Tag: idiocracy

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,

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.

Herman Cain: If it’s good enough for Sim City, it’s good enough for America.

gonzodave:

Aside from being an egomaniac, Cain is a plagiarist.

~g

Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 — which was released in 2003 — were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. (That is, of course, if you didn’t use the cheat codes to get unlimited money and avoid taxes altogether.)

Cut to: Bachmann press conference in which she breathlessly announces that she’s gained access to the secret government cheat codes which, when entered into a secret keypad in the Bible on the day of her inauguration, will allow for unlimited revenue on no taxes whatsoever. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new national GOP polls leader.

Herman Cain: If it’s good enough for Sim City, it’s good enough for America.

Most Republican voters believe, with good reason, that Romney stands a strong chance of winning the nomination and beating President Obama. The question is whether he would put repeal front and center—whether he would emphasize it in the general election campaign, and whether he would go to the mat for repeal once in office. Would Romney’s campaign build enough momentum for repeal to achieve 60 votes in the Senate and defeat a potential filibuster? If not, would Romney be willing to advance repeal in the Senate via reconciliation, the complicated and unconventional process that takes only 50 votes but which would also require a far greater expenditure of political capital?

Jeffery H. Anderson makes me wonder if he’s even been paying attention. If we assume that the posited chain of events occurs: GOP holds some kind of House majority and gains a new but non-60 vote majority in the Senate (and, of course, President Mittmentum) then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to derive the complex psychohistorical formulas for what happens next?!?!?
The GOP eliminates (by simple majority) the filibuster on the first day of the new Congress. The MSM declares this an entirely reasonable, “sensible center” approach to governing. Wholesale dismantlement of the New Deal follows, coupled to and justified by the oncoming tax revenue collapse from a 0% effective tax rate on the rich and consumption-based, maximally regressive tax on everyone else.
It’s what they’ve been talking about for years. They are entirely serious. They mean to do it at the first opportunity, and this would be it. There will be no fiddling with reconciliation or anything approaching “normal order” as we define it in 2011. How many times do they have to say this stuff before someone in the MSM takes them seriously and asks a follow-up or two? Or, for that matter, before The Democrat starts using these positions against them. (Shrill! Class War!!).
The far-right GOP candidates and elected officials are not “blowing smoke” or “providing red meat” for the “true believers.” This is who they are. Everyone else can kindly go die in the streets.

I didn’t go to Harvard. You know, I went to the school of hard knocks.

Scott Brown, describing his time in the urban hellscape that is the Medford campus of Tufts University. Later in life, he took on the mean streets of Boston College Law School. Chestnut Hill is about to get real.
Also worth noting that Harvard tuition is ~$39,849. Tufts: $42,962. Warren’s actual alma mater, University of Houston? That would set you back $9,211.

Rick Perry’s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you’re attempting to get the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 — or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country’s state legislatures — and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign.

By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney?

Charles Pierce, getting it exactly right at his still newish blogging perch.

Rick Perry: Constitutional Scholar

Q: The Constitution says that ‘the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.’ But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116 [of “Fed Up!”], you left ‘general welfare’ out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that ‘general welfare’ includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does ‘general welfare’ mean to you?

Rick Perry: I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term ‘general welfare’ in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

Q: So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by ‘general welfare’?

Rick Perry: I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

Q: But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

Rick Perry: [Silence.]

Q: OK. Moving on […]

…first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea—there’s more to life than full employment—and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges.

Matt Yglesias, leaving out the next line in the exchange; the one where the conservative screams “that’s socialism,” makes a lot of unfounded claims about runaway spending, and then says government initiated stimulus has never worked, and most especially never worked in the guise of the colossal stimulatory effect of government spending to fight WWII. That recovery was the either “power of the markets” or “the markets anticipating Reagan and ‘morning in America.’” As usual.