Rick Perry

..is a total tool.

Perry officially retired in January so he could start collecting his lucrative pension benefits early, but he still gets to collect his salary — and has in turn dramatically boosted his take-home pay. (Texas Tribune, hat tip = Balloon Juice)

And also too:

The Free Market At Work

(hat tips = The Agonist and Hullabloo)

"Welcome to the AshleyMadison.com era"

From Media Bistro:

“Now that Newt is the leading contender in the race for the GOP nomination, we felt compelled to make a point to illustrate how times have changed when a serial divorcee/adulterer is capturing the hearts of the American people,” says Noel Biderman, founder and CEO, premier online affair service Ashleymadison.com.

One From Wonkette

Wonkette is on a roll.

...what we need is another ultimately unsuccessful Third Party Candidate to safely release the steam of rage from the national pressure cooker. It worked in the 1980s and the 1990s and all the way to 2000, heh heh. (Funny how Liberal Democrats kind of lost the taste for Third Party candidates after the GOP stomped back into the White House using Nader’s cover, right?)

La Musica

Too Typical

Did the KKK use the slogan "Keep America American"? Yes. Did the Romney campaign use the slogan "Keep America American"? Yes. Is any of that in dispute at all? No. But Tweety decides (for all of MSNBC, apparently) that they have to walk it back. And the reasoning is that MSNBC should have - but didn't - get a comment from Romney first. Really? Was yesterday the only chance anybody had to call Romney? Are all the phones broken or busy today? MSNBC has not been shy about reporting on Nixon's Southern Strategy in 1968, or Reagan's dog-whistle speech in Mississippi in 1980. They managed to point out the Trent Lott / Strom Thurmond / Dixiecrat connections, and they took several opportunities that I recall to remind us of Robert Byrd's KKK past. Wanna know why "Independents" keep gettin' suckered by Repubs? It's because the Dems and the Librul Media are so easy to paint as appeasers and apologizers. Grow some hair on your sack. If what you said was true, then stand up and defend it.

Bill O'Reilly: Super Genius

What is it with this guy? There's a part here where he actually tries to make the point that the US military is not "government".

Assuming my standard position that there are no accidents on DumFux News, then O'Reilly is either advocating for change, or he's announcing a change. I have to wonder - how close are we to the Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of a US Military-as-Private-Enterprise?

Considering his comment that "the government can't even run the Post Office" (which it doesn't, btw - and hasn't since about 1973), maybe he's just painting himself into a rhetorical corner(?)

(hat tip = Wonkette)

Where's Life Magazine When Ya Need It?

What if the war ended and nobody noticed?

It's A Wonderment (updated)

NOTE: I couldn't get any confirmation on this - no news outlets are picking it up at all.  So it's prob'ly falsely reported or an outright hoax.

This one has me going in 37 different directions at once. I'll try to get some guidance by running it by some people who should know about such things and come back to it later, but I feel the need to post it right now.

Some questions: Is this what Rumsfeld's vision was all about? Did he simply take Smedley Butler's characterization of the US military as "muscle for the corporations" and let it fly? 

This OathKeeper stuff has been around for a dozen (?) years, and the militarization of law enforcement has been there for just as long - why is this coming up big again now? Is it just because of this latest fight over Defense Authorization, or is it because "the wrong guy" happens to be in the Oval Office?

However it lays out, there's political gold in this for somebody.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Political Recycling

The Gingrich believes poor kids are in need of some good old fashioned lessons in The American Work Ethic, so he says we should put them to work scrubbing floors and toilets in their schools.  For right now, let's try to ignore the stunningly blatant hypocrisy of Big Government raising children, and just concentrate on the Modified Southern Strategy aspects of it all. (pause to reflect)

OK, now let's take a look at WIllard's latest foray into race baiting (via Wonkette):

Here’s the title of a pamphlet published in 1920 by the United Klans of America, as found in the catalog of Yale’s Beinecke Library:

Why you should become a klansman : of interest to white, protestant, native born Americans who want to keep America American.

None of this is new in any way shape or form. Let the freak speak his mind; and sometimes all you can do is turn your back and walk away, but then somebody who would normally be on his side has to have the balls to shut him down.

Something To Watch For?

I've been wondering when the smart guys on Wall Street would wake up and start to see the Occupy thing as a customer service issue, and apparently, some of them are doing just that.

From Mother Jones:

Founded in early October by former British diplomat Carne Ross, the 60-person Alternative Banking Group has become a repository for OWS-friendly financial insiders. It includes current and former investment bankers, traders, and lawyers for the securities industry, but also many laymen—including housewives, people who used to sleep in Zuccotti Park, and guys with piercings who wear Che Guevara T-shirts. The group shares Occupy Wall Street's website, its nonhierarchical structure, and its distaste for partisan politics. "I'd say the one thing that everybody agrees on is that the system isn't working," O'Neil says. "And there is nothing about being a Republican or a Democrat in that statement."

Early in the piece, there's a reference to a reform proposal put out by Jon Huntsman that I think has some merit - which prob'ly means the Wrong Wing Media will never let it see the light of day.

Today's Pix

Taking The War On Christmas Very Seriously Now

About That Liberal Press Thing

Couldn't remember if I'd posted the graphic when it came out, so just in case I missed it, here it is.

And BTW, this isn't some kind of outlier.  The basics that lead to these results don't ever change more than a few percentage points.

I remember Pew doing the same thing after the 2000 election, when the heat was really on - seemed like the nutters couldn't stop howling about how the press was constantly trying to put Gore in the White House.  Well, guess what, boys and girls?  Pew's research in 2001 showed a bias in favor of Bush positives and Gore negatives in every major newspaper - it all worked out to be something like 7-5 against Gore.  And of course it got practically no play outside of Academe.

Guess what else?  The effect this slanted coverage has on our thinking actually has a name: "Media Priming", and while it's news to me, it's been around for a very long time.

Here's a fun little appetizer from Melissa Dahl at msnbc.com:

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

And from a guy named Scott London, a good breakdown of "Framing":

In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems.

Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a 'context of no context.'"

--more--

In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."

There are no accidents when it comes to what goes on in our politics.  It's being carefully scripted for us, and we have to find ways to countervail it.

A Quick Take On Newt

The Gingrich has figured out how to make his troubled (and troubling) past go away.

First, the rubes are kinda predisposed to forget and/or ignore things that happened 10 or 15 or 20 years ago - or 20 minutes ago for that matter.  It's history, y'know, and ol' Newt's a highly regarded "historian"; and they'll take his word for what happened over the word of some librul doofus with a google machine any day of the week.

Second, he sounds like he's adopting a style of narrating his past as a story of sin and redemption.  And the timing couldn't be better.  After a parade of false prophets, Jesus Newt is finally born in the dark days of December blah blah blah.  Starting in January, he's visited by the wise men, and gifted with wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina (ok, maybe a close 2nd in NH).  And by Easter, in a flood of heavy donations covered by the din of heavenly choruses, he's fully resurrected and takes his place at the right hand of The Lord our Reagan blah blah blah.

Or he could revert to his usual form and just self-destruct in the middle of it all.  Every time he's held real power, he's over-reached in the most imperious way possible, and come crashing down under the weight of his grotesquely over-sized ego.

(BTW: I managed to screw the pooch by predicting success for Herman Cain, so there's no way to take this but with a handful of salt - as always)

But - ya heard it here first.

Sounds Encouraging

A judge in Colorado apparently has some real balls for a change.  How long before we get the Repub Chorus singing the standard Judicial Activism tune?

"There is not enough money in the system to permit school districts across the state to properly implement standards-based education and to meet the requirements of state law and regulation," she wrote in her ruling. "This is true for districts of every description. . . . There is not one school district that is sufficiently funded. This is an obvious hallmark of an irrational system."

You don't get good solutions just by throwing money at a problem (duh), but you don't get any solutions at all unless you start working the problem.  It always takes more time, effort and money than anybody wants to spend, and we've gotten really good at whining about it. Grow up, shut up and pony up.  We got shit to do.

Read the story in The Denver Post.

This Won't End Well

From truthout.com:

A logical explanation of why true oversight hearings have continued to decline is that there is less and less stomach to hold hearings that would expose and embarrass powerful corporations and individuals who would or could become a steady source of campaign money. So, it is easier to have fewer hearings and hearings on safe subjects such as social issues and to attack bureaucracies that aren't within the political beliefs of the party in power. Meanwhile, as more and more of the federal government is contracted out to major corporations, there is less interest in exposing fraud, waste and abuse in contracting, favoritism in contract selection, and other forms of cronyism such as the revolving door.

It would be simply astounding to find no fire when there's so much smoke in the air.