Cogitamus

Obama the Anti-Christ? 35% Say Yes. Welcome to Looney Tune Land

You can't make this stuff up.

What is an Unhealthy Snack Food?

Or what Larry the Cable Guy might say he saw at a topless beach.

Orly Taitz.

Jesus, is this woman bringing the crazy, non-stop 24/7, coast to coast.  oddjob had asked in comments if I was paying attention to the latest travails of the birther lawyer extraordinaire and all I can say is oh hell yes.  This woman is genuinely unbalanced -- she does not seem to understand the difference between bullshitting on a blog or Fox and being a litigator in federal court.  (I remain skeptical that this woman is actually a member of the bar -- it really cheapens the whole deal for the rest of us if she is.)  Judges do not like having their courtrooms turned into politically motivated freak shows.  And they really don't appreciate being called treasonous or "subservient to the illegitimate de facto president."

Judge Clay Land, a Bush appointee who sits on the United States District Court for Middle District of Georgia emphatically dismissed Taitz's lawsuit and then, when she filed a motion for reconsideration (a motion that is essentially never granted absent some material change in the state of the law) he issued an order to show cause why the court should not impose a $10,000 fine on Taitz.  I suspect our wingnut friend is going to be looking at disbarment and possible incarceration for contempt if she keeps it up.  One can only hope. 

Federal courts remain rare places in our society -- places where facts still matter, where evidence is required, and where intellectual honesty is demanded.   They seem like places Orly Taitz might want to avoid.

Of Men and Mascots

Via Thers, John Derbyshire posts the following:

The affection a leftist feels for the toiling masses is abstract and theoretical, like the affection modern American liberals feel for minorities. The Common Man is, for old-line leftists, a mascot, not someone he wants in his dining room.

As Thers points out, not only are many minorities and working people liberals, but these days, the guy we call "Mr. President" is one of those minorities.  Guess Derb lives in an America where he doesn't even see the minorities.  (There's a name for that America: it's called "the Republican Party.")

Now I, despite my collection of degrees, have dined with working-class people many times over the past couple of decades, what with having married into a blue-collar family: my wife was the first in her family to go to college.  So they aren't exactly mascots to me: they're real people with real problems, some of which are related to their economic status, and some of which aren't.

But if I couldn't say that, so what?  When I lived down in Bristol, VA, I drove (on my way to my low-paying job) through neighborhoods that were populated by folks who clearly had it worse than I did.  If I didn't want to dine with them, how exactly would that invalidate my recognition of the greater difficulty of their lives, and my sense that things should somehow be fairer than they are?  How would my lack of eagerness to dine with them invalidate my observations?

And why, exactly, do right-wingers rarely if ever seem to be possessed of some of these same feelings?  Is it better to not care at all, than care from a distance?  Because, as best as I can tell, that's Derb's bottom line here.

Wingnut Values On Parade

The Values Voter Summit is coming to DC this weekend! 

As Firesign Theatre once asked, "Daddy, where can I get a good deal in a Christian atmosphere?"

And boy, do they have some good deals on values!

They've got talks on "True Tolerance: Countering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools."  Because everybody knows that it's morally essential to retain the right to treat a minority group like shit.

Or "The Threat of Illegal Immigration," which I'm OK with their seeing it as a threat to somethingorother, but I confess cluelessness as to how a bunch of people who want to come here so badly that they're willing to sacrifice what they have in order to come labor in our fields and take other hard and dirty jobs that few Americans want at what the agribusinesses and so forth are willing to pay, are a threat to our values and morals. 

I'd say the main moral issue here is making sure that whoever works dirty and difficult jobs like those that immigrants tend to take are protected by strong labor laws, diligently enforced.

Or "ObamaCare: Rationing Your Life Away," whose presenters, I'm certain, regard as a serious moral issue the deaths of an estimated 45,000 persons a year in America due to lack of insurance.

Or "Speechless: Silencing the Christians."  Yeah, I know, since January 20, James Dobson & Co. no longer have the President's top advisors on speed dial.  Rough life, that.  In the words of Dennis the Peasant, "Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, didn't you?"

Or "The New Masculinity" whose description starts: "Feminism has wreaked havoc on marriage, women, children and men. It is time to redress the disorder it has wrought and that must start with getting the principles and ideals for a new "masculinism" right."

As I look around my office, where I work with lots of very intelligent women, with many of the younger ones being drop-dead gorgeous as well, yeah, too bad about the havoc feminism has wreaked.

As far as a new 'masculinism' goes, they might just try what the Lord said to the prophet Micah: "do right, love goodness, and walk humbly with your God."

The whole idea that somehow feminism is responsible for screwing up masculinity is really kinda silly: if you figure out for yourself what is right and wrong, and who you need to be as a person - which is what any man, or woman for that matter, should do - then the stances of some group that you don't have much regard for in the first place probably aren't going to mess up your thinking too much.

Making excuses and looking for someone else to blame your own lack of understanding on, sounds like pretty sucky 'values' to me.  But what do I know?

And it goes on like this.  They've got one called "Thugocracy - Fighting the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy," and another about "Global Warming Hysteria: the New Face of the 'Pro-Death' Agenda."  Yeah, I know - actively bearing false witness has long been part of the 'values' of the supposedly Christian right.  I'm kind of amazed that they have the chutzpah to post the Ten Commandments in places, given that one of the Ten addresses that behavior with a big "thou shalt not."

Ah, the joys of Christian values.  They don't have much of anything to do with Jesus, but what else is new?

Good Policy and Good Politics

History suggests that the best kinds of progressive social policy, see e.g. Social Security and Medicare, become virtually unassailable once they become institutionalized, a part of the fabric of expectations of all citizens.  (This is true in other countries as well -- both the Canadian single payer system and the British National Health Service have proven untouchable even under right wing governments.)  Social Security and Medicare have in common their universality (well if you're old), simplicity, effectiveness, and broad based funding mechanisms and the fact that you will never, ever (Cato Institute fantasies notwithstanding) be able to take them away from people.

Whatever the Democrats ultimately do on health care reform, they need to keep these examples in mind.  Otherwise, "Baucuscare" could turn out to be the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988.     Concern over deficits or costs are completely misplaced at this point -- what is needed is a universal health plan with costs that can be afforded by the average person.  Worry about the deficits later -- get a plan in place, make it a good one, and once established, the necessary funds will follow.  The public will demand it.   

Lifestyles of the White & Suggestible

By the brilliant Max Blumenthal, whose book Republican Gomorrah just debuted at number #15 on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

As for this video of the 9/12 Teabaggers' Extravaganza, aka The 2-Million Loon March The Unintentionally Hilarious But Nonetheless Scary Tantrum of the Seventy-thousand Seriously Deranged, well, there's a phrase in Spanish that sums it up neatly: sin palabras. No words.

Well, there are a few words on display here, but as you'll see, most of them are risibly misspelled.

Misplaced Priorities

MaxTax will cost about $775 billion over 10 years.  That's a lot of money, as the GOP is pointing out.

Would you like to know how long $775 billion would last in the Department of Defense?  Well, if you add the base budget and supplementals for 2010, $775 billion would last. . .

14 lousy, goddamn months.

That's right, the most-debated bill of this Congress, the one currently being slammed by Republicans and their Blue lapDogs for being so expensive, would manage to fund our bloated military-industrial complex for just one year and two months.

Feel free to pass this dose of perspective on to your representatives in Congress.

The Real Goal

Good Lord, Max Baucus has come up with a mess, hasn't he?  It's not so much that he's thrown together a bad bill, but that he's barfed up something that would need to improve greatly in order to be merely incoherent.  There's an individual mandate, but no corporate mandate.  People can escape paying a fine only if they can't find coverage that's less than 10% of their adjusted gross income, or if their employer-sponsored plan exceeds 13% of their total income - what the hell is that difference in there for?  Are people magically able to afford to pay more of their income on insurance premiums if it's an employer-sponsored plan?

Then there's the co-ops, which Ezra says aren't even what people originally meant when they pitched that idea.  Instead, they're "a neutered version of the co-op idea, which was in turn a neutered version of the public option."

Baucus has been working on this plan for quite some time - ever since he cynically produced a good plan that he obviously never intended on developing or supporting so he could move into the leadership position vacated by the then-ailing Ted Kennedy.  It's been a closed-door process, especially to anyone from the left of the left, as it were.  And while Baucus is enough of a corporate whore to make a Blue Dog blush, this final bill doesn't really have the character of a big wet kiss to the insurance industry.

It looks like it on the surface, but it's come under such strong attack so quickly - from all sides - that I'm pretty convince it doesn't have a chance of passing the Senate.  Hell, it's so bad it might actually galvanize other Senators to either introduce a new bill or amend it enough to make it decent.  If it was just another bill intended to fatten corporate coffers, I would expect something a bit more sophisticated.

I believe that Baucus has lost sight of serving his corporate masters, I really do.  I think he's lost sight of putting together a bill, whether good or bad.  This bill, to me, says that Baucus has been completely captured by the goal of attracting some Republican votes.  Every single bad part of the bill is a direct response to Republican whining.  It's less a piece of legislation than it is a marginally connected series of knee-jerk reactions to whatever a Republican happened to be saying about healthcare reform at any given time.

I've long derided the Democrats' willingness to engage in the Villager Bipartisanship Games.  Many times I've written that giving in to DC's dysfunctional definition of bipartisanship - doing what the GOP says so they can attack you for it - is cover for the fact that many of the Democrats on Capitol Hill are conservatives.  But it's appearing that the end goal is simply to create legislation that will attract a couple of Republican votes, because no other motivation - being a corporate whore, pissing off liberals, engaging in political jujitsu by creating a bad bill which motivates liberals to put forth a good bill which ultimately passes the Senate - nothing else can explain what Baucus has done.

There's being captured by the system, and then there's Democratic Senators.

I'mma let you finish

I'm going to file this site under Sweet Jeebus, I love the Intertubes. You can click on the archive to see them all, or choose the random generator. Either way, you simply must hear the audio (on the Home page) wherein our president refers to stage-crashing Kanye as a "jackass" .

(Yes, I am fourteen years old.  Sometimes.)

More like this pls., President O--now how about letting loose on the far-more-significant-and-worrisome Blue Jackasses who are buggering up healthcare reform?

And Another Thing

- Why do Democrats keep selecting leaders from politically marginal states like, say Nevada?  Being a legislative leader paints a target on a politician -- and legislative leaders are rarely popular with the public writ large.  It seems to me that there is a lot of sense in picking your leadership from relatively safe places, see e.g. San Francisco.  You would think after Tom Daschle and Tom Foley and (for you really old guys) John Brademas, the Dems might opt for a guy like Dick Durbin, a competent leader from a safe state.

- Pat Buchanan just never disappoints.  First, Hitler the much misunderstood vegetarian.  And now, the decline of American unity as represented by the elevation of the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Caesar Chavez to hero status at the expense of such great Americans as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  The title of the article -- you cannot make this shit up -- "Is America Coming Apart?"   Irony isn't just dead -- it's been subject to a blitz krieg and a bayonet charge.  By the way Pat, you just need to hop in the car and drive south from DC for a little bit.  You will soon see the Stonewall Jackson Shrine and once you get to Richmond just head down Monument Avenue and you will see huge statues of both Jackson and Marse Robert (not to mention great unifying figure Jefferson Davis).  (Of course the always divisive Arthur Ashe tarnishes the site.)

- I have often accused the Republican right of being a Leninist style organization -- one in which there is no objective truth, but only that which helps to advance the cause.  The lies about Tea Party attendance spring to mind. David Frum seems to agree with me.   

- Pete Stark is my new hero.

- If this is the case, then why can't the Washington Post cater to its liberal readership?

- Isn't this going to end badly at some point?

- And, yeah, Kanye West is a jackass.  But so too is Max Baucus.

When did we Become so Afraid

I've been reading with growing despair the spate of posts about the merits of letting kids walk to school or practices and other activities alone.  Like many people of my generation, I walked to and from school my entire life, from age six on.  I would also walk to sports practices, playgrounds, etc.  Now, it is true I grew up in an old fashioned small city in Massachusetts -- the kind of place where there were sidewalks and pedestrian traffic and destinations close enough to walk.  I find it disheartening that the only ones seemingly arguing for developing autonomy in children are those who don't have them like Amanda, Nick, and Atrios.  From the parental side, it seems to be all paranoia all the time.

As per usual, this kind of thing demonstrates the absolute inability of people to engage in any kind of reasonable risk analysis.  In response to the ultra remote prospect of child abduction by a stranger, people opt to put their kids in about the most dangerous place they can be, an automobile.  As Atrios pointed out, in 2000, there were 2,343 traffic fatalities among children age 0 to 14.  Moreover, in that same year, there were 797 children of that age injured  every day in car accidents. (Of course, when it comes to crime the most dangerous place for kids is probably with their parents, followed by boyfriends of mothers, relatives, clergymen, teachers, coaches, scout leaders and Republicans.) 

My son did not attend a school within walking distance until he was 12, so I did not grapple with this when he was a small kid.  However, once he had reached 12 I was not only comfortable with him walking to school, but also taking the Metro or the bus to places during the day time.  Once in his mid-teens, I have encouraged him to do things that he wants to do like go to professional soccer games or rock concerts even if there isn't a friend to accompany him.  I want him to feel like the world is to be engaged not feared. 

The one thing that I've sought to avoid in terms of child rearing was being stuck with a teenager in a suburb where drinking and driving is the cultural norm -- now that's something to fear (and I speak from personal experience on this score). Cars are not your child's friend.especially in their teen years.

We, as a culture, really need to take a deep breath, turn off the tabloid TV, and try to teach our children a little bit about living without undue fear.

The Ugly Face of Teabaggery

oddjob shared this video with us (with a hat tip to Wicked Gay Blog) in comments and I think it is well worth posting.

CNN actually deals with the craziness that is at the heart of teabaggery. Clearly Jim Spellman, the correspondent reporting on the movement, is spooked by what he has seen and heard.  Why we are not seeing more reporting of this kind is a mystery to me.  There is indeed something very dark and disturbed about this entire movement. 

What really pissed me off about the Post's treatment of this story yesterday was not merely it's front page position, but even more so the bloodless fashion in which the movement and the protesters were described.

The mass rallies that I have been to have always had a pretty clear goal and set of grievances inspiring them. Could any of the tea partyers describe any aspect of government policy (actually existing that is) that they wish to change and why.  One listens to cries of "tyranny" and "gestapo tactics" and "liberties" lost and one grapples with the impossibility of engaging these people.  Gestapo tactics?!! From a president who seems to have a hard time even mildly denouncing his opposition?  Lost liberties?  Do tell.  (Quite rich from the supporters of an administration that took the position that the president could indefinitely detain American citizens without charge and could engage in warrantless wiretapping as part of the Executive's inherent authority as Commander in Chief.) Tyranny?  The tyranny of having to collect your goddamned Social Security payments monthly and have your medical bills paid by Medicare? 

What you see here is a lumpen mass whose inherent sense of resentment and suspicion has been turned up to eleven by right wing manipulators like Fox, NRO, Malkin, Instapundit, and their fellow traveling cretins.  It's all well and good until one one or two or more of these armed rubes snaps and we have carnage on our hands.  Then despite the inevitable protestations of shocked innocence on the part of the aforementioned shit stirrers, they will truly have blood on their hands.    

Old, White, Ignorant, and Irrelevant

So the teabaggers have brought their own special brand of crazy to my town.  One is struck in looking at the pictures at how monochromatic and old the crowd is -- the old people part really pisses me off.  Here is the one group in America that benefits from socialism via Medicare and Social Security and these ignorant fucknutz are here to protest "socialism." 

I enjoyed the claims that they had attracted up to two million people here.  To say that this is laughable is a grotesque understatement.  This is a city of about 550,000 people.  When you have an influx here of a few hundred thousand people, it is quite noticeable.  When you have an additional two million as we had around the time of the Inauguration in January 2009, it is beyond noticeable -- it has an impact in virtually every quadrant in town.

I was at the Inauguration and have been at three of the largest demonstrations held here during the last twenty years -- Solidarity Day on Labor Day in 1991, the March for Women's Lives in April 1992, and the March for Women's Rights in April, 2004.  These protests drew approximately 400,000, 500,000, and 800,000 people respectively and their participants were much in evidence throughout the city in the days before and after -- on the streets and the Metro, in restaurants, and hotels.  Their multi-racial crowds filled a substantial part of the Mall, which is an enormous space. I've also been on the Mall during at least a dozen Fourth of July celebrations, which before pre-September 11 security levels, routinely reached a half a million people.  (The only time I've ever seen the Mall close to full was during Obama's inauguration, which really was of a different magnitude than anything I've ever witnessed.)

I've seen the pictures of the teabagger event and it seems very unlikely that they even hit the 100,000 mark, and more likely had somewhere in the tens of thousands range.  There has been no discernible impact in the areas of town outside of the Mall -- things in Northwest DC were totally normal yesterday.  

I was annoyed to see the Post give the protest front page treatment that was absolutely uncritical of the incoherence of the protesters' goals.  Of course, the Post consigned a considerably larger anti Iraq War demonstration to the Metro pages a few years ago. 

I laughed at the claim that the teabaggers were somehow neater than left-wing protesters.  Again, I can attest that people were very conscientious about dealing with their trash at the big rallies to which I've been.  However, with something as big as the pro-reproductive rights rally in 2004, there is the ever present problem of simply overwhelming the trash cans.  When you have a group roughly one-tenth the size, it's a much smaller problem.

The ultimate impression one gets of the tea party crowd -- in addition to the fact that they are some of the most incoherent people one can imagine -- is that they simply cannot accept the idea that they are no longer a majority of Americans.  It is unimaginable to them that this cool, young, multi-racial President is representative of the aspirations of the majority of Americans and they are shaken by the diminution in tribal sentiment among whites that is allowing this to happen.  They (along with the Republican Party) are doubling down on one last gasp of dog whistle politics.,  It may actually get them some results in the 2009 and 2010 elections, but I am pretty confident by 2012 and the years thereafter it is going to look like a huge sucker's bet.  

Desperately Seeking Validation From Those They Claim To Despise

This post from Thers was absolutely hilarious to me until I got to the end and saw that conservatives were yet again making the ridiculous claim that at their gatherings and protests, no trash is left on the ground, unlike those dirty liberals who can create trash out of thin air to leave strewn all over America's glorious landmarks.

And that's just very sad.  I don't understand why the teabaggers find it so necessary to inflate their crowd to such ludicrous levels.  How, well, dumb do you have to be to think that people will actually believe you got two million people on the National Mall the weekend after Labor Day?  And how desperate for validation do you have to be in order to convince yourself that such numbers are real?  It's as if the Teabaggers are a bunch of Napoleon Dynamites, talking about killing wolverines with their uncle and how they have a supermodel girlfriend in Oklahoma.

What really makes it pathetic, though, is how they actually believe - or at least want everyone else to believe - that they are so pure, so holy and righteous that they don't even generate trash.  That two million people could spend all day in one place and leave it as spotlessly clean - no, more so - as they found it.

Human beings are dirty.  They create trash and then litter it around.  Archaeology as a discipline exists only because of this part of the human character.  While I would like us to spread less trash, and less trash that poisons the planet, I for one would not criticize the Teabaggers just because they left a mess on the National Mall.  If they managed to not deface and/or destroy anything that's good enough for me.  I've got plenty else to criticize them for. 

Oliver Willis has some good pictures of the event here, Matt Yglesias has a few here.  Matt also brings up the point that

your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment.

Protests are never only about what they're about.  On the left there's always going to be the "Free Mumia" signs and other assorted topics that have nothing to do with the protest's declared purpose.  But I'll take the "Free Mumia" folks over a bunch of Confederacy-venerating, gun-fetishizing, woman-hating (and that includes women), warmongering, authoritarian freaks any day.

Broder: I Haven't A Clue About How Washington Works

Broder:

[Obama] knows he has to move [Medicare] toward the models of the Mayo and Cleveland clinics and the few communities around the country where networks of doctors and hospitals have committed themselves to high-quality, low-cost medicine. But he is not telling people that Medicare must change, so members of Congress will be reluctant to take the first steps in that direction.

We all want something a lot better than what will ultimately pass the Senate. But at least out here in the blogosphere, we know that it's all about either what can get 60 votes in the Senate, or what can get crammed through via reconciliation.  We also know that Obama really has very little leverage over recalcitrant Business Dog Democrats in the Senate.

Broder seems to be aware of none of these things.  If he can't even comment intelligibly on the inside-the-Beltway state of play, what good is he?  He's long since lost touch with the country; his understanding of the state of play in Washington is the last possible remaining justification for anyone's  publishing the senile old fart's maunderings.  So much for that.

Addendum: Fred Hiatt thinks it's important to firmly hold Obama to his pledge that health care reform won't increase the deficit.  I don't remember his equally bothered by the deficit-raising effects of two Bush wars, two major Bush tax cuts (the second of which passed when we were in those wars, and it was starting to be clear that there would be no quick exit) and Medicare Part D, just for starters.  When it comes to creating and increasing deficits, Fred Hiatt thinks IOKIYAR.

Hiatt also asks, "Will that financing be adequate to underwrite the cost of expanded coverage -- not only within the 10-year budget window but beyond?"

Who the fuck knows?  It's hard to know what the world will look like that far down the road, and it's best to let the people who live there deal with the details.  In 1995, who knew that Clinton would soon have four balanced budgets - and that GWB would then be elected, and bring back the era of humongous deficits?

And again, it all depends on what can get through Congress.  Obama would have a lot more cost-cutting tools available to him, if each one of them didn't raise cries of 'rationing!' and visions of putting Granny out on an ice floe.

The WaPo opinion pages are absolutely scary in the extent to which they bring the stupid.

Saturday Night Song of Obsession

"I Need Love" - Sam Phillips

From the truly fabulous 1994 release "Martinis and Bikinis" which I recommend to you all.

What's inside the mind of Mark Foley?

Why, only sugar and spice and all things nice--I'm sure of it.

Chew on this: disgraced ex-congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) is getting his own radio talk show. Yes, that Mark Foley. A radio talk show, on Palm Beach-area AM station WSVU, which also features programming from CBS radio, "adult standards" tunes, and the thoughtful musings of Don Imus, among others.

According to ABC News, WSVU spokesman Joseph Raineri is looking forward to having Foley on board having Foley join his team hearing what's on Foley's mind. In fact, the show is actually entitled Inside the mind of Mark Foley. Said Ranieri:

"With everything that's going on with healthcare and everybody questioning what's happening in Washington, DC, we thought who better to explain what's going on than Mark Foley."

Well, speaking as a Florida resident, I'll happily admit that when I find myself feeling, you know, confused about what's happening in Washington DC and wishing with all my questioning little heart that there was someone I could turn to for explanations about healthcare reform and the like, the first person who comes to mind is almost always a hypocritical wingnut predator whose primary claim to fame is having propositioned teenage boys the same age as my son before being quietly disappeared to a rehab clinic somewhere.

WSVU's spokesman:

"You're going to be amazed!"

We already are, Mr. Ranieri. We already are.

(H/T Michael at Pushing Rope)

Town hall meetings in the time of King Arthur

Ah, plus ça change...

Acquiescing To Unreasonable Demands Only Teaches Them To Make More Unreasonable Demands

You know, it's rather embarrassing to belong to a nation which proves itself to be the most susceptible of any to terrorist threats and actions.

We all know that this nation's response to the attacks on 9/11 was to curtail our own freedoms and take action in the Middle East that did more for Al Qaeda than 100 fallen skyscrapers. 

But it's not just the big stuff, and terrorism isn't just people with brown skin blowing things up.  The Republican party's strategy for quite some time now has been to wage a terrorist campaign against the rest of us - threatening Americans constantly with everything from the promise of attacks on American soil if they aren't reelected to disrupting our government's ability to function merely out of pique.

And people are still giving in.  The US Census Bureau has just announced that it will not use ACORN for the 2010 Census.

"It is clear that ACORN's affiliation with the 2010 census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 census efforts," [Census Director Robert] Groves wrote.

Good one, Groves.  Be sure to let us all know when Michelle Bachmann decides to start publicly campaigning for greater cooperation with the Census, because reacting to her rhetorical* poo-flinging is surely going to work.

Whatever happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists?"

*It is still just rhetorical, right?

The Only People In DC Worse Than The Republicans Are The Democrats

So some retrograde good ol' boy from South Calinky makes an ass of himself, his party and his state during President Obama's address to Congress.

Not only was he out of order in terms of the etiquette of such a gathering, he was, as has been demonstrated over and over, completely wrong.  Effectively we have a sitting member of Congress who publicly slandered the President of the United States of America.  Way to go, dumbass.

So what was the Democrats' response?  Did they merely mock Wilson or use his outburst to point out that section 246 of the bill specifically  - and as KO mentioned, in all caps - forbids any subsidies or other help going to undocumented aliens?

No, they of course took it seriously, because they take all criticism from the right seriously, no matter how off-base or deranged it might be.  When members of their own party criticize the DC Democrats, they fall all over themselves in their rush to the microphones to insult the dumb hippies.  But when a racist fuckhead acts like a emotionally disturbed child, they get into a huddle and start rewriting legislation to more fully cater to his irrational demands.

At this rate, they might as well just have Rush Limbaugh write the entire bill - that's most likely where Wilson got the idea that undocumented aliens would get free health care; Limbaugh has been pushing this a while now.

As to this post's title: I know that the Republicans in DC are ontologically worse people than the Democrats - most of the Democrats.  But their numbers are so reduced that the only reason they have any ability at all to muck things up in Congress is because the Democrats let them - indeed, are far more willing to work with people whose only goal is to destroy this nation in order to save it for themselves than they are us dirty fucking hippies who are the ones that campaign and vote for them.

Whether or not they make any changes to just how amazingly illegal it will be for an undocumented alien to purchase something, Baucus and Conrad have once again managed to make the Democrats look like bigger fools than even Joe Wilson of South Carolina.  Optics, unfortunately, matters more than policy in DC, and the Democrats somehow manage to stink at both

A 'lost decade'? No - a lost generation!

The fact of our "lost decade" with respect to median household income is getting wide play in the blogosphere, and even getting picked up in the mainstream media, which is good.  But the truth is that Joe and Jane Sixpack have been doing little more than treading water for a lot longer than a decade.  According to the Census' 2008 Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance report, median family income in 1973 was $45,533 in 2008 dollars; in 2008, it was $50,303.  This year, it is surely a few thousand dollars worse than that: as Ezra Klein reminded us this morning, the unemployment rate was only 6.1% last August; now it's 9.7%.  And plenty of employed people are experiencing furloughs and pay cuts.

So between 1973 and 2008, median family income has increased by only $4800 in constant dollars, which isn't very much - and the current recession may wipe that out entirely before it's over.  And yes, we're comparing a 1973 peak to a 2009 or 2010 trough, but the point is that over the past three and a half decades, the median household should have made far more progress than could possibly be wiped out by a single recession. And it hasn't, despite the enormous gains in wealth in our society over that period of time.

Something has gone seriously wrong here.  And I think we know what it is: a systematic and quite successful effort across the decades to shift wealth upwards.

And as I mentioned yesterday in comments, even that isn't the whole story.  Median earnings for men are actually down over that period of time; only the entry of tens of millions of women into the workforce over those decades has kept median family incomes rising at all. 

As a couple, Joe and Jane Sixpack are putting in a lot more hours at work than they did in 1973 to be just slightly better off, and even that gain may not last.  A lost generation, indeed.

On September 11, a word from Humphrey Bogart

Once the shock of 9/11 wore off, who would have believed that, eight years later, Osama bin Laden would not have been killed or brought to justice?  I keep coming back to Humphrey Bogart’s words at the end of The Maltese Falcon:

When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s-it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

Same thing here: when 3000 of your fellow citizens are killed, your government is supposed to do something about it. It’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every American everywhere.

It may have been unclear at the time whether it was the right decision to rely on the locals to help surround and capture bin Laden at Tora Bora.

But in early 2002, with the trail still hot, Bush pulled Special Forces troops, trained in the local languages, from Afghanistan, and moved them to Iraq to start scouting for our eventual invasion.

I can’t see any reason to forgive Bush for that decision. I doubt that any court will every try Bush for any of his manifold crimes and sins.  But may he be forever afraid to show his face in public.

Higher Life Forms for Rob Miller (aka the Dem. opponent of the guy who yelled You Lie during President Obama's address)

Readers, I've created an ActBlue account for those who, like me, wish to support Rob Miller, the gentleman who'll run against Joe Wilson (R-SC), that rude, miserable, badly-raised creature who's now famous for shouting out You Lie! during President Obama's address last night.

The fundraising page is called Higher Life Forms for Rob Miller.

Click here if you're interested in throwing a few bucks his way--your donation will go into the larger overall fund for Mr. Miller, which, as of this writing, has grown to over $100,000 $260,000 since last night!

Thanks, everyone.

UPDATE:  a late-night e-mail from Rob Miller's office confirms the ActBlue 1-day effort has raised more than $600,000.  This means the ex-Marine Democratic contender is well on his way to running a fantastic campaign and  taking over yet another House seat next November.

A note to our American cousins

I see Ezra and Matt comparing idiot Joe Wilson's outburst to the British tradition of heckling our elected leaders.

In fact, accusing an MP of lying is the one thing not protected by Parliamentary privilege, and if not immediately apologized for can have an MP removed from the House of Commons (in Canada and the UK at least -- dunno about other commonwealth countries.) Of course, the President isn't an MP, but addressing a joint session more closely resembles a Speech from the Throne, and I cannot imagine a scenario where any party would put up with an MP interrupting the Queen or a Governor-General, much less calling them a liar. We'd be in a by-election before you could say "tut tut, cheerio".

Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance in the United States: 2008

Just got released this morning.  The full report (warning: big-ass PDF) is here.

The press release leads off:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008, from $52,163 to $50,303. This breaks a string of three years of annual income increases and coincides with the recession that started in December 2007.

The nation’s official poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. There were 39.8 million people in poverty in 2008, up from 37.3 million in 2007.

Meanwhile, the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008, while the percentage remained unchanged at 15.4 percent.

And that's where things stood last year.  Needless to say, the 2009 numbers that will be released a year from now are going to be noticeably worse.  A lot more people will have lost their jobs, and with it, their health insurance.  Median household income will take another big hit.  Poverty will take another big jump up.

But enough depressing stuff.  You know how the wingnuts (including loudmouthed Congresscritter Joe Wilson (dumbass - SC)) are paranoid about the possibility that universal health coverage will insure a lot of illegal aliens?

As the press release said, there were 46.3 million uninsured in the U.S. last year.  Guess what region 20.2 million of those uninsured are in?  That's right, nearly half of the uninsured live in the South.  (Flip to Table 7 on p.28 (by Adobe's pagination) of the big-ass PDF.)  I bet they're mostly not illegal aliens.  Just a hunch.