Iowa Liberal

Budget cuts in all areas of social services means that there are more people like Albert Flowers walking the streets without treatment.

These events happen quite frequently where I live. High on right wing theology and under constant pressure to juke stats that show an increase in collared “criminals”, juiced-up cops cruise the streets on search and destroy missions looking for anybody who dares to accidentally trip over a piece of broken sidewalk or drive to work with registration tags a month overdue. When they happen across an obviously mentally ill individual they jack them up and haul them into jail and then when they get too out of control they dump them off at the local emergency room. The hospital tends to them at a cost of up to $3K per day until they’re stabilized and then they’re sent out the door with, thanks to Medicare Part D, 30 days of domestically produced/priced meds. Those thirty days expire, the patient starts to self-medicate with alcohol, becomes delusional and sometimes violent and the process starts all over when they once again become a nuisance to the locals.

The thing is that when you look back, the stimulus was one of the few things that did have an effect on the recession. We already had low taxes and a deregulatory paradise before the economy collapsed, why would those things be expected to work as salve for fiscal wounds?

-hw

Santorum wins Iowa by 34 votes and it’s declared a draw?

So somebody neutralized those 34 votes.

Who has that power? I’d like to know, and why. What is the limit?

-hw

Wisconsin voters got a million signatures to give Scott Walker the boot for his disastrous, deceptive mauling of the office of governor. And it’s looking like yesterday’s SOPA awareness effort made a huge splash, got people talking, and turned a few politicians away from the entertainment industry money. Now I am, of course, a big entertainment industry supporter but don’t tell us we have to break the internet and give their lawyers the kill switch for them to make a buck.

People power, right? Make sure you take an extra fifty bucks before November and give to as many as five or ten candidates you support. Five bucks from you makes a huge dent in the system. It’s money that the politician owes to the electorate, not just the big money sponsors. If everybody with an opinion gave a candidate five bucks, every candidate in America will be awash in campaign cash, thus neutralizing the impact of money. Flood the system with your currency, and the policies will rise to the top. Real debates will be had. And won.

-hw

Yummy:

If you were trying to come up with the most atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn’t do much better than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular moderate governor who lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he’s run in and whose signature issue Romneycare is an enormous failure. Moreover, he’s so uninspiring that he makes Bob Dole look like Ronald Reagan and that’s before you consider his incessant flip-flopping that makes it impossible to really know where he stands on any issue. Romney’s candidacy also runs counter to almost every political trend in the book right now. He’s the antithesis of everything the Tea Party stands for — a moderate establishment-endorsed, principle-free Rockefeller Republican. On the other hand, he’s like a bad guy straight out of central casting for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, a conscience-free 1 percenter who makes $10,000 bets and lectures the public about how corporations are people — while hordes of poor and middle class Americans that he fired trail in his wake telling tales of woe about how Romney made their lives into a living hell.

This is just as brutal:

The best thing of all is that the rest of their choices aren’t any better. They’re trying to resuscitate Newt, for gawd’s sake. That’s trading one symbol of all that’s wrong with Republican politicians for another, but losing the hair and chiseled jaw in exchange for a giant grey man-baby.

So with the GOP presidential race winnowing down its field of mediocrity down to a flower pot of amorphophallus titanum, I declare today that 2012 is really about Congress. Just as it’s always been.

It’s been cool and hip to declare more loudly than the next liberal how much President Obama has betrayed the base and his accomplishments are trifling. Hell, sometimes it’s been on the nose. But let’s take the latest horrible betrayal: The NDAA.

SO who among the self-mutilating Republican-enabling left will care to point out that the bill was sent to President Obama with a Senate vote of 86-13?

Should Obama still have vetoed it? Yep, I absolutely believe he could have and should have attempted to peel off more Senators and get out the offending amendment. Would he have succeeded? Possibly. But when a bill comes his way with a nearly twenty vote margin above a veto override, I’m not about to use all my gunpowder on Obama.

The core reality, the path that will actually get something done in this world we live in where Republicans are running on torture, abolishing women’s rights and starting a war with Iran, is to primary the hell out of these jackasses in Congress whenever we get the chance and to start standing up for liberal values even in the reddest of the red states. The fact that Obama even got healthcare passed was because Democrats were succeeding at doing this since the fire got lit under their asses in 2004 and he was able, for a few months there, to get 60 Senators to override the Republican filibuster.

Without Congress, there is nothing. Even with Congress, we were blocked and obstructed, the really good Democrats in the House sending bill after bill to the Senate to die. We have to have complete control of Congress and have Republican Senators afraid to try stalling.

So primary every unsatisfactory Democrat with grassroots money, and beat the living shit out of every Republican in an election. That’s how you’ll get something done. That’s how you’ll get a world where Congress restores the Constitution. That’s how you get your Democratic president signing one good bill after another. That’s how you’ll get the Glenn Greenwalds of the left applauding their leaders with clear conscience. That’s how you’ll get your country back, and by “your country” you mean one with a real goddamn Constitution, not just one with a white president ala the Tea Party.

-hw

Can’t sum it up better than this. Maybe, “Should we start including peanuts in our peanut butter?”

I must giggle a bit that Mitt Romney’s stupendous campaign of constant, unskillful lying has pressed the NYT to confront some of its attitudes towards stenographic journalism. After two Gee Dubya campaigns, the euphemization of torture, and Sarah Palin I didn’t think the press had any boundaries on reprinting bald-faced lies, but there ya go, a limit.

-hw

1. Another nail in the Romney coffin before he’s even out of the general election gate. Romney has as much a chance of winning as Mr. Burns.

2. It’s still okay to treat Occupy protesters like cockroaches.

3. Citizens United backlash still spreading. People are catching on that these immortal supercitizens who cannot be jailed are steering our government while actual citizens are left behind.

4. This Iran idiocy really is going off the rails. Ron Paul, noted racist and homophobe, has been the only public figure to throw water on our increasing manic anxiety over Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, which already has most of the GOP field declaring war and the Democrats trembling over looking “weak.” Well, Dems, if you don’t want to look weak, be strong and face reality. Iran seems to be stomaching various acts of war against them with some patience, perhaps because they know what anybody who isn’t a harebrain knows, that they will eventually get the nukes anyway and then maybe they’ll be left alone.

5. The pressures of inequality on the market and its link to the Great Recession. It’s not exactly rocket science that the wealthy do better when everybody’s doing better, but thirty years of voodoo Reaganomics has taken its toll.

6. Think the Republican contenders are delivering body blows to Romney over Bain? Wait til the Democrats pull out their big guns

7. Excellent analysis of the crazy cult of anti-Obama haters that the GOP has become. Along the lines I’ve laid out before:

The main reason, I believe, is that the American right was backed into a corner and had no other card to play. The disastrous presidency of George W. Bush revealed the complete bankruptcy (literally) of the two core right-wing nostrums, “freedom” (good) and “big government” (bad). “Freedom” had led to the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression. And big government – which was greatly expanded by Bush, to the deafening silence of the soon-to-be-anti-Obama fanatics – had done nothing to prevent it. In the wreckage left by Bush, there was nothing for the right to do, if it wanted to live to fight another day, except deny causality (and reality) and demonize Obama.

Exactly. Do you remember that little moment in 2008 where the Republicans were losing, so utterly adrift that people started to wonder if they were finished as a party? Where they had to come up with something to say, and there was nothing sane left to say? That’s when the Tea Party started.

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“Oh Lord. Oh Lord! Are we just numbskulls out here in the heartland of America? Just a bunch of numbskulls who can’t read the unemployment numbers and see that 5 trillion dollars in new debt later under her husband, President Obama, five trillion dollars more, and we still have fewer jobs today than we had before he took over,” Palin said, responding to a clip of Mrs. Obama claiming that some people are “confused” about the president’s real accomplishments. “But, we’re numbskulls out here and we just don’t understand what these numbers mean, what they represent.”

You, Sarah Palin, certainly are a numbskull, and your attempt to conflate yourself with all people in the “heartland” (since when is Alaska the heartland?) is just an attempt to cover up for your numbskullduggery. The debt exploded because of the recession, not because of any new policies from Obama. The jobs are lost because of the recession, not because Obama’s policies lost jobs (as I just noted, Republicans have done their best to kill jobs since the Tea Party took over the House)

If you are the type to get offended when people think you’re an idiot, one step you can take is to stop being a goddamn idiot. Palin prefers to act self-righteous, and still seems to have learned nothing. After three years, she couldn’t be bothered to learn enough to pretend to be a semi-plausible Republican presidential candidate, and with Rick Perry still in the race that’s an absolute crime. She’s never demonstrated an ounce of insight or intelligence, and yet when she mangles statistics we’re supposed to immediately discount the possibility that she doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. Because, of course, it’s the correct and immediate answer anybody sensible would seize upon.

But just let me say, the strange invective and spite being hurled at Michelle Obama recently really is something else. She’s quite beloved by most of the country, certainly by more people than Sarah Palin, and she pretty much does nothing but look amazing and advocate for healthy living. Considering her formidable intelligence and talents, she’s been remarkably restrained the past three years. But there you go, the difference between a confidently quiet intelligent person and an neurotically insecure loud fool.

-hw

For people who have decided they’re going to repeat the phrase “job killing” as often as possible whenever talking about Democrats (regardless of the facts), Republicans sure have managed to kill a lot of jobs.

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Haven’t said much because the Republicans are about to nominate a pathological liar nobody likes who grew up rich and got richer firing Americans and outsourcing their jobs, who then later became governor of Massachusetts and made his signature accomplishment the very health care reform plan that was conceived by Republicans but used as a model for the Affordable Care Act (OBAMACARE!!!).

Then again, I can’t lose with this field, can I?

And while this is a pretty miserable crop, it is so for a reason. These are the only people fool enough to try running for president as Republicans when the Republicans have gone from bankrupt in 2008 to completely flibbeldy-floo buggers beyond belief. They are utterly riddled with inexplicable hatred for President Obama, and as a result they’ve painted themselves into corners so many times they’ve taken to jumping out windows. Whereas President Obama has handled the recession too conservatively, Republicans have forced themselves to believe he handled it no differently than Chairman Mao. Whereas Obama clearly was not responsible for the actual crisis itself or the hemorrhaging of jobs taking place as he swore his oath, Republicans are so unable to stomach looking at the scoreboard that they have no political option except to lie, lie, lie repeatedly. Romney has done well being a rather exceptionally prolific liar and dissembler, but he’s merely won first place among liars. The problem is, nearly all sane and mildly informed people know he’s lying. In order to appease the base, he has almost nothing he can say that is the truth, because they’ve been drinking pure horsepiss and dining on horseshit for three years.

And with our lovely Tea Party congress, we’ve gotten a full laboratory experiment in which we can see that obstruction and austerity do nothing to help job creation, and even hinder it.

So Republican policies created the crisis, Republican policies left us so in debt that fighting the crisis became even more difficult, and Republican politicians when elected made the economy worse with the debt ceiling debacle and forcing deep cuts in the public sector.

What’s Mitt or any of them supposed to run on? They’ve already done what they could to flee from or lie about Obama’s foreign policy record. Even though Mitt is perfectly willing to lie through his perfect teeth about Obama’s foreign policy, he’s not going to win re-election promising war with Iran and another eight years in Afghanistan. His only chance is the economy being so bad without hope of recovery that nobody cares he’s a pathological liar and Wall Street fatcat who collects $26 million a year from a company he doesn’t even work for anymore. Or that nobody will notice he has nothing more planned than even higher tax cuts for the rich, which will create even more debt wars, resulting in again more punishment of the remaining 99% of Americans.

So yeah, it’s hard to talk about Romney or any of the candidates with a poker face. Can we really be this lucky? Well, all I can say to sober up is that the luck is purely political, and that America itself has been profoundly disserviced by the Republican party. When we needed governance we got looted and pillaged. When we needed responsibility we got only fingers pointed at those who came in after the fact. When we needed recovery, we got only betrayal.

May this election be over soon for our nation’s good. In the meantime, we might as well enjoy the sad spectacle of Mitt Romney, who is whatever he is at the moment yet can never get better.

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Are we really going to start removing fat kids from their parents as a solution to obesity? It does not seem to me to be a wall we should lightly hop over.

Yes, parents are responsible for their children. And extreme obesity may be a sign of deeper, more severe issues at home. But it is nonetheless seriously disgusting to see children wrenched from their parents when, at the highest levels, we are represented by a government that has made it abundantly clear it would prefer to pander to the interests of the frozen food industry than reform childhood nutrition. One in which presidential candidates mock children’s health initiatives as “nannying.” Even the authors of that provocative JAMA story recommended governmental “investments in the social infrastructure and policies to improve diet and promote physical activity among children.” It takes a village to raise a child without a body-mass index number in the danger level.

Imagine if you were a little boy, perhaps without the best body image, and you knew that seeing your mom was contingent upon losing weight. Now imagine the over 12 percent of third-graders in Ohio who are severely obese and may now be facing a similar fate. Whatever you think of parental accountability for childhood obesity, ask yourself this: If one child can be removed, what happens to the rest? Who’s going to decide which parents of obese kids are neglectful? And who will take care of their health when neither their government nor their families seem to know how?

When Michelle Obama says, “You should eat vegetables and exercise more,” Republicans may choose to see that as further proof of the impending Liberal Holocaust, but this kind of meddling threatens to legitimize such complaints. It may be a tragedy when a parent lets their child’s body go to ruin, but not only can we not prevent all tragedies, we do not have the right to do so. And when the government so clearly fails via the school system where it has proper domain in providing proper nutrition and necessary exercise, by what argument can it claim legitimacy? Throw in genetic components of obesity and the issue becomes hopelessly muddled. Failure to justify a power means conceding that power does not rightfully exist.

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Their state Supreme Court calls bullshit on the Citizens United ruling which declared as a fact that allowing corporations to buy elections does not result in corruption. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of history in this country to cite, and they do.

The federal Supreme Court, having four plainly radical Republican activists on the bench will doubtlessly ignore reality, but Kennedy does occasionally show signs of regard for empirical evidence. In the meantime, our government is up for sale, politicians desperate to raise the money needed to pay off the private broadcasters who we gave public airwaves to for virtually nothing.

I just keep wondering, if money is speech, why can’t I bribe a police officer or judge? Am I not merely speaking and practicing my First Amendment rights?

-hw

This kind of stuff doesn’t get a lot of fanfare, but it’s got a lot more to do with national defense than bombing people in Afghanistan or starting a new war in Iran as the GOP candidates proudly promise.

With two years of the Obama administration, almost four times as much clean energy has been put on the grid on public lands as in all the previous 40 years.
All the renewable energy ever permitted on public lands totaled 1,800 MW by the end of 2008. In the last two years, the Department of the Interior has approved 6,600 MW of new projects.

I’ve mentioned it before, but at a relatively inexpensive cost we could generate 70% of our electricity with solar alone by 2050. Throw in support from other renewables like wind (and possibly waste-eating fast neutron nuclear power) and we’re set.

-hw

I’m a man of few- yet very strong- relationships. In San Diego I’ve pretty much got one regular homie/bro/party person, and he’s done a lot to make the past six or seven years fun and intellectually stimulating. I had a pretty tough run my first few years in California, with every “friend” eventually doing everything possible to ruin my life, but in Aaron I’ve had a friendship built on mutual respect, honesty, and fairness. In person he’s one of the nicest, most genuine people you’ll ever meet, and that honesty carries over to his uncompromising art…

…and so I proudly introduce his website, DEMON TRIBE HOLLOW. Streaming audio and all sorts of other goodies.

Interestingly, Fletcher started bopping and grooving the second he heard it. Well, I’d be proud to have a son like Aaron, so there you go:)

Good luck, Aaron! Hope this link goes far.

-hw

UPDATE: I should give readers a hint: liking Meat Beat Manifesto is a strong indicator that you’ll dig Aaron’s music.

With 98% of precincts reporting I’m calling it for Palin.

Rod Dreher (via Roy Edroso) found an anonymous individual that buttresses his hatred of the poors:

["Dr. Smith"] said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.”

He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it…

The observable common behavior [of the poor] is so strange, irresponsible, and wholly dysfunctional that it’s hard to relate it to any norms we recognize as healthy, or even sane. But one is not permitted to say things like this out loud, or one will be accused of heartlessness, and worse.

Yet here’s Dreher saying it out loud; what a brave fellow! Be nice to him, now, he just lost his sister.

At the hospital I work at we refer to the class of people that Dreher is meta-speaking of as the “mentally ill”. Or more specifically, “schizophrenics” or “those suffering from bi-polar disorder” or “dementia” who, when filling out job applications, defer to the voices in their heads when listing references. How unscrupulous of them! But therein lies the rub: they’re either digging through your garbage or they’re involved in some form of established state run mental health systems that are perpetually under-funded. The problem is that right-wingers find both of the above two options disagreeable and instead unanimously prefer the far more expensive option of incarceration because it’s not really about public health issues or the money being spent on hypothetical stubbed toes. It’s about looking for an opportunity to complain that Somebody Is Getting Something That They Don’t Deserve.

-mg

Holy smokes:

That’s the clean version. Just got back from Iowa and I’m feeling all Mr. Rogers.

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If you want a straight shot of SIX OF ONE HALF DOZEN OF THE OTHER!!! conventional bullshit without a scrap of thought in it, this attempt by Politifact to further defend its decision to call Democrats liars for saying Republicans voted to end Medicare will stick the junk right in your veins.

Nowhere in it will you find an address of the merits of the case. I really mean it, because this is the only sentence the merits are touched upon:

We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

That’s correct, the only line that mentions the merits of the criticism specifically states that the merits were not considered. Thus it does not matter whether or not the Ryan plan would end Medicare in all but name. It doesn’t matter if it hands out each senior a magic healing stone with “Medicare” carved on it. The merits of the plan are not to be considered.

What was considered? As you can see in the article, the usual tropes about oh, what sad partisan times we live in, and excuses that the Washington Post did it too so it’s okay.

The facts were not allowed in a fact-check. And everybody else should just suck it in and take it except Politifact, apparently.

How quickly people rise from nowhere into vaunted infallible hubristic disrepair.

-hw

Yeah, I never blog much when I’m in Iowa. The world isn’t a simple place.

So anyway, good story, I show up at Mike’s place with Fletcher in tow, and within an hour I’m in the bathroom beginning a twelve hour stomach flu nightmare.

And then we all got proof that Ron Paul is a racist homophobic liar!

The vomit and diarrhea, I think, was psychic anticipation of the moment I would never again trust a rightwing libertarian to not be tiptoeing around his bunker of Nazi paraphernalia.

-hw

p.s. Fletcher managed to mercifully sleep through most of The Ordeal. But he will grow up with few illusions about Ron Paul.

I was always a Home Depot guy anyway. But Lowe’s shying away from controversy is one thing. The people slithering out of their dank neocon caves to support Lowe’s are just straight up hating.

You’ll have to turn to Jon Stewart for the ultimate smackdown though.

-hw

Ten grand, I say, that my chicken quiche won’t melt your heart. Let’s put another ten grand on whether or not I can do the Fox Trot! And why not? Let’s bet a fucking yacht that I can bowl over 200. I’m so frivolous I should run for president.

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Say, doesn’t it seem like conservative blogs were really interested in public opinion about Congress just a couple years back?
-TT

Gosh, won’t someone just give him a chance? He’s trying so hard, and he really really super conservative and he’s against anything Obama-ish or Democrat-esque, he is a mighty rightwing warrior waiting to take off! He’s very much against Obamacare, for instance. Check out this withering attack:

If you don’t have to have insurance until you’re sick, why buy insurance? … How much would insurance be if only people who needed insurance bought it? The whole point of insurance is: healthy people buy it, sick people buy it, and those who are healthy support those who are sick…. But if insurance is only sick people buy it, well guess what’s going to be the cost of insurance. That’s why there’s a preexisting-condition clause.

Whoops, Rick Santorum just explained why either one has a mandate or else insurance companies just get to weed out anybody unprofitable. But he doesn’t seem to be aware, much like the other Republican candidates, just what the ACA is or what it’s already done for him.

Recently, Santorum has been openly discussing his three-year-old daughter’s illness, a rare and very serious chromosomal condition called Trisomy 18. “I had insurance under my employer,” Santorum told the students. “And when I decided to run for president, I left my job, I lost my insurance, I had to go out and buy insurance on the open market. We have a child who has a preexisting condition. We went out and we said, we left this plan, and we want to join your plan. Fine, we have to pay more because she has a preexisting condition. We should pay more. She’s going to be very expensive to the insurance company. That cost, while not the whole cost, is passed along to us…. I’m OK with that.”

You know what else the Affordable Care Act does? It bars insurers from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions. Right now. Before the bill was signed into law last year, a parent in Santorum’s position could find his child denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. Is he OK with that too? Because if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, that’s precisely the situation parents like him — though mostly not former U.S. senators — would find themselves in.

I’m not sure how wealthy Santorum is, so perhaps he could have afforded any level of insurance, but the fact is that for 98% of Americans, having a little girl with Trisomy 18 could mean being denied healthcare under Republican rule.

Nearly everything about the Affordable Care Act is popular among voters, and the one snag that gave Republicans hope, the individual mandate, has steadily increased in popularity as people come to understand what no mandate means.

Weed out the sick, break the insurance companies, or have an individual mandate, what’s your choice? Although breaking the insurance companies could deliver us into the sanctuary of a single payer program, I don’t think many people would agree with such an outright attack on private insurance, so what’ll it be?

For Republicans, the answer is just keep hating Obama, but that won’t heal a sick child, will it?

-hw

Hat tip to Sullivan here.

All the way around to socialism, only redistributing wealth upwards instead of for the general welfare.

The whole “socialism” charge is usually an indication that somebody doesn’t understand what socialism is or that the USA is already a capitalist-socialist hybrid. But they had to think of something to say about Obama, and so policies that should have been largely uncontroversial suddenly became hot-button issues, and now Republicans are so swept up in their cries for unfettered lassez-faire capitalist destruction derby that they’re opposing absolutely anything Obama proposes for the middle class and even coming up with new attacks on social fortifications we thought untouchable (e.g. child labor laws). Their anti-Obama mania has resulted in a group of utterly self-interested Galtians completely useless to anybody else, especially most voters and anybody un- or underemployed.

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Back on the subject of asset forfeiture, financial incentives for police departments to go after drug arrests, even casual pot smokers, are skewing justice (as money is wont to do, not being merely “speech”):

The drug war’s financial incentives appear to be having an effect. A drug offender is much more likely to be arrested in Chicago than he was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. But kill someone in Chicago, and you’re only about half as likely to be caught as you were in the early 1990s.
Last July, more than a year after her attack, Shaver’s assailant “Sonny” was finally convicted. He was sentenced to six months of probation. Reflecting back on the last tumultuous two years, Shaver says, “It just doesn’t make sense. Repeat violent offenders get to walk while casual pot smokers get terrorized by SWAT teams. I’m pretty disappointed in the justice system.”

It would be nice if our police officers were out there actually enforcing justice fairly and equally. Instead, they’re morphing into highwaymen, out to collect booty. It’s not their fault, ultimately, but the fault of those who create the drug war incentives that are intrinsically corrupt via actually being a war on Americans. Police officers, like any other human beings, will pursue the monetary incentives placed before them in their line of work.

-hw

1. Two Americas update: If you haven’t noticed, our criminal justice system is designed to inflict maximum punishment on the poor while giving the wealthy as many free passes as possible.

I seem to remember the moral dilemma question about what to charge the man who only steals food for his children. All this woman did was lie about her drug history, which renders her morally equivalent to most politicians.

2. This is kind of true if you mean that anybody who writes for television or movies dares to believe something outside the realm of acceptable opinion on Fox News. Apparently, regardless of what any of us think is right or wrong, we should only write and produce art that conforms to one overriding goal: not offending people who capitalize on being offended.

Climate change is only controversial within the balloon of Fox and the right in America. Making a movie that touches upon our fears of the future is hardly controversial itself. Fear is one of the best topics for a film, even if it’s a fear that apes will rule the world while battling psychic mutants.

3. Can we just accept that politicians who have to run from the press should be chased faster? Mitt, you’re not going to be able to tap into the rightwing distrust of all non-rightwing media when you take on the rightwing media. Going apeshit on journalists trying to get close to Romney only exonerates the media for its supposed sins.

4. The Newt Comedy Tour primer. But what interested me was item #13, which shows Newt Gingrich repeatedly supporting the individual mandate as a conservative alternative to horrible things like Medicare for all. Every day it becomes clear that Republicans really have few core principles that they won’t betray the second Obama supports them. Obama started with compromises, Republicans started with, “Go back to Kenya with your anti-colonialist atheist Muslim communistic destruction of all that makes America dear, Barry Soetero!” The mandate always was a non-issue, the issue is hating Barack Obama, and Newt’s candidacy is rising because Republicans believe him when he vocalizes that hatred.

If Republicans want to run Newt, I say good for everybody. Because you couldn’t ask for a better representative for who the Republican Party really is and has been since Newt became Speaker in 1994. Strip away the folksy dunces like Dubya and you get the prep school dullards like Newt who turn their rejection into political resentment. They’re generally unlikable, and confuse arrogance for confidence. And they’re easy to deflate in online debate;) Newt’s biggest weakness on the way to the nomination is the fact that he’s also said enough to make any Republican hate him. But who could be the anti-Newt? Are they finally looking at Huntsman?

5. The more Republicans blather about Reagan (and unflattering themselves by comparison), they make us look back to the actual record of Reagan’s presidency, and it wasn’t good. Reagan’s single greatest accomplishment, it seems, was to make Republicans feel good about themselves. His attempts to play chess in the carnage of South America are so applauded that no manner of law-breaking displeased the forever loyal GOP base. The clear evidence that Reagan was increasingly a minor player in his own administration gave Republicans the model of the spokesman president who winks at America while the realpolitikers operate underground. This culminated in the disastrous two terms of George W. Bush. Reagan’s belief system broke in September 2008, and we’re just seeing the scattered pieces on television.

6. Bush and Blair guilty of war crimes says some foreigners, but they need to shut their mouths because America rules!

7. A wealthy man questions his status as a “job creator.”

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

This has become forgotten in the American collective, overwhelmed by Republicans chirping, “Job creators!” incessantly. Supply-side economics ends with low demand. People earning checks and spending their money on life’s basics with a few luxuries is the lifeblood of an economy. Giving money to billionaires competing for some damn list in a magazine for highest-stacked pile of cash isn’t quite as productive.

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If more politicians talked like this, and were actually willing to act on it, there might be some hope for America exiting this war on its own peaceful citizens. I’m doubly impressed that it’s coming from a Republican. Unfortunately, while President Obama has given some lip service to the senselessness of the Drug War and must surely know about the racial disparities in its enforcement, it hasn’t even been on his radar and the DEA under him is going bananas on harmless marijuana users. It sickens me to think that it’ll take a Republican with the “toughness” credibility to implement sane measures, because all it would take is a Democrat with actual toughness.

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This is becoming inevitable, as the Republican Party, while ever ready to say the word, “Constitution,” is a complete and udder fraud on the subject, and has categorically dismissed most of the Amendments and the underlying philosophy behind the Constitution’s writing.

Now, I know it is required that I disclose the presence of a certain contingent of chickenshit Democrats who regularly cave whenever Republicans get hot and bothered, but they’re never the driving force, and they’re a minority within the Democrat Party, so there. It’s the wholly unbridled unified army of the Republican Order that drives an agenda that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, except as their protections pertain to white Christian heterosexual males.

1. They’re actively pro-torture, even though they square that by declaring any form of torture they like to not be torture. Simple, right? Not only is the Constitution unambiguously against cruel or unusual punishment, i.e. torture, but the entire history of the country at war has hewn to the same principles. Ronald Reagan was explicit in his condemnation of torture. The Republican Party today is best represented by Rick Santorum telling John McCain that he doesn’t understand torture.

2. They’re consistently against or dismissive of the religious freedom of gays, gay-supporting straights, Wiccans, atheists, Muslims. That the First Amendment ever be read in context with a world of varying beliefs is verboten. It’s about the Christian right to inject Christianity into anything they do, even and especially as a public employee. But when it comes to gays, the Christian right directly posits its beliefs as important enough to cancel out those of gays and to directly affect how gays live their lives by forbidding them marriage. The thought that Jesus might look kindly upon a loving gay couple cannot be entertained.

3. Search and seizure, forget it! Everything is open, up for grabs, ready to be peeped upon by Uncle Sam whenever he wants. The Drug War paved the way, the War on Terror planted the settlement and opened shop. Merely being suspected of having drugs can result in asset forfeiture, meaning your property rights are violated without due process, the police department acting as judge and jury. The burden of proof is often reversed onto suspects in such cases, and property is rarely returned regardless of charges.

Every phone and internet conversation has been opened up, and siphons through the NSA’s data miners.

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney considers himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

Power creeps, as the Founders realized, and always, always had to be balanced.

4. While ever ready to claim that rights not spelled out in the Constitution aren’t really rights, directly contradicting the Ninth Amendment, the Republican Party has declared that money equals speech. Why then should I be punished for bribing a police officer or judge? I’m merely talking to the them.

No, anybody knows exactly what money in politics means, it means buying politicians, period. Money buys politicians, it buys media outlets, it pays people to spout theories that testify to the greatness of the wealthy, and it’s all done for the sake of ever more money. As Danny DeVito said in The Heist, “That’s why they call it money.” It’s not the same as speaking your mind, it’s engaging in a transaction. There’s a reason “money talks” is a cliche. With money, speech isn’t so important anymore. It becomes the pretty envelope on a fat wad of cash.

5. Nor does it say anywhere in the Constitution that corporations constitute distinct immortal citizens with full rights. The very construction of a corporation is a legal designation, a product of government legislation. Who ever talks about it in those terms? Certainly not Republicans. Apparently God made corporations?

Ruling in Citizens United that not only could these corporations donate unlimited funds to candidates, but do so anonymously? Does anybody on this planet think the politicians don’t know exactly who donated? It merely creates a gigantic firewall against the public, keeping them out of the process, refusing to tell them who’s bought their supposed representative.

Jesus declared that the rich would not easily find their way into Heaven. He said no such thing about those with lots of opinions. Yet a party built on Judeo-Christian superiority delivers the sentiment, “money equals speech,” to us with deeply sincere faces, even strident faces. Add to that, “a corporation is a person,” whereas one soulless legal entity is equated to a human being, and the conundrum deepens. How do these people maintain such cognitive dissonance? With great strain.

6. Indefinite detention. Like torture, it is the complete and utter opposite of each and every plank, nail, and window in the Constitution’s house. It is the Gulag. It is the dungeon. It is the concentration camp. And now one of the two major parties has not merely let it fly under their radar, but made it their agenda. Take a few Dem politican scalps if you will, but only lefties and a few libertarians (where are you guys when we need you?) are going to bring this fight at all. Lesson from 2010: Letting more Republicans get into office is not a solution.

7. General Welfare: Abolishing the EPA? YHGTBFKM (You have got to be fucking kidding me). The Koch brothers need to dump more poison in our groundwater, Michele, won’t you help them?

The entire concept of the general welfare of the country has completely evacuated the Republican Party. In their eyes, fuck the general welfare. People get what they deserve, and if your life sucks, blame yourself. Of course, if everybody did a lot more looking in the mirror at themselves, we wouldn’t have many Republicans left. Instead, they survey only the oily shell of the individual, and perceive nothing of the complex lattice-work of society that supports their existence.

If you don’t fund schools, you end up living in a world of noisy uneducated people giving you rotten service, and you can only keep moving to new suburbs so long. If you don’t fund police departments, you end up with high crime rates and decreased property values. If you fund prisons while not funding rehab clinics, your Drug War will result in financial incentives that outweigh regular crime prevention. A Drug War waged primarily on minorities will turn jail into a martyrdom ritual, and your children will revere felons as heroes.

President Obama turned the health care system into a universal program, for which he is reviled by the right (not to ignore the political convenience…had there perhaps been a President Romney in 2008, his Massachusetts plan would be considered to be a rightful and just conservative blueprint to accomplish the goals of liberals through free-market means). The rather explicit permission of the Commerce Clause gives the government more than fair leeway to point out that uninsured people merely transfer the cost of their care to others. A mandate is really little more than a distribution of that cost among all citizens. You might not like it, but who’s going to be there for you if you have a stroke in twenty minutes and spend your remaining decades fully paralyzed?

8. Abortion. The government should enter the womb and put up a sign telling the mother to keep providing the nutrients but she’s not in charge anymore? That assertion of domain over the entirety of her body and its natural processes isn’t listed in the Constitution as a specific right, thus it does not exist?

As I mentioned, this is in direct violation of the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly states that the enumeration of certain rights is not meant to disparage the others. The Constitution is not a finite list of rights, and it says so clearly! And it certainly grants the government no power over a woman’s reproductive process. Anti-abortion sentiments were rare at the time of the writing of the Constitution, unfit for a special extension of government powers. And yet as the subject has become a crusade for religious fundamentalists, attempts to justify its Constitutionality have naturally occurred. Their crowing is as predictable as a rooster.

______

Republicans have in many cases not merely gone passive about certain rights, they’ve turned outright aggressive against them. Such a republic facing this prospect would rightly be deemed to be in or near its death throes, about to face a civil war. No matter how casually Republicans treat the Constitution, they’re emphatic about it, often moreso than Democrats. And that should just never be the case, because the only people I see left standing up for the Constitution anymore are left. And if libertarians were to be believed for half the things they say about liberty, there wouldn’t be Republican majorities anywhere.

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Fortunately, the White House is issuing a pretty stiff veto threat to a law invalidating the US Constitution and pretty much Western Civilization for those accused of terrorism (or supporting terrorists, of course, or possibly knowing something about terrorists…) and locking people up indefinitely, US citizen or otherwise.

Yet, as usual, we have a Republican Party that long ago stopped caring about due process for non-Republicans and enough chickenshit Democrats peeling off at the slightest whiff of being “weak” to get it passed in the Senate. Where’s Newt Gingrich with a history lesson when you need him?

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Or $7,700,000,000,000.

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
‘Motivate Others’

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

They committed fraud, basically.

At least those libertarians will take a break from bitching about the Constitutional income tax being “theft” to talk about actual government theft.

If you can’t acknowledge that we threw away most of our Constitutional rights over the Drug War, who are you to even talk about liberty? Especially those who would declare that freedom in America died the day we passed health care reform. Hmmm, requiring me to pay for the medical care I expect to receive, vs. breaking into my house and permanently confiscating my property without any conviction or even charges filed?

Where do your priorities point you?

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UPDATE: Lovely Drug War nugget that connects to the Newt Gingrich Comedy Tour: Newt once proposed mandatory death penalties for those bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into the country. And yes, of course Gingrich has admitted to smoking pot, but check this out:

“See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”
August 8, 1996, Wall Street Journal

I wonder if it’s moral again, and what determines that?

The study that shows Fox News viewers know less than people who watch no news at all might have something to do with conversations like this, where Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly go to absurd lengths to prove what authoritarian tools they are.

Kelly called the pepper spray “a food product, essentially,” but both wondered whether the particular mix the campus police used to repeatedly spray student protesters had been diluted. “A lot of experts are looking at that and saying, is this the real deal?” Kelly said, though she added that the spray was “obviously abrasive and intrusive.”

She then said that it was not clear that the police had overstepped their boundaries, since they were trying to disperse a crowd practicing civil disobedience.

“I know that the tape looks bad,” she said. “I agree it looks bad. All I’m saying is from a legal standpoint, I don’t know that the cops did anything wrong.”

O’Reilly was a tad less nuanced in his comments. “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police,” he said.

It’s just food, ya know!

As the paper and this Speakeasy Science blog post by Deborah Blum (which cites the paper) point out, pepper spray is far more potent than even the hottest of hot peppers. Blum writes that commercial-grade pepper spray is listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units — a measure of “hotness” that hinges on capsaicin content. Compare that to between 200,000 and 350,000 Scoville units for habanero peppers.

The NCMJ paper notes that when the skin is exposed to OC spray, people can experience “tingling, intense burning pain, swelling, redness, and, occasionally, blistering.” If it gets in the eyes, it can cause pain and stinging — and temporary blindness that lasts 30 minutes or so. According to this paper from 2000, published in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, the “immediate changes in mechanical and chemical sensitivity” can persist for up for a week but that a single exposure doesn’t appear to harm the eye tissues.

Respiratory exposure can be more dangerous, with responses including “burning of the throat, wheezing, dry cough, shortness of breath, gagging, gasping, inability to breathe or speak .. and rarely, cyanosis [blue or purple skin or mucous membranes], apnea and respiratory arrest,” the NCMJ paper says.

Blum writes that the sprays “pose a genuine risk to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions.”

At least one of the protesters went to the hospital with chemical burns. You see, they weren’t Tea Partiers so all’s well.

But the flaming zeppelin of depravity here is, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police,” quoth Bill O’Reilly. We don’t, Bill?

There’s also the fact that the students were passive, just sitting there. So what was the pepper spray, but punishment?

So since when did our justice system devolve to the point where police officers are now dispensers of punishment?

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Leading with his chin, Newt Gingrich kicks off his lead in the Republican polls vocalizing something that’s been festering in the right-o-sphere: an end to those cumbersome child labor laws!

Grab your popcorn…

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#^!#%¥£€~>[]&$@*=+ uppity???

Did Limbaugh think playing the race card over true accusations against Herman “black people are brainwashed” Cain was a free pass to utter one of the worst racist slurs towards Michele Obama? No, because he’s been saying racist shit his entire career.

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UPDATE: Glenn Beck seconds the motion.

Apparently future yearly deficits are contingent upon us actively choosing to continue policies that make them happen, but doing nothing erases deficits and saves us $7+ trillion in the next decade, so let’s do nothing!

Personally, I’m exceptionally skilled at doing nothing, so I support this plan, and am completely prepared for full disengagement.

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That’s what exists between this and the American way envisioned in the Constitution:

I guess we’re lucky we haven’t had another Kent State, or that we’re not being mowed down in the streets like in Syria, but that isn’t where the line between authority and individual rights lies in the US. Those aren’t our standards.

Let’s review that First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I don’t see the part in there that says, “But if we say no tents or stand here but not there and you don’t listen, we bash your head in and pepper spray you.”

There is absolutely nothing complicated about this. Anybody who’s even paid the slightest lip service to the Constitution should be steaming mad about this, period. If not, perhaps Syria might make a better fit for you.

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-mg

A reminder that our drone strikes, generally good at nailing people we think are terrorists, also rack up huge numbers of dead people we know next to nothing about. My position is that a few thousand dead by drone is at least an improvement on a hundred thousand dead by botched invasion ala Iraq, but that both are tragic, and we must soon use the numbers of al Queda we’ve killed as an opportunity to clear out of the Middle East as much as is physically possible.

Glenn Greenwald will say so, I’ll say so, but who else? Obama’s drone strike policies have completely enamored the Beltway and have even managed to wrest praise from Michele “Batshit” Bachman, who surprisingly couldn’t come up with an argument that drone strikes prove how pro-terrorist Obama is. Democrats are understandably proud that President Obama has notched some huge victories against Islamic terrorists and Middle East dictators, notably bin Laden and Gaddhafi, agreed to remove troops from Iraq (hey, Glenn, let’s just remember that Bush signed that deal after Obama won the election promising to end the war…Bush was only reading the writing on the wall, and it’s ridiculous to pretend it would have happened had McCain won or that McCain would have felt bound by any such agreement), and gently handled the Arab Spring revolutions. But it’s important to remember there is no such thing as a clean war that spares the lives of innocents, and that power unchecked will naturally grow deeper and wider in its reach. It seems we’re subject to President Obama’s conscience to choose a better path, but there’s little cause to expect the Nobel Peace Prize winner to do anything significant before his second term. But perhaps he will hear the discontent out there with these drone strikes, note their growing counter-productiveness, and lessen their frequency.

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Now that I finished my eulogy for Dana Pico’s blog, it’s high time to note some more things making life for Republicans unbearable:

1. Oh, those elections last week! And let me savor above all the defeat of Russell Pearce, Arizona’s chief architect of pretty much every anti-Hispanic measure on the books. I recently watched a documentary on Arizona going after ethnic studies programs in high school, and Pearce was a big bad guy in that process. A picture of Che Guevara on the wall bothers even me, but that doesn’t mean Hispanic Americans can’t learn about Hispanic culture the same way we learn about European culture and that such efforts must be outlawed. The man behind the fascist anti-immigrant laws that turn every brown person into a suspect, Pearce is utterly controlled by hatred and deaf to what makes America the land of the free.

2. Waaah, I’m Joe Walsh, I fight for the family, except my own, especially my children whom I owe six figures to! What, you think the banks are behind the crash? YOU MAY BE RIGHT BUT I’M GOING TO TRY YELLING AT YOU TO SHOW HOW RIGHT I AM! The sound of voters laughing at his fake rage is priceless. Here’s a tip: If you’re a hypocrite and an idiot, shouting at your constituents is likely only going to make such qualities stand out brightly.

3. Whoops! Republicans thought they could attack health care reform and the Affordable Care Act by going after the one single part that didn’t poll well because it required a bit of responsibility, but people are starting to understand that without the mandate, the private insurance companies get to keep weeding out people with previous conditions who are most likely to need care in the future. The individual mandate is now polling above fifty percent. It’s all up to the Supreme Court now, which is certainly scary, but other conservative courts have upheld the ACA and the SC must surely know that the healthcare industry is behind the mandate.

What can continue to fuel the Republican party? Service to the ultra-rich is becoming counter-productive. They’re mostly left with unbridled hatred of Democrats and everything they stand for, whatever that is, updated daily.

A Marxist rendering of the current Republican philosophy:

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Our chief rival blogger, Dana Pico, has called it quits.

While there is always some value to a good rival, the decline of Dana’s site was ultimately an act of justice. By good rival, I mean Dana Pico and his crowd of co-bloggers and regular commenters were always ready to engage and at least present a fairly well-distilled authentic version of the blather that passed for Republican thought. I probably couldn’t last long on Red State without getting axed, but Dana Pico had one conceit that made his blog tragically superior to most rightwing blogs: he wanted an unfettered free speech zone, where liberals and conservatives would match wits without fear of removal.

Now, this is standard practice at Iowa Liberal, but for a rightwing blog that’s quite amazing. Rightwing blogs do no exist to create dialogues or foster advancing thought. They can only exist as echo chambers, and the only liberals who can hope to remain standing in a comments thread are those too weak and easily battered about to pose a real threat. The model is Rush Limbaugh’s show, where an intelligent, articulate liberal who will stand his ground has no chance of making it through the polished screeners or Rush’s mic-cutting button.

Dana bemoans the loss of his regular commenters, and I couldn’t help but feel a little pang of responsibility. As I read the names, Sharon, Eric, DNW, assovertincups, etc., I could almost recall the precise threads that led to their demise. And I was directly involved in each. Yes, I made Dana’s friends go away, but it’s a political blog, not a Facebook page. So screw’em. I didn’t chase them away with cruelty or mocking, I chased them into corners and didn’t let them bullshit their way out. Climbing out the window was their only option. Or stopping the bullshit and being intellectually honest, but apparently that’s a worse option than suicide to such folks. The bullshit is what fuels their existence. Why argue with me and concede anything when they can go listen to Sean Hannity tell them they’re brilliant?

The real sad part of it all is Dana himself, who really did exist in a class above his partners for most of his blog’s existence. Dana could marshall facts together in a manner that demonstrated at least some regard for the value of veracity. His interpretations of a chart might have been skewed, but he was much less likely than other rightwingers to throw complete fiction out there. He might have been veered into racist dogwhistling with his constant invocations of Barack Obama’s middle name, but he somehow managed to convey in his writing a bit of a wink and a nudge: hey, don’t take it too seriously, I’m just razzing.

But ultimately, Dana couldn’t outrun his allegiance to the letter R next to a politician’s name. After eight years of George W. Bush, leaving the country in financial ruin, disrepair, and locked in permanent war, Dana doubled down, declaring Gee Dubya the second best president of his life next to the sainted Ronald Reagan. The hated and reviled Dick Cheney, architect of America’s degradation via torture and surrender to polluters, was Dana’s choice for 2008. Dana dutifully defended Sarah Palin and recently Rick Perry, calling them smart and relying on the defense that people once called Reagan dumb. Personally, I think comparing Palin to Reagan demonstrates more disregard for Reagan than it does credibility for Palin.

The flipside of this is that Dana also tried getting revenge for Dubya by branding President Obama “the worst president” of Dana’s life. The fact that Dana was forced to recognize that Obama prosecuted the “War on Terror” with greater energy and effectiveness than hero Dubya boxed him in further, leaving him with one plank to rest his case on: Suggesting that not only did Obama fail to magically undo the destruction that Republican policies of the past thirty years had wrought on the economy, but that his policies had actually made the economy worse. I pointed out many times that Dana was against TARP, against the stimulus, against saving the auto industry, essentially advocating nothing as a means of fighting the Great Recession, and Dana readily concurred. I asked him, what if Obama had done “nothing,” and we were at 12% unemployment…? Dana said he wouldn’t give Obama the slightest quarter and would bludgeon him with the 12% number anyway, and literally admitted it was because he was a Republican, Obama was a Democrat, and thus he had to “restore fiscal sanity.” Exit integrity.

But Dana still had hopes of using this narrative to win an election. Until the debt ceiling fiasco.

The debt ceiling fiasco, where Republicans held the economy hostage, threatening to sink the whole ship if Democrats tried to combine spending cuts with tax increases to get our deficit problems under control. Obama surrendered, seeing his approval numbers shattered, the avenger of 9/11 bowed before Republican economic terrorism. In the immediate aftermath, the combination of being so close to the brink damaged our credit rating, and the threat of austerity measures dampened the stock market. How did Dana respond to this great Republican success? Yep, he blamed Obama. Integrity stood no chance of return.

Unfortunately for Dana and the Republicans, Obama’s rope-a-dope strategy snared them again. With the debt deal complete and the public soured on the issue, Obama was able to pivot to active job creation measures. It had been proven to the public and the media for anybody to see that the Republicans were utterly intransigent, and would do absolutely anything to block Obama in the hope of drawing blood for 2012. Emboldened, they weren’t about to stop and suddenly cooperate, and thus the Republicans found themselves once again advocating nothing except more passes for the rich, the 1%, to pay fewer taxes, pollute more, and ship more jobs out of the country.

Then Occupy Wall Street happened, and the dynamic of the country shifted. Everything became crystalline, and the real picture of the past thirty years of Reaganomics became clear. The system was rigged for the rich to get richer and everybody else to suck on their fumes. “Trickle down” economics didn’t work. Bush’s tax cuts broke the bank. The “job creators” were moving factories elsewhere and had the Republican Party firmly in pocket re-writing the rules to keep the money moving in one direction- up. They weren’t making jobs, they were inventing piles of money on paper, calling shit loans triple-A, and when they came up short, when reality intervened, the country took the blow and the taxpayers were handed the bill. Right now, millions of homeowners are still underwater, obligated to pay imaginary prices, facing no good options while the bankers responsible got a bailout.

In that aftermath, lodged in this reality, it’s no surprise that the Republican primary process is a circus, that any halfway-decent candidates long ago opted out, and that we get to tune in to buffoons tossing word salads around trying to pretend that somehow, Dana’s alternate world actually exists. That yes, it’s really Obama’s rescue measures that hurt us, not Republican deregulation. That lower taxes for the rich will do us some good. That we should really keep pouring billions into overseas wars that the public wants out of, and maybe start the biggest one of all with Iran. Why the fuck not nominate a pizza salesman who is proudly ignorant? Knowing things hurts the Republican dream, knowing things chases the la-la fantasies away. Why the hell not claim that Rick Perry is smart and that, you know, he couldn’t do worse than Obama!?

This is an utterly horrible time to be a Republican, and an even worse time to be a Republican blogger who doesn’t want to ban opposing voices from his blog. Dana was too dedicated to his flock, yet his flock wanted seclusion and affirmation. Free speech? Dana’s product didn’t sell.

And so he’s now resigned to offering some content to the blog of his craziest collaborator, John Hitchcock, who’s now begging their few readers for handouts because he’s too broke to afford a decent car (I drive a 2007 Honda CR-V, and I don’t exactly make a fortune, so what’s the deal, Hitchcock?).

I turned very bitter on Dana after the debt ceiling disaster, my patience finally snapped. But it was all politics. Personally, I have no trouble understanding that Dana is a genial, nice guy who would probably make a great neighbor. I’d trust him with him son, I’d hand him the keys to my home if he needed to crash in San Diego. To me, stuff like that really has nothing to do with political arguments. Even most segregationists were lovely people back in the day, if you were white. But if Republicans tried understanding that principle, they’d deflate the core of what drives populist Republicanism, resentment.

I simply say to Dana, either embrace rational thought or go the way of your friends and heroes. The two have become mutually exclusive. Your blog, in that it was an attempt to reconcile the two, was doomed from the start. I believed at one point you were smarter and wiser than your friends, now I think you to be merely a slicker salesman trying to make blatantly unpopular and unsound positions sound like folksy “common sense” that defies any real common sense. Maybe there’s a brighter future for you, but in all likelihood the only chance is to sell out completely and turn those skills into cash money pimping for the Republican Party at a higher level. Revive the blog, make it exclusive, keep the interfering liberals out, and watch your garden thrive. You might even get your Joe the Plumber moment. Won’t do the country any good, but hey, that obviously stopped mattering awhile ago, didn’t it?

-hw

Jeremy in Minneapolis flagged a good one on FB this morning:

Teh horror.

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One year down!

Somehow, raising him has been even more fun than making him was;)

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-is that you will believe anything Republicans say. Not that Tea Partiers are models of intellectual honesty, consistency, or principle, but surely it must deflate their tires to see Republican politicians jump on their bandwagon then turn around and suck up whatever government largesse they can claim for their states/districts.

One of the numerous problems with the Tea Party was that they were never really organized around any idea beyond “commie black president takin’ my tax dollars and giving them to lazy black parasites,” but even that was secondary to the big goal, which was to shift power from the semi-rational Republican elites and put it in the hands of the crazy base. The elites, realizing where the wind was blowing, quickly offered deference, but did everything they could to make sure that someone other than their own voters contribute the suffering that Tea Partiers demanded. You see, it’s always somebody else out there sucking the lifeblood out of the government, the government benefits you receive are what you deserve!

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Hey, deadbeat dads, you too can get an award for upholding family values, even if you owe six figures in child support! Just hate teh gay and women.

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A good primer compiling numerous resources on the cause of the 2008 financial collapse. Short version: Just because Republicans decided everything was the fault of blacks and the gubmint doesn’t mean anybody has to take it seriously. Just like invading Iraq after 9/11, they decided that the best thing to do was blame the people they already hated, so they came up with whatever it took to paint that picture, even if it meant leaving out virtually the entire story of what really happened.

Regardless of whether or not Republicans are racists or just generally bullshitters and assholes, the fact is that we as a country really have to stop giving them any credibility until we see real proof. Over and over and over again Republicans make grave pronouncements and intimations of irrefutable fact, and just as often we find out that not only are they wrong, but easily verifiably wrong by the most basic empirical standards. And their mistakes are rarely harmless. We elected them back into office in 2010 without ever holding them accountable for 2008. We didn’t even expect them to know what happened in 2008, instead we listened to their fabulous fibbing yet again. And how successful can a repairman be if he doesn’t understand what’s broken? As could only be expected, they only did further economic damage to the country, directly destroying jobs, damaging our credit rating, and taking us to the bring of economic Armageddon (just to prevent tax increases on the rich, mind you).

No party that cannot come to terms with our predicament and what caused it can be trusted to lead, period.

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Says the “person” who pays no rent:

(Reuters) – Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform, but seems unable or unwilling to act.

Pepco Holdings, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied.

The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, but over the 2008-2010 period, very few of the companies studied paid it, said the report.

The average effective tax rate for the companies over the period was 18.5 percent, said Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, both think tanks.

Their report also listed General Electric Co, Paccar Inc, PG&E Corp, Computer Sciences Corp and NiSource Inc as among the 30 that paid no taxes. All 280 corporations examined were profitable over the period.

Corporations will say rightly that the loopholes that let them slash their taxes were perfectly legal, the report said.

“But that does not mean that low-tax corporations bear no responsibility … The laws were not enacted in a vacuum; they were adopted in response to relentless corporate lobbying, threats and campaign support,” the report said.

Despite the moaning and groaning, companies in the United States have it easy. Sure, they’ll threaten to “Go Galt” but that bluff was called after the Affordable Care Act passed and the biggest threat the 101st Fighting Keyboarders could come up with was to stop tipping their wait staff which we all knew was bullshit from the start because nobody tips the cashiers at McDonald’s. So why are they calling for more tax breaks for corporations that already pay no taxes? Because, as the above article points out, in the case of Pepco Holdings you’re receiving a net subsidy. Players gotta play, lobbyists gotta lobby and tricking some meth-addled sheet-rocker from Tulsa into footing the bill for your Bulgari cufflinks won’t weigh heavy on the conscience when your boss is a legal fiction with no responsibilities to its fellow “persons”. To do otherwise would be socialism!

-mg

By “Muslim” I mean “white Christian right-winger,” but hey, who’s counting? -TT

I think I’ve posted once the past week? Well, little Foobers needs entertaining…

Fletcher turns 1 on Nov. 8th. It’s hard to believe Iowa Liberal has (barely) survived this year, as I nearly wrote it off those first few weeks. Some months have been easier to handle, but he’s reaching that perpetual motion stage lately…

-hw