Newsroom

Another guilty pleasure from Aaron Sorkin - master of the This-Is-How-It-Oughta-Be TV series.

Working It Out

Of Growing Concern And Connecting Dots

When the American Conservative agrees with Rolling Stone (pay wall - which isn't working for me right now, goddam hippies) anyway, when those two agree, we may be seeing a monumental shift in political tectonics.

(hat tip = JG)
The American Conservative:

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

A book review (LA Times) of The Betrayal of the American Dream, by Don Bartlett and Jim Steele that ran in The San Jose Mercury News:

Since the 1980s, a host of politicos, both Republican and Democrat, have sold their business-friendly reforms to the American people in the name of economic efficiency: Corporate America saves, and we all save! But the real winner, Bartlett and Steele argue, is the American "ruling class." Among other things, the economic elite have quietly, methodically and ruthlessly restructured the tax code on behalf of the wealthiest Americans, the authors say. Tax cuts on unearned income and carried interest allow the richest of the rich to pay less income tax with each passing year.

Put that together with NPR producing a whole segment around it:

"Everyone loves Apple. Apple makes nothing in this country anymore," Bartlett tells NPR's Steve Inskeep as an example. "But then, look over here on the other side and you have Intel, and their plants are massive, and they are good-paying jobs. They continue to invest in this country. And what we need in this country now are more Intels and fewer Apples."

For models of how to boost manufacturing and job growth in the U.S., Barlett and Steele look abroad. "Germany has had a fairly good record in recent years," Steele says. When the global financial meltdown happened, Germany adopted a policy that subsidized companies in order to help them keep employees on the rolls. "It's one of the reasons the German unemployment rate is much lower than in this country," he says.

Is anybody still really wondering why it just feels like there's something wrong goin' on?
 

And that graph is the rather generous way of looking at the disparity of income growth after taxes.  There's plenty of data suggesting Real Income has gone down for a huge percentage of American workers - especially when you look at the number of people who've been shifted into Salaried positions, and who're putting in longer hours and getting no overtime pay for it.

Here's a fun fact:
In 1979, there were more Americans employed in manufacturing - in this country - than there had ever been before or have been since then.

We're gettin' fucked with our pants on, guys.

It's Not Unusual

Repubs needed desperately to get rid of Todd Akin as a way of putting a nice looking slipcover over their extremely extremist extremism.  A bunch of 'em kicked Akin in the head as hard as they could trying to make us think he was some kind of outlier; some crazy uncle who just showed up uninvited (and drunk) at Thanksgiving dinner or somethin'.  They need us to see him as not one of their own - and definitely not of their own making.

As it turns out (and as many have suspected all along), Todd Akin is no real exception.  (hat tip =  Blue Virginia)

via MorningCall - in a post about a GOP candidate for US Senate named Tom Smith:

When a reporter asked Smith Monday how he'd tell a daughter or a granddaughter who'd gotten pregnant as a result of a sexual assault that she'd have to keep the baby, the Republican nominee told reporters that he'd "lived something similar to that with my own family, and she chose life. I commend her for that. She knew my views, but fortunately for me, I didn’t have to … she chose the way I thought."

--and--

Smith quickly clarified, adding, "Don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape,"

Smith then appeared to imply that having a child out of wedlock was similar to rape, but then quickly added, "No no no, but put yourself in a father’s position, yes. It is similar. This isn’t … but back to the original, I’m pro-life period.”

So it's pretty obvious that guys like Akin and this knot head Smith aren't the aberrations the GOP leadership is telling us they are - because oddly enough, guys like Mike Huckabee (arguably among the leaders of the party) are charging to Akin's defense, saying he's just articulating a core value of mainstream Republicans.

I think it's clear the GOP has a huge problem.  They've been pimpin' the wingnuts for 30 years to get themselves elected, only to turn around and punk 'em once they're in office.  Well, that worm's been turning at an accelerating pace for awhile now, and it could get real messy real quick.

Hurricane Isaac is a good thing, BTW, because it provides an excuse for the GOP to take this fight "indoors" - and we all know how much political parties love to make a show of their "open and inclusive process" while all the deals are made in private, and the outcome of every "vote" is known well ahead of time.

Anyway, I don't know what signals to watch for, but I'm betting this will get more interesting as it goes along.

The Dog Whistle

We hear a lot about the various dog whistle language that (particularly - tho' not exclusively) the GOP guys use to speak in public about the Southern Strategy items that can no longer be discussed openly.  It must be a constant struggle to come up with new ways to say "lazy scary uppity nigger" without actually saying the words themselves.

That's how we get to this latest one - Romney's "joke" about nobody asking for his birth certificate.  Which, BTW, was really just another of the standard plays intended to make a Democrat seem foreign and exotic and non-American blah blah blah.

Well, I've been wondering about all this and there's another one making the rounds.  And maybe it's just too subtle (these things do escape me with an annoying frequency), but it suddenly occurred to me that it's exactly the same kind of crap.

And here it is:

This junk goes right along with the big fluff the wingnuts have been putting up about "Obama's Victory Lap" and congratulating himself on the raid that got bin Laden etc.

And it's almost brilliant.  It downplays the facts:

• In spite of Dick Cheney's warnings, we didn't "get hit again" even tho' we elected a Democrat.
• As a political asset, Junior Bush decided Osama bin Laden was worth more alive than dead, so he stopped even looking for him - which left it up to Obama to get him, which of course he did, which now means that the "Repubs are better on Nat'l Security" thing is exposed as being total bullshit.

...but the main thing is this:  "conservatives" are pretending Obama is some kind of  braggart because they're trying to invite us to make a base-level inference - they want us to picture "the swaggering buck, struttin' his stuff, and showin' off his prowess".  

The bin Laden issue is the "My Dick's Bigger Than Your Dick" debate, and suddenly it's too painfully obvious that the GOP dick is a lot smaller than they've been telling us it is, and - holy fuck - the Democrat's a black guy.  This is gonna be real bad.

As Freudian and repressed as most of these bozos appear to be, I just don't have any real doubts about this.

Buncha sick fucks.

Packaging Paul Ryan

LA Times explodes the bootstrap myth that's being woven around Paul Ryan.  The guy is not quite the typical SIlver Spoon Legacy Fuck I love to hate, but damned close.

And yet Ryan, 42, was born into one of the most prominent families in Janesville, Wis., the son of a successful attorney and the grandson of the top federal prosecutor for the western region of the state. Ryan grew up in a big Colonial house on a wooded lot, and his extended clan includes investment managers, corporate executives and owners of major construction companies.

The seeming contradiction appears to have its roots in a family crisis in 1986, when at the age of 16, Ryan discovered his father dead of a heart attack.
The death of Paul Murray Ryan forced the family to make adjustments. Ryan’s mother went back to work. And Ryan took up jobs, as well….

But there was also more to it than work. Ryan’s rise to political power and financial stability was boosted by family connections and wealth. The larger Ryan family has repeatedly helped the candidate along in his career, giving him a job when he needed one and piling up tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions…

By the time Ryan had entered Congress in 1999 at the age of 28 and filed his first disclosure statement, he reported assets between $167,000 and $1.3 million, owned a home and had three rental units.

No more Roosevelts, no more Kennedys, no more Rockefellers, no more Bushes, no more Clintons etc etc etc.

No Dynasties, no Legacies, no Entitled Aristocracy.  Not here.  Not now.  Not ever.

Re-Inventing Willard

"I stand by what I said - whatever it was." --Mitt Romney

Educate Yourself

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Uh Oh

From Up With Chris Hayes yesterday:
They're talking about what a party platform is, and what it should be, and what the candidate's obligations end up being regarding the various interest groups and constituencies that have to come together to hammer out the platform; which is the same weird mixture of sometimes competing groups of voters (ie Donors) you have to put together when you run for the only National Office there is.

MSNBC Video: Romney adviser says GOP activists will have ”very little” purchase on a Romney presidency

Didja hear it, Wingnuts?  Did you hear it, Independents?

Romney's gambling that he'll pick up enough Indies to offset the votes he's losing on the far right.  This seems like the kind of cynical calculus that gets worked on a regular basis, but with these Romney guys it's like they've decided it's not necessary even to try to disguise it anymore.  So get ready 'cuz here comes another Etch-A-Sketch moment.

Could Be A Good Thing

Andrea Seabrook (NPR's Capitol Hill Reporter) just couldn't take the shit any more.

So she split, and started DecodeDC:

"I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say.

...

We need to stop coddling lawmakers, stop buying their red team, blue team narrative and ask harder questions of them."

Hoping it works out great - worried that it won't.

The bit on NPR from a few weeks ago:



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)