Bottomless capacity for evil

Somewhere in the human genome lurks, not just the capacity for violence, but a bottomless capacity for evil depravity. Sociopaths turn up in every generation, as well as seemingly ordinary people who snap with awful brutality.

What should we make of this resume?

• math teacher
• Khmer Rouge soldier
• mass torturer and murderer
• aid worker
• remorseful defendant (apparently)
  

Duch is a man who presided over the torture of countless fellow humans and the murder of 16,000. He is asking forgiveness.

The Khmer Rouge showed quite baldly that "never again" was a vain hope, not really a rational expectation of the end of genocide. But what can we say about the ones who have repented? In some ways, the evidence that they still have consciences is scarier than the lack of any conscience at all among the others.

Blood from a coprolite

The best aspect of the torture of Abu Zubayda is that he is actually an enemy of America. After that, there's not much that's good.

Before torture, he gave up many names in al Qaeda. After he ran out, the Bushists began to hurt him, and all they got was blood from a coprolite.

Once they tortured this jerk, he sent them around the world at a cost of millions chasing bullshit.

Once they tortured him, they lost any valid use of his testimony against others.

The Bushists hurt him because they had him and they could. They broke him - everyone breaks. They got nothing out of him through torture.

Duhbya and Darth are enemies of the Constitution and the rule of law and thus also enemies of America. You don't see me advocating torture for them. But justice? Yes!

What I'm really, REALLY sick of

Windows routinely lets processes run away and hide with the CPU stuffed down their pants. For a while I thought Firefox sucked, but if so Google Chrome sucks, too. The anti-virus package my company's IT people require sucks, too. Anything running a JRE sucks. There's a common thread here, but then Outlook sucks, too. And PowerPoint sucks all the suck out of sucking.

The common thread is the defective process executive of Windows, under which a greedy process can suck up every last cycle that Intel or AMD can give. You don't even need Task Manager to know. The cooling fan ups its duty cycle to 100%, and that means everything up to and including keyboard input turns sclerotic. Rhymes with erotic but makes the blood rush to the other head.

It's not quite as bad as when my college roommate's acoustic fucking coupler used to drop back from 300 baud to 110 and you might as well type with your damn nose, but after 30 years and the assumption of progress, it's close.

We will now return to your regularly scheduled political rants.

Of millstones and McConnells

For Mitch McConnell (R-Squirrel Brains, KY), it's all Duhbya's fault that the Republican Party is unpopular. Mitch himself? Didn't screw up at all.

Never mind that McConnell worked in lockstep with Duhbya for his entire disastrous reign, that he believes in the exact same platform as Duhbya, and that he even forgot his jealously guarded Senatorial prerogatives by dropping even the pretense of Congressional oversight of the Executive. McConnell's not going to take responsibility. He's from the party of everyone else's personal responsibility.

Instead, here's what we'll hear from Tobacco Mitch:

• He's disappointed that Obama's not so "bipartisan" that he agrees with the Republican right. Y'know, like Joe Lieberman. Or David Broder. I applaud anything that disappoints McConnell.
  
• Republicans do, too, have a budget, just not one that requires any liberally biased arithmetic. They can call it a blueprint all they want; you still couldn't build a house from it, not even a house of cards. What it really is is a cocktail napkin dressed up as a ... fancy cocktail napkin.
  
• He's proud to lead the party of no. He'd filibuster anything. Continuing resolution? Isn't it time to try Newt Gingrich's excellent adventure again and shut down another Democratic government?
• The Republicans in Washington are not going to change their ossified minds about anything.
  

John Boehner on the Republican side in the House is even worse. You'd think since the votes he controls are impotent that he'd at least have time to put together a more plausible wingnut budget.

Except that there's no way to get Republican bullshit to add up without repealing the math facts that grade schoolers learn before the fourth grade...

The bankers you have

I've been trying to figure out why Obama hasn't moved more aggressively to assert government's role. What!???, you may say. He's borrowing and spending trillions.

His lack of aggressiveness is that he's handing the money over to the same people who made this diarrhea soup, as if he expects them to change their minds and their hearts about how the markets ought to work and what their cut should be. He should be clawing back money from them instead of making whole their bonuses, their stupid investments, and their shareholders (o.k., not whole exactly).

The credit markets are still blocked because everyone knows that what Atrios calls the big shitpile is still hugely overvalued, and the financial institutions want us to take the hit instead of them.

For some reason, though, Obama and Geithner believe that we need these people to run the system and to unwind all the deals. They think they're going to economic war with the bankers they have, not the bankers they wish they have.

Then there's the fear that wingnuts will scream socialism even louder. So what! Embrace it, tell them it's temporary, and then make it happen. Nationalize failed banks and financial institutions. They don't seriously think they're going to convince the idiots that Newt Gingrich is fomenting anger among, do they?

Who you callin' socialist?

Click panel for full Elena Steier cartoon, "The Queen of Everything".

Duhbyavilles

Finite sadness

All the gossip that fits

David Sirota smacks the abandonment of journalism by journalists:

Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper -- rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere. News, in short, mimicked finance: Just as Wall Street made bets on bets with credit default swaps and then watched investors bolt, print journalism mass-produced gossip about gossip, and now sees its audience flee.

Nobody cares who reports on Britney going commando. Any lucky blogger can handle it. You either have pictures or you don't.

If you can report facts, you actually have something of value that can't be replicated without effort. That used to be the competitive advantage of big media, but they trashed it.

To the wodeshed

One who pretends to comment on forms of humor should avoid this sort of credibility default swap:

The 20th century’s finest humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, doesn’t use [puns]. (Emphasis added)

Not enough

They sentenced juveniles to lockup for money. A more appropriate sentence than 7 short years would be the sum of all the unjust detention orders and sentences they handed down and the forfeiture of every cent, including salary, benefits, and retirement accounts, not to mention the kickbacks.

Incredibly, it took ten years from first reports until this corruption in plain sight was stopped.

Naturally, these judges were conservative hanging judges who ruled by fear and fiat. Their light sentences are another case of double standards for the rich and powerful - and that's the real standard of their view of law.

CNN fails again

CNN has graced us with the publication of bullshit from Brent Bozell as if anything Bozell ever says has the slightest chance of being true. Despite a complete, total, utter lack of even a single shred of evidence, credulous CNN thrusts the obvious propaganda. There's no byline on it because it's a warmed over press release from the Media Research Right-wing Propaganda Center.

So of course there's no response from any skeptic in this blurb, nor any acknowledgement that even an increase in Limbaugh's audience doesn't change the brilliance of making him the corpulent, disastrous face of the Republican Party for the large majority of Americans who can't stand the blowhard.

Grandstanding lunatic

The right answer to Michele Bachmann's delusional questions whether America might abandon the dollar: Are you nuts?

Can we please sell her to the highest bidder? The Treasury could use another $13.50.

'Cause Fred said

Why can Fred Thompson still get on TV? He's a snoozer. He's less popular than Dennis Kucinich, and you don't see him turning up on your screen. Is Kucinich's jaw wired shut or something?

I've got it. Fred is soooo gorgeous. That must be it.

What he says makes no sense either:

"If he takes us down the road of tripling our national debt in ten years and making us vulnerable to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and things of that nature, I want all those policies not to succeed," he said.

Somehow CNN's John Roberts is not prepared to ask Reaganite Fred to compare Obama's plan to what Reagan and Bush did in their 12 years - multiply the national debt by a factor of four and a half! Saint Ronnie tripled it on his own.

Update: In the liquor store, there's Fred again, cover boy of "Cigar Aficionado" magazine. Run, Fred, run! I guess Jeri hasn't had enough of the spotlight.

Cause and defect

President Michael Steele? I realize that you have to be a world-class narcissist to think you should be President, but doesn't a little reality ever creep in. I guess if Sarah Palin is a popular candidate in the Republican rump, anything is possible.

Still, I have no idea how to reconcile this statement:

"I am a cause and effect kind of guy," he said.

with this one:

"[If I run] it'll be because that's where God wants me to be at that time."

The only way god would choose Steele to run for President is if she wanted to obliterate the Republican Party. Hey! Maybe there is a god.

Not an oxymoron

Smart conservatives do exist, for instance Jeffrey in Georgia (March 25th, 2009 11:22 pm ET):

See, this is interesting. Not because Palin said it. Palin's a nonentity, and if she runs in 2012 it will only mean another four years of Democrat leadership. No, it's interesting because Palin articulated the problem with the Republican party. Republicans, take note. We want a good, conservative party, we really do. Many of us who voted for Obama have not abandoned conservative principles. But we will no longer support a party that abandons those principles and hides behind fundamentalism and fear. We will no longer support a party that blames everyone but themselves. Palin thinks the Republicans simply need to better communicate their ideas. I say the Republican ideas have been communicated in the best way possible, and now that we've finally cut through the spin and learned what they are we will no longer support them.

The Republicans can come back when they're conservative again, and I'll vote for them. Until then, no dice.

Now that's wha' I'm talkin' 'bout. I will not vote for the party that fills the big niche in the center right where the Republicans used to be. At least, I won't do it often. But America needs a competitive political environment in which the competition is between plausible ideas, in which the right side is not trying to do better marketing of complete, utter, total bullshit.

Or maybe Jeffrey in Georgia is really a liberal who's trolling. He writes well enough.

Looking for 'unglued'

Sarah Palin has no doubt always blamed others for her shortcomings, but this could be a new low:

"So I'm looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra," she said. "And the McCain campaign, love 'em, you know, they're a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray."

She couldn't find one of the McCainiacs that she was willing to pray with, and it's their fault! No doubt when Todd knocked her up and they eloped she was the virgin Sarah, too.

This is a woman who will use anything to manipulate the stupid wishful people who couldn't possibly believe in her except that they so ardently want to. And the media is just awful because it doesn't spend its every waking moment kissing - frenching! - her ass.

Shoe fits

Many homophobes object to being called homophobes! We'll see whether Antonin Scalia objects publicly or only privately. Racists didn't like being called bigots either. Still don't.

Lots of wingnuts dust off their Greek (oh, my, maybe not!), their English suffixes to say that they are too not afraid. They're big boys. They wear big boy underwear. But they don't want anyone gay thinking about their underwear. As if.

The fear that '-phobe' refers to here is the fear of how society might change with full acceptance of homosexuality. It doesn't mean Barney Frank is saying homophobes live in fear of the neighborhood gay activist kicking their butt.

Of course, based on their stereotypes of swishiness, they probably do fear that a gay man might know enough tae kwon do to make them his beeyotch. That would be sooo humiliating for a mighty 101st Fighting Keyboarder.

Yeah, I can live with that

Hugo Chavez calls Barack Obama "ignorant." Maybe he used the word literally with no intent to disparage Obama's intelligence, maybe not. I'm not listening to the podcast to find out.

Either way, it makes me laugh. Derisively.

Obama needs to read this

No, not my (non-humble) opinions - Paul Krugman's:

[E]arly on in this crisis, it was possible to argue that it was mainly a panic. But at this point, that’s an indefensible position. Banks and other highly leveraged institutions collectively made a huge bet that the normal rules for house prices and sustainable levels of consumer debt no longer applied; they were wrong. Time for a Swedish solution.