A Tale of Two Advertisements

Lena Dunham made this video



Which is pretty funny and is driving the Right nuts. This ad, on the other hand so far as I can tell has slipped underneath their radar, perhaps because Wheedon is rich:



(via)

Why does the Right hate humor? Why does the Right lie about everything? Because if they told the truth they would be less popular than TB that's why. 

David Brooks

likes Mitt Romney because they both lie like rugs. I was going to write something about today's bullshit but this is much better. It has charts and everything. Brooks' is deal is to sound like he 1) has a clue 2) takes the problems confronting the world seriously so that he can 3) prove it is all the Democrats fault.

He likes the way the rest of us breathe and, to be blunt, he needs find a new line of work. I am thinking that he, Mitt, and Ryan can start a road show selling omni-balsamic reinvigorator. Indeed, like the whole panoply of Melville's confidence men, the Three Liepateers and the Right have nothing to sell that doesn't depend out the purchaser's credulity, which is too say their voters have been had.

Also, too.

Conservative Fact Checking

Over to the NRO's Corner Online Eliana Johnson fact checks the Democrats on Planned Parenthood and access to mamograms. According to Johnson five phone calls to some New York state Planned Parenthood offices proves that the claim is nonsense. Two seconds with Google finds specific examples of PP providing free mamograms and pap smears.

It is simply bizarre that a fact so easily checked is twisted into its opposite in a desperate attempt to deny that the water is wet, which is to say that providing funds to an organization dedicated to offering low cost health services to poor and less well off leads to the poor and less well off obtaining necessary medical services at lower costs.

Lies or Necessary Myths

Fred Clark has shown repeatedly that the evangelicals need for there to witches when clearly there aren't any. Here is a representative post. In an profile of Lynn Vincent in the current New Yorker, she insists that her mother, who was -- she tells us -- a drunken whore of a sluty drug addict, just prior to her death was learning to be a witch. Indeed, Vincent let us know that the witch with which her mother study was Wanda the Witch from Wisconsin.

Here is Wanda:



I call bullshit, in the Frankfortian sense of bullshit. What baffles me is that the New Yorker reports the whole thing as fact without making the relevant point that, you know, evangelicals lie about witches all the time.

Truth In Advertising

Over to the Think Progress, we learn that

Santorum is under fire from Republicans for suggesting that the GOP might as well re-elect Obama if they nominate Romney. He lashed out at a New York Times reporter this weekend for asking about the issue, calling the question “bullshit.”

Except, of course, that's a gross distortion of the events under consideration. Here's a video:



Santorum, who is both a cad and bounder as well as a nutbar, is in fact making the case that as a standard bearer against Obama Romney is the worst Republican in the country.

Whats actually interesting here is that ranting maniacal manner in which Santorum speaks both during the speech and in his interaction with the reporter. This barely suppressed rage and clear desire to either scream at or punch people with whom he is speaking is an aspect of Santorum's persona that I have seen for quite a while. Why, I wonder, do the press forward an erroneous narrative when the actual one seems to be much more interesting.

Rick Santorum is an angry little twit.

A Quick Word

I've been to New York City recently and, much like the myth of Germanic humorlessness, the idea that New Yorkers are misanthropes is a lie: New Yorkers are among the nicest people in the world.

I Call Bullshit

The Heritage Foundation claims that

a reduction in the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent shows impressive growth for the U.S. economy.[3] For example:

• The number of jobs in the U.S. would grow on average by 581,000 annually from 2011 to 2020, with 531,000 on average being created in the private sector each year;
• U.S. real gross domestic product would rise on average by $132 billion per year;
• A typical family of four’s after-tax income would rise on average by $2,484 per year;
• U.S. capital stock would grow by an average of $240 billion more per year; and
• Gross private domestic investment would increase by $57.2 billion per year.[4]

Reducing the corporate rate would make investing in the U.S.—by both domestic and international firms—more attractive. The lower rate provides an incentive for foreign corporations to make investments in the U.S.

According to a

report by the Congressional Research Service, using different methodology, found that the U.S. had an effective corporate tax rate of 27.1 percent in 2008. Other industrialized countries had an average 27.7 percent effective rate, using a weighted approach that adjusted for the size of the economy, and a 23.3 percent rate with an unweighted approach.

A 2.1 percent decrease is going to lead to a 132 billion per year increase in GDP forever and 1/2 a million jobs per year for 9 years straight? Seriously? Corporations are so greedy that because of a loss of 2.1% of their after tax income they deny themselves and the world 9x5ook new jobs and customers per year plus 132millionXinfinity dollars.

Why it's almost like they think people are too stupid to walk and chew gum. We are not all, after all, the current or former Governor of Texas.

Stop Telling Lies About My Bicycle

P.J. O'Rourke in a particularly silly and lazy anti-bicycle rant inadvertently, I suspect, revealed why Conservatives and fools more generally hate bicycling. And, in so doing, once again revealed that if your ideas are sound lying ought to be unnecessary.  His "argument," in part is that

maybe there's a darker side to bike-lane advocacy. Political activists of a certain ideological stripe want citizens to have a child-like dependence on government. And it's impossible to feel like a grown-up when you're on a bicycle if you aren't in the Tour de France.

How, one wonders, is a mode of transportation that hinges on individual effort like the bicycle able to create a sense of dependence? Remember the day when you first learned to ride a bike without training wheels? Or the time you helped a kid learn to ride a bike without training wheels? Remember the pure exhilaration and sense of freedom? How often, when you ride the bike to work or the store, does the feeling come back? For me it's often.

Think about the absolute independence of anyone on a bike, able to whiz here and there unconcerned with the fuel or oil levels; moving freely from the paved to the unpaved and back again.  Finding parking with no trouble; no need for pipelines, gas stations, or tow trucks. Think about the misery of car ownership, with its constant and continuous need for gas, oil, new tires, brakes, trained mechanics, costly electronic parts, road repair, highway construction, parking garages, limited parking spaces, and the equal misery of a car-centric universe in which all the stores are over there and "good" parking is hard to find and the traffic to work is terrible and etc. 

Which would you rather? The child-like joy and independence of moving yourself from point A to point B or the childish dependence of pasty-faced, self-limiting and expensive following of routes laid out by face-less bureacrats [1]?

One last point, in the course of being wrong about everything having to do with the independence of cyclist and the dependency of motorists, O'Rouke calls the bike, derisively, a donkey car without a donkey. Unknowingly, I assume, he's right. The basic idea behind the creation of a bicycle or, really, all the early human powered vehicles was to replace the expensive, filthy, and unreliable horse, donkey, and oxen with a clean and reliable machine that translated human power into motion. The bike is, in fact, one of the pinnacles of industrial design and techniques.

[1] I kid, road systems are great, although the constant pandering to motorists isn't, because of expert commitment to getting things right.