Just A Dang Minute

From CBS News:

Authorities stormed an underground bunker in southeastern Alabama Monday, freeing a 5-year-old boy and shooting his captor to death after a week of fruitless negotiations that left authorities convinced the child was in imminent danger.

Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, had taken the child off a school bus after fatally shooting the driver Jan. 29 and was holed up with the child for seven days, authorities said.

An FBI Hostage Rescue team launched the rescue attempt after concerns mounted that Dykes was growing more unstable and presented a growing threat to the boy's safety, a U.S. official told CBS News. At some point during the negotiations, authorities had inserted a camera into the bunker and observed that Dykes had begun brandishing a gun and acting increasingly agitated - signs his mental state was deterioriating. Rescuers stormed the bunker from an entrance at its top, set off a diversionary explosive device and ultimately shot Dykes.

But put yourself in the shoes of that kid's parents for a short moment - some asshole Doomsday Prepper has murdered a school bus driver in the process of kidnapping your son; a coupla phones calls are made and, as if by magic, the cops materialize at your door and they say - oh I dunno - they say something that can easily be paraphrased and boiled down to, "We're from the government and we're here to help you".  Is your first inclination to spit on their shoes and tell 'em to get the fuck off your porch?

Tune For The Day

Over-produced, but nuthin' beats Etta.

The Basic Fallacy

Krugman has a quick one about the argumentative attacks that get thrown at "Liberals":

Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.

This mirror-imaging thing has been effective for a long time, and it's the big reason (I think) for why Democrats get beat even when they have better ideas; why they're seen as weak in the face of political opponents who've got nothing but slander going for them.  Unfortunately, The Mud-Slinger usually wins - especially if he's the first to sling that mud.  Gerrymandering has plenty to do with why Dems couldn't get a majority in The House this time even when they got more votes overall, but the main thing is that way too often, the Repubs have put out some bogus crap - either a false positive for themselves or a false negative for the Dems - and let the already-in-place belief that "both sides do it / they're all the same" do the rest.

Once you've set up the framing that requires this Manichean binary simplicity, it gets easier.  And if you have Press Poodles who're willing to help maintain this false balance between false equivalence and false dichotomy, then you have the required 3-legged stool on which to build the perfectly false reality we kinda find ourselves in right now.

Thanks, Obama

From Jenna Marbles:

Podcast

Decode DC - Some very interesting stuff here.

The idea of protecting people's intellectual property is a ridiculously important one.  You have the right to profit from your own work, and this was built in to our Constitution.  But this guy mentions The Mickey Mouse Provision, which extends Copy Right exclusivity for 75 years after the death of the Copy Right owner.  To me, that's exactly what we weren't supposed to do, because it contributes to the creation and perpetuation of Aristocracy - where the only thing some people have to do for a living is to be born to privilege.  That's not what this joint's supposed to be about.

Music (redux)

Today's Quote

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” --Winston Churchill

That quote came to mind as I was listening to the podcast from The Professional Left.

Listen To Your Mother

From Mother Jones - 10 Gun Myths:

Myth #1: They're coming for your guns.
Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.
Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Myth #8: "Vicious, violent video games" deserve more blame than guns.
Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.
Myth #10: We don't need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.

Great rebuttals for each one - and easy to remember.

One of my faves - illustrating the simple fallacy of More Guns Equals Fewer Gun Deaths.

Music

Always an understandable sentiment.  The trick is figuring out how to come back out of it afterwards.

Cuz They're DumFux

Lots of people hear this crap; internalize it; and then make decisions on things like who they'll vote for (eg) - acting on information that's false.  It's like a one-man Iraq War times 40 Million.

Fox News host Stuart Varney claimed that federal discretionary spending is "out of control." In fact, discretionary spending has already been reduced by $1.5 trillion, and non-defense discretionary spending is projected to be at the lowest level in 50 years.

One more time - Discretionary spending is down $1,500,000,000,000.00

Check it all out at Media Matters.

Connecting Some Dots

This is what I'm talkin' about (from The Village Voice):

As we never get tired of pointing out, Fox Nation is a web-site where totally non-racist editors post links to stories guaranteed to anger up the blood of their no-doubt-about-it racist readers, many of whom immediately take to the Fox Nation comment threads to uncork monstrous slurs those editors then have to delete. It's a brilliant scheme guaranteeing those editors never go out of work: Cram internet babies full of anger protein, and then hose out the diapers!

That's a good bit of honest-to-god journalism right there.  It's a little sad to think an awful lot of people still believe Fox is actually a news operation, but it's good to know there are more folks who see it for the political organization it is - and to let us witness the enormous coincidence of the GOP trying desperately to improve its chances with "the brown demographic" and this rather sudden appearance of a Latin version of DumFux News (launched late 2010).

Counting The Costs

The Chinese economy is a juggernaut.
The Chinese economy is the greatest thing since perforated toilet paper.
The Chinese figured out how to get Gubmint outa the way, and they've unleashed the awesome power of the unfettered free market.

From James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.

Always remember - nature bats last.

Surplus

...is the perfect way to describe what's happening to us, and this guy nails it.

From Gawker - Unemployment Stories, Vol 24:

I'm 40. Just got my J.D. in 2011, passed the SC Bar first go. This is my third career, after Aerospace Maintenance (got our when the airline business model tanked after 9/11) and IT. I've opened a virtual (ie, no overhead) solo practice because no one else will hire me. While having my own business sounds nice, I'm probably going to gross only about $4000 this year. We don't make enough to meet our budget and our credit and savings are almost out. I owe a quarter million in student loans. We've moved to a smaller (rented) house, scrimped, minimized our consumer debt for stuff like phones and cars and TV and such, but we're going to run out of resources this year. If it was just my wife and I, we could find a way, we could eat ramen for a few years. In theory, we could live apart and I could work where the jobs are; I could take a contract and work overseas - Xe, or many of their competitors. But we have an infant daughter, and that changes everything.

Sounds not too bad, right? Well, here's the reality: I've applied for more than 1100 jobs since I graduated in May 2011, legal and anything else I might be remotely qualified for. Pay scales from $20 grand to six figures. Nothing - not a peep. Never had an interview. Not a callback. Only a few rejection letters - just got one recently (September) for a job I applied for last December. It is like I do not exist. I am shouting in a vacuum.

So I've got a solid BS in business and info systems, JD and bar membership, aerospace background, 13 year USAF veteran with management experience both inside and outside the military. I have international experience in Asia (mostly business and education in Japan), have traveled extensively thanks to being a cargo plane mechanic, I get a veteran's preference on fed and state jobs for being mildly disabled (going deaf). Hell, I got the undergraduate version of a Fulbright scholarship (a Gilman). When I was in Law School, and looking at my peers whose previous experience was usually something like waitressing or summer camp counseloring, I thought I'd be fine in the employment area. I could always go back to one of my earlier careers, right?

Even better, rolling all my experience into one job. Or so I thought.

At first, it was merely frustrating. I was sending out about two dozen resumes a week for posted job openings anywhere within sane commuting distance. I figured I had good credentials, good experience, and a good resume - had it worked over by 4-5 different career services. The VA guys told me I had a better resume than they all did. The suspicion that my resume was getting tossed either because it wasn't believable, or because I fell in a black hole of not having enough law experience and having too much education for anything else began to grow. Now I'm certain of it. If I leave off my law degree, I've got to explain a 4 year gap in employment. If I put it in, I'm not considered for anything not a legal job, and even entry-level legal stuff wants 2-5 years of litigation experience. Now, I've given up. I recognize that what I am is surplus to the new economy, that this situation will only worsen, and no one will ever hire me again.

That realization turned frustration into despondence. I went from having the military discipline and drive that gave me the confidence to tackle anything, that had led me to greater and greater successes prior to law school, to the knowledge that I wasn't good enough for anything, that not only had I educated myself out of the job market but by doing so on student loans I had put my family at risk as well. Every day is a struggle to find a reason to get out of bed. Most days that reason is to take care of my daughter - but as a first-time dad at 40, I feel incompetent at that as well. I spend way too much time wondering if my wife and kid would be better off by themselves.

The funny thing is, before I joined the USAF I was actually homeless. I lived in a tent in the mountains, killed my own dinner, and I was happier then. Colder, but happier.

I don't want a handout. I don't want the government to step in and help me (unless they want to tackle my student loans, in which case go US government). At this point I don't even want a small business loan anymore - no one will loan you money if you don't have a house they can take. I just want enough paying clients to keep our lights on.

SCAttorney/IT Guy/Airplane Mechanic... someday.

Todays' Quote, Too

From Alex Wagner on The Last Word (Friday?) - speaking of Sen Ron Johnson's somewhat limited capacity for reasoned thought:

"The reality is that basically, Ron Johnson is intellectual Kryptonite - you get too close to him and your brain cells die."

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today's Pix

Chris Hedges

Posted at truthdig:

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement. 

From The Comments Section

...on a Daniel Larison post at The American Conservative:

• You don’t have to be a liberal to be OK with pre-Bush 2 tax rates.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to resist wasteful Defense spending levels and to see the wisdom of staying out of wars.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to live with a health care system many Republicans endorsed two decades ago.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to practice a productive legislative relationship with the other party.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to allow that at least some regulation is essential for a trustworthy business environment.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit gratuitously insulting minorities and women.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit using sneaky ways to circumvent democratically representative voting results.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to use your small-state Senate seat responsibly.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to have a gun policy that respects Second Amendment rights, but isn’t written by the firearms industry.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to conserve our natural resources.

Today's Quote

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.” --HP Lovecraft, 1936

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Fight The Power

I think this is what revolution should look like.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

Bad Lip Reading

It's unfortunate, but I hafta to believe there's a fair probability that when a whole buncha the Wingnuts "listen", this is what they actually hear.