Today's Reading Assignment

(hat tip = Charlie Pierce)

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.

And nobody makes it easier to understand than Victor Juhasz:

A Question

If it's wrong to steal the wealth from rich people in order to make poor people less poor, then it's just as wrong to steal the labor from poor people in order to make rich people richer.

Having believed that first part while purposefully ignoring the second part is what haunts me about my own career history, and what leads me to believe that the flirtation with economic justice we've indulged in since the 1930s is all but over.  We're sliding back into the old ways of doing things and so we need to call our system by it's more suitable name: Kleptonomics.

I've had a bad feeling when thinking about the downward pressure on real wages and earnings here in the US over the last few decades.  It's almost as if somebody wants us to feel guilty about our success in order to make us more willing to do more and to accept less in return for it; while workers in other countries are portrayed as making "great strides" and how they're humble and so they're grateful for whatever crumbs the noble job-creators are willing to let fall from their tables; and so "why can't you spoiled rotten Americans just take whatever we give you and shut up about it?"

While we're being distracted by game shows and disaster porn and attention whores, the real meanings and merits of Socialism and Capitalism are being flipped and perverted until we have no idea what any of it means at all.

In confusion there is opportunity - somebody benefits while the credit and the culpability are shifted to those who least deserve them.

It all sounds way too conspiracy-theory-ish, but y'know, I may be paranoid but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Oh Yeah - I Get It

Mike's Rule #1:  It's never about what they tell us it's about.

Ted Cruz goes on a gab jag in the well of the Senate, and then votes in favor of cloture on a bill he said he was on his gab jag trying to kill.

Seems not to make any sense at all, but these guys don't say and do the seemingly stupid things they say and do for no good reason.  There's always a good reason, which will become clear eventually, which will involve some kind of play for money, which is how you get power, which is the whole fucking point for these guys.

From Daily Beast via Little Green Footballs:

"These guys aren't stupid. They can read the votes,” says a veteran Republican operative. “That's why Republicans are so infuriated. Folks know exactly why they're doing this. They are using this issue and misleading conservatives in order to expand their own influence and raise money for themselves."

The biggest actors so far in Defund, Inc. have been Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, the leadership PAC that Jim DeMint launched as a senator and handed off to his former staff members to run as a conservative super PAC. While Cruz led the defund fight in the Senate this summer, the SCF led a huge parallel fight on the outside, setting up a website, running radio and television ads, robocalls and a direct mail campaign, all designed to raise money from still-hot conservative activists and urge them to sign a petition to tell Congress not to fund the health-care bill when they greenlight funding for the rest of the government.

Don't be a rube. 

Artificial Living

Louis CK on resisting the electronic pacifier.

Who Ya Gonna Be?

Now, if the obviously very clever and talented film makers could just come up with the 3rd and 4th alternatives - you know, kinda like real life - maybe it could help us figure out how not to buy into the bullshit of a strictly binary universe.

I do dearly love this little film tho'.

Coming Back To Haunt

When they talk about policies regarding the economy, lotsa Repubs make lotsa noise about "uncertainty", and they almost always lay it all at the feet of a dysfunctional gubmint; way too much red tape and regulations etc etc etc.

Now, when we're talking about the Repub plans to - I dunno, pick one - "starve the beast" or "shut the thing down" or "stand firm against raising the debt ceiling" or whatever - and because of all those threats we have an awful lot of the gubmint needlessly diverting hours and effort to implementing action plans for what happens if Teddy The Hostage Taker gets his way - isn't all that kinda contributing to the whole Uncertainty Thing in a pretty big way?

And don't we hafta ask who's doing the most when it comes to making our government dysfunctional in the first place?

It's a wonderment.

Testify, Sister

I'm very much Pro-Krystal on this one, while at the same time I just really wish her parents had been a tad more conscientious when it came time to pick a name for her.

Consumer Activism

I posted a few days ago about what a sludge bucket Lil Chuckie Todd is, and today over at Democratic Underground, they said the petition they started had 100,000 signatures, and yesterday I saw Todd on Alex Wagner and I turned it off immediately and today I sent a nastygram to MSNBC and here's the list of people at MSNBC you can annoy with your lefty radical complaints:

Executives in charge:
Deborah Turness, President, NBC News
Phil Griffin, President, MSNBC
Vivian Schiller, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
Bill Wolff, Vice President, Primetime Programming, MSNBC
Mike Rubin, Vice President, Long Form Programming, MSNBC
Richard Wolffe, Vice President and Executive Editor, MSNBC.com

Media Relations:
For reporters looking for comment on MSNBC.com, please contact:
Danielle Lynn, Media Relations Manager
212.664.7403
Email: Danielle.Lynn@nbcuni.com

For reporters looking for comment on MSNBC TV, please call:
MSNBC Media Relations  212.664.6605

For viewers wishing to leave comments about a MSNBC program, please email: msnbctvinfo@nbcuni.com

The Ol' Double Switch Two-Step

..with a half twist and an inverted flipflop in the pike position.

Repub candidate for Virginia's Lt Gov (EW Jackson) had a debate with the Dem (Ralph Northam).  It was really just a polite chat for the most part because the temperature of our political discourse has been pretty high lately and for people who don't wanna think too hard - well, apparently they feel uncomfortable when it comes to doing any of the actual work required of citizens living in a system of self-government.  So this was more yawn-fest than debate, but whatever.

Although the differences felt muted for much of the debate, the ending more than made up for it.

When Fox brought up Jackson’s record of inflammatory rhetoric, the Republican was ready. Saying he’d expected the question, Jackson surprised everyone in the George Mason University auditorium in Arlington by grabbing a tablet computer he had close at hand.

He then read a passage from the Virginia state constitution. It protects citizens’ rights to express any opinion whatsoever in matters of religion.
To fault him for speaking out on religious issues, Jackson said, was to create a religious test for holding public office. It wasn’t fair when critics did it to Roman Catholic John Kennedy or to Mormon Mitt Romney, and it wasn’t fair to do it to him now. He knew the difference between what he professed in church and what he said as a politician.

The first point is that when you say one thing in church and then you say something very different out in public - yeah, that matters.  Guys like Jackson have been screaming for years about how we need to get back to our Jesus-y roots and if only we cleaved a little more closely to our Sunday School lessons then government would be a walk in the park. But guess what - the handlers and image consultants have figured out that most of us just wanna puke whenever we hear our "public servants" yammering on about what their imaginary friends are going to do to us unless blah blah blah.  So we've already seen a guy like Cuccinelli trying to distance himself from guys like Jackson; now we get the extra special spectacle of a guy like Jackson trying to distance himself from himself.  Pretty neat trick.

And the kicker is the very standard rap that we need to recognize and be ready to stomp into the pavement whenever some slickster pulls it out: pretending that his right to express his opinion is under attack.  It isn't - he's just making that shit up to deflect criticism.  It's about the opinion itself, not the right to express the opinion.

Don't be a rube.

Playing The Opposites Game

American Swastika

Seriously, fellas - what you're using to fetishize your misty-eyed fantasies of a glorious past really doesn't stand for what you pretend it stands for.

Slavery was a bad idea.
Secession in support of slavery was a bad idea.
Fighting a war to defend secession in order to support slavery was a bad idea.
3 strikes.
You're out.
Get the fuck over it.

How To Obamacare

healthcare.gov



If guys like Chuck Todd were real journalists and not just Press Poodles, we'd all know this stuff already.

Today's Gun Nut(s)

There's no good news here - including what would normally be a primo opportunity to say something about the the dark side of irony:  "Well, at least the gun freaks are just shooting each other now - so maybe the problem will solve itself".

  Breaking News

And yet, it's still going to be the NRA's position that people with guns prevent these incidents rather than cause them.  It just sucks - top to bottom, side to side and front to back.

Nature Bats Last

A canary in a coal mine, and an albatross in the Pacific.



Makes me wonder if we have the guts to see the truth before it pops up and kicks us in the face.

Unintended Consequences

Please please please - can we try a bit harder (or at all) to get over this self-imposed exile to Stoopidsville that makes it necessary for a semi-dipwad like Bill Nye to think he should do this kinda shit just to "raise awareness" a tiny bit in order to put a few bucks back into an honest effort at making some sense of the world around us by not just requiring our kids to study the sciences, but also by investing in things that'll give them a decent shot at working at real jobs in the fields we're forcing them to study in the first fuckin' place?