A Christian Freaks Out

The lady seems pretty calm at first - and the recording has nothing about what leads up to her tantrum - but then she gets just a little nuts.

I do wonder about the affects of all this constant exposure of our behavior to millions of people via the inter-tubes.  Seems like everybody has a camera, and there's an awful lot of casual surveillance going on.

Taxation

"We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem."
"Taxes are too high in the US."
"No wonder companies are trying to shelter their income; corporate taxes are sky high."

All of that is bullshit.  To wit (Citizens For Tax Justice):

Today's Brain Lesson

Try not to think about Frank Luntz or DumFux News.



I may have posted this before - dunno; don't care. It's enlightening and bears repeating.

Told Ya So

From Ed Pilkington, Guardian:

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

For a country supposedly filled with smart people, some of the things we do are just fuckin' stupid.

What To Call 'Em

What do you call somebody who can't stop deifying Ronald Reagan, but who also says they would never vote for anybody who raises taxes, compromises with Democrats, and negotiates with America's enemies?

What do you call somebody who says he hates government intrusion, but insists on making the government the final arbiter of morality and propriety in cases of entertainment and radio and TV and print material and internet content?

What do you call somebody who says the government must prevent women from making their own decisions about child-bearing?

What do you call somebody who conveniently ignores the first 13 words (out of 27 total) while trying to make a case in favor of "a strictly constructionist interpretation" of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution?

What do you call somebody enjoying a nice long career at Northrup Grumman who states flatly that the government never creates any jobs?

What do you call somebody who says illegal aliens are too lazy to work, and are at the same time, trying to steal their jobs?

You call these people PseudoCons.

(hat tip: The American Scholar)

Nuthin' But Amazing

And he got up and walked away.

Go And Sin No More

As always, the question is: what are they not telling us?

Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

I think Obama may have made the right call by allowing a whitewash - as shitty as that seems, and as thoroughly depressing as it is.  The Bushies knew how to play it.  They made sure practically everybody shared the guilt - not just the bosses and the party apparatchiks, but the career bureaucrats as well.  Obama couldn't just go after a few at the top because that'd look too politically motivated.  And if he tried to let the thing go wherever it needed to go, then he'd have to spend every waking moment riding herd on it.  Once you start that kind of thing, it quickly turns into a witch hunt, and then the careerists and the cynical manipulators are about the only ones who really benefit.  Obama had to be thinking the costs of that level of disruption outweigh the benefits.

I'm hoping big time that Obama's working behind the scenes (thru the IG Offices maybe?) to root out the bad guys and cut 'em loose.  Unfortunately, I think once somebody gets around to writing The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, this episode will be cited as a signal event.

About DumFux News

From Cynthia Boaz at truthout:

There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

-snip-

The basics:
Panic Mongering
Ad Hominem
Projection
Revision of History
Scapegoating
Violence = Power, Opposition to Violence = Weakness
Bullying
Confusion
Populism
Invoking the Christian God
Saturation
Disparaging Education
Guilt By Association
Diversion

In debating some of these tactics with colleagues and friends, I have also noticed that the Fox viewership seems to be marked by a sort of collective personality disorder whereby the viewer feels almost as though they've been let into a secret society. Something about their affiliation with the network makes them feel privileged and this affinity is likely what drives the viewers to defend the network so vehemently. They seem to identify with it at a core level, because it tells them they are special and privy to something the rest of us don't have. It's akin to the loyalty one feels by being let into a private club or a gang. That effect is also likely to make the propaganda more powerful, because it goes mostly unquestioned.

A Word From Mr Carnegie

“Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.” --Andrew Carnegie

I think Carnegie understood there are ways to get what you want and still be a human being about it.

Also, by retiring and spending his last 18 years disposing of his wealth (about $4.3 Billion adjusted), he ended up turning his fortune back to the people who helped him amass it in the first place.

Kind Of A Dick

I've said many times that whatever the issue is, and whatever the politician says about the issue, we're never hearing the full story.  There's always something they're not telling us.  And so, it's the first priority of a properly functioning free press to find out what we're not being told.

Unfortunately, the Corporate Press has been almost completely co-opted, and serves more of a PR role than anything else.  But they still need to believe they're doing something; and they need to make it look like they're doing something other than simply repeating what they're told at the "news conference".

That's what gives us the Horse Race style of "reporting".  There's very little actual substance they can get from the politicians, and if they get too pushy, or they snoop too much, they'll start to lose their access to the politician and to the staffers, etc.  So what we get is a variation on Yakov Smirnoff's line:  The politicians pretend to do the people's business, and the Press Poodles pretend to tell us about it.

What's crazy, tho', is that when we do get some real news about some pretty amazing fucked-up-ed-ness, it feels like nothing is done about it for fear that it'll look too much like political retaliation - which is (usually) exactly how the Press Poodles present it to us.  (example): By rights, half of the people in the last Bush Administration should be doin' hard time in federal prisons, but all we hear about is how this horrendous official behavior will affect the turnout for the next election.

And so it evolves into a game of Beat The Scandal.  Politicians and power brokers need to make sure we don't realize how thoroughly mangled and corrupt the system is, so they throw us a nice juicy story of some Brand Name politico's misdeeds.  It has to be sexual tho'; official misconduct attracts too much of the wrong kind of attention, and since practically everybody's crooked, then everybody gets roasted if the public knows too much.  The Press Poodles, knowing they're part of the power-and-money problem, tend to play it up in order to give us the illusion that they're digging for the truth and "keepin' 'em honest".

Instead of learning anything at all from Mark Halperin about what prompted him to say Obama was "kind of a dick", we get nothing but the standard package of phony outrage for 2 solid days.  And the thing ran out of steam so fast, they had to shift the focus to the failures of the technology and/or production process that allowed the comment to make it out over the air.

We know Bush lied about Iraq
We know about torture and extra-legal prisons
We know Scalia and Thomas are as crooked as the day is long
We know Big Banking put a thirty-year hole in the world economy
We know Big Corporate buys politicians
We know Obama is outside the War Powers Resolution in Libya
We know Obama signs orders to assassinate people he deems "enemies"
We know there's a storm coming because of the budget hassles

We know all of this - and a lot more - but nobody's being held to account for their fuckups in the past - and nobody's being asked about how we prevent more fuckups in the future.