Workin' In The USA

The Pro-Life Candidate

via Addicting Info:

In an article published by the National Catholic Reporter, an independent news source, civil and canon attorney and Duquesne School of Law Professor Nicholas Cafardi deems President Obama the most pro-life candidate in the 2012 Presidential election. Sorry Romney supporters.

--and--

...even though President Obama is pro-choice, by providing hundreds of millions of dollars through the Affordable Care Act to help poor women, Obama is actually giving more women the ability to decide against abortion, therefore cutting the number of abortions.

--and--

...Romney is running on what he calls a pro-life platform. But any honest analysis of the facts shows the situation is much more complicated than that. For example, Obama’s Affordable Care Act does not pay for abortions. In Massachusetts, Romney’s health care law does.

--and--

But let’s not stop there. Obama does not financially profit from the abortion industry. Romney does. Bain Capital, in the time Romney was listed as its legal head and even when he was attending Bain board meetings, was an owner of Stericycle, a major disposer of the dead bodies of aborted children in the United States.

Repubs claim they stand for a lot of things - claims that prove almost totally false almost every time anybody looks too closely.

They're against Government Expansion?
For 35 years, Government has grown more when Repubs are in charge than it's done under Dems.

They're in favor of spending cuts?
Spending has increased every year - even when they've held majorities in both houses; and even as they've jammed thru their giant tax cut schemes.

They're Pro-Family?
They vote nearly unanimously against anything that's designed to help families.
--Medical and Family Leave Act
--Planned Parenthood
--Minimum wage
--Affirmative Action
--Head Start
--WIC
--Lilly Ledbetter Act
--ACA
--Unemployment Insurance
--Pell Grants
--Student loan guarantee
--Public school funding

and on, and on, and on

These people have no soul and no honor.  Fire them.

Today's Pix

Uh Oh

hat tip = Juan Cole

July was the hottest month ever in the continental U.S., and the past twelve months have been hotter than any such period on record.

Half of all counties in the country have been declared disaster areas, mainly due to drought.

A Word From Juan Cole

You Might Be Paul Ryan If...
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
13 August 12

f you admitted that you got into politics because of the impact on you of the philosopher of personal greed and egotism, Ayn Rand, but later had to deny it because it was bad publicity, you might be Paul Ryan.

If you want to destroy social security for others, but after your father died when you were 16, you used your father's social security survivor benefits to help pay for your education at Miami University of Ohio . . . you might be Paul Ryan.

If you say your budget plan was inspired by Roman Catholic teachings, but nearly 60 prominent Catholic thinkers and leaders condemned it as heartless, cruel and un-Christian . . . you might be Paul Ryan.

If you claim to be a free marketeer but want to keep $40 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil in the budget, you might be Paul Ryan. When it comes to green energy, the Right says it has to be profitable on its own, but won't give it a level playing field.

If you would raise taxes on the middle classes; but your budget would allow your wealthy running mate Mitt Romney to pay almost nothing in taxes, you might be Paul Ryan.

If you are against deficits in an economic downturn and during a Democratic administration, butvoted for all the measures that ran up the deficit under Bush and erased Clinton's budget surplus, you might be Paul Ryan.

If you say you are pro-life, but supported to the hilt an illegal and unjustified US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, you might be Paul Ryan.

If you accused climate scientists of conspiring to "intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change," but are yourself a Koch brother-backed conspirator for the 1%, you might be Paul Ryan.

If your proof that climate change is an illusion is that it still snows in the winter, you might be Paul Ryan.

God Love Hillary

Sometimes the "fun" gets outa hand, and we end up with bad shit about hookers and Secret Service guys.  But most of the time, we get to be a little amazed at what a natural Mrs Clinton seems to be at certain things - like running the State Dept.  Can you really imagine Willard's appointee (probably John Bolton) in this scenario?  It ain't pretty.

I've adopted a strict No-Legacy, No Dynasty policy, so I'm totally against supporting anybody named Kennedy or Bush or Clinton - but dang.  There are times I'm tempted to think I backed the wrong guy in 2008.

Quick little note:  I get the feeling whoever put this up was trying to make Madam Secretary look bad - FAIL imho.

So I guess, it's kinda hard to be that engaged; and a whole lot harder if you try to fake it for the camera.  Seems pretty real to me.  And it makes me miss the "Old Hillary" from about 1993 - the one who used to talk about "the politics of meaning".

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Is this what "conservatives" mean when they say government sucks and government workers aren't worth what we pay 'em?

Raw Data

Here's a look at Paul Ryan's budget proposal via Bipartisan Policy Center.

How Paul Ryan's budget plan compares to that of President Obama and BPC's Debt Reduction Task Force

By Loren Adler and Shai Akabas

Below is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) summary of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget. All of the information about the budget proposal is taken directly from either The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal or the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) Long-Term Budgetary Impact of Paths for Federal Revenues and Spending Specified by Chairman Ryan.

We hope that this comprehensive summary will further clarify the entirety of his plan, and compare it in some key respects to that of President Barack Obama and the plans proposed by the bipartisan fiscal commissions (BPC’s Domenici-Rivlin and Bowles-Simpson).

I still maintain that Ryan is a phony.  Even tho' there are some things he has to say about our fiscal mess that line up with my own views, they are all at the surface.  Once you dig into what Ryan's actually proposing, it's really just more of the same snake oil the GOP's been peddling for 35 years.  Not even guys like David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett are willing to go along with the kind of crap the Ryanites are trying to sell us.

By The Numbers

From Bill McKibben at Rolling Stone:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10^-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

The War of Ideology here in the US continues to be such that we probably won't be able to do much of what needs doing to stop the trend of Climate Change.  I can say there're some encouraging signs that, in spite of the extreme resistance from the Right Radicals, we're doing some of them quietly, but I think we're at a place now where about all we can do is to get ready for more shit to hit the fan.

Today's Pix

Wait - What?

"...the next President of The United States"...

What the fuck, Willard?

Maybe Rachel's right - he really doesn't wanna be the prez.  Why else does he insist on shootin' himself in the foot practically every time he turns around?

This shoulda been a big moment for him, but he fluffs it again.  I'm beginning to get the feeling that they know he's gonna get stomped, and they're just trying to salvage something that might pass for positioning for 2016(?)  I dunno - it's pretty weird.



So, anyway - at least they have a cool logo:

Willard Picks A Veep

And it's another doozie

From Greg Sargent, WaPo:

The Ryan pick is also a break with Romney’s previous theory of the race. He had previously intended to make the campaign about nothing more than a referendum on the economy and Obama’s stewardship of it. Now it will be a choice between two starkly different ideological visions, one that drags the race onto the turf of tax fairness and entitlements — which is much more in line with the debate Dems wanted.

The press is already accurately framing the pick as a clash of visions. But what’s more important is that Ryan’s vision remains vague. We still don’t know in any meaningful detail how he would achieve the deep cuts necessary to make that vision work.

Which raises a question: How aggressively will the news media scrutinize the true substantive nature of his vision? The press has done a great job pinning Romney down on the real implications of his tax plan, largely thanks to that unsparing Tax Policy Center study. Ryan, by contrast, has been widely accorded the presumption of fiscal “seriousness," mainly because he looks so earnest and genuinely despairing in those videos that show him stalking the halls of Congress in the grip of existential deficit angst.

Choosing Paul Ryan tells me Romney and the GOP intend to concentrate on changing Government.  The emphasis will be on changing how we finance the thing, but this is all about "starving the beast" and then "drowning the government in a bathtub" blah blah blah.

The point of the exercise is to move us in a direction that is fundamentally different from the Representative Democracy we've been trying so hard to pretend hasn't been slipping away from us for 30 years.  These guys believe strongly that "the will of the people" is all well and good when you're talking about Abortion and Gay Marriage and Gun Laws and all the other stuff that floats around the edges, but not when it comes to making the decisions that really matter.  Romney is another Silver Spoon Legacy fuck who insists that "The Ruling Class must be maintained to assure a smooth-functioning society".  That's how guys like him think because that's who guys like him were brought up, and that's how guys like him are further conditioned to behave when they get into politics.

So I think it all comes down to Privatization.  They picked Ryan because these boneheads actually think this is an idea whose time has come, and Ryan's "budget plan" is how they think they can force feed it to us.  Forget the simple fact that Government-as-Private-Enterprise is exactly what the American Revolution was all about  (maybe that's why The Right Radicals have been pounding on US History to the point that it's completely bent outa shape).  And maybe that's why they've been harpin' on American Exceptionalism so loudly - if we see the scheme for what it is, they need some of us to be conditioned enough to think "yeah, it was a bad way to go in every other country and in every other time, but hey, we can do it right in America 'cuz we're the exception".

Obama's bad enough, but at least with Obama, we've got a shot at making the thing more about people and not just the fucking numbers all the fucking time  - Romney/Ryan is another GOP-sponsored disaster looking for a place to happen.

The Horse Race

It hasta get harder to sell The Horse Race at some point, doesn't it?

Well, maybe not so much at The National Journal:

After a series of overseas gaffes and a barrage of attack ads, Romney now trails the president by nine points, with 40 percent. This is the biggest lead yet for the president in Fox polls.

Obama holds an 11-point advantage over Romney among independent voters, a seven-point increase over last month. Still, only some 30 percent of those voters are undecided.

The president’s lead also jumped among women, blacks and Democrats.

But I think it's pretty interesting that DumFux News has been bashing Romney for at least several days now -

if not bashing, ala Ann (Bone Smuggler) Coulter



--and--

Chuckles Krauthammer


- then certainly they've been something less than their usual full-throated supportive selves; and now it seems rather suddenly, Romney's falling farther behind Obama just as he needs to be making up some ground to build momentum as he heads for the convention in Tampa.

From DumFux News website:

We'll see I guess, but we hafta be getting closer to where enough people are hip to the Centrism Trick, and don't buy the crap about everybody does it; they're all guilty of something; ya can't just blame one side or the other; blah blah bah.  We have to be able to look at whatever happens and make a smart decision about who's likely to be that one tiny bit better than the other guy when it comes to representation in government.  

You take enough small steps and before you know it, you've gone a good long way.

Due Process

..is a Bee-atch.

Alleged movie theater gunman James Eagan Holmes is being evicted from his Aurora apartment because he booby-trapped his unit with bombs and "murdered numerous individuals," his landlord says in court filings.

Although Holmes has been jailed since July 20 for allegedly killing 12 people and wounding 58 others watching a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises," he is technically still a tenant at 1690 Paris St., said Victor Sulzer, an attorney with the firm representing the landlord.

"His actions are a substantial violation of his lease," Sulzer said.

The Denver Post

There Are No Walk-On Parts

Barry Lopez interviewed by Bill Moyers

BILL MOYERS: So, is the new metaphor not nature, but the stage? That's a powerful idea that we all- have walk on parts in this drama that never ends.

BARRY LOPEZ: But who is it, Bill, that says, one person has a walk on part? You know? That's a political question. Who is it that's standing there saying, that person, this person, that person, those are walk on parts. And this person over here will be the star of the show. I don't like that. I don't like to hear it. What happens if a person speaks imperfect English in a culture like ours, is not articulate, but can dance in a way that makes you shiver? Why is that a walk on part?...

I and Thou, not I and It

BARRY LOPEZ: We have from, you know, the beginning of the Holocene, you know, the raising, the creation of cities in the Tigris/Euphrates, we have created a world in which we marginalize that which we don't think serves us as well as it could. We've turned nature into a thing. You know, Martin Buber's wonderful I/it relationship and I/thou relationship. This is an "it." The book is an "it." It is soulless. It is utilitarian. I can throw it on the ground if I want. But if it's an I/thou relationship, you never make those kinds of presumptions. So a lot of what traditional people when you watch- when you're in their environment, everything is I/thou. The relationship to the wind; the wind is alive. It has a soul. It's part of the moral universe.

And we've created something in which we have excluded from our moral universe everything but us. And in fact, a lot of people have been excluded from this central White Western European dominant culture. Everything else is an I/it relationship. With African Americans or, you know, in Aboriginal people, whatever it's going to be. But when you-- with traditional people, the relationships with everything are about the holiness of the other, the mystery of the other. That's that I/thou relationship.

And what I would like to I guess encourage people to understand is that for the sake of our own convenience, we created an "other," and that other was nature. And we said, if it doesn't serve us, kill it, move it, destroy it, crush it. Make it serve us. And if it doesn't, it's no good.

(hat tip = JR, from a very long time ago)