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 Journey of a Thousand Miles

begins with a single step. Clearly many of the Right's responses to Trayvon Martin's murder have been repugnant. On the other hand, Paul Krugman's op-ed piece shows one way to use the event to focus energy and attention of ALEC and, ideally, convince the non-crazy among us that the time has come to shut down the neoliberals' privatization of everything in their  relentless attempt to destroy America.

Supper

Tonight it was ribs and suds. After  braising:

After Smoking:

Sauced with spuds

2.5 hrs braise, 30 mins hot smoke,shredded spuds with parmesian, butter, and milk for 1hr. Needs a green; therefore coleslaw.

Vote

Would That We Did

Obviously, Bruce is being ironical here but the fact of the matter is if we did Trayvon Martin would be alive and neoliberals wouldn't run the economy.




In a related matter Obama's choice for the World Bank potentially lightens the darkness of our future.

This Isn't The First Time

that official America condoned the murder of a fellow citizen for no good god damned reason.

How to describe

Geraldo Rivera's  comments on the Treyvon Martin tragedy. Grotesque? Heartless? Cruel? Ignorant? Disgusting? Vicious? Vile? Lies? Distraction? Beneath Contempt?

For god's sake a boy was murdered for no good reason and the vile, horrid little man insists that the decision to wear a hooded sweatshirt is as much to blame as the horrid little man who ignored police orders to follow and then confront a kid whose "crime" was being black.

Think about that for a minute.

Controversial But True

Earlier I mentioned that Bill Maher erroneously conflated calling out, condemning, and boycotting liars with misplaced outrage arising from lying about one's outrage at anodyne remarks. Here is an example of a fine human being using potentially inflammatory language properly because every word she says is true. If Mitt Romney et alia want to be all outraged at this and seek to remove or boycott Rachel Maddow that would be wrong and should be resisted. What she did and Limbaugh did are not the same. Civility is one thing, lying is another.

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One of These Things is Not Like the Others

On the NYT opinion page today there is an essay from Bill Maher in which he conflates serial liar, blowhard, and purveyor of vile smears Rush Limbaugh with the ginned up controversies. He is right about the various tempests in tea pots over Robert De Niro's joke and the like. He is just flat wrong about Limbaugh or, for that matter, Anne Coulter.

It's one thing to wax wroth over something that if you squint hard enough might be offensive; it's quite another to object to careers built on lies and vilification of nonexistent enemies in the service of ruining the country.

Can't Explain

Do you think Romney sees this as a stirring call to action?




Because it is a rambling and disconnected diatribe aimed squarely retire the petite bourgeoisie and the empty-headed fools who believe Rush Limbaugh's lies.

Game Changer?

The Trayvon Martin story is horrific. The number of Floridians "legally" murdered because of its insane gun laws is horrific. Its economic condition is horrific.  All of these horrific events and conditions result from some neoliberal reform or another.

The Martin story alone ought to be enough to put an end once and for all to the idea that racism, institution if not personal, is dead. The unnecessary gun deaths ought to put an end to the idea that an armed society is a polite society. The economic misery ought to put an end to the neoliberal fantasies.

Any decent society would denounce the Florida syndrome without hesitation. Anybody is actually interested in our common good and collective future would denounce the Florida syndrome.  Anybody who actually cares about the current crises in America would not be running around wringing their hands about contraception and abortion but would rather denounce the Florida syndrome.

Will we? Will they? Will this be the moment when we finally start to get our country back from the small-minded theocratic thugs, the empty-headed political and tv grifters, the lying cultural warriors, the plutocrats and their academic shills?

God, I hope so. But don't hold your breath.

This is What Kleptocracy Looks LIke

The story of Craig Dubow's disastrous reign over Gannet is pretty well know. Today, it seems, he was given a 32 million dollar severance package.

Much like hedge fund managers Dubow's social utility, which is almost always the argument for these kinds of outrageous payoffs, is near zero. He left the company he ran weaker than when he started; he seriously damaged or destroyed the careers of around 20k living human beings; he engaged in the duplicitous practice of increasing his own and his coterie of wrecker's salaries even as they failed miserably in their jobs.

If someone did this to, say, a house, it would be a case of theft and vandalism; however, because this happened in the "free market," it supposed to be perfectly legal. We're I the owner of any Gannet Stock, I sued everybody on the board and Dubow for theft and vandalism.

Relatedly, over to The New Yorker, there is an article detailing rich peoples comprehensive fraud to avoid paying their fair share. The story begins with a lout who makes several hundred million dollars per year and to avoid paying his taxes he games the system by living in New York City in fact while pretending to live elsewhere. The issues is a technical one when it should be a criminal one: fraud.

It's almost as if the rich are conscienceless swine.

How Does That Work?

From Paul Krugman comes an Alec MaGillis article on hedge fund managers in which a neoliberal economics professor intones, concerning the mild criticism of the men and women who wrecked the economy, that because

it wasn’t just anyone knocking them–it was the president of the United States, notes Eugene Fama, a legendary finance professor at the University of Chicago and Asness’s former mentor. “Lots of [hedge fund managers] started out poor, and made a huge amount of money, and created thousands and thousands of jobs in the process. They’re used to being the American Dream, and now you have the president who looks at them and sneers at them like they’re bad guys.”

How does that work? What jobs did the hedge fund manegers create? One or another of my siblings suggests private cooks, maids, butlers, yoga teachers, and related etc. Recall, on the jobs front, that from Reagan on stock prices rose on the shedding of decently paid jobs and their replacement with machines or shipping of to low wage countries.

Hurrah the hedge fund managers and profit maximizing corporate presidents and boards, they hollowed out the American economy and profited form the semi-slave labor and nonexistent environmental laws and regulations of repressive regimes.

Where'd All The Money Go?

For Sam Stone's kids it was a hole in daddy's arm. For the 99% in the current jobless recovery, it's the hyper rich:

And yet somehow or another Obama is a socialist marxist scum.

How Horrible Are The Republicans

Here is a harrowing account of a woman's experience with the Texas law concerning forced probing and mandated moralization. The woman's account, I think, exposes the heartless cruelty and horridness of the wretched god-botherers who think that their blinkered concept of religious life is the tune to which we ought all march.

These Horrid Little People

Rustication refers to the process of expelling someone from Oxbridge. It features prominently in 19th century British fiction usually associated with some nerdowell or another. Recently, one of Britain's neoliberal twits came to Cambridge to announce the destruction of higher education in the service of expansionary austerity. The students and professors were not pleased and so they

as he came to the lectern, a number of audience members (both students and academics) stood up and read, or performed, collectively, a poem articulating opposition to the policies he was advocating. They continued to read and repeat the poem until after a few minutes Willetts was ushered away and the lecture and question and answer session cancelled.

In response, 

one PhD student was singled out for reprisal by the university authorities, and made subject to the university’s disciplinary procedures.

This singling out despite

a letter signed by sixty dons and students advertising their own actual or implicit part in the protest was drafted and sent. This had no effect on the proceedings, and the hearing went ahead.

The result? The student was given

a sentence of seven terms rustication which, as earlymodernjohn points out, is almost the whole period of PhD study.

From gambling and drink to protesting the absurd idea that the best way to respond to years of neoliberalism more neoliberalism.

Bunny Ears

An earless bunny from Germany:

Der Spiegel reports that earlessness combined with

his cuteness would surely have made him a media celebrity, especially in Germany, which has a history of worshipping furry baby animals.

And so they had the "media" into take video, which could then go viral, unfortunately for the bunny the videographer stepped on and killed the earless fellow.

Again With The Idiocy

First a video as a reminder:



It's not a series of political opinions or policy suggestions, Limbaugh's rantings over at least three day is just one of many examples of his use of lies to create a false image of an "enemy" in order to use vile language and vitriol to whip his ill-informed and willfully ignorant listeners and fellow "cultural warriors" into a frenzy.

So when Andrew Sullivan decries the boycott or quotes child-scribe Ezra Klein centrist Kevin Drum worrying about the knock on effect of the boycott on legitimate political discourse, it might help lay their fears to rest to remember that legitimate political discourse doesn't require lies, abuse, and horrid little men and women.

If the boycott tends convince pundits to stop lying or even just stop using vile language society will be a net gainer.

Conservative or Stupid

Over to The New Yorker John Cassidy, who isn't all that bright, conflates conservative with stupid:

First, Alabama and Mississippi remain two of the most conservative states in the country. Second, Rick Santorum is the most conservative candidate in the G.O.P. field. For a man who has questioned the science of global warming and the morality of birth control to win a plurality of the vote in two states where, according to an election-eve survey from the research firm Public Policy Polling, almost two in three Republicans don’t believe in evolution and almost one in two think Barack Obama is a Muslim, shouldn’t have been so surprising.

In this case, however, it seems to me that he is on to something. Only an idiot holds the latter two positions and only an idiot thinks that Santorum could govern.

Why Contraception Matters

From the Historiann:

 There is more at the link and you ought to read it. The larger point is, I think, that taking away medical advances is a really bad idea. To which I would add, mega dittos.

When Is A Quote a Lie

George Washington in his 1st inaugural:

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

Pretty clearly an argument for either a standing army or for a well trained militia not individual ownership. However, according to AWR Hawkins PhD the meaning of the quote is:

 When George Washington wrote that “free people ought … to be armed,” he gave us a clue as to the kind of America the Founders envisioned. It was one where the government stayed within its bounds, carrying out its limited duties while leaving the people free to exercise their rights and liberties.

If you ignore the full quote and misrepresent it; sure, it can mean whatever you want it to.

Not content with misrepresenting Washington, our PhD insists that

during the 1930s Mahatma Gandhi bemoaned the fact that Great Britain had forcibly disarmed his people. He saw it as not simply a denial of the right to possess a weapon but as something that cut much deeper: “Spiritually, compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly … has made us think we cannot look after ourselves or put up a defense against foreign aggression, or even defend our homes and families.”

The full quote:

Spiritually, compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly, and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, has made us think that we cannot look after ourselves or put up a defense against foreign aggression, or even defend our homes and families from the attacks of thieves, robbers and miscreants.

"We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to a rule that has caused this fourfold disaster to our country. We recognize, however, that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence. We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes. We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of this inhuman rule is assured. We therefore hereby solemnly resolve to carry out the Congress instructions issued from time to time for the purpose of establishing Purna Swaraj.

Ghandi is,  on the one hand, condemning colonialism as a means of infantilizing Indians and, on the other, denying that arms mean or make freedom.

My point is this, Limbaugh et alia cannot wage "cultural war" without resorting to lies, vile rhetoric, and vitriol and, as result, the Right's preferred method of argumentation is lies and more lies.

Here in Wisconsin

Scott Walker's campaign or members of his staff who also worked for the campaign or something or another, are or is under investigation of violating the rules of the road. Today, we learn that Walker has set up a legal defense fund, although he denies being a target of the investigation. Interestingly according to the WSJ, for the last link,

Wisconsin statutes allow government officials to seek or obtain contributions to so-called defense funds only if they are being investigated for or charged with a violation of either campaign finance or other election laws.

 So which is it? Either he is a target or he is violating the law.

What is it with these louts and their refusal to take the law seriously.

Eat

By the way  if you're in or near Sun Prairie stop in at Porktopolis for some really fine BBQ and an array of sauces. The sides, unfortunately, are only mediocre.

A Lie Too Far

The hopeless stupidity of Obama's hugging of Derek Bell goodness knows how many years ago is obvious, I think, to anyone with eyes to see. At the same time, this video of Bell's wife shows the proper response:

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Crazy Talk

Ross Douthat has a Op Ed up in which he "argues" that Republican voters aren't either crazy but rather just being good citizens as they desperately seek someone who isn't Mitt Romney. This might be true were it not for the fact that the Republican candidates have been spewing lies about Obama, crazy talk about Iran's invasion and contraception. On the whole, the primary has been a vile and horrid affair in which the candidates are willing to pander to the 27 percent. The voters are crazy and the candidates either crazy or uninterested in governance and truth.