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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