from undeserving blue Massachusetts to (formerly) red New Hampshire. Voilà.

This wasn't just a slip of the Bachmann's shrill and blistering tongue.  She said it more than once.  It was part of her prepared remarks even if it never reached her teleprompter or her paper text. 

Wingnut commenters everywhere defend Bachmann by claiming equivalence with Barack Obama's 57 state slip.  Since they obviously reason poorly, it's not surprising that they would falsely equate a slip of the tongue with persistent ignorance.  They themselves are too ignorant to tell the difference.

Teapublicans pine for a world of their own devising.  They create memories out of their dreams and claim for them truth.

• The Founders were conservatives.
• America is a Christian nation.
• The Constitution frames a federal government only slightly stronger than the Articles of Confederation did.  (What's the Articles of Confederation, 'twingers ask...)
• The Founders worked to abolish slavery (another Bachmann special).
• Most slaves lived happily in bondage.
• The Civil War was a war of northern aggression.
• The Robber Barons were nice men who employed millions and should have been praised, not prosecuted.
• The League of Nations was a terrible idea.  Actually, they've never even heard of the League of Nations.
• The Great Depression was caused by lazy, no-account spongers.  No wait, that's the Great Recession.
• Anyway, nothing FDR did (other than getting us into WWII) helped the economy.
• Vietnam was a righteous war.
• The 1960s were a horrible time in which everything worsened.
• Richard Nixon was framed.
• Ronald Reagan never raised taxes.
• Star Wars can work.
• Who needs the State Department?  We've got DoD.
• Social Security is demographically doomed (even though one of Reagan's tax increases solved the problem in advance!).
• The Iraq war was righteous.  Is righteous.  After all, they attacked us on 9/11 and they had WMD.
• It's o.k. to turn any Islamic country into a glass parking lot if they say something we don't like.  Collateral damage to the innocent?  Deal with it bitches.  The U.S. is exceptional.
• Torture is good when we do it, an act of war when they do it.
• Due process is for babies, and we don't need no stinking habeas corpus.
• Obamacare is free (and socialist).
• Despite consistent and incredible successes, environmental law is destroying the economy.
• Science is a conspiracy to turn the world oppressive and socialist.
• White people, especially men, are massively discriminated against in our society.
• Sharia is coming.
• No other country has anything to teach us, now or ever.
• The free market can exist and it can solve every problem of resource allocation perfectly.
• Rich people deserve ... everything.

The Teahadists long for a world in which they can believe all these absurdities (and more) without elitist liberals pointing out their errors.  Never mind that they've worked over the media so that their most ridiculous claims get treated equally to actual facts.  They are looking for a world in which we have to hear their bullshit but in which our counters to it infringe their free speech rights.

They're ahistorical morons.  And they're winning.

Flipping the bird

Click image for full MStreeter/Savannah Morning News cartoon.

None dare call it fascism

Except maybe me...



(h/t Balloon Juice)

Shared sacrifice

(h/t DailyKos)

One white, one black, one non-blonde

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

So many funny lines...

Daddy's money too

Can anyone give me a reason why Abigail Johnson, gifted with every possible opportunity and leg up, should not pay an inheritance tax when she eventually inherits her father's multi-billion dollar fortune?  She's already richer than he is, $11.3 billion to $7.1 billion.

Other than middle class conservatives who defend this permanent aristocracy of money, is there anything more ridiculous than the structure of investing, which permits people like the Johnsons to cream off billions, when they can't even consistently beat index funds? 

If you're not an investment professional, don't try to compete with these lawful thieves.  But also don't let them take a cut of your money.  Put it in a no-load index fund and step back.  Or be a pigeon, your choice.

Rehab

Click image for full Jimmy Margulies/Record cartoon.

Another bullshit Republican crisis

We've all heard how desperately underfunded state pension funds are.  It's a scandal!  A trillion dollars those lazy, entitled, gold-plated, union leeches want out of your long-suffering, tax-paying hide!

No, actually, it's another zombie lie of the Republican Party and the Blue Dawgs (PDF), eagerly abetted by the elite media:

Most of the [$1 trillion] pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today. This is by far the major cause of pension funding shortfalls. While there are certainly cases of pensions that had been underfunded even before the market plunge, prior years of under-funding is not the main reason that pensions face difficulties now. Another $80 billion of the shortfall is the result of the fact that states have cutback their contributions as a result of the downturn.

Leaving $70 billion to make up nationwide, in addition to the $80 billion in deferred contributions.

Why would conservatives get their undies in a twist about this?  It's what they do.  More to the point, though, they're opposed to all domestic expenditures with the possible exception of law enforcement.  They don't care if their public rationale to cut spending on people is a lie, only that it works.

But the most important reason is probably the plutocratic one:

[I]f pension funds stop investing in equities, as some have advocated, this would imply higher taxes and/or lower benefits for public employees. It would also mean that other investors could expect to see higher future returns on their stock holdings.

Without the pension funds chasing high rates of return in equities markets, Republican fat cats' capital will be scarcer, thus more valuable and due higher returns.  There is no better outcome for GOP politicos than to sucker a Democratic constituency at the same time it succors a Republican constituency.

(h/t the estimable Paul Krugman)

(Massachusetts, truth be told, is not very good on pension funding.  Our unfunded liability is larger than it should be.  Not a crisis, as GOP Chicken Littles would have you believe, but a debt that should be handled responsibly.)

Bracketopathy

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Only my tribe is deserving

Digby nails the teabaggers:

I'm wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm ... racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It's not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don't like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don't like.

Emphasis in the original.

Zuckerberg lives

I just watched "The Social Network".  (Why didn't they call it "Social Network"?  Cleaner.)

Mark Zuckerberg is still alive, despite being (portrayed as) a conscienceless user asshole.  No, I didn't believe the young associate putting a sweet Hollywood bow on him at the end.  Although it did look as though she might be trying to cheer up the poor little rich boy with a little white lie...

The apparent fact the Zuckerberg is such a creep and is still alive is actually good news.  Not for the business world, which is full of similar successful self-centered sociopaths, but for the political world.

Movies come out every year in which the entire government is run by venal conspiracies that would just as soon kill you as frame you for a crime you didn't commit.  "Enemy of the State" had both.  The Bourne abstraction movies have a shadow government immune from democratic control.  I'm sure I'll enjoy the matrix-y paranoia of "The Adjustment Bureau".

For me, the question has lately been, with trillions of dollars at stake and with humans' obvious willingness to kill over paltry amounts, is our government subject to even worse than the obvious perennial purchase by moneyed interests.  Goldman Sachs has run our economic policy, irrespective of the party in power, for decades.  They got to the top the old-fashioned way; they stole, uh, sorry, creamed off huge proceeds and bought power by contributing to both parties.

Yet if push came to shove and a less wishy-washy reformer than Barack Obama won the Presidency against all the elite cultural factors stacked against him (or her - but not Hillary, she's too DLC), how far would the interests of wealth go to retain their control?  Yeah, this sounds paranoid even to me, its thinker.  But...

Zuckerberg lives.  Maybe popular democracy remains possible, despite the current overwhelming dominance of the wealthy elite.

And I did really enjoy seeing Larry Summers portrayed as an arrogant, short-sighted, ignoramus asshole.  Too bad the filmmakers couldn't prevail upon him to play himself.

Harvard is everywhere in this movie, and it doesn't come off well.  But now Harvard has Drew Faust, and the federal government has Elizabeth Warren.  Maybe the problem all along has been Harvard men, and what we really need is Harvard women to save us.

(Shhh.  Don't tell the wealthy.  Let them get comfortable with Faust's and Warren's admission to the club.  Then bust up the club good and proper.)

Revolting

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

We should be.

Back in the day

Sir Michael Tyson!

Suffering must end

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Your life should suck

Click image for full Jen Sorensen/C-VILLE Weekly cartoon.

A good paragraph

Some writing deserves to be blogged just because of what it does:

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

Vain to ask, What if?  But also compelling, as with the Kennedys and King and Joplin and Hendrix and Challenger and Columbia and Grissom and the girl I loved but never spoke of it to.  And...

Bondage and DOMAnation

DOMA is bad law.  It was bad law when Bill Clinton pandered to the Dick Morris crowd and signed it.  If marriage needs defense from gays and lesbians, it's only because it's been damaged by a long series of trailer trash.  Cheating and divorce does make a hell of a country song, however, proving again that it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

Eric Cantor (R-coiffed to look reasonable without actually being reasonable) is "taken aback" at President Barack Obama's order to the Justice Department to stop arguing for DOMA in court.  Gee willickers!

On the other hand, there is something odd about the government of laws deciding to leave a duly, if venally, passed law to fend for itself.  It's not as though it can hire its own lawyer.  After all, the President and his Cabinet swore (Art. II, sec. 1):

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I'm sure wingnuts everywhere are spitting at their screens to demand Obama's impeachment.  (Uh-huh.)  Even Newt Gingrich, in his continuing campaign to get out in front of the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing mob of teabaggers...

Two thoughts to consider:

• Clearly, the Constitution comes before a law.
• It's much more honest to step away from backing a law.  That allows those who do believe in it to defend it and those who don't to avoid the temptation to mount a vacuous fake defense.

No doubt that last would be the Republican Teapublican approach in similar circumstances.

Update (3/6):  Turns out Republican Justice Departments have abandoned appellate defense of federal laws, so I've fixed my claim that they would instead mount a fake defense.