It's the Weak Demand, Stupid

Paul Krugman debunks the conservative/teabagger red herring that CRUSHING REGULATIONS, "uncertainty," highest taxes ever, and President Obama's perpetual bruising of bankster and executive fee-fees are to blame for our faltering economy:

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy. 

The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false. 

[...] 

Isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No. 

After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment. 

But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.

Republicans and Very Serious People do not want to listen to this reality, but prefer to live in their own contrived Randian fantasy land, because subscribing to facts and reality would mean embracing a demand-side, Keynesian view of economic policy, which is inherently at odds with the snake oil that they traffic on a daily basis. And we all know that what really ails America is that corporations and banksters and plutocrats don't have enough free money.

More Tea Bagger/Christian Stupidity

Morans:

"The end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is the signature achievement of our time," Ferguson told Obama and the crowd. 

At that point, a bearded man standing in the front row closest to the stage began shouting: "Christian God is the one and only true living God, the creator of Heaven and the Universe," according to White House pool coverage of the event. 

Someone then threw a jacket toward the stage. 

"Is that his jacket?" Obama quipped. 

The guy was still ranting while being carried out by Secret Service: "I love Jesus. Jesus Christ is God. Jesus Christ is the son of God." 

Obama stopped speaking briefly, smiling uncomfortably as the crowd booed loudly to drown him out. Eventually, police and Secret Service dragged the man through the crowd and out of the theater. 

[...] 

The man was still on his way out yelled one final epithet: "Jesus Christ is god, Barack Obama is the antichrist!"

I have no words. These people are just fucking stupid. And insane.

Seriously, That's the Best You've Got?

Wanker in the NYT says that the Buffett Rule will adversely impact...municipal bonds. Really.

And of course he also pays homage to the threat of our plutocrat overlords going Galt if Obama is too mean to them. You know, because they might just pout and sit on the sidelines if they aren't allowed to have free money from their investments any longer while the rest of us soak up their tax liability. 

It's actually quite amusing to watch these idiots flailing to come up with a coherent argument against raising taxes on the wealthy. They look like a bunch of damned fools in the process. 

Or We Could Just Ban It

Once upon a time, the modern derivative/future/forward contract was born, and incredibly useful financial instrument that helps anyone from ordinary farmers protecting themselves against the risk of falling prices at harvest, to airline giants seeking to limit their exposure to ever-rising fuel prices. The forward was a prudent tool, whereby two parties entered into an financial exchange - one party essentially betting that the price of the commodity would rise, while the counterparty expecting that same price to fall. Historically, these contracts actually involved the physical transfer and delivery of the underlying asset. So when that farmer bought a forward contract to sell bushels of wheat at some specified price, the counterparty would actually buy those bushels of wheat from the farmer at the specified date, at the specified price.

But like everything in American and global finance, this has been turned into a giant fucking casino whereby it primarily serves the purpose of funneling around huge sums of money in search of short-term profits while doing very little to actually serve its original purpose. The farmers and Southwest Airlines of the world now make up a very small percentage of these forwards. This makes some people enormously wealthy, while passing on the costs of rampant speculation to the rest of us in the form of rising commodity prices, especially oil.

So here's an idea - how about an outright ban on speculative hedging? It's not like there aren't a million other ways for banksters and "job creators" to slosh around their casino funds. There is some work being done on this now both by the Dodd-Frank act and Sen. Ben Nelson, of all people, but you can guarantee that it won't go far enough or even make it out of the gate with the kind of money this makes. When up to 25% of the cost of a barrel of oil is estimated to be due to this excessive speculation, you would think that it would be a common sense policy to rein it in for the sake of the American economy. Rising oil prices are overwhelmingly detrimental to our consumption based economy. But it's big business for the banksters, so don't expect to see any common sense policy any time soon.

The Cuts Will Continue Until Markets Improve

The answer to all of this, of course, is more austerity. The Free Market Jebus is punishing us for insufficient fealty to his whims. We're going to shrink our way out of this recession!

It Was a Ruse, You Big Dumb Idiot!

No one could have predicted that the faux controversy over the opening of a mosque in lower Manhattan was just a clever ruse to rile up the GOP's most reliable voting constituents in advance of the 2010 elections: the old, the uninformed, the white, and the racist. 

Never hear much about it any more do we? Funny how that works.

Stay Classy, GOP Voters

Ahh, GOP presidential debates: the gift that keeps on giving. First we had the audience cheering Gov. Rick Perry's record of executions - the most of any state in the nation. Even more than Dubya. Next came another audience cheering for an uninsured man to die. And now we have them booing a gay soldier:

These people are sociopaths. And what ever happened to the military being the best goddamn real murkins ever? I thought you couldn't say anything bad about the military otherwise Jesus killed a kitten, and if you question their infallibility and awesomeness, you are a terrorist and are going to hell. I guess that doesn't apply when it comes to homosexuals. Because you know, the GOP and its ignorant mouth breathing constituency hates them some gay.

Contrast their reaction with this recent clip from the Daily Show, the operative clip coming at 2:32:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I don't know how you can watch that and not be moved deeply on some level, but again, they are sociopaths. Fuck them. 

Troy Davis Executed

I have not really been writing about Troy Davis at any length simply because I have been more consumed with the number of economic and tax related news lately. There are number of other good writers who have covered this: see Digby and TNC to name a few.

Before I get to my point, Davis was executed by the state of Georgia this evening despite numerous recantations by corroborating witnesses from his original trial. Davis maintained his innocence up until the moment of his untimely execution. In the days leading up to his execution, there was a veritable torch-and-pitchfork crowd within the right wing media overtly cheering for his execution.

I have never really waded into the social politics of capital punishment, but viewing this unfortunate spectacle has changed that for me. The mere thought of rotting for years on death row, facing down execution for a crime I did not commit is enough to make me want to vomit, let alone imagining any of my friends or family in a similar situation. And that is not to say that I am convinced either way of Davis' innocence or guilt. But as I mentioned before, when several witnesses basically say their original testimony was garbage, it probably bears some serious thought as to whether or not we ought to put this man to death. That was tried in various forms all the way up to the Supreme Court, but being the death-loving, ever macho, dick swinging, executions-are-awesome culture that we are, was ultimately denied. Apparently "beyond a reasonable doubt" is just a flimsy term that we don't let impede the assuaging of our bloodlust. 

I think this shows that in some ways, humanity really hasn't come very far from the days of the Roman Empire. When faced with a man's questionable guilt, instead of taking every precaution to ensure we don't execute an innocent man, we rally the most depraved aspects of our national psyche, cheering for his demise like a bunch of drunken Romans watching  a couple of gladiators swinging axes at each other in the Coliseum. On a similar note, this was also on display at recent Republican debates when audiences cheered enthusiastically at Gov. Rick Perry's record on executions (the most of any governor) and Wolf Blitzer's question as whether a thirty year old, coma stricken, uninsured man should be left to die. This sort of display is disgusting, craven, and has no place in a civilized democracy. You might also say this is why the GOP came unglued at the mention of "empathy" during the Justice Sotomayor confirmation hearings. It's because they have none, and the very idea of it is repellent to them.

But as for the politics of the death penalty, I assume its proponents (especially on the right) use their favored "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" sham of a moral argument. This was popularized during the rise of the Patriot act and the War on Terror as Americans rightly expressed their objections and reservations to the government's ever expanding powers of surveillance over its own citizens. But tragedies like Troy Davis' executions are precisely why we should fear the government having this sort of power. Humans, and by extension their institutions, are inherently fallible. This isn't the first case of a potentially innocent man being put to death, and it won't be the last either.

On Defense Spending

Every time you hear a politician talk about cutting our ridiculously bloated, bigger-than-the-rest-of-the-world-combined defense budget, think of these words by Matthew Yglesias:

If you think about, say, Denmark there’s probably some level of concern there that al-Shabab will take over Somalia and create a congenial atmosphere for Islamist radicalism. Then there’s some secondary concern that some of this radicalism might lead to efforts to infiltrate Denmark and launch terrorist attacks in Copenhagen. The proposed remedies for this, however, are going to be general considerations about physical security in Denmark. The country needs effective policing and border security agencies, and it needs to be resilient in the face of the possibility that a bomb may go off somewhere someday without wrecking the country. 

[...] 

The reporters say the “rapid expansion” of these military efforts “is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.” No doubt it is that. But it’s also a reflection of a very grandiose conception of the appropriate role of the American military in the world. After all, a radical who’s in Yemen or Somalia is, by definition, not in the United States. It would be cheaper and easier to focus on making sure people can’t get from Yemen to Yuma or from Somalia to Sacramento than for us to go halfway around to try to kill them. But America’s strategic concept is basically that if there’s a problem anywhere in the world that could potentially be ameliorated by dropping American bombs, then we ought to drop the bombs. That strategy requires an extremely high level of defense expenditures. Bombs, planes, bases, “secret” airstrips, etc. are all expensive. To reduce military spending, we would need to adopt a more restrained view of the role of the American military. That hasn’t happened.

Defense spending is going no where, at least not in any meaningful capacity. Not until we discontinue our fetish for Endless Wars and piss pants reactions to anything that goes bump in the night and smells like a terrorist. And unfortunately for us, I don't see either of those things ever happening. 

The Fox News / GOP "Class Warfare" Canard

The political right is absolutely apoplectic right now with Obama's newly found populist stance on taxes and economic. It has been kind of fun watching them implode into a swirling morass of wails of class warfare. I've already written about how incredibly pathetic this talking point is, but I don't doubt that it won't be effective with the low information morons that watch the not-at-all-biased Fox News Channel to begin with. Nevertheless, Obama is not letting it go unanswered:

"This is not class warfare -- it's math," Mr. Obama said from the White House Rose Garden, addressing GOP critiques of his plan head on. 

"The money has to come from some place," he continued. "If we're not willing to ask those who've done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit... the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we've got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor." 

[...] 

"I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare. I think it's just the right thing to do."

Yup. It's not class warfare, it's common fucking sense. At least it is in every other Western modern democracy, but we are a little behind the times with our social contract here in America. Newly minted Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren also did an excellent job today of taking down this wildly assbackwards falsehood:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. 

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. 

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. 

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Expecting rich people to contribute back to the societies that have rewarded their success so richly? What a commie. 

More of this please. More of all of it. This is the grounds on which I want the 2012 election to be fought. It's a clash of ideals that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats.

First the American Jobs Act, Then the Buffett Rule

And now Campaign Obama fires another salvo with this:

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire, closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age. 

Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. 

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy. 

That veto threat will put the president on a direct collision course with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said last week that he would not support any legislation that included revenue increases in the form of higher taxes.

I must say, I much prefer this new found Obama persona. Let's hope he can sustain this not only through the election, but also into a potential second term. If he keeps this up, he will garner the support of independents and rally an extremely pissed off and exasperated base. 

Divorce It Like It's Hot

In Pat Robertson's defense, he is just advocating the standard Republican position when it comes to abandoning terminally or very seriously ill women in favor of hot, way younger, non-death bed ridden trophy wives. Mean Ol' Man McCain is a big fan.

Sheriff Joe: Racist Asshole

"Legitimate complaints" my ass:

Infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio does -- which is why he announced a five-person "Cold Case Posse" that will delve into the issue of President Obama's birth certificate.
The posse follows a request by the Surprise, Arizona Tea Party, who Arpaio met with on August 17. The Surprise Tea Party believes that the long-form birth certificate released by President Obama in April -- which put the issue to rest for pretty much everyone -- could be a forgery. 

"The Surprise Tea Party is concerned," they wrote, "that no law enforcement agency or other duly constituted government agency has conducted an investigation into the Obama birth certificate to determine if it is in fact an authentic copy of 1961 birth records on file for Barack Obama at the Hawaii Department of Health in Honolulu, or whether it, or they are forgeries." 

[...] 

"This investigation does not involve politics," Arpaio told WND. "I listen to all the residents of Maricopa County who come to my office with complaints, regardless what their politics are. 

"My door is open to everyone, and I don't kick them out. If a complaint is legitimate, I don't dump it into the wastebasket," he continued. "When I get allegations brought to me by the citizens of Maricopa County, I look into the allegations, just like I am doing here."

Uh-huh. So if myself and a bunch of other ignorant mouth breather types demand that Sheriff Joe investigate Gov. Jan Brewer's and the private prison industry's suspicious connection to the drafting and passage of immigration bill SB1070, I am sure he will jump right on it, because after all, this is not about politics! His door is open and actions will be taken if a complaint is legitimate!

Fuck this guy and the people who keep putting him into office. He is a disgrace, a complete failure at his job, and uses his office and badge for little more than to wage political wars against brown people and anyone else he deems an enemy. 

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Evil Socialist

You can now add Eric Schmidt to the Right's growing list of wildly successful capitalists Unserious evil dirty socialist scum: 

But the current strategy is ludicrous. You have a situtation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand. The classic solution is to have the government step in, and with short-term initiatives help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth producing things, like highways and bridges and schools. 

[...] 

Business can create enormous numbers of new jobs in America. All we need to see is more demand. What's happening right now is: Businesses are very well-run, they have a lot of cash. They're waiting for more demand. At the moment, business efficiency allows them to grow at 1 or 2 percent, which is what we're seeing today. They don't have to hire more people. And until we solve the problem, people are going to sit idle. And it's a real tragedy.

Other recent and prominent additions to this list include Warren Buffet, for his audacity to point out the fact that the mega rich pay absurdly low, regressive levels of taxes.

Random Thought

Is there any reason why they decided to tuck Campaign Obama away for the last two years, and only bring him out again now that the GOP has spent the last two years telling Governance Obama and the country to go fuck themselves? I understand you can't constantly be in campaign mode, but its obvious which of the two personas the public prefers. They also do not need to be mutually exclusive; in most cases Campaign Obama would lead to much better politics and policy outcomes than what Governance Obama has achieved. 

And if he wins a second term, he better disabuse himself of the notion that Americans want to see a repeat performance of him as the reasonable guy in the room.

Occupy Wall Street

More of this please.

There is a shortage of true populist protests and activism over what this country has endured at the hands of Wall Street and the way in which government has aided and abetted the banksters in shielding them from any accountability. Obama famously told top bankster CEOs that "I'm the only one standing in between you and the pitchforks." Well, we need to see more pitchforks. Sure people are pissed, but really only in rhetoric and not in action. 

And the Misinformation Begins

Paul Ryan is on the Sunday shows today, vomiting up the entirely predictable GOP tax cut talking point dreck that I alluded to yesterday:

RYAN: It adds further instability to our system — more uncertainty — and it punishes job creation and those people who create jobs. Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics. We don’t need to divide people and prey on people’s fear and envy and anxiety. We need to remove the barriers so entrepreneurs can hire people. These tax increases don’t work.  

[...] 

This is a double tax… If we tax investment and tax more you will get less of it. It looks like to me not a very good sign. It looks like the President wants to move down the class warfare path. Class warfare will simply divide this country more, will attack job creators, divide people, and it doesn’t grow the economy.

He hits them all - the dreaded uncertainty canard, the delicate sensibilities and fee-fees of our "job creators," the reverse class warfare, and suppressing the investment that hasn't materialized despite more than a decade of record low taxes on the rich. Also, where are the jobs we were promised from the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Ryan?

As ThinkProgress notes, Ryan is also in favor of letting the current payroll tax cut expire. Ryan and his cronies in the GOP love this idea because it is overwhelmingly punitive to the poor and middle class. The payroll tax is only levied against the first $100K or so of gross incomes. In other words, it is levied against pretty much the entirety of poor or middle class incomes, while affecting a very small portion of the incomes of the affluent. But this is a feature, not a bug, of the Republican platform. Remember, the problem with America is that the poor don't have any skin in the game, or in most cases, still have some skin left at all. 

The way the GOP wields the 'class warfare' cudgel as a talking point is so inept and bereft of any facts or merit that it really behooves the Democrats to seize on this and use it to their advantage. Sure, pitting one economic strata against the other is by definition class warfare, but that is why context is everything. If we were talking a 50/50 split or even a 60/40 split, then Ryan's vapid statements might make some sense. But we are literally talking against the top 2-10% versus the lower 90-98% of the country. When Democratic politicians and the lower 90-98% ask that a fraction of the country as small as 2-10% (the very same group, mind you, that claims to love America and its freedoms more than anything, except when it comes to actually giving back to the nation that has afforded them such lavish wealth) pay more in taxes during a period of the lowest taxation since the 1950s, its laughably stupid to term that as class warfare. It's simply economic and social justice, both of which are abhorrent and repellent to the modern GOP.

Our Economic Broken Record - Republicans Oppose Everything

This wasn't totally predictable or anything:

In a Friday memo to all House Republicans, GOP leaders came out against nearly all the major proposals in Obama's $447 billion job-creation plan, including his middle-class tax cuts and his approach to federal spending on transportation and school construction. 

The Republican leaders said cutting payroll taxes through 2012 would lead to a tax increase in 2013 -- an argument that didn't deter Republicans from a much bigger, 10-year tax cut in 2001 that was extended last December but is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2012. 

"There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases," they wrote in their memo. "We are creating significant new uncertainty in an already uncertain economy."

This is just fucking crazy. They are now actually arguing that we can't cut taxes now, because when they return to their original level at a later date, that would be a tax increase. Am I the only one that sees the abject lunacy and idiocy in this argument? This is really what one of our major political parties now uses to justify its infantile bull shit?  And as many people have already noted - Republicans have finally found a tax cut that they don't like. Why? Because the payroll tax overwhelmingly benefits the wrong kind of people - poor and middle class citizens. If we were proposing a 200% tax increase on the working poor while abolishing capital gains and the top marginal tax rate, you know they'd be on board. They did vote for the Ryan plan after all. 

Anyone that has paid even one ounce of attention to politics for the last two and a half years know that the Republicans will never support anything the President proposes. So I will admit that while the American Jobs Act is long overdue and a much needed economic stimulus, I have never really seen its path through Congress. Sure the President wants us to call our congressmen and women, even the asshole Republican ones, but does anyone honestly believe that Democratic constituents calling Republican representatives and senators is going to make them shift from them their putrid ideological entrenchment? 

I think really the most likely scenario is that the economy is going to continue to suck tremendously well into the 2012 election season, thereby endangering Obama's re-election. We will get some sort of movement on economic stimulus between now and then, but it will be purposefully hamstrung by the Republicans who will ensure that it is a series of half measures or contains a bunch of their bull shit ideological sacred cows that will do nothing to stimulate the economy. The President's only chance between now and then will to be continue to bring Campaign Obama both to the American public and to his style of governance. If you can't get anything through Congress, then the one thing you can do is present an unmistakably stark contrast between the two parties values and ideas on how to rebuild a broken America. That started with the roll out of the American Jobs Act, and it continues with this:

President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. 

With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid. 

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages. 

Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday.

Republicans will never in a million years support a tax increase of any kind, especially not one on millionaires, or the "job  creators" as they are known among the mouth breathers. The problem that faces the Republicans is that a millionaire's tax is overwhelmingly popular with the public. They can spew all the bull shit they want, but the fact of the matter is that the public intuitively understands that there is a infinitesimally small slice of the population that controls pretty much all the wealth in this country, and they pay an absolute pittance in income taxes. As the NYT piece says, this tax would hit about three-tenths of one percent of tax payers. It doesn't matter how the GOP and Fox News try to spin it, with all the caterwauling about job killing tax increases or the delicate fee-fees of our job creating plutocrat overlords, the public is just not going to care when you're talking about hitting such a small portion of the tax base with this increase. It's good policy, and even better politics. 

Again, the Buffett Rule faces an even steeper uphill climb in Congress than does the American Jobs Act. But these are the sort of populist positions that Obama should have been taking long ago, since January 2009 on his first day in office. The public saw far too much of Obama as the most reasonable guy in the room. Maybe it's finally catching on that when you're in a room full of unhinged lunatics that want to savage the founding principles of this country and hand it over to rule by corporations and plutocrats, being the most reasonable guy doesn't count for much. Americans want someone on their side, and Obama appears to be finally understanding that.

And The Clean Water Act Is Killing Exxon Mobil

It's not exactly a stretch to note ad nauseum that Michelle Bachmann is big dumb idiot, but in cases like these, it's more important to remember that a large number of people (almost half of the country if you go by party split in presidential elections) accept her statements at face value and in some cases, actually believe them.

Freedom of Coercing Small Children to Work for Shit Wages

Media Matters is on a roll lately, or maybe it's just the stupid people that feed them their material. At any rate, since the Republicans and Tea Baggers are such huge fans of third world policies and third world standards of living, I for one welcome them to just shut the fuck up and collectively move themselves to a true third world nation (remember, we're only aspiring to be one at this point) and see how much they love the awesomeness and freedom and stuff.

And for all you "But Fox is fair and balanced!" types, I think it's just adorable how they are barnstorming  wall-to-wall coverage of the exact same agenda that Republicans in Congress settled on coming out of the August recess.

Time For Obesity, Early Onset Diabetes Protests

It's my inalienable, Jebus given right to be a slovenly fat ass! Keep Michelle Obama's Kenyan socialism out of my bucket of KFC...that happens to be sitting on the other side of the room, that I can't reach, and I'm too fat to walk over there to get it, so I'll just wallow for a while because Medicare hasn't yet approved my claim for a Rascal from the Scooter Store.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Heckuva job, Democrats:

“I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said in an interview Wednesday, joining a growing chorus of Democrats who prefer an à la carte version of the bill despite White House resistance to that approach. “For that reason alone I think we should break it up.”
[...]
But Democrats, as is their wont, are divided over their objections, which stem from Mr. Obama’s sinking popularity in polls, parochial concerns and the party’s chronic inability to unite around a legislative initiative, even in the face of Republican opposition.
Some are unhappy about the specific types of companies, particularly the oil industry, that would lose tax benefits. “I have said for months that I am not supporting a repeal of tax cuts for the oil industry unless there are other industries that contribute,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana.
A small but vocal group dislikes the payroll tax cuts for employees and small businesses. “I have been very unequivocal,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon. “No more tax cuts.”

I suppose it would be too much to ask for these prima donnas to just shut up and support the President's agenda for a change. That is what political parties do when they want to get something done. Just look at what the Republicans did with the Paul Ryan plan. They mainstreamed making Medicare into a voucher program while cutting trillions in taxes for the uber wealthy and whipped their entire caucus behind it in both houses of Congress despite it being terrible politics, policy, and overwhelmingly unpopular with the public. And the President can't even get his own party to shut up and unify behind a much needed economic plan in the middle of a flagging economy and 9% unemployment. In an election year.

Ostensibly, a number of the Democrats cited in the NYT piece oppose the American Jobs Act as a paltry attempt to burnish their conservative bona fides. I'm not quite sure what it will take these people to realize that having a 'D' next to their name ensures they will get pasted in any election in a conservative district or state. Just look at 2010 - the largest swath of Democrats that got ousted from the House were Blue Dogs. It's not terribly difficult to comprehend when the Right spends all of its time reading Ann Coulter books and listening to people on Fox News breathing fire about how Democrats are evil and treasonous and hate America and want to kill your children in their sleep. They hate you because you are a Democrat. It's very simple. 

In other words - shut the fuck up and support the President's long overdue jobs agenda already. The opposition party just introduced an identically titled bill that seeks to eliminate corporate taxation in its entirety. As a "jobs" bill. These are the people you're dealing with. These are the people you are implicitly supporting by whining about how Obama is mean or how his bill isn't what you'd like it to be. And they will be coming after your seat in 2012 regardless of how you act or vote. So despite whatever ill founded and delicate political misgivings you may have, Mr. & Mrs. Conservative Democrat, it's time to get on the right side of this issue. 

Thanks Captain Hindsight!

South Park:

Coon 2: Hindsight
Get More: SOUTH
PARKEric Cartman,more...

The Washington Post:

A 16-month federal investigation has concluded that BP’s efforts to limit costs on its mile-deep Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to the blowout last year that killed 11 workers, sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The long-awaited report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement catalogues dozens of mistakes, misapprehensions, risky decisions and failures of communication that led to the blowout and the 87-day spill that spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Right. I understand a formal investigation was necessary, but it wasn't like these things weren't blatantly obvious on the first day after the spill.

Republicans Hate Ponzi Schemes!

Via Greg Sargent, Bloomberg brings us a poll that shows - surprise! - the Republican base is a bunch of ignorant morons:

The most publicized campaign issue focusing on Perry -- his characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi Scheme” -- has Americans divided. Among all respondents, 46 percent said they agree with the remark, while 50 percent said they disagree.
Among Republicans, 65 percent agree with Perry’s statements about Social Security, while 33 percent disagree.

So a significant majority of morons Republicans polled think that Social Security is akin to a criminal investment scheme whereby large sums of money are taken in by an individual, never invested as promised, and then that same individual runs away with the investor money. Mmm-hmm. Sounds just like  Social Security. Not that I would expect Republicans to know any better. I'm sure they were too busy watching Fox News screech about Michelle Obama's war on school lunches to be bothered to know about a very recent example of a Ponzi scheme in the form of Bernie Madoff.

But since Republicans can't ever be bothered with elitist things like "facts," let's just skip ahead to solving the problem. Since the Republican base is too goddamned stupid to know the difference between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme and that Rick Perry is a lying asshole and spewing misinformation to justify his extremist, ideologically driven goal to dismantle America's already inept social safety net, how about they "fix" the program by volunteering to no longer receive any benefits from it?

Oh what's that? They don't want to? Yeah, figured as much.

Fox's Idea of Onerous/Job Killing Regulations

Maybe we would have more jobs only if corporations had the freedom to discriminate against people for race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disabilities, and age. THANKS A LOT OBAMA!

Goddamn job killing regulations! We gotta get the fedrul gubmint outta the way so the private market can overcome this socialist Kenyan asshole's tyranny!

I can't wrap my head around the fact that people actually believe this shit.

Here He Is, The Biggest Douche in the Universe

Dick Cheney.

America's Lost Decade

Not good:

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

And this while congressional Republicans continues to plot how best to fuck over the economy in order to wound President Obama, while continuing their slobbery fealty to their corporate and wealthy masters. In any normal, moral, or sane democracy, these numbers would be treated as gravely as their substance dictates. Elected officials and those in a position of power to do something about it would be rightfully concerned. But not in America. We have an entire political party and their not-at-all-biased corporate propaganda mouthpiece wholly devoted to marginalizing grim reports like this and trying to entrench the perverse idea that the poor are a bunch of whiny, freeloading, lazy fucks who aren't really poor because they have Xbox 360s. I wish I were kidding. And graphs like these are just the best:

Who the fuck cares that they can't afford healthcare, education? They have coffee makers goddammit, and in some cases, more than one DVD player. And Obama wages class warfare because he doesn't think that corporate jet owners should get a tax break.

These people are sick, and it's well past time that their low information base wakes up and tosses them out of office. And while we're talking about sane, moral, normal democracies, I might add that we would  also have a party beating this point to a bloody pulp on a daily basis, unafraid of being labeled as fighting class warfare, and unafraid of being outspent (or not receiving any) in an election by corporate money, and unafraid if fighting these bastards cost them their job. The facts are there, and they are indisputable. Our pathetic center right policies are not advancing the American Dream, but are in fact destroying it. It's well past time that somebody puts up a real fight to reverse this disgusting trend. 

Terrorist Until Proven Innocent

This is exactly the kind of shit that I was talking about in my post about the shameful legacy of our piss pants reaction to 9/11. 

And note how blithely the FBI spokesperson states that the public prefers that they overreact rather than under react. Personally, I would rather prefer they act with a modicum of sanity and not use heavily armed SWAT teams to drag innocent citizens off of an airplane for no reason other than they are brown. And let's be honest with ourselves - that is exactly what happened here.

The Onion, excellent as usual, nails it here.

Your Modern GOP: Rooting for America's Failure Since 2008

A few days ago, I said the following in response to to Obama's laughably naive presumption that there might be any, even a single Republican that might put their country before electoral politics:

With all due respect: Wake the fuck up, Mr. President.

It doesn't take a political scientist to predict these things:

House Republicans may pass bits and pieces of President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, but behind the scenes, some Republicans are becoming worried about giving Obama any victories — even on issues the GOP has supported in the past.
And despite public declarations about finding common ground with Obama, some Republicans are privately grumbling that their leaders are being too accommodating with the president.
“Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?” said one senior House Republican aide who requested anonymity to discuss the matter freely. “I just don’t want to co-own the economy by having to tout that we passed a jobs bill that won’t work or at least won’t do enough.”

This should be the top story on every major newspaper, cable network, and radio broadcast. These assholes would much rather just let the country suffer and wallow through the Lesser Depression than do anything to improve our economic malaise because...it might help Obama. 

The President and Congressional Dems need to disavow themselves of any further bull shit ideals of bipartisanship and compromise. The GOP doesn't want it. They want nothing to do with any policy that would actually help the economy or unemployment, because they view these things as mutually exclusive to their electoral success. 

It doesn't get much more fucked up and cynical than this. These people can not be allowed to make any sort of significant gains in 2012. Ezra Klein has a piece up today that basically posits that the American public is so stupid and ill informed that they will believe that any potential future Republican acts of government that have nothing to do with the economy or unemployment, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act or rolling back EPA regulations, will be credited for any recovery beyond 2012.

And sadly, he’s right. Which makes it imperative that a Republican does not sit in the White House come January 2013. The last thing this country needs, the last thing this country can afford is to have the failed militant conservative ideology validated by a GOP huckster taking credit for a recovery they wanted nothing to do with and actively sought to prevent.

(via Steve Benen)

The High Cost of Overreacting

I've said it before, but there is never any cost/benefit analysis to Absolute Safety. Ever. Why? Because freedom isn't free. And because shut up, that's why! And you don't want to get snuffed out in your bed at 3:00 am by a terrorist do you?!

I think someone once said something about all of this, years ago:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.

We may have had Navy SEALs swoop in and shoot him in the face, but you can't argue that he didn't ultimately accomplish his goal. I know I'm not the first freedom hating, anti-American liberal to point this out, but it bears repeating as the ten year anniversary of September 11th nears tomorrow. We allowed two terrorists armed with box cutters and a plot that cost $500,000 to fundamentally alter the fabric of America and by extension, the world. We essentially reacted like Gotham City did in The Dark Knight at the hands of the Joker: "Look at what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets." We played right into their hands, launching two endless wars, one of which was completely unrelated to the attack on our soil, and spent billions and trillions of dollars in the pursuit of the laughable ideal of Absolute Safety. We circumvented civil liberties long enshrined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution, to the extent that many who have grown up during the time of 9/11 now view this as normal. Even when bin Laden came out and publicly stated that this was his end game, we kept right at it anyway. And we continue to do so, and these same policies will continue into perpetuity. He got in our heads, altered our psyche, altered who we are as a people, even going so far as to justify torture as a means to an end, and gave birth to the insanity of the national security apparatus that has its tentacles firmly wrapped about America, ever wooing citizens to forego their civil liberties and basic governmental services commonly offered by other Western democracies so that we can plow billions into defense and security spending in pursuit of the specious goal of wholly preventing all future and potential terror attacks. All of this despite the overwhelming volumes of evidence that show that more Americans die in car accidents than they do as a result of terror attacks. Maybe it is time for no-drive lists and screening shoes and liquids before people get behind the wheel!

Contrast this with how Norway's prime minister reacted when recently confronted with a violent attack on his nation by an unhinged extremist:

Earlier Mr. Stoltenberg said the attacks were directed at Norway's "fundamental values" - democracy and openness - and that the response would be "more democracy, more openness." He said he expected people to participate more broadly in politics.
He added it was too early to consider new security laws.
"Now is the time for comfort for those who have lost family members [and] friends, and to help those who are still wounded," he said.
"Then afterwards, and especially after the investigation is finished, there will be a time for going through all the experiences, learning from what happened and then draw the conclusions regarding, for instance, security measures."
But the prime minister said the time would come when it was necessary to move on.
"We have to, at some stage, move back to some kind of normality, and also to convey the message of sadness with a message of something positive - and that is that we have seen a very united Norwegian people."

Any American politician uttering these words would be labeled a dirty hippie, pussy-ass coward and Unserious.

I'm not even going to go into the opportunity cost of $3 trillion dollars and what we could have done with that money. Just remember during all the flag waving and high-minded, freedom loving, America #1 speechifying that will take place tomorrow, it didn't have to be this way. We voluntarily embarked on a lifelong, national policy of absolute insanity in the wake of the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, co-opting their deaths and memories to subvert the rest of the nation into accepting endless wars and the perpetual empowerment of the security state. Their lives and legacies deserve better than this. 

UPDATE: ThinkProgress gives the thrust of my post a leg up, noting that in the ten years since 9/11, only 33 Americans have been killed as a result of terror attacks, while 150,000 Americans have been slain in murders.

Belated Obama Speech Reaction

I didn't get to watch Obama's American Jobs Act (AJA) until long after it aired, since it went on at 7:00 EST/4:00 PST to appease all the mouth breathers that had to watch the NFL season opener over trivial things like the President addressing a joint session of Congress during the Lesser Depression. Here's a few thoughts:

1. Obama's speech offered the most full throated defense of liberalism and government's role in a modern society that we have heard him utter in quite some time. That was heartening for me, since the last several months have been completely played on the GOP's turf, both strategically and rhetorically. Just a matter of weeks ago, our political overlords were arguing over not if we were going to slash government spending, but by how much, with the President even trying to one-up the GOP at their own pathetic game. Now we have Obama decrying the GOP's insistence that America race to the bottom when it should be racing to the top, and repudiating the notion that we will use harsh economic times to dismantle the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. This is the kind of shit I have been yelling about for months on this blog. This view of government is exactly what Democrats and independents believe in, and what sets the tea bagger and GOP types into orbit. In other words, this is the drum Obama should have been beating all along.
2. It was sufficiently combative. Obama dropped the Conciliator in Chief canard for once and urged our modern Do Nothing Congress into action. And while the GOP will find any reason to oppose and obstruct this seemingly uncontroversial piece of legislation regardless, the President sought to strip them of their previously favorite cudgels: the deficit, and Obama's ideas as extreme socialist out-of-touch-with-middle-America liberalism. He repeatedly beat home the point that this bill contains ideas previously proposed and popular with both parties (indeed, tax cuts comprise almost half of the $450 billion bill), essentially daring the GOP to oppose this and tie themselves in knots in the process of doing so. He further challenged the Super Congressional Justice League Committee to pay for the bill in its entirety through finding the cuts/revenues to do so in their study due this November. Again, the Republicans will find some pathetic, infantile reason to oppose this anyway (the sky is blue, Obama is black, today is Saturday, because Obama said 'pass this bill now' and is mean and hurt our fee-fees), but he has made it incumbent upon them to find a new reason to do so.
3. More importantly beyond appeasing cantankerous bloggers like myself, the speech, and the bill itself, has already won critical acclaim. Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, a darling of both parties for economic analysis, estimates that the AJA would shave 1% off of the unemployment rate, adding as many as 1.9 million jobs. Other non-partisan estimates have that number even higher. Now moving unemployment down to 8% is clearly not enough. But this is a step in the right direction and much more effective than the GOP worldview of slashing government spending when no other entity, consumer or corporation, is currently spending either. And arguably, this could be used as a prototype to woo Americans away from the GOP's fire breathing ideology of government-is-always-bad-and-can't-help-create-jobs and enact further stimulus legislation down the road. Beyond Zandi, the speech seems to have placated Paul Krugman to an extent, who has long been the most strident critic of Obama's pathetically inept fiscal policies up until this point.

All of this is great, but the linchpin of this legislation will be the extent to which Obama follows through and hammers this home daily to the American public. That is not his strong suit. We've seen it before in the stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act - two pieces of legislation which should ostensibly be popular with the public were they properly informed of the content and the benefits for average Americans. The administration completely conceded the message on both of these, allowing the GOP to paint the stimulus as a failure and the ACA as a socialist government takeover of their Medicare. If Obama wants the AJA to succeed, he is going to have to do a much better job of selling it and repeatedly touting its benefits. I am cautiously optimistic that he will. This is now campaign trail Obama, who is arguably much more effective at messaging and agenda-setting than governance Obama (sadly enough). 

All that being said, this is a start. I'm hoping that we will see more of this fight in Obama and congressional Democrats as a whole going forward. They are going to need to sustain this aggressive stance and momentum if they want to have any hope of succeeding in 2012. The next election needs to be a referendum on two extremely different set of ideals, not bat shit Republicanism and slightly saner, less bat shitty centrism. It's a winning message, and one that the Democrats must sustain and hammer relentlessly for the next 14 months.

Nation Building

It only applies after you have invaded and dropped freedom bombs on brown people:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.” 

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Clearly the solution here is that we need to bomb ourselves, and then the GOP will be interested in finding money to invest in our crumbling infrastructure.

Don't Tackle Me Bro

So now we're tackling and arresting senior citizens for their audacity to speak their minds at their congressman's town halls. 

So much for our representative democracy. Congressman Ryan (and many others) are not interested in what the peasants have to say.

(via Digby)

The Problem With America In One Graph

Click here for the full size image. I don't know how anyone can look at that and still vote Republican. Democrats are certainly not the stalwart protectors of the poor and middle class that they once were, especially as they continue to rely more and more on corporate dollars for reelection, and corporatist policies because they fear being labeled as "anti-business." But the GOP is just crazy, and anyone who argues against the indisputable fact that they are the party of plutocrats and corporations is stupid, lying, or both. This is the reality they have created; this is the reality they want. But it's not enough. It's never enough. And they want to make it worse. It's like Jon Stewart said the other day - the problem, from the GOP perspective, is that the poor don't have any 'skin in the game.' In other words, the problem is that the poor still have skin. 

Noted dirty commie socialist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes the following in the op-ed accompanying this image:

Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats. 

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest downturns. 

[...] 

But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It cut spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the national economy and shifted more of the costs of public higher education to families. It shredded safety nets. (Only 27 percent of the unemployed are covered by unemployment insurance.) And it allowed companies to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize. Fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. 

More generally, it stood by as big American companies became global companies with no more loyalty to the United States than a GPS satellite. Meanwhile, the top income tax rate was halved to 35 percent and many of the nation’s richest were allowed to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax. Inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent of earners were sliced. Yet at the same time sales and payroll taxes — both taking a bigger chunk out of modest paychecks — were increased.

We are living in a reality wrought by a thirty year march to the beat of the drum of the extreme conservative orthodoxy. Sure, there have been Democratic administrations in between, but the mantra of deregulate/cut taxes for the "job creators" survives and remains at the forefront of any economic debate. Meanwhile, current Democrats don't understand the importance of agenda setting or proper messaging, so these abject lies continue to pass as good ideas. It's very depressing.

(h/t Balloon Juice)

Polls from ObviousTown

Via Ezra Klein, NBC/WSJ has a new poll showing that Obama's post-partisanship fetish is not going so well with all those people that are out of work and otherwise have a shitty standard of living while Washington continues to do nothing to help them:

On the deficit, which was at the heart of the pitched battle over the debt ceiling earlier this summer, Obama has reaped no dividends for trying to produce a compromise agreement with Republicans. Six in 10 disapprove of Obama’s work on the federal budget deficit, a percentage that is relatively unmoved in recent surveys and basically where it was a year ago.

No shit. You don't need a poll for these things. It has long been glaringly obvious that no one gives a fuck about Obama's post-partisan brand/strategy (if you can even call it a strategy anymore) except for the Obama political team. People are hurting and they want substantive results that improve their bleak standard of living, even if that means hurting the Republican's fee-fees, getting a little aggressive, or rightfully and repeatedly calling them on their bull shit. People want Obama to be a fighter. Being Conciliator in Chief during the Lesser Depression and against unprecedented, childish Republican obstruction is not going to win him any favors. The Republicans want Obama to fail and do nothing, and he is handing that to them on a silver platter while simultaneously hamstringing his own re-election prospects. 

If Obama loses in 2012, he really has nobody to blame but himself. He has doubled down on this 'above-the-fray' strategy time and again, and it has long since been apparent that no one cares for it. There's a time and a place for such high-mindedness, and the midst of the Lesser Depression is not one of them.

 

"But Obama promised to bring hope and change and be different and change the tone of Washington and end partisanship during his campaign," you say. Yeah, well he also promised a ton of other shit in the campaign that on which he did not and will not deliver. I would have rather seen him uphold even a fraction of the other campaign promises at the price of ditching this 'turn the other cheek' dreck.

Hmmm, He Seems Like A Nice Guy!

I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

"We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party."

With all due respect: Wake the fuck up, Mr. President.

That Didn't Take Long

Remember what I said the other day?

In the meantime, we will be stuck with Fox News and the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of this world completely losing their shit, spewing hate speech as they watch their precious grip on America continue to unravel as a new generation rises up and rejects their ignorant worldview.

Well, that was fast. Good ol' GB just couldn't help himself:

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck tackled a particularly sticky issue when it comes to race. How does it make any sort of sense, he wanted to know, to refer to all black persons as "African American," particularly when so many black individuals don't live in the U.S.? 

[...] 

So is the term "colored," Beck and co. wondered, really such a "bad thing" as we're lead to believe? "Only here," he lamented, referring to the U.S. "Why are we made to feel bad?"

Yeah, it's so tough being a white man in America, because we are guilted into not calling people "colored" anymore. I mean, why is the n-word such a bad thing either? Black people say it right? Why can't we? Why are we made to feel so bad?

Don't worry, it gets better:

"African American" was not made to do anything except try to create a super man. "Oh don't you dare feel bad about yourself! You're African American!" No. You're an American. Instead of building the country up and saying, "Lookit. We all have the right, here in this country... Look at what happened with Martin Luther King. That makes you an American. 'Judge not by the color of your skin.'" And you weren't over in Africa! Your great-great-great grandfather was, your great-great-great-great grandfather may have been, but you weren't!And sure this country sucked for blacks. Sucked. Beyond sucked, for a long time. But it doesn't now. It doesn't now. Be proud to be an American.I am sure that Glenn Beck knows firsthand just how bad the country "sucked" for African Americans. He emphasized it twice, just to show how empathetic and understanding he is. And it doesn't anymore! Racism is over because of Obama's election! Just be proud and wave the flag!

Fuck that guy. I don't really know what else to say. It's appalling that he has a national audience of millions of people.

Also too, meanwhile:

Minorities accounted for 98 percent of the population growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, according to a new report, as the country’s white population continued to stagnate, and in many places, decline.
Hispanics and Asians led population growth in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas over the past decade, growing by 41 percent and 43 percent respectively. The population of blacks grew by 12 percent, and the aging white population was largely flat, increasing by less than 1 percent.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution and the author of the report, also said the United States had reached a demographic milestone: About half of all recent births were to minority parents, a shift that will have broad policy implications in the years to come.
The country’s largest cities are changing the fastest, Dr. Frey said, and provide a snapshot of what the country might look like in the future. 

[...] 

“Where these large metro areas are now is where the rest of America is headed,” he said. “The old image of the white and black American population is obsolete.”

You could say maybe this is why the redneck tea bagger white fringe of the Republican party is so unhinged and why they want their country back. They are losing it to an increasingly tolerant, multi-cultural, and diverse America. They could welcome it, but they choose not to because they are scary, other, not like them, not white, and not real murkins.

Reducing Unemployment Through Increasing Pollution

This is a neat trick, albeit one that we have seen before:

House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth.With everyone from President Obama to his Republican challengers in the 2012 campaign focusing on ways to spur economic growth, House Republicans will roll out plans Monday to fight regulations from the National Labor Relations Board, pollution rules handed down by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulations that affect health plans for small businesses. In addition, the lawmakers plan to urge a 20 percent tax deduction for small businesses.“It is essential that the House continue our focus on the jobs crisis,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote in a memo to be sent to GOP lawmakers Monday. 

[...] 

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”The result of these votes is likely to mirror failed efforts this year to repeal landmark legislation that was approved during Obama’s first two years in office — his health-care law and the Dodd-Frank consumer protection bill — but it will provide a framework for Republicans to highlight a jobs agenda. Also, leaders have pushed several of their freshman lawmakers to advance the anti-regulation bills, providing the newcomers with a chance to tout proposals that could resonate with voters in their districts.

I am seeing a formula here - pick a policy or boogieman completely unrelated to current economic conditions but that resonates with your failed ideology and mouth breathing base, relentlessly hammer at this policy in the House even though it has zero chance of ever passing the Senate and even less of a chance of making it past the President's veto pen, all the while taking to Fox News and the Sunday shows and spew lies, misinformation, and propaganda about how the Democrats are killing the nation with their support of the boogieman and how it's their fault that we're in the mess that we are, and oh if they would just compromise a little bit on this very reasonable and "pro-growth" GOP position, we would all be rolling in the Benjamins. 

We saw it the last two years with the deficit as a political cudgel. The deficit has absolutely nothing to do with unemployment or flagging GDP - not a fucking thing. But that was the Republican meme. And the Democrats went along like the bunch of groupthink fraught morons that they are. But I have a feeling that the GOP has gone a bit far on this one and I don't think they will get very far with a "screw labor unions/pollute more" agenda for jobs. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that anything the President reveals in his speech next week will be much more palatable to the American public, but I could also be placing far too much faith in our incredibly stupid and uninformed electorate. 

Finally, this latest stunt from the GOP circus is just further proof that they don't care fuck all for the country or the economy. Focusing on labor unions and environmental regulations at a time of 9.1% unemployment and GDP growth nearing recession is laughable and stupid. It's just an attempt to enact an extreme, ideological agenda under the cloak of jobs. After all, two pillars of the modern Republican party is gutting worker rights and polluting as much as possible because pollution creates jobs and climate change is a farce and only Jebus can harm or end this world. But they are Very Serious People because they hold elected office, and their buddies in the media will treat them as such with kid gloves. Expect this to get a similar treatment to Paul Ryan's 'courageous' abolition of Medicare. The media won't care that the GOP is a bunch of clowns and these policies are cynical and ideologically driven and will do nothing to improve the economy or create jobs. What matters is that they're trying! They're putting something on the table!