A Gentle Reminder

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus, 1883

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Victoria Jackson - Super Genius

I remain unconvinced that she's not making a fairly lame attempt at satire.

Signage

From my quick trip last Thursday up to DC to check on Occupy K Street.

Elizabeth Warren

I'm a Capitalist because God's a Capitalist.  And I favor regulation because God favors regulation.

Signage

The Jobs Bill

Obama asked the Senate to put aside their rancor for a moment in order to try something that might help get a coupla million Americans a little help finding work.  And the Senate replied:

Tech Solutions For The Revolution

Whenever the rabble get a little riled up and start to do that icky and unsanitary thing called "a protest", the establishment (or powers that be, or whatever you choose to label them) always try to tamp the thing down by interfering with the crowd's ability to communicate.  In Iran and Egypt and practically every other arab state where protests sprang up, the governments took down the internet, or they suspended cellphone service or they blocked twitter - they did whatever they thought would be the most disruptive to the protestors' need to communicate and coordinate.  It's a primary tactic in every conflict, and every government does it whenever they feel threatened.  Remember that the USSR banned fax machines for years, and when they finally allowed them, each machine had to be registered and each transmission was monitored and recorded.  That's how threatening free and open communication is to any government, including here in the good ol' USofA.

Occupy Wall Street has struggled with NYC's prohibition on the use of amplification in public spaces.  Their work-around has been to use humans to relay the speakers' words out to the crowd by simply repeating what the speakers are saying.  Semi-brilliant in that it's organic and cheap and very "community-ish".  I imagine it also tends to work in favor of keeping the oratorical blather to a minimum.

I'm wondering, tho', if maybe there's a better solution that serves the purpose and stays within the law.  What if you just put together a conference call?  One quick pass thru Google and I found a company offering "free" conference calling, allowing up to 1,000 listen-only participants.  If you had a thousand cell phones scattered thru the crowd (on external speaker), it'd be like one of those church services at the old drive-in theater setups.

There must be other tech solutions too.  Get thinkin', you guys.

This Is What You Call A Recovery?

To go along with Bush's Jobless Recovery, now we get Obama's Wageless Recovery.  And it kinda makes sense in a weird, Compendium-of-Official-Horse-Shit kind of way.  We already have the Non-Denial Denial, and the Non-Apology Apology - now we can add the Non-Recovery Recovery.

NYT

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

It gets harder and harder for me to justify voting for Obama again.  I'll probably stick with him because the alternative (so far) just seems too terrible to contemplate.  That could change tho'.  Everybody has to decide; at what point are you willing just to let the fuckin' thing burn?

OWS Statement

Oo-rah

And what would you like to say to Sean Hannity?

Megan And Me

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

I spent quite a lot of time on the "We are the 99%" website last night and this morning. There's been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause). Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point. These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand. Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people. Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

I think it's hard to read through this list of woes without feeling both sympathy, and a healthy dose of fear. Take all the pot shots you want at people who thought that a $100,000 BFA was supposed to guarantee them a great job--beneath the occasionally grating entitlement is the visceral terror of someone in a bad place who doesn't know what to do. Having found myself in the same place ten years ago, I can't bring myself to sneer. No matter how inflated your expectations may have been, it is no joke to have your confidence that you can support yourself ripped away, and replaced with the horrifying realization that you don't really understand what the rules are. Yes, even if you have a nose ring.

I'm not sure that this constitutes the seeds of a political movement, however. For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it's not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere. They have a low cost of time, they're in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun. No, don't tut-tut me. I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the "Sleep Out for the Homeless" events and the "Take Back the Night" vigils. It's fun, especially when you can see yourself on television. This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we're talking about here.

So my question is, how does this coalesce into a broader platform? Does someone have a coherent, plausible answer for someone whose pricey liberal arts degree has not equipped them for a tough job market? And is it a coherent, plausible answer that they will believe? I don't think those kids in Zucotti park are waiting to hear about QE3 and the American Jobs Act.

My posted comment:

Nice try, Ms McArdle.

Was this supposed to make yourself sound almost human? ("Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.") 

And almost kinda bright? ("When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people.")

They pay you for this?

Let's be really clear on a couple of points. First, the people who do the hiring and set the policies in practically every business are not overly troubled at the prospect of having 15 or 30 or 100 applicants for every job posted, because it means they can pick up some pretty great talent at ridiculously low prices. It's called Free Market Economics, and it's exactly the kind of Labor Market most of the big players have been working towards for at least 30 years. Do you have any research help at all, or do you simply choose to ignore it?

Second, your little puff piece here is a classic example of how you Press Poodles have become completely disconnected from what's happening. Mocking the choices people make does nothing about the effects of those choices. You say you don't want to sneer at these people, and then you sneer at them anyway. Typical of the snobbery of Corporate Media, you build a false reality by trying to substitute 'what if' for what actually is.

Also typical - your reporting is so lousy that your analysis has no credibility at all.

Strategy Revealed

It feels a little paranoid, but given the fact that beating Obama in 2012 has been identified in public and on the record by more than one prominent Repub as pretty much the only thing that matters, I think it's not unreasonable to put a couple of things together, and to reach a conclusion (or at least postulate) that Repubs are willing to fuck us all over just to have a shot at getting Obama out of office.

The simplest explanation is that while Obama's signature measure to boost the economy has had fairly significant positive results in terms of Net New Jobs, the Repubs (who control enough State Governments to make a difference) have been busy laying off enough public sector workers to make the gains in the private sector look far less impressive.

What Reagan Said

USA USA USA

A return to the bad old days of Protectionism, and of Unions that were too big and too powerful isn't a good idea either.  So don't try to play that binary bullshit on me.  What I'm talking about is making an effort to get some sanity and balance back into the system.

Legislative / Judicial / Executive

Management / Labor / Government

Company / Customer / Vendor

Ya gotta have balance.  If you let any part(s) of any system overwhelm the other(s), then the system becomes unstable.

The guiding principle is that when anything becomes too big and too powerful, it has to be beaten down and brought back into balance.  I'm pretty sure that's what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be.  All of history before the USA was about playing and replaying all that imperial crap; "we're God's chosen people"  Well shit, how many empires were "chosen by God" before us?  How many of them are still around?  Is God just really lousy at choosing empires?

I'm pretty sure the people who started this country had the same ideas that occur to me, and they tried to set up a system aimed at resisting the temptations of power; to make it as hard as possible for any one entity to dominate the others; to ensure that we'd at least have the means to prevent the ruinous drift back into monarchy and empire if only we could muster the will.

Over time, of course, people forget.  We get sold on a different idea of how it's supposed to be.  Politicians and Marketeers blur the lines and turn meanings upside down.  We end up believing it's our patriotic duty to support policies that do damage to our founding principles.

And now we have giant multi-national Mega-Corporations taking the place of the old lines-on-a-map Nation States.  (This is nothing new, btw)  People who sit at the top of these Mega-Corps are not called Barons or Captains or Kings for the hell of it, or because it makes them seem quaint or whimsical.  We call them Barons and Captains and Kings because that's how their organizations function, and that's what they are.

300 years ago, Nation States were family-owned private enterprise military organizations that subcontracted out for food, clothing, shelter and trade goods in exchange for protection.  Whenever one of those contractors pushed a little too far into somebody else's territory, the Crown would try to hold up its end of the bargain by invading or otherwise making war on somebody to protect the interests of the merchants, which were in turn, the interests of the Crown.  Government and Business both gradually morphed away from the Inherited Entitlement System towards a more egalitarian system, but there's always a kind of gravitational pull; always something inside us that wants us to return to what our faulty and selective memories perceive as a better time; fueled by the relentless energy of profit-at-any-cost (an oxymoron if ever there was one).  We have to resist that backslide, and remember always that good people continue to fight and bleed and die - sometimes for the noble cause, but mostly for the good of the multi-national companies, and to further the interests of an Entitled Aristocracy that is again coming to believe it owns the government - and owns it by God-given right.

If you want the power, you have to take the power.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I try never to be unaware of boobies, but I truly appreciate the concept of a whole month dedicated to them; when it's more or less OK to tell women how much you love those beautiful secondary gender characteristics.

Yo, Thumpers

Art Of The Deal

Dad: I want you to marry a girl I've chosen for you.
Son: No way.
Dad: She's Bill Gates' daughter.
Son: Well, in that case, sure.

-- Dad goes to Bill Gates --
Dad: I want your daughter to marry my son.
Gates: Nope.
Dad: But my son is CEO of World Bank.
Gates: That's different - OK.

-- Dad goes to the Chairman of World Bank --
Dad: I want you to appoint my son CEO.
Pres: No way.
Dad: He's about to become Bill Gate's son-in-law.
Pres: By all means then.

And that's how shit gets done.

Corporate Media

Things are changing pretty fast.  We're becoming more aware that some things we've been told over and over for the last 20 years are total bullshit.  Like the notion that we have a free press.  The press is not free - it's owned and operated by big corporate interests, just like practically everything else in this country.  Another one is the lie about "the liberal press".  Take a quick look at the utter contradiction at work here.  Corporations are anything but liberal (most of them anyway), so I'll bet you dollars to dog shit that the people who run those corporations aren't voting for a lot of "Lefties"; and they're going to use the very powerful tools at their disposal to shape a narrative that makes the political climate favorable to themselves and their Corporate Clients (ie: Cronies)

From Wonkette, via Balloon Juice:

Mainstream

Has anyone ever heard either Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh say that their organizations present a general viewpoint that ISN'T widely-held?  Don't they at least intimate that their political bent is in agreement with a big majority of the American people?

How do these bozos get away with bitchin' about "the mainstream media" when they ARE the mainstream media?

We Are So Fucked

Campaign Finance has to change if we're ever going to get anything that remotely resembles what American Democracy is supposed to be.

From The Atlantic:

"This may be the first presidential election where we really have no idea who's funding the campaigns until it's too late," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "By January 31, the first five primaries will be done, the nomination process could be all but over, and we'll just be finding out where most of the money came from."

Payback's A Bitch

Don't Let The Bastards Get Ya Down

But Is It Real?

We hear and see what want to hear and see.

It's A Problem

Part of the bigger problem of "they're all alike" and "both sides do it" is Obama's pursuit of the terrorist bad guys, and the use of drones to kill them.  Bush put the program together and now, under Obama, the operators seem to have refined it to a very sharp point.  And that's usually at the heart of this kind of problem.  We develop these deadly capabilities without regard for the legal ramifications, and then we find it almost impossible not to use them in the face of political pressures.

I think we can see the standard political calculation going on here too.  Obama kills terrorists (and sympathizers - and some innocents as well) while ignoring the niceties of due process because he figures he gains more against his political enemies than he loses among his friends.  It's cynical, and I don't like it, and I'm sitting here every day rationalizing it away because I support Obama on most other issues; plus I can't stand the thought of putting any of the current crop of Repubs in power.

This really sucks.

Exactly

If they're not as deliberately ignorant as they seem to be, why are they constantly providing evidence that they are?

Action

Two basic choices for any politician who wants to survive beyond the next 14 months - get something done or get the fuck outa the way.

I've also wondered some about the criticism that this thing can't possibly get anywhere because it "lacks a clear message". This of course from the people who helped get us into this mess to begin with. But never mind. What Occupy Wall Street is showing us is that it doesn't really matter where you start - but ya gotta start. Act faithfully and faith will come.



From We Are The 99%:

Deep Down

I think it's a good idea to remind myself once in a while that politicians are always in search of a unifying theme to shape the political narrative, and one of the most powerful is Self-Loathing.

How many of the TeaBaggers (eg) are people who absolutely deify "The Greatest Generation"?  How many of them were too young - or not physically present on the planet - to have had much to do with either the Great Depression or WW2 (the events they keep telling us made that generation The Greatest)?  How many of them look back at their own lives and "hold their manhoods cheap" because they didn't have the chance to test their mettle in the forges of hell?

How many Boomers are thinking they copped out on their opportunity to mount a protest and missed their chances to get "hassled by the pigs" or shot at by teenagers in Nat'l Guard uniforms?  How many are thinking they should have stayed true to what they used to believe in because a lot of what they thought was wrong back then is coming back on them now?  Or we can take that one in the other direction, and ask how many Boomers were happy to duck military service in the 60s and 70s, but now feel a little guilty about it?

And how many of us feel the need to make up for our past failings by finding ways to demonstrate how worthy we are now?  Seems pretty natural - a shot at redemption is a powerful thing.

Nobody likes the feeling that their main problem is themselves.  Smart politicians are always looking for ways for us to take the anger we all occasionally feel towards ourselves, and redirect it at a conveniently unpopular target.  Starting to sound familiar?

Both Sides Do It

Except when they don't.

I dunno exactly what the score is, but when I look at things in general, I see one side making some large sized efforts to restrict people's rights.

Abortion
Collective Bargaining
Marriage Equality
Religion in Government
DADT
Voting

This is not my Republican Party.  These people are rabid and radical, and I wouldn't trust them to run a coin-operated laundry, much less a government.

From Balloon Juice:

...in my opinion, conservatives and media have succeeded beyond my worst nightmares in convincing people that the fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed right to vote is exactly the same as cashing a check, using an ATM, or purchasing a bus, train or airline ticket. I’m sure I missed one or two comparisons there, although I believe I’ve heard every one. Like everything else under the sun, the franchise is now akin to a commercial transaction.

War Sucks

You wanna do everything possible to avoid war because once the shit starts, you can't contain the costs.  War is just plain bad business.

Listen to Peter Van Buren on Fresh Air.

The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers. When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased twenty- five chickens that morning specifically to kill for us. This was good news, a 100 percent jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.

Holy Fuck, Batman

Elections are decided by an average of 12 votes per precinct. Don't believe for a minute that there aren't people out there who think they're doing their patriotic duty by stealing an election or two.

The current narrative in the press is aimed at setting us up to accept "a stunning upset win" by a GOP that is nothing more than about 20% of the electorate.

Save A Pretzel For The Gas Jets

I guess the real tragedy is that he makes almost as much sense when you hear exactly what he's actually saying.

(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Listeria

The story about the Listeria outbreak is several days old now, and I have yet to see or hear hardly anything at all on the aspects of food safety inspection - except on some of the blogs I read.

AGAIN - where the fuck is the reporting?  There was one piece a day or two ago that briefly mentioned the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, and said food handling/processing facilities were supposed to be inspected at least once every three years, but apparently, nobody has brains enough to go to the FDA and ask about the status of inspections at Jensen Farms!?!

This one, from The Guardian, is typical.

From the Business Section, NYT.

Every article at least hints at the industry policing itself.  Apparently, we're deeper into an era of privatization and free market self-regulation than I thought.  In the NYT piece, the food safety manager at CostCo is calling for better Quality Control measures from the growers and handlers, but he says nothing about an actual food safety inspections regime on the part of any level of government.  I'm not saying every food item should be tested, but there are sampling techniques that work astoundingly well in manufacturing (eg) that could be applied to cantaloupe or potatoes or practically anything else.

So I'm asking American Business to tell me what the calculation looks like: how many people have to die before it becomes cost-effective for you to stop killing your customers?

FInally, here are a couple of dots that can be connected to this story:
1) All those annoying emails about how grand it was once, back in those golden days when we could do as we pleased and we didn't have to worry our little heads about anything.
2) Tort Reform; particularly Product Liability.

Do you really think this shit just happens at random?

This Latest GOP Debate

Rick Perry took most of the pundit flak because he stumbled again and bungled his sharp-angle rebuttal against Romney's flip-flops (again).

Also, he's had to defend his position on granting in-state tuition for the kids of illegals against attacks from the Hard-Ass Retribution Wing of the GOP, saying something like "if you feel the need to punish kids for something they had no part in, then you have no heart" - and he's gettin' slammed for that defense.  One schmuck on DumFux News said Repubs don't want to hear that because it sounds like something "some liberal would say".  So - yeah.

First, what Perry said sounds a lot like recycled Compassionate Conservatism to me.  Maybe that's what they're worried about.  Hard to say of course.  As hard as the Repubs have been working to wipe away all traces of Junior Bush from the national memory, I imagine they hate it when the guy they've been subtly marketing as the Cowboy Guvner From Texas Who Actually Knows Some Stuff is the one who keeps reminding everybody of the boob they're trying to get everybody to forget.  Circularity's a bitch I guess.

But second, it kinda sounds like these pundits are saying, "Everybody knows we're assholes - our brand is all about Asshole now.  Being assholes got us a majority in The House.  We have to be ever more asshole-ish or we'll lose our credibility, and our momentum, and nobody'll be afraid of us anymore, and then it won't be any fun at all."

That's pretty fucked up, right there.

My Dear Mr Santorum

This guy is just completely stuck in 1992.  He carps about 'Social Engineering' in the US Military when it comes to DADT, and ignores all the other social engineering that's been implemented with some real success stories coming out it all.

Black people serving side-by-side with white people.  That was a bit of social engineering.  They said  we couldn't do it because unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Guess what - it disrupted unit cohesion.  Guess what else.  The unit got over it; and in fact, the unit got better because we started drawing form a wider and deeper pool of prospective talent.
(ok - so I lifted most of that from an episode of The West Wing - it's exactly the point and it bears repeating)

Women - see preceding paragraph.

LGBT - see preceding paragraph, and understand that there's been an LGBT presence in the US Military FOREVER.

Santorum loves to warn us about the dangers of sexuality - especially HOMO SEX - In fact, it seems like every time anything pops up regarding LGBT, the guy goes straight to the Oh-My-God-There's-Gonna-Be-Just-Way-Too-Much-Fucking-Going-On-I-Can't-Stand-It-But-I-Can't-Stop-Thinking-About-It card.  Why should I not think he's just a little too obsessed with it?  Why should I not wonder if he's battling his own demons?  OK, too easy.  If he's a latent case, I gotta figure it'll show up soon enough.

What really gets me tho', is that none of the Press Poodles has picked up on the claim about LGBT's wanting us to "grant them special rights".  That's been bullshit going back 20 years as the Repubs have been trying to pass all those fucked up amendments aimed at denying equal rights to LGBTs.  Where the fuck is one decent journalist who'll ask Santorum to delineate exactly what 'special rights' LGBT's are demanding?

Ya Still Gotta Sell It

One of the problems with how "the left" has traditionally approached issues is their inability to sell the idea in a way that appeals to the people who have to be sold on the idea in order to support it.  The idea may be the best thing since perforated toilet paper, but if you can't sell it to the big squishy political middle, then it's not gonna happen.

Mike's First Law of Business:
No matter how good your company is; no matter how great your product or your service is - nothing good can happen for your company until somebody sells something.

Repubs and "conservatives" have been a lot better at coming up with catchy slogans and snappy jingles, and a sales patter that gets people standing in line for the crap they're selling.  Dems and "liberals" always seem to rely on lofty ideals and 30-point policy statements about why it's good for us to eat all the stuff that tastes bad.

I'm not saying change the message or abandon your principles; and I'm not saying water it down or sugar it up.  But you have to sell it better, and the way you do that is to make it appeal to the self interests of the prospective buyer.

If you have nothing but "do it 'cuz ya know ya oughta do it", then you're going to lose at the first sign of resistance because it's the easiest thing in the world to rationalize away anything you "oughta" do when it's inconvenient or it costs a little more than doing it some other way or not doing it at all.  And it's really easy for the opposition to paint you as a preachy know-it-all trying to tell people how to live.  And yes, I know the other side is trying to tell people how to live too, but if they're first to accuse you of that, then they win the point.

If you want action on Climate Change, then you sell it on the strength of doing business in a smarter, cheaper, more cost-effective way that does not require learning a whole new way of doing everything.  Revolutionary change may sound exciting and cool to you, but it scares the shit outa the people you're asking to make the changes - and who, BTW, have the power to squelch the idea before it even comes up in the next executive committee meeting.

One of the things Selling is about is getting the prospect to the point where he realizes that buying what you're selling is not just a good idea, it's actually what he had in mind all along.

Makes Me Wonder

The main question is exactly what Olbermann asks: In a media environment that desperately needs content to fill a 24/7 airspace, where's the coverage for this? I can see how CurrentTV would use the lack of coverage by others to pump up their own cred, but that doesn't explain how practically every other outlet is avoiding the story of a days-long protest aimed at the heart of American economic power.

Smart Is Good

I think it's getting safer for people to be smart again. I'm hoping this anti-intellect thing is passing into the dumper where it belongs.



And btw: maybe it's just that I've felt starved for really smart policy arguments for a very long time, but I think Elizabeth Warren is really sexy.

Madison Ave Gets It?

So how far behind the rest of us does Washington have to fall before they start to understand that they have to lead?  They can't just sit there waiting for the new polling numbers to show them it's time to get up off their butts and get out in front of something.  Step up or step aside, fellas.

Jesus Junkies

The visible spectrum of the GOP has been almost completely captured by the Christianist wing. It's pretty obvious that there's very little room in any Repub primary for anybody not willing to lie his ass off (if need be) to establish his bona fides as a standup God-fearin' TheoCon.  This is not new, of course.  Its been heading this direction for at least 30 years.

For my own self, I lean towards atheism and I believe strongly in making my own decisions about my own life; knowing that it has to be tempered by the understanding that we're all in this together so we need rules to keep us from steppin' on each other too hard or too often - not much that's particularly odd about any of that; but I find myself totally unwelcome in a political party I once thought of as home.  Don't get me wrong, I think registering as Independent has been a net plus.  It's kinda forcing me at least to make the effort to dig out something I can hold onto from "both sides".  Also, I've had to disabuse myself of any notion that what we have here is a two-party system.  One of the soul-stripping effects of the system we do have (ie: Legalized Bribery) is that we can either vote for the candidate who's a complete asshole, or we can vote for the one who's slightly less than a complete asshole.  So, yeah - it's a Hobson's choice between the lesser of two evils, but that means you damned sure better be paying attention so you don't pick the greater of the two evils.

Attempting to counteract the TheoCons, "Lefties" are trying to hold up the Jesus of The 4 Gospels, saying "Repubs are hypocrites because they're not following the teachings of their hero".  Sorry guys, but these jokers believe we're living in the End Times now.  They're way past that Hippie Jesus.  We're talkin' kick-ass Jesus from Revelation here, Bubba.  This Jesus wears a blood-soaked robe, and he has a sword coming from his mouth.  This Jesus is gonna give his followers the power to "rule the nations with an iron rod".  Jesus is coming - and he's pissed - at you.

If you watched the Repub debate the other nite - the one where the yahoos cheered Rick Perry's record of executions, and then shouted in the affirmative when Blitzer asked Ron Paul if he'd just let people die if they chose not to have health insurance - and these things both appalled and puzzled you; well, guess what?  The "truth" has set them free.  The worst possible behavior has now passed out of Unthinkable, through Forgivable (and through Acceptable too), and is now arriving at a place called Preferable.

Do not hand the reins of power to these pricks.

The Job Creators

Add this to the growing litany of Repub bullshit: "Government never created even one job."

(hat tip to John Gorman)

Both Sides Do It

...except when they don't.

The Southern Strategy
Watergate
IranContra
Willie Horton
The Arkansas Project
McCain's Black Bastard Child
WMD (update: this one can be balanced off by Gulf of Tonkin)
Valerie Plame
Swift Boaters
Max Cleland
Birthers
The Kenyan Usurper
Death Panels

I don't have any problem understanding both Dems and Repubs being at least roughly equal in their venality when it comes to the Pay-To-Play aspects of our system here in the US.  We've allowed a pretty great thing to get almost totally FUBAR.  From that viewpoint, they're dead even.

But when I look at how the 2 sides conduct themselves when they're trying to sell the public on either a candidate or a policy, I see one side getting a lot deeper into the muck.

If you can come up with something Dems have done that can match the whoppers I listed at the top of this post, please apprise me of them so I can check and compare.

The Agonist

Pretty good crop of items today at The Agonist.

1) Israel is looking to hookup with Kurdish rebels in Turkey

2) Looming default in Greece

Iraq

Precisely typical of the quagmire scenario that everybody but Junior Bush seemed to understand:
Baby Bush says, "We'll leave if you'll stop attacking us."
Muqtada al-Sadr says, "We'll stop attacking you when you leave."

Obama rides in and starts the process he promised - altho' it's a couple of years later than most expected.

According to Reuters, Muqtada al-Sadr told his militias to cease operations against US soldiers until the full withdrawal is complete at the end of 2011. If the withdrawal is extended or US troops remain, he has promised renewed attacks.

"Out of my desire to complete Iraq's independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete," al-Sadr said in a statement late Saturday.

And then he warned: "if the withdrawal doesn't happen ... the military operations will be resumed in a new and tougher way."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/muqtada-al-sadr-radical-iraqi-cleric-tells-followers-to-stop-attacking-us-troops-2011-9#ixzz1XkNLsqX9

On Obama's Jobs Speech

'Bout fuckin' time.  Now let's see a little followthrough, please.

Huey Lewis And The News

You have to be selective because so much of Huey's stuff was pure crap. But the guy knew how to put a band together, and when they got it right, it was pretty damned good.

Cold Shot

Not everybody loves The Guvner, I guess.

An Email

For my intellectual friends:

AMAZING WORD GAME

Did you know that the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells "race car"?

And that "eat" is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, "ate"?

And if you rearrange the letters in "Tea Party Republicans," and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the fuck up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefits-grabbing, resource-sucking, violence-prone, hate-spewing, hypocritical assholes, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black, so get the fuck over it."

Unconvincing

This is ridiculously powerful, but it's (prob'ly) not gonna matter.

First, she's obviously an egghead, and we all know now that all eggheads are liberal tools of the liberal academic establishment, and the liberal media.  Science cannot be trusted because it keeps insisting that we address "What Is", rather than freeing us to indulge ourselves in "If Only".

Second, she keeps referring to the EPA, and (here again) we all know that the EPA is just a bunch of Big Gubmint looters and parasites bent on obstructing the free market system and denying our noble entrepreneurs their God-given right to do whatever the fuck they want.

You Can't Go Home

The GOP started to lose me in Reagan's 2nd term (Charles Keating and the rise of the TheoCons, Ed Meese's censorship commission, Iran-Contra, etc);  I then struggled mightily to vote for Senior Bush because of the Willie Horton ad; and then had no problem at all going with Clinton* twice - mostly because he was the best Republican president since Eisenhower (IMHO) - but also because his guys weren't pulling shit like The Arkansas Project.

(*large bunches of Clinton's achievements had some pretty great short-term effects.  The problem is that they also helped get us into our current abysmal pickle; but that's a slightly different rant.)

By way of truth-out.org and The New Republic, here's some good smart analysis of what's been going on.

Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery. --John Judis, tnr.com

-and-

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. --Mike Lofgren, truthout.org

My conservative instincts tell me to stick with the program.  ie: when the problem is that democracy is at risk, the solution is never less democracy.  Even when the system itself is corrupt (maybe especially when the system is corrupt), you can't strengthen democracy by abandoning the principles of that democracy.

Rebound

Racism.  Racist rhetoric.  Race resentment.  Affirmative Action Backlash.  Southern Strategy (Repubs).  Modified Southern Strategy (Dems).

Wishful thinkers have pushed the concept of a Post-Racial America since about 2006, when Obama really started to get up some speed.  Maybe 'wishful thinking' is the wrong description for it, because I see a pretty strong tendency in my own kids to categorize people in ways that seem to have a lot more to do with behavior than with race.  One thing that's been kinda jarring for me is that when I've talked with them about their attitudes toward "different kinds of people", they've all but told me I'm a racist my own self.  So maybe the social evolution thing is working the way it should, in that I can claim to be somewhat less racist than my dad was, and that I think I can say with some certainty that I'm  a lot less racist than his dad was.  It doesn't mean the racism problem is fixed, but things are better than they were when I was a kid.

Anyway, we have a system of electoral politics that looks and feels exactly like The Cola Wars, or McDonald's vs Burger King, or Ford against Chevy; or whatever, but it's no longer about finding ways to connect people thru their shared experience and aspirations; it's about getting a mob together based on who and/or what they despise and/or fear.

Crooks and Liars

Oh, and BTW -  it's all Obama's fault.