Years ago I remember a lot of moderate liberals talking about how the Bush era radicalized them. For me, it was the economic collapse of 2008 that did it. The financial industry almost literally came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the world, but even so it took only a few short months for them to close ranks with Republicans and the rich to prevent anything serious being done to rein them in. Profits are back up, new regulations are barely more than window dressing, nothing was done to help underwater homeowners, bonuses are as obscene as ever, unemployment remains sky high, and the public has somehow been convinced that this was all their own fault — or perhaps the fault of big government, or big deficits, or something. But the finance industry has escaped almost entirely unscathed. It’s mind boggling. If this doesn’t change your view of who really runs the world, I don’t know what would.
Month: March 2011
On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.
The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?
E.J. Dionne, remaining blissfully unaware of The Third Thing.
Seriously, I’d enjoy living in the dimension inhabited by Our Beltway Punditocracy. Must be really nice in there.
Newsflash, E.J., if Obama came out to the Rose Garden this PM in favor of cutting the non-military discretionary budget to $0, the GOP would immediately balk and say it’s not enough. Just how is he supposed to get involved in a “debate” on those terms? Furthermore, such a step would still not solve the budgetary issues the GOP claims to be so very concerned about. For that, we’d need the thing of which nobody speaks: revenue.
That the GOP systematically and categorically ignores revenue proves that they are not serious about deficits. Never have been. Never will be. You’d think a serious person would start to pick up on this at some point.
But, far be it from me to talk. I’m shrill and out here on drugs with the rest of the pajama wearing naysayers who know nothing of your dimension and its needs.
Seriously, I’d enjoy living in the dimension inhabited by Our Beltway Punditocracy. Must be really nice in there.
Newsflash, E.J., if Obama came out to the Rose Garden this PM in favor of cutting the non-military discretionary budget to $0, the GOP would immediately balk and say it’s not enough. Just how is he supposed to get involved in a “debate” on those terms? Furthermore, such a step would still not solve the budgetary issues the GOP claims to be so very concerned about. For that, we’d need the thing of which nobody speaks: revenue.
That the GOP systematically and categorically ignores revenue proves that they are not serious about deficits. Never have been. Never will be. You’d think a serious person would start to pick up on this at some point.
But, far be it from me to talk. I’m shrill and out here on drugs with the rest of the pajama wearing naysayers who know nothing of your dimension and its needs.
We’re gonna kick their ass.
House Speaker John Boehner, in comments to his caucus.
Gonna?
Gonna?
There Is No Third Thing
Ezra Klein, on the tepid reaction to the President’s energy policy:
This brings up one of the toughest questions in punditry: What is the right thing for the president to do on an issue that’s 1) morally urgent and 2) absolutely dead on arrival in Congress?
He forgets one thing:
3) and which his political opposition will be allowed to argue both sides of?
Libya is only the latest example, but there are many, many others. As soon as the President is for it, the GOP is categorically and irrevocably against it regardless of where they stood in the millisecond before Obama made a decision. This is how Obama went from “dangerously disengaged” or “timid” on Libya and missing his big chance to remake the region to dangerously over-aggressive and missing his big chance for peace in our time in the course of approximately 36 hours.
This is precisely why Obama needs to start inveighing against the perils of windpower, the tyranny of train-based transportation, and making demands that every US citizen above the age of 14 be required to carry at least one gun with its safety off at all times.
I’m only half-joking here. Any rational policy decision will have to be couched in, at best, seeming disinterest on the part of Obama. And this is why many issues are currently hung with the “why isn’t Obama saying anything about…” rubric. Once he takes up a position, even if it is the GOP position, you’re going to face instant and intransigent opposition to whatever Obama says. Even if they were the ones promoting it yesterday. On really sticky issues like Libya, you’ll have the Serious Person dream situation: categorical GOP opposition coupled with strong attacks “from the President’s left.” And just how it’s possible to be “to the left” of a radical socialist community organizer is left as an exercise for the student, as these are questions that the MSM simply will not ask. Shrill.
Progressives angry that their pet issue isn’t receiving enough facetime from Obama should frankly count their lucky stars. Once he weighs in, your issue is over. It is only in the face of Presidential disinterest that even incremental policy progress can actually be made in this environment.
Until such time as the GOP gets significant push-back on this form of rampant and entirely political flip-floppery, it will remain the only game in town. Since such push-back would require research and preparation on the part of the MSM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That this cycle happens to be a game that is measurably and inexorably killing the country is yet another of those facts that do not matter.
The lyrics, a first-person narrative, appear to relate the story of a man pleading with a woman to let him in her house; the speaker calls himself “Papa McTell” in the first stanza (“Have you got the nerve to drive Papa McTell from your door?”). Throughout the song, the woman, addressed as “mama,” is alternately pleaded with (to go with the speaker “up the country”) and threatened (“When I leave this time, pretty mama, I’m going away to stay”). Throughout the non-linear narrative, the “Statesboro blues” are invoked—an unexplained condition from which the speaker and his entire family seem to be suffering.
McDonald’s Oatmeal
You knew it had to be bad, but this bad? Bittman on McOats:
A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”
[…]
Incredibly, the McDonald’s [oatmeal] contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)
Read the whole thing; Bittman really hits it out of the park on the perception of simplicity, speed, and “cheap” calories. I particularly enjoy knowing that cream “contains seven ingredients, [only] two of them actual dairy.”
Cokie’s Law in Action
FOXnews VP Bill Sammon was caught on tape making a rather unfortunate admission on a conservative cruise:
At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.
Then, later, walking back this statement:
[Obama’s supposed “advocating” of socialism] was a main point of discussion on all the channels, in all the media [and by 2009 I was] astonished by how the needle had moved.
You (or your proxies) go on television, you knowingly lie repeatedly, your entire network repeats said lie knowingly and with malice aforethought, on all programs 24/7, then you proclaim yourself astonished that some number of people have picked up the lie and repeated it themselves (whether knowingly or unknowingly is now immaterial; congratulations, you have successfully propagated the meme).
Now, of course, because of the ironclad rules of Cokie’s Law, you simply continue to repeat and repeat and repeat the lie you know is a lie (because you were complicit in its genesis) now with the “it’s out there, we have to report it” fig leaf. And the rest of the MSM steadfastly defends you as an accurate, respectable news source despite all evidence to the contrary. I guess that concept is “out there” too.
The only imaginable reason that Donald Trump would release this obviously unofficial birth certificate is that he is and always has been a secret terrorist anchor baby with malevolent intent towards Our Republic. That he is so brazen in his efforts to overthrow the proper Christian monarchy of the United States is only further proof of his complicity in the global islamofascist movement that is hell bent on instituting Sharia law in those vanishingly few districts of America not already under its inescapable yoke. There is simply no other rational explanation for this. Dark days for America, as Trump is plainly here to restore the caliphate.
Your Federal Tax Receipt
This should be an automatic part of every single tax return. In fact, tax returns should be so simple that they can be entirely collected by employers with no further action on the part of the vast majority of taxpayers and then said receipt arrives in the form of a post card with your information, where the money is going, and basic information on how to proceed if you think the card’s data is wrong.
Naturally, it is in Congress’ interest to keep tax returns complex (the better to use internecine complexities such that they can make what appear to be juicy carve-outs for all parties) and in the GOP’s interest to maximize both the overall sense of taxpayer outrage at the difficulty and ridiculousness of it all, all the better to play their “ya done got robbed of your money, and for what?” broken record.
Amazon Women of the Modo
Holy Lord is Alex Pareene’s Salon piece required reading:
Was President Obama “henpecked” into waging war on Libya by his “Amazon warrior” female advisors? Only if you’re shocked by the thought of women in positions of power actually asserting their power. It also helps if you consider skepticism of military engagement to be inherently “feminine” and think that getting convinced of something by a woman is in and of itself emasculating. And if you’re Maureen Dowd you repeat all that stupid, backward cant, because you’re the hard-charging award-winning New York Times columnist with the most retrograde conception of gender relations this side of Hays Code-era Hollywood.
Dowd’s first paragraph is simply a list of clichéd terms for war-making women. In the rest of the column she purports to be simply compelled by the media attention paid to the role of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton in planning the Libyan campaign, but she is actually just reveling in the opportunity to call a Democratic male politician an effete weakling surrounded, as always, by ball-breaking bitches […]. There is little daylight between her “position” on the matter and Rush Limbaugh’s, except that Rush is at least honest enough not to cloak his chauvinism in the trappings of irony.
All I have to say to that is: more please.
Lemkin 