The New Hoover

Vote Romney - 2 Escalades for every wife and an elevator in every garage.

From Prof Krugman via NYT

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just A Thought

We keep hearing about what a horrible problem the National Debt is, but do we know for sure what all has contributed to it? Why is it such a huge number?

Obviously, there're plenty of factors, but I think we can identify 3 main things:
1) Direct Revenue Reduction - aka Tax Cuts
2) Recession - higher unemployment equals fewer tax payers equals lower tax collections
3) Wage Stagnation plus Speculation-Driven Inflation - a multiplier effect

But it seems like we never stop to consider what we've had to borrow in order to spend at least $2 Trillion on a couple of wars, plus an amount we don't even get to know about that's been sucked up by all the Black Ops / Homeland Security boondoggles over the last 10 years.  If you borrow $2 Trillion, you're gonna have to repay it to the tune of about $6 trillion when it's all over - if we get that far.

Anyway, here's a thought:  Let's call it "Bush's War Debts".  But only for a little while - just long enough to squeeze out all of the Sunshine Patriots like Cheney and Giuliani and Bolton, and anybody else who was married to the NeoCons' bullshit fantasies.

Pin the word "debt" to their lapels and let's see how long the rubes stay in line behind 'em.

After a while, it'll naturally evolve to The War Debt, and we might have a chance to get back to where we understand that we don't get to do anything without paying for it - sometimes in ways we hadn't anticipated.

The Greatest Scam

Religion tries to tell me that my life is meaningless without an AfterLife©, and then proceeds to tell me I can obtain this Heavenly Glory only if I believe in this or that brand of god.

Religion is a scam that gives you a disease, and then sells you a cure.

History New Found

"I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character." --Thomas Jefferson

From a site called Liars For Jesus, and a lady who knows her shit.



This David Barton guy is running a typical play from "conservatives".  Take a guy like Tommy Jeff, who practically personified The Enlightenment and who was pretty representative of The Founders' near-unanimous rejection of "princes and popes" - you take that guy and you turn him into something he's not, using revisionist bunkum and outright lies.

Today's Quote

A golden oldie:

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."  --Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Uh Oh

At least one headline writer at one media outlet has had a sudden attack of conscience or integrity or truth-telling - or something - I'm not sure we even have a word for it anymore.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Not to worry tho'.  I'm sure it was just a momentary lapse.  A little Paycheck Reduction Therapy should straighten that guy up and make sure he doesn't run the risk of becoming Fact Addicted or anything.

Today's Oxymoron

Cool Republican

Do you knuckleheads really think you have any chance to compete with this guy?

Atta Boy, Willard

Because it's just a universal absolute that their parents have all the money any kid will ever need to start a business or go to college or spend a coupla years in Europe or whatever.

The sense of entitlement on the part of way too many "conservatives" is like having a whole family of dead rotting rodents stuck in your wall space.

Push Button To Add Drama

What we really need is a Drama Removal tool - which, I think may actually be the point here.

Today's Pix

An Aha Moment

"Conservatives" will always argue against making any serious cuts in Defense Spending by trying to make it all about National Security.  They have to ignore the 6 million American jobs that are directly dependent on the Pentagon because of course, "gubmint don't create no jobs", so they have to rationalize the flat-out waste of things like F-22 and F-35, the B-1 and the B-2, and the maintenance of a Doomsday Capable nuclear arsenal etc etc etc.  Hey, ya just never know when them Rooskies might start feelin' peckish, so we need to be ready.

I have to admit, I've been a little reluctant to hack away at the military budget because of the those jobs.  I remember a few times when cutbacks put a lot of good people out of work and had a pretty bad ripple affect across the economy; and I remember thinking Reagan's huge deficits were OK because the gi-normous military buildup was really just a federal jobs program in disguise.

But guess what.  Turns out it was mostly bullshit.  Imagine that - somebody with a vested interest in keeping the money flowing telling me stories about jobs that weren't really true just to keep the money flowing.  Sometimes, my own ignorance and gullibility shocks even myself.

So here it is - a new look from The National Priorities Project, and The Project For Defense Alternatives

hat tip = Wonkette

Here's the PERI link

Here's the PDA link

Disclaimer: Everybody's playing an angle of some kind, but not all angles are equal.

Dots

There's a connection here that has everything to do with conducting ourselves in private in a way that makes our public lives worthy of whatever honor and respect we can reasonably expect from other people.  It's all about learning to live our lives without needing Jesus or a cop or our mommies looking over our shoulders the whole time.

From The Atlantic:

What Does It Take To Break The Athlete's Code Of Silence?

Rare is the sports scandal, whether it's blood doping on the Tour de France or Tiger's sex life, in which complicit silence does not lie at or near the heart of events. It played a key role in the NFL's Bountygate. And in last fall's nightmare at Penn State. If baseball's antisnitching poster boy is not Weaver, it's Greg Anderson, the longtime friend of and personal trainer for Barry Bonds. Anderson was willing to spend time behind bars rather than testify against his friend. The blind loyalty of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil can give lots of cover for doing evil.

-and-

Television News And Accountability

Part of this comes out of an old sense that the power of news media emanates from its unfailing accuracy. But given that no one ever is unfailingly accurate, and given that we now exist in a world where numerous sites are dedicated to pointing this out, it may well be smart to emphasize other values.

When wrestling with your conscience, it's important to remember that you need to lose once in a while.

Today's Pix

The Hand Of God

Communist My Ass

Mr Jefferson said some things that get clearer and wiser the more I revisit them.

"Every generation needs a new revolution."

-and-

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

We hear a lot about how China is this big and powerful and scary thing.  We also hear lots of criticism of China's "Communist System" and how these dirty commies may be doin' great capitalistic things, but they're still just a buncha dirty commies blah blah blah - well, they aren't really.  At least not completely.  Not when there's a story about the grandson of one of China's old guard Party People, who's been hangin' like a rock star as he matriculates at Harvard, cuz suddenly it's kinda hard for me not to see it as another example of the amazing resilience of the very human propensity towards aristocracy.

From NYT:

One Chinese friend of mine was a judge in corruption cases, and made a good living taking bribes from defendants. Another friend, the son of a Politburo member, was paid several hundred thousand dollars a year simply to lend his name to a real estate company.

Officials have a maddening sense of entitlement. When I lived in China, my wife and I once attended a party with many middle-age officials (including one now in the Politburo) and a crowd of trophy female secretaries. One cabinet minister mistook my wife, who is Chinese-American, for a secretary and crassly made moves on her. Let’s just say that my wife ruined his evening.

The scale of corruption has become mind-boggling. Zhang Shuguang, a railways official,managed to steal $2.8 billion and move it overseas, the state news media have reported. A Chinese central bank report suggested that 18,000 corrupt officials had fled China and taken $120 billion with them. The average take was almost $7 million per person.

The backdrop is the staggering wealth enjoyed by the elite. More than 300 million Chinese lack access to safe water, but one tycoon’s home I visited had an indoor basketball court, a movie theater and a pond with rare fish worth up to tens of thousands of dollars each.

In Chinese, the words for power (“quan”) and money (“qian”) sound alike, and in China one often translates into another.

The Old Made New Again

Reading thru this today from The ArchDruid, via The Agonist:
(while trying to find a new way of saying "forget your history and you'll have to relive it")

The first of these shifts was the Great Depression or, more precisely, the feckless response of both American mainstream political parties to the economic collapse that followed the 1929 stock market crash. In the crucial first years after the crash, Democrats and Republicans alike embraced exactly the same policies they are embracing in today’s economic troubles, with exactly the same lack of success, and showed exactly the same unwillingness to abandon failed policies in the face of economic disaster. Then as now, the federal government launched a program to bail out big banks and corporations—it was called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in those days—and pumped dizzying amounts of money into the upper end of the economy in the belief, real or feigned, that the money would work its way down the pyramid, which of course it didn’t do. Then as now, politicians used the shibboleth of a balanced budget to demand austerity for everybody but the rich, and cut exactly those programs which could have helped families caught by hard times. Then as now, things got worse while the media insisted that they were getting better, and the mounting evidence that policies weren’t working was treated as proof that the same policies had to be pursued even more forcefully.

And then I had to go reread the Kipling piece:

The White Man's Burden --Rudyard Kipling, 1899

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Yeesh

You tho't it just couldn't get any worse than Rebecca Black - think again.

Dear Mrs Romney

Dear Mrs. Romney,

Perhaps you can advise me. Since you have raised 5 boys, I'm sure you'll understand. One of the kids is sick again and I have no sick days left at work. In fact, my boss gave me a bad performance review and no raise this year because he said I obviously don't care that much about my job since I've missed so many days and if I miss anymore he may have to replace me. Whenever my child gets sick, my boss reminds me how easily I can be replaced.

We don't have health insurance at my job, so, if my boy gets worse, I'll probably be at the ER most of the night tonight. Not for the first time, but that's ok, he'll get care. It's tomorrow I'm worried about.

As you know, regular day care will not take a sick child, so if I want to work when my child is sick, I have to pay for sick child day care, which costs as much as I make, and, as I'm sure you know from personal experience, I still have to pay my regular day care, whether my child is there or out sick, so I actually lose money in order to work while he's sick. It's that or take a chance on losing my job entirely.

Should I take my child to the day care for sick kids and lose money and not have enough for my bills this month, so I can keep my job, or should I stay home with my sick child and hope that I don't get fired?
What did you do when this happened to you?

Sincerely, Just Another Mom

Us vs Them

So here's a potentially interesting thingie - al Jazeera reports a big scary story about all the mutant seafood coming from the post-BP Gulf, complete with eyeless shrimp and clawless crabs; while US Federal agencies seem a bit reluctant to tell us any bad news about what we're eating.  And I'm wondering: does a good American patriot believe the terroristy news agency or does he look to the Gubmint for reassurance?

(hat tip = Wonkette)

Baldwin vs Buckley

The great debate of its time (mid 60s I think).

The American dream at the expense of black people
- or -
The American dream in spite of the injustices shown black people



Two things always to remember:
1) When a great injustice has been done, it becomes nearly impossible for either side to trust the other.  On some level, the victim will always expect the perpetrator to repeat the crime, and the perpetrator will always expect retribution from the victim.

2) The victim requires the witness to (voluntarily) carry part of the burden of his victimhood by making a morality judgement.  The perpetrator only wants the witness to be morally neutral - to see, hear and speak no evil.

At about 48:00 Buckley makes the classic 2-part conservative argument that (1) yes, it's true "the black problem" is bad, but hey, we're workin' on it, and (2) we're working on it harder than anywhere else in the world (this is where nowadays somebody starts the USA USA chant).  The problem here is that conservatives always conveniently ignore the simple fact that the USA has foundational documents that are very explicit in calling for (and requiring) equality for all people, and that those same documents REQUIRE the government to work towards ensuring that equality on behalf of everybody in this country.  Plus, this conservative argument seems always to ignore the simple fact that guys like Baldwin are never asking for anything more than for the USA to live up to its own declarations and fundamental tenets.

Straight From The Horse's Mouth

James Fallows is no Libtard.

One thing this means is that we could reduce our Oil Consumption dramatically, which means we could reduce political tensions in the world dramatically.

The 8.2 million barrels of oil (per day) we're currently burning as gasoline in light duty autos becomes 2.9 million.  Please don't try to tell me we wouldn't benefit greatly from that kind of change in the status quo.

And please don't try to tell me there's nobody working overtime to keep that kind of change from happening.