Friday, January 31, 2014

Professional Left Podcast #217

ProfessionalLeft
"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash."

-- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
 Links:

Da' money goes here:






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The Typos of Andrew Sullivan


I just wrote Mr. Sullivan alerting him to a typo in this post.

My email reads:
You wrote: "Because the GOP has not been a conservative party these past five years..."

When obviously you meant "Because the GOP has not been a conservative party since I was five years old..."
In a completely different post, Mr. Sullivan explains why his blog does not have a comment section.

I leave the rest as a problem for the reader.
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Ain't No Party Like a Whig Party

QUEENBOBO_SM

'Cause a Whig Party is Imaginary (UPDATE)

In today's New York Times, David Brooks invites the President of the United States to come down into the dark and eat chicken with him:


But before we get to that, let me take a moment to gloat immodestly...

Longtime readers of this blog know that, post by post, year by year, I have built what I believe to be an irrefutable case that New York Times columnist and America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, David Brooks, has given up writing about Reality as you and I understand it altogether, because over the last few decades Reality has hurt his tender, fee-fees so very deeply.  

And so, like most Conservatives, rather than face a Reality which has rudely demonstrated over and over again that you really do not have the slightest fucking clue what you are talking, Mr. Brooks has instead taken refuge down a Centrist rabbit hole of his own making, inventing an entire alternate history in which the last twenty years simply never happened (from a disreputable and long-forgotten wag of my acquaintance, with emphasis added to catapult the propaganda):
Second, it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.
So imagine my LMFAO complete lack of surprise to discover Mr. Brooks generously confirming my belief that he has not just been taking a very, very long Gentleman's Intermission from Reality, but is now actively suing Reality for divorce on the grounds of Loss of Consortium.

Because Both Sides!

And, yes, because The Fucking Whigs!
[President Obama] might start, for example, by scrambling the current political categories. We now have one liberal tradition that believes in using government to enhance equality. We have another conservative tradition that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom. These two traditions have fought to a standstill and prevented Obama from passing much domestic legislation of late.

But there is a third ancient tradition that weaves through American history, geared directly at enhancing opportunity and social mobility. This is the Whig tradition, which begins with people like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln. This tradition believes in using the power of government to give marginalized Americans the tools to compete in a capitalist economy...
And, yes, you can search Mr. Brooks' entire column and not find the word "Republican" anywhere. Nor will you find a single word about obstructionism, or Tea Baggers, or the entire history of a Movement to which David Brooks sold his immortal soul for a nice house in a tony suburb.


Instead, as always, you will find David Brooks just free-style ass-whistling in the pages of the New York Times.  Making his usual, vague, mumbly gestures in the general direction of an inexorable "American history" which has somehow, inexplicably, led us to this terrible impasse because...something something...Both Sides!......something something...

You will find no mention of the terrible wingnut Doomsday Machine that Conservatives like David Brooks


eagerly helped construct and set in motion -- a machine built to create precisely the havoc which Mr. Brooks now weeps over.

Instead, what you will find America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual counselling President of the United States to (no kidding) completely give up on trying to get anything done (Because, again, Both Sides!) --
President Obama can spend the remainder of his term planting a few more high-tech hubs, working on reforming the patent law and doing the other modest things he mentioned in his State of the Union address. And if he did that, he might do some marginal good, and he would manage the stately decline of his presidency during its final few years.

Or, alternately, he can realize that he is now at a moment of liberation. For the past five years he has been inhibited by the need to please donors, to cater to various Congressional constituencies and to play by Washington rules.

But the legislating phase of his presidency is now pretty much over. Over the next few years he will be free to think beyond legislation, beyond fund-raising, beyond the necessities of the day-to-day partisanship...
-- and instead spend his remaining years in office barnstorming the country on behalf of David Brooks' Imaginary Whig Party:
President Obama could travel the country modernizing the Whig impulse, questioning current divisions and eroding the rigid battle lines. More concretely, he could create a group of Simpson-Bowles-type commissions — with legislators, mayors, governors and others brought together to offer concrete proposals on mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the life span
I would end this with a flourish of fancy adjectives, but frankly I'm tired, and have little to add to what that disreputable, permanently-underemployed potty-mouth of my acquaintance already said back in 2012:
Like a sculptor inspecting a magnificent slab of raw statuario marble, the wise critic carefully circles today's amazing, mile-high-shitpile of a David Brooks column once... twice... thrice... before unwrapping the tools of his trade.

And then the wise critic stops and realizes the futility of such an enterprise.

Because long ago Mr. Brooks simply stopped writing "columns" full of "facts" about "stuff" and started writing a collection of Whig Fan Fiction short stories.

These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be.  And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.

When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right... 
UPDATE:  Charles Pierce weighs in:
Dear Jesus, he's gone mad. This reads like Smithsonian combined with Parade -- "My Life Had No Meaning Until I Met Millard Fillmore." Oh, and Lincoln stopped being a Whig, and the Whigs stopped being a party, because of an issue involving a certain group of "marginalized" Americans that Brooks is too polite to mention here.
President Obama could travel the country modernizing the Whig impulse, questioning current divisions and eroding the rigid battle lines. More concretely, he could create a group of Simpson-Bowles-type commissions - with legislators, mayors, governors and others brought together to offer concrete proposals on mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the life span...
Kill me now. I mean it. Kill me right now with an entrenching tool. This is the orgasmic howl of the Beltway Gollum -- One, two, many Simpson-Bowleseses, precious, precious, yes, YES, YES!!!!...

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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Thug Life


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A Tale Of Two Assholes


The one on the left is Republican Representative Michael Grimm from New York. 

The one on the right is Republican Representative Peter King from New York.  

The one on the left is an asshole who recently said something stupid and threatening to a reporter.

The one on the right is an asshole who recently said something stupid and threatening about a reporter.

So far, the stupid and threatening stuff the asshole on the left said is generally being taken as par for the course because, frankly, whaddya expect from a Republican asshole like that.

On the other hand, so far, many people have made a strenuous effort to portray the stupid and threatening stuff the asshole on the right said as part of President Obama's War on Journalism!  A conspiracy so vast and deep that it nearly exists!

Because there is no hook too small that it cannot support all the outrage in the world.  
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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Crazy Uncle Liberty, Tracy Flick and the Purity Caucus Mount Off-Broadway Production of SOTU Roshomon



I heard a pretty good speech tonight that played almost every fife and fiddle in the Liberal orchestra.

Manufacturing
Climate Change
Minimum Wage
Funding Basic Research
Health Care
Voting Rights
Gun Control
Reining in drones
Reforming the NSA
Immigration Reform
Closing Gitmo
Iran
Afghanistan

And much more.

Obama was upbeat and energetic.  Kennedyesque.

Cory Remsburg's bio was inspiring.

And none of it has a hope in Hell of going anywhere until the GOP is buried at the crossroads with a stake through its heart.

At least that's the speech I heard.

Crazy Uncle Liberty was listening too.

Here is what he heard.










We no longer live in the same Universe as these people.

But there was no time to dwell on this because, live from 1981, it's the Republican response to stuff President Obama never actually said or did, brought to you by Tracy Flick

She has plans.

Boy howdy.

Big plans!

But not gummint plans. No! No! Never any icky gummint plans.

But Republican plans.

Big Republican plans!

Sadly she apparently has no time whatsoever to explain any detail of any those Big Plans..

At all.

But she does have ample time to strew the floor with plenty of adjectives about how you will feel..

..how warm and happy and yummy in your tummy you will feel...

...about yourself..

...and about America...

...after her Big Plans have succeeded in solving every problem and wiping every tear from your eyes.

And there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain,
For the old order of things has passed away.

Which was followed by this spectacular ad hoc response performed in authentic frontier gibberish by Loony Party Statuary and Pictures Committee Assistant Recording-Secretary, Tim Huelskamp:



Which was, in turn, followed by David Sirota's inevitable Brogressive Purity Caucus response to the response to the... well, you get the idea:

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Russia Discovers Spying


Oh noes!

The Sochi Winter Games are already the most expensive Olympics on record, and they're shaping up to be the most watched, as well — not by spectators or television viewers, but by the Russian government.
Amid heightened security concerns and terrorist threats, Russian security forces have constructed a powerful surveillance system designed to monitor the movements and communications of virtually everyone on the ground at Sochi. The aim is to deter attacks and unrest through blanket monitoring, though there are fears that the Kremlin is going too far.
"The Russian secret services are just obsessed by the idea of ... total control," says Irina Borogan, an investigative journalist for Moscow-based watchdog Agentura.ru. Last year, Borogan and Agentura editor-in-chief Andrei Soldatov published a series of reports on the surveillance programs that Russia is implementing for the Winter Olympics, which run from February 7th through the 23rd.
Their investigation shed light on a security system of remarkable breadth — one capable of gathering not only metadata, but actual phone conversations and internet activity. In an interview with The Guardian, one security expert described the program as "PRISM on steroids," referring to the controversial data-gathering system used by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
...

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David Brooks Burnishes His Christian Mingle Profile -- UPDATE



First, a profession of faith.
Sort of.
From "Alone. So Alone"  "Alone, Yet Not Alone":
There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.”

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.
...

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand...
Yeah, these kids today and their crazy ideas and jazz and reefers and sexytime.  Who knows what they'll say next!

Thankfully a reasonable "silent majority" that Mr. Brooks has made up for the occasion lurks just out of sight who are not taken in, so don't worry potential-future-Mrs.-David-Brooks: you will be safely in the sensible majority with Mr. Brooks at your side.

Under "likes" we find that Mr. Brooks appears to enjoy Catholic singer/songwriter Audrey Assad -- 
For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.
-- however only 800 words to work with, Mr. Brooks had to keep it short, so interested ladies should also know that Mr. Brooks is a committed lifestyle-asymmetriphobe who also likes
But he does not like:
(Yes, I know Mr. Brooks is Jewish, but when it comes to plunging back into the dating scene, many a recently-divorced man has cast a very wide net.  And anyway, Both Sides!)

UPDATE:

Over at The Rectification of Names, citizen Yastreblyansky points out that, once again, where Mr. Brooks plants his feet and firmly stands on timeless issues depends entirely on what the calendar says and which way the wind is blowing.
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Monday, January 27, 2014

More Silly Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

Vanity_Fair

Sore afflicted with that debilitating-but-financially-advantageous strain of Memento disease which prevents him from forming any new political memories past 1992, Conservative-by-Choice Andrew Sullivan is always perpetually shocked and amazed when leading American Conservatives sincerely aver the kind of ludicrous, paranoid, hateful, destructive beliefs that Liberals have always told him are at the core of American Conservatism.

And so, every week or so, Mr. Sullivan treats his readers to another post shot through with Sullivan Brand stunned indignation that another rapacious plutocrat Conservative asshole or bigoted halfwit Conservative asshole or anti-science, bible-rigging Conservative asshole is behaving in a way that would be tediously predictable to any honest observer of American politics and culture for the last 30 years.

In today's exciting episode, Mr. Sullivan is appalled at the whole line of "Obama is a Socialist Monster!" line of Conservative free-form ass-whistling given how pro-business and pro-Wall Street this Administration has acted over the last five years:
There has been plenty of well-deserved derision directed at the billionaire fretting in the Wall Street Journal that the super-duper-rich like him are headed for concentration camps. Paul Krugman fires an AK47 into the world’s smallest barrel here; while Josh Marshall has a must-read. Josh is actually trying to understand rather than simply excoriate the completely bizarre idea that the Obama administration is a populist, socialist threat to a capitalist system it all but saved from itself
...
I’ve been a little taken aback too by the attitude of the Wall Street class, after they royally fucked up the entire global economy, were bailed out by the rest of us, still get Dimon-style compensation, and have enjoyed one of the sharpest booms in stock prices since 2009. At some point, you have to ask: WTF?

Of course, the point at which the WTF's should have begun was the day Ronald Reagan decided to slalom down the Laffer Curve with the American middle class tied to his bumper, but aside from recommending that Mr. Sullivan settle in with Thomas Frank's entire collection, he gets no argument from me...


...right up until this (emphasis added):

Well, yes, they have returned to pre-Reagan levels of taxation. But the tax take is still roughly where it was in the mid-1990s and I don’t recall Clinton being perceived as a socialist or howls of protest from the wealthy...
And that's where the laughing begins...

Just for fun, let's reintroduce America to John "Johnny Smooth" Daggett (Motto: "You might remember me from such political hit-job supporting roles as "One of the clowns the GOP tapped to napalm Anita Hill because who can resist Johnny Smooth!") circa 1999:

CLINTON'S SOCIALIST MANIFESTO

Published: 01/22/1999 at 1:00 AM

Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech reveals a socialist who wants to take away your freedom. Bill’s speech drips with his contempt of our free market economic system. Bill’s speech is a declaration of war against America’s heritage.

Bill says that the government can do a better job of spending your money than you can. Bill says that you are not smart enough to take care of your children, your parents or your communities without government direction. And if that is not enough to boil your blood, Bill also wants to destroy the stock market, steal your money and federalize your schools.
...
Exit Johnny Smooth, pursued by bears.

Too obscure?

Enter Newton Leroy Gingrich circa 2011.  A man who, unlike Mr. Sullivan, believes that all of the Socialist Monster talk about the Kenyan Usurper is perfectly justified Because!Socialism!, but like Mr. Sullivan, believes that certainly no one was slinging around the "S" word back when Bill Clinton was in the White House:
In 1993, you had nothing like the current focus on the 10th amendment. You had nothing like the current desire to get power out of Washington. And you didn't have the sense of radicalism that Obama has injected into the system, in the sense of drifting toward a socialized bureaucratic structure that runs the whole country.
Here's Gingrich, quoted in the February 17, 1993, New York Times:
Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the House Republican whip, welcomed Mrs. Clinton to Capitol Hill today. But in an interview, he said proposals being considered by her committee looked like "washed-over old-time bureaucratic liberalism, or centralized bureaucratic socialism."
And the December 17, 1993, New York Times:
On Tuesday, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the House Republican whip, said the Clinton proposal would lead to too much central planning and could bring socialism" in the health care system. Mr. Clinton made light of that criticism today after listening to some of his supporters from the ranks of medicine.
And the Boston Globe, from December 2, 1993: "Gingrich [...] criticized Clinton's health-care proposals as being 'based on West German socialism.'"
Which should not come as a surprise to anyone who did not spend the 1990s with his head up his ass.  After all, this is the same Newt Gingrich who spent an enormous amount of time and effort developing and rolling out an entire Orwellian language training system for the Republican Party designed to standardize, routinize and ramp up the by-then-already-routine slandering and demonization of Liberals and Democrats to levels that would make a North Korean propaganda minister proud.

To punish him for his key role in helping to dumb Republicans down to the point where they will swear on the grave of Imaginary Reagan that Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are geniuses, the Mainstream Media finds as many ways as possible to stuff as money as possible into Newt Gingrich's pockets, and to loyally re-re-re-re-rehabilitate his reputation every time he publicly shits the bed.

Shine on you crazy diamond!

Where was I?

Oh yes!  Just this, repeated for the hundredth time -- like most Conservatives, Mr. Sullivan has lost his capacity to look the past squarely in the eye.

Which is not surprising.

After all, for Conservatives, what awaits them in the rear-view mirror is downright terrifying. 


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Silly Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.



It's Both Sider Day over at Mr. Sullivan's Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Stuff aggregation site:
If the 10 – 15 percent form the bedrock of one party’s base, and shape and echo a message fed through the hyper-partisan cable pipeline, it is precisely the isolated nature of the phenomenon that gives it power. After all, anyone who is not super-ideologically committed or highly partisan would find both MSNBC and Fox to be ridiculous, propagandistic caricatures of news. That’s why their audiences are relatively small. In fact, both propaganda channels may have maxed out on their reach because most (sane) Americans never stop laughing or gasping at cable news’ inane extremism when they have the misfortune to turn it on.

-- Andrew Sullivan, 01/27/14
As even Mr. Sullivan is clearly if dimly aware, using "1984" as a business model, Roger Ailes corporation is engaged in grand, long-range project to shape and direct a genuine American Fascist Party: one that wields real political power while at the same time it makes it's brain caste very, very rich. (1)
Without Fox News, no Tea Party.
And as often as it fails, what several key players at the Weimar-weak, deeply compromised, internally conflicted and often inept MSNBC at try to do is push back against a vast, entire, well-funded and well-choreographed Axis of Asshats led by Fox News, Hate Radio, Koch Brothers-funded Conservative Think Tanks and PACS, and virtually the entire leadership of the GOP.(2)

Why Mr. Sullivan can evidently clearly see the former (1) and is so congenitally and bitchily committed to failing to see the latter (2) has been a matter of some speculation on this blog for many, many years.

And for all of the "Ask So-and-so Anything" featurettes that he posts over at his Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Stuff site, since Mr. Sullivan does not have the guts to face off against a real Liberal in a real debate on this important subject, I suspect we will never get an answer to that question.

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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- UPDATE



Ever since Sunday officially became national "Make Edward R. Murrow Spin In His Grave"-Day, he Mouse Circus has been a weekly race among the networks to see which of them could lard up the airwaves with the most deplorably unfit aggregation of pundit pie-wagons, grifters and political snake handlers. 

Usually, David Gregory's collection of waxworks dummies and yowling zombies 



wins it going away, but this week I think, in the spirit of the Winter Games, we must in all fairness give the laurel to "Face the Nation" host and Legio X Fretensis Daily Pantagraph lifestyle reporter, Bob Schieffer, who spared no expense stocking the sideboard Face the Nation with the finest hack in all the land!

The main course was a tureen of gristle, back-fat and gall named Ted Cruz which, served cold and oily,


put Bob Schieffer solidly in the lead.  But unable to shoehorn all the crazy into the regular broadcast, Senator Bat Chain Puller added another course by posted some additional IRS!Scandal! content for his loyal orcs:

And it wouldn't be real Beltway five course feast without real table blessings and trimmings, and so we also got...
Peggy Noonan
Bill Kristol
Bill Daley
Bob Woodward.
...all together, all under once roof.

UPDATE:
After three year, Mr. Pierce is getting very tired of seeing his efforts in the pages of Esquire being fed through the chipper and slopped to the hog:
...
The Blog has been at this for going on three years now and it is quite frustrated that its most ironclad rules are regularly thrown to the winter warblers by the elite members of its profession. I've given up waiting for anyone except les freres Krugman and Cay Johnson to acknowledge the blog's First Law of Economics -- Fk The Deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money. -- but it shouldn be too much to ask for these people to abide by the Five Minute Rule as regards the members of the extended Paul family, especially Crazy Uncle Liberty (!) and his dim spalpeen, Senator Aqua Buddha. This holds that one may take what they say seriously for precisely five minutes. But, exactly at the 5:00:00:01 mark, they will say something so off-the-charts whackadoodle that one is forced to back away slowly from the whole idea of handing any kind of power to these people -- and, in fact, to back out of the studio entirely in search of a dim bar where one can argue with a better class of crazy person.

The latest conspicuous violator of the rule is Disco Dave's Disco Dance Party, where Aqua Buddha wandered in yesterday from the not-entirely-well-lit precincts of his own mind and put on the kind of political Tijuana donkey-show that should have had the Dancin' Master numb with shock, emerging from it at last only to call the police and send out to resupply the Green Room with M&M-shaped Thorazine.
...
I feel you, brother.  I have been working the "Sunday Shows/David Brooks/Andrew Sullivan/Can't We Please Just Stop Being Stupid" beat for going on nine years and even with my own line of bespoke graphics I am unable to catch the attention of a single newspaper, magazine or most online Liberal watering holes, much less actual policy wonks and king-makers and mainstream media gatekeepers.

Hey, here's an idea!

Why don't we trade?

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

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Saturday, January 25, 2014

RIP Luis Alcala


From the Sun Times:
Founder of Alcala’s, one of the Midwest’s biggest Western wear stores, dead at 92
BY MAUREEN O’DONNELL Staff Reporter January 24, 2014 7:58PM

Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, Mexican ranchera music king Vicente Fernandez and a winner of Chicago’s International Mr. Leather contest all had something in common: Each stocked up at Alcala’s on West Chicago Avenue, one of the biggest Western wear shops in the Midwest.

The store boasts a Texas-size inventory of 10,000 pairs of cowboy boots available in every hue and in hides that include python, ostrich and eelskin, and 5,000 cowboy hats, including a $5,000 chinchilla number.
...
Mr. Alcala hustled on Maxwell Street, selling used bikes, brooms and ashtrays — anything to support his growing brood. His wife gave birth to six boys between 1952 and 1959, then had two girls, another boy and two more girls. Mr. Alcala also worked as a janitor and security guard, at one point holding down four jobs.

He opened his first store in 1972 at 8727 S. Commercial but saw business dry up as customers’ jobs at U.S. Steel disappeared.

Mr. Alcala liked the bustle around Chicago and Ashland, so he set up shop at 1733 W. Chicago Ave. in 1974. The neighborhood was mostly Ukrainian, Polish and Mexican. But two nearby theaters — the Hub and the Alvin — showed Spanish-language movies that drew Mexican Americans to Alcala’s.

He treated everyone as if they were the carriage trade, offering quick, free alterations.

“He’d tell his Mexican customers, ‘We’re shorter in nature. . . . You’re never going to find a pair of trousers to fit you right off the rack. Pick out your pants and shirt, leave them while you go to the movie, then come back, and your pants and shirt will be ready for the dance in the evening,’ ” said his son Robert Alcala.
...
Starting back when that stretch of Chicago Avenue was a ghost town by day and impressively sketchy by night, through the period when the neighborhood started to come back to life thanks to local artists, urban pioneers and Da Mare moving in several hundred city jobs, I got all my western gear at Alcala's. Half a dozen belts, as many buckles, six pairs of fine boots over the years and a black Stetson I still take out on occasion.  Great service and a selection big enough to afford me an amazing number of choices for getting my giant feet shod in style.

Farewell Luis. You always dealt on the square and treated everyone who came through the door with respect.

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David Brooks Continues To Beg America



To stop - please, for love of God stop -- talking about the predatory antics of the rich people he shills for as if they have anything whatsoever to do with the plight of the Poors or the Soon-To-Be-Poors:
...
Inequality is certainly widening. Mobility is something we have to think about as Americans. It is the American dream. But as a frame, it is a very broad frame. What Mark talked about, the concentration of wealth at the top, is caused by one set of problems, middle-class wage stagnation caused by another set of problems, what is happening in the lower 20 or 40 percent caused by a different set of problems.

So you have got a whole bunch of problems all intermingled. And my viewing, the political system I don't think can deal with all these different problems all layered on top. If I were President Obama doing the State of the Union address next week, I would say, where is the greatest injustice? Where is the greatest harm?

And I would say that's at the bottom 20 percent or the bottom 40 percent...
Definitely!

Let's all "think about" this stuff.  

As Americans.  

Because something something the American Dream.

Meanwhile - Look over here!  Look over here! -- please for God's sake lets get back to talking about unwed teenage mothers and stuff:
...You take kids, what do they have to do to have a pretty -- chance of a decent life? Graduate from high school at age 19 with maybe a 2.5 GPA, not get convicted of anything, not get pregnant. Only 37 percent of kids at the bottom 20 percent income scale are doing that, only 37 percent.
For the record, without too much effort, any competent citizen from Paul Krugman to my sainted mother can incinerate Mr. Brooks' increasingly frantic and transparent attempt to decouple 30 years of aggressively pro-plutocrat, anti-labor, anti-equality policies of the Right from any discussion of income inequality...

...which is so much of out mainstream is devoted to keeping fragile Conservatives like Mr. Brooks as carefully protected and climate-controlled as any hothouse orchid, and the Hell away from competent citizens.

But if you find it entertaining to watch someone just punch this whole, stupid line of claptrap right out of the ring, check out David Cay Johnston at about the 10:35 mark of this video from the Melissa Harris-Perry show (if you have the time, the whole thing is worth watching):




And for extra laughs, your Moment of Zen comes courtesy of David Brooks -- the man with the new, $1.3M Cleveland Park mansion *$4M Cleveland Park mansion, who began his career making a buck shilling for one horrid brand of Conservative snake-oil after another and who now jets all over the planet on the New York Times' dime -- expressing his bafflement about why anyone would do stupid, terrible things in pursuit of money and status:
What is mystifying about this couple [the McDonnells] is the fascination with Rolexes and Ferraris. I have like a $80 watch or something like that. Why do you need a $6,500 watch? What are you getting out of it? He needs status. I guess he wants a Rolex.
*Thanks to alert reader marindenver for correcting my failing memory.
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Glass Housing Sales Remain Brisk



Mr. Greenwald January 25, 2014:
Yes, any opinionating at this point regarding Mr. Snowden's motives is inherently speculative.  But as to the charge of McCarthyism, well I am old and forgetful, so maybe someone can remind me which of the victims of Tailgunner Joe's smears actually:
Mr. Greenwald continues:
On this, Mr. Greenwald and I are in complete accord: recklessly and indignantly asserting that your wild, evidence-free innuendos are true is pretty reprehensible.

But it is especially bad when journalists do it.

And it is super-especially bad when journalists who are fanatics about media accountability do it.

Right Glenn Greenwald?

Mr. Greenwald August 2, 2013
Mr. Greenwald, August, 2013: 
“[Snowden is] doing very well, he’s obviously very happy for the obvious reason that he’s not going to be subjected to the standard whistleblower treatment that the United States government gives to people, which is to put them in a cage for decades and render them incommunicado.”
Mr. Greenwald, August, 2013:  
“Well I think the concern is that whistle blowers in the United States have become the number one public enemy of the United States government, which is incredibly disturbing. McClatchy has been reporting great things about how the Obama administration equates whistleblowing with treason, with all kinds of programs. [...] Whistleblowers in the United States are put into prison for decades and basically disappeared, as we just saw with Bradley Manning…”
Mr. Greenwald, Januarry 2, 2014:  
If Edward Snowden came back to Washington, before he were...was...convicted of anything he would be "disappeared" into prison and not be allowed to speak.


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Friday, January 24, 2014

There is a Club and You Are Not In It X 1,000



A very angry little boy named Matthew Continetti has written a very angry article to the effect that Liberal Nepotism is ruining America!

Why the wide world of sports do I now know the name "Matthew Continetti"?

Because Young Matthew is also the editor of the Washington Free Beacon.

And how did Young Matthew build this perch from which he now preaches against the horrors of Liberal Nepotism?

Wait for it.

Wait for it... 

 From New York Magazine:
...

But what’s truly amazing about Continetti’s passionate screed against the nepotistic liberal elite is that it was written by Matthew Continetti, who epitomizes what the Chinese call guanxi more than either Kass or Wagner, and arguably more than any American alive.

After graduating from college, Continetti received a well-funded fellowship at the Weekly Standard financed by a wealthy organization, founded by William Simon and Irving Kristol, which is dedicated to subsidizing conservative journalists. Book editor Adam Bellow had an idea for a project, and asked Bill Kristol, Irving's son, for a name. Kristol suggested his young charge, Continetti, who was also in the process of becoming Kristol’s son-in-law (you can read the wedding notice in the New York Times). Kristol probably didn't trouble himself too much about the threat to meritocracy, having himself attained his position in life in part by being the son of Irving Kristol. Needless to say, Bellow — the son of Saul Bellow, and the author of In Praise of Nepotism — probably didn't mind, either.
I.
Have.
No.
Words.
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Professional Left Podcast #216

ProfessionalLeft
"Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em."

-- Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, "A Face in the Crowd"




 Links:


     


Da' money goes here:






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Both Siderism, Supersized

LINCOLN3F
Remember this guy?

The guy who Roger Ailes hired to make Lonesome Rhodes
clockwork_moron2
look like William Sloan Coffin?

The culture-war criminal and profiteer who made a fortune whipping the Pig People into a state of constant, unholy frenzy

and then made another fortune selling them prepper seeds and doomsday gold and an endless supply of Threshold Edition-published claptrap?

The guy who, one year ago, was busy hyping his own Randite Epcot walled-off Utopia scam called Jonestown Lil' Mordor Kim Jong-Un's Waterpark Adventure The Village Potemkin Acres The Clans of the Alphane Moon Cleveland Park Independence, USA?



Yeah, that guy.

Well now he's branched out from fake outrage bomb throwing and conspiracy mongering to fake contrition

over his suddenly epiphany that a career spent exhorting imbeciles to set the woods on fire at 50,000 decibel might have somehow caused some, y'know, woods to be set on fire.

Over on my Liberal teevee, Squint and the Meat Puppet were so blown away by Mr. Beck's sincerity (Because OMFG, he has So Much Money!) they devoted an entire segment to tag-team tongue-bathing him  (which was extra-super special because, as Meat Puppet explained, no one has been more harsh in their criticism of Glenn Beck than he.)

According to your Liberal teevee, how big a deal was Mr. Beck's few minutes of fake atonement?  So Fucking Big that, as Meat Puppet explained, it didn't even matter if he was lying about it because (no kidding) Capitalism!

Don't try to figure it out.  Just let the authentic frontier wingnut gibberish over you and move on.

How big a deal was it?

So Fucking Big that instead of using their regular workaday tin cup to drizzle their Fake Centrist poison into America's political discourse, they went ahead and emptied an entire slop-trough of the stuff, raw, into the well-water.

So Fucking Big that, by my count, they had to scamper down to the Liberal teevee cellars to bring up another Nebuchadnezzar of Both Siderist Special Reserve five different times to properly celebrate the occasion of Mr. Beck's crocodile tears:

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Thursday, January 23, 2014

First They Came For The McDonnells... UPDATE



Noted crazy person, disgraced college president, Newt Gingrich BFF --
The conservative flamethrower’s recent article in Forbes magazine served as the inspiration for Newt Gingrich’s notorious comment about President Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” being the essence of his character.Gingrich thinks D’Souza’s piece to be a “stunning insight,” the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.
-- and auteur in the genre of wingnut paranoia hate-porn, Dinesh D'Souza, may still have a little further to fall before going splat back at the base of the Great Wingnut Welfare Food Pyramid.

 But if so, it is a distance that can now be measured in inches.

From Reuters:
Dinesh D'Souza indicted for violating U.S. election law

BY JONATHAN STEMPEL

NEW YORK Thu Jan 23, 2014 6:03pm EST

Jan 23 (Reuters) - Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D'Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate's campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment.

Attempts to reach D'Souza and a lawyer representing him were unsuccessful.

D'Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count of causing false statements to be made.
...
Obviously Mr. D'Souza made the classic mistake of not being partisan enough. Which, we all know, is the only reason the Liberal jackals of the American judicial system ever go after Conservative heroes like Mr. D'Souza.

Because Freedom!

Also I'm sure his future contribution to America letters --"Notes from the Liberal Gulag: My Life as a Conservative Prisoner of Conscience" -- recounting his harrowing four months trying to survive low sheet thread-counts and a very limited wine list at the Taft minimum-security Correctional Institution will go on to be Regnery Press' biggest seller of 2017.


UPDATE:  And just like fucking clockwork...

From Fox News:
...
D’Souza’s co-producer in “2016” Gerald Molen told FoxNews.com he believes the charges are politically motivated and D’Souza is being singled out by federal authorities for a “selective prosecution.”

The 2012 film examined President Obama’s past and early influences that may have shaped his political ideology and was a surprise hit, making over $33 million at the box office.

The duo is teaming up again for a new film “America,” which Molen said will be released on schedule in July 2014 regardless of what happens in the case.

“Neither the filmmakers nor the American public can allow this prosecution to deter us from the film's release, and I am calling upon the American people to show their elected officials that this kind of selective prosecution will not stand, by joining us at the box office,” Molen said. “I look forward to my good friend Dinesh being vindicated for what appears to be nothing more than a misunderstanding."
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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Ha Ha, Charade You Are


As you read this, consider all of the creatures which walk or swarm or crawl on the land or fly in the air or burrow beneath the soil or swim in the rivers and seas.

And then consider, of all of the living things currently drawing breath on planet Earth, which among them would sound the most pulverizingly ludicrous with this coming out of it's mouth-hole:
I just know egos, folks.  I studied 'em, political, performer, professional, insensitive, insecure.  I know egos, and I'm just telling you that Richard Sherman is lost in himself...

Anyway, so he gets caught up in that, and I made an analogy: "You know people like this.  You know people who are so lost in their egos that they think that everybody's thinking about them all day and all the time."

I used, as an example, Obama as a large-ego type person who I'm sure probably sits around in private thinking of himself. You know, I love asking people a question, and I've been asking people this question of successful people for 30 years.  I asked George Will once when I interviewed him. ... I said, "When the family's gone to bed, you're the only one up, it's late at night, and most of the lights are off and you're sitting around doing whatever you're doing, do you reflect?

"Do you ever stop to reflect on what you mean to so many people and how much influence you have over so many people?"  He looked at me, cocked his head, and said, "No, I'm thinking about what I have to do tomorrow.  I'm not sitting around thinking about my influence on people." I've asked a lot of people that question, and every one of the profoundly successful people I've asked that question say the same thing (to one degree or another) that George Will said.

"No, I'm not thinking about me."

But there are people like that, and I just think Obama's probably one of them.  I not even "think" it; I know it.  He has to be...

Yeah.

It's this guy:



Because of course it is.
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Lessons Learned

UNITY

What Valuable Lesson has the King of the Pig People learned from the crash-and-burn of Moochin' Bob McDonnell?

The same Important Lesson he always learns.
Let's keep in mind, by the way, too -- this is very important to point out -- that while in office, the conservative, McDonnell, did his best to be bipartisan and to reach across the aisle, and we see all the good that it did him.

-- Rush Limbaugh, January 22, 2014
And the People of the Pig said, "Amen!"
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