Oops

It's an axiom of politics that a gaffe is what they call it when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Mitch McConnell was trying to talk about why so many senate Repubs are suddenly against military adventures in arab countries.

"The only thing I can tell you at this point is that there are differences. I’m not sure that these kind of differences might not have been there in a more latent form when you had a Republican president. But I do think there is more of a tendency to pull together when the guy in the White House is on your side. So I think some of these views were probably held by some of my members even in the previous administration, but party loyalty tended to mute them. So yeah, I think there are clearly differences and I think a lot of our members, not having a Republican in the White House, feel more free to express their reservations which might have been somewhat muted during the previous administration."

What's right? What's best for US interests? What's really their honest opinion?  None of that matters.  The only thing that matters is the political advantage that can be gained or lost for you own party.

These people have no soul and no honor.

Nostalgia Warp

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?  Yeah.. Me neither.

Yikes

Just in case you were feeling a little too good about things in general, here's something to ponder as you set about choosing between pills, a rope or a gun. Yeeesh

Land Of The Free

The embedding code was disabled on the original - dunno why. Luckily, in this world of blogging and the viral spread of info, we still get to see examples of the growing threat of authoritarian governance.



I made a call to the Rochester (NY) PD, and the lady who answered told me she'd been instructed to read a statement issued by Chief of Police James Sheppard. (585-428-7033) RPD website

Oy

The question is "Should evolution be taught in school?"

If you're scoring at home*:
Yes = 16
No = 2
Yeah But -or- Both = 28
WTF = 5



*50 states plus DC

A Short Response

To my friends of the Libertarian persuasion: yours is the ideology of the five-year-old.  To put it simply: No, you don't get to do whatever you want.  Grow the fuck up a little.

A Bi-Lingual Cat

The Pre-Googlian Era

Today's Big Idea

A stop light with a Status Indicator.

Today's Question

Repubs are fond of saying, "they govern best who govern least".  Then they run an election campaign on the premise that since the Dems haven't solved any of our problems (surely not due to Repub obstruction of course), you should vote for them to run the government because they have better ideas about how the government should go about solving problems.

The Pledge Updated

Under The Sun

Just another day here in the old solar system, until the sun explodes.

Doin' The Math

We keep hearing from certain politicians that Tax Cutting is a magic elixir that always fixes anything that could possibly be wrong with our economy.

Here's a simple little chart that says different, in the words of Michael Linden:

“These numbers do not mean that higher rates necessarily lead to higher growth. But the central tenet of modern conservative economics is that a lower top marginal tax rate will result in more growth, and these numbers do show conclusively that history has not been kind to that theory.”

It's from Think Progress, so of course there's a certain bias towards a more traditionally conservative approach to economic stimulus, but still; how d'ya argue against real numbers?

What Congress Looks Like

This does (and somehow doesn't really) surprise me. From a study published in National Journal.

One other thing that caught my eye was the bit on Lobbying experience.  We've been led to believe that government is chock full of lobbyists, but that's not how it looks.  Maybe we need to look at how many people working for lobbying outfits have experience in Congress(?)

Welcome Back, KO

Current TV on the web.

DirecTV: 358
Comcast: 107
Time Warner NY: 103
Time Warner LA: 142
Dish Network: 196
Verizon FIOS: 192
AT&T U-Verse: 189

We Are So Fucked

A rosy outlook from BBC's Richard Black:

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

It's not about "saving the planet".  The planet was just fine before we showed up, and it'll be just fine long after we're gone.  This is about self-preservation, and making our own living conditions as pleasant as possible.  It's about not making it any harder than it has to be to survive; and to thrive; and to enjoy our lives.

Same Shit, New Day

In a very real sense, everything the Watergate Burglars did in 1972 - hijinks that got them sent to jail, and which then led directly to Nixon's resignation (one step in front of Impeachment, Conviction and Removal) - can now be considered reasonably within the law.

NYT Editorial:

Instead of tightening the relaxed rules for F.B.I. investigations — not just of terrorism suspects but of pretty much anyone — that were put in place in the Bush years, President Obama’s Justice Department is getting ready to push the proper bounds of privacy even further.

This is not what I voted for in 2008.

Dilemma

It'll be hard for me to vote for Obama in 2012 because he's continuing a lot of the abuses of power I complained about under GWB (Illegal wars, Gitmo, etc)

And it'll be hard to vote for any of the current Repubs because of the usual reasons (God, Gays, Guns, Abortion, Tax Cuts and all-round dickishness).

Good politicians know all this.  Their advisers know how to slice and dice the polling results in order to tweak their candidate's positions so he picks up more votes than he loses on any given issue.

So it's become a lot easier for me to understand the complete non sequitur of so many people simply rejecting the only thing that has any chance of fixing whatever they think is wrong.  How do you justify participating in a system when you're convinced the system itself is broken?

But when the system is in such dire need of remedy, how do you justify withdrawing your support for it?

The Drought

Back in April, Gov Rick Perry called for Texans to pray because the drought was kinda bad.  Here's what it's been like since then:
Drought Map

Something else I wonder about: Perry has been playing the Labor Arbitrage game, and he's done a good bit of bragging about the influx of people because there're so many new jobs in Texas.  First, Texas leads the US in minimum-wage jobs. Second, the majority of new jobs in Texas are minimum wage or minimum plus 20% jobs.  Third, a big increase in population only puts a greater strain on things like infrastructure and resources like clean water.

Just sayin'.

Voter Fraud

Repubs make a big noise about how the Dems try to steal elections, but some how there's never any evidence of it at the end of loud and distracting investigations.

And then, there's this.

Voters in Maryland started getting mysterious phone calls on election day last year, that told them to "relax" and not bother going to the polls because President Barack Obama and Gov. Martin O'Malley "have been successful."

"Everything is fine. The only thing left is to watch on TV tonight," the robocalls said.

Some truth from The Brennan Center at NYU Law.