Obviously Time To Start My Birthday Fundraiser

Since it looks like I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Because while there is a lot of yadda yadda in this article about what a clueless, sleazy little hatepimp Ben Shapiro is --

Welcome, Ben Shapiro
What a precious snowflake.

Ben Shapiro is the kind of person who talks about opening the door to civil, genuine conversation, then slams it on your foot and taunts you if you say “ouch.” ...

-- here is a cold, hard fact, with a little emphasis added to liven up your field of vision:

His speaking tour is sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, a big-budget conservative youth organization that uses its outside money to coordinate and pay speakers who come to campus, ostensibly at the invitation of their campus YAF chapters. The organization is more top-down than its preferred, heroic, resistance narrative of “small campus conservative group takes on the liberal goliath” and standing up against the “self-perpetuating aristocracy” that is the public university. The YAF holds over $71 million in assets. Thanks to a $10 million gift from the DeVos family, the national organization recently bought the Ronald Reagan ranch, and a 2016 $16 million bequest has turbo-charged their national speaker initiatives. The YAF is also closely affiliated with the State Policy Network, a web of conservative think tanks awash in Koch brothers money and the organizational power behind the ALEC initiatives to get ultra-conservative template legislation into state legislatures. Real outsiders. Alumni of the YAF include Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller and Ann Coulter, while current speakers range from the anti-Islamic Robert Spencer to the questionably credentialed Ted Nugent.

Simply put, the kind of money the Right puts behind even a clueless, sleazy little hatepimp like Ben Shapiro buys him and his filthy agenda a place at the table.

With that kind of money, you can buy your way into national media conversation and onto the national agenda.

With it, you can buy your way back into the spotlight no matter how miserable an excuse for a human being you are:

Fox was trying to convince the public that its culture had changed. But they were determined to keep Bill O’Reilly. https://t.co/0ykzHam7Ik

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2017

Without it, you're just another crackpot standing on an orange crate, annoying the passers-by.

So here's the deal.

If I can raise just a tiny fraction of what Fox News spent to buy Bill O'Reilly out of prison time and back into prime time ... just a wee percentage of what the Young America’s Foundation is willing to drop to keep America's media pantry stocked with human toe-jam like Ben Shapiro ... say, a million dollars ... I solemnly promise to run right back down to the Dollar General and buy this very copy of Newt Gingrich's Brick Of Turgid-Bullshit (assuming someone hasn't snapped it up by then) -- 

-- and send it -- autographed by me -- to the person who puts me over the top!

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Yesterday They Were Just Two German Clerks

 Today they're the "Honored Dead".

-- Rick Blaine, Casablanca

This morning on the Comcastrati Network, respected Conservative thinker and Wrongest Man in America, Bill Kristol, rhapsodized with respected Conservative broadcaster and Very Big Liar, Joe Scarborough, about the Good Old Days when the Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable (h/t Charlie Pierce) was a trusted and legitimate news outlet.

Y'know, before they were overrun with haters and morons like this shitbag:

From Politico:

Kristol wryly suggests new name for Breitbart News

By NICK GASS 08/17/16 08:15 AM EDT

"Right Wing Intolerant Mean-Spirited News" does not quite roll off the tongue like Breitbart News. But that's what Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol would have the conservative organization, whose top executive temporarily stepped down Wednesday to lead Donald Trump's campaign, renamed.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Kristol lamented that the conservative news organization has become something other than what its late founder Andrew Breitbart intended.

"I knew Andrew well, and he was a troublemaker. But he was a good-hearted person who would not have—I mean, I hate the fact that that it’s called Breitbart News," Kristol remarked...

"It's unfortunate that we're all sitting around talking about Breitbart. It's a disservice to Andrew's memory," Kristol said, while remarking that the website, under Bannon, has been "pretty successful" from "a business point of view."

But, Kristol added, "someone should go look at all the things they've said."...

Here's the video (h/t Crooks & Liars):

I'm going to have to sit with this remark by Bill Kristol -- "someone should go look at all the things they've said" -- for a long time.  

At least until my uncontrollable crazylaugh stops.

Because if the Dirty Liberal blogosphere could be said to have served one, overarching mission since the beginning of recorded blogger history, it has been to jump up and down, waving our arms, saying "Fuck!", and trying mightily and ineffectually to get members of the Beltway media to just please for fuck's sake "go look at all the things" -- the terrible, horrible, no-good, lying things -- their colleagues get away with saying every single fucking day.  (See also: Every damn thing I have ever written.)

Corollarily, if the entire Beltway media establishment could be said to obey one, all-encompassing commandment with Borg-like single-mindedness, it is to make absolutely god damn sure that no one within the Beltway media ever, ever, ever starts tugging on the "someone should go look at all the things they've said" thread.

Because the Beltway media is a confederacy of con men -- a sodality of hacks -- each dependent on all the others not to bring up the fact that this is all a puppet show being run for the profit of corporate interests at the expense of our democracy.  And if anyone with any real clout and access to a really substantial audience ever started to actually "look at all the things they've said" (See, "The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks") the unstoppable cataract of recriminations and mass firings that would soon follow -- starting with parasites like Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough -- would wipe them all out.

Which is why there is safeguard after safeguard in place to make sure that never happens.

On the video you can see every single person on this panel working in frantic unison to separate themselves and their party and the Fake Tea Party the invented to get their off their party off the hook for the being hateful morons who spent eight years cheering for Bush...

...from "Trumpism", which they all swear on the lives of their children was invented out of whole cloth at the Breitbart website in 2010.

No Joe.  It's not "Trumpism".  It's good, old-fashioned, filthy, hateful, fact-averse "Republicanism" from crotch to crown.  And you damn well know it, because you and all of your depraved pals have damn well prospered by it for 20 years.  

The Patient Capital Of Crazy

This is Warner Todd Huston.  The one on the left.

Longtime readers will be somewhat familiar with his work from posts I have occasionally done over the years like "Big Red Todd and the Monsters".

Mr. Huston's oeuvre is repackaging wingnut talking points and pooping them out like little paving stones on the road to Hell. And at this job he is very persistent. He just chugs along, rain or shine, diligently reprocessing the bottom of the RWNJ birdcage into content for a variety of Conservative sites you have known and been alternately amused and repulsed by during your sojourn through these here internets:

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com,  StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany's Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

Huston has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. Huston's work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neil Bortz, and Michael Savage. He has appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy show, many times on Chicago's WGN 720AM, and dozens of local shows from coast to coast, and many blogtalk radio shows.

Mr. Huston has appeared on local TV news to discuss his writing, has been a guest on Fox Business Network, CNN's blogger lunch, and has appeared on Breitbart TV's B-Team show.

Warner is also the editor of the Midwest Editor for RedCounty.com and has a blog on the Tribune-Owned ChicagoNow.com website. He is a well known writer on Illinois politics.

He has also written for Liberty Ink Magazine, several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture"which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Mr. Huston's work has also appeared in several College Textbooks...

Keep that in mind.

Well, yesterday Ol' Warner got kinda famous outside of the precincts that corner of Crazytown where he plies his trade.  You see, the cult Warner works for spends half its time shrieking about President Obama being the antichrist because of whatever he did yesterday, and the other half of its time all twitchy and amped and hair-trigger ready to go absolutely apeshit over whatever President Obama does tomorrow.  And it literally no longer matters what the President actually does or does not do -- whatever he has for breakfast tomorrow, that thing will be spell the Death of Freedumb and Our Glorious Republic unless we act to defeat this tyrant now!now!now!

Rinse and repeat.
Forever and ever.
You know the drill.

Well, as a professional spreader of conspiracies and amplifier of  bullshit, Warner sorta forgot that he's not actually very bright or capable of distinguishing between the scent of Chanel No. 5 and his own refried Limbaugh farts.  And what with all the copying and pasting and bitching and keening, he kinda got way out over his skis and fucked massively up.  And that fuckup sailed right through the wingnutosphere like ebola through a human centipede before anyone bothered to notice that is was indeed a fuckup.

Which is how got all over the Liberal side of the internet, starting with TPM and spreading outward through the radio, through Esquire and onto the MSNBC teevee machine:

Breitbart Issues Best Correction Since Forever

I generally don't like harping on other outlets' errors or the always mortifying process of issuing a correction. It's a mix of 'there but for the grace of God' and, in this case, look at the source. But I think here we may have perhaps the best 'correction' in the long storied history of 'corrections', especially ones stemming from errors no remotely careful journalist ever would have made in the first place.
As noted a bit earlier, on Saturday Breitbart published an exclusive pointing out that President Obama's Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch was part of the team that defended President Clinton during the Whitewater investigation - not a bad little scooplet. Only it wasn't the same Loretta Lynch, which kind of takes the punch out of the story.
Breitbart then issued a 'correction'. But like I said, it's a correction for the ages.

As you can see, the headline and the entire article is intact, replete with various references to Lynch's time in the early 90s defending the Clintons. There's a little "[Corrected]" tacked on to the headline, even though the headline stays the same. And that's it.
Until you get all the way down to the bottom of the piece.

The best I can say in defense of this comical 'correction' is that it would be challenging to amend the piece in light of the categorical collapse of the article's central assertion. I mean, how do you correct it? I guess you just don't? Which is pretty much what they did here.

But here's the thing.  If I had to bet the rent money, I would bet that this won't harm Ol' Warner's career one little bit.  Sure, he'll get banged around by the Liberal Media for a day or two, but all that means is a promotion from dreckslinger to full-on Conservative Martyr (3rd Class).

And that is the point.

One of the main reasons obviously insane Conservatives win at election time is that they are willing to invest in and cultivate third-tier ideological button men like Ol' Warner.  Willing to invest in their movement's communication infrastructure and and human capital -- materially supporting them, patiently, year after year after year -- until even a plodding goof like Ol' Warner has a steady audience and a resume that would look pretty impressive if you had no fucking idea what you were looking at.

On the Left, there is nothing like this.  Nor are there any plans to develop anything like this anytime soon.

And that is a big part of why we lose.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- Birthday Fundraiser Edition

Today on "Meet the Press", war, plague, misery and the aristocracy of money.

Not actual war, plague, etc. , mind you, because that would make people's brains hurt.  Instead Murrica gets a rundown of how various horsemen of the apocalypse will run in various political spin claiming races to be run on November 4th this year in exotic locales like Kansas and Iowa and Isengard.

Also it turns out, in politics as in every other aspect of life in the Land of the Free, money is, y'know, a big, hairy deal. No. Really. Big, hairy deal. (Not Safe For Work)

And how better to explain this largeness and hairiness of this deal long after it is too late to do anything about it than in a manner best summed up as follows:

"This Sunday on Meet the Press: I, Chuck Todd, will buy booze for kids because Uncle Chuck is cool like that." *18-34 demo still ignores*

— Christian Lynch (@monsterLUNCH) October 26, 2014

From the Meet the Press transcript:

CHUCK TODD:

Well, we're America, and it'd be fair to say we do most things bigger in this country. And that's certainly true when it comes to elections and campaign spending. My man Luke Russert is here to talk about this. You've been crunching some numbers.

LUKE RUSSERT:

Indeed.

CHUCK TODD:

This stat’s unbelievable.

LUKE RUSSERT:

It's wild, Chuck. Remarkably, you could pay for 80 British general election campaigns with what's being spent on this year's midterms alone. And there's real concern about the role money is playing in our politics with some even going as far to argue our democracy is being bought and sold.

Wild indeed, oh poster child for wholly unearned privilege.

But this is a fundraising day after all, and I'm sure that Charlie Pierce will do the rounds and count the toe-tags sometime tomorrow. So just for for today, let us go back and back to my very first Sunday Morning Comin' Down. Back when Young Luke Russert was still the Kegger King of Boston College, and long before Brother Charles Pierce discovered Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, David Gregory or the many other slithery denizens of the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus.

The first SMCD post I ever did went up in April, 2005.  Since I did not know at the time if I was going to keep doing this, I had not yet picked out a title for the feature.  To show you how much has changed, the subject of the original Sunday show post was my take on the fascistic stylings of George Will.  You can still read it here, where it remains frozen in bloggy amber and encrusted with all of it's original, vintage 2005 spambot droppings.

But for today, I'll be reposting this from Christmas Eve, 2006.  (Yes, I write all the time in all kinds of weather.)

After which I will ask you for money.

Christmas (Eve) Morning Comin’ Down.

"How high is the bullshit, Momma?"

"Five feet high and risin'."

In which virtually every angstrom of the broadcast spectra is given over to GOP SpokesMommies. Because that’s what Baby Jesus would do!

And so we strap on our hollyhock codpiece and sugarplum cleats and run screaming into the gooey, smelly slack-water at the low ebb of a Mouse Circus Yule Tide.

So once more unto the Dearth, dear friends, once more…

On "Fox News Sunday" -- Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney; Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl; Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham.

Where Chris Wallace continues the proud Fox tradition of never “askin’” no Republican of the First Water nuthin’ that ain’t a softball or a teabag, allowing First Lady Macbeth to open her hellmouth and let the bats (vampire and brick) come winging out unchallenged.

Lynne Cheney: Our sense of mission has been there since the start. September 11th. Long Struggle. Children and grandchildren safe.

Wallace: Iraq? Rethink?

Cheney: Dick wakes up every morning committed to doing this important job. Well, first he has a fresh mug of virgin’s blood, reseats his heart plugs, and then leaps into the fray.

Wallace: And this damnable Democratic Congress?

Cheney: Well, we’ll “cooperate” so long as Dems dutifully bend over and grab their ankles. I personally have the sense there are bright lines. Torture Detainee policy. Police State v 2.1 Domestic Spying. Patriot Act. Freedom-hating Democrats consistently batter these programs and argue against them. Oh, if only they loved this country! The Preznit will not let any “group” strip those important Imperial Perks away.

“Groups” like…80% of the American people.

Wallace: The Midterm Thumpin’?

Cheney: I blame extraordinary ethical failures. Bipartisan of course, but in the 6th year of any Imperial Reign this was to be expected.

Wallace: And Scooter Libby?

Cheney: Fine man and a pal ‘o Dick. In fact, they’re going hunting together! I think it’s bizarre that po’ Scooter is the only one going under the bus for the Valerie Plame dealie.

Wallace (batting his eyelashes and making kissy noises): Oh, Mommy, tell us all why historical education is important?

Because we – and the media particularly – spend so much time flailing our country and finding faults, that we need to teach the Little Ones the really really real true story of our unalloyed wonderfulness.

Wallace (braiding her hair and sighing coquettishly over her wonderfulness): But Mommy, how do you make it fun?

Wallace (treading so lightly that his tiny hooves leave nary a crease on the rice paper): What about the Mary Cheney kerfuffle? The new Grandcheney?

Cheney: We like being grandparents. Mary’ll be a great mother. Period.

Wallace: But what about this horrible, horrible War on Christmas?

Cheney: There IS a war on Christmas! There is!

Cheney: But we should be considerate of all the non-saved, hellbound heathens out there, so, for example, we had a menorah at our Christmas Party. In fact, some of my Best Ornaments are Jewish!

Cheney: And a big shout out to the troops! Thanks for putting your ass on the line for my husband’s delusions of grandeur!

Then onto the God Squad...

Mrs. Lotz: Our spirituality in America ignores the One True God. What is wrong is the object of our faith. We make Gods up. That’s the problem.

Archbishop: We are where we have always been. Our struggle is to not let the spirit get overwhelmed by the commercial/material world.

Immigrants?

Preach to ‘em.

Stem Cell research?

Every blastocyst is sacred.
Every blastocyst is great.
If a blastocyst is wasted, God gets quite irate.

And so we get 15 minutes of the Good Hair Good News Conservative evangelizing in the guise of news.

Not exactly a shock on Jebus’s Fake Birthday on God’s Favorite network.



On "Meet the Press" -- Rev. Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life"; Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham.

Whither Jebus?

Americans like Faithy Leaders.

Both sides wrong. Both sides bad. Both sides rude. Both side uncivil.

If only both side would take a breathe and treat the other with respect.

With all due respect, fuck that.

We tried that for 30 years.

The Right adopted Hate Radio and Christopathology as a curative to its paranoid White Southern fantasies of persecuted minorityhood. The GOP took every crossburning freak and Bible-banging bigot into the fold to win elections.

Period.

Preaching that the problem with our nation is that I need to continue to be civil to a people and party that have carefully cultivated blind, boundless, self-satesfied hatred of everyone I care about and everything I believe in ain't gonna fly anymore.

We tried it. For 30 years. It. Doesn't. Work.

When the Right disarms and lays down their weaponized Scriptures, Liberals will disarm and go back to being the open, tolerant people we are by nature.

Until then, fuck these people. Sideways.

Rick Warren: The 20th Century saw the death of millions and millions of people at the hands of atheists – far more than Christians ever killed. Godless Communism. Nazism…

Which is where Godwin's Law pops up like a Bouncing Betty and one must loudly call “bullshit”.

Saving for another day the argument that the Infallible and Omnipotent Dear Leader cults of Stalinism and Maoism were anything but “godless”, it is simply ridiculous to assert that Hitler would have been possible without Germany’s long, rich history of unadulterated, Christian hatred.

To make the preposterous inference that Nazism was not (and is not) Christian right down to the shiny tips of its jackboots because it’s oppressive or anti-Democratic and authoritarian ignores oh, say, the last 1,700 years of the Catholic Church.

Pretending Teutonic fascism doesn’t have everything to do with a deep, Protestant taproot that goes all the way to Martin Luther’s second-and-now-scrupulously-underreported best seller, “On the Jews and Their Lies” is both ludicrous and dangerous, and in doing so, Rick Warren – whatever his other virtues – demonstrates the terrible rot that threatens the marrow of all faiths: That willingness to wish away unhappy reality when it does not conform to our pretty, shiny theology.

And thus do men of faith ignore the wide-gauge tracks as they are laid right up the gut of the transept, out the narthex and into the death house.

Now was Nazism a terrible perversion of Christianity?

Absolutely.

So is Fundamentalism.

So is Roman Catholicism.

So is the Westboro Baptist Church.

So is Bob Jones University.

So was the predicate for Slavery.

So is the 700 Club.

So is Focus on the Family

So was the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

So what was your point again?


On "This Week" -- Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C; U.N. Secretary-General-designate Ban Ki-moon; former President Bush and his wife, Barbara.

Whither Syria?

Of visiting Syria, the White House sez, “Bad, Senators! Bad!”

Dodd: Screw that. Ignoring a major regional player is stupid. You don’t have to love them, like them or want to dine with them, but your do have to talk to them.

Graham: No. Talking to dictators is bad. “The world” should hold Syria accountable.

“The World” should do a lot of stuff. Like rain chocolate on my birthday, and voluntarily cool down, spontaneously sweep the air and water clean, and cough up some more oil - preferable in stable places like Nebraska or Disneyland -- so that we can drive Space Shuttle-sized SUVs everywhere on $0.32/gallon gas forever.

But that’s not going to happen either.


"Face the Nation" Guests: -- First Lady Laura Bush.

Why bother?

“The Chris Matthews Show” -- Dan Rather, Clarence Page, Katty Kay, Norah O’Donnell

A Laundry List of best, worst, most, least, wankiest, wackiest, wickedest, and so forth.

All head and no beer.

Except for this little sip of Noron’s weeping, self-serving, faux-center bilge: “In America, you can’t be moderate or objective anymore! Now you have to be either Democratic or Republican!”

Nurse! 5,000 cc’s of fainting couch! Stat!

Oh, the horror. That to take a position on anything or in opposition to anything –- global warming, evolution, slavery, the Holocaust, the shape of the Earth -- means that you are, by Big Giant Head Media definition, immoderate and irrational.

Then Noron immediately violates her own idiot, “objective” catechism and says flatly that Iraq is getting worse!

But…but…Noron, there are people living in bunkers and basement and blogs all over this fair land that assert that Iraq is getting better.

That we’re winning!

That it’s all the fault of the traitor media for not reporting the Good News that positively flows through the streets of Baghdad like Peeps sailing on a river of mulled wine.

In other words, Noron Takes a Position, thereby giving up her Big Media journalistic maidenhead and making her, by definition, immoderate and irrational and no longer worthy of our attention.

So take a biiiig pull off that bottle of Ol’ Doc Friedman’s Ersatz Centrist Patent Medicine you’re so hot to hawk to everyone else, Noron.

Mmmm. Brackish!

This is the part where I ask you for dough:

PS (and repeat). I'm trying to put together a series of "Best Of" posts for this fundraiser, and would like your suggestions as to what I should haul out of storage and repost this week. I am away from the computer for longer and longer stretches these days so please be patient when posting comments -- I will approve/publish them as fast as I can.

PSS (and repeat).  If you are one of the small group who donates to this blog on a monthly basis, this fundraising appeal is not directed at you. You bastids are already more than generous and I appreciate it more than I can say.

Thanks!

Your pal,

driftglass

Hello, Dollar! *

"Atlas Shrugged: A Thousand Pages of Bad Science Fiction About Sock-Puppets Stabbing Strawmen with Tax Cuts."

-- driftglass

Oh lord:

Ayn Rand-Inspired Sci-Fi Musical The Anthem Sets World Premiere

Jason Gotay, Remy Zaken, and Randy Jones will lead the cast of the political piece.
By Hayley Levitt • Apr 8, 2014 • New York City

The Anthem, a sci-fi musical inspired by Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, will make its off-Broadway world premiere at Culture Project's Lynn Redgrave Theatre this May. Performances will begin May 20 in advance of an official May 29 opening...

On the one hand, Anthem is very bad, short science fiction (as opposed Atlas Shrugged, which is very bad, looong science-fiction).  So if very bad science fiction is like unto, say, shooting yourself in the foot, then turning very bad science fiction into a musical on purpose is like taking another, bigger bullet and sloooowly pounding it through your through your other foot with a ball peen hammer.

On the other hand, I want to write the lyrics for at least one of the tunes so much it hurts.

*Judges would have also accepted The Lyin' King and The Wealth Producers. What other musical parody names can you think of?  The ones that crack me up will be posted with attribution on the front page of this blog.

The Supreme Court, LLC Proudly Presents

Your bright, Sheldon Adelson future.

From Charlies Pierce on today's McCutcheon decision:

...
It is here helpful to note the everlasting irony of Antonin Scalia's view of Bush v. Gore. There is no individual right to vote, but an individual's right to purchase a candidate must be untrammeled -- but here, Roberts is saying it plain. To restrict money is to restrict speech. Period. And the only real legal restraint on the wholesale subletting of American democracy is John Roberts's strange devotion to "disclosure" as some sort of shaming mechanism within the electorate. Good luck with that one.

Justice Stephen Breyer takes up a lot of these points in his dissent, most notably, the majority's laughably narrow definition of what political corruption actually is -- that political corruption exists only if you buy a specific result from a specific legislator. But it hardly matters. The five-vote majority in favor of virtually unlimited corporate and individual spending in our elections is a rock solid one. Four days after almost every Republican candidate danced the hootchie-koo in Vegas to try and gain the support of a single, skeevy casino gazillionnaire, the majority tells us that there is no "appearance of corruption" in this unless somebody gets caught putting a slot machine in the Lincoln Bedroom on behalf of Sheldon Adelson.
...

Time to start thinking about shuttering the blog and learning how to deal Pai Gow.
UPDATE:

Bill Moyers adds some more salt to the wound:

A Blistering Dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives Substituted Opinion for Fact
...

The court’s four-member minority issued a blistering dissent, written by Justice Stephen Breyer. He charged that the majority’s “conclusion rests upon its own, not a record-based, view of the facts.”

Its legal analysis is faulty: It misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake. It understates the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions. It creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign.

Taken together with Citizens United, Breyer writes that McCutcheon “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”

He goes on to dissect the claims on which the court’s ruling rest. He first takes issue with the idea that the government only has an interest in preventing a direct exchange of cash for votes.

Stately Whine Manor

Taking a break from running down a few link relating to Our Mr. Brooks' latest passel of journalistic dereliction long enough to lay clear title to the name "Stately Whine Manor" (tm) for his new digs.

From the Washington Post (h/t Mike the Mad Biologist for the story)

Surreal estate: David Brooks moves from Bethesda to Cleveland Park 

By The Reliable Source

Price: $3.95 million

Details: The New York Times op-ed columnist and wife Sarah are trading up — from their longtime home near Bethesda’s Burning Tree Club to a century-old (exquisitely renovated) five bedroom, four-and-a-half bath house in Cleveland Park. It includes a two-car garage, iron and stone fence, generous-sized porch and balcony, and what appear to be vast spaces for entertaining. The timing seems to have been right: After only a few days on the market, their old place (which also boasts five bedrooms) is under contract for $1.6 million.

Should you ever have occasion to read Mr. Brooks' interview in Playboy wherein he describes his exhausting, joyless life as America's most prominent Conservative Public Intellectual, just remember that he his doing all of this -- all of the endless lying, all of the tireless hippie punching, all of the acting as the eager creature of power -- for money.

Because that Centrist stooge dollar is an excellent dollar.

(BTW, for the OFA people who are flooding into Chicago to run Obama's Midwest command center, my Chicago residence went on the market several weeks ago for a tiny fraction of what Mr. Brooks laid out for his new shanty.  Lovely place located in the heart of Chicago liberaldom, steps to the lake, public transit, good schools, great neighbors, fireplace, flooded with light, deeded/gated parking, awesome kitchen, decadent master bathroom, etc.)

Assembled by Rote

out of cliches left over from 100 other identically mediocre columns, Our Mr. Brooks has struck again:

This historical pattern
has been universally acknowledged
and universally ignored.

Instead, leaders
in both parties
have clung to the analogy...

The Democrats, besotted by the myth
that the New Deal ended the Great Depression,
have consistently overestimated...

Republicans,
who should know better,
also have an inflated sense of...

Democrats
should be learning
about the limits
of social policy.
...

Republicans
should be reflecting
on the fact that if a Republican president
were in office right now,
and even if he or she did sensible things
...

Many voters
seem to think that government
has the power to protect them
from the consequences of their sins.
...

You know, I write about Mr. Brooks frequently because he is without question the single most powerful and shadow-casting practitioner of the dark art of lazy, incestuous, cheapjack Centrist punditry that is suffocating our culture under mile after smothering mile of tepid, Villager establishmentarian treacle.

And yet as I move from reading his empty, bloodless, word-tapioca blattings to writing about them for this blog, the realization that, in a country where 1 in 6 of my fellow citizens live below the poverty line, Our Mr. Brooks is actually paid -- actually, richly rewarded with money, privilege and social cache -- for the act of cranking out 1,600 words worth of this forgettable, poisonous tripe every week still just knocks me out.

Every single time.

Voting Them Off The Island

Remember this map?

Well, everyone has an imaginary scenario, so here's mine.

The Obama Administration announces next week that since the GOP refuses to participate in good faith in the actual work of governing the United States, in order to avoid defaulting on our national debt and sending the world into a global financial meltdown, the Administration would accede to Republican demands that all deficit reduction be accomplished solely by making radical cuts to existing government programs with no increase in taxes.

However, in the spirit of the Time Honored Conservative Principle of Federalism, the President adds that the cuts would not be allocated programmatically, but geographically by state.

Using a CBO-updated version of the map originally provided by "The Fourth Branch" in 2010,

cuts will be allocated based on the status of each state's overall contribution to the federal budget.

Fourth Branch explains:

The red states in the map [above] are states which received more than $1.00 in federal money for every $1.00 in taxes paid by residents of that state. Blue states are states which received less than $1.00 in federal money for every $1.00 paid by residents of that state in taxes (information from a 2005 study by the Tax Foundation).
...

There is a very strong correlation, then, between a state voting for Republicans and receiving more in federal spending than its residents pay to the federal government in taxes (the rust belt and Texas being notable exceptions). In essence, those in blue states are subsidizing those in red states. Both red and blue states appear to be acting politically in opposition to their economic interests. Blue states are voting for candidates who are likely to continue the policies of red state subsidization while red states are voting for candidates who profess a desire to reduce federal spending (and presumably red state subsidization).

Under the Obama Administration's proposed "Rewarding Wealth Producers and Penalizing Moochers Patriotic American Values Re-alignment" Act, "wealth producing" states such as New York, California, Illinois who have traditionally received less than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes would be exempt from any budgetary cuts, and would qualify for across-the-board tax cuts since wealth-producing states should always be accommodated and encouraged in every way possible, regardless of circumstances.

On the other hand, the "welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking" states such as Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Alaska who have for years gotten away with parasitically looting their wealth-producing neighbors by receiving more than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes will now assume 100% of the responsibility for eliminating the federal budget deficit. Each of these welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states will be given a block rescission amount representing the percentage of the federal deficit for which they will be now be help legally responsible.

(And to those from the welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states may try to argue that this is somehow unfair, let me point out that everyone knows that adding even one thin dime to the tax burdens of the wealth-producing states would instantly and forever destroy them as job creation engines, so that must be off the table.)

Each welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking state will be given 30-days to develop a budget plan which will guarantee compliance: welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states who fail to comply with this directive will be taken over by a federal budget receiver and the national guard who will make the necessary cuts unilaterally.

Acting together in this way, I am sure we can get through this current budget crisis and something something our great nation towards, oh, let's say a brighter future.

Thank you.

God bless you.

And God bless the United Freaks of America.

I Almost Missed This Article

"by" Andrew Sullivan on the Huffington Post's Shameless Blogsploitation Business Model of building a personal fortune on cranking out a constant, steaming river of traffic-driving softcore porn, gossip and the unpaid-for writing of others...

The HuffPo Model: Rich Liberals Exploiting Blog-Serfs For Millions
14 Feb 2011 02:01 pm

In the wake of the AOL merger, Nate Silver wonders how much money the Huffington Post makes off its unpaid serfs bloggers:

The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. But it also has a huge amount of content accounting for those page views. It publishes roughly 100 original pieces per day — paid and unpaid — in its politics section alone. And politics coverage, according to Arianna Huffington, reflects only about 15 percent of the site’s traffic. How many page views, then, does an individual blog post receive? And roughly what is it worth to The Huffington Post?

...

...lost as it was in the Daily Dish's usual barrage of posts made up mostly of free content gleaned from Politico, CNN, Ezra Klein, the National Review, Megan McCardle, PBS, The New York Times, Dave Weigel, Tyler Cowen, American Conservative Magazine David Frum, Wired, Twitter feeds, reprints of reader emails, the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, Matt Yglesias, Michael Medved, Christopher Hitchens, Felix Salmon, a variety of other Atlantic Writers, William Saletan, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, YouTube Videos, more David Frum, Nate Silver, Al-Jazeera, Radley Balko, still more reader emails, and so on.

The Huffpo Model -- which shares little DNA with traditional publishing, but bears a striking resemblance to industries like mountaintop mining or clear-cut logging insofar it concerns itself almost exclusively with the use of technology to ever-more-efficiently exploit its targeted resource while at the same time showing absolutely no concern with the disastrous, long-term damage their techniques are doing to the very environment which has made it possibly for them to prosper -- seems so perfectly engineered to kill whatever "professionalism" is still sloshing around at the bottom of the profession of writing that it is almost impossible to imagine that it was entirely accidental.

Mr. Sullivan's own addenda to the work of Nate Silver :

...
The temptation to run a website devoted almost entirely to hysterical claims about Obama's betrayals of the left and shirtless pictures of Hugh Jackman striding out of Australian surf becomes rather huge. Addictive even. But huge is the point. HuffPo's business model is sheer size. If you can throw as much content - free, borrowed or merely linked to - in one, sprawling place, you will generate a big enough crowd of eyeballs - 40 million of them a month at last count - to bring bigger and bigger advertisers to sign on.
...

was re-printed from his Sunday Times column.

Which, as he notes, is pay-walled.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I'm not sure what it is, but it does give me an excuse to re-run one of my favorite videos from Harlan Ellison:

Blood Money for Billionaires

"And, for an instant she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human"

-- Count Zero (1986)

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This is the hill the Right was willing to die on.

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This was the issue over which the Party of God was willing to screw "...the least of these."

This was the issue over which the Party of Personal Responsibility was willing to hold America's unemployed hostage during the worst economic calamity since the Republican Great Depression.

This was the issue over which the "How fucking dare you question the Commander-in-Chief" Party was willing to endanger American lives and let a nuclear treaty with Russia rot just to make the Commander-in-Chief look weak.

And it worked: they got their Blood Money for Billionaires.

So, are they celebrating? Dancing little goose-stepping jigs?

Of course not.

They're bitching that their patriotic, deficit-warrior, Tea Party sensibilities were cruelly violated because the tax cuts did not go nearly far enough.

They're moaning that the weak-willed GOP was willing to give up one pfennig to subsidize the lazy, mooching lifestyles of unemployed losers.

And they're breathless awaiting Conservative Media Hero Andrew Breitbart's latest cinematic opus about Sinister Negroes, Reparations and Obama's Secret Radical Liberation Theology.

Or ACORN.

Or those evil Unions.

Or something.

Because it's always something,

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Shatterday

The Mouse Circus was intensely disorienting; a perfect, teevee representation of the schizophrenic rift that has split the American brain right down the middle.

Over in the Higher Reasoning Center –- where all of our math, history, logic skills, blues appreciation and sexual prowess are kept –- Christiane Amanpour interviewed Warren Buffet, Bill and Melinda Gates, Ted Turner and hedge fund manager Tom Steyer.

These are some of the richest people in the history of the world, and they are now giving away huge chunks of their treasure to support causes they believe in.

These are also some of Capitalism’s most successful “Generals on the ground”. Every one of their business cards reads “I understand wealth better than anyone else you will ever meet”, and their consensus opinion of these people is that supply side economics has been a horrible failure, that taxes should be raised on the rich, and the GOP is basically run by skeevy, lying hacks.

Although they were all too polite to put it just that way.

Warren Buffet believes that taxes need to be raised on the rich by a lot. That he got rich because he “won the ovarian lottery” and that “the idea of dynastic wealth is kind of crazy.”

The Gates’ state very clearly that they believe all lives are of equal value, and educational inequality is a scandal.

One of the worst times in Ted Turner’s adult life was when his AOL/Time-Warner deal crashed and burned and he ended up losing $10 million a day, every day, for three years.

At the end of that unimaginable, financial hemorrhage, Ted Turner still had $2 billion in the bank. When asked why he was giving one billion dollars to causes that arguably the government should be doing (securing loose nukes, for example) Turner said that governments are like anybody else. They can use some help. No matter how rich and powerful, everybody can use a little help every now and then.

Socialists, one and all!

Why do these billionaire capitalists hate America?

Meanwhile, over in the drunk, belligerent, power-mad, mendacious half of the American Split Brain, United States Senator John Kyl spent a little time lying about the START treaty.

Then Republican Ratboy Ed Gillespie expressed his great unhappiness that Barack Obama has been insufficiently grovel-y to the Republicans.

Then the Wall Street Journal's human wine-bag -- Peggy Noonan – decked herself out in her best sackcloth and ashes to mourn that the Obama White House has not yet figured out that the solution to all of America’s political problems is to bend over for Republicans much, much further.

According to the Right’s ranking barfly, Obama needs shakes himself, dusts himself off, and gives the GOP everything they want.

After all, 2010 changed everything!

Of course, 2008 changed everything.

And 2006 changed everything.

And 2004 changed everything.

And 2000 changed everything.

And 1994 changed everything.

And 1960 changed everything.

And 1862 changed everything.

Everything changed everything.

Noonan: Obama lost the Center because…

Then, Moar Sarah Palin!

And much talk about “most Americans”?

Do you think most Americans?

What about most Americans?

Most Americans think…

Most Americans believe…

Most Americans want…

But there is no such thing as “Most Americans”. There hasn’t been for years.

I believe it all began in the cell-phoneless 1980s, when – through an accident of astral projection or perhaps Kirlian photography – the American Shadow broke loose from the American Self.

They have been at war with each other ever since; fighting over who gets to be "America" once and for all. Because, as in physics and in Harlan Ellison fiction, it is has become impossible for our America and their America to occupy the same space at the same time.

Unfortunately, unlike “Shatterday”

it is the bad guys who have have been getting stronger every day.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Nasty, Brutish and Short.

Starting things off with a sigh, for some reason, Bob Schieffer of “Face the Nation” (long thought to be The Mouse Circus’ “adult” in the room) apparently believed the wormy spawn of Traitor Dick Cheney had not appeared on the teevee machine nearly enough and held out a chair for her today.

You're back on the list, Schieffer!

On “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace interrupted Claire McCaskill to opine that “most Americans” believe that the Democratic Party is too far “to the Left” and shouldn’t she be counseling her Party and President to “move to the Center”? (FYI, the Centrist “compromise” Chris Wallace specifically has in mind it to extend the Bush tax cuts for at least another year or two, because in Fox World, “compromise” is defined as "humping Mitch McConnell’s right leg and capitulating completely to The Crazy Party".)

And because she is such a good, little Blue Dog, McCaskill obligingly hopped into Wallace’s lap and told him how much she loved, loved, loved compromising with Republicans!

Then, without the slightest flicker of irony, Wallace immediately switched from the topic of keeping the budget-crushing tax cuts for rich people in place to the Entirely Unrelated Topic of the Horrible!Horrors! of saddling future generation with debt.

On “This Week” George Will once again went Full-Monty Burns.

First was his giddy, positively chop-licking lust at the thought of a full-on corporate takeover of the United States gummint using angry rubes and bigots as a battering ram, and an infinite amount of secret corporate money as fuel.

Second came his palpable, vinegary distaste at A) being seated next to Meghan McCain ("Smithers, who is this sticky, road-house trollop and why is she being allowed to sit at the grownup's table?!") and, B) being forced into a brief, perfunctory pretense that he gave a shit about anything she had to say about "the young people" before dismissing it all in favor of his own, mildewed wisdom.

Meanwhile, on “Meet the Press” Ken Buck continued to embarrass the good people of Colorado in a variety of ways, most notably by equated being gay with alcoholism. But considering the severity with which the weepy, paranoid side-effects of Buck's rumored, raging, $1,000-a-day Ibogaine habit must be whipsawing him by now, one does not know whether to pity the poor, crazy fucker or simply wish the Flatirons would tip over and tent-peg this hateful swine into the Earth's core.

Oh how I miss the frolicsome antics of the V1.0 Tea Party Hucksters:

at least they had better music.

Buy why are we wasting time talking about this trivia, when two of the most important events of the year are reaching their apotheosis in just two, short weeks?

Some sort of rally down by the national cement pond...

And my Fall fundraiser-cum-birthday shakedown.

Experts Advise

People to choose better; spend scarce education dollars learning something useful and well-paying.