Getting Suckered by Our Own Guys
Our political system has devolved into a cross between a bad Don Rickles joke and a high school fire drill during freshman orientation. Obama is at best a hypocrite and at worst Hillary in drag, only with less heavy eye-liner. Hillary seems to be going for Nixon Redux, and McCain is Fright Nightwith the Kewl Kids at the National Review Dorm, surrounded by an army somebody gave them for Xmas to play Dungeons ‘n’ Dragons with.
Not a pretty future we’re looking at here, and attention should be paid before it’s too late. Meaning, of course, that it already is. We’ve saddled ourselves with a crew of right-wing choices, all of them corporate stooges, all of them hawks to greater or lesser degree, and none of them have the slightest interest in challenging the Beltway status quo or the punditocracy’s assumptions. What to do?
Sphere: Related ContentTime for Accountability: Dump Them All
canuckgal (via eRobin) notes that the furor over Obama’s chief economic advisor assuring a Canadian official that BO’s anti-NAFTA remarks lately weren’t serious but merely whimsical, light-hearted, unserious “campaign rhetoric” has heated up. The Obama advisor was named by CTV as Austin Goolsbee after Obama and his camp denied the report. canuckgal wastes no sympathy on them.
Sphere: Related ContentBush Regulation Changes Threaten Medicaid for Kids
Two of the prime characteristics of stupid people and arrogant people is that a) they never learn and b) they never change either their beliefs or their actions no matter how often objective evidence proves them wrong. The prime characteristic of the modern Republican is an abysmal lack of any emotion except greed.
All three came together this week when George W Bush, the “compassionate conservative”, decided to kill the SCHIP program by executive fiat because he couldn’t use Congress to take away the health care program for poor kids.
Sphere: Related ContentPigs on Parade: Our Corporate Democrats
It was perhaps inevitable that once our political system was captured by corporate interests, there would come a time when virtually all the candidates available to us were hypocrites. We’re looking at that time now on the national level. All three candidates still standing are corporate conservatives. Two of them have flip-flopped so many times they could be IHOP icons featuring pancakes instead of faces. The third is your standard political hypocrite, saying what people want to hear but voting and supporting very opposite policies to the ones he claims to be championing.
I shouldn’t have to tell you at this point which is which. The NYT helped today by breaking down the Democratic hypocrites, particularly Hillurary.
Sphere: Related ContentBush Pushing Another Anti-Choice Theocrat for the Federal Bench
While the political world is totally caught up in the primary Kabuki trying to figure out whether TweedleBam or TweedleShe will wind up as the Democratic nominee and acting as if it matters, Emperor Georgius is taking the opportunity to push the Senate Judiciary Committee to report out the nomination of one Richard Honacker to the Wyoming Federal District Court.
The nomination was made last March and has been hanging fire ever since. He obviously thinks that with the Senate bowing and banging its head on the floor in a rush to protect him and the telecom companies who blatantly broke the law for years and years from prosecution for their crimes, now would be a good time. You know, while they’re already in Surrender Mode.
Sphere: Related ContentTop bin Laden Aide #269 Claimed Captured By Pakistanis
When it comes to top-heavy management, it would seem that even the Boy Emperor surrounded by his Band of 100 Bigots has nothing on Osama bin Laden. Between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Washington and Islamabad have claimed the capture or killing of nearly 300 men described as being “close to OBL”, “top bin Laden commanders”, or having “close ties” with AQ’s elusive leader. The latest is Mansour Dadullah, whom Pakistani Army Maj Gen Athar Abbas says was taken in a firefight in Afghanistan’s mountain province of Baluchistan.
(”Confidence is not high, I say again, NOT high…”)
Sphere: Related ContentHope AND Change? Or Hope FOR Change?
Kyle’s post, “What Hope and Change Really Mean“, is a beautifully written and crafted synopsis of the Obama Pitch, and is also most likely a pretty good summation of his (Obama’s, not Kyle’s) appeal. The fact that it’s both wrong-headed and at the same time amounts to little more than wishful thinking and generational warfare shouldn’t undercut the importance of having these sentiments out in the open where they can finally be addressed.
Sphere: Related ContentHillary and Obama: Change, Finally? Don’t Make Me Laugh
Glenn Greenwald drove the point home in his Salon blog this morning that the Democrats remain, under DLC leadership, tied to playing monkey-see/monkey-do with the GOP despite the fact that Republicans and their policies are reviled throughout the country.
Sphere: Related ContentThe WaPo Sinks Lower: Inventing an Opposition Party
Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, two of the Washington Post’s most reliable (and least trustworthy) boosters of Bush’s disastrous economic policies, have combined forces for a piece today about the so-called “stimulus package” that approaches fantasy.
Sphere: Related ContentBush Asserts US "Right" to Kidnap Foreign Nationals from Foreign Soil
I’m afraid that says what you think it says. The London Times Online is reporting that a British lawyer hired by the Bush Administration is arguing in a British court that the US has the right to kidnap anyone it decides has broken its laws without the dreary formality of extradition and haul them back to America to stand trial. (Via Libby at The Reaction.)
Sphere: Related ContentDemocrats Attack Credit Card Co’s
I don’t have to remind you that credit card companies have become in the last few years little more than loan sharks. Their interest rates are usury, the hidden fees and fines are out of control, and sudden, invisible rate hikes have shocked consumers pretty regularly. A friend of mine had a total of $7000 on 3 cards, and when she added up the charges, she discovered that she had paid $12,000 - nearly double what she owed - and still had almost $4000 left outstanding. Even if she tripled or quadrupled her monthly payment, it would virtually all be interest, leaving the principle balance almost untouched. She also noticed for the first time that there were large late fees tacked onto her payments even though she regularly mailed them the week before they were due.
That graf barely scratches the surface of the tricks, cons, and scams lenders have developed in the past 8 years to increase their already massive profits. And it isn’t like you can, you know, free-market-style, change your provider for a better deal. Nearly all the lenders who dish out cards do the same things. Some may be marginally worse than others, but they all pretty much use the same tricks to inflate what you owe them beyond all reason, and this despite interest rates that would make John Gotti blush. Well, WaPo business reporter Carrie Johnson writes today that the Democrats are preparing legislation to put a halt to the worst of the abuses.
Sphere: Related ContentPositive Thinking and the Looming Recession
Norman Vincent Peale has a lot to answer for. His gospel - that the “power of positive thinking” overcomes all obstacles - infected the executive and investor class in the 50’s and was magnified by the conservative corporatocracy for the next 50 years. They institutionalized it and then grafted it onto their own beliefs, defining “positivity” or optimism as the fulfillment of their wish list. Since they tend to be bi-polar thinkers with little tolerance for, say, nuance, that meant that everything contrary to their beliefs became, ipso facto, “negative”. “Thinking positively” came to mean being positive about their ability to depress wages, subvert regulation, shove their expenses onto the govt and the rest of society (a la Wal-Mart) so they could pocket more of their profits, freely exploit the labor and resources of other countries without blowback, and so on.
Unfortunately, it also meant developing a rigid denial of the inevitable consequences of all that unrestricted self-interest. Global warming, economic stagnation and growing poverty for a majority of the population, peak oil, massive debt, Bush - all of those ticking time bombs and many more were simply denied recognition. “If we don’t see them, they don’t exist.”
That attitude has now infested Wall Street. According to the NY Times, this week’s rally is primarily the result of “positive thinking”.
Sphere: Related ContentBush Battles Budget
Talk about Alice in Wonderland. Like the Red Queen’s, BushLogic tends to circle back on itself to become its own opposite, canceling itself out as well as violating all its previous positions. An item in today’s WaPo illustrates just how far down the rabbit hole we’ve fallen under the Shrub.
El Supremo has decided to fight the Democratic budget bill - you know, the one tied to troop withdrawals - by whining about how his not signing it will hurt (are you ready for this?) the profits of the military-industrial complex.
Sphere: Related ContentIf a Republican Wins, Head for Tierra del Fuego
I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night because there’s no point to it. They’ve established a pattern and it’s always the same: 2 or 3 of them get into a vicious fight over who’s most like a dictator, who’d violate the Constitution the most often, who’d break more laws, who’d give the oligarchs the most tax breaks, who’d torture more innocent people, who’d invade the most Muslim countries, and/or who’d make sure a maximum number of the poor would starve, freeze to death, and end up homeless, roaming the streets.
And just to be sure we’re clear, those aren’t attacks against their opponents. They’re boasting.
Sphere: Related ContentOnce Upon A Time, Republicans Had Integrity
If we fail to impeach, we have condoned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with the reasonable expectations of the American people. We will have condoned a presidential course of conduct designed to interfere with and obstruct the very process he has sworn to uphold. We will have condoned and left unpunished an abuse of power totally without justification. In short, a power appears to have corrupted. It is a sad period in American history, but I cannot condone what I have heard, I cannot excuse it and I cannot and will not stand still for it.
~ Rep M Caldwell Butler, R-VA, in 1974 on the impeachment of Richard Nixon
Hard to imagine a Republican voting for his country over his party these days.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Fabulous Condi v Darth Cheney et al: A Fable From Hindsight
What with the Fabulous Condi ginning up a photo-op-centered “Mid-East Summit” in Annapolis intended to provide pictures-without-words (or results) to make it look like Bush is, you know, doing something about The Palestinian Problem, the NYT thought it would be a good time to excerpt not one but two sections from BushBaby Liz Bumiller’s forthcoming biography of her. Titled Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, Bumiller has apparently found herself a new hero - or, put another way, an extension of her old one.
Sphere: Related ContentBushBuddies Dying Like Flies
First England kicked Tony Blair out for being Bush’s Poodle and replaced him with a much less malleable Gordon Brown. Then Spain’s Jose Aznar got the boot for pretty much the same reason. Now Oz’s autocrat-in-chief, John Howard, has bit the dust behind his support for Bush’s oil war.
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