Fox "News" Viewers Getting Their Instructions

Liberals will always be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the inherently authoritarian right. We have a visceral indisposition to walking in lock-step; a concern for means as well as ends; a commitment to attempting to discern and speak the objective truth; the capacity to consider points of view we don't ourselves hold; an awareness of and appreciation for nuance. The right is burdened by no such constraints. It makes for an unfair fight and I'm damned if I know what to do about it.

Cheney at Work on his Memoirs

Punked?

It will doubtless come as a surprise to the right-wingers among you, who apparently believe your own bullshit, but there is concern ranging from disappointment to anger among the sentient beings of this country that Obama is perhaps not the progressive they took him to be, but rather a middle-of-the-road, business-as-usual corporatist who will prove either unable or unwilling to shepherd through some of the fundamental changes so vital to the long term ethical and economic interests of the nation; specifically in the area of health care.

In fact, there was a provocative Frank Rich column in the NY Times yesterday that asked whether those of us in the center/left had been misled, or as Rich colorfully phrased it, "punked".

But of course, it's Obama who is getting punked. He's doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign; attempting to reach across the aisle, striving to move beyond partisanship, searching for common ground and consensus. And as many had predicted, he's finding it somewhat akin to trying to compromise with a spitting cobra; a really agitated, really determined, really stupid spitting cobra.

I think of Obama as the NY Times of political figures. Both are cogent, civilized and rational. And both -- apparently stung by accusations of 'liberal bias' -- have bent over backwards to disprove such assertions, thus allowing the voices of un-reason to effectively emasculate them. And what has been their reward for their earnest, respective efforts? Obama is branded a traitor, a baby-killer, a foreign born hence illegitimate president, a racist and a crypto-communist; and the NY Times is still referred to as Pravda by the no-nothings of the right and their plutocrat manipulator/masters.

I've given up on the Times ever getting beyond characterizing the patent, factual untruths promulgated by the Republican party with adjectives less mealy-mouthed than "disputed", but I still hold out some vague hope for Obama, in part because only six months into my last new job, I still didn't know where they kept the extra paper clips.

My ever diminishing hope is mostly predicated on my perception of his intelligence and character for which I still have high regard. But sadly I've pretty much concluded that the game is unalterably rigged and the entrenched interests arrayed against him are too rich, powerful and implacable to allow for substantive change.

Congress is bought and paid for on both sides of the aisle, and almost as bad as the Republican brownshirt tactics and disinformation squads (death panel, Ms Palin; really?), will be the inevitable crowing and beating of the chest by Democrats when they give us the watered-down, ineffective health care reform that is so clearly and tragically in the offing.

No significant progress will be made as long as the insurance lobby has anything to say about it; and their massive "campaign contributions" (read: bribes) speak volumes. They bring nothing to the table but an ever-growing appetite for money on the backs of the citizenry. Want to save $400 billion on health care? Take out the 'for-profit' middlemen that provide no service but obstruction.

Feast of Fools, Part II

"This is no party of Einsteins...only 6 percent of scientists said that they were Republicans"

"6 in 10 Republicans said they thought that humans were created, in their present form, 10,000 years ago"

"Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt"

Not only are anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do. Blinded by fear and passion, armed with misinformation and misplaced anger, they descend on these meetings and hoot and holler in an attempt to shut down the debate rather than add to it.

I must say that this says more about them than it does about any forthcoming legislation. Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt.

Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it.

A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released last Friday found that 28 percent of Republicans don’t believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States and another 30 percent are still “not sure.” That’s nearly 6 out of 10 Republicans refusing to accept a basic truth. Then again, this shouldn’t surprise me. According to a Gallup poll released last summer, 6 in 10 Republicans also said they thought that humans were created, in their present form, 10,000 years ago.

Let’s face it: This is no party of Einsteins. Really, it isn’t. A Pew poll last month found that only 6 percent of scientists said that they were Republicans.

~Charles M. Blow

Feast of Fools

If despair is truly a sin, I'm in severe jeopardy of spending eternity in perdition; or wherever it is atheists like me are sent (an endless Sarah Palin rally?)

The following comment was posted in response to a column in today's NYTimes and pretty well sums up my feelings as well.

Kate Madison
Depoe Bay, Oregon
August 8th, 2009
9:07 am

Okay, Gail, I surrender! Give up! Call in the men with the white coats to take me away!!!

What is going on in America today is in no tradition I can remember, and I am pretty old! I listened to Bill Maher tonight, and his New Rules were positively depressing--although funny in a "gallows humor" sort of way. For instance: 34% of Americans STILL believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11! 47% of Republicans TRULY believe that Barack Obama was not born in the US (maybe that's a good thing?), Sarah Palin says Obama's healthcare plan is "downright evil," and would force her to take her Down Syndrom child before a "death panel" every five years!!! Eeeeek! Get me out of here!

Is it any wonder that our ill-informed, highly anxious citizens are massing at town hall meetings yelling at their congressmen to "Tell the Government to Keep Its Hands Off of My Medicare?" Who think that a Living Will is a "Death Panel?" OMG--is our citizenry really this stupid and uninformed? Will we ever get over ourselves--and the Civil War????

Clunker Class War

I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Fox "News", but, um, fortunately I usually know what they're exercised about because DeFazio makes a pretty effective echo chamber. Bill O'Reilly speaks, the words go into DeFazio's ears, and -- completely bypassing his brain -- come out of his mouth virtually unaltered. That was how I found out about "the war against Christmas", for example.

It's also how I inferred the right's opposition to the Clunker Program, which seems to have the combined virtues of effectiveness, help for everyday people in tough times, support for the battered car industry, reducing mid-east oil dependency, reducing pollution...and all for the cost of about an hour's expenditures in Iraq (best current estimates of the full financial cost of the Iraq "war" total around $3,000,000,000,000; or an average of about $10,000 each for every man, woman and child in the country. My share of the cost of the Clunkers program is $3.33. Money's tight, but I can swing that.)

And of course, the right completely ignores realities regarding the state of the economy which came dangerously close to imploding entirely under Ethelred the Unready Bush and remains in parlous condition, and disingenuously chooses to view this as what it caricatures as a standard liberal giveaway (giveaways are legitimate only when the recipients are, say, Halliburton or the top .1% of earners) as opposed to a specific stimulus designed for current circumstances.

Here's Timothy Egan's take in today's NY Times


August 5, 2009, 9:45 pm

My clunker was a ’64 Ford Galaxie, logging maybe eight miles to the gallon on level ground, the back seat burned to the coils by a knucklehead friend who left a cigarette to smolder. When it died, just short of 140,000 miles, everything went. Sold it for scrap and $50 — with the tow.

Today, I’d trade that dog on wheels in a New York minute for the upgrade, some smart mileage car that is one of the autos zooming off my neighborhood lot as part of the Cash for Clunkers program.

But according to a barnacled cluster of senators, this program must be sunk, now. It’s been far too successful — dealers have been swamped, people are lining up to buy cars that burn less gas and bring instant cash to crippled local economies.

This is old fashioned stimulus of a sort that Republicans have always advocated, using financial incentives to change behavior. Representative Candice Miller, a G.O.P. lawmaker — albeit from the car-dependent state of Michigan — called it “the best $1 billion of economic stimulus the government has ever spent.”

But look where the rest of Miller’s party is. Last week, Senator John McCain threatened to lead a filibuster rather than let Cash for Clunkers continue to September, as the House has agreed to do with an additional $2 billion from money already approved in the stimulus law.

He backed off this week, though he and other critics continued to treat Cash for Clunkers like swine flu with a steering wheel.

They hate it, many of these Republicans, because it’s a huge hit. It’s working as planned, and this cannot stand. America must fail in order for President Obama to fail. Don’t be surprised if the tea party goons now being dispatched to shout down town hall forums on health care start showing up at your car dealers, megaphones in hand.

But there’s another reason, less spoken of, for why some people get so incensed over little old Cash for Clunkers: it helps average people, and it’s easily understood — a rare combination in a town where the big money deals usually go down with packaged obfuscation.

The overall amount of money is paltry, to the government. But to a typical family, a $4,500 break on a new car with greater gas mileage is a big deal. Consider the extraordinary giveaways of your tax dollars that happened without serious filibuster threats by the protectors of free enterprise.

The granddaddy of them all, of course, was President George W. Bush’s $700 billion bailout of banks, insurance companies and Wall Street miscreants who helped to run the economy into the ground. As presented initially, remember, the bailout had to pass in a day or two, with minimal debate. Or else.

“The goal isn’t to control markets, but to revive them,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized at the time, backing perhaps the greatest reward for bad behavior in the history of capitalism.

Yet, when a tiny fraction of that amount went to strapped consumers this summer for their revival, The Journal jumped back on their Adam Smith pedestal, calling Cash for Clunkers “crackpot economics.”

Then there is the American International Group, the pariah A.I.G., now being kept afloat by the taxpayers to the tune of nearly $180 billion. This money from us to them didn’t sell any cars. It didn’t improve gas mileage. It didn’t help neighborhood businesses. It went to fortify an insurance giant that made terrible bets on complex securities and then threatened to bring us all down with them. McCain was there for A.I.G., no filibuster in his quiver.

And when it came out that some of those same corporate welfare titans would still be giving each other bonuses, former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani rode to the rescue. Bonuses, he argued, trickle down to waiters, limo drivers, cafes that sell donuts to cops — cash for dunkers.

But try to give struggling families a one-time boost to buy a more fuel-efficient car, with an amount that wouldn’t pay for paper clips at A.I.G., and it’s … outrageous!

Reports from car dealers show that clunker stimulus has boosted show room traffic up to 200 percent. The most common vehicles being traded in, they said, are pickups and S.U.V.’s; the most popular replacements will save drivers more than $1,000 a year in gas costs.

Those who oppose this program on principle argue that government should not be choosing winners and losers in the marketplace, even in a down economy. But both parties have long used federal money for precisely that, intending to change society, in ways big and small. What was the G.I. Bill but the greatest escalator to the middle class for returning war veterans? Home mortgage subsidies allow millions of families to own their own house, benefiting realtors, drywallers, roofers and assorted contractors.

I don’t like that big agriculture gets rewarded for monopolizing rural economies while stuffing nearly every processed food with the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup. I was against giving $35 billion in federal help for oil and gas companies over the next five years, as Republicans advocated during last year’s campaign.

For that matter, I hate to see small independent book stores disappear from the landscape.

But Cash for Clunkers is a bare slight against free market chastity. It’s simple stimulus, caught up in a much larger system that’s always been there for the big money players, but holds a much higher standard for anyone else.

New Breakthroughs from Birthers

East Jesus, Alabama, August 4, 2009

FOX News reports that J. C. "Jugs" Scruggs, leader of the Birther Movement has uncovered incontrovertible evidence that not only was Barack Obama not born in the United States, but that all black people residing here were born in Kenya. Scruggs and his researchers have obtained copies of the birth certificates of all 36,000,000 African-Americans which prove that they were all born on foreign soil, entered the U.S. illegally and are hence subject to immediate deportation. Many of the documents were written in crayon on the backs of Walmart receipts, but, Scruggs explained, "that's the way they do stuff in Africa".

The Birthers are also currently putting the finishing touches on...strike that... assembling additional evidence that apparently proves that all Jews in the U.S. were born in Israel, all Hispanics in Mexico, and all Muslims in Baghdad. In fact, Scruggs asserts that everyone except for white Christian southerners was born elsewhere and should be deported immediately. The only two exceptions admitted by the Birthers were, on the one hand, ostensible southern white-trasher Bill Clinton, whose real name turned out to be Vasily Clintonovich and who was born in Moscow and is therefore subject to deportation, and, on the other, some Italian guy in NJ who they recommended be allowed to stay owing to the fact that "he has the right attitude and is a pretty good guy for a Pope loving dago".

Scruggs went on, "We ain't got nothin' against nigras, spics, hebes, wops, chinks, rag-heads or nobody else. We're Christian people and we love ever'body. But this is a nation of laws and these people entered this great country of ours illegally. Hell, my daddy coulda died defending this country and its laws and he maybe woulda died if'n he had been in the military, and I'm goldurned if I'm gonna stand by and see the sacrifice he mighta made go fer nothin. That's what this is about; upholding the goldurn law. The fact that lots of them smell bad or killed Christ or whatever ain't got nothin' to do with it."

Scruggs was immediately declared the front runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination by main stream media publications across the political spectrum, including the august NY Times. As to Scruggs's claims regarding the non-citizen status of 85% of the country's population, the Times, hewing to its longstanding policy of objectivity and even-handedness, characterized the assertion as "disputed by some", and offered Scruggs a weekly column on the op ed page.