Month: October 2011

On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive. This has led to a kind of frustration.

Bill Daley, White House Chief of Staff. This is why they fail.
Anyone, and I mean anyone who holds this opinion, much less speaks of it to a journalist of any stripe, should resign immediately or have been fired long ago. You think this is frustrating Bill? You think “your” side is equally to blame? Then go the fuck home. You are part of the problem and we’ll get nothing truly worthwhile done until everyone who thinks like you has long since left the scene.
Source: tnr.com

Yeah, I’ve drank bathtubs full of hooch, but I never craved it. I didn’t drink because I was depressed or anything. I used it because funny things tended to develop when I was drinking. It took me a while to see how repetitive it is, how people do and say the same things at a bar. Now, maybe I’ll have a drink, maybe a beer once a month at the most, when me and Dian go out.

I had a strange relationship with the bottle. I never met anyone who drank as often as I did, but who did it purely for recreation. To me, going to the bar was like going to the circus every day.

Pete Dexter, journalist, novelist, writer, and former circus aficionado on his relationship to hooch and hooch purveyors.

Dear NPR,

Compare and contrast Jonathan Chait’s approach to Paul Ryan’s fantasyworld with dread Liberal Mouthpiece NPR’s view from nowhere approach in which Ryan is simply allowed to say whatever he wants, without challenge or even follow up of any kind.

Day by day, hour by hour, brick by brick NPR is building its own tomb. Once they’ve chased off all thinking individuals from their “coverage,” a defunding move by the GOP will be a non-event. NPR has vastly higher listenership than FOXnews and still, occasionally, reports facts. Therefore NPR must cease to exist. This is who they are. This is what they do. They want to destroy you, NPR, and you are going out of your way to help.

Dear NPR,

…this is the way the right goes after everyone who stands in their way: accuse them of everything, no matter how implausible or contradictory the accusations are. Progressives are atheistic socialists who want to impose Sharia law. Class warfare is evil; also, John Kerry is too rich. And so on.

Paul Krugman, sole member of the mainstream media who seems to understand this simple concept.
Source: The New York Times

Compare and contrast with this exchange on NPR yesterday (emphasis added):

[NPR’s Melissa] BLOCK: Let’s move on to the budget questions that are pending here. You sent a rather lengthy letter to the Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about a month ago, making the case for the Marine Corps in a time of, what you called, considerable fiscal austerity. And the message to Secretary Panetta seemed to be, as you’re slicing an ever small, an ever shrinking pie, protect us, protect the Marines. I wonder if this becomes a battle essentially among the service branches of who is most worthy. And if that is the battle, what’s the case from the Marines?

[Marine Corps Commandant General James] AMOS: Well, I think in anybody budget crisis – when you’ve got multiple services – in some cases, it can relegate into roles or missions. In other words, what’s the role of this service, the mission of this service? I think it can happen that way. And if you’re not careful, it can break out probably the worst of behavior.

So, what I was really trying to say is that as we come down and reduce capabilities and capacity in our nation, one of the ways that you can – and you assume a level of risk when you do that. You know, we’re going from what we are down to something less. When that happens, how do you mitigate the risk?

Indeed, it’s going to take a lot of risk mitigation to even begin thinking about some smallish cuts to this budget. And but also: this is what they call a “budget crisis” and “considerable financial austerity.”

Source: ilovecharts

You have a one-half of one-percent surtax on the 1,000,0001th dollar – in other words it doesn’t affect anybody who makes $999,000, it doesn’t affect anybody making $999,999 – and if you want to find the guy who make $1,000,0001, it only affects that $1. That’s the only thing the rate goes up on. If you make $1.1 million, and god-willing this passes, you would pay next year, $500 more in taxes. […] I say to the American people: watch your senator. Watch him or her choose: Are you going to put 400,000 school teachers back in classrooms; are you going to put 18,000 cops back on the street, and 7,000 firefighters back into firehouses? OR are you going to save people with average income over $1 million a one-half of one-percent increase in tax on every dollar they make over a million.

Joe Biden and every other Democrat in Washington DC should’ve been talking like this since day one. But now is as good a time to start as any. More please.
Source: tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com

Wash it Off

CNN’s Piers MORGAN: let’s talk about homosexuality because — and is that wrong? Do you think it’s a sin?
GOP Presidential Hopeful Herman CAIN: I think it’s a sin because of my biblical beliefs and although people don’t agree with me, I happen to think that it is a choice.
MORGAN: You believe that?
CAIN: I believe that.
MORGAN: You believe people — seriously, you think people get to a certain age and go, I think I want to be homosexual?
CAIN: Let me turn it around to you. What does science show? You show me evidence other than opinion and you might cause me to reconsider that. […Crosstalk…] Where is the — where is evidence?
MORGAN: Just common — you’re a commonsense guy.
CAIN: Are you a common sense kind of guy? […]
MORGAN: Wait a minute, let me ask you. You genuinely believe millions of Americans wake up in their late teens normally and go, you know what, I quite fancy being a homosexual? You don’t believe that.
CAIN: Piers.
MORGAN: Do you?
CAIN: You haven’t given me any evidence to convince me otherwise nor has anyone else. […]
MORGAN: It would be like a gay person saying, Herman, you made a choice to be black.
CAIN: We know that’s not the case. I was born black.
MORGAN: Yes, maybe if they said that, you would find it offensive.
CAIN: Piers, this doesn’t wash off. I hate to burst your bubble.
Lemkin: The MSM eternally believes that the GOP field doesn’t actually believe any of this stuff. Inevitably, when they bother to probe what they assume is just bluster and/or red meat for the far right, they are shocked, SHOCKED to find that, yep, they all actually believe and plan to act on all this stuff and more. You’d think that on the 4 millionth occasion of this sort Serious People would start to see a pattern and begin to report on it accordingly. Herman Cain believes the gays should just wash it off and join “proper,” Herman Cain’s Christian God-fearing society. Perhaps this sort of incredibly unpopular, far right opinion both imparts important information about his dedication to personal liberty (that the GOP spends so very much time talking about but zero time actually implementing for anyone in the 99%) and furthermore speaks to how he’d govern on a host of similar wedge issues. A version of this country with a functioning media would be a very different place indeed.

Americans are hurting across this country, and the president’s out there campaigning. Why isn’t he governing? He doesn’t — he doesn’t have a jobs plan even now.

Mitt Romney, who must be referring to the fact that the GOP minority in the Senate has already filibustered said “jobs bill” to death and plans to filibuster its pieces to death as well. That pretty much means “Obama has no jobs bill,” right? After all, it’s been uniformly reported as “Democrats fail to pass…” and “Obama jobs bill fails” and never, ever the decidedly shrill “GOP blocks…” or even “Republicans outmaneuver Democrats on jobs…”
Note to Anderson Cooper: this is precisely the sort of thing you might mention next time it comes up in a debate amongst the folks vying for the Republican nomination for President of these United States. To quote some future Sam Jackson movie: “You the moderator? Then moderate, motherfucker.” Or we’ll just let Watson do it the next time. Frankly, I don’t see how Our Computational Overlord could do any worse.

Does that mean that you would raise taxes on the 47 percent of Americans who currently don’t pay taxes?

Anderson Cooper, buying into the entirely wrong, entirely Tea Klan promulgated notion that about half of Americans pay no taxes.
Anderson, and everyone else, everyone, every single adult citizen pays federal taxes in this country or they are breaking the law. Even this 47% to which you refer still pays payroll taxes related to Social Security, Medicare, and etc… if they are employed. However, they may well earn too little money to exceed the standard individual/married filing jointly deduction. Thus, they effectively pay no federal income tax. They do, however, still pay all the rest of it. Period. They do, however, still pay state and local taxes. Period. In any meaningful case: This adds up to a lot more than one dollar (which was Bachmann’s suggested “solution” to the “issue”). But that’s all too boring or too partisan to mention, apparently.
In a functioning society, the media individual selected to mediate this event might just see fit to mention this. Worth noting that, in our society, that sort of thing never, ever happens, and this tax thing is but one of literally hundreds of such opportunities for meaningful intervention in last night’s debate. The level of foreign aid, the current funding totals for defense (with regard to the suggested cut), the real impact of immigration on the economy of this country, foreclosures, and on and on and on.
And so the Republic crumbles.