So Sorry

Today's Pix

Today's Best Blog Piece

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Tell me my country's romance with its firearms isn't utterly insane. What we accept as a reality seems from afar like something Aaron Alexis heard from the voices in his head. Our ignorance is deliberate and profound. The BU study was published online on September 12. Did you see anything about it on the news? In the newspapers? Anywhere except at the Think Progress website, which gave it good run? I didn't. Four days later, Aaron Alexis -- who heard voices and bought his gun legally -- went on his spree. The findings of the study may seem little more than an exercise in confirming the obvious, but that's an exercise the country needs. It needs to have the obvious -- guns kill people, health insurance helps keep them alive, large banks are all thieves, economic oligarchy is incompatible with political democracy -- proven to it, over and over again, because the industry of bullshit has become too efficient. The contempt for learning, the scorn heaped on reason, the distrust of expertise have leached like foul water into all of our institutions, and particularly into our politics.

Here's the Think Progress article regarding the Boston Univ gun study.

And here's Today's Eternal Sadness video:

From the comments section attached to the video report:

Today's Best (Blog) Paragraph

God love Wonkette:

It has been some time since we have heard anything about our old friend BENGHAAAAAAAZI!!111!!!! We are of course referring to the insidious act a year ago when Hillary Clinton traveled via wormhole to Libya to smother Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans with her vagina while one of her vast army of clones went to the White House to roofie President Obama, drag him out to the putting green on the South Lawn, and leave him to wake up thirteen hours later clutching a bloody nine-iron in his hand with vague memories of pummeling American heroes to death in a frenzy of murderous rage. It’s really the only scenario that makes sense.

I didn't have to read any more - that made my day - but it's worth a quick perusal.

Food Stamps Theater

It seems like the Repubs in Congress are just all about doing nothing but making symbolic gestures - mostly of the raised middle finger variety.

The House voted yesterday to cut $40 billion from SNAP (food stamps) over the next ten years.  First off, it really doesn't "sound like all that much" (we're still gonna spend $700-800 Billion in those 10 years), but when you look at how little help SNAP provides for individual households, it's a real blow.

Center on Budget Policy and Priorities:

The 2009 Recovery Act’s temporary boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is scheduled to end on November 1, 2013, resulting in a benefit cut for every SNAP household. For families of three, the cut will be $29 a month — a total of $319 for November 2013 through September 2014, the remaining months of fiscal year 2014.[2] That’s a serious loss, especially in light of the very low amount of basic SNAP benefits. Without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014. (See Table 2 for estimates of the size of the SNAP cut in each state in fiscal year 2014.) Nationally, the total cut is estimated to be $5 billion in fiscal year 2014.

It seems unlikely that Congress will enact legislation to remedy this problem, as President Obama and some members of Congress have proposed. Consequently, states need to prepare for the benefit cuts — including determining how they will provide information about the upcoming benefit reduction to participating households and other stakeholders as well as how to manage increased client inquiries when the cut takes effect.

So yeah, it sucks but it prob'ly doesn't make any real difference because the thing has practically no chance in the Senate - Debbie Stabanow has been calling it "a monumental waste of time", which it most certainly is.

It's just standard issue bullshit.  Repubs get to cast a feel-good vote to show their wealthy contributors how willing they are to get all hard-ass and tough-lovey, while further stoking their constituents' sense of being victimized by those rotten undeserving illegal aliens and welfare cheats; and their Democrat enablers.  And nothing but the date and the time will change.

But there're a few questions I keep thinking somebody in "the press corps" might wanna ask Eric Cantor or John Boehner or any of these jag-offs who can't manage to get Ayn Rand's dick outa their mouths long enough to think about what happens to actual flesh-and-bone people who have to live with the results of these fever-dream hallucinations they keep trying to enact into law.

(I know - silly me - actually thinking one of these Press Poodles might figure out how to do his job; and expecting a certain brand of politician to behave like a mensch).

Here's one question: In a year's time, do you think the cuts you're proposing will cause  fewer people to be poor?
And another: What's your plan if by some crazy happenstance your plan doesn't reduce the number of people in need of food assistance?

Here're some more:

• Will the cuts in Food Stamps lead to more grocery stores being opened in poor neighborhoods?
• Will there be jobs in those neighborhoods?
• Will the people who live in those neighborhoods have reliable ways to get to those jobs?
• Will the banks make capital available so all those newly minted poverty-level entrepreneurs can start the bidness of their dreams, thus inventing jobs for themselves instead of relying on somebody else to give them jobs? 
• An awful lot of families who rely on Food Stamps include children - are those kids supposed to get jobs (or create their own jobs) too?
• Do the kids need to be drug tested?
• If the parents test positive, do the kids lose their benefits as well?

One more: How long do you think it'll be before somebody in one of those neighborhoods decides to beat you with a broom handle the first chance they get?

Don't Forget Now

...this Sunday is National Back To Church Sunday. Woo-hoo!

So I wanna remind everybody to be sure to find something more useful to do - like go for a hike or take in a movie; or just stay home and alphabetize your Tupperware or re-shingle the doghouse or pick fly shit outa the pepper shaker.  Anything at all.

And if you click on that link - do some shopping, because nothin' says you love Jesus more than good old fashioned e-tail bidness - cuz y'know, if you don't care enough to spend a few bucks in support of The Savior™ well then don't be surprised to learn he don't love ya back when your time comes - know whadda mean?

That's What I'm Talkin' About

I complain a lot about Press Poodles, and how way too many "journalists" are doing a crappy job of reporting.

Well, from FAIR's excellent website, here's the primary-number-one-whole-wheat-no-artificial-ingredients-99-and-44-one-hundredths-percent-pure-and-unadulterated example of not just doing a crappy job, but the straight-up refusal even to know what the fucking job actually is:

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd's declaration that it's not his job to inform viewers when politicians spread misinformation was noted by several progressive blogs today, including Talking Points Memo.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe today (9/18/13), Todd responded to Ed Rendell's claim that Obamacare opponents are full of misinformation about the program by explaining that this was because Republicans "have successfully messaged against it." But wasn't journalism's job to expose misinformation? No, Todd insisted; if the public was misinformed about the Affordable Care Act, it was the president's fault for not pushing back:

Chuck Todd: "What I always love is people say, 'Well, it's you folks' fault in the media.' No, it's the president of the United States' fault for not selling it."

(If the embedding has been disabled, the TPM version of the YouTube video was still up as of about 11:30AM EDT

There is no longer any reason for anybody to pay any attention to anything Lil' Chuckie has to say.  Ever.

(And finally, if you're as sick of this shit as I am, you can drop 'em a line via email: viewerservices@msnbc.com)

Dear Mr President

It seems pretty simple - don't negotiate with hostage-takers.

Congress and the president are again at loggerheads on how to move forward as the government's money runs out at the end of the fiscal year this month and federal agencies are once again warning employees and preparing contingency plans for a closed government.

All this because Republicans are making demands in exchange for government funding and Democrats are saying "no way."

Some Press Poodles (not a lot, but some) are actually talking about it in truthful terms, and have been willing to challenge the Repubs on occasion.  Again, not many and not often because most of our "journalists" are still completely hung up on their Fairness Bias, which makes them believe that if they quote somebody saying "the sun came up this morning", they're required to get a reaction from somebody with an opposing point of view - and you can straight-up count on the simple fact that somebody's just dying to get his own bad self on the TV so he can finally have that one shot at fame that his mama always told him he deserves.  Take a quick tour through your Program Guide and then tell me all about the huge differences between DumFux News and COPS and Chuck Todd and Gator Boys and Joe Scarborough and Honey BooBoo and Howard Kurtz - or any of the other "reality shows" polluting the air.

So anyway, in keeping with how the wingnuts like to do business - usually a variation on  "blaming the victim" - we have Repubs holding their breath and stamping their little feet to get what they want.  

And does anybody ever ask what they really want?  No - not really.  

Sometimes we hear a Press Poodle ask some random Repubs why they're threatening to blow the place up and they'll mutter the standard empty platitudes of "Fiscal Responsibility" or "We have a spending problem..." or whatever phrasing they've paid Frank Luntz to pull out of his ass today, but nobody ever asks them what any of it actually means in terms of policy; or what outcome they expect to achieve by that policy; and never mind if it means people could simply start to die in the streets if it doesn't work this time any better than it's worked the last 35 fuckin' years.

Repubs made huge strides in the 90s after Newt Gingrich taught them to keep repeating "failed liberal policies" over and over and over - when do we get the other side of that coin?

Today's Toons

Synchronicity

I'm wondering if there's anything that can be drawn from this having to do with our seeming need to look alike and act alike and think alike -  is there something physical that drives us towards conformity that can be so simple (and subtle) that we don't even notice it?

Teach Your Children Well

Buy This Book Right Fucking Now

Equivocation

Equivocation exploits the ambiguity of language by changing the meaning of a word during the course of an argument and using the different meanings to support some conclusion. A word whose meaning is maintained throughout an argument is described as being used univocally. Consider the following argument: How can you be against faith when we take leaps of faith all the time, with friends and potential spouses and investments? Here, the meaning of the word “faith” is shifted from a spiritual belief in a creator to a risky undertaking.

A common invocation of this fallacy happens in discussions of science and religion, where the word “why” may be used in equivocal ways. In one context, it may be used as a word that seeks cause, which as it happens is the main driver of science, and in another it may be used as a word that seeks purpose and deals with morals and gaps, which science may well not have answers to. For example, one may argue: Science cannot tell us why things happen. Why do we exist? Why be moral? Thus, we need some other source to tell us why things happen.

(The illustration is based on an exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll'sThrough the Looking-Glass)

Street Justice

In a way, I don't like the fact that I still get a kind of zesty feeling inside when something like this happens.



There's an element of Instant Karma to it that I think is not completely unjustified.  I guess what I worry about is that people seem to take a small-ish incident like this one and then try to apply the principle to every situation.  Over time, we start to lose not only our sense of proportionality, but we get further and further away from the basic tenet of Due Process itself.

David Frum

Frum has been trying to pull his guys back from the brink. (and btw: that shouldn't make anybody think I consider him any kind of hero - he's not)

But when the guy gets one right (IMO), I think it's OK to say he got one right.

Mr Frum's tweets:

Today's Pix

Lying Liars

...and their doofus constituents - this is practically the very definition of Co-Enabling.

From The National Memo, via Little Green Footballs:

The deficit is down 37.6 percent for the first 10 months of the 2013 budget year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But a new survey conducted by Google at Paul Krugman’s request finds that more than 50 percent of Americans think it’s still growing.

Just another solid example of Deliberate Ignorance, fueled by the cynical manipulations of certain Coin-Operated Politicians who say they only want the very best for us - and have managed to convince significant numbers of people that volunteering to wear the shackles is what sets them free.

When almost 60% of us believe exactly the opposite of what is true; when the facts can be discovered by spending a lousy 90 seconds with Google; don't we have to think maybe there's something wrong?

St Ronnie Exposed(?)

Well, no - not really.  This is just a pic of Reagan meeting with some of our Mujahideen buddies in the 80s - way before a whole fuckload of 'em morphed into The Taliban and then re-morphed into al-Qaeda (which is bullshit of course, because these guys were assholes back then too; it's just that they were "our assholes" so we pretended they were cool).  But hey, geo-politics gets pretty weird and complicated.  Sometimes ya gotta sleep with dogs and deal with the fleas later.

So anyway, none of that matters because if Obama did this, we'd never hear the fucking end of it, now would we?

Are we beginning to understand why Obama never seems to have anything in the tool kit but bombs and drones?

Can we see now why Kerry and Obama made nice with Putin - because the Repubs are totally unreliable partners when it comes to...well, fuck; when it comes to anything?

Today's Eternal Sadness

Another white neighborhood, another white cop, and another dead black guy.

Addicting Info:

At this time there is no evidence to suggest that this was anything more than a terrible accident. However, once again it raises questions about racial attitudes in America. Jonathan Ferrell was black. From the information and photos available on the Bradfield Farms HOA’s website the community appears to be a middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Based on reports there is no evidence that Ferrell attempted to enter the residence of the woman who called police, or that he attempted to accost her in any way, yet apparently she did not try to communicate with him, even through a locked door. Instead she hit her “panic alarm” and called police. Just as George Zimmerman decided that Trayvon Martin was out of place in the community where he was killed, could both the woman and the police officers have assumed that Ferrell was “up to no good” because he was “out-of-place?”

As the Trayvon Martin case proved, the media created myth of the criminal young black man is alive and well in supposedly “post-racial” America. While we will never know for sure, there is a good chance that had Jonathan Ferrell been white, he would still be alive.

Yesterday's History

Think IEDs and Ethnic/Sectarian Violence are either new or somehow run contrary to our glorious American heritage?  Think again.

Wikipedia:

In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton,[1] Herman Frank Cash, and Robert Chambliss, members of United Klans of America, aKu Klux Klan group, planted a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, near the basement.[2] At about 10:22 a.m., twenty-six children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for the sermon entitled “The Love That Forgives,” when the bomb exploded.[3][4] Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14), were killed in the attack,[5] and 22 additional people were injured, one of whom was Addie Mae Collins' younger sister, Sarah.[6] The explosion blew a hole in the church's rear wall, destroyed the back steps and all but one stained-glass window, which showed Christ leading a group of little children.[7]

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 2005

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Birmingham was a violent city and was nicknamed “Bombingham”, because the city had experienced more than 50 bombings in black institutions and homes since World War I.[8] Only a week before the bombing Wallace had told The New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals."[9]

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested but only charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On October 8, 1963, Chambliss received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.[10] At the time, no federal charges were filed on Chambliss.[11]

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected Attorney General of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the FBI had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover. The files were used to reopen the case in 1971.[12]

In November 1977, the seemingly forgotten case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing was brought to Court, where Chambliss, now aged 73, was tried once again and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.[13] Chambliss died in Lloyd Noland Hospital and Health Center on October 29, 1985.[14]

On May 18, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime.[15] Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested, and both have since been tried and convicted.[16]

It seems like the calendar is filling up with anniversaries of the incredibly shitty things we do to each other - mostly done in the name of something that's supposed to be holy or honorable or in our best interests as one "nation" or another.

God Bless Jon Stewart

And welcome back, big guy.

Here's a good takedown reaction on the thing I posted a few days ago.  I wish I could do this:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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