Idiots Write The News

Today's example: Whistling Past The Graveyard

You keep believing that, Count of Mounting Crisco. After voters have had a taste of national healthcare and a revivified economy, the GOP will be lucky to maintain 30 seats in the Senate.

Dog Bites Man

And conservatives consume porn faster than liberals:

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

OK, here's the issue with this.

It's not about moral hypocrisy. People have confessed one faith while worshipping at the altar of others for millennia.

It's about economic hypocrisy. I get the sense that conservatives would like porn to be kept under the covers, errrr, so to speak, in order to monopolize the market on it.

If we lived in a truly free market enterprise society, then porn would likely be the second largest business, right after alcohol and other narcotics (I'm including cigarettes).

Period. Look at, even as tightly regulated as those markets are, how much is spent in America alone.

Porn could be the stimulus package, errrrrrrr, so to speak, that would help America recover its economy.

So what really keeps porn off the free market? Morals?

We send soldiers overseas to kill for us, yet the Bible tells us not to kill, but nothing about looking at naked men or women.

We open shops and businesses seven days a week (mostly) even though the Bible says to keep the Sabbath holy.

Indeed, about the only two outright bans on any sexuality in the Bible are the story of Onan's masturbation and the commandment that states, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and even that was less a moral statement than a statement not to screw around with your neighbor's wife (a social commentary).

So how is it on the one hand, conservatives can claim moral higher ground in preventing the distribution of pornography, and on the other hand, utilize it so dramatically?

Errr, so to speak.

The only logical reason I can come up with, errrr, so to speak, is to monopolize the market on it, to prevent those who might limit the supply conservatives have enjoyed from obtaining it.

You know, teenagers.

Which brings up an entire other can of worms regarding the attitudes of this nation towards horny teenagers and sex.

But that, I'm afraid, is probably best left to another column. Or to Bristol Palin.

Buy More Tea

The ridiculous sight of a few dozen assholes corporate sheeple braving the chilly airs off Lake Michigan notwithstanding, it turns out the entire Chicago Tea Party (and the sister movement in DC, as well as others) was a sham, orchestrated and staged by the conservative wing of the Republican party:

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm..,and the proof?

“Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

(hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for making sure this hit the spotlights)

Which now makes Santelli's fifteen minutes of fame extension (e.g. the claim that Obama's White House was now investigating him based on some really crappy evidence that only a real paranoid, a coward, or a Republican (which by definition is a paranoid coward) would dare extrapolate from.

Just in case, you know, you thought the Republicans were done being rat bastards...

What Part Of "Comedy" Do You NOT Understand?

Here is the Jon Stewart piece from Boston.

Here is the reaction of Mary Katharine Ham at The Weekly Standard (click at your own risk)

The media has devoted hundreds of stories of late to the tenor of audience comments at McCain-Palin rallies, fretting about "rage" and "incitement" by the campaign, but the only account of Stewart's appearance is a one-sentence mention in the Boston Globe, and his abusive Palin comments are not included.

Now, admittedly, this is not Stewart's funniest bit. I think the network censors force his comedic stylings to focus on delivery, more than content.

But to equate a stand-up comedian to these folks:

Or these folks:

Hammie, that kinda smacks of desperation, dontcha think? I would like to believe that the "wing" that has both Rush Limbaugh AND Glenn Beck, two avowed "comedians", would understand that sometimes humour gets angry, humour gets ugly, and humour makes a point.

Sorry your skirts are ruffled, Hammie, but Stewart's points are spot on: the cities and suburbs ARE where most of the people in America live and you know what? Maybe those folks in small town America have some wisdom that we SOphisticated city folk don't, but I'd like to see one walk from Wall Street to Harlem, just once, without a frikkin' map and GPS system.

And understand that running a country is a LOT HARDER than negotiating a simple grid formation (north is higher street numbers, east is lower avenue numbers, etc.)

Perhaps your fainting couch is in dire need of a visit, Hammie?

(show Memeorandum the love, gang!)

You Ask, "How Desperate?"

I answer "This desperate":

1) OBAMA SEX PERV SCANDAL - Apparently, the right wing, not content with the reaction that Bill Ayres got from the general public, has now decided to paint Obama as the ally of child molesters. Mark Foley, anyone?

2) A New Wrinkle (or Unwrinkle) in the Campaign: The Biden Brow - GASP! A politician who has had Botox treatments! Wow, who could imagine a politician could be so vain?

3) Fighting Words - Drunk right wing blogger sets up straw man, dukes it out with him in his imagination and somehow ekes out a split decision.

4) Ugly Misogyny at the Official Obama Blog Site - Wow! Random advertising unauthorized by the Obama campaign (who subsequently removed the offending ad after being notified!) proves that Obama beats his wife!

5) McCain Claims Obama Rally Crowds Call Him Terrorist, Traitor - TRANSLATION: "Look, my supporters get to make shit up, why can't I????"

6) Worst Case Scenario - To arms! To arms! THE LIBERALS ARE COMING! THE LIBERALS ARE COMING!

7) My God is Bigger Than Your God- A vote for McCain is a vote for Jesus.

8) AN OBAMA PANIC? MARKETS FEAR HIS POLICIES - SCARY BLACK MAN! WE'LL ALL BE ON THE WELFARE! Nevermind that the market ALWAYS does better under Democratic presidents than Republicans, and that's even after you factor out the two major stock market crashes of 1929 and 2008!

9) TIP: RICO ACTION TO BE FILED AGAINST ACORN TOMORROW MORNING - US Attorney will file charges against Obama-led organ-- what? No? Oh. Nevermind! NOTE MAJOR WALK-BACK OF ORIGINAL STORY

Kinda sad, when you come right down to it...

The Best Part

Believe it or not, the tragic and frightening economic news of the past week has had one very positive side effect: It's shut the right wing echo chamber down.

To-wit, so mired in confusion and calumny, as well as self-doubt, has the right wing blogosphere become that they are resorting to the tactics employed against Dan Rather: trying to make shit up in a large enough pile that someone has to pay attention!

For example, comes this story from the Confederate Yankee:

We have fresh information regarding poorly-researched claims made in the media (including CNN, US News & World Report, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and literally dozens of other "professional media") that Sarah Palin presided over a Wasilla, AK city government that charged rape victims for the forensic medical examinations designed to collected physical evidence of sexual assaults. With very little variation from one media source to the next, media accounts attempted to portray Palin as a callous monster out to re-abuse victims.

The best evidence available indicates these are entirely false claims.

Shocking! If true...but my old friend Bob conveniently ignores something he himself posted a bit further down the page:

On March 6, 2000, Del Smith, the Deputy Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, testified in support of HB 270 (the bill outlawing the billing of rape kits)

Errrrrrrrrrrrr, huh? Why is a law "outlawing" something that never happens being discussed? Ahhhhhhhh, here's why!

Testifying in front of the same committee, Lauree Hugonin, Director, Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (ANDVSA) noted that "billings have not come from police agencies but have come from hospitals." Trisha Gentle, Executive Director, Council on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault noted that police departments were willing to pay for the exams, but that it was an internal decision on the part of the hospital as to who pays the hospital bill.

So rape victims in Wasilla WERE being billed for rape kits by the hospitals, probably because the mayor said "We ain't paying for them." Palin's administration callously looked the other way.

Simple logic, Bobby. Use it or lose it. Oh...sorry...too late!

Another example of the right wing merry-go-round that is the blogosphere. You may have heard about these videos that were posted on YouTube, since taken down, by "eswinner".

"Dr." Rusty Shackleford (PhD in Obtuseness) got his skirts aflutter because it turns out that Ethan Winner has notverycloseatall ties to Joe Biden!!!!

I wonder where Rustbucket was during the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John Kerry, which was basically run from inside the Oval Office? Think he was as outraged over that?

I'm guessing not. If you want a good laugh, do read Rusty's piece. A better essay on self-deluded paranoia you'll not read in an Abnormal Psychology text.

Finally, we have a piece by, no, not a blogger, but an honest to goodness...how was it Cornfed Wanker put it? Oh, right... "professional media" type: George Will.

The abject horror in Will's column today over McCain's recently, um, queenly behavior is matched only by his emotional confusion over the election: should he vote for the scary black man or the candidate channeling Alice In Wonderland?

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

*sniffsniff* Can you smell it? It smells like plastic melting...must be the right wing.

Stupidest. Column. Yet.

Charles Krauthammer-

WASHINGTON -- For the last 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt -- have entered (or re-entered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

HULLO???? PEARL HARBOR??????

Why The Right Wing Needs An Enema

First, let me say this: I have no desire to see Mamma Mia!; I did not want to see it (despite having had an offer for opening night tix) on stage and likely will not see the movie unless I'm sick or something and it's on cable.

I had enough of ABBA music in the 70s, thank you. I wouldn't, for example, want to see a musical based on Phil Collins' music, either.

However, I think there is reviewing a movie on its merits and reviewing a movie self-referentially. To-wit, Pajamas Media

Firth keeps saying things like, “I’d quite like to freshen up” and “Might I be shown my room now?” and “There wouldn’t by any chance happen to be a trouser press down here?” No doubt you are correcting me in your mind: “Not gay. Just British.” I’ve forgotten so please remind me: what exactly is the difference?

There are times when Mamma Mia makes Hairspray seem like Magnum Force by comparison. I have no reason to suspect Meryl Streep is a gay man, but did RuPaul write her dialogue? Wielding a power drill, she is asked if she’s “getting any,” at which point she powers up the drill and says, “Down boy!” She also worries about “A crack in my courtyard,” but do we really want to hear about her crack?

Much of the talk is far worse. Did I really hear the words, “I won’t be muzzled by an ejaculation?” And, “Harry’s talked Tanya into water sports!” and “He’s all mouth and no trousers” and “Get the meat out of the heat”? Still, I could praise all of this and more if only the movie had provided me with a warning to avert my eyes before it provided a shuddery glimpse of Skarsgaard’s butt cheeks.

The Streep character and her battle-ax friends (Julie Walters, Christine Baranski) sing into vacuum cleaners and hair dryers in Dancing Queen, then strut around in pyramid formation. Everyone and everything is “fabulous” or “gorgeous” or “a little minx,” and at a, well, climactic moment a geyser busts out of the floor and bare-chested boys revel in it, in slow motion. Walters is definitely onto something when she says, “It’s very Greek.” Really, what kind of movie borrows its plot from the 80s miniseries Lace? All that is missing is a scene in which the bride asks, “Which one of you three bitches is my father?”

OK, class, now let's count up: I see two overt accusations of "teh gay", one RuPaul, cross-dressing reference, one reference to a Freudian image of a woman castrating a man (with a jackhammer, no less), and several presumably straight (pun intended) faced schoolboy jokes about double entendres and innuendoes (again, pun intended). Not to mention having to drag Dirty Harry (pun intended) Callahan's monster gun into it.

And then it gets worse: poor Kyle, apparently he's never been inside a locker room at a country club (or the airport restroom in Minneapolis), because the sight of an aging male ass has him practically quivering with delight anxiety! An orgasm of outrage fairly explodes out of Smith's keyboard (typing one-handed, probably)!

The denouement, the afterplay, if you will, speaks of sex toys and "fag-hagging" (really, Kyle, you can say it! No one likes you anyway...).

*WHEW*

I'm spent just having read my critique of his review!

All Things In Moderation, Including Moderation

Lately, one of the big memes in Blogtopia (© Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo) has been Jonah Goldberg's latest expulsion, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, or simpy, Liberal Fascism.

For a fairly in-depth analysis, I refer you to Sadly, No!, a somewhat amusing blog whose writers and editors have done signal work in deconstructing these ten pounds of crap in a five pound book. See in particular, this post. (Side note: It's a tough audience, but I'm thrilled they've accepted me as a somewhat regular commenter in threads, and even note my modest attempts at humour).

For fairly good reason, I might add. You see, in Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, or Liberal Fascism (LOLcats added for readability).

In a nutshell, Goldberg takes a fairly innocuous statement, "There’s this idea that the further right you go the closer you get to Nazism and fascism, and the further left you go the closer you get to decency and all good things, or at least having the right intentions in your heart" which Jonah "proves" is wrong. This is the first of many strawmen he burns.

A sane (ed. note. Lawyers...*sigh*) reasonable man would interpret that the way people have for millenia: The further out on the fringe you go, the more likely that you will cross over to the other extremist position.

In other words, politics is not a spread spectrum like something you'd see in a lab, but more like a circular rainbow, in which the colours all whip around in a continuum. Go far enough out on the left, and you start to see elements of the same dogmas that you'd see on the right.

And there's the key term: dogma.

We see it in other areas of life as well. Some militant atheists, for example, are as dogmatic about their non-belief in god as some fundamentalist (Islamist, Christians, Jews, take your pick).

Similarly, some political dogmas transcend "wing" descriptions, and here, if Goldberg had stuck to this point, he might have made some philosophical point, and maybe even dug up some insight into American politics. For example, dogmatic people tend to believe their's is the one best way of running a society (sounds like Goldberg himself, but that's a digression), and it really doesn't matter if the rest of their philosophies can be labeled fascist or socialist.

What does matter is an adherence to the dogma. Alfred Meyer covers this from a geopolitical perspective in his 1978 book "Theories of Convergence" (seems to be out of print, for the good reason of losing relevance), albeit with the US and Soviet Union as examples.

What Jonah does is use this "wrap-around" to create an entirely new school of thought: that liberals are fascists.

Nevermind that he includes in this fascism people like you, me, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. He also includes Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, AND FDR, and what dinner conversation they must have had, that quartet!

In other words, because he sees a rising of liberalism that mirrors the rise of progressivism in the 60s, Jonah has decided the best way to tamp it down is to somehow link it to fascism.

In other words, he employs the "Big Lie" of Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

Wouldn't that make him a liberal?

Jonah, because I know you're self-involved and self-indulgent enough to read every single piece written about your specious book, let me say this right here:

You want to get in my face, in the face of millions of liberals? That's fine because it's to be expected of a dogmatist like yourself, but just know that the tar you paint with is spitting more back on you than you're able to smear on us.

Y'know, I wish I had a mommy who was a literary agent. Then my book Right Wing Nutcases And The Sale Of Cheetos would be number one in perpetuity.

THAT'S how bad a book you've written!

Would you like a Dorito, Fudgie?

How To Shoot Yourself In The Foot

Since this is extracted from a New York Times article, I'm going to quote from it more extensively than usual, since I don't know how quickly they'll archive it.

If you've been paying attention to the blogosphere these past few days, a storm's been brewing over the Democratic response on September 29 to President Bush's weekly radio address. 12-year-old Graeme Frost urged Bush not to veto legislation that was then pending in Congress (and subsequently passed):

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — There have been moments when the fight between Congressional Democrats and President Bush over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program seemed to devolve into a shouting match about who loves children more.

So when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.

OK, so far, no harm, no foul. The anger the Republicans felt was directed where it should have been: at the Democrats, not Frost or his family.

And then the Republicans called in their orc stormtroopers...:

In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.

There is a certain disingenousness about attacking a 12 year old (and you'll note the White House silence on this so far) and his family to the point where in truth, these blogophericals have stalked the Frosts.

The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.

One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.

Oops.

I suppose this all wouldn't be nearly so ugly if it wasn't for the confrontational attitude that many in the media, particularly Michelle "Jackpot Baby" Malkin who has a history of invading people's privacy while hypocritically bitching when the tables have been turned on her, having been forced to move (and admitting it on her blog) when Jesus' General posted general directions to her house at his blog.

Poor Jackpot Baby, but when you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas...

Back to the Frosts:

Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.

Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.

In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.

Now, you'd think this is precisely the kind of family that Republicans would want to help!

After all, among the major reasons people give for filing bankruptcy and then going on public assistance is (drumroll, please) major catastrophic medical expenses not covered by health insurance.

As I said, you'd think...

But Michelle Malkin, one of the bloggers who have strongly criticized the Frosts, insisted Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches.

“The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets,” Ms. Malkin wrote in an e-mail message. “Maryland’s S-chip program does not means-test. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.”

No. It doesn't means test.

Neither do SBA programs that are intended to rebuild businesses after a catastrophe like Katrina. Or tax deductions for property taxes. Or tax credits for farmers (Michelle, are you listening?). Or oil exploration credits. The interstate highways don't charge fees based on how expensive your car is.

And Iraq swore it didn't have WMDs, but no one bothered to wait around until that was "means tested" by Hans Blix, either.

The simple truth is, blogosphericals, that people suffer tragedies and can't afford to recover from them, even if they appear to be in fairly decent shape. Those of us who have the means to be able to recover shouldn't make fun of or harass those who don't.

Just as those of us who were born here of legal American citizens shouldn't denigrate the citizenship of jackpot babies. Thems the law, and that's the rule we play by.

The Nader Of The GOP

The lessons learned of the 1992, 1996, and 2000 elections apparently did not sink in to the Republican party:

To many values voters, Giuliani's rise is one more insult in the wake of the serial GOP sex scandals in Congress, the failure of George W. Bush's Administration to amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, and a hunch that religious voters register on the Republican radar only when Election Day is in sight.

No duh!

We get a bit of an insight into why Karl Rove bailed out on the Republican party just when they need him most: for the past seven years, his hand-picked choice for President, the man to whom he delivered 3.5 million additional conservative Christian votes in 2004, has failed miserably, not just in imposing freedom in Iraq, but also in imposing a clear, conservative Christian agenda on America.

Sure, he's made inroads, no question about that: the nominations of Justices Roberts and Alito have all but cinched a conservative agenda for the next four decades in the court system, barring a sudden change of heart with a new President.

But look what hasn't happened, what was promised to the religious right: an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution, overturning Roe v Wade, an end to the sex scandals that plagued government during the Clinton administration (suddenly, Monica Lewinski giving the Big Dog a hummer doesn't seem nearly so outrageous, when he was derided by people who "meat up" in men's rooms in airports), and other Christian stances that were, in fact and deed, repudiated by Bush (on issues such as saving the environment and assisting the poor such as in the Katrina tragedy).

There are two dynamics at work here: the first and overarching one is the hubris the Christian Coalition has shown over the past twelve years when in point of fact, its harsh stances and inflexibility has created many of the legislative logjams and moral morasses we see now.

After all, would Larry Craig have been such an huge hypocrite if his constituency, egged on by people who have their own moral matters to contend with-- like Ted Haggard or Ralph Reed-- hadn't insisted he tow a hard line in order to win their votes?

Pardon the pun.

On the flip side, the Republicans bear a lot of the responsibility here, too. Just as Democrats are often accused of taking (pick your minority/interest group) for granted, the Republicans assume that Christians have no alternative, having painted themselves as the final arbiters of Jesus' work here on earth.

*AHem*

If you take abortion off the table, the Democratic positions are much closer in fealty with Jesus' teachings than the Republicans, which is why the GOP is terrified of a Hillary nomination.

She's truly the only candidate of either party who is in a position to take a nuanced stance on abortion, as both a women and a Christian, and her "let's make abortion rare, safe, but legal" stance resonates with many more Christian middle class women than overturning Roe v. Wade does, while maintaining a strong position for liberals to embrace.

Meanwhile, the GOP doesn't have anyone in the race or on the horizon who could accept the full embrace of the Christian Coalition while having a plausible presence in the rest of the country's mind as a President.

In other words, the Christian Coalition is looking at itself in a mirror, thinking it sees the country, which it does not.

The sort of hubris that Ralph Nader's supporters saw in 2000, and look what that got us.

OK, that's not entirely fair. Al Gore lost the election (despite the stealing of Florida) for any number of reasons, not least of which was his failure to win his own damned Congressional district, much less Florida.

And yet, Nader got into the race, as his campaign staff put it "to put George Bush in the White House," in order to punish the Democrats for drifting from the left.

You'll notice they've tacked ever closer to the center and actually started winning some elections, Ralph. You might have done more good for the progressive cause by sitting out the 2000 election.

In many ways, this uprising by the conservative Christians is more damaging than Ralph Nader's was. Having seen the failure for two terms of their hand-picked candidate, and the moral incompetence of their handpicked Congress, for them to pull out now would be like taking heroin from an addict.

But then again, Christians were never particularly tolerant of people's weaknesses, even if their Lord is...

Do As I Promise, Not As I Do

Leave it to New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg to put things in perspective:

Bloomberg earlier gave a speech to the opposition Conservative Party's annual conference in Blackpool and took aim at conservative American politicians who ran up budget deficits.

"It seems to me that the Conservative Party in the UK is much more fiscally conservative than many American politicians who call themselves conservative," he said.

"Too many of them want to run up enormous deficits and hope that some way, somehow -- someone else will pay for it. That's not conservatism, that's alchemy, or if you like, lunacy."

Or, create a problem, then pray it goes away.

But Mayor Mike's comments got me to thinking: why is it that Republicans and particularly conservatives, can't keep their peckers in their pants when it comes to running up a bar tab the size of Montana (or a national debt the size of, literally, China)?

After all, conservatives are supposed to be all about fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, and restraint (of the unfun kind), and yet the last three conservative Presidents have run up massive Federal deficits.

There's a school of thought that says by running up these deficits, conservatives can choke off the money for discretionary spending programs, like Medicaid or welfare or mass transit grants, and to a degree, there's some truth: we probably would have had smaller budget surpluses under Bill Clinton (Greatest. President. Ever.) if we hadn't reformed welfare and cut some of the bloat out of that bureaucracy.

But Clinton's presidency also points out the folly of that plan: unless you can persuade the vast majority...not the majority, the vast majority...of the uselessness of a particular entitlement, all that will happen is a) the entitlement will get funded through deficit spending or b) you're going to have people agreeing to a tax hike to pay for it.

No one objected to Clinton's tax hikes after the fact, because Clinton's tax hikes were directly linked (perhaps justifiably, perhaps not) to the booming economy of the 90s, where Reagan and both Bush's have tax cuts that led nearly directly to recession and even economic depression.

Despite increased Federal spending, something that should mitigate economic slowdowns. Thus you have ballooning deficits, since economic slowdowns produce even less tax revenue than anticipated.

One possible reason, exogenous to any economic or political theory we might examine this issue of conservatives and ballooning deficits, is a psychological one: there are very few fiscally conservative Republicans who had to "come up through the ranks," so to speak, who actually had to scrape from paycheck to paycheck to pay off a mortgage.

And who's businesses always had a bail out at the dead end of the street.

Let that last thought sink in for a moment.

And now let me emphasize this next point:

Don't you think it's odd that the men who have made the most of the American dream, the Bloombergs, the Buffetts, the Gates', the ones who started from the ground up with a business, and struggled and perservered without a hand out, without Daddybucks behind them, are fairly liberal people?

And then there's George W. Bush: a man who has failed at each and every business he's ever run, a man who's had to have handout after handout from the bin Laden family, from the people of the state of Texas, from James R. Bath, from his daddy.

Are we seeing a pattern here? An entirely paternalistic concept-- to let your boy run a business into the ground, then pay off his mistakes-- has become national policy for an entire party.

And we're Daddybigbucks, backing these assholes.

Boobs & Balls

I gave this item a miss when the story first hit the papers, mostly because everey other frikkin' blogger on the planet seemed to be writing about it, but also because I didn't think the story was an appropriate one in the first place and the blue-nosed tut-tutting that was going on only fed the fire.

And they call me a pervert, a sex-obsessed freak!

Anyway, you might recall that the other day, the Washington Post ran a story about a speech Hillary Clinton gave in the Senate, and focused on her "low cut" outfit which revealed some cleavage. NEWS FLASH! A WOMAN HAS YABBOS!(to give you an idea of the sexual repression involved, the only clear copy I could find was on some fascist website, who shall remain nameless). To be fair to the WaPo, the writer, Robin Givhan, is a fashion writer and to be sure, fashion and politics go hand-in-hand in Washington.

Her words belie something else, though:

There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.[...]

The cleavage, however, is an exceptional kind of flourish. After all, it's not a matter of what she's wearing but rather what's being revealed. It's tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far. No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!

A rather ham-handed attempt at being faaaaaaabulously snarky fell flat on its face, and Givhan had to man the barricades for the fussilade of criticisms from the left and unintentional shrapnel from the right's brickbats tossed at Hillary's boobs.

For the record, Ms. Givhan, although you've won a Pulitzer, a better comparison would have been "the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting John Edwards' package in a pair of too-tight chinos."

I mean, really, if you're going to get disgusting about it, go the whole nine yards! Oh, it wouldn't have made it past the editor?

Then maybe the question you needed to ask was, "What's the difference between a woman's cleavage and a man's bulge?" and indeed, why is there a difference?

All you did was engage the stereotype and advance it one step further: women's bodies are to be examined carefully, clinically, while men's bodies are referred to in shibboleth. This isn't Pamela Anderson running for President (and even if it were...)! This is an intelligent, involved Senator who by all accounts has worked very hard during her tenure to get up to speed and prepare herself for the most difficult job in the history of the world: cleaning up after that huckleberry, George W. Bush.

The other side of this dust-up is the bizarre reaction from the right wing, who regularly trot out this pundit or that lunatic, dress them up real purty-like for their bohunk masses to jerk their gherkins to while keeping their TeeVees glued to Fox News, thus ensuring ratings.

After all, nothing a man likes after a long day of tamping down his sexuality by harassing the "chicks" than to have a sexual fantasy that one is his equal, sees things exactly the way a man would, showing her boobs while he drinks a beer. And it showed in the way the right wing blogosphere captured this story as a "NOT SAFE FOR WORK" moment, trying to tie Hillary's boobs into some bizarre primal suprstition that burqas protect men from raping women.

The Poster Girl For The Estate Tax

(hat tip to Hieronymous Bosch XIV for the image)

Mat 6:24-33 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

For after all these things do the Gentiles seek: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

This is the Word of God. Amen.

The right wing Mammon-addicted economic royalists and their co-dependent Religious Right have long had a way of turning economic issues into "moral values." Take welfare, for example: it's immoral, because God talks about labor from the sweat of our brow as our birthright from Adam. Heaven forbid we should assist someone in dire need!

Or, a man lives and struggles (don't get me started!) all his life, and at the end of his days, as his body is lowered to its final rest, the taxman stands graveside, plundering his miserable earnings eked out across his life...assuming he stowed away more than $5 million dollars, minimum.

Most of that money having been untaxed during his lifetime, I should add.

The truly cynical aspect of all this is that, in an attempt to lure suckers for tax cuts like moths to a flame, or more appropriately, addicts to a crack mountain, the Republicans have foisted upon their bases, the numbnuts who don't read the newspapers and the others who read the Bible only, to believe that this makes sense: giving more money to the rich, because one day, "you too may be this wealthy."

I was listening to the radio this week and heard a commercial for a seminar on how, you too can avoid the estate tax! Just a few hundred dollars is all you need to learn the secrets the really rich use to avoid paying any estate tax at all! GRATs! Family LLCs! Generation skipping trusts!

And I wondered how many people who are worth over $5 million dollars don't already have an estate plan--...oh!

Right. This isn't about them. This is about the morons who will never, until their death beds, get that $5 million is a LOT of money, and they never even achieved 20% of it...and they're now being ripped off by the bottom feeders who see the scam the Republicans pulled off and want a piece.

But Paris Hilton gets a pass because of this cynical abuse of the American greed. When she garners her inheritance, the only people who will see any portion of it are a couple of drug lords in Colombia, her boy toys, and now, the LA Sheriff's Department.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The judge who sent Paris Hilton to jail called a hearing for Friday on why the hotel heiress was released early and placed under house arrest in a move swiftly challenged by prosecutors and local politicians.

Hilton, 26, a symbol of privilege and the excess of American celebrity culture, was released by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for unspecified health reasons on Thursday after serving just three full days of her original 45-day sentence.

Hilton, whose term the sheriff already had reduced to 23 days citing state sentencing guidelines, was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet to track her movements and ordered confined to her lavish home in the Hollywood Hills house for the next 40 days.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said her "reassignment" from an 8-by-12-foot cell to house arrest was carried out after "extensive consultations" with doctors at the jail and others, including the sentencing judge.

But a court spokesman said the decision was made without the approval of Judge Michael Sauer, who later set a hearing on a request by prosecutors to send Hilton back to jail for the remainder of her sentence.

Forget about the fact that she's famous merely for being famous. Forget about the fact that she's fabulously wealthy in mammon. Forget about the fact that her soul is about as deep as the gene pool at a hillbilly family reunion, Uncle Dad.

Let's focus on what she truly represents: idle wealth creating nothing in this country but headlines and tabloids.

Jesus promised us that God would take care of us. Who cares if we have no clothes, no food, no shelter? If we believe, God will provide what we need. Let's face facts though: at some point, man was making enough mammon to be able to help his fellow man.

Maybe He said, "OK, I can slack off making rainment appear out of thin air. They seem to have things under control there."

At some point, He looked down at the bountiful harvests that man was growing and said, "You know what? They seem to have this feeding thing knocked out, as well. *Whew* Because it was getting hard making manna drip from the sky!"

At some point, He saw our builders and engineers making these massive houses and structures like churches, and God said, "OK, now, I guess I can stop strewing branches and reeds on the ground! Well, maybe not. Other animals use them. But these men got it going on!"

Don't you think He might, might, get a little miffed at the creation by our society of a Paris Hilton, who wastes our time, our money, and His resources with her antics, particularly since they are validated and by extension endorsed by our inane fascination with her lunacies, but moreover, our financial support by our tax code?

I'm thinking Jesus' job gets harder and harder the more and more Republicans get elected.God Will Provide, Paris!

The New Math Of A False Economy

(graphic courtesy tengrain at mockpaperscissors.com)
As my long-time readers know, I'm a wonk for economic stuff. Hazard of my avocation, I suppose, needing to stay on top of the economy and make decisions based on my observations. So I stumbled across this story, and started reading it, when I found a paragraph that I think can help explain and tie together some loose threads that have been floating on the periphery of your field of perception lately:

"The negative housing wealth effects on consumer spending could be more pronounced than anticipated," Zandi warned, estimating that a third of U.S. households tapped a substantial amount of home equity in recent years to support spending.

But with stagnant or falling home values, and rising mortgage delinquencies, consumer spending's sole support looks to be wage and income growth, and this at a time when households are being heavily taxed with higher energy prices.

Energy costs rose only 2.9 percent in 2006. But in the first three months of this year, they shot up at an annual rate of 22.9 percent, accounting for about 41 percent of the increase in U.S. consumer prices.

The Consumer and Producer Price indices that are so heavily reported by the mainstream media purposely ignore energy and food prices, due to their volatility. Personally, I think that's a mistake: first, we have much better tools to measure these and to factor out volatility now, and second, these are two core purchases that consumers must make, so to say "inflation was only 3% last year," while food and energy prices were up together anywhere around ten percent is a lie designed to make the administration look good.

But I digress.

Take a closer look at the excerpt I posted: you'll note that the past several years' economic growth has been generated not by wage and income increases (which have remained stagnant to down. It wasn't until 2004 that the final leg irons of recession, consumer income, surpassed the levels at the end of the Clinton administration and even that's not factoring in inflation), but by borrowing against the equity in our homes.

An increase in debt, in other words. Debt can be defined as an advance against income you hope to receive in the future, and interest payments a hedge against the lender losing all that money if your gamble fails.

The optimistic presumption the average American lives on is things are going to get better: my company will make more money. They'll pay me a higher wage. I'll be able to pay off my debts.

Not so much, anymore. Wages have stagnated for nearly thirty years while the banking industry has gone to great lengths to fool consumers into believing they are worth more money than they truly are.

I suppose to a large extent, bankers can be blamed for this situation. Anyone with half a brain who spends a little time studying the overall economic state of this nation would have tightened their lending rules, not expanded them, in order to keep their balance sheets honest and their mortgages current. And banks are chock-a-block with MBAs from Ivy League schools who are trying desperately to learn the lessons I learned on the streets of Noo Yawk: don' lend someone money what can't pay youse back, unless youse is prepared to break deir bot' legs.

See, another side of this comes out in the quarterly earnings report that banks have to prepare for their shareholders. Obviously, if I'm Chase Manhattan, I have to keep my earnings higher than Citibank in order to keep my investors from moving their money there. New loans generate gobs of short term income. Old loans do not. The shell game is to keep those fees and surcharges rolling in (which is why the penalties on credit cards have also become so exorbitant: that's pure profit).

That "immediacy culture" pervades right down to the administrative level, as those Ivy League MBAs are thrown into competition with each other to come up with "the next insanely profitable cash cow." To the winner goes the spoils: make the bank the most money, and you get the corner office, the bigger bonus, the trips to Hawaii.

No one thinks long term, so no one looks long term, so in truth, no one saw this coming, but it is.

We're already in the soup on this, and there's not much to do to bail Americans out. The government could try but thanks to Bush and his tax cuts for the wealthy and his invasion of Iraq, the government has no money either and the money it has borrowed is not going to be allowed to go to its people who need it most.

In effect, we'll all be wage slaves to China. And we've seen what their standard of living is like.

After that, the future gets murky. Obviously, taxes on the wealthy will skyrocket. They have to, particularly as baby boomers retire in greater numbers each year and the pool of productive tax paying Americans dwindles. Taxes on all of us will go up, as well.

Suppose for a second, though, that they don't. Some political pressure keeps honest politicians from talking about tax increases. It becomes a political third rail.

We can't cut spending sufficiently to offset the loss in revenue. Aside from Social Security (which is funded separately anyway) and defense, there's not a whole lot the government spends money on that could scale up to free hundreds of billions of dollars for domestic spending programs that would now go from discretionary to mandatory, unless the sight of people dying in the streets is somehow magically made palatable to Americans. Events of the past week indicate Americans wouldn't want that on their TVs.

About the only places we could cut are defense. And defense. And homeland security.

I think we all know what that means.

So by destabilizing the American economy for decades if not centuries to come, Bush has created the single most dangerous breeding element for the domestic security of Americans: a weakened economy with not enough money to spend on protecting us all.

Thanks, Dumbya.

Bush
economy
mortgages
taxes

Welcome To The Party, Pal!

There's a certain amount of wanting to smack a person upside his head for seeing the light, two years too late:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chief strategist of George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign said he had lost faith in the U.S. president over Iraq and other issues, in a high-level rupture of Bush's famously loyal inner circle.

Matthew Dowd, a polling expert who switched parties to become a Republican and also served as a senior strategist in Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, told The New York Times in an interview on Sunday that Bush must face up to Americans' growing disillusionment with the war.

You gotta get a load of his reasoning...

"If the American public says they're done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want," Dowd said. "They're saying, 'Get out of Iraq.'"

He also cited the administration's bungled handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Bush's refusal to meet Cindy Sheehan, who had lost a son in Iraq, while she was leading a protest outside Bush's Texas ranch.

"I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up," Dowd said. "That it's not the same, it's not the person I thought."[...]

Dowd said he had been attracted to Bush by his ability as Texas governor to work across party lines but Bush had failed to do the same as president and had become isolated with his views hardening. The Times said Dowd was speaking out partly in an effort to get through to Bush.

"Um, Matt?," Actor212 says gently as he puts his arm around his shoulder and walks Dowd along the river's edge, "you might have realized that a Texas Democrat is about as close to the Democratic mainstream as a Connecticut Republican."

*SPLASH*

"Next time, don't walk along the riverside....guess you didn't see that shove coming, either!"

Now, you might want to ask what was the final, deciding factor in this change of heart...was it the bungling of global goodwill in the aftermath of September 11?

No.

Was it the bungling from inception of the Iraq War?

No.

Was it the mismanaged economy which has resulted in parlous times for the working and middle class of this country?

Yer kidding, right? Dowd could retire tomorrow and not worry about his next meal.

Oh, well, maybe it was Katrina?

That's so two years ago.

No, it was far more self-centered:

The Times said Dowd acknowledged that the expected deployment to Iraq of his oldest son, Daniel, an Army intelligence specialist, was a factor in his changed view of Bush.

Gee....a rich white guy's son is in peril and suddenly he becomes a liberal?

I think it was Elizabeth Warren who said "A Conservative who files bankruptcy suddenly becomes a Liberal." In other words, when the shit hits the fan, suddenly they want the fan turned off.

Welcome aboard, Matt. See that seat next to Arianna Huffington and David Brock and Andrew Sullivan? It's reserved just for you.

Siddown and shaddap.

snarkasm, snarcasm, snarky

Bush
Matthew Dowd
Conservatives
Liberals