Today's Smartest Thing

They're talking about the sausage-making in DC, and at around the 4:45 mark, Alexis Goldstein (OWS) makes an observational analogy that just knocked me my off my chair.

Paraphrasing - lobbyists get in to see the Congress Critters so regularly and so often - effectively pushing constituents and consumers and "regular people" off to the side - that it starts to look like a Denial of Service Attack.

Watch, and gape - and then try to explain to me how you think your Reps in congress are there to serve you.

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About That Dead Elephant

It's generally not a good idea to predict the actual demise of a whole political party.  I wanna say I recall a time not that long ago when lotsa people were saying the Dems wouldn't survive, and gosh, just look at 'em now.

However, there's plenty to be gained politically by making the Cool Kid appeal - ie: "nobody votes for those guys anymore because they're terminally lame and def un-cool", or "they're so 2006", or "I'll bet they're all Nickelback fans", or whatever.

An awful lot of us just run with the pack.  We pay little or no attention until some encounter when we might say something previously considered hip or evenhanded or otherwise stylish and end up getting the feeling we've made some kind of social error by not being in step with a change in political fashion.  That's why yard signs and bumper stickers work - they give people permission to vote a certain way without having to invest much time or effort in making a committed decision. When we see enough evidence of a sufficient number of other people doing the thinking and taking action, and formulating the rhetoric, we start to feel safe enough to go along with the crowd.

I know a woman who told me straight out last summer that she wouldn't be making up her mind on voting for Obama or Romney until she was sure about "who the nation was backing".

So anyway, from an old(ish) post at Addicting Info, here's some speculation about what's eating the GOP from the inside out:

What Reed, and other party bosses, are ignoring is that in their grab for political power, they attempted to blend together three opposing factors, and the pressure between these groups is about to blow the lid wide open.
These groups are:

Libertarians vs. social conservatives – Social Conservatives want more government intrusion in to people’s lives, the opposite of the Libertarian government-out mentality.

Right-wing populists vs. the pro-business crowd – Populists are against the subsidies which the pro-business groups live on, and they are at each others throats.

Deficit reduction hawks vs. small government activists – Deficit hawks want to reduce the deficit, but a small government cannot manage its deficit due to the lack of revenue. With such opposing demands, it is only a matter of time before they come to blows.

In the recruitment of the radical fringe, what, in ages past, would be the Know-Nothings or the Dixiecrats, the GOP has sown the seeds of its own destruction. Now the party has come to accept it. 

Today's History Lesson

Heroes remain heroes only as long as we don't look too close.  It's always important to judge slowly.

From a long pice at AlterNet:

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

--and--

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

--and--

When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.

It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Iraq By The Numbers

This is the best rundown I've found recently - and expanding on the basic theme (as Fugelsang does) - if you voted for Jr Bush and/or you supported the war in Iraq, you never ever get to make any noise about the deficit or the debt again.  You just get to shut the fuck up while the rest of us get some of this shit straightened out.

Today's Pix

So glad they made pot legal - am I doin' this right?

Yo, Glenn

...ya wanna get my flag up off the fuckin' floor, please?



Not that long ago, he called himself a rodeo clown.  I think maybe he's turned into something else now.  I haven't seen much of him for a while, but - holy crap, dude - you might make a bit more sense and be a lot more watchable if you started to drinkin' again.

Another One Bites The Dust

Just in case you're as Math-Challenged as I am, here's the deal on the "conservative" meme about how American life-expectancy was so much shorter way back when Social Security was first put in place.

If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.

As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).

"Average" can be kinda tricky.  I try to remember that if I put Warren Buffett in line at the local soup kitchen, the 'average' net worth goes up to about $100 million, but I've still got 50 homeless guys plus Warren Buffett.  Tricky.

hat tip = Paul Krugman

Harvest Moon

God Bless The Child

The best quality I could find - sorry - I remember this from a TV show sometime in the 70s(?)



This band was another example of the kind of shitty things that happen when The Suits take over.

The People's Music

I used to fiddle with a 4-track DIY mini-studio thingie I bought for a coupla thousand bucks way way back in the Jurassic 80s - and on my best fuckin' day, I could maybe almost imagine doing something like this.



Astounding is all it is.