This Is How Low We've Sunk

The pursuit of higher education and attending college, once a long-standing pillar of the American Dream, is now controversial. Because, you know, Obama supports it.

The tea bagger interviewed in the article scoffs at the Socialist Kenyan Usurper's librul elitist hogwash because, "we need garbageman, we need welders, carpenters." And that is certainly true. But the distinction here is that the President would seek to increase access to higher education so that people have the choice to either go to college or become a garbageman, welder, or carpenter. You shouldn't have to be relegated to a career as a garbageman simply because higher education is out of the question due to your economic means. 

And I would add that societies also need court jesters, clowns, and fools. And for that, we have the tea baggers. 

Proof is in the Racist Pudding

Perhaps you may have thought that I was being a meanie liberal ideologue when I said that Santorum and Gingrich's racist statements revealed how they truly feel, that it was not a misstatement, and that it was a rare glimpse into the depravity of their ignorant worldview. Did you think I was being a bit presumptive or hyperbolic?

QED:

JUAN WILLIAMS: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also said poor kids lack a strong work ethic, and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans? 

GINGRICH: No, I don’t see that.

Weird, no one could have predicted that Gingrich's overtly racist statement was intentionally and overtly racist.

Sexism Cuts Across All Parties

It goes without saying that I am no fan of Michelle Bachmann, but in her defense, this is total bull shit (via Digby):

After Bachmann left the race, several of her advisers pointed to sexism as a contributing factor. “We did believe that sexism — I use the stronger word misogyny — was at play,” said Peter Waldron, her faith outreach coordinator. 

Waldron said that several influential pastors called for her to drop out of the race, reasoning “that a female could not be a civil magistrate.” Johnson himself is a pastor at a central Iowa church.

Hooray! Look at all the progress that has been made since the 1960s! We have women running for president....and organizations full of old, misogynistic, white, male Christians telling them that there is no place for vaginas in the White House. Because you know, that is not what Jebus would have wanted.

This is not a left/right issue. No female should ever be subjected to this kind of regressive, ignorant treatment, and it is a sad reflection on the state of our lack of progress on gender equality. 

Greed is Good

And we wonder why Wall Street is one of the most highly subsidized industries in the country, or why presidents of both parties always fill their administrations with ex-banksters/Wall Street acolytes.

It's where the money's at. Average citizens do not contribute hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars, thus average citizens do not get cabinet positions or undue influence.

It's a Wingnut World After All

Obama can't do anything right ever - Disney World edition:

Maybe I am crazy, but I come from a world where it is a privilege, dare I say an honor, to hear a sitting president speak in person. I guess I am a little biased, because if it were George W. Bush speaking at Disney World, I would probably rather ride the Tea Cups until I puked up my intestines. But regardless of the speaker, there is still something unique and timeless about the opportunity to see an American president speak in person. Not so for the Fair and Balanced brigade at Fox, who automatically assumes that the Kenyan Socialist Usurper is shitting all over Real Murkins' vacations by his very presence. 

I know it's belaboring the obvious at this point, but Obama can't do anything right in these people's eyes. The fact that they still hide behind the laughable 'fair and balanced' label, and the fact that people actually buy that facade, is pathetic and laughable. 

Should the Media Strive for Higher Standards than TMZ?

I think this was the biggest story of last week (via Atrios):

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. 

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information. 

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

Wow. The stenography of the media is one of those things the you know is going on, but when you see them openly admit it in print, it suddenly makes it much, much worse. I suppose this is progress though. The best comment by far on this revealing query comes from Glenn Greenwald:

That’s basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being “truth vigilantes”) is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory.

Exactly. People read the news to be informed, and for the purpose of having an independent third-party hold powerful interests and government to account. In most cases, neither of those things presently happen. And the fact that someone in Brisbane's position even has to ask this question just shows how far we've fallen. 

BOOOOOOOOOORING!

The always excellent Media Matters pillories our pedantic, infantile media's refusal to report on the Stop Online Piracy Act, a giant shit heap of a bill with significant negative ramifications to the web.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the corporate control of our media overlords and the fact that many of them have a vested interest in this bill being passed. 

Fun with Math

Maybe next up we should have Holocaust related word problems.

Seriously, who the fuck are these people? On what planet would anyone consider this to be a good idea? Other than the south, I guess. I have just given up on expecting much of anything out of that shit hole part of the country.

The 'Black Friends' Defense

See? Newt's statements weren't racist, because he has black friends:

LAMOTHE: My question to you is, do think blacks represent an American problem. And if you don’t think that, when you start using blacks in general as a stepping stone or a punching bag – 

GINGRICH: I didn’t say that. I just want to say that frankly this makes me very irritated. The Democratic National Committe took totally out of context half of the sentence, OK? I mean clearly somebody who’s served with Colin Powell, who has served with Condaleeza Rice, I have a fairly good sense of the fact that African Americans have many contributions to America.

Conservatives love that line.

Getting Warmer

I have never claimed to understand climate change or really take a strong position on it, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that something is going on when you read about things like this:

Daily record highs have been set in Des Moines, Iowa (65 degrees), Rapid City, S.D. (73 degrees), International Falls, Minn. (46 degrees), St. Louis, Mo. (66 degrees) and Fargo, N.D. (55 degrees), to name a few locations. Although the record warmth subsides on Friday for the Plains, the mild air mass will bully its way eastward. We’re talking temperatures in cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati enjoying highs on the order of 10-to-20 degrees above average. High temperatures around 5-to-15 degrees above average will make it all the way to the East Coast including New York City, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, N.C.

It's easy to focus on cold climates dealing with warmer temperatures, but here in Phoenix, we had 100 degree temperatures well into October last year. And 2012 isn't off to a great start either with the first week of January notching temperatures in the 80s. 

Or perhaps this is just another platform from which I can gripe more about the shitty weather in Arizona. 

Farther Down the Rabbit Hole

Some asshole over at the Politico is whining that Newt's overtly racist remarks were taken out of context and that he is being unfairly pilloried. I wish I were kidding.

Some days, American politics and the American media is like a bad reality show. It's enough to make you want to vomit profusely while hitting yourself in the junk and slamming your head against the wall all at once. 

Winning the 'Blah' Vote

I linked to this Think Progress piece yesterday regarding Newtie's desire to head over to the NAACP and lecture them about how they need to have higher standards (pay checks, not food stamps). Embedded within that same article is a link to another recent example of the continued conservative outreach to minorities, this one from professional homophobe and proud American Taliban member Rick Santorum:

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”  

[...] 

It is unclear why Santorum pinpointed blacks specifically as recipients of federal aid. The original questioner asked “how do we get off this crazy train? We’ve got so much foreign influence in this country now,” adding “where do we go from here?”

Asshole white Republican says overtly racist thing. Yes, we have seen this story thousands of times before. No point in questioning the motive - this is what they really believe. It is their world view, their ideology, it is part of their repulsive character (not to mention their base usually loves it and feels the same way). But what makes this story unique is what is likely the most pathetic attempt of a walk-back in modern political history (via Balloon Juice):

Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News, but he maintained that people misheard the word "black" when he stumbled on a word. 

“I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn't," Santorum said. 

“And I can tell you, I don't use — I don't — first off, I don't use the term ‘black’ very often. I use the term ‘African-American’ more than I use ‘black' ... I think sometimes you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt if it's a little bit of a blurred word."

Yeah, come on! You know, all of those 'blah' people on welfare! Get your facts straight, liberal media! 

He may as well have pulled one of these:

With Apologies to Jesse Jackson
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

The way these assholes spew this bile and then react to it when people rightly are offended and call them on their bull shit is just indicative of what I said earlier in this post - this is REALLY what they believe. This is REALLY how they feel. It is who they are. Full stop. Otherwise they wouldn't let it roll off of their lips so blithely. If Santorum honestly felt this statement was offensive, he wouldn't have made it in the first place. But he doesn't see that it's racist (not to mention patently false), and he doesn't think it's offensive, so he said it. 

And bear in mind that a good 45-49% of the country will vote for the party that puts these disgusting pigs up for their nomination. We've got a long way to go, America.

Not At All Racist

I don't expect much from the modern GOP in terms of racial issues, but this is a special gem:

GINGRICH: More people are on food stamps today because of Obama’s policies than ever in history. I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history. Now, there’s no neighborhood I know of in America where if you went around and asked people, “Would you rather your children had food stamps or paychecks,” you wouldn’t [SIC] end up with a majority saying they’d rather have a paycheck. 

And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And I’ll go to them and explain a brand new Social Security opportunity for young people, which should be particularly good for African-American males — because they’re the group that gets the smallest return on Social Security because they have the shortest life span.

Spoiler alert for Newt - the NAACP is probably not going to invite you to their conference so you can say, "Hey all you freeloading n*ggers - you should demand paychecks instead of welfare, you lazy fucking assholes."

Never mind the fact, as Think Progress notes, that the majority of food stamp recipients are white. Facts/reality do not play into the conservative psyche. All lazy people and welfare queens are unequivocally black/brown and otherwise non-white. Remember - racism is dead because we have a black president.

Fuck these people. 

The American Dream Co-Opted By Pesky Foreigners

Today marks my re-entry into blogging after a several month long hiatus for a number of personal reasons. Didn't feel like doing it, so I didn't. I figured if my heart wasn't in it, then there was really no point. That being said, I'm glad to be back on (off?) the wagon. It's a new year - an election year no less - and there is bound to be an innumerate amount of issues to write about and discuss.

Issues like this one:

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
[...]
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
[...]
While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.
[...]
In 2006 Professor Corak reviewed more than 50 studies of nine countries. He ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, with the United States and Britain roughly tied at the other extreme. Sweden, Germany, and France were scattered across the middle.

Read the whole thing. As the article says, the issue isn't that people don't have money or decent paying jobs (although that is obviously a separate issue) but rather that the American Dream is under assault. That is, it is increasingly statistically difficult, if not impossible, to be born in one economic strata and be able to move to a higher one through sheer force of will and hard work. That was the essence of the American Dream - that anyone that played by the rules and had an exceptional work ethic could become upper middle class, or at least significantly better themselves. Not so anymore, at least in most cases. That fairy tale has been left behind in our collective rear view mirror in the 1950s. And don't be fooled by the financial crisis/recession - this has been decades in the making. 

This is what happens when the de facto economic policy of the US is wildly tilted towards the highest echelons of the economic ladder in hopes that magical fairies and wildly generous and wealthy benefactors will trickle down their gains and table scraps to the rest of us. You'll note that the common denominator here is that the countries in the article with superior economic mobility do not subscribe to such fantasies. They have higher taxes on the high earners/wealth (sorry - the job creators) and don't believe in the infantile fallacy that if you give the wealthy shit for free, they give it away to the rest of us and make it rain because they are just that generous.

Occupy Wall Street is a start, and a good one at that. And people outside the movement are even starting to catch on - despite the abject failure of Washington and both political parties (with heavier blame on the GOP), public opinion wildly favors progressive economic policies. And I would venture to guess that a solid majority of the country would be very pleased with the results of a true progressive tax code and higher taxation on those who have done well if they would simply remove their heads from their collective asses and realize that they themselves are a part of the very statistics that this article details. This is what the 2012 election should be about (but probably won't be). Hopefully this dialog will continue into the future. Our political overlords would be incredibly stupid to ignore the dialog that OWS has started.