Campaigns are like buying hay for a dead horse

By Distributorcap

And they're off....

Unemployment remains high, Libya is in flames, gas prices are heading above $4 per gallon, food prices are rising fast, foreclosures remain at record levels, the housing market remains in the toilet, our education system is collapsing, unions are being kicked to the sideline, Boner thinks defending DOMA is more important than jobs, budgets for everything are slashed as the rich continue to get tax breaks, guns remain easy to get, homelessness is rising, we are addicted to foreign oil more than ever, climate change is destroying agriculture patterns, ice blocks continue to break off, dead fish wash up on shore, North Korea threatens the West with impunity, the middle class moves toward extinction, the Supreme Court allows the rich to buy elections, a Supreme Court justice overtly snubs all ethics, a governor tells transplant hopefuls to get their affairs in order, lunatics in the teabag party are overtly dominating the media...

but what is important to many cable talking heads? ... The Presidential horse race is on!

Be prepared to hear (if you can stomach watching most of the cable news shows) endless talk about who is in, who is hot, who will run, what today's poll says (which will we be different tomorrow, of course), who has a 1-point lead (which of course means they will absolutely, positively win, until the next poll). Also watch the same vomitoria give credence to morons assholes quitters douchebags people like Sarah "Blood Libel" Palin and airtime to idiots fascists nincompoops media whores people like Michele Bachmann -- not because they add to the intelligence quota or bring anything of value to American society, only because they are good teevee.

Currently, there are 611 days until the next presidential election on November 6, 2012. Rest assured there will be more time spent on every bit of minutia about the teabag GOP kochotrons vying for the nomination than on any of the above problems. I guess it is a lot of fun handicapping the 6th race at Teabag Downs, but it isn't much of a barrel of monkeys finding solutions to climate change or our economic malaise.

When you live in a society where Charlie Sheen and Justin Bieber are more important than the firing of teachers or the continued dependence on energy imported from tyrannical regimes ("but they are our tyrants"), I guess you can expect one day we will have a country run by Rufus T. Firefly with his benefactor Mrs. Teasekoch. But hey, the cable pundits are having fun! Maybe as one infamous New York City weatherman and one infamous Indiana University basketball coach each once said about a certain act of agression, "if it is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it."

Passion play

By Capt. Fogg

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

___________

If you managed to get through grade school, you've read this many times, but it never seems to influence the way Americans act or feel: a syndrome that seems more influenced by mob psychology and sectarian chauvinism than anything else. Of course, it's long been this way and we've long been a xenophobic and gullible nation, but with the advent of round-the-clock swineherds like Fox News, the grunting and squealing of feral-hog America is drowning out the voice of our founding fathers and of decent men and women everywhere. 

[E]ven if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service. (Ben Franklin) 

The same folks who want to persecute Muslims for their religion and prohibit the free exercise thereof will assert, without twitching their nostrils at the smell of hypocrisy, that this is a Christian nation and that Christian laws, whatever they might be, supersede our national laws about abortion, birth control, spending government funds on Christian activities, and browbeating children into theological submission. It's not okay that a Muslim man doesn't want to drink alcohol or a Jew doesn't want to eat pork, but it's fine that a Christian pharmacist refuses to dispense condoms. Damn the Constitution, we're a Christian nation. The laws of other religions need not apply, and, in fact, although there is no chance whatever that the United States will adopt the Qur'an as a replacement for the Constitution and its body of laws, it's not enough for the grunting pigs of God who would like to make the free exercise of Islam illegal. 

He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. (Isaiah 53:3) 

The latest crusade seems to be about portraying every comment by every Muslim as an example of Sharia, from a cabby in Detroit asking that he not be forced to transport alcohol to someone praying in Arabic in front of the White House. According to one witness, he was asking for a blessing on those "Christians" who seemed oblivious to the staggering irony of a mob mocking and cursing a bearded man, bent in prayer, forgiving them for persecuting him. None of this has anything to do with any effort to replace our laws and courts with Islamic laws or Islamic judges, nor can it since no effort exists. As to the rules of private observance, let's let only Christians do that! The only credible attempt of theocratic pretenders to the throne is of course by self-styled Christians, as the porcine squeals of the glossolalians Palin and Huckabee would prove. 

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen... (George Washington) 

Perhaps it's fortunate that such people are stupid enough to hoist themselves with their own petty petards. You'll recall, and perhaps with a smile, Oklahoma's attempt to thwart the non-existent Islamic takeover by attempting a tin-foil-hat law banning all religious commands -- which in effect banned the Jewish commandments they had been trying to insert into American life, but we can't afford to depend on their congenital stupidity when so much is at stake. And yes, it takes a stupid man to think that somehow Americans would decide to write Sharia or Islamic tribal practices into American law in open defiance of the Constitution or that the tiny percentage of Muslim Americans would somehow magically or accidentally do it by themselves.

The courts have decisively ruled that the establishment and free exercise clauses forbid the federal and state governments to prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion or atheism. The Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an, the Gita, the works of Nietzsche: state or federal government may not adopt any of them as preferable, much less mandatory. But we're a little people, a silly people -- greedy, barbarous, and cruel people, if I might borrow from T.E. Lawrence -- and a cowardly, ignorant, and hateful people as well. "Conservative" legislators continue and will persist in thriving on our traditional sins by inventing threats that must be countered by measures to accelerate our inexorable descent into loserhood. They'll continue to demonize the way their predecessors demonized German, Irish, Italian, Mexican, African, Catholic, Jewish, Chinese, and Indian immigrants, and history will continue to prove them wrong.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

What will it take for Americans to wake up and reform capitalism?

By Carl 

This is what:

Yes, the rich live in a different world. And no, information won't change them. But a revolution will. Revolutions build slowly over a long time. Then, suddenly, a critical mass, a flash point, something totally unexpected ignites the ticking bomb.

It happened recently in a remote Tunisian village. Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old college graduate, unable to pay bribes, set himself on fire to protest police confiscation of his unlicensed vegetable cart. That triggered a revolution. And his death rapidly led to the collapse of a 24-year dictatorship.

Today we have four hot time bombs, tick-ticking, soon to make history; any one can easily accelerate the revolution that's already killing Wall Street from within. 

I'll list them but I urge you to go to Market Watch and read the descriptions in full:

1. Wealth gap: Super-Rich vs class wars, death of democracy
2. Wall Street's doomsday capitalism vs rule by anarchy
3. Pentagon's perpetual war machine vs America's budget time bomb
4. Global population explosion vs resources, jobs, better lifestyles

ANY ONE of those will trigger a mass collapse of the American economy. Any one. All four are in motion already.

You see, the rich really are different. As the article notes, they vacation in elite resorts, they meet at elite clubs, and they manipulate the economy from behind barriers and firewalls that would make Fort Knox blink. 

And they are woefully out of touch with the nations they "reside" in. "Reside" is in quotes because like there are now transnational corporations, there are now transnational people. They may reside in the U.S. or Britain or Switzerland or some small tropical island, but their power and influence and economic activity is so globally pervasive that they can influence far flung regions of the globe.

Prime example? Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who made his media bones in the UK before crossing the Atlantic, and then the Pacific to set up Asia's first pan-national satellite television system.

The rich not only are different from me and you, they don't even care about me and you.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Wishing Blue Jays Major League prospect Darin Mastroianni good luck

By R.K. Barry and Michael J.W. Stickings 

RKB:

I've been a baseball fan for a long time. My first team was the New York Mets and I'm just old enough to have really enjoyed watching the Miracle Mets win the 1969 World Series. I remember it well. Having moved to Toronto many years ago, I've become a serious Blue Jays fan and recall fondly the '92 and '93 Series wins.

A special treat for me this year is that the son of a grade-school friend is competing for a spot with the Blue Jays. His name is Darin Mastroianni and, according to his bio, he's a speedy outfielder who played Double A ball last year and was called up to join the 40-man roster last fall and is now in Florida trying to make the team.

The truth is that his father, Paul, and I knew each other when we were between 5 and 10 years old, then went to different junior high schools before going to the same high school. But by then we didn't know each other anymore and never really reconnected. No matter. I remember Paul well and am very excited for him that his son has a real shot at making it with a major league team -- my team, in fact.

If Darin is half as decent a fellow as his dad, he is fully deserving of whatever success comes his way.

Obviously all of these young men playing in a major league setting have family histories and usually fairly conventional life stories -- with the exception of their prodigious athletic talent. It just seems interesting to have had brief contact with the bloodline of a prospective major leaguer more than 20 years before he was born. Maybe that just means I'm getting old.

Anyway, I'm pulling for Darin and wish him well. It would be a blast to watch him play at the SkyDome this season. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

**********

 

MJWS:

Forget politics. Baseball's back! Spring Training is in full swing, fantasy fanatics such as myself are preparing for upcoming drafts, and, well, it means better weather is coming. And with the full sports package, I can see pretty much every game this year, every game of every team. Awesome. For all the problems with Major League baseball -- revenue and salary inequality between big and small markets, the steroid era, being a Jays fan and having to play in the same division as the Yanks and Sox -- I just love the game.

Like R.K., I was not a Jays fan at first. I grew up in Montreal and loved the Expos. Even after living in New Jersey, near Boston, and then in Toronto, I remained loyal. I went to all the Jays-Expos games here in Toronto whey they played interleague. But when the Expos moved to Washington, that was it. There was no way I was staying with them. And so it made sense to switch to the Jays, and while it's been a tough stretch these past several years since the switch, I'm really excited going into this year.

No, they're not a playoff team, not yet, but they seem to be on the right track under the leadership of GM Alex Anthopoulos. They have a few key veterans, including big-time slugger Jose Bautista, but they're a team of young hopefully-soon-to-be stars, and I have high hopes that they'll make a huge leap in the right direction this year. I'm not sure if Mastroianni will make the team out of Spring Training, but he's one of the bright young players in the system, and, like R.K., I wish him well.

I would just note, sadly, that it's not SkyDome anymore, it's the Rogers Centre. I do wish it were otherwise. And we really do need an old-fashioned baseball-only stadium in this city, preferably down by the water. As for Rogers, one of Canada's main communications companies, owning the team, well, let's just way I do wish that were otherwise too. But we have to take what we can get, and, for now, Rogers does seem willing to let the baseball people run the show. What we need is some salary cap sanity in the league, and that, combined with the strength of the Canadian dollar, would go a long way towards equalizing the playing field with the big spenders.

Now can we play ball already?! I've been waiting all winter for this. 

The internal contradictions of Mike Huckabee

By R.K. Barry 

When former Arkansas Governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee blurted out twice in the same radio interview that President Obama grew up in Kenya, implying that this helped to explain why the president's worldview is supposedly different from most Americans, I immediately thought that something interesting was going on. It was not, however, the obvious point that Obama did not grow up in Kenya and, in fact, only visited there for the first time in his twenties.

No, anyone remotely well-informed knows where Obama grew up (Hawaii and Indonesia), and Mike Huckabee is generally speaking a fairly well-informed person. The question for me was why he would say such a thing.

His claim that he misspoke and meant to say Indonesia rather than Kenya makes no sense if we examine exactly what he said, which was:

But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

As is also well known, President Obama's father abandoned the family early on, so that part of the statement is contrary to fact. But on the claim that Huckabee simply said Kenya when he meant to say Indonesia, it should be noted that the Mau Mau uprising took place in Kenya in the 1950s. In other words, Huckabee didn't misspeak. He meant to say Kenya, and he said Kenya. He was spreading a blatant falsehood to pander to those on the right who continue to believe that Obama has been influenced by un-American ideas or that he was not even born in America.

Now hold that thought.

A short time later, Huckabee decided it would be good to take on the whole idea of single mothers by slamming Oscar winner Natalie Portman for, at least for moment, being in that category. In yet another radio interview, he stated:

People see a Natalie Portman who boasts, "We're not married but we're having these children and they're doing just fine." I think it gives a distorted image. It's unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.

Huckabee then took some heat for his comments from those who think he should mind his own business and then more or less immediately backtracked by claiming that his comments about Natalie Portman's pregnancy were distorted and taken out of context and that he was merely making a point about statistics, not a poke at the Oscar-winning actress's pregnancy before marriage.

But just as in his retracted claim that Obama grew up in Kenya, I suspect that this is all bullshit. I am guessing that Mike Huckabee, should he choose to run for president, is busy sending up flairs to signal to hardcore conservatives everywhere that he is on their side. His efforts to distance himself from his own comments are, I believe, an equally cynical attempt to curry favour with more centrist swing voters who don't have much of an appetite for birtherism or moralizing of the Christian right variety.

Huckabee knows the truth and that's what makes all of this so unseemly. The challenge for any Republican presidential hopeful is going to be to try to square the circle: to be conservative enough to secure the nomination and centrist enough to win the general election. The former governor of Arkansas is hoping that, by speaking out of both sides of his mouth, enough voters will hear what they need to hear to believe that he is their guy.

Could it work? Stranger things have happened.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

Porcupine Tree: "Time Flies"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Porcupine Tree certainly needs no introduction from me.

They may not be all that well-known here in North America, relatively speaking, despite some recent Grammy nominations for "Best Surround Sound Album" (a technical category), but they're perhaps the most accomplished prog rock band of the past 20 years, a band that still dares to make concept albums -- "progressive," yes, but they defy easy categorization.

A few years ago, I blogged about their outstanding ninth album, Fear of a Blank Planet, a dark, gloomy, and deeply empathetic examination of technology, media, and youth.

They released their tenth, The Incident, in 2009. As singer, guitarist, songwriter Steven Wilson explained, "[e]ach song is written in the first person and tries to humanize the detached media reportage" of various "destructive" and "traumatic" incidents.

One of the stand-out songs on the album is "Time Flies." Porcupine Tree is often compared to Pink Floyd (although, to me, no band will ever be even close to the equal of Pink Floyd, except The Beatles), and understandably so (at least with respect to their earlier stuff). The band generally resists the comparison, but this song is thematically a lot like "Time," the Floyd classic from Dark Side, with guitar a lot like Gilmour's on "Dogs," one of the epic pieces on Animals. It's 11:40 on the album, but it was cut down for release as a single, and for a video.

And here is that video. Enjoy. (And if you don't know Porcupine Tree, do yourself a favour and get on it.)

Elephant Dung #21: O'Reilly challenges Palin over entitlements for the poor

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

I'm not sure this was really a sign of the deeper Republican crack-up as much as it was about O'Reilly just being fed up with Palin's platitudinous right-wing bullshit:

It's hard to say why it happened, but all of a sudden Bill O'Reilly decided last night to stop tossing Sarah Palin the usual softball questions and Hannity Jobs she's become accustomed to during her tenure at Fox News. He asked her to finally get specific instead of bloviating in vague generalities about where and how she's achieve the budget cuts she's calling for.

Yes, O'Reilly actually looked compassionate and sane next to Palin, who responded to O'Reilly's comment about how there are "a lot of people on the dole" in Alaska by, predictably, blaming the federal government and calling for more irresponsible environmental misuse ("tap into energy resources").

In the meantime, you have to wonder how much longer Palin is going to enjoy her free ride at Fox. If O'Reilly is toughening up on her, that probably means Roger Ailes is getting close to throwing her to the wolves.

Well, I'm not sure we're there quite yet, but it's abundantly clear that many on the right, and within the GOP, have grown tired of Palin's idiocy, however popular she may remain with the base.

Here, watch and enjoy:

"Human Sexuality" class at Northwestern includes after-class session on BDSM, complete with dildo penetration and orgasm

By Michael J.W. Stickings

No, I'm not kidding:

More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school's popular "Human Sexuality" class.

*****

The optional, non-credit demo followed psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey's sexuality class. Nearly 600 students are in Bailey's class this quarter, and most didn't stick around for the after-class show, which featured four members of Chicago's fetish community describing "BDSM," or bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.

Conservatives like Michelle Malkin are jumping up and down in disgust, but then they're generally opposed to both education and sexuality, so this, to them, was doubly bad. And it was indeed educational:

"I didn't expect to see a live sex show," said Justin Smith, 21, a senior economics and political science major who was in the after-class session. "We were told we were going to have some people talk to us about the fetish world and kink."

Smith said it took him awhile to process what happened, but he doesn't object to the way the material was presented.

"It was for me academic like everything else," he said.

Professor Bailey was hesitant to agree to it but couldn't really "come up with a legitimate reason why students should not be able to watch such a demonstration. Was it obscene? Only if you think such normal aspects of human sexuality are obscene -- and, yes, I mean normal, which fetishes (and female orgasm) very much are, and exhibitionism is hardly a "weird" one. Besides, everyone present was an adult and the whole situation was fully consensual. The woman, Faith Kroll, "said she was not coerced in any way and students were repeatedly warned it was going to get graphic."

I applaud the university for supporting Bailey, the course, liberal education, and academic freedom:

"Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines," said Alan K. Cubbage, vice president for University Relations. "The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge."

I realize that conservatives don't get that -- the advancement of knowledge, that is -- but there is so much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their repressive right-wing ideology.

As for me, I just wonder why I missed out. I don't remember anything like that ever occurring at Tufts. At least not in a classroom.

Elephant Dung #20: Fox News suspends Santorum and Gingrich but not Palin and Huckabee

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

The Huffington Post:

After news broke on Wednesday that Fox News was suspending former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum as a contributor to the network, it didn't take long before the potential presidential contender spoke out on the matter.

Appearing on CNN's "John King USA" the same day, Santorum said the decision to sever ties came after never being asked by anyone at Fox News about his plans for 2012.

According to the network, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who both contribute to the network and are believed to be mulling presidential campaigns, have not been suspended in their roles.

"I don't know why Fox differentiated, whether there's been conversations," he said. "They didn't talk to me and ask me whether I'm running or not. It wasn't something that we had a conversation about. I don't know whether other people have had conversations."

It's not clear why Fox News did what it did, and whether what it did involved playing favourites -- selecting Palin and Huckabee, who will continue to have the network's media platform from which to play politics -- but a wedge seems to have been driven into the potential Republican presidential field, and perhaps into the party itself.

Unless, of course, Fox News knows something we don't, namely, that Santorum and Gingrich are running and Palin and Huckabee aren't, but that seems far-fetched.

For his part, Santorum didn't take any direct shots either at Fox News or at his rivals, but he didn't really have to. He has previously gone after Palin and appears to be trying to out-Palin her (by playing aggressively to her right-wing constituency within the GOP), and in reinforcing his seriousness about (thinking about) running he was able to make his anti-Palin point (that she's in it for the money while he's in it to win) without being petty. In the end, after all, he'd need Palin's support to get anywhere in the primaries, and it hardly behooves him to criticize her more than he already has.

But you can tell he's really irritated.

Will he run or won't he? Wading into the self-aggrandizing bullshit of Newt Gingrich

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Back in January, Newt Gingrich said he'd make a decision on running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination by the end of February. Well, it took him until March 3, but actually he still hasn't decided:

Newt Gingrich said on Thursday he is "seriously" considering a 2012 presidential run and unveiled a website to explore a potential bid for the White House.

"We will look at this very seriously," Gingrich said at the state Capitol as he stood between his wife, Callista, and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.

"We will very methodically lay out the framework of what we'll do next. And we think the key is to have citizens that understand this is going to take a lot of us, for a long time, working together."

His brief comments, part of an eight-minute news conference, were an exercise in carefully chosen words — Gingrich steered clear of the phrase “exploratory committee.”

The former House Speaker is the first major Republican candidate to open such an exploratory effort.

He has created a fundraising committee, Newt Exploratory 2012 – which is different from an “exploratory committee” - to pay for activities like polling, staff and travel as he weighs a presidential campaign and the new website seeks donations. No paperwork has yet been filed by Newt Exploratory 2012 with the Federal Election Commission. He also launched a twitter feed, NewtExplore2012.

Newt this, Newt that. When you deconstruct it all, all you end up with is "self-aggrandizing bullshit." And the joke's on anyone who takes him seriously.

Because nothing has changed, allow me to quote myself from October 2009, when he was also talking about running:

Please. This is what Gingrich always does to keep his name out there, and to maintain his quasi-celebrity status on the national political scene, more with the national media than with the party leadership or base.

He's an attention whore, you see. Whenever he's not getting enough attention, he floats the "I may run for president" bullshit, knowing that the media will lap it up and put him back in the news.

And he doesn't mean it... He won't run, and never will, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he knows he'd lose, badly. He likely wouldn't even make it out of the Republican primaries, where his pompous, self-absorbed windbaggery would put him at a disadvantage against his sucking-up-to-the extremist-base rivals. (Sure, he'd suck up, too, and he's surely an extremist of sorts, but it's hard to see Republican primary voters trusting him.)

He also knows full well that all the old dirt would come out, and a lot more we don't know about yet -- the truth about the character and conviction of Newt Gingrich -- and it's that, one suspects, that motivates any reluctance he might have to re-enter electoral politics, perhaps even more than the fear of losing...

The fact is, Gingrich enjoys a certain status on the national scene. Simply put, he is respected. Some of us find that respect seriously misplaced -- and I wish we'd dispense with the "big thinker" label for a self-aggrandizing partisan who is "big" only relative to the smallness that rules the GOP -- but the media love him, and not just the right-wing kind. And he's not about to give that up by risking the truth coming out, which it would, nor by fighting it out in the GOP gutter only to lose, which he would.

So please. Enough.

And while I'm quoting myself, let me do so again from June 2009, when I wrote about Newt's ridiculous argument that "we are surrounded by paganism":

I'm not sure Newt was being so "Christian" when he was getting blown by his various mistresses (but not, he claimed, committing adultery, because oral sex apparently doesn't count) -- or when he demanded a divorce from his first wife Jackie in her hospital room, where she was recovering from uterine cancer surgery -- or when he refused to pay alimony and child support after their divorce -- etc., etc., etc.

 

All that would come out again, and more. Maybe he's convinced himself that it's his time and that he could actually beat Obama -- highly, highly unlikely -- but I'm not buying it. He can't even bring himself to form an actual exploratory committee, after all, just to set up a website, and thinking "seriously" about something isn't exactly the same as actually doing it. He's not serious about running, just about keeping his name in the news and remaining a key player in the Republican Party, and I suspect we'll learn soon enough that his "framework" is just as full of shit as he is.

Jim DeMint thinks unions are the most powerful political group in the country. Really?

By R.K. Barry

(Let's make DeMint our Craziest Republican of the Day! -- MJWS)

Though I am quite used to Republican politicians saying spectacularly stupid things, there is the occasional comment that strikes me as particularly dim. In this case, it was something recently said by South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint in reference to attempts to bust public-sector unions in Wisconsin. He stated the following: 

The unions are the most powerful political group in the country today... Their power in politics is unprecedented. And without the unions, the Democrat Party fades away. The president is completely dependent for his reelection on the unions, and so are the Democrats. 

It's hard to know which part of this statement is more absurd, that unions are the most powerful political group in the country today or that the Democratic Party would fade away without them.

In a post-Citizens United world where corporate interests can throw piles of money at election campaigns, does anyone think that unions are actually the most powerful player on the partisan stage. Seriously?

Maybe DeMint is just full of shit and he knows it. Or maybe, like a lot of people on the right, he reasons that corporations are just like individuals expressing legitimate and uncoordinated support for candidates. They do not, on this view, share a common interest and should not be considered a political group at all. It's only unions, apparently, whose actions can be classed as organized.

That's the only way his comment can make sense to me. It's bullshit, of course, but not an uncommon view amongst conservatives.

They are an entertaining bunch. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Elephant Dung #19: The Tea Party prefers Charlie Sheen to John Boehner

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Poor Johnny B.

Try as he might, he just can't win -- that is, win over the Tea Party that is now so much an integral part of the GOP. And the radical rightists are placing him squarely in Palin's crosshairs:

A national tea party group is in revolt against House Speaker John Boehner and wants to see him defeated in a 2012 primary, arguing that he looks "like a fool" in the debate over spending cuts and makes less sense than actor Charlie Sheen.

"You look like a fool," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in a post on the group's website, directing his message at the Ohio Republican. "Charlie Sheen is now making more sense than John Boehner."

Ouch. That's like saying you have less musical talent than J-Lo. (Yes, American Idol reference. I went there. I'm not watching this year -- why, without Simon? -- but I did catch her new video on last night's show. "This is the worst song ever," said The Reactionette. Hyperbole, to be sure, but only slight. "That was terrible. Just awful." Agreed.)

Boehner "did not get the message" from the tea party movement demanding big cuts to federal spending, Phillips said, and "the honeymoon is over." The movement should respond, he said, by finding "a candidate to run against John Boehner in 2012 and should set as a goal, to defeat in a primary, the sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives."

Right, because Boehner is all-powerful and can therefore make it all happen, even with a Democratic Senate and president. Not that I wish to defend him, but he's reasonable and sane compared to the Tea Party, which largely sits on the sidelines spouting ideological extremism, and attacking sinners while seeking to cleanse the Republican Party of the ideologically inadequate, while legislators like Boehner are forced to work within the parameters of a democratically-elected legislature, that is, to seek compromise to get anything done.

The Tea Party completely misunderstood last year's midterm election results, just as it misunderstands politics generally, and expected right-wing revolution right away. But revolution was never to be, and not just because of Boehner. It's not just extremism but delusional ignorance that drives the Tea Party.

The Republican right, the party's new mainstream, has taken over. It's pulling the party further and further to the right, away from its former establishment, and it's purging the party ranks of those who aren't sufficiently right-wing, who aren't ideologically acceptable to the new Bolsheviks. Among its many targets are some of the most reputable members of the party, including those with long careers advancing conservative causes, like Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. We can now add Boehner to the list, a long-time loyal partisan who's been speaker for just two months.

And Democrats, of course, are salivating.

Huckabee on the carpet

By Capt. Fogg

British comedian Ricky Gervais recently put together a short TV comedy series, An Idiot Abroad -- seven episodes indulging his obvious schadenfreude by making his "friend" and reputed moron Carl Pilkington miserable despite having been being sent to visit some wonderful places. It had the effect of annoying me since Pilkington, who isn't quite the idiot Gervais says he is, seems rather to be a nice and decent sort of fellow and deserved better treatment, even if that would undermine the premise of the show.

I don't feel quite the same way about Likable Mike Huckabee, affable and avuncular and sincere though he may seem. It's as hard to feel sympathy for one whose idiocy seems more purposeful and politically founded than genetic, although that may be a factor too. I'm not just talking about his shameless promotion of Bronze age ignorance and mythology and the snickering denigration of science. I'm not just talking about promoting the invasion of Libya and thus cementing the authority of Qaddafi, making us appear imperialistic and escalating the debt and putting a strain on our military capability. I'm talking abut his attempt to enlist a far more scurrilous bit of political mythology than "creation science" to promote his grotesque candidacy by telling us our president grew up in Africa and so really doesn't either understand us or have our interests at heart.

It's not just the racism. I'm used to racism. It's that the possibility of his candidacy rests on building and arming an insurgency of idiots who neither know or care about reality. It's like inviting the Klan to use your back yard for a rally and claiming you're above that sort of thing yourself.

It's not that he's black, you see -- it's just that you can't trust someone with the troubling attribute of being dark skinned. Smiling Mike surely knows that Barack Obama lived in Indonesia as a small boy but wasn't born in and didn't live in any part of Africa. He knows he was born in the USA as surely as Bruce Springsteen was and Mike Huckabee was and grew up in the American Midwest and was raised by his white relatives. So if he does know that and chooses none the less to have you believe otherwise, he's a liar willing to use lies to get elected. If he doesn't know that, he's an idiot to the degree that he shouldn't be given a more responsible or well paid position than a men's room attendant.

Huckabee shouldn't be trusted with leading a Boy Scout troop, much less the United States. He represents, despite his smiling, self-effacing sincerity, the lower skirt of the intellectual as well as the moral decency bell curve, no matter how you measure it.

Yes, professional fixer and HuckPAC Executive Director J. Hogan Gidley says Huckabee "simply misspoke" during his book tour, which is as convincing as saying the dog didn't crap on the carpet, but simply misshit. It only means he's not toilet trained, can't be trusted and we surely don't want him on the expensive rug in the oval office.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

U.S. military fucks up in Afghanistan, killing children, strengthening Taliban

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Times:

Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.

The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.

The NATO statement, which included an unusual personal apology by the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the boys had been misidentified as the attackers of a NATO base earlier in the day. News of the attack enraged Afghans and led to an anti-American demonstration on Wednesday in the village of Nanglam, where the boys were from.

Something tells me the personal apology from Petraeus isn't going to help much. As Comrade Misfit puts it, "[n]o matter how many clinics NATO sets up or how many schools are opened, the relatives of the dead children aren't going to be in a forgiving mood."

And neither, of course, will the Taliban, which only gets stronger each and every time the U.S. (and NATO) fucks up like this. As Andrew Sullivan puts it:

Of course this was a mistake. But it reinforces the human toll of fighting an insurgency you often cannot see in a region you cannot fully control where insurgents and civilians are often interchangeable. At some point, the inevitability of this kind of civilian death makes one reassess the justness of this long, long war -- and the chances of "success" whatever that now means.

Can you imagine how we would feel if nine American boys were slaughtered from the air by an occupying power? Does anyone think this kind of mistake -- inevitable in such a war zone -- can do anything but help the insurgency?

Maybe it was inevitable, maybe it wasn't. But the fact that it happened, along with the inevitable anti-American response from justifiably angry Afghans, reveals a great deal about a war that has turned into a quagmire of failure.

Americans would never put up with this. Why should we expect the Afghans to?

Buddy Roemer, baby! The incredible 2012 Republican presidential field is about to get a whole lot more incredible!

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Romney... and Pawlenty... and maybe Gingrich... and maybe Santorum... and maybe, oh, uh... Barbour... and, er, oh... Huckabee possibly... and maybe Giuliani... and, um, Karger, can't forget Karger... and, well, Daniels... and Huntsman, you never know... and Paul, Ron Paul, CPAC star... and The Donald... Trump, that is... and, of course, Palin... or not.

Is that about it? For the big names (Karger excluded), yes, though I highly doubt Barbour will run and I'm highly skeptical Gingrich is serious and even Giuliani isn't that delusional, right? Karger's a gay rights activist and hardly anyone knows who he is, Huckabee's got some right-wing cred but seems less interested than four years ago, and Daniels and Huntsman, the latter Obama's ambassador to China, are just way too reasonable for the GOP, however solidly conservative they may be. Ron Paul has the crazy libertarians behind him, but he's way too anti-establishment, and Trump is a loud-mouthed buffoon who can get a lot of press but who would never win (and will never run -- this is all about generating buzz). And, as for Palin... please. She's tantalizing us, but there's no way she gives up her cushy, absolutely-no-responsibility position as brightest Republican star for what would be an utter disaster, unless she really believes in her own "god"-given greatness and decides that she's an unstoppable force. Which is possible, I admit.

Anyway, what are Republicans to do? Well, maybe they can look to Louisiana.

To Gov. Bobby Jindal, an Indian-American who's relatively sane for the GOP? Er, no.

To Ex-Gov. Buddy Roemer. Who? Exactly.

The GOP's white-bread presidential primary is about to get a dash of Tabasco.

Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer will announce Thursday in Baton Rouge that he is forming an exploratory committee, he told POLITICO.

"I should be president or somebody better than I should be," Roemer said in an interview. "And the only way to make sure of that is to make [my opponents] go around me, through me or over me in the primaries."

First, through him or over him? For some reason I don't see that as a huge challenge.

Second, somebody better than him? It's a pretty crappy (potential) field, but he's not exactly a superstar. (And he was actually a Democrat until he switched during his one term as governor.)

And third -- to Politico -- "a dash of Tabasco"? No, he's pretty darn white. Saying that he'd bring some Tabasco (i.e., flavour, or maybe even colour) to the field, because he's from Louisiana, is just plain stupid.

The only possible major contender -- so I'm not counting Tea Party fave Herman Cain -- who isn't as white as they come is Giuliani, who presumably would bring some much-needed arrabbiata to an otherwise bland and largely tasteless Republican primary.

The chill in the air

By Carl 

Yesterday, the SCOTUS made one of the single biggest boneheaded decisions from a court full of them (Citizens United, anyone?): 

The Westboro Baptist church were sued for emotional distress by the family of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, after members of the church picketed his funeral with signs that read: "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "You're Going to Hell".

But the US Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against the family and said that the church was entitled to protest under the Constitution's First Amendment, the right to free speech. 

In those two paragraphs are all you need to know to understand the dire predicament the right to privacy is facing in the United States with the Roberts court. There can be no more private moment in a person's life than the moment at which the friends and family gather together to say goodbye, to mourn the loss of a human life.

Yes, free speech is important and should be encouraged at all times, but the right of an American to be free to be where he wants, to do what he wants (within the boundaries of the law) and to be left alone trumps the sole right to shout obscenities, 3 to 1.

This ruling has implications beyond that of some rude speech by evil people. Privacy and the right to it is on shaky legal ground in a strict constuctionist court. See, it's not in the original Constitution per se. Yes, freedom from undue search and seizure, and stuff like that, all point to a Constitutional basis for a right to privacy, but the right is not delineated in the document, and according to the children on the right who act like demented fifth grade crossing guards, it cannot possibly exist.

This means sodomy laws can and will be enforced. Abortion can and will be under dire assault nationwide. It means fifty separate lawsuits defining what consenting adults may or may not do behind closed doors (the case that brought about the implied right to privacy, Griswold v. Connecticut, was about the use of contraception... contraception!... by a married couple).

The Roberts court has opened the barn door on all the horses now, guaranteeing itself a long run as arbiter of America's moral code.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Democrats push for recall of Republican state senators in Wisconsin

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Greg Sargent:

The Wisconsin Democratic Party has decided to throw its weight behind a nascent grassroots drive to recall a number of GOP state senators, a move that will considerably increase the pressure on them to break with Governor Scott Walker, the Dem party chair confirms to me.

"The proposals and the policies that Republicans are pushing right now are not what they campaigned on, and they're extreme," the party chair, Mike Tate, said in an interview. "Something needs to be done about it now. We're happy to stand with citizens who are filling papers to recall these senators."

Previously, Wisconsin Dems had not publicly supported talk about recalling GOP Senators, in hopes of privately reaching a negotiated solution to the crisis. The Wisconsin Democratic Party's decision to support the recall drives represents a significant ratcheting up of hostilities and in essence signals that all bets are off.

You know what's great about this? For once, Democrats aren't putting up with Republicans' shit, with their efforts to implement an extremist right-wing agenda that voters strongly oppose (and only support when the GOP's propaganda, pushed through a willing media establishment, screws with their heads).

And also, for once, Democrats are actually winning the issue and driving the narrative, sending Republicans into fits of defensive desperation.

Feels good, doesn't it?

Taxing the super rich like it's 1959

By R.K. Barry

Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labour in the Clinton Administration from 1993 to 1997, has a very interesting blog on the current state of affairs that contains any number of useful observations. 

I recently came across one of his posts, which laid out some rather compelling facts about the grossly uneven distribution of wealth in America and how it is that we have come to be in a situation where we can't pay for the things that any civilized society really should be able to fund.

No great surprise, but nearly everyone in America has bought into the idea that we need to radically reduce expenditures rather than give any thought at all to increasing revenues through taxation, specifically by taxing those who can most afford it – the super rich.

We have heard this before, but the numbers, as I say, are compelling.

I do recommend that you read Reich's post in its entirety, but here are a few interesting bits:

Today's typical 30-year old male (if he has a job) is earning the same as a 30-year old male earned three decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

The bottom 90 percent of Americans now earn, on average, only about $280 more per year than they did 30 years ago. That's less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. Families are doing somewhat better but that's only because so many families have to rely on two incomes.

This may not sound catastrophic, but, and here's the rub, the American economy is more than twice as large now as it was thirty years ago. So, Reich asks, where does all the money go? And the obvious answer is: to the top:

The richest 1 percent's share of national wealth has doubled – from around 9 percent in 1977 to over 20 percent now. The richest one-tenth of 1 percent's share has tripled. The 150,000 households that comprise the top one-tenth of 1 percent now earn as much as the bottom 120 million put together.

In so many ways, I have to say that I don't care what one's politics are. This is just wrong. 

But you might think that with the economy growing so rapidly over the past 30 years, those benefiting the most would be called upon to kick in a bit more. You would be wrong. The power of the super rich has been such that they have been able to make just the opposite happen:

From the 1940s until 1980, the tax rate on the highest earners in America was 70 percent or higher. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent.

Under Ronald Reagan the top rate dropped to 28 percent. Under Bill Clinton it rose to 39 percent and then under George W. Bush dropped to 36 percent (which is, of course, where the Republicans want to keep it).

Reich goes on to talk about big slashes to estate taxes and capital gains taxes, but you get the picture.

To add insult to injury, Reich makes the point that even before the current economic downturn the middle class's share of the nation's total income had shrunk while their tax burden had grown as they paid bigger chunks of their income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than they did before.

A lot of right wingers want to talk about common sense. Well, it makes no sense to me that public services and programs that the middle class and poorer Americans count on are poised to get the axe while this gross, and relatively new, uneven distribution of wealth in America does incredible damage to the fabric of the country.

The obvious point that Reich makes is that we need to hike taxes on the super rich -- not that this is going to happen any time soon.

No, we are going to continue to vilify public sector employers and big government in general. We are going to let big money buy all the means of mass communication and politicians it needs to convince everyone that what we really need is smaller government, which is just another way of saying that people, a growing number of people, will simply have to do without what they need to live a decent life.

A more equitable scheme of taxation would go a long way to solving the problems we are told can only be solved by massive cuts, but that would simply seem to make too much sense.

I'll give Professor Reich the last word:

Do this and we can afford to do what we need to do as a nation. Do this and you prevent setting the middle class against itself. Do this and you restore some balance to a distribution of income and wealth that's now dangerously out of whack.

Amen.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)