Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"The Return of Senator Moondoggie" Edition

"Like, tax cuts, Daddy-O"


This Sunday marked the 733,285th time 2008 Republican standard bearer Senator John McSame showed up on “Meet the Press” , this time treading the boards to beg forgiveness of the Pig People who now completely own his party by touting two of the GOP’s signal failures – recession tax cuts and Sarah Palin – as wildly brilliant national salvifics that we po’ dumb Liberals were just too hateful and Socialistic-y to embrace.

Dick Gregory: Knowing everything you know now, would you still have picked Caribou Barbie?

McSame: Ab-so-lute-ly. If the stock market hadn’ta crashed, we coulda won!

Gregory: What about the stimulus? It’s all of four month old now and the same frantic wingnut economic anarchists who spent all winter trying to kill it, have spent all Spring declaring it a failure.

McSame: The stimulus is Generational Theft. And who said we wanted to do nothing? The GOP had an awesome stimulus program.

driftglass: Ah, yes. Those 18-pages of fact-free GOP glory!

Trust me, Moondoggie, we all remember it very well.

McSame: We were gonna to cut taxes to small businesses. Big businesses. Giant businesses. Pan-dimensional consortia. The House Harkonnen. Also to moderately rich people, very rich people, the super-rich and the often-overlooked, preposterously “Diamond as Big as The Ritz” rich. It woulda been soooo cool!

Gregory: But 40% of Obama’s stimulus package is tax cuts.

McSame: Fuck you, hairpiece.

Gregory: Could you support another stimulus?

McSame: No. We need to focus on tax cuts. Every problem can be solved with tax cuts. Like with health care: we need to figure out how to combine cutting taxes for someone somewhere with making sure that insurance companies continue to make obscene profits by denying care to sick people.

McSame: Also what’s with bailing out those lazy fucking union-wrecked auto companies? GM doesn’t generate jobs. Chrysler doesn’t generate jobs. Small businesses generate jobs!

driftglass (all AZ labor statistics taken from this site): I’m sure it will come as a shock to the 2,800 Arizonans who work in the small business of auto body and repair that their Senator thinks the existence of companies like GM and Chrysler don’t have anything to do with the fact that they have jobs.

I would imagine Arizona’s 311 auto glass installers would also be pretty stunned by Senator McSame’s defiantly ignorant and ideologically-blinkered 18th century grasp of the 21st century economic networks that make their jobs possible. As would Arizona’s 15,547 automotive service technicians and mechanics. The thousands who make their living as bus and truck mechanics and diesel engine specialists. The thousands more who work as welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers. The 3,700 Arizona voters who keep a roof over their head working as machinists The machine setters, operators, and tenders. The 28,000 Grand Canyon Staters who go out every day and try to make their mortgage selling the machines that the specialists use.

In one, cavalier paragraph, Senator McSame also manages to forget about the hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans nationwide who are directly employed by the auto industry, the millions of parts makers and suppliers the industry employs indirectly:

In the world’s biggest auto market, United States employs more than 8,50,000 people were employed in the manufacturing sector till the end of 2008.
...

and the tens of millions of our fellow citizens who have jobs because the machinist or punch press operator down the street has enough dough in his or her pocket to eat out, take in a show, take a cab and buy their kid a bicycle.

Or vacation in the Grand Canyon State.

Gregory: Afghanistan roadside bombings are way, way up. What about that?

McSame: We need to learn the lessons of Iraq and send in more troops.

driftglass: Why don’t we just we just cut their taxes?


Over on “This Week” that other laughably ridiculous gasbag from Arizona– Senator Jon "Crazy Legs" Kyl – took up the “Tax Cuts 4 Evah/Health Care Nevah!” banner and ran it right over the horizon.

Kyl: Health care is a job killah! No on taxes. No on mandates. No on “rationing”. No on government-run health care. Republicans are for reform, just not reform that changes anything in any way whatsoever.

Kyl: It has now been generally acknowledged that the stimulus hasn’t worked. We’re still losing jobs and stuff!

Not it hasn’t, and Senator Dick Durbin from my state gently corrected his colleague's bullshit.

Durbin: We’re four months into a two year plan. What Kyl doesn’t acknowledge is we’ve written checks for 57 billion dollars. We included tax cuts for work class people. Is Senator Kyl against that? Stimulus-funded Transportation projects, getting people working and rebuilding our infrastructure. Is Senator Kyl against those?

And although Kyl’s next tired, wingnut talking point – “Gummint doesn’t create job! Only the private sector creates jobs!” – has been taken apart like a two dollar watch and repeatedly exposed as the ridiculous, despicable lie that it is on this site among others (from February, 2009):

Wow. So this is now the official policy of the Party of God.

That cops don’t have “jobs”.

Neither do teachers.

Or firemen. Or sewer workers. Road construction crews. Bridge builders. Snow plow drivers. Bus drivers. Train conductors. Coast guard.

The United States Army.

has no "jobs".

Neither does

the United States Navy

The Peace Corps?


Nuh-uh.

Neither does the Marine Corps.

No "jobs" for state-funded nursing care. Doctors. Foster care workers.

Consultants and contract employees working the private sector aren’t really really working at “jobs” either, since their contracts eventually end.

The lady who delivers your mail doesn’t have a “job”.

The lifeguard who saved your uncle from drowning at a public beach doesn’t have a “job”.

The public defender that got your kid a little justice doesn’t have a “job”.

The judge who put the drug dealer who was terrorizing your neighborhood away doesn’t have a “job”.

The auditor who makes hedge fund managers pay their fucking taxes doesn’t have a “job”.

The tech guy who makes sure the computer lab at your daughter’s school can take a beating and still run the next day doesn’t have a “job”.

The hematologist at the county blood bank doesn’t have a “job”.

The gearheads and welders who make sure the buses and garbage trucks run, rain or shine don’t have “jobs”.
…

at the Mouse Circus it just saaaaailed right on by unrebutted.

Then talk turned to “Cheney? WTF?”

Stephanopoulis: Hey, turns out Cheney might be an even bigger lying traitor than we thought he was. Should we hold hearings?

Kyl: Let’s not jump to conclusions.

Stephanopoulis: Even if the Vice President ordered the CIA lie to congress?

Kyl: Well, maybe it wasn’t a big program. Maybe it was secret. Maybe it was imaginary. Maybe Jebus told him to.

Stephanopoulis: C’mon, Kyl; even you can’t believe the bullshit you’re slinging here.

Kyl: Let’s not jump to conclusions.



After that scintillating exchange, The Panel toddled out in front of the cameras, led by George Will, whose seething contempt for working people continues to stick out all over like a coat hanger in a condom.

Will (direct quote):

I rise in defense of the stimulus because its accomplished one thing, and that is its sent so much money to state and local governments to prevent unionized public employees – which ware the base of your Party, Donna [Brazille] – from suffering the same kinds of sacrifices that private sector employees (garbled.)

First, Will is, of course, talking straight out of his ass: the Great Republican Recession has crippled hundreds of programs and already cost tens thousands of people their jobs providing services for our most vulnerable fellow citizens are precisely the moment when such services are most in demand. Progress Illinois has an excellent site here that is tracking the brutal effects of social service shutdowns and layoffs across my state. Here is a tiny, tiny fraction of that list:

- Chicago's Carole Robertson Center, which provides early childhood care and education, laid off 20 of its 170 employees on July 2 and gave the rest a 25 percent pay cut. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Foster care and education services organization Children Home + Aid, based in Chicago, has cut 86 of its 750 employees. The group provides services for over 40,000 children and families across the state. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Aurora's Mutual Ground Inc., which counsels victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault, is closing its emergency shelter. (Crain's, 7/4/09)

- Planned Parenthood of Illinois laid off 19 employees. (State Journal-Register, 7/4/09)

- In its Chicago, Dixon and Peoria offices, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois laid off 32 workers who provided children’s services. (State Journal-Register, 7/4/09)

- On July 1, Community Counseling Centers of Chicago laid off 14 workers, affecting over 250 Chicagoans who depend on their services. By July 6, the number of layoffs had reached 32, with services terminated for 1,200 individuals. (WBEZ, 7/1/09; Verified by PI, 7/6/09)

- The Mattoon Area Adult Education Center laid off eight employees and shut down its facility for the first time in 44 years. (Journal-Gazette/Times-Courier, 7/1/09)

- The Occupational Development Center in Bloomington has discontinued a program that provides job training for the developmentally disabled. (Pantagraph, 7/1/09)

- The Association for Individual Development in Aurora has cut 80 jobs and "told 1,100 clients with developmental and mental health disabilities that they would lose services." (Daily Herald, 7/1/09)
...

Second, since no one else is bothering to ask the obvious question, I’ll do it:

Hey George, do you have a contract? Was it negotiated by professionals? Did you use the perceived value of your labor in the marketplace as leverage to extract the very best deal for yourself? Is your contract tricked out with penalties that will kick in if your employer tries to unilaterally fuck with you?

Because when you boil it all down, that is all unions do, George: use the power of contracts to temper both the market pressures of unchecked capitalism and the autocratic whimsy of owners, which will both inexorably bend in the direction of WalMart feudalism if not balanced out with a countervailing force.

Of course when it's banksters floating on a sea of taxpayer-bailout money demanding that their contracts be honored and their pockets be filled regardless of abysmal performance, from Washington to Wall Street, Armani-clad shoulders are shrugged; like it or not, we are told, that’s just how the free market operates.

A snip from this fine essay over at Tom Dispatch:

...
As it happens, thanks largely to that taxpayer-funded bailout, bank stocks have risen since last fall's meltdown. Selling those warrants, then, should mean a tidy profit for taxpayers. But no such luck, it seems. Almost a dozen small banks have already bought back their warrants, and for a considerable discount -- a mere 66% of their value -- costing taxpayers upwards of $10 million. If this were to continue when giant firms like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley come up to bat, taxpayers could be out up to $2.1 billion. Think of that as a small potential thank-you note from the banking business to Americans for helping it out of a jam.

Right behind that bit of sprightly news was a report from the Associated Press that the giant insurance firm AIG, almost 80% owned by taxpayers, was now back in consultation with the Obama administration over just how much more it should pay out in further retention bonuses -- this after multi-millions in such bonuses were already paid -- including "about $235 million for employees at AIG's financial products unit." AIG's near collapse, added the AP, "was not due to its traditional insurance operations, but instead risky derivatives contracts written by the financial products division." In addition to those traders, for 40 top execs of the dismally failed company, there is to be a payout of a mere $9 million in further bonuses for 2008. What a comedown!
...

Ah, but when working men and women wield exactly the same tools to achieve some meager measure of financial security, suddenly Socialism is threatening to put its commie-clad jackboot up Lady Liberty’s ass.

And why?

Because working people enrage conservatives most when they most behave like capitalists.

Lastly, if you looked quickly and at just the right moment yesterday, you might have noticed a rare example of how Cokie Roberts’ baked-on carapace of privileged Washington insider barfly cynicism occasionally pays a wee dividend.

Yes, you had to wade through her gassing unbearably on about “what Murricans really believe” – one of the many, many subjects about which she has not one fucking clue. And, yes, one had to scamper through the minefield of her mindless filtering of every issue on Earth through the lens of how successful/unpleasant it’s discussion will make her lawn parties (This week she was grousing that a torture investigation might make the Villagers cranky and spoil the newly restored atmosphere of cloying clubbiness at Georgetown Mojito-and-Brooks-groping parties.)

But crammed between commercials for ABC’s umpteenth consecutive Michael Jackson Dead Celebrity special – with the panel alternating between George Will rolling his eyes and Bob Woodward maundered pompously in his bizarre, eight-syllables-then-stop-then-eight-more-syllables-then-stop cadence about the Price of Celebrity and the Meaning Of It All -- Cokie, to her credit, delivered the goods about the one subject about which she knows a great deal: how debased and pornographic her chosen profession of teevee news has become.


Cokie (as processed through the driftglass truthification babelfish engine):

It’s about the money bitches. Everybody’s making Big Cake off of Michael Jackson’s corpse. Look, we all know the news business is in the crapper, and into our laps drops this story that every mush-headed rube with enough disposable income to meet his sudden need to buy a special “nostalgia” copy of “Thriller” is interested in. Dead MJ is Big Media’s stimulus package. He’s our Soylent Fucking Green, and because everybody here damn well knows it, we’re gonna be on this like pyroclast on Herculaneum until out bosses have mined every single action-figure-with-coffin nickel. Its got everything; the tearful farewells of children; spotlight-starved politicians and influence hustlers fighting to out-bombast each other; killer soundtrack; Joe Jackson crawling out of the shadows like Wolf-Larson-turned-pimp to exploit his child for one more payday.

Hell, the only way this story could get any more perfect is if Al Cowlings throws the body into a white Bronco and low-speed chases it across Southern California under a canopy of news helicopters.

Shortly after that I bailed out of the Mouse Circus and over on the nostalgia station, where the Hardy Boys were rushing to bring down the Feathered Hair Hammer of Teen Sleuth Justice on some evil doers.

I suspect Old Man Will.