Palin's tele-palm-ter

From Media Matters:

Hannity, Morris join other right-wing media in defending Palin's use of "crib notes" on her hand

The most appalling thing about Palin's use of crib notes and the rallying to her side of the usual conservative suspects is that she had to have notes for the most banal of ideas,

It's not like she was being asked to split the atom. She was being asked her positions and views on basic issues and ideology.

I could understand needing notes to recall the names of the 10 people in the audience you wanted to have stand and be recognized, or the amount of each annual budget deficit for the last 10 years.

But if you can't remember something as simple as "tax cuts for rich people" or "drill baby drill" without cheating, then you're way too unprepared, or you're in the wrong business.

Shoved onto buses?

From Media Matters:

Jim Quinn on Democratic constituents: "mobs of poor people that they shove onto buses every election day"

Shoved onto buses like this, Jim?

"The Steele campaign recruited six busloads of poor and homeless Philadelphians to hand out flyers to Maryland voters portraying Steele and his ticketmate, governor Bob Ehrlich, as Democrats. Steele is currently Maryland's lieutenant governor; Ehrlich is governor."

It's snowing, so global warming is a myth

From Media Matters:

Human Events' "Al Gore Snowman Contest," will award prize to snowman resembling "the chief poobah of global warming baloney"

This contest will make perfect sense provided that the snowman is delivered to Vancouver before the Olympics.

Murtha's legacy

From Media Matters:

Breitbart's Big Journalism: "'ABSCAM Jack' Murtha, RIP ... let's remember him as he was"

The Murtha legacy regarding ABSCAM will always be that he TURNED DOWN the bribe from the undercover FBI agents and testified against other Congressmen who did take the money.

Two Words

Republican Scott Brown DEMANDS to be sworn in early as a US Senator.

Democrats agree!

Two words, you stupid bastards: AL FRANKEN!

Republican negotiation strategy

Media Matters: King lets Hatch falsely claim GOP was shut out of health care reform in "an arrogance of power"

Here's how Republicans negotiate:

Imagine that you go to a car lot. You say to the salesman "I want to buy a car today."

Salesman: "No."

You: "I see that you have all black cars on the lot. I really wanted a red one, but I''m willing to compromise. I'd like to buy a black one, please."

Salesman: "No."

You: "Look, I see that your cars are $20,000 each. I'll pay you the full asking price even though it's not the color I want."

Salesman: "No."

You: "I'll give you $25,000 for one."

Salesman: "No."

You: "I'll give you $20,000 for HALF a car, then I'll figure out later what to do about the other half."

Salesman: "No."

You leave the lot.

Sales manager to salesman: "How come you didn't sell a car to that guy?"

Salesman: "He wouldn't compromise, so we couldn't make a deal."

Sales manager: "What's it going to take to get him to buy a car?"

Salesman: "Well, if he's willing to sit down at the table with me and make some REAL concessions, maybe we can strike a bargain."

Obama Right to Tap Bush for Haiti Aid Effort -- I say no

Like a child who begrudgingly has to invite his weird cousin to his birthday party, there are some things a president simply must do. So it must have been when President Obama asked George W. Bush to join with U.N. special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton to raise funds for the earthquake-ravaged nation. (The three men will meet at the White House Saturday.) After all, despite Bush's formidable fundraising prowess, his presidential record on disaster response and Haiti in particular does not exactly inspire confidence...

...At the end of the day, it is both right and fitting that President Obama turn to his predecessor to help raise money for the victims in Haiti, even if that means dragging Dubya away from his upcoming speaking engagement at the Safari Club International Annual Hunters' Convention designed to "replenish the ol' coffers." It's not merely a requirement of political decorum at a time of crisis. As George H.W. Bush showed in his joint appeals with Bill Clinton after the tsunami, the Bush family stepped up to the plate to make a difference...

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Democrats never get this. It doesn't matter what they say or do in the name of "bipartisanship." The other side will STILL call them traitors and communists and thieves and murderers. And all the while those same Republicans will take as much as they can in the "negotiations," but will not have to give any of it back when they end up not supporting the final measure.

Democrats bent over backwards to obtain Republican support for the stimulus bill. The Republicans voted "no" almost to a man, yet they still got what they wanted in terms of reductions in the size and scope of the project, plus individual set asides for their own districts. Then they went home to complain about Democratic "overspending" while at the same time taking credit for spending in their own districts and states.

Health care reform has gone the same way. Democrats did everything possible to accommodate Grassley, Snowe, Collins and one or two others who SAID they were negotiating in good faith. Then the GOP voted against the final bill, but they got to keep in it all the concessions that had been made to them in the hopes of attracting their support.

Since Democrats are going to be opposed in the end and called names anyway, they'd be better off not dealing with the Republicans in the first place, but they never learn.

Does anyone doubt that Haiti relief will be just like that? Bush will put on a show of making this a "nonpartisan" effort while the usual GOP suspects call Obama traitor and a racist and complain that he's spending too much and that he's allowing this event to distract him from the "real" problem of keeping us "safe" from terrorism. Limbaugh and Beck have already started on this theme. It's only a matter of time before the rest of the Republicans pick it up.

And those observations about the process don't even begin to scratch the surface of the real problem I have with George W. Bush in this regard. Based on his ignoring of and then subsequently poor performance after Hurricane Katrina, he's the LAST person whose name should be considered in the same breath as "disaster relief."

Based on how Bush took care of Mississippi (Republican governor) while screwing Louisiana (then Democratic one), if Bush stays involved in this effort, the people of Haiti will find that they get little to no help because the head of their government isn't a fat, doughy, white, lying Republican like Haley Barbour.

Bush ruins everything he touches. We'd be better off without him getting involved.

Ill informed supporters try to defend Tea Baggers

From Media Matters:

Fox spent weeks promoting apparent tea party scam

TPM Media's Zachary Roth reported earlier in the week that the political action committee that organized the Tea Party Express -- Our Country Deserves Better PAC -- funneled almost two-thirds of its spending from July to November back to the political consulting firm from which it was spawned, Russo, Marsh, and Associates. More than $850,000 of the money the supposedly grassroots PAC collected went to the firm of GOP political operatives who ran it.

For those who may have forgotten, the Tea Party Express was the faux-grassroots operation that Fox News hopped aboard in late August, after the network's promotion of the health care town hall meeting disruptions but before they started flogging the 9-12 protest. (It's so hard to keep Fox's political activism straight!) It was a nationwide bus tour organized by a political action committee whose mission is to oppose President Obama and other Democrats; with a pedigree like that, how could Fox resist?

Fox News heavily promoted the Tea Party Express; the Our Country Deserves Better PAC even used Fox's promotion in a fundraising email. Then Fox's Griff Jenkins hit the trail with the Express, following that bus around the country, throwing journalistic integrity aside as he declared its riders "the America that Washington forgot."

But somehow, Jenkins missed out on the real story: how loyal tea-party-goers were separated from their hard-earned cash, which was funneled to fat cat Republican political consultants. Russo, Marsh, and Associates salutes you, Fox News. They could have scammed the tea partiers without you, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as lucrative.

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Commenter Bilbo_dies objected to some comments that suggested that the Tea Party activists are not too bright:

Oh please don't go there.
Even though there are some on the right who are light on their education, you have to understand that they are not all "dumb country hicks".

All you have to do is look at people like Dick Chenney. He is an extremely intelligent man who has decided he knows more than anyone else about how the country should be run.

Some people are going to be led, no matter what. If you want to make a difference work on pointing out the falsehoods that the media spends so much time disseminating.

My replies:

I disagree. I've seen on the news one too many misinformed idiots at Tea Party events saying "keep the government's hands off my Medicaid!" and "Where's the birth certificate" and "he's a Muslim" and "how do we beat the bitch" to give them credit for intelligence, awareness of current events, or good intentions.

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When someone refuses to acknowledge commonly accepted and easily verifiable facts because they don't fit in with his bigoted narrative, he's not disagreeing in good faith or unintentionally uninformed -- he's willfully ignorant.

In fact, the Tea Party types LIKE being stupid. They sneer at educated people as "liberal elites."

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Another commenter, rrastro, disagreed with me:

that is a claim that is difficult to defend. The one person (yes I know small sample) did not like being ignorant and spent time and money to alleviate his ignorance via education.

Many people sneer at liberal elites because they dislike being told that small government is stupid and the only reason things are expensive is profit.

My reply:

Look, these fools regard "liberal elitism" as correcting them when they falsely claim a gathering of 50 thousand people was "really" 2 million.

To them "liberal media" means asking a sitting governor and candidate for vice president what newspapers she reads. It was a "trap" by the "liberal media" that they asked a question so complex that the candidate couldn't comprehend or answer it.

(As I've said before, I refuse to believe that Sarah Palin wrote a book on the grounds that it's apparent that she doesn't even READ them.)

If the tea party members and "conservative activists" think people like me are condescending and scornful of their opinions and points of view, they're right -- it's because they've EARNED it.

Will Ted Nugent be Dixie Chicked?

Ted Nugent tells Royal Flush magazine:

"I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist.

"Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up."

When can I expect this type of media hue and cry?

I think we all know the answer. Nugent will either be ignored or praised and amplified. Why? Because IOKIYAR.

Amen. Times ten.

Spot. On.

Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs, by Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute

December 22, 2009

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade. If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless 'Oligarchs' in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.


10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '“very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger.

8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.

7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin's Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people's mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights under vague and unconstitutional rubrics such as 'providing material aid to terrorists,'(rights which seem unlikely ever to be restored).

6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America's great cities. The administration's unconcern about the unsound dam infrastructure, about climate change, and about the fate of the victims are all a wake-up call for what all of us have in store from the small social class that Bush served.

5. The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration's attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow. It should have been nipped in the bud, but was not. Once an insurgency becomes well established, it is defeated militarily only about 20 percent of the time. Eight years later, the Neoconservative thrust into Central Asia (in search of hydrocarbon leverage, or in a geopolitical pissing match with Russia and China?) of the early years of this decade has bequeathed us yet another war, this time one that could destabilize neighboring Pakistan-- the world's sole Muslim nuclear power.

4. The Iraq War, in which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over a million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion.

3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the
Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda's largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslim country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty). Al-Qaeda was a small fringe crackpot group of murderous conspiracy theorists, since most of what they considered an American 'occupation' of Muslims was no such thing. The leasing of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? They intended to make themselves look like a world-historical force, and the US new Oligarchs, who no longer had the international Communist conspiracy with which to scare the American public into letting them have their way, were happy to buy in to the hyping of al-Qaeda, as well. But the catastrophe was not only the attacks, deadly and horrific though they were, but the alacrity with which Americans surrendered their birthright of yeoman liberties to a Bonapartist regime that ran roughshod over law, the constitution, the Congress, and anyone, such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared oppose it.

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.


End/ (Not Continued)