...Spock and Kirk infiltrate CPAC 2015 and destroy the Twitter Machine along with the Right's capacity to troll comment sections anywhere in known space.
Faced with the horror of having to fight for their stupid ideas for real, Kirk offers them a solution.
The best offer they will ever get. Put an end to it. Make peace.
Hannity: There can be no peace. Don't you see? We've admitted it to ourselves. We're a hateful assholes. It's instinctive.
Kirk: All right. It's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million hateful asshole years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're hateful assholes, but we're not going to be hateful assholes today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't be hateful assholes...today.
Democrats are winning on DHS funding, the media acknowledges that BIll O’Reilly is a serial liar, and progressives even get a Keystone veto and (after we recorded this podcast) net neutrality. A round up of Illinois primary results, Chicago and downstate mayoral races shock the incumbents. Plus Science Fiction University. More at ProfessionalLeft.blogspot.com.
The FCC snatches political control over more of the economy.
The Federal Communications Commission’s decision Thursday to regulate the Internet as a public utility is a depressing moment for American innovation and economic liberty. The FCC is grabbing political control over a vibrant market that until now has been driven by inventors and consumers. Welcome to the Obamanet.
President Obama demanded this result in a November speech, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel have now dutifully voted to apply last century’s monopoly telephone rules to Internet service providers. They have in the process made a mockery of the agency’s supposed independence.
...
Congress likely won’t be able to stop the FCC, so the best near-term response will have to come in the courts. In the best case, the lawsuits will delay the new rules until after the 2016 election. Then a new President less set on political control can appoint a new FCC and rewrite this effort to subject this great engine of American innovation to the untender clutches of the same folks who brought you ObamaCare.
The comments are the usual frantic, end-times nut-logs with which all the usual patriots fill their Ronald Reagan Underoos every time someone shakes a stick at them and says "Obama Boo!"
We're still in 1984. Obama and his useful idiots will grind the US into the totalitarian muck if it's the last thing he does.
they talk about freedom all the time, feed us their line of B.S. about human rights, and then Obama's government grabs control over the internet just like we do.
Congress should immediately defund the FCC and extinguish the agency in its entirety.
Silicon Valley meets Code Pink.
Nothing but a breathtaking power grab of another major part of the American economy. Tom Wheeler, and his two FCC brethren, are left-wing tools of his high holiness, Barack Obama...
But hands down this one takes the "Keep Your Gummint Hands Off My Medicare" cup going away...
Elections have consequences. Sooner or later, the government ruins everything it touches. Under this Marxist dictator of a president, it was bound to be sooner. In this case, the internet, before now the most beautiful example of human accomplishment ever seen...
Because only in the hermetically sealed terrarium of the Fox News cult could the concept of making sure the internet remains what it has been all along -- a roughly level playing field for everyone -- be considered both a pillar of the International Commie Conspiracy and the Sixth Seal of the Apocalypse.
David Brooks -- pillar of the modern American Conservative movement for decades -- continues on his epic and highly successful quest to pretend that 99.9999% of the actual history modern American Conservatism never happened.
This week watch how Mr. Brooks makes all of the crucial details of George Bush's Iraqi Debacle (and his own deep complicity in it) completely disappear in two, short paragraphs.
...
Over the past centuries, Western diplomats have continually projected pragmatism onto their ideological opponents. They have often assumed that our enemies are driven by the same sort of national interest calculations that motivate most regimes. They have assumed that economic interests would trump ideology and religion — that prudent calculation and statecraft would trump megalomania.
They assumed that the world leaders before 1914 would not be stupid enough to allow nationalist passion to plunge them into a World War; that Hitler would not be crazy enough to start a second one; that Islamic radicals could not really want to send their region back into the 12th century; that Sunnis and Shiites would never let their sectarian feud turn into a cataclysmic confrontation in places like Iraq.
...
As with all magic tricks, the key gere is misdirection. I this case, Mr. Brooks' little carnival act depends on keeping the rubes focused on big, sweeping, historically distant phrases like "centuries" and "Western diplomats" and "1914" and "Hitler"...
...rather than on the actual words of actual, still-gainfully-employed Neocon war pimps like Mr. Brooks' former employer, Bloody Bill Kristol, some of whose imperishable wisdom has been helpfully compiled by Eric Alterman here:
• 18 September 2002, Kristol promised: a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East".
• 21 November 2002: "We can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy."
• 20 February 2003: "Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world. … France and Germany don't have the courage to face up to the situation. That's too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated."
• 1 March 2003: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together." Also: "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president."
• 5 March 2003: "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."
• 1 April 2003: "And on this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
And of course there are also the immortal words of David Brooks himself, still available to anyone with a mouse and a computer who want to bother to take the trouble to look and see what Mr. Brooks actually said on the public record just a few years ago:
The Collapse of the Dream Palaces
Mass destruction of mistaken ideas.
APR 28, 2003
...
Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.
...
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.
In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.
In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.
Instead, Mr. Brooks has contended himself with cashing the checks, taking the promotions, keeping right on with the hippie punching and just pretending that the truly despicable means by which he clawed his way to fame and fortune never happened.
Of course to pull of this an act of press-tidigitation this huge, Mr. Brooks would need pretty much the entire Beltway punditocracy to be in on the conspiracy.
In my haste to Fish Mooney my eyes out after reading through the CPAC 2015 lineup yesterday, I neglected to mention that, in addition to all the other Crunchy Frogs and Spring Surprises in this year's Whizzo Wingnut Quality Assortment, convention-goers will also be able to attend James O'Keefe's midday "Ratfucking and Hustlebucking" workout and film school where credulous hillbillies will be shown how to combat Negroes "Voter Fraud", presumably by learning how to turn this...
...into this.
...and then suckering sclerotic old-media dimwits into treating it as "news".*
Ah, time again for Conservatism's Big Fucknozzle Trade Show; that magical weekend every year when half of the GOP leadership lines up to flatter the party's deranged base...
I only glanced briefly at the 2015 CPAC lineup before I collapsed in uncontrollable laughter but here is what I could glean from my short perusal of the map of crazytown...
At The Imaginarium of Doctor Reverse Mortgage, Fred Thompson narrates an immersive 4D experience that let's the viewer pretend invading Iraq was a fucking brilliant idea, and we woulda won too if it weren't for those meddling Libruls!
The Carousel of Regression takes you back...back...back to a time when Murrica was better because mouthy women, gays, Mexicans and uppity Negroes knew their place.
This years's Flag-Wrapped NRA Bullshit Extravaganza will mark the sixth anniversary of explaining in no uncertain terms to the same audience of paranoid and defiantly ignorant chumps that jackbooted UN goons and Eric Holder are right outside their bunker, ready to kick in their door, take their guns and ship them off to a FEMA camp for re-education. (As always, Kenyan Usurper Survival Paks will be available at deep discounts to all convention-goers in the Huckster Room.)
Ron Christie's Superhero Theater will feature a panel discussion on how it is impossible for Conservatives to be racists because of their x-ray vision, which enables them to see past the surface differences which obsess Libruls and deep into the content of your wallet.
From Ronald Reagan and Jesus writing the Constitution to Ronald Reagan defeating Hitler and splitting the atom with his might Sword of Freedumb, Newt Gingrich's audio-animatronic Murrican Adventure tells the story of American history that Leftists don't want you to hear!
And of course, no CPAC would be complete without opening the Gipper Vault so that Holographic Ronald Reagan can congratulate the faithful on successfully navigating the latest Reagan Crisis, and explaining to them how that Crisis fits into the overall Heritage Foundation plan.
In 2008, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two young conservative writers, argued in their book Grand New Party that the Republican Party needed a new agenda that focused on working class Americans. With that, reform conservatism, as it has become known, was born.
Since then Douthat, now at the New York Times, and Salam, the executive editor of the National Review, have been joined by dozens of conservative writers, including Ramesh Ponnuru and James Pethokoukis. These so-called reformocons have gained influence both within the GOP and in the national media. The fact that, over the past two months, they have been repeatedly attacked from the left and right over their conservatism is a testament to that growing influence. But while they have made substantial progress over the past six years, their toughest challenge is yet to come...
Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich?
On Monday, The Week's Jeff Spross offered the latest advice to the reformocons: Join the Democratic Party. “Pushing changes through the legislature and past the presidential veto pen requires log-rolling and compromises, which gets to the bedrock problem: the reformicons have nothing to offer other Republican constituencies,” he writes. “From the standpoint of a well-heeled evangelical or an oil business professional or a Wall Street trader, reformicon proposals are all costs, no benefits. In their current home, the reformicons have no room to maneuver.” Spross’s piece followed up one earlier this month from Salon’s Elias Isquith, who argued that the reformocons lacked “a dedicated constituency.”
...
A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you wish you had some meat.
Bow bow bow...
Reform conservatism does not have a clear constituency that will put money and manpower behind their ideas to turn them into laws. But that is far too static an analysis of reform conservatism. Instead, consider how far Douthat, Salam and their fellow reformocons have come in a short time. Along with having positions at top media organizations, they have developed a policy institute called the YG Network...
The other day I had a ricochet biscuit.
To be clear, the reformocons have a long way to go. They’ve made it onto the national stage and have convinced some key Republican figures that their ideas are best. But it’s a whole different game to convince the base of that—the Tea Party, specifically.
A ricochet biscuit is the kind of a biscuit thats supposed to bounce back off the wall into your mouth. If it don't bounce back...you go hungry!
Bow bow bow...
While Needham’s essay demonstrates how the Tea Party’s interests can be closely aligned with those of reform conservatives, it also reveals the reformocons’ biggest challenge: governing responsibly without endangering that Tea Party support. If the Tea Party has proven anything during the Obama presidency, it is that they cannot govern responsibly. Needham’s essay reinforces that.
Like the Escher or Dali, reformicons make their living painting pictures of fantastical lands where the laws of time and space and physics do not apply.
Unlike Escher or Dali, reformicons then try to sell their dreamscapes as architectural diagrams.
To people who live in caves.
And insulate their walls with their own shit.
And are terrified of fire.
The reason reformicons have "positions at top media organizations" has nothing to do with the quality of their thinking and everything to do with the long "Both Sides" con being run by the people who lead those organizations.
So while influential Conservative con men like David Brooks -- who have dedicated the back nine of their careers to shoveling vast stretches of recent history down the memory hole and replacing it with Whig fan fiction -- might proudly hang an original Douthat or Salam on the walls of their own castles in the sky, it is a simple fact that the problem with American Conservatism is American Conservatives.
And no quantity of white papers about melting clocks and circular waterfalls is going to change that.
Whether they are Very Serious People, like David Brooks, or they work the back alleys of the wingnut dungheap, they never, ever back down. Once they have decided a thing, no matter how utterly, pandimensionally wrong subsequent events show them to be, they never, ever admit they were wrong and they never, ever stop looking for excuses to re-litigate matters which reality has already settled beyond any doubt.
Take, for example, indestructible human trash-fire Paul Wolfowitz:
As the good Doctor Maddow points out so eloquently here, there is no matter of recent history more utterly fucking settled than the fact that "if you hear something clangingly, obviously wrong in America, look around. Paul Wolfowitz is somewhere near you."
Back in 2003, a greasy little neocon climber at The Weekly Standard named David Brooks was hard at work slandering critics of George Bush's Awesome Iraqi Adventure. And of all the revolting Conservative claptrap Mr. Brooks cranked out on his way to fame and fortune at the New York Times, the method he used to champion the cause of scumbag Paul Wolfowitz was possibly the sleaziest of all.
However since it appears that no onr in America but me remembers any of this, allow me to excerpt a small portion of Mr. Brooks' stirring defense of ol' Spitcomb McGee from almost exactly 12 years ago:
It's Back
The socialism of fools has returned to vogue not just in the Middle East and France, but in the American left and Washington.
11:00 PM, FEB 20, 2003
...
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.
Then, of course, it all turned to shit, which is when people like Mr. Brooks -- the recently anointed high priest of the Beltway's brand new "People Should Publicly Apologize and Atone and Shit" temple -- quickly scrambled to use the awesome media platforms they had been give to mass neuralyze the American public --
-- so the uncomfortable subject of everything fucking thing they had said and done during the Age of Dubya never came up again.
Then people Mr. Brooks went immediately back into the business of selling the same old, horrible ideas to the public, but this time slathered in a thick layer of "Who can really say who was right and who was wrong?"
Here, then, is David Brooks' stirring defense of ol' Spitcomb McGee 12 years later, on the occasion of Mr. Wolfowitz being appointed to Jeb Bush's foreign policy team (h/t Heather at C and L. Also emphasis added because I know you're busy people):
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. And so Bush has this problem.
And I thought the speech — I wasn’t quite as underwhelmed as Mark. I don’t know how you rate underwhelmed-ness. But I do think it was sort of lacking in some of the innovation and substance, the willingness to take a risk and offer something new.
I think what’s heartening is that — we can have different views about Paul Wolfowitz. I think he’s a much more complicated character than sometimes he’s portrayed...
At no point do people like David Brooks ever stop being horribly wrong.
And at no point do these people ever admit being wrong, or apologize it, or correct their thinking.
Because they don't have to. Because at no point do they suffer even the slightest professional consequences for being wrong, or for being hypocrites.
Man's Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century Today in Pigfuckery
...
The point, I think, was that in both the Ohio and Nebraska primaries, back to back, McGovern was confronted for the first time with the politics of the rabbit-punch and the groin shot, and in both states he found himself dangerously vulnerable to this kind of thing. Dirty politics confused him. He was not ready for it….
This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get a way calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
If we lived in anything like the Better Universe, our highly paid media persons would breeze on past the latest verbal bowel movements of Rudy Ghouhliana and and take up the grave matter of the spiritual, intellectual and ideological bankruptcy of a political party whose only, tangible product is an unlimited supply of lying demagogues.
"Was this latest steaming pile of racists shit an attempt to distract the country from your parry's abject failure at the basic job of governance?" our imaginary highly paid media persons might ask. "Or is your party actually this fucked-in-the-head?"
As usual and entirely without irony, Chuck Todd accidentally got right to the heart of what killed American media, reprising a David Gregory segment certain pundits have taken to calling "Reading Aloud From Some Beltway Centrist Parasite Desperately Trying To Shift Blame Away From Some Conservative Monster" --
... Dancin' Dave did change things up a little bit: instead of his usual practice of reading aloud from David Brooks' latest awful "New York Times" column
and asking David Brooks and the rest of the panel what they think of it, he read aloud from Tom Friedman's latest awful "New York Times" column
and asked David Brooks and the rest of the panel what they thought of it.
-- and asking for his brood of talking heads to respond:
CHUCK TODD:
You know, Ron Fournier wrote something yesterday that I thought was interesting. He said this, "Ask any parent. Our culture is coarsening. Civility is eroding." This goes to your point, Michael: "The internet easily reinforces and amplifies hateful language. Nobody wants to live in a country where the singular measure of patriotism is that you agree with me. Giuliani isn't a deplorable man. His words were."...
No, the internet has nothing to do with this.
No, Rudy Ghouliana is indeed a deplorable man.
And, no, nothing Ron Fournier writes is of interest to any sane human being. In fact, in a Better Universe, the only thing Ron Fournier could possibly write of interest to anyone would be a blood oath swearing keep his bibble spigot closed from now until the end of the age.
And speaking of "And now why is this clown on my teevee?", Chuck Todd scoured the known world and could find no one better to consult as an expert on whether or not race or religion has something to do with something than "Boss Hogg" Barbour:
CHUCK TODD:
They did respond, full disclosure here, that after this story appeared and there was a little dust-up last night, his office put out a response that said this, "Of course the governor thinks the president is a Christian. He thinks these kinds of gotcha questions distract from what he's doing as governor of Wisconsin and make sure the state is better, make life better for the people in the state." But I guess you've got to be nimble if you're running for president. Do you not?
HALEY BARBOUR:
Well, it's about how you can match up the opportunities. And I remember Jeremiah Wright, who is very unpopular among the people who would be voting in the Republican primary. Now, if someone were asking me about that question, that's the way, if wanted to be political, I wanted to take the question.
I think Scott Walker's probably just being truthful, you know. He is a son of a preacher. He is a Christian. And he may have taken that question the way I did the first time I heard about it, do you believe he's really a Christian, or do you believe he just professes to be a Christian? But I don't know the answer to that, either.
CHUCK TODD:
Well, what does that mean?
HALEY BARBOUR:
A lot of people say, "I'm a Christian," but deep down inside they're not. That's what I thought the question was. You think he really is--
(OVERTALK)
CHUCK TODD:
I understand that. But this is how it comes across to some folks when suddenly there's a debate about this, which is why is it Barack Obama, the first African-American president, has had questions about his religion pop up in the political conversation? It didn't happen to Bill Clinton. It didn't happen to George W. Bush. A lot of his supporters hear that and think this has some racial overtone. What do you say to that?
HALEY BARBOUR:
I don't know that race has anything to do with it. I would bet a higher percentage of African Americans in the United States are Christians than of whites. I mean, of course, I've come from a place where I'm very familiar with that. Religious leaders are very powerful leaders in the black community in my state. And they're good Christians. So, I don't get the race question about Christianity.
You might remember that Governor Barbour, has always had a little trouble telling the difference between the past as it actually happened and shit he just made up because Freedumb!
I guess in in former Mississippi governor's mind, all versions of history are separate but equal.
Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi has probably located the right emotions for l'affaire Ghouliani -- pity and pride:
...
I feel sorry for Rudy that he can't love this country the way it is. I love America even with assholes like him living in it. In fact, I'm immensely proud of our assholes; I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump. If that makes me an exceptionalist, I plead guilty.
In all seriousness, the Rudy story is a bummer. It's not easy to love America and hate half the people who live there. It requires that you spend a lot of time closing your eyes and wishing history had happened differently, which, at least in my limited experience, doesn't work very well.
And that's not something to gloat about, either. A lot of people in this country think like Rudy, and if our present doesn't work for them, the future won't work for any of us. We're all going to end up miserable together, and that sucks.
Here in this country, the what little is left of "Liberal" teevee is being put up on blocks and stripped for parts --
-- while in a far, far better place, a newsreader is taken in for questioning:
We discuss conservatives who think spouting hate and then hiding behind “my opinion” is political debate. Rudy Giuliani and Dinesh d'Souza go full bigot, and Jeb Bush hires all the Bush 43 foreign policy team. More at ProfessionalLeft.blogspot.com.
Recently, Mr. David Brooks wrote 800 words on yet another topic about which he knows nothing: PTSD.
Which was predictable.
See, ever since the war he championed so ardently from behind his keyboard at The Weekly Standard went tits up, Mr. Brooks has had keep his massive hard-on for write big, gassy columns about Humanity and Morality and War stuffed in his pants. After all, having failed so utterly and publicly at all three subjects, and having written endless, turgid sermons about the need for Other People to atone for their fuckups by contrition and penitence, who in their right mind would let David Fucking Brooks anywhere near a keyboard again to blat on about Men and War and The Meaning Of It All, without some monumental and public acts of apology and contrition?
Well, OK, the New York Times for one.
And National Public Radio.
And PBS.
And "Meet the Press".
Yale.
And...so on. Because there is a club. And so forth.
But since much of his column was copy/pasted out of a book on the subject PTSD, some of it was moving and eloquent. This passage, especially, jumped out at me:
“Trauma destroys the fabric of time,” Morris writes in his book, “The Evil Hours.” “In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.”
I am very grateful that Mr. Morris is willing and able to write so clearly and beautifully about such a painful subject, and lend me his experience by proxy so that I can better appreciate what it is that people who have been traumatized in this way go through.
Since I have nothing to add to Mr. Morris's account but my appreciation for it, let me turn to a different condition that came out of the same, misbegotten war: Post Iraq Memory Pandemic.
Post Iraq Memory Pandemic -- or PIMP -- is a much more rarefied condition than PTSD, which seems to strike mostly well-fed, sanctimonious pundits, Iraq War architects, college Republicans and a whole warped menagerie of Conservatives bloggers who spent the war as far as humanly possible from any actual combat, while exhorting War, Inc. to continue shoveling the nation's blood and treasure down the rat-hole of their fantasies of empire.
Like PTSD, PIMP destroys the capacity of the afflicted to perceive history and linear time, but in a much more selective and specific way. For example, those who mounted up on their Very High Horses to demand in the name of Patriotism that other people's children be sent off to fight and die for their failed imperial dreams now just...can't...seem...to...remember whole swaths of recent American history.
In an effort to keep the flaccid MSNBC dirigible from crashing completely into the sea, company President Phil Griffin has once again broken out the Emergency Executive Decision Ouija Board and decided to jettison some ballast:
MSNBC pulls 'Ronan Farrow', 'Reid Report'
In a bid to stem cataclysmic ratings declines and waning relevance, MSNBC has cancelled the daytime shows "Ronan Farrow Daily" and "The Reid Report."
In their place, MSNBC will bring in Thomas Roberts to anchor a new daily two-hour block of news programming from 1-3 pm, a network spokesperson told the On Media blog. Roberts will stop anchoring Way Too Early, the 5:30-a.m. show that precedes Morning Joe.
Ronan Farrow will launch a new series of primetime specials, featuring in-depth interviews, and will continue to be a special correspondent across programming. He will also continue his partnership with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Joy Ann Reid, the host of Reid Report, will become MSNBC’s national correspondent across platforms, a regular contributor for MSNBC’s primetime shows, and the first dedicated reporter for NowThisNews, an MSNBC online partner.
...
"Obvious merit hire" [to borrow a cuppa nomenclature from Cholly Pierce] Ronan Farrow was always a ludicrous choice to put behind a desk, even buried midday between soaps and the ginned up hornet's-nest-poking "drama" of reality teevee. But Joy Ann Reid is smart and capable and like many smart, capable people that Phil Griffin has treated shabbily before her, deserves much, much better.
Ask any Liberal who still bothers to watch anything at all on the Peachick Network other than a little catch-up in the evening and a helping of MHP on the weekends, and they will tell you immediately that if they had one Great Big Teevee Wish it would be to bring back Firefly send Squint and the Meat Puppet packing.
Like, yesterday.
(Also Steve Kornacki's "Meet the Press Muppet Babies" is a massive letdown that is rapidly heading into rolling disaster country, but one Great Big Teevee Wish at a time.)
And speaking of the Republican party's odious three-hour beachhead at MSNBC, guess who comes out ahead on this whole deal?
MSNBC Shakeup Means Viewers Will Get Even More GOP Talking Points With Extra Morning Joe
By: Jason Easley
Thursday, February, 19th, 2015, 10:33 pm
With Thomas Roberts moving from the pre-Morning Joe slot to replacing Ronan Farrow and Joy Reid, something had to take over Roberts’ old show, and that person will be Joe Scarborough.
According to an MSNBC spokesperson, Morning Joe will be taking over MSNBC’s Way Too Early show until a permanent replacement can be named.
See if you can spot the moment this story becomes unreadable (hint: it's right where I leave off):
What Does It Mean for Obama to Love or Hate America?
Rudy Giuliani is only the latest conservative to claim that the president isn't fond of his country, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Rudy Giuliani is developing a productive sideline in rage-baiting. Fresh off a largely incoherent comment about black-on-black crime following the Michael Brown case, America's Mayor said Wednesday night that President Obama doesn't love America. Here's what Giuliani said, according to Politico, during a "private dinner" for Scott Walker "at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan":
I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.
Some liberals find it tempting to read this as nothing more than race-baiting. Isn't this just portraying Obama—who just happens to have a funny name and look different from Rudy—as the Other? (The White House simply replied, "It was a horrible thing to say.") But Giuliani isn't the only person to make this claim, and the others aren't just fringe figures. Erick Erickson, hailed by The Atlantic as America's most powerful conservative, says Obama "hates America." Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes doesn't think Obama loves America, nor does a prominent Tea Party organizer. Once-and-likely-future presidential candidate Rick Perry has doubts. The view is also importantly different from the idea that Obama is a threat to America, a critique that allows for the fact that the president may in fact be doing what he thinks is best for the nation and its citizens, but that is wrong. The Erickson-Giuliani consensus is important in that it requires a measure of malevolence on Obama's part. Therefore it makes sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama.
...
No.
No it definitely does not make "...sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama."
Because this is not 1982. Because we have all lived through decades of watching the Affable Reagan Mask rot off the Party of Lincoln to clearly reveal the paranoid ghouls and lobotomized bigots beneath. Because we have watched the craven Beltway enablers of these monsters prop them up over and over again with heavy planks of Both Side Do It for long enough to know that it's a feature not a bug.
Because at long last is just a silly, masturbatory waste of time to continue to pretend that raking the coals of wingnut arson will yield any useful results.
So stop it, Liberal media. Please just stop it.
Because for far too long to pretend otherwise, the Conservatives in this country have amounted to nothing but a mob of vicious, ignorant asshole holding a gun to the head of my country and baying the same angry, incoherent gibberish that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh has been shitting into their skulls for years. And trying to address their movement as if it were anything other than a form of madness to be contained and exorcised from the body politic is as pointless as debating pod bay doors with HAL.
I am not remotely interested in their backstory and motives or carefully parsing "what evidence they marshal". Instead, I am intensely and exclusively interested in getting the gun out of their hand, and care about the tenets and internal "logic" of their lunatic cult only to the extent that I might be able to ransack it for some useful means of putting their movement down like the dangerous, rabid beast it is.
Back in early 1990s, when I was still an un-defrocked technology guy, the corporation I worked for was aggressively courted by an East Coast technology company. Among the many earthly delights they showed us during the pitching of the woo, was, at the time, a genuinely startling revelation about what kind of personal information was available on public and subscription databases, and how detailed and personal a profile of almost anyone could be built up by cross-referencing the right files (I remember our president was visibly discomfitted at the sight of how much detail on her personal life could be deduced from the available data pool and, upon reflection, I am not entirely sure that what we witnessed wasn't both of a dazzling display of cutting edge technology and a genteel threat leveled at our carefully-closeted boss because who knows what else we know about you?)
Since then, the situation has gotten ever so much worse at an exponential rate by search algorithms which have reached near-sentient sophistication and hundreds of millions of social media users' who have been suckered into (and have pressured their peers into) backing their personal lives up to the digital trough and dumping terabytes of shockingly personal stuff into the web.
So you can imagine what a hearty and refreshing laugh at Young Conor Friedersdorf's call for a New Birth of Internet Freedom, in which corporations neither bow to outside pressure nor use the tools with which the times have provided them to pry into your private life and use that knowledge to your detriment:
...
Meanwhile, I propose a new social norm. My strong suspicion is that we'd all be better off if Americans developed a broad aversion to people being fired for public missteps that have nothing to do with their jobs. That norm would do more good than bad even if you think some people deserve to be fired. Sure, I'd advise against taking flip photographs at a military cemetery. But whatever one thinks of that error in judgment, there's no reason it should cause a woman to lose her job helping developmentally disabled adults.
An insensitive Halloween costume may justify a dirty look or scolding or even shaming. It should not deprive someone of their livelihood! It's strange when you think about it, this notion of getting sacked as a general purpose punishment that an angry faction of the public demands of an at-first-reluctant employer. The target, the mob demands, should have to find a new job, or go on welfare, or move back in with their mom, or perhaps starve. It's not even clear what's meant to happen. Let's rethink this.
People should usually feel ashamed of themselves for thinking, "I should get that stranger fired." Companies should be left alone when one of their employees does something offensive while "off-duty." Since some Internet trolls will break that rule, here's another: Companies should expect to get more criticism for caving to the demands of trolls than for letting a briefly unpopular employee keep performing his or her duties, even amid an episode of obsessive public shaming. After all, these things always blow over, the attention span of the Internet being short, while losing one's job is, for many, a setback with consequences that last years. And have any of these firings achieved any social good? I defy anyone to produce hard evidence to that effect.
Here's what corporations should say in the future: "Sorry, we have a general policy against firing people based on social media campaigns. We're against digital mobs."
But note the one exception built into what I propose. Sometimes people do stupid things in the public eye that relate directly to their jobs. If, say, a DEA agent writes a Facebook post bragging about how many innocent black people he's going to lock up for drug trafficking next month, then it's obviously legitimate to demand his immediate termination. But generally speaking, Americans ought to be averse to the notion of companies policing the speech and thoughts of employees when they're not on the job. Instead, many are zealously demanding that companies police their workers more, as if failing to fire someone condones their bad behavior outside work. Few general standards work out best in every last circumstance. But the one I suggest would be better than what we've got.
I feel for anyone who has been whacked because of a digital mob which, like the wind, "...blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes", but comtemporize, man!
In a very real sense, Young Conor, this is the world conservatism made. A world in which corporations have been encouraged to systematically erase any concept of "off the clock". Where you are always on screaming, white-hot deadline. Where assigning you to do more in a week than you can possibly get done in a month is the new normal. A world of "What do you mean you haven't had time to finish the Gundersen presentation yet? You sure seem to have plenty of time to stay up until all hours arguing tax policy online! "
A world where peeing into a cup, polygraphs, credit checks, criminal background checks and a deep dive into your online life have become SOP in HR.
Where "at will" employment laws have been created specifically so employers can sack your ass for any reason or no reason at all.*
And since our dominant corporate culture has all but abolished the boundaries between home and work, this is now a world where anything you say or do anywhere at any time can be sufficient grounds for termination or never getting the job in the first place.
If you happened to be visiting my fair state today and are unfamiliar with local custom, then I should explain heard that the pious callbacks to the Emancipation Proclamation and quotes from Lincoln you heard wafting outta the state house this afternoon --
“The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion… We must think anew and act anew.”
-- means it's time to settle in and watch Governor Hedgefund try to put the hammer to the widows and orphans of Illinois in a speech that was certainly piled high with something.
Yes, in case you were still wondering, Governor Hedgefund is indeed as serious as a heart attack.
While on Medicaid.
Which he plans to cut!
Because according those who have gotten a peek at the budget plan he submitted today, services for all citizens of Illinois except for the independently wealthy would to be immediately and radically amputated to fit the Koch Brothers' vision of government as a weak, compliant vassal of corporate power.
Widows and orphans? You each get one "Fuck" and one "You" so don't spend them all in once place.
Medicaid recipients? STFU and die already, ya moochers!
Your kid's teachers? Hope they weren't planning on, y'know, using that retirement money. Oh, and kiss all of the following goodbye: Advance Placement, Arts/Foreign Language, Agricultural Education, After School Matters, the Parent Mentoring Program, Lowest Performing Schools, funding to East St. Louis SD 189, Regional Safe Schools, Children's Mental Health Partnership, National Board Certified Teachers, Tax Equivalency Grants, Teach for America, and Targeted Initiatives.
Higher education? Cut by a third. A third. Do the math. And do it quick before Governor Hedgefund cuts it from the curriculum.
Also you should start planning to to find some alternatives to using roads. And bridges. And trains. And Paratransit. Just stick to your private jet and you'll be fine.
It goes on like this. On and on and on. But you would never know it from the governor's speech, in which none of this was mentioned. In fact the letters "c-u-t" only occur four times in the entire speech
"Along with this modest cutback, our turnaround reforms will reduce unfunded mandates, and give local governments and voters the tools to save hundreds of millions of dollars through consolidation, employment flexibility and compensation restructuring."
(Because shit rolls downhill, moochers, and now I'm King of the Mountain!)
"...waste and inefficiency can be cut from the complex web that comprises our public transportation structure."
(Ah, my old friends waste, fraud 'n abuse. Is there nothing you guys can't do!)
"For years, state support for education has been cut, even when it didn’t have to be."
(WTF?)
"We've got to freeze property taxes, cut the red tape inside state and local government, and let people control their own economic destinies."
(Bootstraps for sale! Getcher John Galt Commemorative Bootstraps right here! Can't hoist yourself outta poverty and control you own economic destiny withoutcher Bootstraps!)
Also you would never know if your kid's after school program or mother's meds had been wished into the cornfield from reading the budget briefing books, because according to statehouse elves, in defiance of tradition no such documents were provided to the departments which were affected or to the legislators.
Or, to quote Harry the Horse from Guys and Dolls, "But Big Jule cannot win if he plays with honest dice!"
And so, with no facts with which to formulate coherent questions, department's whose budget may or may not be nuked out of existence were able to ask little more that "When will we get some answers?" and were given nothing but "No" and "We'll hafta get back to you on that" by Governor Hedgefund's minions (the full speech and commentary is available here.)
And speaking of minions...don't you kinda wonder where did this roadmap for the Kansasization of Illinois come from?
Well wonder no more! Because, citizen, it came from exactly the sort of place that you would make up if you were a really terrible writer. Working on an impossible deadline. And you had to come up with some kind of cartoon Villain of the Week who gets paid a small fortune by, oh, say, SMERSH, to go around kicking disabled children in the teeth.
First, you'd make her Illinois' new CFO...
Brought in on a $30,000/month no-bid consulting contract at the exact moment you are preaching the virtues of slashing state workers for being overpaid...
And make her an acolyte and business partner of -- no kidding -- discredited Reaganomics quack, Arthur Laffer...
Who has spent the last decade flitting from one wingnut-statehouse to the next, dreaming up new ways of herding the poor and working class onto ice floes and shoving them out to sea.
Bingo.
Bruce Rauner turns to high-priced consultant for budget plan
When Gov. Bruce Rauner set out to craft the budget he'll propose Wednesday, he turned to a $30,000-a-month consultant with a history of helping Republican governors and a devotion to the supply-side economic theories popularized by Ronald Reagan.
From Michigan to New York, Florida and California, Donna Arduin knows how it goes when a new governor sweeps into a statehouse with ambitious plans for doing away with red ink. In states with friendly legislatures and healthy economies, Arduin found success. But when politics and economics were less cooperative, her efforts fell flat.
...
Arduin declined an interview through Rauner spokesman Lance Trover, who would not say why the governor had selected Arduin, how she came to the administration's attention or how her fee was determined. In purchasing paperwork, the Rauner administration said Arduin's firm won the no-bid contract because of her record doing similar work in other states.
"The parties conducted arm's-length negotiations as to price and conditions," the form said.
Arduin is among the "superstars" Rauner pledged to hire to help him get the job done. He has said he's willing to "take arrows" to get Illinois out of the red. The new governor's Wednesday budget address will shed light on how he and his consultant plan to navigate the political and financial obstacles in Springfield.
Until now, Rauner has said he would favor broadening the sales tax and wants to lower property taxes and boost funding for education.
"We can't just cut our way out of our problems," the governor said at an event last week. "Purely cutting alone without structural pro-growth reform won't get us there."
That pro-growth mantra is familiar territory for the governor's consultant. Arduin and Arthur Laffer — the economist known for the theory behind Reaganomics that tax revenues can be boosted by tax rate cuts — are partners in a consulting firm that promotes reliance on consumption taxes over income and property taxes, which they argue stunt growth.
Arduin has had her own tax troubles, which she resolved just days before Rauner announced her as his new CFO. In October 2013, the IRS filed a tax lien against Arduin, saying she owed nearly $166,000 in income taxes.
While Arduin declined to answer questions about the matter, Rauner spokesman Trover said the lien came about because Arduin had borrowed from her retirement savings to buy a piece of property and wasn't able to get a bank loan in time to repay the money within the time frame allowed by the IRS.
...
While Arduin was working for Pataki, the state enacted tax cuts, reduced the number of employees and had a run of budget surpluses. But those successes came at a time when tax revenues were booming from a bull market. Pataki was criticized for not preparing for tougher times ahead, and after a recession hit in 2001, Albany again faced major budget problems.
Arduin was long gone by then. She had moved on to Florida to work for then-Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. He had the advantage of working with a Republican legislature that bristled at times at what they saw as a heavy-handed approach but largely went along with his agenda. He cut property taxes by $1 billion and business taxes by $600 million, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., which gave him an "A" rating in 2002. ...
...
Full disclosure: this budget, if passed in anything like its current form, will kill or cripple critically important programs that I care deeply about. And the aftershocks from it will very likely eliminate one of the part-time jobs onto which I am hanging by my fingernails.
But I find that I can't really work up that much cranky at Governor Hedgefund himself.
After all, had enough voters bothered to read anything, or bestir their mouse-clicky fingers long enough to Google north to Wisconsin or west to Kansas they would have seen exactly what a Rauner administration was going to look like.
So this is what the voters and non-voters of Illinois wanted.
And now, this is what they'll get.
At best, complete stalemate pinning citizens and state employees between the deeply corrupt Democratic machinery of House Madigan and Governor Hedgefund's Republican white walkers (with Rahmses willing to swing either way
as long as it screws the teacher's union.)
At worst, four years of Brownbacking with no dinner first or flowers after.
+ + +
One additional and only tangentially-related note.
While many of you are familiar with some of Illinois' more infamous ex-governors -- included two who were elected back-to-back and who both ended up serving sentences at the House of Many Doors at the same time -- you may not be familiar with indicted-but-acquitted Illinois governor Len Small (R).
He was governor from 1921 to 1929, was brought up on charges of corruption, acquitted, and subsequently gave eight of the jurors who let him off the hook jobs with the state. His story is amazing, for a lot of reasons, including the that that one of his defense lawyers -- a former governor named Joseph W. Fifer -- tried to get Small off during the pre-trial hearing by asserting that governors enjoy the same divine rights as kings and therefor...
Small, a Kankakee farmer, former state senator and two-time former state treasurer, was elected governor in 1920. Just seven months after taking office, he was indicted on charges of embezzling millions of dollars while treasurer. The scheme went like this: He allegedly deposited the state's money in a fictional bank, lent it out at almost 8 percent interest, paid the state less than 2 percent interest and pocketed the difference.
On Saturday, June 24, 1922, after a five-week trial that detailed the complicated financial shenanigans, a jury deliberated barely 90 minutes before it acquitted him of all charges. Questions of jury tampering arose even before the jury was impaneled.
Three people, a juror and two mob heavies, were indicted on charges of tampering with the Small jury. All three were acquitted, also without putting on a defense. The jury in that case deliberated for just an hour. Two other mobsters went to jail for six months after refusing to testify before a grand jury. Small pardoned them.
Over the next few years, eight of the jurors who acquitted Small ended up with state jobs. Other people associated with the case also landed on public payrolls, including the presiding judge's brothers.
Still, in 1924, Small was re-elected, despite a Tribune editorial declaring him the "worst governor the state ever had."
