Friday, March 18, 2011
David Brooks Listens To The Voices Inside His Head
Nice Try, Asswipes
Doubling Down On Dumb
Sarah: Failed And Fall
Nobody Asked Me, But...
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Reallly....How Dumb Is FOX News?
A Growing Meme
It didn’t take long for the light bulb to go off in my head once I got to the third paragraph to see truth in his article. The first and obvious is the recent bailouts, which included the bailouts to General Motors and Chrysler. The American people were sold on the bailouts being essential to save American jobs; perhaps there is some truth to that. However, it wasn’t long after the bailouts when GM began the talk of closing down American factories and building factories in China, Mexico, and Korea.
Left vs. Right became in government terms corporations vs. individuals. There was no guarantees (sic) in the bailouts, nothing that forced automakers to invest in our country. It was just easy money thrown their way at the expense of the taxpayer to make up for their bad corporate decisions.
You Teabaggers want populism? Here's populism. It's not about the government, who can be and must be answerable to us (but no longer is). It's about the monied interests who will do anything to advance their agenda, even destroying our lives.
And that's all of us, Teabaggers, left AND right and if you and I can't join forces, we will surely all hang separately.
From my very good friend and idle idol, Phil Proctor:
O-LIGARCHY
O----Oligarchy! Where the Rich get Richer all the time,
And the Union Slobs, just lose their jobs,
While the profits climb and climb and climb!
O----Oligarchy! Where a Corporation is a Guy,
And our country’s shot,
Right through the heart,
While their bonuses rocket to the sky!
The U.S. was once proud and free,
But today, we’re all broke,
And up a tree!
So when we shout – “Hey!
One day you’ll have to pay!”
We’re only sayin’ --
“We’ve had enough, you greedy bastards,
Oligarchy – go ‘way,
OK - Get lost, today!
Oligarchy -- NO WAAAAAY!!!”
Remember That Arizona Anti-Immigration Law?
o/~ Green Acres Is The Place To Be
I Don't Have A Problem With This
Things That Make You Go "Hmmmm"
I Forsee A Bubble
Please Lord, Let This Come True
Blowback
In the video, NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller and a colleague met with two members of a fictional Muslim group dangling a $5 million donation. Prodded by the "donors," Schiller said liberals "might be more educated" than conservatives, described Republicans as "anti-intellectual" and said the GOP had been "hijacked" by the "racist" Tea Party.
Or did he? After the tape became national news, and after NPR hastily sacrificed its CEO to appease critics, a video editor at the Blaze—a website founded by Fox News host Glenn Beck—compared the edited sting video and the two-hour original, also posted online.
Schiller did say some bad things, the Blaze found. But the short video took them out of context, like a bad reality show, and made them sound worse. It transposed remarks from a different part of the meeting to make it seem as if Schiller were amused by the group's "goal" of spreading Shari'a law. It left examples of his complimenting Republicans on the cutting-room floor.
And that Tea Party quote? Schiller was, for at least part of it, describing the views of some Republican friends.
This article will appear in this week's Time, on newsstands tomorrow. This will be the first many Americans even hear of the tape, aside from some watercooler and barroom bullshit their Teabagger friends have railed at them.
This is not good news for O'Keefe, his bear...I mean, mentor...Andrew Breitbart, the Teabaggers, or the GOP in Congress who are trying to cut NPR funding.
Somehow I doubt he's that smart, though.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Whoompf! They It Is!
Welcome To The Party, Pal!
I'm Sorry....
Tilting At Windmills
When Is A Reactor Not A Reactor?
"Ignore Sarah Palin Week" Is Over
Stagcession
A New Generation
We Really Are Fucking Idiots
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Jim Geraghty: Douchebag
Wanna Bet Republicans Don't Touch This Budget Item?
The End Of The Huffington Post
Bad Movie Ideas
One Last Aftershock
A Koch Brother In The Making?
Taking The Safety Off
A Short Prayer
Moron Westboro Baptist Church
Still, Westboro member Margie Phelps, reached in New York, claimed Westboro members were present, holding signs containing statements such as "God sent the killer."
She said the group had "outfoxed the mob" by staying clear of where everyone would look for them. She also claimed the group had accomplished its mission by penetrating the minds of the mourners.
"Do you think there was a single person there who didn’t have ‘Thank God for dead soldiers’ on their mind?" she said, referring to signs Westboro members regularly display at funerals of soldiers.
I'm not a violent man, but death is too good for Margie Phelps and her klan.
In Other News...
Aftershocks
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Lord Taketh Away, The Lord Giveth
Expected News, Wisconsin Edition
Best Comment On The Current Union-Big Business Dust Ups
My wife is a retired teacher, and the dozens of dollars she rakes in each month permit us lives of staggering opulence. Just the other day, we were privileged to choose between filling my 13-year-old mini-pickup with gas or paying the dentist.
The Wolf Who Cried Boy
Au Revoir, Frank!
Another Bites The Dust
Most Moronic Quake story Yet
Truth In Journalism
Walker's Long Knives
Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labour to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.
But who is one to steal from? Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because (to paraphrase Willie Sutton) that's where the assets are to take. Throughout history the world's most successful economies have been those that have kept this kind of primitive accumulation in check. The US economy today is faltering largely because its past barriers against rent-seeking are being breached.
Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee – Wisconsin's largest city, and once the richest in America – is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatised as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.
Warren Buffet famously observed that no one is a self-made man: we all rely on other people and free resources to create our wealth, and we appropriate it as ours. Indeed, studies have shown that if we factor in the replacement costs for things that nature provides to our economic activity-- sunlight, air, water, pollination and so on-- we could easily double the costs of manufacturing in America (some studies show these costs are actually twice as high as the artificial production costs, thus tripling the costs to produce.)
George Will (of all people) also observed further that the American economy is one where profits are privatized but losses are spread out to society as a whole.
American history truly IS about theft for wealth. If it's not out and out piracy of someone else's property, then it's a grab for land and resources that no one else either wants or knows what to do with, without appropriate reimbursement.
Think about all those cowboy movies you saw back as a child where the ranchers battled the farmers over water rights, or mining companies would steal farms from families, and so on. Or even just ponder the tragic concept of slavery.
We've run out of the "free" resources, and so now have to cannibalize each other. This is the America we've left to ourselves. Rather than learn to live within our means, we've consistently expanded our resources so that we delay the inevitable accounting for what we've done to the land and to each other.