Say Hello to the Woodman

Robert Lauder: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Woody Allen: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful.

Because the boundaries of political debate in Washington are also the horizons of the discussion on “Washington Week,” the show has no grace, mystery, edge or dissonant voice. What if the system is broken, the political elite is failing the country, accountability is a mirage and the game is a farce run by well-educated people who manipulate the symbols of the republic? Whenever those things are true, “Washington Week” becomes a lie.

Jay Rosen. Don’t mince words, Jay, tell us what you really think. Oh, and: yep.

That was surreal. Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.

Maybe I shouldn’t be president, but [McCain] definitely shouldn’t be.

Barack Obama, as reported by Jonathan Alter, reacting to the pre-election meeting with Hank Paulson, McCain, various members of Congress, and then-president Bush

Oil’s Darkside

It was not a mistake. The response to Katrina was not a mistake, and neither was the lack of an acoustic switch on the wellhead that could have shut down the flow when the platform was lost:

Cheney’s energy task force – the secretive one that he wouldn’t say much about publicly – that decided that the [acoustic] switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry

$500,000 was “too much of a burden” on an industry receiving $36.5 BILLION in government subsidies over and above any historic profits they just might be reaping. BILLION. With a “B”. Versus $500 THOUSAND. I’m willing to bet that Halliburton’s compensation committee gives bonuses in excess of the cost of said acoustic switch that wasn’t there to stop the oil spill that occured when they fucked up the bore cementing job they were down there doing. Poorly, in all likelihood.
In 2009, Halliburton’s CEO received $12.4M, a stunning reduction of 20%. One wonders how he gets by. The no-doubt struggling compensation committee awarded him, him, as in just him ALONE, a bonus of $8.1M. By my count, that’s 16.2 acoustic switches without even touching his regular pay. This, however, is an unsustainable burden on the oil industry, which Halliburton isn’t even directly involved with (in terms of directing exploration, drilling, and refining).
Worth noting that there are, as of April 2010 56 licensed and operating oil platforms that the US has purview over. FIFTY SIX. It would cost $2.8M to outfit THEM ALL. $36.5 BILLION in direct government subsidies to the oil industry before any profits are even estimated, but, according to Dick Cheney, $2.8M is too great a price to pay.

By all means, blame it on Obama. His fault all the way.

Not a Mistake

southpol:

“Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama’s “Katrina.” But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster..”

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology

(via ryking)

Also worth noting that the debacle of a Katrina “response” detailed in this quote was not a mistake. It was the logical extension of “Go Die in the Streets,” the mantra by which all GOP decisions were (and are) currently made.
It was only the palpable and forceful public revulsion at this reasoned choice that both mandated and resulted in the spasmodic, utterly demeaning to US self-image non-response that came after (heckuva job, Brownie). And it was only the torrent of fury to that response that finally, finally elicited something approaching competence and problem-solving from the administration.

The board of Transocean Ltd., owner of the drilling rig where 11 workers died last month, eliminated executive bonuses last year over concerns about the company’s safety practices

Rebecca Smith and Ben Casselman. Holy fucking shit that platform must have been a floating abattoir along the lines of the Saw movies. I mean, Christ, tinkering with executive compensation like this is just so barbaric.

Four Things

The way I see it, this graph boils down to four things:

  1. Perceived level of understanding is a dangerous thing. But then, we knew this.
  2. Self-identifying independents of 1993 were largely moderates. Today, they are (apparently) the far right that finds the GOP not-quite-lunatic-enough and (probably) some fraction of former GOPers who are horrified by that party today. A “voted-X in last election” cross-tab would’ve helped here. A lot.
  3. The epistemic loop seems entirely responsible for the shift in initial wrong-ness, and misperception among Democrats that also has to be corrected through painstakingly slow re-education and gradual convincing. Lots of Democrats were buying into the Death Panels horse-shit too, after all, they heard it on the news, so the news-givers must be making at least a casual effort at factual correctness instead of merely reporting what various “sides” said. Right? Right? It is a mortal lock that these Democrats are older, and came of age with Walter Cronkite. They implicitly trust what they hear on TV, even if it’s on FOXnews. You can (eventually) convince them otherwise, but only with a lot of work; and research shows they still marginally believe the wrong fact if it comes first, even when said people realize the initial fact is misinformation. This is why primacy in the race to inoculation in the messaging war matters so goddamned much, and yet the Democrat categorically refuses to use it.
    Nearly 80% of Republicans self-identifying as “not knowing much” about healthcare reform knew that there were going to be Death Panels. More than 80% who “knew a lot” thought that as well. This is FOXnews, Rush, Beck, and Drudge (aka the MSM’s assignment editor). No other explanation for it.
  4. The Facts Do Not Matter

Full report (PDF link) here.

Playing into their hands

The fecklessness of the Democrat never ceases to amaze. Ezra Klein notes that

Pages 8 through 18 [of the Democratic Proposal on Immigration Reform] are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.”

Look, the merits of this sort of thing are totally beside the point. Please recall: the facts do not matter. You’ve got the right wing epistemic loop working overtime on every manner of perceived plot, up to and including forced implantation of identifying microchips. The fact that GOPers are themselves (and themselves alone) proposing the forced implantation of microchips…into immigrants? Beside the point. (The facts do not matter) Here we have the death panels, and they’re about to track each and every man woman and child in these United States.

This gift on the part of the Democrat only serves to confirm the wildest fears of the far-right conspiracy nuts, whilst also giving ample cover for your garden variety, non-far-right pol to speak in whistle-tongue about this sort of utter lunacy, thus sweeping up the merely right wing along with the birthers and the rest of the lunatic fringe into one neat package. Apparently it’s considered a shrill move to try to splinter that particular block.

Expect plenty of “definitive proof that Obama is the antichrist” rhetoric as soon as this hits the fan. Maybe even on the floor of the House and/or Senate. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oilbama

Krugman makes predictions on just how it is that Obama will be blamed for the oil platform explosion and subsequent mess:

Will it be claims that liberals and/or scientific conspirators sabotaged the rig, to undermine good Americans who want to drillheredrillnow? (Michael Crichton already wrote that novel).

Will it be that oil workers, demoralized by the march of socialism, fell into despair and let the accident happen?

Will it be claims that since this didn’t happen under Bush, it obviously shows that Obamanomics is responsible?

Apparently Rush has already started in on choice #1.

I think my vote is more along the lines of

“…and I think it’s clear that this accident only happened because we aren’t drilling enough. These poor companies are over-working what they have because they can’t make a walkable ring of oil platforms that encircles Florida. This sort of lunatic under-drilling leads directly to the sort of accidents we’ve seen off the coast of Louisiana, Wolf. That, and I might just mention that Biden used the F-word.”

Which, by the way, I’m for installing. So there’s that. Thank me later, Florida.

Wolf’s answer to that statement, you ask?

“Alright, we have to leave it there.”

What the fuck else does he ever say?