Grandstanding

This is about as bad as it gets.

via Little Green Footballs:

The Justice Department announced today that the House Republicans who voted to find Eric Holder in criminal contempt are a bunch of grandstanding buffoons.

Not in so many words, of course: Justice Department Won’t Pursue Case Against Holder.

So Darrell Issa makes a big show of "investigating" Fast & Furious, building up a head of steam that finally explodes on Eric Holder in a dramatic vote to hold the AG in Contempt of Congress - knowing the whole damned time that NOTHING WILL COME OF IT.

The vote itself may have given us a wee peek at how "seriously" everybody was taking the thing: YEAS = 95, NAYS = 14.  Keep in mind the entire House of Reps voted on this piece of shit, and there were 324 NO VOTES.  435 Representatives, and almost 75% of 'em either registered NO VOTE or skipped the little charade altogether.

“The longstanding position of the Department of Justice has been and remains that we will not prosecute an executive branch official under the contempt of Congress statute for withholding subpoenaed documents pursuant to a presidential assertion of executive privilege,” says Deputy Attorney General James Cole in a letter to the House speaker, John Boehner.

The letter notes that during the Reagan administration, DOJ took the position that the contempt statute could not constitutionally be applied to an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege. That policy was first articulated in a memo written by Ted Olson when he was at DOJ in 1984.
Cole writes that the position has been asserted several times since then, most recently during the Bush administration in 2008.

He concludes by saying that the Justice Department has determined that Holder’s response to the House committee subpoena “does not constitute a crime” and the Department will not refer the matter to a grand jury “or take any other action to prosecute the attorney general.”

It's all just a fucking game with these assholes.

Everybody Pays

Here's WIllard talking with DumFux Cavuto about having just signed the Romneycare bill into law in 2006.

Highlites = 2:00, 4:00, 5:30.

"We already have universal healthcare..."



When it comes to Obamacare, it's not hard to accept the notion that "conservatives" aren't against the policy - they're against Obama.  That makes a kind of weird political sense to me here in 2012.  What I really don't get is that so many people are so adamantly opposed to something that brings a solid benefit to them, and fits with the "stand on your own feet" approach (Individual Mandate), AND which fits the Competitive Markets model.

SCOTUS And ACA

Modern Methods (updated)

I caught this episode on The Science Channel the other night - this is what explains to me some of the methods political hucksters use to get us leaning and keep us in line.

It's what prompted a previous post - Modern Methods.

And for all the Centrists out there, please look around and tell me what examples you can find to show that the Dems are trying to pull the False Memory trick.  I realize they're using a lot of the same advertising gimmicks, but I've not seen the outright attempt to change the facts of historical events to fit their ideology.  That seems to be the near-exclusive province of the Wingnuts.



Full episode on YouTube

At about 14:30, they start talking about the causes and effects of Memory Errors.  Once this is understood, it's a short step to manipulation.  ie: Play up the fear, which revs up the amygdala; plant the new memory, and you've got yourself a new convert.  Sounds like a pretty handy little tool to me.

That Was Odd

So ACA is upheld by SCOTUS today, and the wingnuts are having a deuce of a time trying hard to blame Obama for the whole thing while also practically turning themselves inside out to avoid criticizing one of their pet "conservatives", Chief Justice Roberts.  I don't know why, but it just seems a little weird to me.

The Assault

The decisions regarding any woman's healthcare needs has to be left to each woman.  And if you believe in free will, then you damn sure better be prepared to let people make decisions on their own, without your interference, and without your peevish little fears of sexuality, or that somebody might make a choice you don't agree with.

An open letter to GOP (Addictive Info)

A thousand State House restrictions on the rights of women.

Mr Job Creator

You have to know what a tin-plated fuckin' phony Willard is just by watching him try to maintain some semblance of cool when he walks on camera.

But the giant steaming pile of Mitt-speak when he talks about the economy and how he knows everything there is to know about creating jobs - man, not even the Shit Flies are gonna land on that scow.

From WaPo (which sometimes tries so hard to remember they're supposed to be a newspaper - it's so cute when they do that):

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While economists debate whether the massive outsourcing of American jobs over the last generation was inevitable, Romney in recent months has lamented the toll it’s taken on the U.S. economy. He has repeatedly pledged he would protect American employment by getting tough on China.

AGW And Climate Change

Mt Everest then and now:

And a Ted talk:



Questions?

Modern Methods

Actually, I don't really know how modern it is, but Repubs have developed an extremely effective approach to convincing people of the "rightness" of their political views.

The one overarching objective of this process is to turn somebody into somebody he's not.

eg 1:
Sarah Palin had no real chops as a politician, and certainly no great knowledge as a citizen (or as a human being for that matter), but the GOP needed us to think she was ready to serve as VP so they mounted an all-out campaign to turn her into some kind of Statesman Savant.

eg 2:
John Kerry is a mostly honorable guy and (as much as possible, I think) a legitimate war hero, but the GOP couldn't afford direct comparisons between him and W, so in 2004 they set about turning Kerry into a French-ified flip-flopping coward who lied about his war record to get medals blah blah blah.

This shit works because too many of us just don't have the time or the inclination to try to sort it out and find what the truth really is.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."
Thomas Paine

Sounds good, doesn't it?  Now, maybe you trust me to verify the stuff I put in here and maybe you don't, but how many people are going to look at that quote and just accept it at face value, versus the ones who'll take 45 seconds to Google it and at least make a cursory effort to check it out?

Enter Thomas Jefferson.  Even the the jerkiest of "conservative" jerks know they're not gonna make it to where they wanna go by sliming Tommy Jeff, so there's an ongoing effort on the part of the Wingnuts to co-opt Jefferson, and turn him into a guy who said things that seem to support the Christianists' point of view.

Some of what Mr Jefferson actually had to say:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes."

"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind."

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

 Some of the bullshit they want you to buy:

"Sir, no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I as chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example." monticell.org

"Without God, liberty will not last." monticello.org

 "The Bible is the source of liberty" monticello.org

Take nothing for granted.  Always check, especially when it seems this or that "quotation" attributed to a "Founding Father" seems to be in near-perfect alignment with any particular ideology.  Let's be careful out there.

With Apologies To Mr Godwin

..again.  A popular "conservative" debate trick right now is to refer to ACA as National Socialist Healthcare, obviously trying hard to get people to create a mental link between  Obama and the Nazis.  Not exactly new, but that kinda manipulative shit's been working for them for a good long time so why give it up now?

But anyway, another one of their favorite tricks is to revise (ie: pervert) history to the point that they claim Hitler was an atheist and so the horrors of The 3rd Reich were possible only because he espoused non-belief, which of course invites the inference that Atheist = Nazi.

Well, gosh - guess what?

It's popular among Christian apologists to claim that Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are all consequences of atheism, secularism, and liberalism. Such arguments fly in the face of reality: Adolf Hitler regularly proclaimed his faith in God, Nazi ideology was committed to supporting Christianity (on its own terms, of course), and Nazi anti-Semitism was firmly grounded in Christian anti-Semitism. Hitler's theism, religiosity, and Christianity are supported in his own words. His beliefs were not quite what most Christians today believe, but they are part of the same family and nowhere near secular atheism.