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Today In Faithiness

If Jesus was a live today, he'd probably have a lawyer and an agent and a publicist who'd all be working hard to keep hucksters like Sarah Palin from moochin' off his fame and his public image.

My hero, Charlie Pierce:

Will o'god, it's the week of St. Patrick's Day, is there no respite, no brief truce, no fragile ceasefire, in the War On Christmas?

Apparently not. 

Today's Gun Nut

From Addicting Info:

One of the few absolutes from the pro-gun advocate side of the gun violence conversation is that they demand that we believe that gun owners are responsible people. That it is just “them”, the nebulous of bad people, or crazy people who kill with guns. They further say “Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals.”…Wayne LaPierre at the January 30st Senate hearing on gun violence.

But reality and history prove them wrong. Over 230,000 guns [reported] of “law-abiding gun owners” end up in criminal hands each year because gun owners don’t properly store their weapons. And hundreds of kids die and thousands are wounded each year with unattended firearms. These are not responsible “law-abiding gun owners” and they are a big part of the gun violence problem and the pro-gun community acts in their words and deeds as enablers to them.

Beltway Bubble-Think

Wonkette has a good takedown on Paul Ryan and the Very Serious People - and the Press Poodles who just can't give up on the extremely minuscule probability that somebody in the GOP might come up with some proposal that doesn't closely resemble something you stepped in as you were walking through the park.

It is budget season again in Washington, D.C., which means it is time for the villagers in our nation’s capital to pretend that a plan written by Congressman Paul Ryan, who was last seen on election night icing down his tuchus after being spanked hard by Barry Bamz and Old Handsome Joe Biden, is not the legislative equivalent of a rotting whale carcass washed up on a beach.

And, as suggested, here's our new National Anthem:

The Seven Godly Sins

Wrath: God condemns those who don't believe in him to eternal damnation and torture.
Envy: God punishes those who believe in other gods.
Sloth: God allows tragedies and disasters to occur which he could easily prevent.
Gluttony: God has plenty while millions go hungry.
Pride: God demands his followers' complete devotion.
Greed: God's followers must pay tithes and make offerings in exchange for his blessings.
Lust: God insists on being party to every marriage.

Sounds like a great gig - where do I get an application?

Today's Silly

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

The Rising Fuss

Part of what's coming back around is racism, which is really just another manifestation of the kind of class-bashing that's gone on in this country from the beginning.  (the whole concept of Racial Difference was invented in the Antebellum South as a handy mechanism for keeping poor white trash separate from the blackfolk, which helped keep everybody focused on something other than how they were all slaves to the interests of the landowners in one way or another)

And we're seeing it blossom all over again with this continuing beat-down of working stiffs who put in longer hours (and soon maybe, longer than the usual 50 years on the job), who are being made to feel they're just not worthy of anything but the meagering crumbs left over when the Executive Committee's done with their latest circle jerk - oops, I mean spreadsheet reviews that indicate there's another 3/10ths of a penny per share in dividends to squeeze out of the labor force.

Melissa Harris-Perry:

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Something else that keeps popping into my head:  Take a good look at a few movies from the 1970s sometime, and pay a little attention to the background they were filmed against. Try The Taking Of Pelham 123 or Harry And Tonto - movies that weren't just trying to show the blight, but were supposedly showing "The Real America" at the time.  Any of it look familiar?

The underlying point is to keep us thinking, "Things are kinda shitty, and it seems like I'm gettin' fucked over pretty bad, but maybe it's partly my own fault because I'm not working hard enough or I'm not smart enough, or I wasn't prescient enough to see what was coming; but hey - at least I ain't black".

I dunno - maybe I see threads and connections that aren't really there.  Maybe I'm just being paranoid.  But I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people who play politics at any level of any real consequence to know enough to look for ways to consolidate their own positions and to try to keep their opposition from uniting against them.

Besides, I may be a little paranoid but that doesn't mean nobody's out to get me.

Today's Smartest Thing

They're talking about the sausage-making in DC, and at around the 4:45 mark, Alexis Goldstein (OWS) makes an observational analogy that just knocked me my off my chair.

Paraphrasing - lobbyists get in to see the Congress Critters so regularly and so often - effectively pushing constituents and consumers and "regular people" off to the side - that it starts to look like a Denial of Service Attack.

Watch, and gape - and then try to explain to me how you think your Reps in congress are there to serve you.

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About That Dead Elephant

It's generally not a good idea to predict the actual demise of a whole political party.  I wanna say I recall a time not that long ago when lotsa people were saying the Dems wouldn't survive, and gosh, just look at 'em now.

However, there's plenty to be gained politically by making the Cool Kid appeal - ie: "nobody votes for those guys anymore because they're terminally lame and def un-cool", or "they're so 2006", or "I'll bet they're all Nickelback fans", or whatever.

An awful lot of us just run with the pack.  We pay little or no attention until some encounter when we might say something previously considered hip or evenhanded or otherwise stylish and end up getting the feeling we've made some kind of social error by not being in step with a change in political fashion.  That's why yard signs and bumper stickers work - they give people permission to vote a certain way without having to invest much time or effort in making a committed decision. When we see enough evidence of a sufficient number of other people doing the thinking and taking action, and formulating the rhetoric, we start to feel safe enough to go along with the crowd.

I know a woman who told me straight out last summer that she wouldn't be making up her mind on voting for Obama or Romney until she was sure about "who the nation was backing".

So anyway, from an old(ish) post at Addicting Info, here's some speculation about what's eating the GOP from the inside out:

What Reed, and other party bosses, are ignoring is that in their grab for political power, they attempted to blend together three opposing factors, and the pressure between these groups is about to blow the lid wide open.
These groups are:

Libertarians vs. social conservatives – Social Conservatives want more government intrusion in to people’s lives, the opposite of the Libertarian government-out mentality.

Right-wing populists vs. the pro-business crowd – Populists are against the subsidies which the pro-business groups live on, and they are at each others throats.

Deficit reduction hawks vs. small government activists – Deficit hawks want to reduce the deficit, but a small government cannot manage its deficit due to the lack of revenue. With such opposing demands, it is only a matter of time before they come to blows.

In the recruitment of the radical fringe, what, in ages past, would be the Know-Nothings or the Dixiecrats, the GOP has sown the seeds of its own destruction. Now the party has come to accept it. 

Today's History Lesson

Heroes remain heroes only as long as we don't look too close.  It's always important to judge slowly.

From a long pice at AlterNet:

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

--and--

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

--and--

When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.

It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Iraq By The Numbers

This is the best rundown I've found recently - and expanding on the basic theme (as Fugelsang does) - if you voted for Jr Bush and/or you supported the war in Iraq, you never ever get to make any noise about the deficit or the debt again.  You just get to shut the fuck up while the rest of us get some of this shit straightened out.

Today's Pix

So glad they made pot legal - am I doin' this right?

Yo, Glenn

...ya wanna get my flag up off the fuckin' floor, please?



Not that long ago, he called himself a rodeo clown.  I think maybe he's turned into something else now.  I haven't seen much of him for a while, but - holy crap, dude - you might make a bit more sense and be a lot more watchable if you started to drinkin' again.

Another One Bites The Dust

Just in case you're as Math-Challenged as I am, here's the deal on the "conservative" meme about how American life-expectancy was so much shorter way back when Social Security was first put in place.

If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.

As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).

"Average" can be kinda tricky.  I try to remember that if I put Warren Buffett in line at the local soup kitchen, the 'average' net worth goes up to about $100 million, but I've still got 50 homeless guys plus Warren Buffett.  Tricky.

hat tip = Paul Krugman

Harvest Moon

God Bless The Child

The best quality I could find - sorry - I remember this from a TV show sometime in the 70s(?)



This band was another example of the kind of shitty things that happen when The Suits take over.

The People's Music

I used to fiddle with a 4-track DIY mini-studio thingie I bought for a coupla thousand bucks way way back in the Jurassic 80s - and on my best fuckin' day, I could maybe almost imagine doing something like this.



Astounding is all it is.

Winter Storm Saturn

A few pix from this morning:

Of course, power went out late last night and isn't expected to be back up for another day or two or three or whatever.

Lots of broken branches and downed trees - and the generator is again proven to be a great investment.

There They Go Again

From WaPo:

In a post today on the ABC News site, Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross deliver a few details that upend a Nov. 1 Daily Caller story alleging that Menendez paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. That story consisted of interviews with two alleged prostitutes who attested to having conducted transactions with the senator.

It looks as if ABC News got the same spiel as the Daily Caller. In her story, Schwartz-Ross say that ABC News received back-to-back interviews with the Daily Caller with three women who leveled the allegations against Menendez. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, one of those women has recanted the story and says that the whole operation was an effort to frame Menendez and a friend and donor from Florida, Dr. Salomon Melgen.
Three bombshells from ABC News:

Bombshell No. 1: The recanter yesterday was identified as one Nexis de los Santos Santana. That’s news to ABC News:

In her interview with ABC News before the election, she said her name was Michelle Rodriguez and that she had come forward because Menendez had paid her only $100 of the $500 she had expected. She now says she was coached to make the claim.

Bombshell No. 2 (nuclear): From the story: “Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named “Bob” was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name “Bob” into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.” Here’s what came up on the Erik Wemple Blog’s computer when we searched on “Bob.”

Bombshell No. 3: ABC News reports a troubling degree of sameness among the women’s accounts: “Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as ‘Bob.’” In other words, there appears to have been some coaching involved here.

The ABC News story isn’t a game changer; it’s a game ender.

Nobody doesn't know that Bob Menendez has some trouble keeping to the straight-and-narrow; everybody knows there's a thing or three wrong with New Jersey politics, and everybody knows we have something of a pay-to-play system in effect in at least a good bunch of our government.

But in their absolute insistence on maintaining Centrist Orthodoxy, some of the Press Poodles swallowed the Fable of the Dominican Hookers like a...well, like a hooker swallows whatever a hooker gets paid to swallow.
It's classic.

• Menendez has a reputation, so anything that gets thrown his general direction will prob'ly stick as far as some folks are concerned. 
• some sleazoid lawyer gets paid to dish some dirt (ie: make shit up)
• the story starts out at Daily Caller (or WND or Drudge or whatever)
• it gets picked up by "the real news guys" 
• by the time it's debunked, the wingnuts have another Libtard Myth memorized and ready to drop into any conversation about any policy - and one they can pull out whenever one of their guys gets caught actually doing something shitty.

And in the meantime?  Bob's real problems are conveniently ignored, and we can all go back to being comfortably numb.

The good news is that ABC somehow managed to find it's own "center", and instead of going with the flow, they did a little thing (that we used to able to recognize) called "JOURNALISM".

In some ways - at least in some cases - the narrative is starting to change.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

What Are We Waiting For?

It's just possible "the American people" are finally gettin' hip to the centrist bullshit of Both Sides Do It; They're All The Same; A Pox On Both Your Houses.

I'm not saying the Dems are all perfect angels and the Repubs are all complete dicks.  And I'm not going to put up the long list of examples showing how Repub Policies are harmful and how the combination of Republican Platform plus Republican Obstruction is actually intended to take their Gubmint-Is-Bad slogan and turn it into a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Right now, it's Sequestration.  But almost without exception, It turns out to be pretty simple:  We get a deal when The Repubs decide we get a deal.

Ezra Klein at WaPo:

The bottom line on American budgetary politics right now is that Republicans won’t agree to further tax increases and so there’s no deal to be had. This is not a controversial perspective in D.C.: It’s what Hill Republicans have told me, it’s what the White House has told me, it's what Hill Democrats have told me. The various camps disagree on whether Republicans are right to refuse a deal that includes further tax increases, but they all agree that that’s the key fact holding up a compromise to replace the sequester.

But it’s unpopular for Republicans to simply say they won’t agree to any compromise and there’s no deal to be had — particularly since taxing the wealthy is more popular than cutting entitlements, and so their position is less popular than Obama’s. That’s made it important for Republicans to prove that it’s the president who is somehow holding up a deal.

The narrative is changing.

hat tip = Democratic Underground