Roaches scurry

Political junkie though I am, I had not previously realized that the Senate requires a supermajority vote* - usually dispensed with by unanimous consent - to start debate.

But Republicans are nothing if not endlessly creative in finding ways to say no, in this case, of course, to even talking about making Wall Street safe(r) for America's economy. I have to thank them for exposing to me yet another facet of the brokenness of the Senate.

Part of that brokenness I would also lay at Harry Reid's feet. Finally, finally, he exposed us to the plain fact (which many of us already grasped) that Republicans are a bloc of blockheads. I've called for a long time for the Democrats to make the intransigent two-year-olds on the other side of the aisle pay a deep and visible political price for their tantrums.

Reid made Republicans stand up under the glare of TV cameras and defend the indefensible. They caved. Immediately. And scurried for cover.

The filibuster and its less-known cousins (how many are there?) need to die. The Republicans have worn them out.

Jan. 3, 2011, no matter which Democrat is Majority Leader...


* Actually, I'm still guessing. It's possible that unanimous consent is the only way debate can start, that the hoary old Senate not only lacks its own equivalent of the House's discharge petition, it even lacks a way for the majority's leadership to force a measure to floor. But I can't find out for sure, since all the Senate Floor Procedures I've tried to read from the Committee on Rules and Administration are unavailable.

Natural law

One more thing I meant to say about Lindsey Graham's gaseous effluvia about skipping immigration reform ahead of global warming...

“Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,’’ Graham said.

It seems to be a law of nature that Republicans accuse their targets of exactly their own sins. Graham, obviously hurried and panicked, makes a cynical ploy to escape his illicit political relationship with a Democrat, throwing up some sleight of hand in which he vehemently attacks a convenient target - Harry Reid - who is universally despised in Graham's South Carolina.

I'd bet that Frank Luntz (y'know, the nonpartisan pollster) or some other liar-for-pay has actually advised the ignoramus caucus to immunize themselves from accusations by beating their adversaries to the punch - even if the charge barely even makes sense.

Update (4/28): More evidence of Republican projection, at least regarding cynical political ploys:

And because irony apparently can't die too often, I see that Rick Santorum says Democrats's decision to bring up immigration in D.C. is a "cynical attempt to try to further turn Hispanics away from Republicans." And the effort to turn white people in Arizona (and elsewhere) toward Republicans by means of an immigrant-bashing law ... that wouldn't be cynical at all, would it, Rick?

Calling the tune

Krugman identifies another corruption of our vaunted, innovative financial system:

[Debt rating] was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt — which increasingly meant Wall Street firms selling securities they created by slicing and dicing claims on things like subprime mortgages — could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job. It’s all too obvious, in retrospect, how this could have corrupted the process. [Emphasis added.]

Since Enron corrupted Arthur Andersen by applying the leverage of money to built-in conflicts of interest, it has been obvious that it would be impossible for any alleged watchdog paid by the watchees for its watching to resist payment from the same parties not to watch. Free market competition guarantees it.

Krugman's hardly ever slow on the uptake. Maybe he just didn't have any public statements to point out, proving that he had noticed long ago.

(h/t Atrios)

If he filibusters, make him pay

I've long advocated Atrios's program: Force feed the Republicans their own bullshit by making them filibuster in the Senate well on C-SPAN, with press releases from the Leader's office that pick out juicy and wingnutty quotes for the easy consumption of our perennially lazy big media organizations. Cut Youtube clips together for stinging ridicule? Duh.

Then, on Jan. 3, 2011, kill the filibuster.

This climate did change

Lindsay Graham (R-what passes for semi-reasonable, especially in the lunatic politics of South Carolina) didn't bolt from his work with John Kerry on carbon emissions and climate change because of some poisonous and high-handed change in the Senate calendar by Harry Reid. (Note to journalists: The fact that Graham claimed that is, ahem, a lie, though you're all far too whipped to say that.)

Graham found the excuse he needed to go full metal wingnut to appease the ignoramus caucus, now the dominant Republican faction. He had previously pushed to speed up on immigration reform. What he really wants is to regain the good graces of his teabagger constituents. Absent Reid's own electoral need to respond to his neighboring state's new law on driving while Mexican, Graham would have found something else - "Your necktie, Mr. Majority Leader, is an obamanation, uh, abomination up with which I shall not put!"

None of this flanking right will work for Graham. Not only did he once say something agreeable to a Democrat - and you know the Democrat Party is bent on the satanic destruction of the Holy United States of Neo-Confederate America - Graham also isn't married to an acceptably deferential Southern Baptist woman with whom to play hide the salami. Instead, he's a bachelor, so there are three choices, none of them acceptable to the ig-caucus:

• He ain't gittin' none.
• He's a goddamned fornic-, fernicat-, furni-, aw hell, playboy, and that means he ain't p-whipped like me.
• He's one a them other kinds a teabagger, the kind that oughta be stoned - and I don't mean on no pot - stoned according to our lord Jesus Christ the prince of peace's dad, who sure as hell wasn't no damn hippie freak believer in not castin' the first stone at them types a folks.

What changed for Graham was Doug Hoffman, Marco Rubio, and now - incredibly - three even wingier candidates who find Utah's Bob Bennett to be not frothingly extreme enough, at least in part because they would prefer to be living through the Second Great Depression right about now. Hey, they have a year's food stockpiled, right? Graham doesn't want to follow Dede Scozzafava, though she is far more moderate than he is, nor especially Charlie Crist.

Teabaggers and the Republican right - you couldn't pry them apart with a crowbar - want fire and brimstone from their pols. No more laws! The Ten Commandments are enough (even though there are actually 11 or 12 of them, but who's counting?). Not even laws based on Republican proposals, and especially never any real liberalism.

What they want is more of the aptly named Jim Dement, sorry, DeMint. And Republicans everywhere are falling all over themselves to give the crazy extreme wingnuttitude to them.

Outsourcing to Jon Stewart

Hardly anyone in big media has the guts to criticize the bullshit of Fox News. I guess journalists all fear some future job interview after Sarah Palin privatizes her Minitru into the capable hands of propagandist Rupert Murdoch. A job interview, they hope. That cage of rats around the face, ugh, almost as disgusting and painful as Glenn Beck!

So the New York Times outsources its critique to Jon Stewart by pretending to merely report what he says:

[Stewart] said on the show this week that he criticizes [Fox] a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

Evidence for Stewart's assertion, if anyone is obtuse enough to still need it, is Fox's drumbeat that the logo of the recent nuclear summit is derived from the characteristic Islamic symbol of the evening star at new moon. The logo, which the Times unaccountably neglects to show, is:


Hydrogen! Oh my Lord Jesus Christ! (No, not Allah. Never Allah.)

Just say for sake of argument that the logo is a reference to Islam. If so, it would only serve as a stark reminder that radical Islam and nuclear proliferation are indeed a serious threat that we in the liberal west are rightly working against. Would that concern be unpatriotic? Hardly.

The whole logo controversy only works as propaganda if its recipients are already in thrall of delusions about President Obama. It only appeals further to their unreasoning beliefs and, mostly, to their tribal, often bigoted mistrust of him.

Nor is this the first time the wingnutosphere has made mountains (for Mohammed!) out of graphical molehills. They actively search for invidious touchstones to enrage their easily manipulated flock of dittoheads.

The obvious purpose of Fox's logo-rrhea (hyphen signals scatological joke) is to keep its audience in constant angry arousal for electoral purposes. Many of them are armed, and quite a few of those gun owners are clinically insane.

Fox doesn't care. The coming violence - coming further violence actually - will only drive ratings up, and Fox's large stable of provocateurs will piously declaim that they had nothing to do with the violence, that it was of course liberal words and government that forced the neo-Confederates off the deep end. Because, God save us, the Muslims have already taken over Microsoft!


Still don't believe me? Fox and the neo-Confederates didn't object to this far more Islamic logo:

Crescent moon, stars! But it's a Republican logo. IOKIYAR. And we know that Saudi Arabia's party in America couldn't possibly have anything to do with Islamic symbolism.

Who you calling Anglo?

Click image for full John Branch/San Antonio Express-News cartoon.

Sacked

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

Beast with two backs

When the economy goes tits up, it's not Wall Street that gets screwed.

Click image for full David Brown/Los Angeles Sentinel cartoon.

Waking up

The good news is that even a reflexively centrist conciliator such as President Barack Obama has limits to the bullshit he'll tolerate from the ignoramus caucus of the Party of No:

"It doesn't matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big 'ol fight over it. So he doesn't have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns," the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct "anything of consequence" put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. "The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right," the official added.

My recommendation:

• On John Paul Stevens's replacement, fight visibly and without bending with the Senate Republicans, win or lose.
• If they succeed at their filibuster, no need to go nuclear. Make a recess appointment at the first opportunity.
• On January 3, 2011, get whoever is the Senate Majority Leader to kill the filibuster, not to mention the unconscionable system of secret holds. Through overuse, they've outlived their function of caution and become the obstructive tool of a bunch of two-year-olds throwing tantrums.
  
• Gain Senate confirmation of your recess appointee with fifty-whatever votes you have.
• Call Mitch McConnell and sweetly tell him to go fuck himself. With a chainsaw.
  

Worked for Doc Hollywood

Let's enact a sweet piece of nostalgia as if it could possibly be good public policy in a predominantly urban and suburban nation. Barter chickens - or a pig or Vialula's reputation - for an ACL reconstruction, and let the orthopedic specialist, with a quarter million dollars in loans to repay, slop the hawgs.

As Anonymous Liberal says, it's hard to have any kind of conversation with a movement and a party so determined to shout la-la-la-la whenever reality rears its ugly head and proves not to be the perfect place for the ignoramus caucus that they fervently desire it to be.

The reason that violence from the right is coming is that the wingnuts have built a humongous P3 containment to protect their stupidity from the world. The world is at negative pressure, so the virulent wingnut pathogens leak into it, yet the nuts never have to learn anything but the profitably fomented rage that comes so naturally to them.

They are going to view us as vermin to be exterminated. Or converted. Our choice.

Make the earth move, baby

Like American conservative Christians, Iranian Islamic clerics can't be in the same room with female sexuality. Showing a little ankle under their chadors, Iranian women make the ground move for the righteous mullahs. And it's the women's fault - or Allah's - that a few square centimeters of bony flesh give them such wood that they can no longer control themselves.

What is wrong with these freaks? And how did any people allow themselves to be under their control?

Typical wingnut shit-fit

If it's not obvious to you, Republicans are nasty sore losers. They don't believe in democracy. They believe only they can govern.

Democrats, by contrast, are much more even-tempered and stable.

Dust in the wind

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Opportunity breaks the door down

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

No business like show business

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

What's David Vitter up to these days?

It's David Vitter watch, day 1009!

A Republican political operative is hiding in the shadows of "performance art" by a Libertarian stalking horse candidate. The obvious purpose is to continue to harp on Eliot Spitzer's consorting with prostitutes. The Libertarian is herself a madam. (Management! Obviously the Republican constituency...) At least she has the courage of her conviction(s), and advocates legalization. As if that would pass.

Meanwhile, David Vitter (R-not caught paying skanks lately) is running for reelection! And a porn star who was twittering about running against him has decided not to - that pole dancing beats poll dancing.

John Ensign (R-Indecent Proposal) also remains in the Party of NO, just not the party of saying no.

The Republicans don't actually need these filly-busters to sustain their perpetual filibuster. Keeping the Dems at 59 is enough. They're just immune to their own hypocrisy.

The Republican way

It's not surprising that a Senator from a tobacco state, Mitch McConnell (R-better keep your KY handy if you're not a corporation), would use obfuscation, denial, and bullshit to fog his true objectives. Paul Krugman:

It’s a truly shameless performance: Mr. McConnell is pretending to stand up for taxpayers against Wall Street while in fact doing just the opposite. In recent weeks, he and other Republican leaders have held meetings with Wall Street executives and lobbyists, in which the G.O.P. and the financial industry have sought to coordinate their political strategy.

And let me assure you, Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts. By depriving regulators of the tools they need to seize failing financial firms, financial lobbyists increase the chances that when the next crisis strikes, taxpayers will end up paying a ransom to stockholders and executives as the price of avoiding collapse.

Paul Krugman (and I, here and here) can tell that the Republicans are bullshitting, but the teabaggers go right on screaming that they pay too much in taxes, never mind that their taxes have gone down during the Obama administration.

The teabaggers are the Republicans' target demographic because they're easily fooled into believing nonsense that keeps them serfs to the feudal lords of Republican crony capitalism.

That ain't Monopoly money

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Who's auditioning for Lady Macbeth?

Click image for full Keith Knight cartoon.