Today In Faithiness

If Jesus was a live today, he'd probably have a lawyer and an agent and a publicist who'd all be working hard to keep hucksters like Sarah Palin from moochin' off his fame and his public image.

My hero, Charlie Pierce:

Will o'god, it's the week of St. Patrick's Day, is there no respite, no brief truce, no fragile ceasefire, in the War On Christmas?

Apparently not. 

Today's Gun Nut

From Addicting Info:

One of the few absolutes from the pro-gun advocate side of the gun violence conversation is that they demand that we believe that gun owners are responsible people. That it is just “them”, the nebulous of bad people, or crazy people who kill with guns. They further say “Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals.”…Wayne LaPierre at the January 30st Senate hearing on gun violence.

But reality and history prove them wrong. Over 230,000 guns [reported] of “law-abiding gun owners” end up in criminal hands each year because gun owners don’t properly store their weapons. And hundreds of kids die and thousands are wounded each year with unattended firearms. These are not responsible “law-abiding gun owners” and they are a big part of the gun violence problem and the pro-gun community acts in their words and deeds as enablers to them.

Beltway Bubble-Think

Wonkette has a good takedown on Paul Ryan and the Very Serious People - and the Press Poodles who just can't give up on the extremely minuscule probability that somebody in the GOP might come up with some proposal that doesn't closely resemble something you stepped in as you were walking through the park.

It is budget season again in Washington, D.C., which means it is time for the villagers in our nation’s capital to pretend that a plan written by Congressman Paul Ryan, who was last seen on election night icing down his tuchus after being spanked hard by Barry Bamz and Old Handsome Joe Biden, is not the legislative equivalent of a rotting whale carcass washed up on a beach.

And, as suggested, here's our new National Anthem:

The Seven Godly Sins

Wrath: God condemns those who don't believe in him to eternal damnation and torture.
Envy: God punishes those who believe in other gods.
Sloth: God allows tragedies and disasters to occur which he could easily prevent.
Gluttony: God has plenty while millions go hungry.
Pride: God demands his followers' complete devotion.
Greed: God's followers must pay tithes and make offerings in exchange for his blessings.
Lust: God insists on being party to every marriage.

Sounds like a great gig - where do I get an application?

Today's Silly

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

The Rising Fuss

Part of what's coming back around is racism, which is really just another manifestation of the kind of class-bashing that's gone on in this country from the beginning.  (the whole concept of Racial Difference was invented in the Antebellum South as a handy mechanism for keeping poor white trash separate from the blackfolk, which helped keep everybody focused on something other than how they were all slaves to the interests of the landowners in one way or another)

And we're seeing it blossom all over again with this continuing beat-down of working stiffs who put in longer hours (and soon maybe, longer than the usual 50 years on the job), who are being made to feel they're just not worthy of anything but the meagering crumbs left over when the Executive Committee's done with their latest circle jerk - oops, I mean spreadsheet reviews that indicate there's another 3/10ths of a penny per share in dividends to squeeze out of the labor force.

Melissa Harris-Perry:

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Something else that keeps popping into my head:  Take a good look at a few movies from the 1970s sometime, and pay a little attention to the background they were filmed against. Try The Taking Of Pelham 123 or Harry And Tonto - movies that weren't just trying to show the blight, but were supposedly showing "The Real America" at the time.  Any of it look familiar?

The underlying point is to keep us thinking, "Things are kinda shitty, and it seems like I'm gettin' fucked over pretty bad, but maybe it's partly my own fault because I'm not working hard enough or I'm not smart enough, or I wasn't prescient enough to see what was coming; but hey - at least I ain't black".

I dunno - maybe I see threads and connections that aren't really there.  Maybe I'm just being paranoid.  But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people who play politics at any level of any real consequence to know enough to look for ways to consolidate their own positions and to try to keep their opposition from uniting against them.

Besides, I may be a little paranoid but that doesn't mean nobody's out to get me.

Today's Smartest Thing

They're talking about the sausage-making in DC, and at around the 4:45 mark, Alexis Goldstein (OWS) makes an observational analogy that just knocked me my off my chair.

Paraphrasing - lobbyists get in to see the Congress Critters so regularly and so often - effectively pushing constituents and consumers and "regular people" off to the side - that it starts to look like a Denial of Service Attack.

Watch, and gape - and then try to explain to me how you think your Reps in congress are there to serve you.

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About That Dead Elephant

It's generally not a good idea to predict the actual demise of a whole political party.  I wanna say I recall a time not that long ago when lotsa people were saying the Dems wouldn't survive, and gosh, just look at 'em now.

However, there's plenty to be gained politically by making the Cool Kid appeal - ie: "nobody votes for those guys anymore because they're terminally lame and def un-cool", or "they're so 2006", or "I'll bet they're all Nickelback fans", or whatever.

An awful lot of us just run with the pack.  We pay little or no attention until some encounter when we might say something previously considered hip or evenhanded or otherwise stylish and end up getting the feeling we've made some kind of social error by not being in step with a change in political fashion.  That's why yard signs and bumper stickers work - they give people permission to vote a certain way without having to invest much time or effort in making a committed decision. When we see enough evidence of a sufficient number of other people doing the thinking and taking action, and formulating the rhetoric, we start to feel safe enough to go along with the crowd.

I know a woman who told me straight out last summer that she wouldn't be making up her mind on voting for Obama or Romney until she was sure about "who the nation was backing".

So anyway, from an old(ish) post at Addicting Info, here's some speculation about what's eating the GOP from the inside out:

What Reed, and other party bosses, are ignoring is that in their grab for political power, they attempted to blend together three opposing factors, and the pressure between these groups is about to blow the lid wide open.
These groups are:

Libertarians vs. social conservatives – Social Conservatives want more government intrusion in to people’s lives, the opposite of the Libertarian government-out mentality.

Right-wing populists vs. the pro-business crowd – Populists are against the subsidies which the pro-business groups live on, and they are at each others throats.

Deficit reduction hawks vs. small government activists – Deficit hawks want to reduce the deficit, but a small government cannot manage its deficit due to the lack of revenue. With such opposing demands, it is only a matter of time before they come to blows.

In the recruitment of the radical fringe, what, in ages past, would be the Know-Nothings or the Dixiecrats, the GOP has sown the seeds of its own destruction. Now the party has come to accept it. 

Today's History Lesson

Heroes remain heroes only as long as we don't look too close.  It's always important to judge slowly.

From a long pice at AlterNet:

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

--and--

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

--and--

When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.

It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Iraq By The Numbers

This is the best rundown I've found recently - and expanding on the basic theme (as Fugelsang does) - if you voted for Jr Bush and/or you supported the war in Iraq, you never ever get to make any noise about the deficit or the debt again.  You just get to shut the fuck up while the rest of us get some of this shit straightened out.