Crackpot cons make their own reality

Apparently they believe their own crackpottery. In the world according to the vandals of the Crackpot Caucus in John Boehner's House of Dysfunction, you can shut down the federal government for the sole purpose of abolishing a duly enacted law of the land outside the normal process of governance and simply pin the blame on President Obama.

They are urging Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to gamble that Obama and Senate Democrats will take the blame if they reject legislation that keeps the government running but stops ObamaCare.

At least 43 conservatives want the GOP leadership to go for broke, asserting that Obama has been damaged by stumbles over Syria and by several delays in implementing the Affordable Care Act.

They're convinced Obama won't let them do it. To which Obama responds, please proceed crazy Congresspersons. Meanwhile, establishment Republicans are freaking out and somewhere in an undisclosed location, John Boehner is quietly weeping into his cocktail.

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Washed out in Colorado

I know everybody has been preoccupied with Syria and then the Navy Yard shooting today, but I'm genuinely surprised at how little internet chatter there's been about this. This is huge. The devastation from the floods in Colorado is stunning.



Twitter tells me the GOP fought against funding dam maintenance there. Many dams failed in the epic rain. Yeah for deficit reduction... [More photos at the link.]

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Not just Fox

This could be said of most of our teevee media. [photo via Kennett Area Dems]

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Your moment of Zen

Hand raised Monarch in Maeve's magic garden.

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Republicans in disarray

I'll probably rot in hell for taking such untoward pleasure in watching the meltdown of Boehner's House of Dysfunction. The establishment GOPers empowered the crackpots in order to gain a majority. Clearly it didn't go quite the way they expected.There's a raging civil war going on within the party. Rank and file Republicans are looking for some leadership to chill down the Tea Party caucus and they aren't finding any. Both Johnny and Cantor are in hiding.

I think it's going to get ugly but the way forward is clear.

There will be voices of caution about how the Democrats have to be the grown-ups in the room because the country needs to be govern. But here's the thing -- the country's not being governed now. One half of the political system is under the effective control of people who believe their primary obligation as elected officials is to make sure the government doesn't work. The Democratic party must make no compromises with the insane. There is no legitimate middle-ground to be found in that tangle of bizarre tactics and political Tourette's. The only responsible thing to do is to make John Boehner either own the nutball caucus or stand up against it. The country demands this. Us or them, John. Time to choose. Whip's coming down.

I don't think Boehner can stand up to them so it's going to be up to the Democrats to make him own it. It would be great if for once, they rose up to the task.

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Lazy crazy days of Summers

Well. On top of having averted an air strike by the US and another chemical weapons strike by Assad inside of Syria this week, here's more good news from inside the Beltway.

Former White House economic adviser and Treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers has withdrawn his name as a candidate for Federal Reserve chairman...

I couldn't be happier. He would have been a disaster in that spot. Of course, I don't suppose we'll get Janet Yellen either. Certainly not if President Obama really believes the banking industry is just fine. It's not. It's still very much broken.

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Living in hope, waiting for change

Posting has been light because, fully engaged in real life at the moment. Forgot how time consuming that can be. So outsourcing your Sunday reading to Betty Cracker's briliant post Your HOPE T-Shirt Won’t Get You Into Heaven Either. Seriously, read it all, it's not long but this is the really important part.

Part of the deal used to be that we could share the crumbs from their table. But now that the plutocrats have realized that their vast wealth can serve as its own sovereign state, they can cut the rest of us loose, buy governments in bulk and carry out enforcement actions using contract armies without relying on the US military as their muscle. [...]

President Obama is a smart guy who surely recognizes this, but he operates within this system and is a creature of it, just as all of us are. He rearranges the deck chairs on our sinking empire and even bails out some water sometimes, which is about the best we can expect given the geopolitical and economic realities. But trust him 100%? Only a fool would.

Yes, it is important to elect and support Democrats instead of Republicans. In fact, it’s our only hope, since putting our faith in fake President Dr. Jill Stein will only hasten the implosion by empowering the party that is 100% owned by the plutocrats instead of 80% co-opted.

President Obama is just a guy with a ridiculously stressful job working within an entirely corrupt system. We could have done much worse. He can't singlehandedly change the way the world works. People should probably stop expecting him to do so.

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Your moment of Zen

Roman Street to Bordighera. ~Claude Monet.

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Your moment of Zen

Pura Ulan Danu Temple on Lake Bratan, Bali, Indonesia.

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A system based almost entirely on fraud

There's another important anniversary at this time of year. Five years ago this week the Banksters crashed our economy, basically by lying and stealing. Their "punishment" cost trillions. Out of our pockets, not theirs.

In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn’t to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. [...]

Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever.

Which brings us once again to the largest income gap between since the Roaring 1920s when the previous record was set.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income in 2012, their largest stake in Internal Revenue Service figures in at least a century. The previous peak of 18.7 percent came back in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

And do spare me the wailing about how the 1 percenters suffered more during the crash:

[S]ince the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

Last year alone, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 19.6 percent, compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

There oughta be a law. Oh wait. There was a law. They got it abolished and they'll be damned if they're going to allow it to be reinstated.

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Your moment of Zen

Toys in my head. [Soviet Trade Dictionary via Erin O'Brien.]

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Remember the Raisin

By Capt. Fogg

The people who like to manipulate us by creating and preserving anger, like to give us slogans.  Remember the Maine, Remember the Alamo, Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember the Raisin! Never Forget!! 
 
All these things are inevitably forgotten despite the slogan advertising campaigns and sooner or later we'll get tired of remembering 9/11. Sloganeers will get tired of milking the faded fear and self-pity and choreographed mourning. The people who were born too late to remember it will eventually need to be told to remember something else that some party needs to cultivate anger about, so as to pass some kind of horror like the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 or the Patriot Act.  9/11 will be forgotten by most everyone but historians and those who remember will remember it in context of the things we did and the laws we passed and the freedom we gave up while we were whipped into a passion.

Think calls to 'always remember'  are genuine and untainted by politics?  Wonder why we shouted Remember Hoover! in 1936 but nobody remembers to Remember Bush?  Remember Katrina and at least 1800 fatalities?  Why not?   We spent billions and billions on a the Largest government agency in history and abridged the Bill of Rights in 2001, but we didn't do a damned thing to improve reactions to natural disasters which you can be sure will occur more often than a repeat of 9/11.

I suspect that calls to remember are  calls to preserve a mental state in which we can be manipulated, tricked and sold some unsavory product. Stay angry, stay afraid and obey.

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Your moment of Zen

A Piuva tree in Brazil.

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Everyone has their part to play in the kabuki

Long day offline. My internets tell me we aren't bombing Syria this week. I'm good with that. George Zimmerman is still a raging maniac who's allowed to wander the streets waving around loaded guns. Not so good with that but unsurprised. And apparently somebody killed the Redskins which launched an epic breakdown on my twitters.

In the words of Scarlett O'Hara: "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow."

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Nothing left to lose

This is criminal. Witness government sponsored predatory debt collection.

On the day Bennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to the curb.

Movers carted out his easy chair, his clothes, his television. Next came the things that were closest to his heart: his Marine Corps medals and photographs of his dead wife, Martha. The duplex in Northeast Washington that Coleman bought with cash two decades earlier was emptied and shuttered. By sundown, he had nowhere to go.

All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill.

But mostly because the government sold his city lien to an out-of-town debt collection company which proceeded to rack up a boatload of bogus fees and added it to his bill.

Coleman, struggling with dementia, was among those who lost a home. His debt had snowballed to $4,999 — 37 times the original tax bill. Not only did he lose his $197,000 house, but he also was stripped of the equity because tax lien purchasers are entitled to everything, trumping even mortgage companies.

Mr. Coleman is not alone.

Foreclosures have upended families in some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. Houses were taken from a housekeeper, a department store clerk, a seamstress and even the estates of dead people. The hardest hit: elderly homeowners, who were often sick or dying when tax lien purchasers seized their houses.

One 65-year-old flower shop owner lost his Northwest Washington home of 40 years after a company from Florida paid his back taxes — $1,025 — and then took the house through foreclosure while he was in hospice, dying of cancer. A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.

How did we reach the point where such vicious preying on the elderly and the weak is legal? These vultures shouldn't be in business, they should be in jail.

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Opening bell rings for 2016

Amusing story of the day. Peter King first to announce for 2016.

WOLFEBORO, N.H. — Rep. Peter King won’t be the best known Republican presidential candidate in 2016, but he is the first.

King, making his second of four scheduled visits to the state in the summer and fall, told a New Hampshire radio station Friday that he’s there “because right now I'm running for President.”

To which I can only say:

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Your moment of Zen

Peaches and Cream dahlia.

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Holy Joe

This is an old link I never got around to but it's still relevant. In case you were wondering what Joe Lieberman is doing now:

This is what the political afterlife looks like for the 71-year-old Stamford native, who is starting his second month as a part-time senior counsel at the Manhattan commercial litigation firm of Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.

"This is Broadway. Right around the corner is `The Book of Mormon' and `Chicago,' " he says. 

Mother of God, please don't let this happen:

Going forward, Lieberman envisions playing a role similar to that of George Mitchell and the late Warren Rudman, former Senate colleagues who found second careers as independent investigators and strategic counselors. In Mitchell's case, he investigated steroid use in Major League Baseball. Rudman looked into the abuses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And sweet Jebus will this phony narrative never die?

"I think outside of the far left, he never stopped commanding great respect on both sides of the aisle and particularly among people who were serious policymakers," Gerstein says. "When he speaks, he still will have an impact and influence because he is known for being thoughtful and independent in his thinking."

"Independent" meaning go for the big grift and throw in with GOPers, like this:

Lieberman's ideology is reflected in some of his current endeavors, including serving as co-chairman of the American Internationalism Project with former GOP Sen. Jon Kyl. The program is run by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank associated with neoconservatism.

Lieberman is also partnering with former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, another Republican, as co-chairs of the Bipartisan Coalition for American Security, a 501(c)4 advocacy group that expects to run television spots highlighting lawmakers' records on military spending. Asked if that could pit him against any of his former colleagues from Connecticut, Lieberman grins. "It's possible."

(Restrains impluse to fly to New York simply to bitchslap that smug smirk off his face)

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Team Yellen

Considering the ongoing dismal state of our so-called economic recovery, it's rather clear the Fed's monetary policy under Bernake was (as the kids say) all fucked up and bullshit. So now that we got rid of Helicopter Ben, Obama has a clear choice. It's between the Bankster's best friend, Larry Summers or the Bankster's greatest fear, Janet Yellen. Joseph Stiglitz is on Team Yellen. So am I because:

The controversy over the choice of the next head of the Federal Reserve has become unusually heated. The country is fortunate to have an enormously qualified candidate: the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. There is concern that the president might turn to another candidate, Lawrence H. Summers. Since I have worked closely with both of these individuals for more than three decades, both inside and outside of government, I have perhaps a distinct perspective…

Whoever succeeds Ben S. Bernanke as the Fed’s leader will have to make repeated judgment calls about when to raise or lower interest rates, the levers of monetary policy.

Two elements enter into these judgments. The first is forecasting. Wrong forecasts lead to wrong policies. Without a good sense of direction of where the economy is going, one can’t take appropriate policies. Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.

Of course, the galling reality is Summers will most probably get the job because, the damnable Boy's Club. This is why we can't have nice things.

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Your moment of Zen

Lemons.  [Soviet Trade Dictionary via Erin O'Brien.]

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Don't want to go to war no more

I haven't talked about Syria because there's already enough chatter out there but for the record, this is one fight I hope Obama loses. I believe Assad used chemical weapons. Yes it's appalling but I don't want to bomb Syria. I fail to see how that solves anything. The end result is more dead people. So what's the point?

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The GOP's greatest nightmare

Obamacare is lowering costs for health insurance much more than initially expected.

The most comprehensive study on Obamacare to date finds that Americans’ insurance premiums under the health law will be “lower than expected.” Many Americans will pay even less than the top-line rates after factoring in government subsidies for their health coverage, with some paying nothing at all for crucial medical coverage.

And, it offers actual health care coverage unlike the sort of low cost private insurance with caps on coverage so low it wouldn't cover the cost of treating a hang nail.

Thus it's no surprise Republicans are now trying to kill Obamacare by sabotaging the rollout via cockamamie investigation. With less than a month before open enrollment begins, Republicans issued a massive document demand to the agencies assigned to assist Americans wishing to enroll in health care exchanges.

Welcome to new world of fiscal conservatism where public health is an impediment to thwarting the President. Their timing could not be more obvious. The GOPers are targeting the several states with the most uninsured. Clearly the Republicans aim to prevent as many people as possible from signing up. Once again I wonder, why in hell would anyone vote these heartless cretins into office?

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Your moment of Zen

From the Soviet Trade Dictionary via Erin O'Brien.

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Purple Haze

By Capt. Fogg

I like to read books by theoretical physicists who are good at presenting mind-bending material to the general public. I should say that I like reading about these things in English because I can't, quite frankly, even imagine being able to follow the math involved in portraying multidimensional universes, Calabi-Yau manifolds, P-branes and loop quantum physics, just to scratch the surface.

The idea of other universes, possibly an infinite number of them with every point therein stretched out on holographic membranes only a tiny distance apart yet forever isolated, fascinates me far more than any science fiction written these days. There was one school of thought not long ago.  I'm not sure it gets any credit or ever did, but it attempts to explain the relative weakness of the gravitational force by postulating that force particles, or gravitons are able to leak into neighboring planes where they perhaps show up as 'dark' matter, but I'm so far from being able to talk about such things intelligently that I might as well be in another universe. Another universe perhaps identical but perhaps subtly different. I have sometimes nonetheless to wonder if somehow, by some random quantum fluctuation, we don't on occasion just take that tiny jump to the left, that little step to the right, and do the time-warp again.

 I'll bet that you've occasionally asked yourself if you've just woken up in another universe, almost exactly like the one you were in yesterday -- almost.  Silly sci-fi scenarios involving worm holes and time warps are just that: silly -- and we've all read or watched the cheesy movies. The pilot loses contact briefly only to reappear in another time and place. The guy wakes up on groundhog day every day.  You've seen that movie I'm sure.

And yet.

Over the weekend I was motoring south down the Indian River Lagoon as a thunderstorm engulfed us.  The radar reflecting off the rain made the radar screen a sea of purple superimposed over the GPS chart.  I couldn't see ten feet in any direction, reflections  from my nav lights in red and green made an eerie glow in the downpour..

It passed in time for me to be able to find my intended port and eventually to arrive safely home -- but still -- did I return to the same place I set out from? I was gone only a couple of days, but how and when and why, if  this is still the same reality, did all the yogurt in all the supermarkets and groceries in the world suddenly become Greek?  A small thing, but small things add up. And when did the hipsters stop calling each other "bro" and unanimously begin saying "brah?"  Just what did happen in that purple downpour just at the edge of the Bermuda Triangle?

Before that mysterious, disorienting moment,  president Obama should have been impeached for any involvement in Libya and now his delay in  bombing Syria is "shameful" according to one Krauthammer I won't mention by name.  No, I don't believe in space aliens flying around at night with their lights on or in ancient aliens, prophecies and apocalypses, but something is happening here and I don't know what it is. There's a purple haze all in my brain. Lately things just don't seem the same.

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The Divided States of America

GOP crackpottery in California

YREKA — The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 this afternoon to pursue seceding from California.

More than 100 people packed the supervisors' chambers late this morning for a discussion on whether the county should issue a declaration that it wants to secede from the state. Nearly all those in attendance appeared to be for the move. [...]

In August, county residents lobbied the board to consider separating from the state over a laundry list of complaints including a lack of representation in Sacramento for the Republican-majority county, issues pertaining to water rights and the rural fire prevention fee.

I say if they feel so put upon by the damn librul gummit in Sacremento, then let the idiots secede. Cut off all their state services. Charge them a pro-rated fee for any state funded infrastructure. Maybe then they'll realize how much they need the state's help.

It's not as if Siskiyou County would be able to survive better as an independent state. Like most Republican counties in California, Siskiyou gets more money from Sacramento than it pays in.

These cranky cons are simply sore losers who don't want their money funding programs that don't have their personal stamp of approval. The concept of the common good isn't even in their vocabulary.

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Your moment of Zen

Mary Badham et Gregory Peck sur le tournage de "To Kill a Mockingbird". [photo via Improbables Librairies/Improbables Bibliotheques]

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Shaming the poor - Updated

Crackpot conservatism reached a new low in Portland, Oregon. This anti-poor flyer campaign is pure thuggery.

Dear Reader of This Note,

There are twenty seven people in this neighborhood who vote and receive food stamps. The names of these people are being posted where they can be seen by taxpayers and the neighborhood can decide who is truly in need of food.

(signed) Artemis of the wildland

 And he's not just targeting the hungry, he also attacked the disabled.

This happened before just last month. A letter signed with the same name, targeted people with disabilities. In that letter, the author suggested that receiving benefits makes people with disabilities a threat to the Republic.

Of course, this courageous concerned conservative is taking these potshots against the poor anonymously. Guessing he also finds the mere idea of a gun registy an odious infringement on his privacy rights.

Update: Charlie Pierce catches this story today and adds deep context to this contemptible thuggery.

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Your moment of Zen

Hobsyllwin, the white dragon in Patagonia. Close to the city of Gaiman (South America). [photo via The Pagan Poppet]

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Slow motion planetary suicide

Call me crazy, but this non-stop radiation leak at Fukushima seems like a bigger threat to our national security than any terrorist could hope to be. I mean, let's check the map.

Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned. Last week the plant's operator reported radioactive water had leaked from a storage tank into the ground. It now says readings taken near the leaking tank on Saturday showed radiation was high enough to prove lethal within four hours of exposure.

And then there's the pure incompetency of the utility company.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour. However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts. The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

This can't end well.

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Your moment of Zen

Another day in Maeve's magic garden.

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What's wrong with the media

Jake Tapper explains how he conducts an interview:

Most interviews that I do are not super aggressive. They can’t be, and they shouldn’t be; that would get pretty tiresome. So when there’s an interview that’s tough or a question that’s tough, it’s something that raises eyebrows. It’s not easy to do that in the White House briefing room, at a press conference. That’s never easy. It’s not fun. Because as humans we are built to try to avoid conflict. Society constantly looks down its nose at conflict, even if the media doesn’t. And it’s not a comfortable feeling. It’s absolutely nerve-racking. It’s much easier to be chummy with people in power. It’s much easier to ask softball questions, to not upset the apple cart. And that’s why most people, including me, don’t spend all of their time asking tough questions. But there are times when they are called for, and I think definitely they’re needed in politics, in political journalism.

I actually like Jake. I cut him a lot more slack than most people do because I do think within the parameters of what passes for TV journalism today, he's more willing than most to challenge the GOP perfidy at least some of the time. But he's wrong about this. Aggressive interviews are not tiresome unless they're based on phony memes instead of facts. The traditional mission of the journalist was to engage in conflict. Afflict the comfortable and all that. When he says society "looks down its nose at conflict" he's talking about society inside the Beltway. He's talking about losing access to the insiders by not being invited to the important soirees. Not seeing that as a concern outside the DC bubble.

In my world the people are starving for reliable information on policy. The only thing they're "looking down their nose at" is the media fixation on horserace reporting, false balance and click-baiting. Which sadly, is now the norm in the news business.

[Big thanks to Tengrain for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Roundup. Tengrain also blogs at of Mock, Paper, Scissors and Dependable Renegade. If you're not reading both, well, you should be.]

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Your moment of Zen

A treasure trove of sea glass. [photo via Mrs Cupid Stunt]

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We've come too far to turn back now

It wasn't so long ago that Republicans won an election by fearmongering about gays destroying "traditional marriage." So it's rather stunning that we've evolved so quickly to this level of public acceptance of equal marriage rights for gays.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court member to conduct a same-sex marriage ceremony Saturday when she officiates at the Washington wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser.

The gala wedding of Kaiser and economist John Roberts at the performing arts center brings together the nation’s highest court and the capital’s high society and will mark a new milepost in the recognition of same-sex unions.

I imagine it will make the society pages. Wonder if Sally Quinn will be there.

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Your moment of Zen

Life is a highway. [photo via Harry Hunsicker]

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Your moment of Zen

At the Minneapolis Peace Garden.

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Republicans ban Heritage Foundation from Capitol Hill

This is the most amusing story I've seen this week. The crackpots at Heritage are no longer welcome at GOP strategy sessions.

According to a report Wednesday in National Journal, the Republican Study Committee is no longer allowing employees for the Heritage Foundation to attend the meetings. Heritage, currently led by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), had been a fixture at the meetings until last month when the RSC, comprised of 172 conservative GOP House members, made the change.

Apparently the establishment GOPers are not happy with Heritage's role in screwing up the vote on the Farm Bill, which ultimately failed on the House floor after the crackpot agitators at Heritage meddled in the negotiations, leaving John Boehner looking like an idiot.

This of course is a disaster in terms of good governance on behalf of the people, but admit I'm taking untoward pleasure in watching the GOP suffer the consequences of having enraged the crackpots with their medancious propaganda in the first place.

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Poverty is not healthy for children and other living things

A new study shows poverty is bad for your brain:

The mental strain of living in poverty and thinking constantly about tight finances can drop a person’s IQ by as much as 13 percent, or about the equivalent of losing a night of sleep, according to a new study. It consumes so much mental energy that there is often little room to think about anything else, which leaves low-income people more susceptible to bad decisions.

Previous studies have shown it is also bad for your health and diminishes a child's chances to escape the cycle of poverty:

Poverty has other negative impacts. The chronic stress of growing up in poverty has been found to impair children’s brains, particularly in working memory. A study of veterans found that poverty is a bigger risk factor for mental illness than being exposed to warfare. The mental stress of being poor is also a major reason for why low-income people tend to have negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and cholesterol or elevated rates of obesity and diabetes.

Poverty takes its toll on health in a number of other critical ways: It prevents people from buying healthy food, makes people more likely to smoke, means they are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality, and can cause health problems that begin in the womb.

I've long been astounded that so many people believe living in poverty is a willing choice because, free government cheese. I can only believe these people have never been poor or spent any significant time among the poverty stricken. Poverty hurts. The poor have to work ten times harder just to accomplish the simplest tasks of daily life. Small wonder they seek to escape the pain and fear in short term pleasures when their future prospects are so harsh and uncertain.

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Your moment of Zen

In Maeve's magic garden the hummingbirds have no fear.

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Seriously. Thanks Obama

Busy with real life stuff so outsourcing all my posts today. Betty Cracker finds a bucket full of good news:

1. Colorado, Washington get OK from feds on marijuana

2. Federal Tax System Will Recognize Married Gay Couples Even If Their States Do Not

3. HHS Extends Medicare Benefits To Married Gay Couples

Plus the executive order on guns. Not a bad day’s work. Thanks, Obama!

The gun order closes a loophole that allowed convicted felons to subvert background checks by taking possession of firearms through a corporation and shut down the reimportation of military weapons from abroad. Click over for the supporting posts.

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Government waste on welfare

This has happened in every state that has tried this trick. It's wasteful and the money would be better spent on helping people rather than trying to feed bogus stereotyping. Why drug testing people who need welfare assistance is stupid.

Utah has spent more than $30,000 to screen welfare applicants for drug use since a new law went into effect a year ago, but only 12 people have tested positive, state figures show.

The idiots in the Statehouse who sponsored this bill were (shockingly) unavailable for comment. [image via]

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What's in a name?

Via Charlie Pierce, this is really a brilliant idea for naming major storms.



And while you're at it, just click over and read everything Charlie has to say. Perfect place to catch up on the news that matters when you've been offline for a while.

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Your moment of Zen

A flying car The Convair Model 118, a prototype which unfortunately never made it into mass production, 1947. [photo via Historical Pics]

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Public confused about Obamacare

A new poll from Kaiser Family Foundation shows a majority oppose defunding Obamacare. Only 36% would approve, whereas 57% would disapprove. Which makes the GOP's grand plan of shutting down the entire federal government rather than pass any appropriation bill  funding the ACA even more tone deaf than they usually do.

Meanwhile, Americans remain entirely confused about what Obamacare actually does, which is not surprising given the enormous amount of disinformation and outright lies circulating about the law. Especially egregious are the number of mega-corporations lying about Obamacare forcing them to cut their workforce and/or dropping coverage. As Think Progress points out at the link:

Large companies are blaming this move specifically on the health law. But in reality, Obamacare just serves as a convenient scapegoat for anti- labor practices. Employers have been attempting to shift more health costs onto workers for the past decade, and workers’ health care costs have been skyrocketing as the same time as their wages have stagnated. Indeed, studies have shown that large employers were trying to slash workers’ hours long before Obamacare was around. Most large companies aren’t actually planning to slash their employees’ benefits specifically in response to health reform, despite the headlines proclaiming otherwise.

The Kaiser poll also finds only 8% consider BigMedia as a trusted source of information. Ironically fully 81% are getting information from BigMedia. Small wonder everybody is so confused.

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Your moment of Zen

Moonflowers in my friend's garden.

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When silence speaks louder than words

Most brilliant protest ever:



Haddockmopnger tells us the tickets were actually free. No idea if this is true. Don't really know any of these guys. It was retweeted into my stream by Jay who was a random follow back. Might add he's been a pleasant addition to my timeline. He rarely posts politics. Most of his tweets are beautiful photos.

But whether it's true or not, it's a brilliant idea for a silent protest.

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No liberals need apply?

News isn't doing it for me today, so cleaning up a few amusing links. Rachel Maddow picks up on an odd Heritage Foundation event

What you need to know about the event
Date: August 19, 2013

Time: Registration begins at 6:00 p.m. Town Hall Meeting begins at 7:00 p.m.

Location: Pratt Place Inn & Barn, 2231 West Markham Road, Fayetteville, AR 72701

Cost: Free for conservatives. RSVP required.

Rachel wonders, "Have Heritage events always been listed as 'cost: free for conservatives'? or is this new for the DeMint era?"

I have no idea but I wonder how they figure out if you're a real conservative. And if you admit you're a liberal do they refuse to give you their "exclusive opportunity to meet Heritage President Jim DeMint?" As in, you're only to free to attend if you agree with DeMint's crackpot scheme to defund the entire federal government in order to overturn a duly passed law of the land?

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Your moment of Zen

Wild Iris. [photo via The Garden Oracle]

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Cyber-stalkers of the NSA

I don't find LOVEINT terribly shocking:

We have HUMINT, or human intelligence gathered from agents. We have SIGINT or signals intelligence. And now we have LOVEINT or NSA analysts occasionally reading the emails of ex-lovers. It doesn’t happen a lot, the NSA told the WSJ, but often enough that there is a word for it.

I don't even think it's necessarily always being done with bad intentions. Who hasn't done an internet search on an ex-lover or even a long lost friend to see what happened to them? Which is not to say LOVEINT isn't a concern.

The difference with LOVEINT is they have so much information at their disposal and have the ability to cause trouble for an ex and/or the new love interest of a lost love. Beyond that, if they can check on old lovers, they can also stalk current enemies and that has a great potential to not end well.

The thing about domestic surveillance is it really has been going on as long as I remember. What makes it urgent now is technological advances have made it so easy for them to accumulate all the data about our lives. I don't think our government is using it to stalk us all 24/7 -- yet. I don't think they can yet but with the speed of new advances, it's only a matter of time before we could find ourselves living in a real life version of 1984.

I'd also guess this cyber-stalking is a lot bigger than "just a handful of rogue agents" since the ones they caught were mostly self-reported. And of course we now know they've been illicitly sharing their data scoops with law enforcement which was once forbidden under the Fourth Amendment. So the question is, how do we stop them? I'm not sure we can but I am sure we're never going to be able to even diminish it to keep it within some less invasive parameters as long as internet fights keep the focus of the story on the players and the politics instead of the policy.

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Your moment of Zen

A peace garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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The Canadian Candidate

Or is it the Cuban Candidate?

By Capt. Fogg

Birthers, or at least the ones I've heard from, like to disassociate their theory about Obama's African origins from racism and pretend instead a real concern for constitutional propriety, but the lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the same line of  'thinking' as it applies to Ted Cruz's eligibility for Canadian citizenship and perhaps even Cuban citizenship is a bit like a porthole in a septic tank.  All the shit is on display.

But a cynic has to be grateful for having the Tea Party to quote, its members being far, far too stupid to conceal the opinions they'd like to deny. I read with delight the Texas Tribune article that has one Tea Partootie insisting that there's no comparison between their lack of concern for Ted Cruz' conflict of interest or his eligibility for the presidency and the obvious problem of Obama since Obama - wait for this - was born in Kenya and has strong ties to that country. Facts be damned.

The fact that you can damn all you like but is here to stay, is that Cruz is a Canadian citizen. Constitutional or not, this is a conflict of interest, but since "Canada is not really foreign soil" according to one Tesas TP twit. we can ignore it.  And why pray tell is there no concern that a Canadian Candidate might have a hidden agenda including Health Care Reform and forced hockey game attendance?  Because Canadians are more likely to be white or whiteish? Ya think?

Look, Cruz can't just promise to deny his citizenship and make it so.  The government of Canada may have something to say about that. According to Reuters, Cruz has to prove to the Canadian Security Intelligence Servicethey are or will become a citizen of another country, do not live in Canada and are not a security threat. They must also explain in writing why they do not want to be a Canadian anymore. A Canadian judge must sign off on it and it can take 8 months, so until and unless that happens, Mr. Cruz is campaigning not only stupidly, but dishonestly -- in other words in true Tea Party style.

And then there's the matter of his father having been a Cuban citizen at the time and a Cuban citizen who fought with Fidel Castro before coming to the US. That makes him eligible for Cuban citizenship.  Is he going to deny that too?  The plot thickens, but not so thick as the skulls of his supporters.  Racist supporters I might add.

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The world according to Derp

Damn Dimmocrats:

[I]n Lincoln, Ill., GOP Rep. Aaron Schock told an audience at a coffee shop that the Democratic-controlled Senate had "sat on their hands" while the House sought to repeal Obama's health care law. "The president right now is doing a very good job of trying to make it look like the House is dysfunctional," Schock said. "Really what we're trying to do is carry out the wishes of the people."

Because surely, the American dream has always been overpaying insurance corporations for crappy health care.

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Dueling charts - Updated

Well, this is an editorial so clearly it "was not intended to be a factual statement." For one thing this is not "Obama's Recovery," this is your future under Republican economics.

You might think the editors of the Investors Business Daily would have some interest in telling the whole story because rising tide lifts all ships or something like that. Oh wait, no they don't. The recovery has sucked for almost everyone except the very wealthy investor class, who want corporate friendly Republicans in power. So they won't mention the GOP's obsession with austerity and draconian cuts in government spending they extorted have greatly impeded recovery that benefits all the lower income classes.

Neither will the concern trolling editors at IBD mention how Big Banksters impede the growth of small business.

Neil Irwin highlights these charts from Hyun Song Shin’s comments at the monetary policy summit in Jackson Hole, WY, which provides an “interesting analysis that goes a long way toward explaining why growth has been so disappointing over the past four years.” The chart on the left shows that credit for the corporate business sector has picked up since the recession, while the chart on the right shows credit continuing to flatline for the non-corporate business sector.

Big Banksters got megatons of money on the cheap from the Fed for the express purpose of lending to non-corporate businesses. But they didn't, and still don't, lend to anyone but their corporate cronies because, profit. They like the recovery just the way it is but they're happy to keep the little people angry with half truths so they won't notice who's really screwing them.

Update: Explosive addition to this story by Greg Palast, who has the Bankster's secret end game memo that tells the story of how they invented and enshrined casino capitalism.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

The memo is authentic.

Fair warning. Do not read the nauseating details on a full stomach.

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Give the people a living wage

Alec MacGillis asks a good question:

Liberals have spent years now agonizing over why it is that many working-class white Americans vote for the party whose policies on taxes, organized labor and much more work against their own economic interests—the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem. Well, here is an issue where lower-income people who vote Republican are quite clear about what's in their own interest—that is, they state a preference at direct odds with their party's line. Maybe it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to peel them away by actually talking up that issue?

Raising the minimum wage polls well with pretty much everybody except crackpot cons who are against anything that doesn't piss liberals off and the people who make a living exploiting minimum wage workers. All the focus inside the Beltway bubble is on the well off and reasonably secure but the working poor are the fastest growing demographic in our country. They're not feeling any grass shoots recovery in those circles.

Championing this demo could not only win back the House but a successful push to raise the damnably inadequate wage would actually help all the people. Hell, it might even restore the people's faith in government.

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Your moment of Zen

A butterfly in the hand...

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Name Change by Bradley Manning

I suppose Bradley Manning's statement this morning was shocking to most people. For me, well, I lived for 15 years in lovely downtown Northampton where we elected an openly lesbian mayor several times and the local public college had a center for transgendered students. Natural reproduction in all species is imperfect. Wrongly assigned gender at birth is more common than you might imagine.

So believe me when I tell you, it's not complicated to deal with Bradley Manning's gender shift to Chelsea Manning. It's just ordinary etiquette. She's declared her choice of gender so from now on simply refer to her as Chelsea Manning and use the customary pronouns you would use for any other woman.

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Terms of impeachment

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn dangles impeachment to soothe the angry base at a home district speaking event.

“No, I agree,” Coburn said. “My little wiggle out of that when I get that written to me is I believe that needs to be evaluated and determined, but thank goodness it doesn’t have to happen in the Senate until they’ve brought charges in the House. Those are serious things, but we’re in a serious time. I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor, but I think they’re getting perilously close.”

Translation: Happy to feed your impeachment fever. Get back to me when John Boehner's House of Dysfunction gets their shit together.

A year ago I would have laughed derisively at the notion the GOPers would try for it. Thing is, they won't be able to pretend they can kill Obamacare for the next three years and all their other faux scandals are falling apart. They're going to need a new chew toy for the rubes to gnaw on and the angry base loves them the taste of impeachment.

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Your moment of Zen

A lotus blossom. [Birgit.Juergen Pictures]

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Why Americans are so uninformed

Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.

Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.

Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.

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Woodward and Bernstein did it without computers

[Guardian photo]

Adding a bit to my earlier post on trusting BigMedia, here's The Guardian on the destruction of their computers. Not sure which iteration of the story this might be but I'm told this is not a photograph of destroyed hard drives.

Read it and see if it makes more sense to you, but for me the real tell was the last graf:

"I hope what [the Miranda detention row] will do is to send people back to read the stories that so upset the British state because there has been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. What Snowden is trying to do is draw attention to the degree to which we are on a road to total surveillance."

As I said when the story broke, Miranda's detention was entirely predictable. And as I asked John Cole, who would have known Mr. Miranda was even traveling if he hadn't been detained? I didn't. And really? No other route  to Brazil available except going through Heathrow?

Clickbait journalism is all about traffic. As Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris said in an interview, "We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate."

In other words, the big money is in infotainment. It's about amusing the people for profit, not some quaint, last century concept about a responsibility to inform the public.

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Blaming Obama

This takes Obama Derangement Syndrome to a new level.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

To be clear, the question specifically asked, "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"

In other words 73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA. And people wonder why we can't have an informed debate on anything in this country anymore?

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Your moment of Zen

An xray of poppies and a pitcher plant. [Yahoo photo, more at link]

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Who do you trust?

I have never trusted any government to tell me the whole truth. All my life they've lied to me. Sadly, outside of handful of responsible journalists and bloggers, now that click bait journalism has become the accepted business model, I don't trust the media to tell me the whole truth either.

I do trust Charlie Pierce. I don't always agree with him entirely, but I always listen to what he has to say because he's honest, he's smarter than me and his institutional knowledge is deep. I completely agree with him about the NSA:

...(There is simply no logical reason to take anything the NSA says on this topic in good faith.)

I would like to believe that this is not simply another salvo in the ever-escalating Toobin-Greenwald pissing contest. The issues are simply too important to get buried under a mudslide of personal pique, even though they're half-interred in that already. But, Green Room hooleys aside, Toobin here fundamentally is telling us, again, that they are all honorable men. I don't care what you think of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden. In this democracy, "trust us" is not half good enough any more.

So then the question becomes, what's a concerned citizen to do? Where do we get the facts? Are we seriously supposed to trust a media that rushes to print every wild rumor, (often from an unnamed source), they can dig up in their frenzy for a ten minute exclusive on the internets? The media standard for publication is no longer are we sure this is true, it's now if it's at all plausible -- run with it and maybe make corrections later.

Take the instant matter of Greenwald's spouse and his troubling detention at Heathrow. The Guardian rushes the story to print, inciting instant mass hysteria about innocent spouses of journalists being detained for no reason. But they omitted a couple of pertinent facts. Within hours the NYT tells us Mr. Miranda was acting as a courier for secret documents between Glenn and Lynn Poitras and his trip was financed by The Guardian. Only then did The Guardian amend its story and I'm told they didn't bother to note anywhere it had been amended. So most people who read their story in the hours before that wouldn't be aware of those salient facts. This does not make for an informed public or a reasonable debate.

Meanwhile, Atrios posts today that "the lack of noise about the destruction of the hard drives has been a bit unsettling." He's referring to the Guardian's story about the UK government destroying their hard drives. Well, at least that's what the first story implied. The second story today tells us they actually destroyed the drives themselves, voluntarily, under the watchful eye of a couple of agents, rather than force the government to get a court order. Which doesn't really make sense to me on any level. But the really weird thing is this happened a month ago. Have to wonder why are they just printing it now?

It's not like this is an isolated instance and it's not confined to The Guardian. Every major story in the last few years has played out the same way. The first 48 hours (or longer) are complete chaos with conflicting reports. Anything incendiary enough to drive traffic gets posted immediately. The subsequent mitigating information is downplayed or sometimes ignored. It takes an enormous amount of effort to glean the complete story from numerous news orgs. Frankly, I'm tired of it. In fact, I'm just plain tired of the hysteria, of the in-fighting, of being told what I'm supposed to feel and do. So sorry if it makes me a bad liberal that I just watch and wait from the sidelines instead of immediately jumping into the melee but I just don't the see the point of adding to the noise.

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Personal trivia

My friend and former employer gets invited to the occasional White House function but this encounter on the Vineyard happened by chance. Tom has spent every August there for many years.



Boston Globe tells me:

One diner who kept his distance was Northampton attorney and Obama fund-raiser Tom Lesser, who happened to be at the restaurant with his wife, Maggie Spiegel, and their daughters Grace and Elisabeth. Obama stopped to say hello and, before leaving, took a quick selfie with the girls. Patrons applauded as the president and first lady departed.

I watched those girls grow up. I still have a note from Gracie that she left for me when she was about five years old. They're both gorgeous young women with fabulous careers now. [photo credit Martha's Vineyard Gazette]

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Simply so predictable

Glenn Greenwald says this is a misquote:

"I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did," Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio's airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

He's right. It wasn't an exact quote. Nonetheless, having read Glenn's version, I think Reuters captured the general sense of Glenn's statement. Even in his own words, it reads like a not so subtle threat. And I can't help but recall a similiar threat Glenn made against the US government on behalf of Snowden. But this isn't about the stolen NSA documents.

In case you somehow didn't hear, Glenn's spouse was detained for nine hours at Heathrow yesterday. They questioned him at length and then they took all his electronics and let him go without charging him. This is apparently legal under British law and to avoid confusion, let me stipulate the law they used is as troubling, if not more, than our own anti-terror overreach. Steve M has more on the law and the thousands of people who endured to varying degrees, the same horrible detention as David Miranda. These overly broad laws in all countries need to be clarified and narrowed, if not abolished. But this isn't about odious anti-terror laws either.

What I find most appalling about this incident is I can't help but think this was entirely predictable. Joshua Foust supplies the full backstory but if here's the short: Glenn has publicly stated he sent the leaked docs to David in the past. In the instant matter, The Guardian paid David to fly to Berlin to courier some sort of documents from Glenn to Laura Poitras, (the other journo on the Snowden story) and then return to Brazil with her docs for Glenn. So they book the return flight through Heathrow? Glenn is not stupid. Thus I'm forced to conclude Glenn set up his own spouse to take this fall and I wonder why.

Joshua articulates my current state of mind rather well:

More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

I remember, respect and appreciate Glenn's work during the Bush administration but it feels different now. It's like I don't know who he is anymore and sadly, I'm not sure I can trust him.

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Your moment of Zen

Morning in the Meadows, Northampton, MA. [George Lenker photo]

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Grimm assessments

New York Congressman Michael Grimm is appalled Obama would use his executive power to do nice things for the peoples because, founding fathers never intended that to happen.

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) said recent executive actions by President Obama, including a plan to extend high-speed Internet connections to virtually every school in the nation, demonstrate a "blatant" attempt to subvert the will of the American people.

"It's just a flagrant, you know, arrogant disregard not just for the current Congress," Grimm said in an interview with Fox News. "Look, it's not about me personally. That's not what this is about. You think about who is the Congress? It really — it is the voice of the people."

Or, if you're a Republican Congressman in John Boehner's House of Dysfunction, you're the voice of a handful of crackpots, but hey -- they're loud . But what's more interesting is new evidence of the GOP's emerging plan to blame their planned government shutdown on Obama.

"I really do believe because of political reasons, it's more advantageous for the president to keep us divided so that he can make these end runs and use these administrators and the people he puts in charge to just go around the Congress to do an agenda that he knows ultimately the people are not going to support," Grimm said.

Greg Sargent flagged the first inklings of the GOP's bizarre strategy last week and the GOPers are staying on message. They're floating this theme among the pary faithful while they're home in their districts. Last week in Virginia:

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.-10th), speaking in Loudoun County today, said he believes President Barack Obama wants a federal government shutdown in the fall.

If the government shuts down, Obama, a Democrat, will use the closure to score political points against Republicans and "stick it to them," [U.S. Rep. Frank] Wolf said. “I believe the president wants us to shut it down … I think he'll literally come at us,” Wolf, a 30-year incumbent, said.

And I believe Frank Wolf is "literally" either a flagrant liar or a raging lunatic who shouldn't be allowed within 50 miles of Capitol Hill. But the point is the GOP felt it necessary to come up with a ploy to shift the blame for a government shutdown using the defense: Obama made us do it. Finding that simultaneously hilarious, pathetic and terrifying.

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Voice inflection is everything

Internet outrage of the moment is Michael Grunwald's loaded tweet in which he said, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

Maybe it's because I'm inclined to think the best of people unless they've proven to be vile. Maybe it's because I don't really know who Grunwald is. He's not on my regular read list. I vaguely recall reading a post of his some time back that somebody linked to that I thought was quite good. So in the absense of knowledge about his general ideology, I took it as sarcasm rather than the expression of actual murderous intent. I mean, I've seen bloggers I do follow and know well post countless requests to DIAF (die in a fire) and don't take those as serious threats either.

Of course, it's August. The news cycle is mostly trivial. The poli-junkies are bored. Many pick somewhat silly internet spats and instant outrage rules the twitter.

That tweet could have been read in several ways. Could just as easily been a diss on the drone program or subtle dig at the state of media today. Which is not to say it wasn't stupid to post it. That statement desperately needed voice inflection to make its intent clear. Maybe Grunwald really meant it murderously, (in which case I would condemn it too even though I've always found Assange to be creepy and self-interested), but I've seen nothing to suggest Grunwald is prone to violent ideation. So I guess I'll save my outrage for things that really matter rather than some awkwardly worded tweet probably posted after a couple of drinks on a Saturday night.

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Your moment of Zen

An allium in the garden. [photo via The Garden Oracle]

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Defeating the propaganda

Where I come from we call it lying, but as President Obama points out, it's perfectly clear the GOPers are trying to confuse the public about the benefits of Obamacare. Of course, they wouldn't have had so much success in doing so if our "liberal media" was willing to point out the inaccuracies (if they need a polite word) instead of simply acting as stenographers for the GOP's false claims. Our insider media is perfectly willing to analyze the political implications (and subsequent benefits of lying) but only Obama is willing to point out the obvious adverse consequences of the GOP's perfidy.

A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they'll somehow be sticking it to me. But they'd just be sticking it to you.

Fortunately for America, albeit unfortunately for the Republican party, the GOP propaganda is not working like it used to. Leaping in where the media fears to tread, the people are calling the Republicans liars to their faces. Far cry from the summer of the angry mob in 2009. To paraphrase Charlie Pierce, at least this summer they're hollering at the right people. So there's that.

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Your moment of Zen

Cygnets on the water. [Back to Earth - Artworks photo]

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Shades of Jim Crow

It's been more than a little embarrassing to live in North Carolina since the easily deluded voters here turned the joint over to the crackpot con Republicans who are now in a race to turn the place into the wingnuttiest state in the union. The latest attack on voting rights in Raleigh is geting national attention. As it should. They mandated onerous voter ID requirements, cut down early voting and made voter registration as difficult as possible among other odious ploys to suppress Democratic voters. But these two provisions are being largely overlooked though they're likely to turn out to be the ones which affect the election the most.

It also empowers election vigilantes like True the Vote—who have been accused of voter intimidation—giving ample room to anyone who wants to challenge the voting credentials of their fellow citizen. It authorizes poll observers, expanding their range and authority, an expands the scope of who can examine registration records and challenge voters, and it allows voters to be challenged by any registered voter in their county without cause. [...]

And, as the icing on the cake, the law also makes room for independent groups to spend as much as they’d like in North Carolina elections, ending public financing programs, raising contribution limits, and eliminating disclosure requirements. It’s a wet kiss to powerful interests as well as an attack on voting.

Meanwhile, our creepy crackpot Governor is out on the bobblehead circuit spewing unadulterated horseshit about the law.

But that's just at the state level. The real work of voter suppressing is conducted by the yahoos on the County Commissions. What happened in Watauga County this week should be national news. It's a mystery to me how this can even be legal.

Read the gory details at the link to get the full scope of this travesty in governance but the shorter short is this. A three person county Board of Elections (2 GOPers, 1 Democrat) held a meeting and the majority membership of two announced the secret deal they made behind closed doors to benefit the candidacy of one of their relatives. They refused the Democratic member's request for the materials prior to the meeting and of course the voters were kept in the dark as well. These are the changes they announced as fait accompli:

1. Rewrote the duties of the elections supervisor, specifying that Jane Anne Hodges is prohibited from being involved in "the discussion or debate of political or discretionary decisions [!]... regarding the location or number of polling places or early voting sites and hours." She is further required to keep a log "of all telephone calls and visitors," and must never be allowed to be in the elections office alone during any polling period.

2. Resolutions to establish a public comment provision: This new board decrees that only written comment will be acceptable.

3. One-Stop Implementation Plan for the 2013 municipal elections: ASU Student Union site, closed. One site only: Commissioner's Boardroom.

4. Resolution to combine three precincts, Boone 1, Boone 2, and Boone 3 into a single precinct with the polling place at the Agricultural Conference Center. This would put over 9,000 voters into a single mega-precinct, when state voting guidelines recommend no more than 1,500 voters per precinct.

5. Move the Meat Camp polling place to the new Meat Camp fire department and move the New River 3 precinct polling place from the Armory to Mutton's Crossing on Bamboo Rd.

You have to familiar with the geography and the demograhics of this county to appreciate just how brazen this move was. Watauga, a rural county, has the only real concentration of progressive Democrats outside of the big cities in NC. These two GOP meatheads effectively made it as difficult as possible for Democrats to cast ballots by moving the liberal district's voting venues to locations that are the least accessible and lack sufficient space and parking to house the voting booths. One venue lacks the 25 foot setback required for political signs, meaning it will be impossible for voters or candidates to pass out informational material outside of the polling place. The only way their intentions could be more obvious is if they had arrived at the meeting wearing sandwich signs saying -- Fuck you Democratic voters. The local newspaper has more coverage and photos of the GOP's smug gerrymandered thugs. May we all live long enough to see their karma kick them in the ass.

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