The KrugMan Speaks

Paul Krugman does a great job explaining the negative effects of the little temper tantrum the Repubs have been throwing for the last 5 years.  And he adds "Expansionary Austerity" to the list of oxymorons - knocking off "Conservative Values" for the top spot.

We should also acknowledge the power of bad ideas. Back in 2011, triumphant Republicans eagerly adopted the concept, already popular in Europe, of “expansionary austerity” — the notion that cutting spending would actually boost the economy by increasing confidence. Experience since then has thoroughly refuted this concept: Across the advanced world, big spending cuts have been associated with deeper slumps. In fact, the International Monetary Fund eventually issued what amounted to a mea culpa, admitting that it greatly underestimated the harm that spending cuts inflict. As you may have noticed, however, today’s Republicans aren’t big on revising their views in the face of contrary evidence.

Hall Pass

This is what makes Elizabeth Warren irresistibly sexy to me:

I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight.

Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end.

According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.

So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry.

We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

It's time for the hostage taking to end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."

She just put that out in an email and my hopeless crush just intensified.

And guess what, kids - unless we get up on our hind legs and put some real pressure on our Congress Critters, we're gonna be right back here to watch this stoopid little dog-n-pony show all over again in January.

Democracy's a do-it-yourself proposition.  Ya want it to work - ya gotta work at it.

Today's Toon

My "Representative"

I suppose most people feel they're not really being heard by their Congress Critter.  Especially when you didn't vote for him, and the reason you didn't vote for him is that you're pretty sure he's got his head up his ass. (can't imagine why he won't talk to me)

Anyway, Robert Hurt (R-VA-05) is a freshman and all, so it's more than probable he voted exactly the way he was told to vote - or at least he begged for permission to vote the way he voted - or whatever.

Makes no difference really, but damn, son; you voted to continue the shutdown and to breach the debt ceiling, which would bring the whole thing down on our heads?

Let's Negotiate

Today's Quote

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

--John Kenneth Galbraith

Today's Pix

Little Jemmy Tried To Warn Us

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
-- James Madison, Federalist 10, November 22, 1788.

We seem to have an extraordinary surplus of bean-counters who think knowing everything there is to know about slicing and dicing the numbers is all anybody needs to know about anything; and who understand how to make sense of (and how to make money off of) a jillion smaller and smaller segments of demographics inside the larger demographics etc etc etc.  Unfortunately, while minting all these MBA-types, we haven't been teaching them much about the simple fact that those numbers are made up of real live human-type individual flesh-and-bone people.

So it doesn't really matter that a mom and a dad somewhere in god's America have to live in fear that their insurance will "run out" before their 11-year-old can finish up the chemo treatments for leukemia.

It doesn't matter that a grandpa will have to put up with the debilitating pain of an arthritic knee for another 5 years before he qualifies for Medicare because there's just no way he can afford the insurance even if he could get it.

It doesn't matter that a 24-year-old who graduated 18 months ago with an Engineering degree has to wait tables and deliver pizza and sleep on the couch at his step-dad's trailer - praying his asthma doesn't kill him in the middle of the night because there's always a little month left over at the end of his inhaler.

The list of incredibly shitty examples of unnecessary anxiety and suffering stretches out  beyond the horizon - but none of that matters because some politicians think their opposition to ObamaCare is "a winning argument".

They believe a sliver here and a sliver there - slivers that might add up to about 23% of the whole population - means they can then run around pretending that 23% is really "what the American people want".  Because they "polled" their own districts, and wow, it turns out 65% of those rubes think what that other 23% think, and that must surely mean they have the one Congress Critter in the whole joint who really knows what he's talkin' about.

"We've been talking amongst this group for the last four weeks about fairness, about whether or not it's fair to give extensions to people who have political connections and make our families live under a different law," he continued. "That is a winning argument for us. But no one asked that question. ... Somebody asked whether it would be different next time, in January or February, whenever we take this up again. The natural inclination is to say 'No, it will be exactly the same.'"

These people have no soul and no honor.

Today's Eternal Sadness

And BTW - it's the guns, stupid.

From WBIW in Indiana, via Addicting Info:

A Martinsville man with a history of arguments with his son was being held in jail on suspicion of fatally shooting the younger man, the sheriff said.

David Carrender, 49, admitted killing 19-year-old Wyatt Carrender on Sunday evening inside the older man's rural Morgan County home, Sheriff Robert Downey says.

The Carrenders had been out watching football games together when they started arguing over whether to return home, Downey said. Once home, the arguing continued.

"It appears the father retrieved a handgun and shot his son, it appears, six times," Downey says.

Why So Serious?

And now for something that's almost as wacky as the TeaBagger antics of late:



hat tip = Little Green Footballs

October

I don't like the idea that we feel the need to make a particular month "Breast Awareness Month" (eg).  Shit, like I need to be reminded about boobies?

I just don't think we should let ourselves be herded into a comfortable mindset that all we ever have to do is wear a little ribbon of a certain color on our lapels - or put a magnetic ribbon on our cars - and just kinda roll our eyes at how cute it is for all those manly gridiron studmuffins to be rockin' the pink accessories.  For one month.

Seriously - does anybody who's done battle with cancer have to be reminded of it?  Do they think about it for just that 8.5% of the year?

Cancer's about the worst thing that can happen to anybody - and cancer doesn't only happen to cancer patients.  It happens to all of us.  Quick, name five people you know personally who 1) has never had cancer, and 2) doesn't know anybody who's had cancer.  I'll bet my bucks to your boogers you can't do it.

But let's get back to our national allergy to feeling real feelings and facing real facts.  Instead of concentrating on the sanitized make-believe romantically noble bullshit being peddled by profit takers and rent seekers running phony joints like Susan G Komen and the NFL, maybe we could be thinking about this, from The Scar Project:

And maybe we could put some real pressure on policy makers to get off their asses and get something done about something that really matters for a fucking change.

Oh, I See

The "deal" everybody was so tickled about early yesterday - the one that had Mitch and Harry locked in the kind of mutual stroke-fest that'd make Harry Reams blush - fell apart when the House TeaPublicans blanched at the idea that there could be a few Dems in Washington who might actually have the balls that everybody keeps telling them they need to find.

From PoliticusUSA:

Do you want to know what Republicans get out of the proposed Senate debt ceiling deal? Nothing, but a crushing surrender.

Republicans will get no changes to Obamacare. They will get no further spending cuts. The government will be funded until mid-late December, and here’s the kicker according to Greg Sargent, “According to the Democratic aide, Dems are likely to demand a debt limit extension into early summer — nine months, rather than six – with the idea being that the closer to the 2014 elections we get, the harder it will be for Republicans to stage another debt ceiling hostage crisis. Democrats don’t want such a crisis. They would prefer that Republicans simply agree to extend the debt limit cleanly. But by pushing this so deep into the 2014 election season, they are giving themselves a kind of insurance policy that guarantees that if Republicans do stage another debt limit crisis, Republicans will pay a serious political price for it.”

They saw it as unconditional surrender.  And worse yet, surrender to a guy they refer to as (alternately, and sometimes simultaneously) a "Commie Muslim Nazi Coon, and his jack-booted LibTard henchmen".  I guess we should've know it was never gonna fly.  But it did get their attention even tho' there are still way too many Repubs who are stuck in the same bubble that had them believing Romney was going to win last year.  The problem now is making sure the Dems don't over-reach, but y'know, the temptation is strong to just slap their stoopid face around the other side o' their head.

Dear Mr Hurt

I'm on the mailing list of my congress critter, and he sends me this kinda crap every week.

My reply:

Mr Hurt -

Your little update is chock-full of passive language, and if you were paying any attention at all in English Comp class in high school, you'd know that another way of saying "passive language" is this: bullshit.

You guys in the House took the hostages - you shut down the government, and you're threatening default. But you insist on painting yourself as either an innocent bystander, or some kind of victim of the bad ol' Democrats. But no matter how hard you try to spin it, people are finally getting hip to your tricks. 74% of us know you're lying to us when you say the ridiculous things you've said (eg) in this email. And what's even worse is the simple fact that you're willing to spend so much time and energy lying to yourselves as well. That horse is dead - you can stop beating it now.

There are certain things normal people just kinda know without having to be told, but apparently, you're in need of a reminder, so here's the short list:
Never piss into the wind.
Never pet a burning dog.
And never ever negotiate with hostage takers.

I look forward to the time you're selling shoes down at the mall.

Mike Roberts
434.960.8698
evillemike2009@gmail.com

A Confirmation Bias To Call My Very Own

The Guardian:

Let us state this unequivocally: false equivalency – the practice of giving equal media time and space to demonstrably invalid positions for the sake of supposed reportorial balance – is dishonest, pernicious and cowardly.

Sometimes, the opening graph is all ya need.

But then:

On the other hand, according to the grassroots American Council of Liberty Loving Ordinary White People Propped Up by the Koch Brothers, the liberal media want to contaminate your precious bodily fluids and indoctrinate your children in homosocialism.

And to drive the point home, he quotes WaPo:

Ultimately, the grown-ups in the room will have to do their jobs, which in a democracy with divided government means compromising for the common good. That means Mr Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M Reid (D-Nev), minority leaders Sen Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) and Rep Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit.

And so - "the left" is right about how "the right" is wrong.

Charlie's Pissed

And you really don't want Charlie Pierce pissed at you.  He'll cut you - up down and continuously.

DumFux News "reporter" Ed Henry flounced out of the room when Jay Carney refused to call on him during a press briefing - Mr Pierce, if you please:

(the piece starts off with a block quote from HuffPo)
A visibly angry Henry walked out of the briefing after press secretary Jay Carney ignored his repeated questions. Speaking to colleague Brian Kilmeade on Monday, Henry said that, though he looked annoyed, he had to duck out to appear on television. "The briefing went on for about 40 minutes and I didn't get a question, for whatever reason," he said. "I guess Jay Carney will have to answer that. I don't know why, I guess maybe he was upset. I wasn't. I was running to do a live shot." "Does he do that a lot?" Kilmeade asked of Carney. "That hasn't happened before, ever," Henry said, adding later that the "professional thing" for Carney to do would have been to call on him.

And Charlie goes to work:

You work for the bilge pump of wingnut propaganda. The "professional thing" for you to do is to slink off and do five years penance reading the hog reports on a 300-watt station in west Texas before you're allowed in respectable company again. The "professional thing" for journalists with any pride to do is to spit at the mention of your network's name and to hang bells around the neck of you and all your colleagues so that we know when you're coming and can clear the room. You're lucky you have Jay Carney. Put me in that job and you're doing your stand-ups from a chicken wagon halfway down the mall. Put me in that job and your picture is in every guard shack.

Your organization is a running sore on the profession. It's what happens when a craft fails to keep its septic system up to date. You do not deserve the respect given to a schizophrenic in Lafayette Park who screams about the aliens from Zontar and the Rockefellers. I know people who staple their screeds to lamp posts in Central Square who are far more worthy of professional courtesy than you are. You work for a Chronic Ward of grifters, unemployables, and whatever else sticks to the bottom of journalism's shoes on a hot summer's day.
Brian Kilmeade is your "colleague."
Res ipse loquitur, dude.