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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

Both Sides Do It - Senate Obstructionism Edition

James Fallows has a very useful piece up that showcases the Republicans' unprecedented, cynical, and childish abuse of the filibuster ever since the election of the black Kenyan socialist Usurper. He links to several recent articles from prominent media outlets that fault either Obama's failure or both parties for the intransigence of the US Senate. 

It doesn't take an especially astute observer to notice the way in which the GOP has effectively transformed the Senate into a 60-votes-required-to-do-anything deliberative body, but most Americans are also not hyper political junkies like myself, or the sort of people that might follow Fallows' blog. And that precisely highlights the problem - you have one party refusing to let the Senate consider any manner of legislation, and then our high-minded, objective observers in the media scoff at these petty squabbles and bemoan that both sides are at fault for the Senate being able to function in the tradition of the modern democracy which it represents. Most people have no idea what the fuck cloture even means. They just know that every bill goes to die in the Senate, that nothing ever happens, they hear from the media that both sides are to blame, and they conclude that both parties in the US Senate are a bunch of assholes.

And let's be clear: filing for cloture requires that the Senate muster up 60 affirmative votes to even proceed to debate and an up/down vote on the legislation begin considered. Again, I doubt most Americans know this distinction, but the GOP minority effectively prevents legislation not from being passed (although that is a byproduct) but from even coming up for a vote that would allow it to be passed or rejected. It's immature, infantile, and deplorable. They have essentially made the use of a nuclear option a routine way of doing business as the minority party. It would be a very different scenario if the GOP had the numbers in the upper chamber and they were bypassing cloture filings, but whipping their members or getting a few Democrats to cross over to block the legislation from passing in an up/down vote. But they are a caucus of cynical cravens that won't even let legislation get that far. 

Fallows links to this graph to illustrate this point:

Let us not forget that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that his number one goal is making Barack Obama a one term president. The abuse of the filibuster is just another means to that end, a cleverly devised ploy to make voters lose faith in their government, and conveniently aided and abetted by the empty suits in the media who give McConnell's strategy political cover by means of being too timid to report the facts. Because as we all know, facts have a well established liberal bias.

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

I have always thought that the 'flip-flop' label, when applied to politicians, is a little banal and childish. People should be allowed to change their opinions, based on facts of course, and not for political expediency. That being said, this statement from Mitt Romney makes me want to puke and slap him all at the same time:

ROMNEY: I don’t worry about the top one percent. I don’t stay up nights worrying about ‘gee we need to help them.’ I don’t worry about that. They’re doing just fine by themselves. I worry about the 99 percent in America. I want America, once again, to be the best place in the world to be middle-class. I want to have a strong and vibrant and prosperous middle-class. And so I look at what’s happening on Wall Street and my own view is, boy I understand how those people feel…The people in this country are upset.

Not one week ago, when asked of the Occupy Wall Street protests, he said:

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare."

So which is it, Mittens?

"Pitting of Americans Against Americans"

In his column from Friday, Paul Krugman discusses what I mentioned previously regarding the establishment media's reaction to Occupy Wall Street:

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them. 

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals. 

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

I highly recommend this article by Kos for a definitive look at just how hypocritical and odious is Cantor's statement. The GOP makes its electoral living off of pitting Americans against Americans and obfuscating their common ties and values. But Krugman's takedown wouldn't be complete without an explanation of why everyone with a heavy pocketbook is rushing to do their best to marginalize this movement before it continues to spread:

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens. 

[...] 

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren. 

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

The sad thing is that I suspect some of these assholes actually believe that the protesters are the problem here.

Banksters Bounce Back

Remember all the talk of a V-shaped recovery around in the summer of 2010? Some amongst us have had it. Spoiler alert - it wasn't the US economy at large:

The idiot talking heads on Fox and CNN and the other assholes that sneer at Occupy Wall Street are being purposefully obtuse. There is no other way to justify their stupidity other than willful ignorance. That and the fact that they have zero empathy whatsoever and are largely insulated from what the rest of the economy is experiencing. The banksters crashed the economy, they were bailed out with taxpayer money with no strings attached, they roared back to profitability and paid themselves billions of bonuses (some of whom continued to do so while still paying back TARP funds), and they have paid no price for their crimes whatsoever. But somehow all of this makes OWS a bunch of ill informed dirty hippies. 

You tell me who is ill informed and misguided - people finally waking up to the way in which Wall Street has ruined the US economy while paying no price and simultaneously maintaining its stranglehold on the halls of power, or the fuckwits in the media sneering and acting like nothing happened.

Stay Classy, Wingnuts

Apparently the Hitler meme was getting a little banal:

Fuck these people.

Let It Burn

No, the Republicans do not have a jobs or economic platform, and the media and everyone else would do well to wake up to this reality. Their platform is to let people suffer and prolong our economic quagmire as long as possible. Deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy are not an economic plan - they are rote, stale, and failed GOP dogma.

We Are the 99%

Almost a month ago, I wrote the following regarding the nascent protests on Wall Street:

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. 

At the time, I assumed (but certainly hope I would be wrong) that the protests would eventually become more than a fringe movement, and a much needed one at that. Needless to say I have been encouraged and elated to see that this has erupted into a nationwide protest over the grotesque income inequality and the economic and social injustice of both the financial crisis and the last three to four decades. 

There's a couple of general notes that I want to make about OWS. First off, it should come as no surprise that those among us with legitimate grievances against moneyed elites would be met with widespread derision and sneering by the very people (the media included) that benefit richly from the status quo. See this Glenn Greenwald piece for a definitive takedown of all the media outlets heaping contempt upon the unwashed masses. Or this one, where he covers the NYT's financial columnist's fealty to an anonymous "top bankster CEO," courageously investigating the OWS protests at his behest. I am sure the Fox News fair and balanced approach to these protests will surprise you very little. When the media isn't busy openly shitting on these folks for having the audacity to be pissed off about having their livelihoods vanquished by the financial crisis while the crooks that caused the same crisis got their asses saved by trillions in tax payer funded bailouts, they are waxing breathless about what is it exactly that OWS wants? They are a bunch of dirty hippies with an incoherent message! What are their demands?! They are irrelevant until they settle on a unified message! And when that isn't the prevailing themes, you have assholes like Mitt Romney calling the "class warfare" being waged by these protesters, "dangerous."

Does anyone recall the tea baggers being subjected to this sort of derision and scrutiny? Certainly they were widely mocked by people like myself and other progressive bloggers, but they were the absolute darlings of the establishment media. There was no chastising of the tea baggers for having a rambling or incoherent message. At its core, the very crux of the tea bagger message was inherently rambling and incoherent, but the establishment media got the vapors over these Very Serious real murkins WANTING THEIR COUNTRY BACK. Here you had a group of mostly educated, older, white dipshits caterwauling about the tyranny of the lowest federal tax burden since the Eisenhower era, a socialistic takeover of government healthcare that was laughably divorced from socialized healthcare or single payer systems, and their collective aversion to government fiscal profligacy despite eight years in which trillions of dollars were spent on tax cuts and foreign wars by the Bush administration, all of this newly and conveniently discovered after the election of a black Democrat. This is the group of people that the media venerated, treated Very Seriously, never questioning their message, their methods, or integrity despite an abiding number of reasons to do so. After all, they were just concerned citizens! A "wholly organic" grassroots movement that were sick of their government making them pay really low taxes and barring insurance companies from discriminating against pre-existing conditions, and trying to spend much needed tax dollars to pull the economy out of an immensely deep crater. They lavished praise and adulation on the group that hoisted grotesquely racist signs bearing all manner of epithets against our President, comparing him to Hitler, proclaiming that they came unarmed (this time), wearing tri-pointed hats adorned with tea bags, and packing pistols and AR-15s at their rallies. They even went so far as to gleefully use their brand to co-sponsor Republican presidential debates. I will let you tell me when you think you will see a CNN/MoveOn debate, a CNN/Daily Kos, or a CNN/Occupy Wall Street debate.

The Occupy Wall Street protests on the other hand? I've already detailed how they have been treated by the media and most of those otherwise unencumbered by petty things like foreclosed homes, unemployment, or the complete economic collapse of their household in general, so consider for a moment the difference between the claims of the tea baggers and those of OWS. Occupy Wall Street seeks to capture the long dormant populist outrage stirred up by decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and financial deregulation being sold to the masses as the panacea for economic prosperity for all, when in fact they have lead to income inequality the likes of which makes third world nations and banana republics blush, a financial crisis that has devastated the already embattled middle class while simultaneously adding millions to the rolls of foreclosures, unemployed, savaged retirement savings, flatlining and stagnant wages, and otherwise economically destitute or unstable. And none of this is conjecture, ideology, or exaggeration. These are facts. The supply side, plutocrat and bankster coddling, wealthy fellating policies of the last three decades have been absolutely devastating for the poor and middle classes, and the financial crisis, catalyzed by rampant fraud and speculation and money whoring on Wall Street, has only exacerbated and compounded the issue. These policies have been an absolute failure for this country. That is, unless you're in the top 1% that controls 40% of the nation's wealth. 

It will be very interesting to see where these protests go from here. I am hoping that they can avoid the same fate as the tea baggers by avoiding being co-opted into the larger party establishment that serves little other than the party's electoral interests. They need to maintain their populist autonomy and independence to truly thrive and have an impact. And they must continue to grow. I'll say it again: it's long overdue, and this is possibly the first opportunity in a long time for much needed progressive change, and a much needed national conversation about the values and policies that we have espoused in this country for so long, and what those policies have wrought for 99% of us.

Move Your Money

The Move Your Money Project had a lot of high-level support in the wake of the financial crisis from progressives like Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher, but I have not heard it promoted very much ever since. But it bears mentioning once more, in light of the fact that Bank of America (along with other national banks) are planning on instituting monthly fees for use of your debit card:

Bank of America, the nation’s biggest bank, said on Thursday that it planned to start charging customers a $5 monthly fee when they used their debit cards for purchases. It was just one of several new charges expected to hit consumers as new regulations crimp banks’ profits. 

Wells Fargo and Chase are testing $3 monthly debit card fees. Regions Financial, based in Birmingham, Ala., plans to start charging a $4 fee next month, while SunTrust, another regional powerhouse, is charging a $5 fee. 

The round of new charges stems from a rule, which takes effect on Saturday, that limits the fees that banks can levy on merchants every time a consumer uses a debit card to make a purchase. The rule, known as the Durbin amendment, after its sponsor Senator Richard J. Durbin, is a crucial part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. 

Until now, the fees have been 44 cents a transaction, on average. The Federal Reserve in June agreed to cut the fees to a maximum of about 24 cents. While the fee amounts to pennies per swipe, it rapidly adds up across millions of transactions. The new limit is expected to cost the banks about $6.6 billion in revenue a year, beginning in 2012, according to Javelin Strategy and Research. That comes on top of another loss, of $5.6 billion, from new rules restricting overdraft fees, which went into effect in July 2010.

In other words, the banksters can never accept a lower profit margin on shuffling their money around in their giant casino and they want to continue paying themselves billions of dollars in bonuses to retain top talent to fuel their hooker and blow addictions and to make sure they have a bigger estate in the Hamptons than the assholes next door. So if you want to access your money, pay up, bitches.

I mean, if they accepted this egregious, socialistic government overreach that costs the industry $6 billion a year, little Bobby Bankster might only be able to get a Ferrari for his 16th birthday instead of that Aston Martin he had his eye on. These are the life-or-death issues at stake here.

So let's get going America - move your money today.

Anatomy of a Failed Media - Solyndra Edition

In case you haven't yet heard of Solyndra, the short version is that the wingnuts and the GOP have been nursing a collective giant boner over what is largely a contrived, overblown scandal filled with their favorite liberal boogeymen - government waste, government excess, and evil liberal non-petroleum based energy. Check out this LA Times article, linked to by Kevin Drum, for a muted but thorough background on the facts of the matter.

But on to more pressing matters. Just like any time the GOP trumps up some purely fanatical, bull shit "controversy" or "scandal," the stenographers in the evil liberal media rush to give it a leg up to avoid the appearance of bias. You know, the monkeys flinging poop at one another are talking about it, so we need to be doing the same:

And I won't include the cable news graph, because you don't need to look at that to know that Fox News has spent an inordinate amount of time flogging this scandal. While Media Matters compares this disproportionate coverage to the corruption at the Minerals Management Service (former name of the failed regulator that allowed awesome things like the BP Gulf oil spill to happen) and war contracting, it is worth mentioning that there are any number of exponentially more egregious crimes and abuses that have received very little outrage and even less coverage. What about the financial crisis? We had a group of asshole Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission who refused to even include the terms "Wall Street" or "deregulation" in their final report. You know, because poor people and minorities are what caused the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

I'll let you decide which is a more prominent case of the wholesale fucking of the American tax payer - trillions of dollars in tax payer funded bailouts to banksters (foreign and domestic) with no strings attached, who immediately returned to the same excess and same practices that lead to global economic armageddon, or a $528 million Department of Energy loan guarantee to a company that ended up getting undercut by a heavily subsidized Chinese market and subsequently went bankrupt. Neither are acceptable nor desirable, but again, which of these are worthy of our national media's golden retriever-like attention span (SQUIRREL!)?

And I'll reiterate for the millionth time - to date there have still been no high level indictments or convictions of high level banksters of financial sector executives despite reams of evidence of endemic fraud and consumer abuse.

Evil Kenyan Socialist First Lady Watch

Her latest transgressions include shopping at Target. I wish I were kidding.

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.