PS) re: Welfare Cowboy

And another thing, dang it!

Regarding Cliven Bundy's fight with BLM over paying his rent for use of public land:

Shouldn't there be at least some small voice coming from the Right Radicals about how the evil rotten lazy no-account shiftless moocher Bundy has grown dependent on gubmint handouts, and that by far the best thing that could happen is for us to kick him in the ass and make him stand on his own?  Ya don't hear that coming from "The Right".

And what ya don't hear coming from "The Left" is, "Ah, c'mon, let the guy stay at the federal tit as long as he needs it - and what the hell, let's throw in some food stamps too".

Both sides my ass.

We Aim To Please

Pick a Bias Confirmation; any Bias Confirmation.

In case you were wondering just how squishy and soft the late great WaPo has gotten.

Ezra Gets One Right

Not that he's wrong all that often, but sometimes Ezra Klein has a truly annoying tendency to shade towards Centrism.

Anyway, his main point here is that it's important to remember:

If you’re around policy research enough you’ll end up reading a lot of studies that violate your intuitions, your theories, your hopes, and even your values. You’ll have the instinct to brush them away or come up with some reason they’re wrong. In those moments, I was told, it’s worth remembering that the world isn’t here to please you.

Politics isn’t here to please you either. And this, I think, is the core of the debate over whether “presidential leadership,” whatever that actually means, can fix Washington.

It's a pretty good post from his blog at WaPo.

There They Go Again

From WaPo:

In a post today on the ABC News site, Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross deliver a few details that upend a Nov. 1 Daily Caller story alleging that Menendez paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. That story consisted of interviews with two alleged prostitutes who attested to having conducted transactions with the senator.

It looks as if ABC News got the same spiel as the Daily Caller. In her story, Schwartz-Ross say that ABC News received back-to-back interviews with the Daily Caller with three women who leveled the allegations against Menendez. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, one of those women has recanted the story and says that the whole operation was an effort to frame Menendez and a friend and donor from Florida, Dr. Salomon Melgen.
Three bombshells from ABC News:

Bombshell No. 1: The recanter yesterday was identified as one Nexis de los Santos Santana. That’s news to ABC News:

In her interview with ABC News before the election, she said her name was Michelle Rodriguez and that she had come forward because Menendez had paid her only $100 of the $500 she had expected. She now says she was coached to make the claim.

Bombshell No. 2 (nuclear): From the story: “Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named “Bob” was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name “Bob” into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.” Here’s what came up on the Erik Wemple Blog’s computer when we searched on “Bob.”

Bombshell No. 3: ABC News reports a troubling degree of sameness among the women’s accounts: “Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as ‘Bob.’” In other words, there appears to have been some coaching involved here.

The ABC News story isn’t a game changer; it’s a game ender.

Nobody doesn't know that Bob Menendez has some trouble keeping to the straight-and-narrow; everybody knows there's a thing or three wrong with New Jersey politics, and everybody knows we have something of a pay-to-play system in effect in at least a good bunch of our government.

But in their absolute insistence on maintaining Centrist Orthodoxy, some of the Press Poodles swallowed the Fable of the Dominican Hookers like a...well, like a hooker swallows whatever a hooker gets paid to swallow.
It's classic.

• Menendez has a reputation, so anything that gets thrown his general direction will prob'ly stick as far as some folks are concerned. 
• some sleazoid lawyer gets paid to dish some dirt (ie: make shit up)
• the story starts out at Daily Caller (or WND or Drudge or whatever)
• it gets picked up by "the real news guys" 
• by the time it's debunked, the wingnuts have another Libtard Myth memorized and ready to drop into any conversation about any policy - and one they can pull out whenever one of their guys gets caught actually doing something shitty.

And in the meantime?  Bob's real problems are conveniently ignored, and we can all go back to being comfortably numb.

The good news is that ABC somehow managed to find it's own "center", and instead of going with the flow, they did a little thing (that we used to able to recognize) called "JOURNALISM".

In some ways - at least in some cases - the narrative is starting to change.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Today's Tweet

From Jay Rosen, NYU:

I don't use expressions like LOL, but if I did... RT @natpkguy Democrats: 1+1= 2 Republicans: 1+1= 3 Media: 1+1= 2.5.
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) February 26, 2013

The Krugman Speaks

From Krugman's blog at NYT:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I don’t know about the divines bit, but the little statesmen thing is completely accurate. Suppose George Osborne were to admit that austerity isn’t working. What, then, would be left of his claim to be qualified to do, well, anything? He has to stick it out until something turns up,no matter how many lives it destroys.

Pretty much the same thing is going on among pundits now stuck in what Jonathan Chait memorably calls the “fever swamp of the center”. Suppose that some pundit who has spent his whole career calling for bipartisanship, a compromise between the extremes of left and right, were to admit the plain fact that Obama is very much a centrist, who is in particular proposing deficit reduction through exactly the kind of mix of tax hikes and spending cuts “centrist” pundits demand — and that the GOP, by contrast, is an extremist organization whose extremism is almost solely responsible for the bitterness of the partisan divide. A pundit making that admission would in effect be saying that everything he has said and done for the past several years was not just useless but harmful, actively misleading readers about the state of the debate. He just can’t do it.

The point he makes on careerism is kinda what the whole thing ends up being about.  Once you've made it more important to maintain your position of power or influence within "the system", you've made the collapse of that system inevitable.  It can take lotsa time, but these things have an unerring mechanism for self-correction.

Re-read your Ayn Rand - Contradiction exists, but it cannot prevail.

Today's Tweet

This is a screen shot from twitter.

Check out the rest of them at :#bothsidesdont

hat tip = Professional Left Podcast #160

Both Sides

The centrist meme starts with a perfectly reasonable assumption that there're at least two sides of the story; that we need to be sure we're addressing questions from as wide a perspective as possible. All well and good, but it starts to fall apart when you take that next step and assume that ALL issues MUST have at least two sides (they don't), and that both points of view are ALWAYS valid (they aren't).

While Centrism has its uses, as a political philosophy, it's just intellectually lazy. It's a product of our need not to feel embarrassed because we supported the wrong candidates and causes; or because we aren't willing to do the work required of every good citizen in a democracy; or that we were just following a fashionable trend; or whatever.

To take just a piece of the argument, here's Bill Maher exposing the lie of "both sides do it".