Jay Smooth

I lost track of this guy for a while.  Glad I caught up with him again.

Who Are Those Guys?

The Washington Post has gone from a truly great example of Gutsy and Righteous Journalism in the mid-70s to its current smarmy incarnation as a Bullshit Centrist Rag.  And seeing as how this piece is co-authored by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, on the surface, it's just more of the same "both sides do it" malarkey.  But it doesn't just feel different - it says it straight out: "the Republican Party is the problem".

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

Then scan through some of the (>5000) comments - which (by my quick and totally unsubstantiated estimation) appear to be running 10-1 in support of the basic premise that the GOP is the problem.  Tho' I think a more accurate characterization would be that the extremists in the GOP who are masquerading as conservatives are the problem.

So like driftglass and BlueGal have been saying, conservatives are lying to us and those dirty liberals were right all along.

Which brings me to my newest bumper sticker idea:

Give A Listen

Nothing better than smart people talking about stuff that matters.

(this is just a screen shot - click on the link above, knucklehead)

d r i f t g l a s s

Just gotta give a nod to this guy:

Using the 1972 Democratic Party platform as a baseline, note what happened to the Left over the last 40 years. And ask yourself, honestly, in that time, have the Left's policies and expectations tacked consistently towards the 1972/GOP Right...or has the Left seized America's guns?

Have we outlawed religion?

Has the Democratic Party moved to make abortion 100% legal and government funded through the ninth month of pregnancy, no questions asked?

Is pot cheap, legal and available over-the-counter at every CVS and Piggly Wiggly?

Have we sold off our last battleship?

Are our schools impossibly well-funded?

Does every citizen have free, lifetime health care?

Does every building sport solar panels?

Is gay marriage legal everywhere?

Have we nationalized our banks and oil companies?

Do we tax the rich at 98%?

Is there an 18 month paid parental leave by law? And three months of mandatory paid vacation?

Is there a $22/hr minimum wage?

Is union membership now mandatory?

Are fully half of the Democratic members Congress stocked open and committed Socialists?

Are a quarter of the Democratic members Congress stocked open and committed Communists?

No.

None of these things have happened.

And yet unless all of these things and more were true, there is simply no comparison between the slow, depressing rightward slog of the Left over the last 40 years...

...and the rage-fueled, anti-science, anti-environment, anti-woman, anti-freedom, anti-Middle Class bullet train to Crazytown that the Right has been on during this same period:

Libertarian Debunked

I venture into town on the occasional Wednesday (or sometimes Friday) to meet up with some buddies to have a little drink and talk a little treason.  Sitting at the outside tables on a recent evening, I spotted the ubiquitous Driving-While-Cell-Phoning motorist and made the usual comment, "Hey lady, hang up and drive your car".

My Libertarian friend contended that I sounded like "a typical Nanny-State Liberal who needs to tell everybody how to live their lives".  Something else came up and we didn't get into it, but I've been thinking about that for a while now.  His assertion that basically, I was butting in where I didn't belong is one of those great turnaround attacks that tend to stop debate, but here's the thing:  Isn't it really the case that the driver talking on the phone is the one forcing the rest of us to live by her standards?  Why do all the other drivers and bike riders and pedestrians have to accommodate her?  What's so special about her and what she has to do?  Why do all of us have to adjust and be a little extra cautious just because she has to "be in touch"?

If I'm a client or a colleague (eg) on the phone with her while she's driving, I know I'm not getting her full attention, and I think I deserve better.

If I'm her friend and I care about what happens to her, then I think I should tell her to hang up and I'll catch her later - or at least I should tell her to pull over for a bit so we can talk.  After all, there's a lot of boneheads on the roads these days who aren't paying as much attention to their driving because they're distracted by something like - I dunno - TALKING ON THE FUCKING PHONE!

Today's Point Rebuttal

Point: Don't blame the war on the warrior.

Rebuttal: What kind of a war ya gonna have if nobody shows up to fight?

Buh Bye, Newt

I'm gonna miss ol' Newt.  The guy's been a consistent source of entertainment, running the gamut of content from his deadpan "Yes" when asked if he was calling Willard a liar, to the way he projects himself into the future and talks about how all the numbers make it impossible for him not to get the nomination, or how we'll have a permanent moon base by the end of his 2nd term.  There's nobody more fun to watch - kinda like some kid on YouTube who does a ballstand when he tries to jump his bike off his mom's porch - it's a little retch-inducing, but I just can't turn away.

It's pretty easy to see why this guy gets 50 large for a speech.  It's a polished performance, and it doesn't matter that it's the classic sales-y yarn that any good huckster learns how to spin - if you do it right, you can get 'em to believe almost anything.  Just make sure you put plenty of plausible sounding goals together with some techno-jargon, place it all far enough in the "future" so the vision is a bit misty and soft-focus, but not so far as to be out of reach.

The message: "Newt has this vision because he's amazing.  I do not have this vision (because I am not amazing), so I need to work really hard to make up for not being amazing like him."

Translation: Newt has some ideas, but no fuckin' clue how to make any of it work, so I get to bust my ass to make it work for all of us.  I also get to pay him large sums of money for the privilege of working my ass off and making him rich, and while I get a little something in return, it'll only be enough to keep me interested, but not enough to make me independent of a guy like Newt, and never enough to be considered his equal."



One other quick note:  At about 16:30, Ol' Newt laments the nastiness of the tone of the rhetoric in congress.  I wonder how it got that way.

Huh?

I've been sifting thru a lot of YouTube stuff on god and religion lately, and sometimes these little tiffs pop up at the oddest times for the oddest reasons.  Here's a "report" on one of my recent faves.

Butter Up And Bend Over

You have to drill down and look deep to get the "whole story", but when it looks this kinda stark it's pretty clear just how fucked we are.

hat tip = TPM

The New Hoover

Vote Romney - 2 Escalades for every wife and an elevator in every garage.

From Prof Krugman via NYT

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just A Thought

We keep hearing about what a horrible problem the National Debt is, but do we know for sure what all has contributed to it? Why is it such a huge number?

Obviously, there're plenty of factors, but I think we can identify 3 main things:
1) Direct Revenue Reduction - aka Tax Cuts
2) Recession - higher unemployment equals fewer tax payers equals lower tax collections
3) Wage Stagnation plus Speculation-Driven Inflation - a multiplier effect

But it seems like we never stop to consider what we've had to borrow in order to spend at least $2 Trillion on a couple of wars, plus an amount we don't even get to know about that's been sucked up by all the Black Ops / Homeland Security boondoggles over the last 10 years.  If you borrow $2 Trillion, you're gonna have to repay it to the tune of about $6 trillion when it's all over - if we get that far.

Anyway, here's a thought:  Let's call it "Bush's War Debts".  But only for a little while - just long enough to squeeze out all of the Sunshine Patriots like Cheney and Giuliani and Bolton, and anybody else who was married to the NeoCons' bullshit fantasies.

Pin the word "debt" to their lapels and let's see how long the rubes stay in line behind 'em.

After a while, it'll naturally evolve to The War Debt, and we might have a chance to get back to where we understand that we don't get to do anything without paying for it - sometimes in ways we hadn't anticipated.

The Greatest Scam

Religion tries to tell me that my life is meaningless without an AfterLife©, and then proceeds to tell me I can obtain this Heavenly Glory only if I believe in this or that brand of god.

Religion is a scam that gives you a disease, and then sells you a cure.

History New Found

"I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character." --Thomas Jefferson

From a site called Liars For Jesus, and a lady who knows her shit.



This David Barton guy is running a typical play from "conservatives".  Take a guy like Tommy Jeff, who practically personified The Enlightenment and who was pretty representative of The Founders' near-unanimous rejection of "princes and popes" - you take that guy and you turn him into something he's not, using revisionist bunkum and outright lies.

Today's Quote

A golden oldie:

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."  --Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Uh Oh

At least one headline writer at one media outlet has had a sudden attack of conscience or integrity or truth-telling - or something - I'm not sure we even have a word for it anymore.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Not to worry tho'.  I'm sure it was just a momentary lapse.  A little Paycheck Reduction Therapy should straighten that guy up and make sure he doesn't run the risk of becoming Fact Addicted or anything.