A Day Late

I wanted to post something that connected the recent murder sprees with the quasi-investigation of Right Wing Extremism from a few years ago, but of course, better bloggers beat me to it.

The Agonist

Crooks and Liars

You probably remember the earsplitting wingnut screeching that greeted this man's analysis of the threat posed to the country by right-wing extremism - a report, incidentally, commissioned by the Bush administration. (Dave Neiwert was, of course, on the case.) If only our politicians had enough spine to stand up to the predictable rantings of the armchair experts, Daryl Johnson's important work would have continued and maybe even expanded to the point where the Wisconsin shooting could have been prevented.

Even The Daily Beast is on it.

The report triggered a political firestorm. “The piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives,” thundered right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin. Rep. Peter King, a past and current chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in Congress, demanded an investigation. Another congressman, Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida, pronounced himself “very offended and really disturbed that they would even say our military veterans, our returning war heroes would be capable of committing any terrorist acts.”

--and--

“Since Obama took office, there have been nearly 20 extremist right-wing attacks and plots, including the killing of almost a dozen police officers in six separate attacks,” Johnson said in an interview last year. Among them was an attempt in 2011—foiled at the last minute—to plant a homemade backpack bomb at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march in Spokane, Wash. The suspect in that case, Kevin Harpham, is an Army veteran trained in artillery.

I don't like the idea that DHS would get beefed up and start looking like a National Police Force, because eventually they'll get used as just another internal political weapon - and start acting like The Stasi or some damned thing.  And it REALLY gripes my ass when it seems like I'm lining up with the GOP on anything.  So I'm not really - I just want an honest assessment of real and potential threats.

Unfortunately, until we figure out how to free our dysfunctional Press Poodles from their choke chains so they can keep an eye out for the shit politicians love to shovel over us, we're not gonna get anything but more of the same and/or worse.

And BTW (at the risk of perpetuating the evil of centrism and false equivalence): Politicians only bitch about "the power" when they're not the ones who own the power.

Understanding

The nasty little piece put up by a pro-Obama Super PAC:



And from Balloon Juice, some good analysis:

Mark Halperin has a major sad about the pro-Obama SuperPac ad featuring the guy whose wife was killed by Mitt Romney’s corporate policies:

This new super PAC spot, called “Understands,” which the White House and the Obama campaign decline to repudiate, is a horse of a different color. It really isn’t about policy (although some Democrats will claim otherwise). It is meant to use the emotion of a tragic story told by a bereaved widower to make voters think Governor Romney is callous and indifferent, and even is accountable for a woman’s death.

Responsible journalists will continue to do their best in the Freak Show environment to truth squad every ad, video, and communication. But when lines of decency are crossed, more strenuous efforts are required.

A few points here:

• Are these the same “responsible journalists” who give the SwiftBoat attacks a pass?

• The actions of rich and powerful people have consequences. Sometimes these consequences involve the deaths of other people. Deal with it. This isn’t beanbag. Ayn Rand’s heroes didn’t sit around whining about what the moochers and looters said about them. Today’s Galtians shouldn’t either.

• When Mark Halerpin says you’re playing dirty, you’re winning. I love it when wingnuts whine about “Chicago-style” politics. It means they’re afraid. And I want them to be afraid.

On Speaking Up

A TED talk about establishing a culture of advocacy, even at the risk of being seen as simply querulous.

Flippin' Willard

Sometimes, a 30 second attack ad has to be 4 minutes long just to get it all in.

Twilight Of The Elites

I guess I really need to read the book.

From a blurb by Chris Hayes about his new book:

But extreme inequality of the particular kind that we have produces its own particular kind of elite pathology: it makes elites less accountable, more prone to corruption and self-dealing, more status-obsessed and less empathic, more blinkered and removed from informational feedback crucial to effective decision making. For this reason, extreme inequality produces elites that are less competent and more corrupt than a more egalitarian social order would. This is the fundamental paradoxical outcome that several decades of failed meritocratic production have revealed: As American society grows more elitist, it produces a lesser caliber of elites.

Romney Fail

From The Guardian:

Ann Romney's horse fails to win Dressage,

but avoids offending British

Short of mocking Shetland ponies over their lack of stature or laying into zebras for their failure to make a significant contribution to the world of equine culture, Ann Romney's horse Rafalca was always going to struggle to match the sheer incredulity that her husband managed to provoke on his recent overseas trip.

Parade Of Stupid

Stoopid shit we say about teachers:

"Teachers are just glorified babysitters."

So let's pay 'em according to current babysitting rates.
($10/hour x 6 hours) = $60/day
($60/day x 5 days/week) = $300/week
($300/week x 36 weeks) = $10,800/year
($10,800/year x 30 kids) - (30% discount group rate) = $226,800

"My kids never act out at home, I wonder what the teachers are doing wrong in the classroom."

This is most strange.  Maybe if the teachers came to observe you in your home for a few days, they could figure it out.  When's a good time for 30 teachers to drop by your house to get some solid tips on how you go about controlling one or two children?  Or maybe it'd be better if one teacher brought 30 kids to your place and just sat back to watch you work your magic.

And the big one - "We pay those teachers with our hard-earned tax dollars."

Speaking for myself, I pay about $4,200 per year in local taxes (property, sales, car, etc).  I'm not dumb enough to think that all of that money goes to the high school where two of my kids are going this year, so I did a little fairly easy digging, and found out that the school budget total for 2012-13 is about $151 Million, out of a total budget for the whole county of $313 Million.  The arithmetic is pretty simple at the top here.  Schools account for about 48% of what I pay in local taxes - that's $2016.
Now let's pretend the whole $1008 (per kid) goes to "my" high school - what are the basics that I get for my contribution?

• 1260 hours of instruction (for the year) in English, History, a foreign language, Geometry, Algebra, Earth Science, Chorus, Phys Ed, Applied Computer Science, Graphic Design and Marketing, Intro To Psych, etc
• In-school tutoring
• Mentoring, coaching, counseling, etc

(Plus, the joint is clean and safe and well-maintained; the kids get Annual Eye and Hearing tests, and a full time on-sight School Nurse; it has a new turf field, and the building was recently upgraded/updated with a bunch of other new goodies - plus they provide door-to-door transportation every day)

But let's just take the main point here, and further pretend that the whole cost of the school is devoted solely to the teaching of one of my kids for the year.  1260 instruction hours + 20 (or so) tutoring hours = 1280 hours.  Divide that into the 1008 bucks I pay, and suddenly it starts to look like I'm gettin' a pretty good fucking deal at less than 79 cents/hour.

At some point, we have to start to understand that we deserve a much better debate than this endless carping about bad government, unions, taxes; and how everything'll be  peachy if we just apply some common sense and remember how great it all was back when Grandma was girl.

What you really need to remember is that Nostalgia was once classified as mental illness.

Today's Pix

Imagine That

A new study from The Chicano Studies bunch at UCLA, saying DumFux News and Rodeo Clown Radio are filled with hate speech and racism:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study analyzes how social networks that form around the hosts of commercial talk radio shows can propagate messages targeting vulnerable groups. Working with recorded broadcasts from five shows gathered over a six-week period, involving 102 scheduled guests and covering 88 topics, researchers determined hosts’ and guests’ ideological alignment on the topics discussed most frequently — including immigration and terrorism — through a content analysis of on-air statements and website content.  The findings reveal that the hosts promoted an insular discourse that focused on, for example, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and pro-Tea Party positions and that this discourse found repetition and amplification through social media.  Of the 21 guests who appeared more than once, media personalities (57 percent) and political figures (19 percent) accounted for 76 percent.  Fox News accounted for nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of appearances by guests representing an organization.  Political figures accounted for 27 percent of all guests, and the Republican Party and the Tea Party accounted for 93 percent and 89 percent, respectively, of all political figures appearing on the shows. Eighty-nine percent of the scheduled guests were white, and 81 percent were male.

I'm fairly certain Rachel Maddow covered this on her show a year or more ago (it was back when I was a pretty regular viewer so it was at least a year ago), but this starts to look like there's mounting evidence of a multiple-screws-loose situation "on the right".

IV. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The data demonstrate the mutual referencing among a relatively small cluster of nodes that include hosts, guests, and other affiliated individuals and groups. The findings reveal that these individuals and groups were connected by certain ideological sentiments targeting vulnerable groups. For example, discus- sions around immigration and Islam were framed in oppositional and absolutist terms: immigrants as “ille- gal” and law breaking, and Islam as the context of terrorism.

If talk radio and social media sustain a social net- work, they do so within a narrow range of ideological positions reflected by the hosts and guests. What’s more, the predominance of guests that represent media organizations not only minimizes alternate voices but also facilitates the mass broadcast and echoing of the shared ideologies that are discussed on the air. What emerges is a discourse that remains insular rather than open and that finds alignment, repetition, and amplifi- cation through social media. This becomes even more significant in light of the fact that social networks, rather than search engines, increasingly becoming “gateways” to the Internet; in this scenario, network members are more likely to be directed to sites, and therefore connect with nodes, with similar points of view (Jones 2011, 127).

What is surprising about this insularity is the extent to which it is dominated by political figures and media personalities, and less so by issue-driven organizations, advocacy groups, and experts. The 28 political figures listed in table 9 account for 27 percent of all guests, and among them there is an almost complete overlap between Republican Party membership (93 percent) and Tea Party affiliation (89 percent). Among the 21 guests appearing two or

more times, political figures (19 percent) and media personalities (57 percent) account for 76 percent of the total. There is also overlap between these two categories, with a number of former elected officials and candidates working as media commentators. In contrast, the frequency of pro-religion discussions and the number of representatives of religious organiza- tions were relatively minimal on these talk shows. While we have focused on program hosts as the cen- tral nodes in this social network, Fox News plays a notable role with regard to the centrality of program hosts and guests. The data showed that Fox News accounted for 24 percent of the talk radio appearances by guests representing an organization (data from the program-based analysis) and 35 percent of the ties to the programs by way of Pamela Geller (data from the guest-based analysis). Further study can expand on the role of Fox News and other organizations identi- fied in the program-based study with regard to the catalytic role of commercial talk radio in the develop- ment of social networks.28 Of particular interest to us is how biomedical research into physiological and psychological effects can provide indicators of the impact of hate speech targeting vulnerable groups as it circulates through social networks sustained by commercial talk radio.

(Paraphrasing driftglass and BlueGal):  When you come to know that somebody's been lying to you over a significant length of time - especially about things that are Mission-Critical regarding the continued health of a properly functioning democracy - what do your senses of Duty and Morality call on you to do about it?

Just wonderin': how long before the wingnuts start screaming for somebody to put an immediate end to all Chicano Studies programs - because they do nothing but promote the kind of race hatred that Obama feels deep within his anti-colonial Kenyan heart?

Baloney Detection Kit

From Michael Shermer via Skeptics Society:

Today's Best Line

From TBogg at Firedog Lake via Balloon Juice:

Harry Reid is the honey badger; he doesn’t give a shit. He has the advantages of being the Senate Majority Leader which comes with a bully pulpit that can’t be ignored, he’s not some bomb-throwing back bencher, and he is a fellow Mormon who, like Jon Huntsman, seems to harbor a white-hot hatred of all things Mitt. Reid is most likely serving his last term in the senate and he’s is plainly tired of fucking around with Republicans and fully intends to bury their standard bearer which can have down ticket implications if depressed Republicans decide to stay home on election day because their top of the ticket prospects look like they are deader than Bob Dole’s dick.

Today's Pix

There - I fixed your Xbox for ya.

With Apologies

...to M Magritte.

The Treachery Of Images - 1928-29
("This is not a pipe")

His detractors all said, "Of course it's a pipe, you fool..."

And Magritte then challenged them - if it's really a pipe, then you should be able to pick it up fill it with tobacco.

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe?  No, it's just a representation, is it not?  So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!"

The point is semantic (even a little pedantic maybe), but he was warning us that what we see is not necessarily what's real.  And he was doing that just as advertising was coming of age, and a good 5 years before Goebbels raised it all to a deadly art.

Great art is the act of telling lies in a perfectly truthful way.

Dueling Tax Plans

Questions?

Absurdity Today