Dear "Conservatives",

I wanna believe you.  I really do.  I wanna know when the people I'm trusting to run my government are fucking up and/or fucking us over and/or whatever.  We all need you to tell us about the things you find out - especially the shit that goes on in every administration that every administration doesn't want us to know about.  Do that and you're fulfilling your number one obligation to our country.  Your guys aren't in the White House right now, so applying counter weight to the balance of power is what you're supposed be doing.  All well and good - but ya gotta stop just makin' shit up.  Cuz guess what - I'm not inclined to believe one fuckin' thing that falls outa your gob-shite pie-holes any more.

First off, there's plenty of stuff about Obama we should be talking about that we're not talking about, because you won't let us talk about it, because you're too busy jumping up and down screeching about stoopid "issues" that're either trivial or straight-up made-up bullshit.

Let's see if Ol' Doc Maddow can 'splain some of it:



Repubs are fond of saying how fucked up Gubmint is, and they seem to be working really hard to make sure it says that way.

Today's Pix

Today's Best Comment

From the comments at The American Conservative:

Cliff says:
June 3, 2013 at 9:18 am

The Tea Party was founded in much the same way as the Monkees…

The Parade Of Clowns

...continues unabated, via James Fallows at The Atlantic:

The menace of the all-powerful bicycle lobby -- revealed at last! Writers at the Onion, take careful notes.

The best part of this video comes very near the beginning when Ms Rabinowitz more than implies (ie: makes a rather straight-up claim) that she represents the entire citizenry of NYC - and the journalist interviewer Press Poodle let's it go completely unchallenged.



The Rupert Street Journal editorial page was a big part of WingNut Central Command even before Papa Murdoch came along, so this shouldn't be such a big surprise for me.  It's just that every time I get a big whiff of the atmosphere from inside that "conservative" bubble, it makes my eyes water and I feel a certain churning in my bowels - like I'd spent the last coupla days chompin' on Feen-a-mint and slammin' Metamucil shots or somethin'.

I mean, c'mon, lady.  Offering bikes for people to ride in a city that's way over-packed with cars - is that really what you're convinced is a sure sign of impending tyranny and enslavement?  Seriously?

This is just too fuckin' weird, man.

It's A Wonderment

From a bit in Forbes, by the leftie-ish Rick Ungar:

With Medicaid eligibility about to be expanded in some 30 states, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Wal-Mart has responded by cutting employee hours—and thereby wages—even further in order to push more of their workers into state Medicaid programs and increase Wal-Mart profits. Good news for Wal-Mart shareholders and senior management earning the big bucks—not so good for the taxpayers who will now be expected to contribute even larger amounts of money to subsidize Wal-Mart’s burgeoning profits.

But, at long last and in a move gaining popularity around the nation, the State of California is attempting to say ‘enough’ to Wal-Mart and the other large retailers who are looking to the taxpayers to take on the responsibility for the company’s employees—a responsibility Wal-Mart has long refused to accept.

It’s about time.

--and--

Of course, the California Retailers Association, where Wal-Mart Stores WMT +1.14%, Inc. is listed as a board member company, is not quite so pleased with the legislation. According to Bill Dombrowski, chief executive of the Association, ”It’s one of the worst job-killer bills I’ve seen in my 20 years in Sacramento, and that says a lot. The unions are fixated on Wal-Mart, but that’s not the issue here. It’s a monster project to implement the Affordable Care Act, and having this thrown on top is not helpful.”

One wonders if we will ever see the day when Americans will stop falling for the hostage-taking narrative consistently put forward by those whose job it is to defend the indefensible. At the first suggestion of finally putting a chink in Wal-Mart’s policy of profiting at the taxpayers’ expense—a practice that should have every American thinking about what passes for free-enterprise in the United States today—the response is to always threaten to take away jobs if we dare to challenge their business practices, even if those practices cost us billions.

I'm not a regular visitor to their site, so I don't know how often they do this kinda thing, but seeing this under the flagship Forbes brand seems odd to me.  It feels encouraging tho', especially considering that Ungar is staking out what has traditionally been the conservative position when we approach the issue of government involvement in private business.

When Wal-Mart practically owns local and state politicians; when they dominate the retail sector of any portion of any economy; and as a result they get to use the power of government to enforce their business plan - isn't that almost exactly the kind of overly-powerful relationship we're all supposed to be against?

Be sure to browse the comments too - Ungar goes toe-to-toe with some of the more rabid knee-jerkers. 

Celebrating Life's Little Victories

How come it seems like when you see one of these guys, it's just always at Wal-Mart?

Today's Quote

The best line I've seen today is this one from Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, translating into English a comment Marsha Blackburn made in her native ShitSpeak:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) says women don’t want laws guaranteeing them equal pay, because they want to have the “power and the control” to let men make those decisions for them: Marsha Blackburn: Women ‘Don’t Want’ Equal Pay Laws.

Just Another KrugMan Post

This one's by way of Balloon Juice, excerpting from NYT:

Last month the Congressional Budget Office released its much-anticipated projections for debt and deficits, and there were cries of lamentation from the deficit scolds who have had so much influence on our policy discourse. The problem, you see, was that the budget office numbers looked, well, O.K.: deficits are falling fast, and the ratio of debt to gross domestic product is projected to remain roughly stable over the next decade. Obviously it would be nice, eventually, to actually reduce debt. But if you’ve built your career around proclamations of imminent fiscal doom, this definitely wasn’t the report you wanted to see.

--and--

Start with Social Security. The retirement program’s trustees do foresee rising spending as the population ages, with total payments rising from 5.1 percent of G.D.P. now to 6.2 percent in 2035, at which point they stabilize. This means, by the way, that all the talk of Social Security going “bankrupt” is nonsense; even if nothing at all is done, the system will be able to pay most of its scheduled benefits as far as the eye can see.

 --and--

What about Medicare? For years, many people — myself included — have warned that Medicare is a much bigger problem than Social Security, and the latest report from the program’s trustees still shows spending rising from 3.6 percent of G.D.P. now to 5.6 percent in 2035. But that’s a smaller rise than in previous projections. Why?

The answer is that the long-term upward trend in health care costs — a trend that has affected private insurance as well as Medicare — seems to have flattened out significantly over the past few years. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are indications that some of the cost-reducing measures contained in the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, are actually starting to “bend the curve,” just as they were supposed to. And because there are a number of cost-reducing measures in the law that have not yet kicked in, there’s every reason to believe that this favorable trend will continue.

--and (the big payoff)--

So what are we looking at here? The latest projections show the combined cost of Social Security and Medicare rising by a bit more than 3 percent of G.D.P. between now and 2035, and that number could easily come down with more effort on the health care front. Now, 3 percent of G.D.P. is a big number, but it’s not an economy-crushing number. The United States could, for example, close that gap entirely through tax increases, with no reduction in benefits at all, and still have one of the lowest overall tax rates in the advanced world.

How The KrugMan Speaks

If you're in a running rhetorical battle with almost anybody about almost anything - and the other side starts to slam you for being rude or personal or shrill or whatever - when they start to complain about your tone, you can take it as a pretty good sign that you're winning.



BTW: I always tho't of Zakaria as a pretty straight shooter.  Not always right and certainly not always in agreement with me.  But then he kinda started drifting into The Zone of False Equivalencies.  It's like the Suits took him aside and had "the talk" with him.  The talk that points out that The News has to pay its way too, and if you piss off 20-30% of the viewers, they won't watch the show, which means they won't see the commercials, which means the sponsors won't buy the airtime, which means we won't make our numbers, which means you won't get paid, which means we'll just pick any of the 5,000 Makeup-and-Hair-Gel Models working in local markets to plug into your time slot, which means you need to concentrate on "balancing this thing out", which means you will not focus in on the facts, which means you will spend interview time hyping the cat-fight du jour - cuz that's what sells the Trinkets and Trash, which is what keeps the rubes bent over and greased up.

Ah Yes, I See It Now

Wes Clark's a pretty smart guy.  I haven't checked on any of this, but I'll bet it's at least as close to The Truth as anything you're gonna get talking to anybody else.

We spend about 1/2 a TRILLION dollars every year trying to secure the flow of oil into the US.

You're a pretty smart cookie too, so I'm sure you're wondering, why is it OK for us to spend all that money every year?  Two basic reasons:
1) The US economy is designed, engineered and marketed as Petroleum-Based.
$15 Trillion dollars per year in GDP, and prob'ly 80-90% of it depends on relatively inexpensive oil products in one way or another.  $500 Billion (aka 1/30th of your "gross revenue") sounds like cheap insurance to some of these pricks.

2) Clark says there's something like $170 Trillion worth of oil still in the ground.



And, oh yeah - 3) Most of the various layers of Government in the US reflect the "realities" of our Petro-Based economy, and the political community has again been corporatized to the point where it's not much more than just another Business Unit.

Knowledge is Power?  Not here.  Not anymore.

from WhoWhatWhy ( a new one for me) with a hat tip to Democratic Underground