Oh, Hunter! You Are So Eloquent!

Hunter writes better than anybody I read. Here's a gem: "Well, here ya go, Steve King's press person. Knit a silk purse out of this pile of crap". If you want to know what the pile of crap is, read the latest installment of Ugly Republicans, a.k.a. Repuglycans.

Rape and Repuglycans

Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for a Senate seat in Missouri, said last week that legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy and that "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

This is what happens when you run a party to appeal to the basest instincts of human nature, to ignorance, and to prejudice: the candidates that make it through the primary process end up representing the bases instincts, the ignorance and the prejudice of the majority of that party's voters.

If your platform seeks to draw such lines as the "fact" that humans have no significant impact on the climate change process, that women who get raped should be punished by being forced to save the "innocent baby", that anyone who seeks to put some limits on the availability of mass-killing weapons is in cahoots with the United Nations to strip all Americans of their Second Amendment rights, or that seeking to protect Medicare from being voucherized is communism, then you get people like Todd Akin elected; and when you do, you have to live with the consequences of their ignorance, prejudice, and vile lack of intelligence, and their clumsy attempts at retracting their "mis-statements".

As Kaili Joy Gray at the Daily Kos, and many others, have correctly pointed out, the fact is not that Todd Akin is out of step with the Republican Party: He is in perfect alignment with the majority of primary voters and with the people who funded his campaign, including the majority of the Republican establishment and its talking heads.

It's like former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett recently said in an interview on The Daily Show: one of our parties is insane, and we know which one it is.

Repuglycans

There is one party in today's America which understands that the key to gaining and holding power is to limit people's ability to cast a ballot. Republicans know that--short of rigging the counting process, which they have done in the past--the key to winning elections is to suppress the number of ballots cast in an election. The higher the turnout, the lower the chance of their regressive candidates and policies to pass. And so it is that the new Jim Crow laws are with us: Republican judge upholds restrictive voter ID law in spite of no evidence being given that it addresses any problem at all.

The G.O.P. is truly America's biggest enemy right now, bigger than any foreign enemy. For all its talk of upholding America's tradition of democracy, the G.O.P. and its agents behave like a totalitarian government. It must be stopped.

Mike Huckabee is a Liar. Period.

Some Republican Super-Pac is now running an ad in which Mike Huckabee utters this lie: ObamaCare has been defined as the largest tax increase in American history. This is not a difference of opinion: It's a lie, plain and simple.

The media needs to call a lie a lie and a liar a liar. It's not a subjective matter. The facts are out there, they can be measured and evaluated. Not doing it is lazy, and doing it and not reporting it is cowardice.

Mike Huckabee is a liar and an idiot. He deserves no respect. He is a shill. He has stooped to the level of Rush Limbaugh's idiocy and deceit Proof of this? He has his own show on Fox News Channel. And this article.

I rest my case.

Vomit

Hearing Mitt Romney extol his pick for VP, Paul Ryan, for having a plan that will save Medicaid and Medicare is enough to make one want to puke: The man has presented a plan that would cut back both programs so much that a circumcised penis wears a hoodie by comparison. Add a sprinkle of "we will restore welfare to work" (another lie, since there is nothing to replace) and the heaving is non-stop.

The next 3 months are going to be very hard to stomach.

Romney and His Tax Returns

If Romney does not release his tax returns people will think that what's in the returns is much more damaging than the continued criticism he gets for not releasing them. My guess: It would show how hypocritical his tax plan is, which lowers taxes on rich people like him and raises them for most other Americans. What kind of rationale, other than sheer greed--can you offer in favor of lowering taxes for people who already--legally--skirt most of what they are supposed to pay?

Releasing the tax returns would only serve to expose the limitless greed of wealthy robber barons like Romney, and would lay bare the false rhetoric according to which lower taxes would spur job creation. In fact, empirically, we know the reverse to be true: higher taxes--with job credits for keeping and creating jobs in America--would create jobs. Nothing else will.

And a Good Weekend To All

Thanks For Pointing That Out

"By the way, they would not have a show if it there was no Fox News. Between 'The Daily Show' and 'Colbert Report,' they don't even write anything. They just watch TV up until 3 o'clock".

This revelation was made by Faux News's Brian Kilmeade during an episode of some show he co-hosts.

Indeed, Faux News Channel provides an endless supply of comedic fodder to the creator of many late-night shows. The fact that it does should be an indication to Kilmeade that the network he works for is so incredibly biased and ridiculous beyond all likelihood that comedy writers have to change little when they cut a segment for their shows. Chances are Kilmeade is completely oblivious to the irony of his statement.

The Sikh and the Sick

The Sikh are the poor victims of the assault that a white supremacist killed in Wisconsin yesterday.

The sick are those who refuse to admit that the United States of America has a gun problem that needs to be at least discussed. There is never a good time or a good place to even discuss gun regulation in this country, and both parties are guilty for the impasse (not that there is no difference between the two parties, but this is truly a case of bipartisan idiocy.)

How Not To Worry About Sick Leave

If you are an asshole zillionaire who owns a media empire that spreads misinfotainment every second of every minute of every hour of every day... (you know where this is going), then you don't see how paid sick leave adds anything worthwhile to the lives of the minions who work for you, and even less to the lives of the lucky bastards who don't.

If, however, you are not Rupert Murdoch, it is easy to see how providing paid sick leave to employees is not only a humane step to take in an increasingly inhumane country, but it is also a way to reduce on-the-job injuries (or deaths), to avoid the preventable spread of disease at work, not to the mention in the population at large, and how it would make the United States a little more worthy to listen to and a little less assholey to the rest of the world (not that any Repuglycans should care.)

And did I mention that the country that Rupert "Asshole" Murdoch hails from has paid sick leave laws, or that "The United States is the only rich country in the world that does not mandate any form of paid sick days or leave"?

And if you are a small business owner who thinks that the cost of providing sick leave to your employees would put you out of business, and therefore you oppose any sick paid leave proposal, then perhaps you should not own a small business.

Bill Moyers on Medicare for Everyone

Republican Politicians and Republican Voters

Among the conclusions I have drawn in life is this pair:

To be a Republican politician you must have a firm belief that people are stupid and do not possess a functioning, critical mind.

To be a Republican voter you must either be a zillionaire, or be living proof that Republican politicians are right about at least some people.

And since Hunter exists, and he can track down imbecilic irony wherever it exists, I have proof that my conclusion about Republican politicians is right. At least as far as John "Agent Orange" Boehner, Speaker of the House (divided) goes.

Justice Scalia, the Insane Literalist

On a Sunday morning show, in response to questioning on which weapons are protected by the Second Amendment, Justice Scalia said this: "Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it’s to keep and “bear,” so it doesn’t apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided."

You have to hand it to Justice Scalia: A literal interpretation of the Second Amendment would indeed seem to allow grant the People the right to carry a hand-held rocket launcher, grenades, and M-16s. And a suitcase nuke too, since it has the benefit of meeting both the definition of "arms" and of "hand-carried" (I have carried a suitcase before, two in fact, haven't you?). And since the Founding Fathers were prophets and Justice Scalia hears their voices every day...

And now, let us pray... Dear Founding Fathers, Hallowed by Thy Name...

The Fantasy of A Revolution

Dante Atkins at the Daily Kos wrote a spot-on post titled The Second Amendment and the fantasy of a revolution. And that's what an armed insurrection against the government of the United States in the third millenium is: a fantasy. Too bad that it's a useful idiocy for the useful idiots (and hobbyists) that the NRA co-opts in support of a deadly serious cause (more deadly than serious actually).

I'll highlight a couple of passages from the post, but please do follow the link above and read the whole, merciless analysis of the whole rationale of the advocacy of insurrection:

When the Second Amendment was written in the late 18th century, the main weapons of war consisted of muskets and flintlock pistols. There are two very worthwhile things to note about this period in weaponry: First, it would have been very difficult for any individual to walk into a crowded theater and commit a massacre with one of these weapons, mainly because by the time the shooter had managed to reload the weapon, everyone could have already run out of the theater, or even escaped at a leisurely stroll [...]

and this:

But previous history has taught us that perhaps the most effective insurgency weapon is the Improvised Explosive Device. If we are serious about defending American liberty against our own military, it's clear that we need our patriotic bomb-makers to have the freedoms they need to defend our country. As long as our government is monitoring and regulating purchases of fertilizers and other nitrates that could be used to make the explosives we need for self-defense, it's quite clear we can't have the freedoms we deserve to defend ourselves against tyranny.

Romney, The Serial Flip-Flopper and Constant Liar

It should work this way: when a candidate lies, the media should point it out. Period. Instead, the media bend over backwards in order to avoid calling out a lie. They call lies "stretching the truth", "factual inaccuracies", and other euphemisms that fall short of using the word lie, and treat that custom as a venerable act of moderation. The only places where lies are called lies is in the blogosphere, and we know bloggers are not worth the keyboards that they type on. At least that's what "respectable" media figures and pundits like Mark Halperin, one of the most offensive regurgitators of political common wisdom, would have you believe. Never mind that, increasingly, the words "respectable" and "media" clash like a polka dot shirt and a pin-stripe suit. (There are exceptions, of course.)

As I was doing a bit of research on the matter of why it has become okay to let lies slide, I found an interesting piece on The Atlantic's website. It contains the following passage, which in my view is symptomatic of the trouble that plagues mainstream media (emphasis added):

I think this point is just absurd and ridiculous. This is a big thing among folks calling it "moral equivalence" (Fallows, Ornstein) and others calling it the "cult of balance" (Krugman). It's just stupid. If you want someone to tell you that Republicans stink, read opinion pages. Read blogs. Also, the underlying sentiment on the left is that this is the real reason why things went wrong in 2010: That the mainstream media is to blame. Sorry, I think that's the sorta head-in-sand outlook that leads to longer term problems for a movement.

The quote is by Paul Kane, a Washington Post reporter. I'd suggest that Mr. Kane listen to BBC Radio interviews, in which interviewers, armed with their British sense that journalism is a public service (go figure!) can often be heard saying to the interviewee "But that is simply not true." Yes, I know, there is a difference between radio and newspapers and between an interview and a news article. Or is there? More importantly, should there be one? I don't think so. Just as I don't think that someone writing on a blog has less journalistic integrity than his newspaper "equivalent".

Luckily for us, Hunter at the Daily Kos is a disrespectable blogger, so he has no qualms about calling Mitt Romney a liar. Romney lies very often, and he seems to be possessed with complete disregard for the truth and for the positions he had in the past, seemingly oblivious of the fact that we are long past the days of the VCR. DVRs and the World Wide Web are horrible things to have around, for people like him.

This Bears Repeating, Until Election Day

During my local news tonight, I saw at least 6-8 commercials very critical of "Barack Obama" (that's that Republicans and their Super-PACs call the President, to reinforce the idea among racist voters that he is a freedom-hating, un-American foreigner) because of "his" deficits, and stimulus money he gave to friends and family (a lie, and a reference to the now bankrupt Solyndra, but who's keeping track?). So this bears repeating, until election day, in hopes that it will reach a few ears: the smallest government spender since Eisenhower is... "BARACK OBAMA!'

Incidentally, over the half hour of local news, there was only one ad for President Obama, which featured the President himself, calmly and quite civilly explaining that in the next election the choice couldn't be starker between himself and--wait for it--"Gov. Romney". The contrast between the angry, accusatory, and--quite frankly--borderline racist ads ran by or for the Republican candidate and the civil ad running for President Obama couldn't be clearer.

I know that Democrats and their Super-PACs have run negative ads against Gov. Romney, but they were generally, by today's standards of political conduct, factual and respectful: They asked tough questions about facts, and about the obvious weakness of Gov. Romney: that there is not one issue on which he hasn't taken diametrically opposed positions if it helped earn him the favor of a political constituency. The same cannot be said for Republican ads, which have very little to do with facts and a lot to do with painting President Obama as the prime practitioner of crony politics and reckless spending, which is particularly astounding coming from the party of a truly crony and reckless spender, who all but bankrupted the nation: George W. Bush.

After half an hour of negative ads, I was so disgusted by the tone of the rhetoric that I started wondering: What kind of person responds POSITIVELY to that kind of commercial? What does it say, about our politics and about us, that political organizations and candidates confidently spend hundreds of millions of dollars each election seasons to influence the opinion of a few million people whose mind is not made up yet, and whose votes the election basically revolves around? And what does it mean that many of the voters who are targeted by those ads do accept, and in fact end up basing their voting preference, on narratives so false and so offensive that they would want most of us turn our TV sets off?

If I were an undecided voter I like to think that I would end up voting against the candidate who runs such ads because the commercials say so much more about him than about his opponents. I find their viciousness and their use of lies repulsive, and I would hope that I am not the exception among voters. But even if my views reflect the views of a plurality of voters, the fact is that in such a closely divided electorate a small minority can make a destructive difference for the outcome of an election, and the lives of millions of Americans.

The USA: 1776-2012?

Just an observation that I posted for my Facebook friends on a post that started out being about gun control and ended with a reaction by a couple of "guests" in the U.S. to how the country has changed (for the worse).

When I moved to the U.S. almost 20 years ago it was a place where work was abundant, fairly well-compensated, and where I felt at home.

Over the years, though, I realized that at least half of the country:

1. has an insufferable and unjustified sense of superiority over the rest of the world, mostly driven by ignorance of how the rest of the world works.
2. values freedom as long as it consists of the following:
   • The freedom to call itself a Christian nation without actually following Christ's teachings (wasn't it Christ who said "If someone slaps you on your right cheek, waste him with a semi-automatic rifle and a hundred bullets?")
   • The freedom to tell those who disagree with them that they are terrorists, communists, socialists, that they are little fucking stupid robots who jump to the orders of the liberal elites.
   • The freedom to tell the sick and dying that they are sick and dying because they are irresponsible leeches who expect the government to take care of them (and why didn't they just go spend a thousand dollars a month on private health insurance and pay 20% or 50% of all medical expenses after they also paid their monthly premium.), and the freedom of the insurance company to tell them that their coverage is denied because the failed to check a box on their insurance application.
   • The freedom to be shot and killed at dinner by a civilian armed like a Navy Seal.
   • The freedom to tell everybody else that it's all Obama's and the liberals' fault.

May I add that real unemployment has reached (and in some cases passed) European levels, that the jobs that haven't been offshored are undercompensated (unless you compare them with the pay of Chinese prisoners, who work for free), and that I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Not sure if I had made that clear.

I think I know what happened: Globalization has made Americans feel less safe about their jobs, and with reason. Globalization is a race to the bottom, at least in the relatively short term, and one that disadvantages those who had everything before globalization started spreading. Consequently, Americans have reacted as people react all over the world when things are taken away from them: Deceived by the oligarchs and plutocrats of globalization, they have taken to blaming all the wrong people (mostly immigrants, unions, and liberals) for what they've had to endure.

This would explain why many Americans hate new immigrants, mostly from Mexico and poor countries: They feel that had immigrants not shown up and taken their jobs, they'd still be fine. But that is not true. Well paid jobs have been offshored, and the people who lost those jobs have less money in their pockets. Had immigrants arrived to take farm jobs, cleaning jobs, and many of the lowlier and humbler jobs, those who have seen a reduction in pay in better-paid fields (like IT, manufacturing, and others that have suffered comparably with the advent of globalization) their reduction in pay would have felt even worse. Had Americans continued to do the jobs that are now done by lowly-paid immigrants, the price of life's basics necessities would have risen, and life would have gotten even more unaffordable than it already is for a lot of people.

I am not saying that we should all be happy about all the immigrant labor that has arrived to the USA in the last 30 years. Immigrant labor is good to have when the economy is booming, but when the economy is in a recessionary cycle the immediate effect of more immigration is to further depress wages (it's the law of supply and demand.) This is not a time to have more immigration. But, as usual, the ire is misdirected: it should go against employers who knowingly hire workers illegally, not against the workers themselves, who are desperate and who are only doing anything they can to improve their situation, as anyone in their place would.

Even then, we should understand that a war against illegal employment would have inflationary effects on the rest of us, because prices of the things we can't do without in life would almost certainly rise as a result of a tougher stance against immigration, unless offshoring is also curbed and criminal prosecutions of foreign tax havens become the norm.

As far as unions go, membership has dropped to the lowest level in decades. The problem with this trend is that weaker unions result in fewer rights and safeguards in the workplace and in lower wages, for everybody--not just for union workers. But again, it's another example of people directing their anger at the wrong target. Why wouldn't most Americans understand this simple truth: While it's true that unions have caused at least some of their problems themselves, it is a fact that many of the largest U.S. companies have reaped some of the largest booties in their history at the expense of workers. An example that may seem extreme at first, but which has become quite common, is how Caterpillar is handling an ongoing labor dispute with the workers of a unionized plant in Illinois. The company is asking workers to accept a freeze in pay and benefits for the next 6 years (which actually would result in a net loss of pay, measured against rising inflation) even has it has just announced the largest profits in its history and an 60% increase in the pay of its CEO (to $17 million annually).

Now some have seen what is happening all along, and many have started to take notice. Most vocal among public voices to decry the wrongs that the middle-class and poor have suffered in recent years have been Bill Moyers, Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schulz, and Paul Krugman, to name but a few. The Occupy Wall Street movement has risen to unusual numbers of participants for American political life, and "99 percent" has now become a common term in political discourse.

The third target of popular anger is liberalism. This is honestly an absurdity that only ignorant people would tolerate. Aside from the fact that the Republican policies of the last 30 years (think Reaganism and what followed, and continued even under centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton) have wreaked more havoc on the health of the American economy, and on the middle-class and the poor of America, than anything liberals have done (or not done), this country has not followed truly liberal, progressive policies since the days of the Great Society and, before that, the New Deal.

Conservatives in this country, aided by the deceitful megaphones of Fox News and by the predominance of their ideas on talk radio and in think tanks, are intent on destroying or undoing every progressive conquest of the 20th century and on returning us to the era of robber barons. They have apparently done a fantastic job at it, as the USA remains the only supposedly-civilized country without a universal and affordable health-care system, with an ever weakening safety net, and with more widespread contempt for liberal policies that any other country.

It is a country on the way to ruin, not just financial but moral ruin; not because of the increasing popularity of gay marriages or legal pot, as the Right would have you believe, but because it treats everything and everyone, including its own citizens, as expendable and replaceable resources. It has devised policies which, in effect, result in a new type of slavery, based not on the forceful exploitation and ownership of human beings, but on their enchainment to the lords of financial globalization.

Even with all of this, you can be sure that Americans will keep chanting as they have always done, even as the ship goes down: USA: Number One! That, more than anything, is proof of the failure of the great American experiment in democracy.

Could Mitt Romney Actually Be A Dumber President Than Dubya?

Let's hope we never find out, but this isn't promising.

Loved Prime Minister Cameron's response, by the way: "We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere [Salt Lake City]."

Oh, Hunter!

You know, if the world were a fair place, Hunter at the Daily Kos would have a show called "Crush the Hacks" or something like it, and it would be watched by 200 million Americans every day, including weekends and holidays. As luck would have it, he has landed at Daily Kos a while ago and he has yet to write anything duller than spectacularly spot on and clever. And his latest post demolishes the spin, hackery, and incompetence of the Wall Street Journal's Gordon Crovitz (and of the rag that published the article). Oh, and by the way, let me quote this stunningly funny remark which I found via one of the links in Hunter's post (go find it), which comes from an interview with Vint Cerf:

Interviewer: Crovitz also writes approvingly of this blogger's quote (from 1999): "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia." Since you developed the TCP/IP protocol, I'd like to know your reaction.

Cerf: I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz' assertion. "

But please click on all the links that Hunter provides that debunk Crovitz's asinine contention, particularly the last one, which ends with the following undeniable truth: "It's now so important for conservatives to claim that nothing good has ever come out of the federal government that they're literally willing to say anything. After all, how many of Crovitz's readers will ever read Hiltzik's response? One percent of them? Mission accomplished."

They'd Better Tell Scalia

The National Right to Life Committee is an organization devoted to saving the lives of the unborn (or so they claim, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). They are so committed to saving the lives of the unborn that they have no regard for facts. Take this example, from one of their communiques in which they attack President Obama for supposedly seeking to stifle their First Amendment rights:

[...] the U.S. Constitution recognizes a virtually unlimited right to freedom of political speech for both individuals and groups of individuals. Without this, it wouldn’t be the America we know. But Barack Obama isn’t satisfied with that expression of our rights. He offended some by openly criticizing the Supreme Court ruling in his 2010 State of the Union message. He challenged Congress to find a way to overcome the Supreme Court’s broad protection of free speech in the Citizens United case. So now Obama supports the “DISCLOSE Act,” which used a different tack to limit the free speech rights of Americans. Unable to directly ban certain kinds of political speech, the “DISCLOSE Act” uses the strategy of punishing those who want to participate with groups of fellow-minded Americans and help their groups spread a political message. It does this by going after the donors and members of groups, subjecting them to disclosure requirements others are allowed to ignore.

That's how freely the NRLC plays with fact. I emphasized a couple of sentences that I find particularly offensive, and which I will stop short of openly calling lies because it might be that Carol Tobias, NRLC President, might simply be ignorant or too lazy to check the facts.

That the Citizens United ruling is one that upholds freedom of speech is only accepted by those who equate free speech with money. Many Constitutional experts vehemently disagreed with the ruling, and many intellectual, politicians, concerned citizens were appalled by the Court's decision, which was actually a rather disgraceful example of what Conservatives love to decry as judicial activism because the Court's majority expanded the ruling well beyond the limited question before the Court (as noted in Justice Stevens's 90-pages long dissent.), to establish previously non-existent rights.

But that is not the point of my distaste for the NRLC's letter. The origin of the distaste lies in the two sentences I emphasized above.

The purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is not, as the NRLC maintains, "to limit the free speech rights of Americans", nor to punish "those who want to participate with groups of fellow-minded Americans". The DISCLOSE Act would simply require that the names of the corporations, organizations, and individuals who make political contributions in excess of the limits established by the Act should be public. The rationale of the Act in setting these monetary limits is that if the American public could know which moneyed and powerful interests are behind a certain group, Super PAC, etc., it would be in a better position to evaluate the agendas that might drive a commercial, a message, an op-ed, and so on.

The idea that the identity of donors to political and legislative causes should be public is not exclusively a progressive cause. In a recent appearance on CNN's Piers Morgan show, Justice Scalia defended both the Citizens United ruling AND the basic ideas behind the DISCLOSE act (even though he did not specifically mention the Act itself.) And this is what Mother Jones magazine points out in an article about Scalia's dissent with Republicans on the issue of disclosure:

Scalia has expressed similar sentiments before, most notably in a 2010 case where anti-gay rights advocates in Washington State were attempting to block disclosure of signatories to a petition on the grounds that compelling them to do so violated their First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed, and in a concurring opinion Scalia wrote that "There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance." Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

So there, Carol Tobias, President of the NRLC, and those who--like her--think that President Obama's support of the DISCLOSE Act is an act of intimidation intended to stifle the voice of organizations like the NRLC: Your right of free speech is protected so extensively that it extends to the right to misinform your members and the American Public. Those who support it {DISCLOSE) only wish that the people who fund your distasteful spin had the cojones to identify themselves.