Sunday, 15 August 2010
Defeat the right in three minutes
Since I know some of you never click on links, even when you are about to comment that I ought to mention something that is directly referred to in the text and conveniently provided link, I thought I'd give you the vital section of this now-legendary piece by Conceptual Guerilla, even though he seems to have a strange aversion to that honorable piece of punctuation known as the question mark. It didn't have a permalink at the time I first found it, and in order to make sure it never again gets lost, I've made a page for it at The Sideshow Annex as well, but I did finally find it, so, here is the relevant excerpt from:
Defeat the Right in Three Minutes
by Conceptual GuerillaIs there really a catch phrase - a "magic bullet" - that sums up the Republican Right in such a nice easy-to-grasp package. You better believe it, and it's downright elegant in its simplicity.
You want to know what that "magic bullet" is, don't you. Read on. You've still got two minutes.
Right-Wing Ideology in a Nutshell
When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" - intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell - which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because it's exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America - whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you'll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite - or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads - your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
Don't believe me. Well, let's apply this principle, and see how many right-wing positions become instantly understandable.
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like social spending or our "safety net". Why. Because when you're unemployed and desperate, corporations can pay you whatever they feel like - which is inevitably next to nothing. You see, they want you "over a barrel" and in a position to "work cheap or starve".
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like the minimum wage, or other improvements in wages and working conditions. Why. These reforms undo all of their efforts to keep you "over a barrel".
- Cheap-labor conservatives like "free trade", NAFTA, GATT, etc. Why. Because there is a huge supply of desperately poor people in the third world, who are "over a barrel", and will work cheap.
- Cheap-labor conservatives oppose a woman's right to choose. Why. Unwanted children are an economic burden that put poor women "over a barrel", forcing them to work cheap.
- Cheap-labor conservatives don't like unions. Why. Because when labor "sticks together", wages go up. That's why workers unionize. Seems workers don't like being "over a barrel".
- Cheap-labor conservatives constantly bray about "morality", "virtue", "respect for authority", "hard work" and other "values". Why. So they can blame your being "over a barrel" on your own "immorality", lack of "values" and "poor choices".
- Cheap-labor conservatives encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners.
The Cheap-Labor Conservatives' "Dirty Secret": They Don't Really Like Prosperity.
Now, read the rest. |
14:42 BST
Saturday, 14 August 2010
A day without sunshinePaul Rosenberg, with a little help from Rachel Maddow, on Cowardice:
This Administration is a failure by choice. It has not been defeated by its enemies, but by itself. By its own actions--and more tellingly, by its own inactions, its failure to act, or even to think of acting. It is a victim of its own lack of imagination as well as its lack of courage.Oh, sure, one can argue that it's not a failure at all. That it's doing exactly what the ruling class wants it to do. But though true in one sense, that's utter bullshit in another. FDR was hated by the ruling class. But he saved their bacon by going against their petty, narrow-minded, self-destructive instincts. Obama is destroying America--including America's ruling class--by not standing up against the self-destructive passions of the moment. Heck, he can't even speak out for the First Amendment against hypocritical clowns like Newt Gingrich.
We are in a fight for the soul of America, as well as the soul of the Democratic Party. And although those who stand against us have a great deal of organizational power, they are losers at bottom. They are liars and cowards. Their vision of America is a sham and a disgrace. And they are condemned by all the minute particulars of what they have done and not done in our names.
Shame on them all. And shame on us, if we let ourselves be cowed by them.
And speaking of Rachel, a glimpse at how so much of the evil going on in America today can thank one of the most powerful groups in America: the prison industry.Digby covers the right wing and receives important information from Newt Gingrich on the employment situation, instruction on Randian motherhood, and a list of the worst people in history.
Center for Economic Policy Research: "The Washington Post really really hates Social Security. They hate Medicare almost as much. Therefore they are willing to give its critics space to say almost anything against the program (the real cause of September 11th) no matter how much they have to twist reality to make their case. Today, Republican Representative Paul Ryan stepped up to the plate. The Post felt the need to give him an oped column after Paul Krugman cruelly subjected Mr. Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to a serious analysis last week. This violated the long accepted practice in elite Washington circles of not holding proponents of Social Security and Medicare cuts/privatization accountable for the things they say. It is therefore understandable the Post would quickly give a coveted oped slot to Mr. Ryan to make amends for such a grievous breach of protocol." (via)
Sam Seder calls BS on Google and Verizon for trying to make an end-run around net neutrality (and says you should contact the FCC).
The Difference Between Marriage and Civil Unions.
MadKane sends an Open Limerick to Gibbs and Obama.
The Shiksa in the Kitchen, making me hungry.
So the other night was supposed to be the best night to see the Perseids, and the sky was so gorgeous, and I really thought I'd finally get to see a shooting star. I went out in between doing things on and off but I didn't have time to hang about, and by the time I was able to take a break and just sit around watching for a while, it had clouded over, and there's been no sky ever since. Bummer. But have a picture. (And while I'm there, this x-ray of flowers is kind of neat, too.)
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22:42 BST
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Mister, Mister, can we have our ball back?March on Washington, Oct. 2nd - Susie says she will be there if she has to crawl: "August 5, 2010, WASHINGTON - The AFL-CIO executive committee voted unanimously this morning to join One Nation, Working Together, a new national coalition of labor and civil rights groups that has as its purpose to 'reorder America's priorities by investing in the nation's most valuable resource - its people.'"
One of the things Watertiger and I touched on Sunday night on Virtually Speaking (download the podcast!) all too briefly was the latest move in the anti-immigrant mania being pushed on the right, but unlike me, Digby actually watched the segment on This Week where the Village discussed the subject, and has their view. Of course, if I'd been there, I would have suggested "immigration reform" that eliminates the concept of "illegals" altogether and simply requires that all alien residents hired in the US must join a union, must have a right to strike, and must be paid at least one cent more per hour than any American with the same job. Of course, not many people would support it, but just think how much less attractive hiring foreigners would be to the Bosses if such a law existed. Also, more from Digby on Wall Street's economic terrorists (and the people who cave in to them), and eight popular lies. And Tristero on making stupidity respectable.
Sirota, "Report: Obama Launches New Program to Help Corporations "Take Advantage of Low Labor Costs" Abroad: In recent months, President Obama reversed his campaign promises on trade issues - first by dropping his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA and then by pushing to pass NAFTA-style trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. Now, with the unemployment crisis persisting, the key jobs question is once again front a center in American politics. Specifically: How do we create jobs here at home and build our most valuable 21st century industries? The first and foremost answer is that our government should stop doing stuff like the program described in this stunning new report from Information Week."
If you've seen Gibbs' remarkable put-down of "the professional left", you probably noticed that almost every word of it is wrong, but Aravosis notes that, "This interview with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs is really quite remarkable. Not in its substance - President Obama's staff smears the Democratic base, and our issues, on a regular basis. No, what's remarkable is that a senior White House official has finally gone on the record in order to smear the Democratic base. That's unprecedented. It also puts to the rest the White House's prior defense, whenever a senior unnamed official went after the base, of claiming it was a rogue employee who didn't represent the President. Gibbs clearly does." But before that Aravosis said an interesting thing in response to Gibbs' claim that the left didn't help Obama get elected: "Then there's all that work we did for the campaign, all the dirty work they asked us to do - and we did it, gladly, and quietly - none of that counted either, apparently." Dirty work? I wonder what he means. Via Suburban Guerrilla.
We're devolving. Or, as Krugman puts it, "America Goes Dark."
When Google leaps into bed with Verizon, it's definitely time to worry about the future of the internet. I mean, if you weren't worried already. Which you should be.
"The mystery of the missing workers, or why there are still some jobs unfilled.You can watch The Decline right here.
Meanwhile, David Cameron's very public project to destroy Britain proceeds apace, and I don't see the Lib Dems doing anything to stop it. And they could, the bastards. What's their excuse?
Strangely, someone in my very own comment thread fell for this right-wing campaign to lie about the people trying to set up the Muslim center in New York.
The Learning Channel signing Sarah Palin to a contract is sort of like Gandhi or Dick Gregory getting their own show on the Food Network.
"
"And they were 17 feet tall and had adamantium bones!"
The way the future wasn't: Surveillance drone airships. Airships!
Lego pipeline explosion
I've never seen this before.
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19:27 BST
Monday, 09 August 2010
Same old same oldTonight, Watertiger and Avedon Carol on Virtually Speaking Sundays beginning at 5:00 PM Pacific, also known as 8:00 PM Eastern, or, as we call it around here, one o'clock in the morning.
The "right-wing Judy Garland will bring the fun back to politics. This has to be a parody site, but I can't find the proof.
Good for Fareed Zakaria for returning his MBE Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize to the ADL after their disgusting display of bigotry. (And I think the word Atrios is looking for is "mensch".)
Rachel Maddow interviews the lawyers who won the Prop Hate case - one of whom, weirdly, is Ted Olsen. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, reckons to back off the fight against gay marriage. Next stop, the Supremes. Oh, well.
Maybe using models that don't work explains why our econ geniuses think doing nothing will.
Even Frank Rich has noticed that the Democrats clever plan of doing nothing but trying to run against Bush and Palin while doing nothing to address joblessness is not a good campaign strategy. (And I see even Rich is now able to put the word "moderates" in quotes when referring to right-wing nuts like Grassly and McCain.) And if even Alan Greenspan can recognize that the Bush tax-shift (the one they call the Bush "tax cuts") should expire, why, pray tell, can't the Democrats? It serves Obama to be able to pretend it's all the GOP's fault, but he's only been doing their job for them.
What's more important than feeding, housing, and educating your children? Maintaining a dying empire.
Maybe if the left just came right out and demanded a Job Guarantee, it would help push things leftward.
I think it's safe to say that Ezra Klein has been thoroughly absorbed by the pod people.
Cocaine Nation reviewed: "Although Feiling doesn't soft-pedal the harm of drug dependence - to addicts, mainly, but also to their families and communities - he argues convincingly that the remedy promoted most aggressively by the United States has proved far worse than the disease."
I'm not big on petitions, but you might want to sign one to defend WikiLeaks, and we're still in danger of losing the internet, so do what you can to stop it.
I've just finished reading Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, turned into a trilogy only by his untimely death. Be that as it may, I still feel like I'm waiting for the other seven planned books and can't wait. Even Thom Hartmann recommends it. (Don't start reading the second one until you've got the third one, but get it.)
Just so you know i haven't magically cheered up, have some Blues For Nothing.
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00:24 BST
Saturday, 07 August 2010
Blues for breakfastThis is an odd article about the thinking of the Catfood Commission: "A source familiar with the proceedings of the working group on discretionary spending tells TPM that some commissioners, including one military contractor, would prefer to save money by freezing military pay and scaling back benefits, rather than by eliminating waste in defense contracting." Leaving aside the fact that there really isn't much scaling-back left to do with what few benefits the troops still have left, what I found particularly odd was an earlier sentence in the article: "Though most of the commission's work occurs behind closed doors in small working groups, early reports indicate that the GOP's unwillingness to support any significant tax increases are pushing the group toward proposed entitlement slashes and larger budget cuts." It's that word "GOP". Obama could have put anyone he wanted on this commission. In fact, he didn't even need to have a commission. Instead, he appointed a whole bunch of people whose mission in life is to take as much away from 98% of Americans as possible to this commission. It's a bit late to be blaming the GOP for any callousness and stinginess that comes out of it.
Atrios: "If the Dems were smart there would be no debate about the "Bush tax cuts" instead they would let the Bush tax cuts expire as the law currently requires and come up with their own exciting "Obama tax cuts" or "Democratic tax cuts" or whatever. Why they want to essentially give Bush credit for their tax cutting is bizarre." Because Democrats refuse to talk to anyone who is to the left of the Republican leadership, they talk like Republicans. It's the only language they know. (via)
Also via Atrios, I see that his chief economic advisor is leaving because she just doesn't feel like his chief economic advisor. I bet she was pretty pissed off at having to try to defend stuff she doesn't believe in, either. (More here..) (Also, can someone tell me what's in this video, since it's "not available in your country"?)
I don't think politics is going to help you much, so it's time to develop a plan for Personal Finance in a Deflationary Period.
Paul Krugman on The Flimflam Man: "One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he's hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic. Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin." You'll never guess what bright new idea this Republican has for solving the deficit problem... unless you've noticed that it's what conservatives are always doing or trying to do.
Meanwhile, in China, there may be good news - people willing to confront their serfdom and fight for a union movement. Trying to for unions in the United States - where we had a Constitutional right of free association - was a bloody struggle. The Chinese have no such right written anywhere, but they are fighting all the same.
David Waldman has a clarification about "ethics trials" here, but what he doesn't explain is why, with all the obvious graft and corruption on the conservative end of the spectrum, the only thing we're hearing about ethics trials is regarding two of the more progressive members of Congress. I'm not a huge fan of Rangel, but he really is one of the few people left in Washington who doesn't sound like a right-winger 24/7. And so is Maxine Waters. Hm, I wonder what they have in common.
Sam Seder posted a bunch of quickie interviews with some of our favorite bloggers from Netroots Nation. He also calls BS on who is joining the hate-fest against Muslims in New York.
There are intermittent sightings of the Northern Lights in the far north of Scotland now and then, but the other night they were visible as far down as central Scotland, which is very rare indeed (more). Seattle got a peek, too. (Pretty.)
Ansible reports: "H.G. Wells inspired a £1000 story competition for under-25s (linked with the Wells Festival - see below or www.wellsfestival.com), which had no entries owing to two strict requirements: handwritten submissions and no horrid science fiction. 'Last year there were plenty of entries because the competition was open to writers of all ages and stories could include science fiction, depicting ghastly invasions of our everyday lives by all sorts of nameless horrors,' complained contest setter Reg Turnill (94). He has since dropped the unpopular conditions and extended the 20 July deadline."
More Kooper & Bloomfield in another musical interlude. (I knew I was going to enjoy Sneakers from the first notes of the opening title music.)
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12:00 BST
Wednesday, 04 August 2010
I watch the sun go downJust in case you had failed to notice already how repellent Tim Geithner is, he had an op-ed in the NYT the other day called, of all things, "Welcome to the Recovery," in which he pretends that, well, spring is here and robins are in bloom and the green shoots are chirping away or something. And I'm sure it is, and they are, for him and his over-fed cronies who have worked diligently to destroy the middle-class and are succeeding magnificently. For the rest of us, of course, the nights are drawing in, and for some it's the dead of winter and may never be spring again. Atrios disliked the article so much that he spent a series of posts pointing out the absence of any mention of housing (and foreclosure, and the designed-to-fail HAMP), how this crises means the economy can't recover, and how downright dishonest and nasty it is to claim it's just about training the unemployed to have 21st Century Skillz.
And, honest to gods, I so want to smack people around when they talk about retraining. Some of the most skilled and educated people in America are out of work and will probably never have another job because they are regarded as too old. For the most part, they will have better educations and be more literate and have wider experience than the younger people who come up behind them because they were educated before the Reagan administration set to work destroying our educational system. More of these people than you might imagine are pretty up-to-date with the skills required for modern technology, but even in the wonderful high-tech area, there are only so many jobs to go around. And, in addition to that, an awful lot of modern management is actually uninterested in anything other than mediocrity, because they want to make sure you all know that you are utterly replaceable cogs in their engine. They don't actually like the highly-skilled and would rather have a bunch of people with limited skills around. People who know their place - they think less of themselves, and it's easier to convince them that they are just lucky to have a job, you see. (And, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you seldom get to be Director of the IT department by knowing anything about IT. You usually get there by knowing how to push people around and demoralize them sufficiently that they are afraid to ask for anything - not a particularly modern skill at all.)
Even at the lower levels, it doesn't exactly take all that much training to get up to speed. There was a period back there in the '80s when companies were desperate for programmers and various sorts of hardware people and they were grabbing secretaries and turning them into software designers. Now they won't even grab experienced programmers and let them maintain software. At least, not if they actually want to earn a living at the job. As far as modern corporations are concerned, there is no percentage in providing real products and services; the important industry is figuring out how to cheat you out of a living wage and take away your property. (That last is important. Someone did a study a while back tracking the fortunes of black families in America, and what they found is that the ones that managed to get ahead were those who had managed to buy land. But even our small parcels of land are being clawed back from us by the rich, now. They even managed to get people to remortgage homes they already owned outright in bad deals that are stripping assets they earned the whole of their working lives. And Obama found a clever way to squeeze them even more with HAMP, as Chris Hayes explains.)
The thing is, most of us already have the skills needed for the 21st, an awful lot of which are just minor adjustments on 20th century skills. Thanks to the economic crunch, which has been going on a lot longer than our captured media will admit, innovation in technology has been pretty much down to zero for the last decade. Maybe you need to brush up on the most popular spreadsheet program, but that's the work of about 15 minutes. IOZ is right about this - the whole idea that unemployed workers need to be retrained with higher-order skills is a scam. Go look around at what's on offer in retraining programs - they are offering to train you in skills you already have. Skills that aren't helping you find a new job. In fact, you very often have to try to sound less skilled and educated just to make it as far as an initial interview for the kinds of jobs that are available, most of which are jobs you got an education to avoid having to take.
You've already lost your most intimate personal freedoms, of course. At work they are checking your hair and urine to make sure you don't have any fun off the job, and apparently your "freely entered" contracts allow private companies to give away your private information to other private entities as well as the government, giving you "a far more effective police state than ever existed in East Germany."
I hadn't realized before the Bloomberg story came out that insurance companies were actually holding soldier's death benefits in their own accounts instead of simply paying a lump sum as is normally done.
Poor David Stockman. He knows that the current Republican leadership is screwing us, but he doesn't really understand why.
Instead of worrying about how best to support our glorious president, a good thing to do would be to fight in the war against the War On Drugs. For a start, you could Just Say Now.
Huxley vs. Orwell? (Personally, I see it as a false dichotomy - it's always been both the carrot and the stick.)
The Blues Project, live 1981
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14:24 BST
Tuesday, 03 August 2010
Give me wingsI Think Krugman is getting that sinking feeling: "What lies down this path? Here's what I consider all too likely: Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility for fixing the situation, politicians and Fed officials alike will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their skills and their connections with the work force, and become unemployable. I'd like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn't all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on." Atrios is, of course, right again, and again: "I guess it should have been obvious for some time, but it's clear that many in the Federal Reserve-Industrial complex always see rising wages as bad. Not simply wages rising faster than productivity gains, or even wages rising faster than inflation, but wage increases period. What this means, of course, is that those who set monetary policy think things are 'good' when the predator class increasingly has the power to extract all rents from workers. Can you say "cheap-labor conservatives"?
"Fox News gets front row White House seat over NPR: Fox News is moving up to the front row of the White House press room, and while that might sound like inside baseball to some, the symbolism is significant. In some ways, this is the very stuff of culture wars, in fact. There was a lobbying effort going on to try and keep Fox News from moving into the front row after a seat opened up with the resignation of UPI's Helen Thomas. Fox News didn't get the seat Thomas had held -- front row center. That went to AP. But Fox News did get AP's old front row seat rather than NPR and Bloomberg, which will be in the second row where Fox used to sit."
Chris Hedges: "We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."
Mr. Transparency's administration wants to expand the reach of National Security Letters.
On Virtually Speaking Sundays with nyceve and emptywheel, yes, Marcy Wheeler did indeed say she thinks if Obama doesn't appoint Elizabeth Warren, he should be primaried.
"The Aftermath Of The Global Housing Bubble Chokes The World Banking System: [...] Thus now do you see the pattern of Armageddon gathering force and deciding when and where to explode and paint a picture of gore all across the world."
John Prescott's testimony about the shocking conversations he was having with his Democratic friends in the Senate just "a couple of days after 9/11" leads Jacob Davis to say in Obsidian Wings: "I guess this is old news, but I still have it in me to find it a little shocking that Democratic Senators were openly talking about invading Iraq right after 9/11. Washington is very strange." Meanwhile, Hans Blix (who really should have said more at the time) explains why the Iraq war was illegal.
Scott Brown on How Max Headroom Predicted the Demise of TV Journalism
Somebody figured out the right way to promote the 40th Anniversary Special Edition of David Bowie's Space Oddity. (Nevertheless, I am reminded to say no thanks to whatever bright light decided the revamp of the YouTube site should make it harder to find the clean, direct link to an individual video.)
Get your wars on.
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14:00 BST
Sunday, 01 August 2010
Assorted things
Bra of the Week
Lightning!
Pop art
The Trifid Nebula, and The Milky Way Over Bryce Canyon
Comic-Con protests Fred Phelps.
"The...money...is...sitting...around."
The big money-maker on the internet is stealing your data.
You can only look at this page once, so make a note of it: a story from November of 2001 called "U.S. Exploring Ways To Sell War Against Terrorism To Overseas Audiences". You may remember hearing something about this at the time. You may even remember people being outraged about it. But you did know, didn't you? "Presidential advisers huddle with Hollywood executives. Cabinet members and generals meet with Muslim media. White House aides in London and Pakistan "war rooms" arrange pro-American publicity. The United States is cranking up efforts to build and retain foreign support for the war against terrorism. [...] Fearing a waning of overseas support as U.S. bombs drop over Afghanistan, the Bush administration is working closely with advertising agencies and local experts to find more ways to disseminate its message against terrorists.
The corporate media wants to talk about Breitbart a lot and blame the internet for bad news, and they also want to dismiss the Wikileaks story as being more of the same. But The Problem Isn't Fast News, It's Dumb News. Dumb, right-wing news.
Meanwhile, Chris Matthews is trying to cover Breitbart's hiney, but when Joan Walsh and Howard Dean tell him he's wrong, the video seems to disappear from the MSNBC site.
It's hard to be in love with Democrats who want to gut your Miranda rights.
"Eventually you have to consider the possibility that we are living under the policy regime the controlling factions of the Democratic party prefer."
In which Thoreau make a rattling departure from the libertarian reservation and decides building codes are not an entirely bad idea.
Wikileaks posts an Insurance policy.
Tonight on Virtually Speaking, nyceve and emptywheel.
Via Atrios, I see that, according to the NYT Caucus Blog:
Republican leaders on Thursday filibustered the $42 billion package - which several Republicans helped write and had the backing of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business - making passage before the August recess highly unlikely.
Did they? The cited story says:With 60 votes needed to advance the legislation, the tally was 58 to 42, with Democrats unanimously in favor and Republicans all opposed. The majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, switched his vote to no at the last minute, a parliamentary step that allows him to call for a re-vote.
That's not a filibuster. When Harry makes them filibuster, then maybe he'll have an excuse. And then we will see. Except the he won't, and we won't. |
14:22 BST
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Counting downEarly readers of this blog may recall that I've spent a lot of time looking at the issues raised by discrepancies in the election results we saw in 2000 and 2004 (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and with growing alarm, here and here.). And that I keep trying to tell people that this is important, for a number of reasons, including the fact that if you don't know who won those two elections, you cannot properly analyze the political terrain around succeeding elections.
For example, there is a great deal of fantasy that it was Ralph Nader who cost Gore the election - a foolish evaluation in light of the fact that many times the number of votes Nader received simply disappeared in an instant from Gore's recorded totals in Volusia County. That didn't happen because a few thousand people voted for Nader, it happened because Jeb Bush was making sure that his brother didn't lose.
I'm not talking about the tiny number of votes by which, according to the NORC count as reported by The New York Times, Gore really won the election. I'm talking about many thousands of votes that were flipped, eliminated, or simply not reported throughout Florida because of deliberately tweaked machines that were programmed to undercount Gore votes and in at least one case that we know of reprogrammed mid-election night to delete at least 16,000 votes in a single Florida county - and that isn't counting the other states (including Tennessee) where quite a few curious events seem to have depressed Democratic votes.
The truth is that it never mattered how many people voted for Nader, because the GOP machine in Florida was going to make sure that Gore's votes always appeared to be fewer than Bush's. And the conservative machine going all the way up to the Supreme Court stood ready to make sure that Bush was installed in the White House. The fact is that if conservatives decide it's time for their people to win, their people are going to win unless the rest of us work very hard and with great vigilance and diligence to prevent it from happening. We haven't. We waited for Al Gore or Jesse Jackson to tell us to do something in Florida instead of getting out there and refusing to accept what was going on. Leading progressive bloggers actually banned discussion of the astonishing numbers in 2004 (despite the fact that far fewer people voted for Nader and yet Bush still "won"). And we pissed our chance away in the last election because we got distracted by the shiny object that is currently in the White House, and we will keep right on doing it unless we stop being scared off by Nader Derangement Syndrome.
It's time to stop quivering in our boots over the possibility that if we start fighting back for real we will elect someone slightly more right-wing than the current crop of right-wingers leading the Democratic Party. There is no substantive difference between Bush's policies, McCain's stated policies, and the Democratic leadership's actual policies, so you might as well step up and admit that, you know, just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.*
* * * * *David Dayen on how HAMP Is Hurting Liberalism explains that all the excuses some people make for Obama simply don't apply to this program that was supposed to help ordinary home-owners who were facing foreclosure but in fact only extends their debt before the axe falls. "The Administration designed this entirely on their own, using money already appropriated. And they designed it terribly. In fact, they lied right from the beginning, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley, who was also on the panel. He was told that the White House would devote $50-$100 billion in TARP money to homeowners and that they would fight for cramdown (what he would rather call lifeline bankruptcy) when it came up in Congress. These were the conditions under which Merkley voted to release the second tranche of the TARP money. And neither of these two things really came to pass. The White House stood mute as cramdown failed, and though HAMP is supposed to have $75 billion in backup, they've spent less than one-half of one percent of it." It's the perfect program to hold up as an emblem of Reagan's claim that nothing is worse than having the government "help" you.Kunstler: "This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical "downturn" that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity." We really are screwed, you know. Permanently.
Apparently, if one more person clicks on that ad to the right and buys a 2L4O T-shirt and tells them I sent them, I win a prize or something. And for those who prefer to be called "left" rather than "liberal", you can now choose a Too Left for Obama T-Shirt.
Gary Lewis & The Playboys
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17:12 BST
Monday, 26 July 2010
It must be utterly without redeeming social importanceJay Ackroyd and Watertiger were pretty good on Virtually Speaking last night, you should give it a listen.
I see via Atrios that Megan McArdle has set her inaccuracy filters on Elizabeth Warren, but fortunately I don't have to link to her to get a little debunking out of it.
At Netroots Nation, Obama sent a surprise video full of hope and change. Just reading the write-up made me want to slap his face, so I didn't watch it.
(And, personally, I think the Democrats just invented this woman to make Harry Reid look good.)
Of course, if you really want to solve serious racial problems in America, it wouldn't hurt to look at the area that has had a devastating effect not just on people of color and the black community, but our entire legal structure: The War on (Some classes of people who use some) Drugs. Like this case, for instance. But it's amazing how many people just want you to forget the issue. Or we get such "reasoning" as that marijuana is dangerous to users because it "contains bacteria and fungi that put users at risk for infection." I mean, seriously. And you might even be surprised at some of the people who are prepared to defend the administration's lack of interest in reversing the odious Drug War policies that have done so much harm.
Krugman notes that Karl Rove is all ready to rehabilitate Bush in the same way the GOP earlier did with Reagan. And, you know, it works - why, a couple of years ago both Krugman and I were observing that the wonderful things Obama believed about Reagan were utterly false. Now the GOP wants us to believe that the economy was really great because of Bush's policies.
Susie thinks Bernie Sanders is a bit late when he says, "While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. The United States must not become an oligarchy in which a handful of wealthy and powerful families control the destiny of our nation." Um, yes, they already do. That's what you can expect when you stop having confiscatory taxes at the top margin - you let them get rich enough to buy off the government.
Meanwhile, also from Susie on Consumer Protection and Chocolate Salty Balls: "Geithner and Bernanke et al have constructed a large and fragile house of cards that rests on the notion that we will all pretend that the banking system is fine - until it actually is fine, and then it'll all be fine! In other [words,] for Warren to do this job as she sees fit, she'd have to acknowledge the financial instability of the banks, and they're not going to stand for it. Nope. In other words, they're doubling down on the strategy that's destroyed our economy."
Once upon a time, Woody Allen stood in for Carson as a guest host on The Tonight Show.
Since I treasure every item in my collection, it kind of hurts to look at them, but still, an interesting time for old vinyl. (I liked a few of these photos, though.)
Laura Flanders interviews Sam Seder, and Sammy has a clip from FDL of Chris Hayes on strategic mortgage defaults and how rich people are doing most of the defaulting, but Congress wants to stop only the non-rich from being able to do that. And the non-rich really need to.
The way things used to be - Civil rights and the family of Shirley Sherrod.
Someone finally posted The Insect Trust on YouTube.
Chip and Harlan, honored again.
Sing a long with Tom Lehrer.
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14:01 BST
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Keep your eye on the ballSammy calls BS on Race War. (And Thers is good on this, too.)
But, of course, this whole race war thing is distracting us from something a bit more important.
Bruce Dixon: "From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going?" Glenn Ford: "For the corporate media, which virtually invented the Tea Party, the NAACP's resolution demanding that the various Tea Party outfits disassociate themselves from racists, was the big news of the NAACP convention. [...] But, in the case of the Tea Party, my question is this: at what point will Black folks be able to say, We beat them? Will it be when the Tea Partyers go back to using racial code words instead of loud and rowdy redneck-talk? Is that all it would take to arrange a truce with racists, that they be more polite about it?"
The real war, as Glenn Ford notes, is much bigger than the Teabaggers: "Before Barack Obama had even taken the oath of office, in January of 2009, he promised to put all of the so-called "entitlement" programs "on the table," for cutting. There was no reason to doubt that Obama really planned to go after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other programs despised by the rich. After all, he had just been elected to a four-year term in a landslide and was, therefore, as secure as any politician can be. Obama was telling everyone who cared to listen that he was would certainly not stand in the way of gutting what's left of the American social safety net. Rather, Obama was telling Big Business that he agreed with them, that the poor and the elderly were sucking up too much of the nation's wealth, and there must be a day of reckoning. [...] In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been "on the table," as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called "deficit commission" is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush. Barack Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight. Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal."
Steve Clemons warns Shirley Sherrod to kick the tires of the fancy new job Vilsack is offering, because it probably comes with less real power to be effective than the job she had before.
Not only are we ruled by idiots who don't listen, but we actually know it.
You know, I really don't want to hear how there's no money in newspapers anymore. It's always been a business with a high profit margin and it still is, so stfu, you whining crybabies.
A death in the family - In Georgia there's a stretch of Interstate 285, from I-20 to the Cobb County line, named in honor of Billy McKinney, an activist who later served in the state legislature and never stopped standing up for the people. On July 19th, his daughter Cynthia spoke at his funeral about his courage and love.
The Cyrkle
You know, I expected at least one of you to say this made you laugh out loud.
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14:27 BST
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Too little, too late, and the lurking smirk at the topCNN actually has a fairly clean recounting of the debacle in their story about Vilsack's apology to Shirley Sherrod after she was forced to resign (including the fact that Breitbart's "correction" isn't much of a correction). Only problem is that it looks like it was the White House that really wanted to force her out without bothering to investigate first.
He spoke to Sherrod earlier Wednesday and said he asked for her forgiveness, which she gave. Vilsack also said he offered Sherrod another job in the department, and she was taking a few days to think about it.[...]
Vilsack noted that "with all that she has seen, endured and accomplished, it would be invaluable to have her experience, commitment and record of service at U.S.D.A.," adding, "I hope she considers staying with the department."
Which is fair enough, although perhaps simply tearing up the resignation and then letting her decide would have been a better move. And, of course, none of the excuses being made for incredibly bad behavior of the administration, including Vilsack, rise much above The Dog Ate My Homework. You simply don't destroy the long career of a formerly anonymous employee without even investigating a charge that came from a known fabricator of libelous attacks on black people who are merely trying to do a good job of helping Americans.And no points to the NAACP for jumping on the bandwagon without knowing what was going on, either. If they haven't noticed by now that the right-wing is in all out war mode against anyone who shows the least sensitivity to racism, they aren't exactly helping their own cause, are they?
The only appropriate response to any of this stuff has always been, "We'd like to find out what actually happened before we comment on any charges that come from people who are, of course, trying to destroy civil rights in America."
For example, no one who has any regard for civil rights goes out of their way to "expose" ACORN. Anything in that vein should have automatically spurred resistance from every part of the civil liberties community. And after that outrage, anything Breitbart had to say needed to be taken with a barrel of salt. "Let's see, a known right-wing operative who is in the habit of racist fabrications is trying to gin up fears of 'reverse-racism'. I wonder what could cause that?" That's how you treat this kind of bullshit if you have any brains.
Which, of course, leads us to the question of just what kind of brains are operating in the White House. Why is the administration in such a hurry to treat these things that deserve nothing but derision with such seriousness? What is it about Obama that nothing seems to fit in his comfort zone like screwing decent people?
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15:22 BST
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
It's clouds' illusions I recallCharles Pierce was Bob McChesney's guest on his NPR show Sunday, talking about Charlie's book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, and you can hear the stream or download the .mp3. (You also might want to listen to the archived show where McChesny's guest was Howard Zinn.)
Krugman: "The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn't do that. Maybe he couldn't have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn't even try." Krugman wants to say the Republican strategy of obstruction is working, but that would only be the case if Obama and the Democratic leadership had made the case for something worth obstructing and whipped their own caucus to support such policies. They didn't; in fact, they agreed with Republican arguments and whipped the Democratic caucus to kill any more liberal approaches.
White House announces it's open season on government employees: "But I also have to wonder if they know what the optics of this are. If two-bit sociopathic wingnuts can scare them to this extent with obviously doctored videos, what happens when they see a real threat? Are they going to flap their arms like penguins and run around in circles screaming "they're coming to get us, run for your lives!!?" At this point, that doesn't seem entirely ridiculous." (Details at Mother Jones.)
It is always good to take any opportunity to debunk zombie lies about Social Security: "No, life expectancy at age 65 has not changed all that much, and those changes were anticipated. No, the beneficiary/taxpayer ratio is not an important issue. No, you can't do better investing the money in private sector funds (and people wouldn't do it anyway. 25-year-olds do not save 15% of their gross for retirement)."
You won't believe how bad Megan McArdle is at simple arithmetic. But it's not just that she can't do the math, but that she hasn't the imagination to see that dividing stimulus money up by every single person in the country is not the most efficient way to use $75bn. Of course, that's what we expect from people who think that allowing extremely rich people to skip out on their obligations to society is a worthier cause than creating millions of jobs and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Normally I wouldn't link to a McArdle article at all, but most of her commenters are a lot smarter than she is and let her know the virtues of, among other things, having a calculator. (Not that you need a calculator when you are working with big round numbers like that - what you need is the ability to count the number of zeroes that go into your figures. She went for "none".) (via)
This Week in Tyranny, there's still plenty of lawlessness, unaccountability, violation of civil liberties, and lies in general, and if you think you see any light at the end of the tunnel it is probably an oncoming train. So, no change there, then.
The former head of MI-5 says the invasion of Iraq increased terrorism: "Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action 'radicalised' a generation of young people, including UK citizens. As a result, she said she was not 'surprised' that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London. She said she believed the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not 'substantial enough' to justify the action."
As Anna observed to me, Tom Tomorrow is still spot-on, but it's a lot harder to laugh.
Noctilucent clouds are so high they glow in the dark. The pictures are pretty, but they might be telling us something more. (via)
David vs. the Christian Volunteer
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15:34 BST
Monday, 19 July 2010
What will you lend on an old golden rule?Via Atrios, who reminds us that food stamps are actually very good stimulus, this horrifying nugget from David Obey: "We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain't easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps." Note: He is not talking about the Republican leadership, he's talking about the White House. Those monsters who want to take food out of people's mouths aren't just Republicans.
Goldman Sachs gets the hand-slap.
The White House is apparently delusional, but they know who to blame. Don't blame me, you jerks, you ran around telling everyone you were going to change things and you just did more of the same. Nobody cares if you are bipartisan or post-partisan or whatever you call it. No one cares if you reach across the aisle, no one cares if you are "modern", no one cares about deficits. People care about whether they can get decent jobs and feed their kids and afford doctors' bills. If you want to stop bleeding money, stop spending it on wars and start spending it on feeding the real economy. You betrayed the people who voted for you, and you think they are disappointed because of bloggers? Who the hell do you think bloggers are? They're American citizens who are sick of being played and betrayed.
As we've all noticed, the prevailing wisdom in the news media is that everything bad or dangerous or reckless or foolhardy is liberal. Obama, for example, is "far left", what with his corporatist love of banksters and allergy to job-creation. No wonder no one even knows what it means.
Digby says we may have someone making the case that it's time for the security state to tighten its belt, in the form of a Dana Priest and William Arkin feature in the WaPo on the Top Secret hidden branch of government. Digby posts an internal National Intelligence Memo anticipating the feature and suggesting a PR campaign will be necessary to counteract the "unfavorable light" the feature is likely to cast on their institution of a police state. She says, "I will be very interested to see what this turns up. I don't know if it includes Homeland Security, but if it doesn't I suspect another investigation should be done there. This gravy train has taken on sacred status as the right has managed to morph the "support the troops" mantra into a "support the Military Industrial Complex," which is just another way of maintaining the police welfare state for connected white guys. If there's belt tightening to be done, this is the place to start." Atrios: "I knew someone who went back to school after the military-industry complex (aerospace mostly) in Southern California dried up a bit. He always joked that it was 'welfare for rich white people.' The secondary point of the WaPo story is that the intelligence-industrial complex has largely set up shop in the DC area, and it's sucking away all of our precious bodily fluids to make everybody in it RICH RICH RICH, or at least more comfortable than many in the Great Recession." And here: "Whatever the initial thoughts behind any of this stuff, it's a tremendous waste of money and resources which, as I said below, can't possibly, in the net, be useful. It serves to transfer money and power to elites while cementing the existence of a giant and extremely opaque patronage system. One with surveillance capabilities." When I was a child they used to frighten us about the evil commies by telling us that the USSR did all the things we are doing now. Ironically, they did not tell us that at least the Soviet police state provided job and a roof over your head if you kept your mouth shut. We're doing all the bad stuff without even making sure you are housed. They call that "freedom".
Elizabeth Warren on the state of play.
Last night's Virtually Speaking Sundays episode with Cliff Schecter and Stuart Zechman, on the news, who these idiots are, and what the hell they are doing. (podcast)
A good year for rich people to die.
Congratulations to Roy and Julia for a great job and the recognition.
David Cameron getting ready to slash and burn the NHS.
The Sign of Things That Have Already Come. If we don't help each other, we will certainly fall.
Stand-up comics in their first Tonight Show appearances.
Armor for cats and mice
Religious Icons.
Threatening cloud; electrical storm.
Sunset Eclipse
Cilla Black at Abbey Road, 1965
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15:15 BST
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Here comes that train-wreckSucking the oxygen out of the room and then wondering why no one can breathe: The only thing I know about Dylan Ratigan is this amazing moment in which my fantasy comes true - someone on TV telling the truth, even confronting one of the "respectable" people who wants to force us to eat catfood and calling his right-wing talking points a lie. Of course, it's just one clip from MSNBC, but oh, man, that was gratifying to watch. "Congratulations, and thank you for nothing." Whooo!
Chris Hayes: "Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity - about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it." And not just there; it's a total system failure.
Axelrod is saying Elizabeth Warren is definitely a candidate to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but you and I both know that no one in the administration wants her there, especially Tim Geithner, who Obama has appointed to make that decision. I think Axelrod is just there for cover, so that still-in-denial progressives will waste time thinking there's a chance for her and pushing her, and then at the last minute Geithner and Obama will show the Villagers how cool they are by spitting in the dirty hippies' faces. Because that's exactly how they have done everything else all along, and there is no reason to think they will suddenly change course. I hope I'm wrong; I suppose it's possible. But I know that they are not here to restore American government, they are here to take it away. Bstrds.
I see from comments that even fairly astute observers have not cottoned on yet that the term "neo-liberal" (or "neoliberal") has nothing to do with liberalism and is in fact a "modernized" term for disguising a thoroughly right-wing economic agenda. CMike helpfully provides your signposts: "Broadly speaking, neo-liberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector, under the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation. The definitive statement of the concrete policies advocated by neoliberalism is often taken to be John Williamson's "Washington Consensus", a list of policy proposals that appeared to have gained consensus approval among the Washington-based international economic organizations (like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank)" In other words, they want to reneg on America's obligation to its people and give all our resources to a small number of rich and powerful creeps.
In American war, we only see some of the faces. In real war, the story is a little different. We used to see more of that story, but those days are gone.
I wonder if Netroots Nation will actually ask Reid and Pelosi any meaningful questions. I don't expect to hear any meaningful answers, although it's possible they will trip up and say what they are really thinking. I expect, however, that this is all just a sop to try to lull a few progs into thinking these people are not determined to sell us all out.
Wolcott has a neat bit slamming Laura Ingraham and the hacks who treat her like she is worth paying attention to, but he also says that he has lost patience and taken HuffPo off his blogroll, reminding me that I still had it on mine, and though I will probably still look at it sometimes, I don't think it needs to take up valuable real estate there, either.
In UK news, The courts recently made an interesting decision against The Times in a defamation case, apparently saying that online news stories that suggest someone is a suspect in a crime should be updated to reflect that the person was cleared. The Times had argued that "the Reynolds responsible journalism defence" protected them, but. "The court also rejected The Times's appeal against the judge's finding that web publication of the same story was not protected by Reynolds privilege after the date when the newspaper knew Det Sgt Flood had been cleared by an investigation because it failed either to take the story down or add a note making clear that the situation had changed since the original publication." Lord Neuberger said, "The nature of the information contained in the allegations is of considerable public concern in that it involves police corruption, but the weight to be given to that point is very severely reduced by the fact that the information is contained in the allegations, which, as the journalists knew, were largely unchecked and unsupported." My friend Mark Stephens disagrees with the decision, but to me it looks awfully like newspapers are having their hands slapped for printing material that is little more than gossip without verification, and I can't help but concur. However, I think there's a difference between a major newspaper like The Times, which can afford to label and revisit articles in its archives and, moreover, ought to be more careful about implying more than they know. SwanTurton Solicitors have a different view of Reynolds from Mark's: "The recent deployment by The Times of the Reynolds defence in defending the claim against it by Detective Sergeant Flood well illustrates the chilling effect that this defence has on both truth and justice. It also illustrates the practical consequences of any defence which transfers the risk of publishing false and defamatory material from the multi-nationals who do so for profit to the individuals who are the subject of those publications, such as innocent serving police officers." Having watched newspapers destroy lives based on what turned out to be utterly false allegations, it's hard to take issue with that view.
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15:32 BST
Thursday, 15 July 2010
A Ford sedan up your assThat title being one of the many suggestions from Tuli Kupferberg's book 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft. Okay, I didn't expect him to live much longer, but still, I'm sad, and I'll continue to treasure the little things he sent me. Tuli was raunchy and funny and playful, and so people often forget that he was also a kind man who wished us peace. Farewell, Tuli.
And farewell to Harvey Pekar, who surprised many of us when we saw that first copy of American Splendor and couldn't stop reading.
I'm tempted to quote the whole first paragraph of Alterman's article on Kabuki Democracy, but I'll settle for the last bit: "Indeed, if one examines the gamut of legislation passed and executive orders issued that relate to the promises made by candidate Obama, one can only wince at the slightly hyperbolic joke made by late night comedian Jimmy Fallon, who quipped that the president's goal appeared to be to 'finally deliver on the campaign promises made by John McCain.'" I'd have said, "laugh bitterly at the painfully accurate joke made by Jimmy Fallon," but I think Alterman gives Obama too much credit. While I agree that the right wing has a formidable media machine, that Bush and Cheney did devastating damage to our government, and that undoing that damage was always going to be hard going, much of it would not have been impossible if we had elected a liberal president. But the simple fact is that Obama really always was and is what is now sometimes called a "neoliberal" and used to just be called right-wing. The fact that he doesn't appear to have foam-at-the-mouth right-wing "social policies" (and watch out for the elasticity of that phrase), doesn't change things: Someone who spouts Reaganite economic rhetoric and appears to believe in the attendant policies, whatever his reasons, is not interested in restoring the American form of government. (Oh, and by the way, let's stop letting people get away with pretending to be "socially liberal but economically conservative". An economic liberal is someone who wants the economic environment to be one in which private individuals can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes blacks, gays, women, and, yes, even people who don't share your religion. Right-wing economics quickly forecloses on individual freedom. That's why right-wingers hate liberal economic policies. It has nothing to do with "efficiency" or fiscal "responsibility" or anything else. This should be obvious to anyone who has noticed how utterly profligate and inefficient conservative economic policies are at everything except sucking the blood out of the real economy. While it is possible that Obama has so far been too stupid to notice this, there is no reason to believe that he will notice it and realize it is a bad thing if he is re-elected - another thing Eric is more certain of than I am.)
When a corporation damages your property, well, that's your responsibility. I realize right-wingers like to pretend that protecting private property is important, but they don't really mean "private property", they mean the property of the rich and powerful.
Some people still believe the fiction that the Chamber of Commerce is pro-business. But to be genuinely pro-business, you have to promote an environment that supports smaller, local businesses and promising new businesses, and they don't. In fact, they do the reverse: They support the stranglehold of giganti-business.
"House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi Tricked Us: Nancy Pelosi tricked her own caucus into voting for a bunch of crap they did not know about, and now she's running some bullshit campaign to blame the Republicans for wanting to do the very thing her own deception made possible: cut Social Security benefits. [...] She's turning into Tom DeLay in a skirt."
At The Washington Post, a funny thing happened on the way to "balanced" reporting - they treat a Wall Street equity strategist as a disinterested party but Paul Krugman as someone with an axe to grind.
It's funny, the Fed's brief is to maximize employment in the United States, but they seem to think they have some other job, and they are pretty happy with the current "pace toward �maximum employment" even though it seems to be going in reverse direction. (I will say I am delighted to know there is a blog called Economists for Firing Larry Summers.)
Federal Court shoots down FCC 'indecency" policy. Good.
Ethics waivers for golf. Of course, because that's more important than whether you can feed your kids or get medical treatment.
Only 529 donors? Can we stop talking about this woman now? I'm sure more people want Bernie Sanders to be president than would vote for Sarah Palin.
I refuse to link to a Fox story that a "study" by a right-wing "research" group found that the votes of convicted felons may have helped elect Al Franken, but I will note that only two states permanently remove the right of convicted felons to vote, and Minnesota is not one of them.
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04:34 BST
Sunday, 11 July 2010
It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint itSara Robinson says we are losing the fight because we've let the right-wing steal our words, and now we need new ones. But I don't want new ones - I want to ditch words that now stink of rhetoric and replace them with plain language of the sort people actually use. I want metaphors and similes that people can grasp instantly. I want things brought down to the level that people actually live with. Like, for example, simple flyers that you can stick through doors and pass out at church that say things like,
You worked hard and played by the rules, and now people in expensive suits who sat in offices recklessly gambling with other people's money want to stop you from being able to retire.They exported jobs to other countries and made it harder to start new businesses to create new jobs. They slashed government spending to the point where even schools are closing. They failed to honor contracts that said they would put money into your pension fund, and now there is no pension fund. And now they want your unemployment insurance so they can gamble that away, too.
They say you need to tighten your belt to pay for their mistakes.
Well, why should you?
You paid for insurance to protect you from this. Demand what you paid for.
Social Security: You paid for it. We have the money. You earned it. You deserve it. And they don't.
Or something like that.RJ Eskow: "The War For Financial Independence: Calls to Surrender: There's a new conventional wisdom forming in Washington, DC this July 4th, one that transcends party lines and the usual classifications of "left" and "right" as they're understood in that city. It's only being recognized now, because it deals with a number of different economic issues, but the underlying theme is the same: The American dream of financial independence and security is gone. The sooner you accept that and raise the white flag the easier it will be, so stop struggling. They're saying the ideal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is dead. Deal with it." Another way of putting it, of course, is that the Revolutionary War is over, and we lost to the Tories.
It's funny, I've known all my life that high income inequality leads to macroeconomic crisis, and Krugman himself is still working it out. But surely it's obvious that if you squeeze the rest of the population, the lazy rich people who think that financial "innovation" is the only kind that's interesting are not going to be the people who invest in creating an environment where real innovation can flourish. The truth is that since economic "conservatives" have taken over running our economy, there hasn't been any real innovation at all. And that stands to reason, since this environment is one in which the ordinary people who do things for themselves and do the real work - and are therefore the most likely to be inspired to real innovation - are simply not in a position to put their ideas into practice, to bring them forward. The very rich do not like real innovation because it destabilizes their order, it makes change possible - change that could weaken their position, or make the behavior of the masses less predictable. They like us to be predictable. But now, here we are, in a situation where we have allowed a few people to amass most of our nation's wealth and refuse to spread it around where it can do some good, and, well, bad things happen to unequal people. But of course, the remedy, we are told, is to apply leeches to stem the blood loss, and if you haven't stopped losing blood, bleed you some more.
Dan at Pruning Shears: "I started 'This week in Tyranny' as a leftover link roundup from my Thursday posts with the point of documenting our slide towards a police state culture. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about the title, maybe thinking it's a little too hyperbolic (and God knows the teabaggers have been gleefully hurling it around for the last year and a half for entirely different, specious, reasons), but stuff like this truly is indicative of an authoritarian environment where dissent is stifled. If that's not tyrannical I don't know what is. (Oh, and also see the almost comically creepily-titled Perfect Citizen program.)"
Joe Bageant on Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball. (Thanks to Helga.)
Bruce Schneier says, "The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated."
Stop-motion graffiti animation: "Big Bang Big Boom"
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Saturday, 10 July 2010
Couldn't get away too soon
Bra of the Week
Unusual Handbag Designs
Other uses for food.
Photomanipulations by Cindy Grundsten
Planck Microwave Milky Way.
Someday I hope to hear Paul Krugman examine the question of why our elite movers and shakers and babblers believe things that are so obviously untrue. Nobody cares about deficits. If they cared about them, they would have cared about them just as vigorously during the previous decade when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor. They only care about them when there is a threat that public money will be used to actually serve the public - then, all of a sudden, they are the soul of frugality. What do you think causes that? (More on that from Atrios.) I mean, they really believe stupid, stupid things, or at least purport to. Maybe they have to, so they can sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that if their policies are destroying the lives of tens of millions of people, it's just not their fault. It can't be helped. Sorry. And yet, even some conservatives are beginning to notice. (Also: Krugman says the real-time debate between Hayek and Keynes is "A spectacular find", which it is.)
Health "insurance": The right to spend three hours arguing with your insurance company over a percentage of one (1) penny while you are being treated for leukemia. Isn't that how you define "freedom"?
In comments to the previous post, CMike tries to work out which presidents really had the worst unemployment records.
All those lazy, something-for-nothing loan-defaulters? They're rich people.
The Democratic leadership is determined to ignore the thing that really matters, and they apparently think they can win by bragging about their crap policy "wins" and pointing at the scary Republicans: "As it happens, though, Republicans are considerably more energized; noting the 'enthusiasm gap' Steve Benen warned: 'The awakening next January will likely be a rude one - intractable gridlock, endless and pointless investigations, and a progressive policy agenda brought to an immediate halt. Hell, presidential impeachment might even find itself on the table.' Such dire warnings seem to be part of the messaging about what might happen if the GOP gets control of the House or the Senate. The problem is, 'be afraid, be very very afraid' is not terribly motivating. Republicans spent two election cycles warning voters about Nancy Pelosi bringing her San Francisco values to the heartland, and it did not work out too well for them. More importantly, it ignores the elephant in the room." (And I'm amused that Steve thinks the progressive policy agenda hasn't already been brought to a halt. Anyone who thinks jobs aren't important is not interested in any kind of progressive policy agenda, unless you mean the progressive immiseration of the populace.)
A considerable part of the graft and corruption in Afghanistan can be blamed on graft and corruption in America that allowed corporations to stiff people they make contracts with, at every level. At home, your promise of a pension plan is a fantasy, your promise of health coverage is a fantasy, and so on. In Afghanistan, the promise to pay a local company for services rendered is also a fantasy. The fish rots from the head, in other words.
It's Illegal to Be Homeless Near DisnyWorld.
It is extremely important to the right-wing to go after crimes that didn't happen. More here. And then there's this flashback.
The G20 was an arrest orgy, and CathiefromCanada has been tracking the stories. (via)
Really, the only explanation I can find for this is that the entire Democratic leadership are actually stealth Republicans. Or they are just more stupid than I can credit.
I thought I'd posted a link to Kindra Arnesen's GulfEmergency testimony, but I suppose it might have been a victim of the recent tech hassles. And anyway, it's at Shakesville with a helpful summary, here.
One way the rich can control you is to make communication too expensive for the people who have the most to tell us. Like, for example, cutting off phone service for Elizabitchez. Because The Red Queen foolishly spent her money on food. Maybe you could help her out.
The Young Rascals (before they stopped being Young).
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