Hume And Wallace

I think this is what they call trying to thread the needle. By now, these 2 old pros must surely have developed a hyper-awarenees of consumer feedback; and they just as surely know how nakedly stupid they look when they try to put up some bullshit about how Obama's going to lose this thing in spite of every indication that Romney's campaign has disintegrated in mid-air and is falling to the ground in flaming chunks. And in spite of their best efforts to beat him over the last 5 years, it looks like Obama's about to crush their guy even tho' "everybody hates the Prez and everything he's done" (according to what DumFux News is always dishing up for the rubes). So here they are doing their best to make pretty pictures, painting with the loads of runny crampy diarrhea that Rove and Armey and Ailes gave them to work with. If Obama takes it, they've got practically nothing left but to revert to their old strategy - so of course, this piece makes me think they're hedging, and it looks like they're resetting the frame for more attacks against  Obama's legitimacy.

 

Like I said - I think these guys know they're being laughed at to the point where they're having a hard time continuing to pretend they're anything even remotely resembling real-life journalists. So y'know what? Fuck 'em.

Word O' The Day

"Mittdacity" - from The Baffler No 21, by Rick Perlstein:

And then there’s the most delicious kind of lie of them all, the kind that hoists the teller on his own petard as soon as a faintly curious auditor consults the record for occasions on which he’s said the opposite. Here the dossier of Mittdacity overfloweth. In 2012, for example, he said he took no more federal money for the Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games had taken; a decade earlier, however, he called the $410 million in federal money he bagged “a huge increase over anything ever done before.”

hat tip = Balloon Juice

On Climate Change

If you ask me about AGW and Climate Change, my honest answer is that I really don't know.  ie: I don't have the direct first-hand knowledge I need to to be "absolutely sure" of it.

But here's the deal - I'm gonna take the word of Climatologists who are educated and experienced way the fuck before I listen to some coin-operated politician on the subject.

The scientist has to exceed a Certainty Threshold (Confidence Interval) of 95% required by most Peer-Review Processes before his findings are accepted as the prevailing thesis.

The politician has to get 50% plus 1.

So, if your broker came to you saying he had 2 opportunities for you, would you go for the one with a 50.01% shot at working out, or do ya think ya might wanna go with the one at 95%?

C'mon, "conservatives" - you're supposed to be the ones who take a cold, clear-eyed look at this stuff.  What the fuck're you doin'?

Music For Today

Danny O'Keefe's Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues:

Gettin' It Done - 2

This one's as big as they get.  And while it's a little silly to play "yeah-but-what-If", I think there're 2 things we can be pretty sure of.  First, without the Stimulus Package we're lyin' in pieces on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.  And second, we'd be miles ahead of where we are now if Obama'd gotten just the tiniest bit of help from the Repubs in congress.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

It's something of a stretch - but not much...

Is That You, Geraldo?

WTF is up with Geraldo Rivera?  "He's been off script for days" (Addicting Info), this time taking down the ever-execrable Eric Bolling on the Benghazi lie.



Eventually you have to realize you've been avoiding eye contact with the guy in the mirror(?)  Dunno - feels encouraging tho'; and not just to think that maybe Geraldo's career at DumFux News is about to be scuttled.

Willard Off Air Oops

This all happened off the air - which is the only time this guy says what he means and lets himself behave like the truly entitled aristocratic dick that he is.

At about the 3-minute mark, Romney says he made a political calculation about his stance on abortion.



He's fakin' it - the guy has no soul and no honor.

hat tip = Addicting Info

I ♥ Wonkette

Just good old-fashioned scary shit is all it is.

The Wonkette:

Republican painter-artist Jon McNaughton has come out with a new painting! You know, in case there was too much subtlety in his painting of Obama presiding over a terror-wracked deathscape Sharialand populated by Nidal Hassan and unemployed brown people.

This one’s called “The Runaway Slave,” and that torch means he’s voting for Romney. “Runaway” is a reference to his escape from the plantation of government dependency, and “Slave” is a reference to him, you know, being black.

Gettin' It Done - 3

It's big and complex and some of it is being used by Big Financial to make it harder for the smaller players to compete, which of course makes it easier for the big guys to capture more of the market (but that's another rant).

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

So "reform" in this  case is a relative and somewhat dubious term, but still, we got something out of it: Consumer Credit Protection, Reinforcement/Restructuring of Sarbanes-Oxley, Some restriction on banks investing in private equity instruments, etc.  It's not everything I think we should have in place, but it's something.

Now if the Repubs on Capitol Hill could manage not to stand in the way, it might do us some real good.

Sandy Toons

You had to know these were on their way.