After the way it handled the 9/11 health bill last week, the United States House of Representative has no right to pass ethical judgment on Charlie Rangel or anybody else.
If Rangel broke the law, let somebody with a legitimate badge and bona fide moral authority lock him up.
If he is going to be put on trial, let it be in an actual courthouse, not a political whorehouse.
When the Repugs were in power, they swept everything under the rug unless it involved a Dem with a dead girl or a live boy or frozen money or, well, anything they could jack him up for. Repugs could get away with anything that wasn't clearly criminal or even things that were as long as it didn't get in the media or bring federal law enforcement in.
Repugs are definitely a higher class of criminals. More practice at it than Dems.
Go read the rest.
An Apology to the Woman Without a Nose on the Cover of Time Magazine
Let's be honest here, too. For women outside of Kabul (and a couple of other places), things sucked pretty badly before the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here, in the United States, Aisha, the Rude Pundit personally knows women who say that their families will kill them if they stray from arranged marriages to get jobs or assert any independence. One says that her male relatives will kill her and make it look like she just disappeared. Are we supposed to bomb Brooklyn to change this?
So, yes, we would like to be the conquering heroes, the knights riding in to save the damsels in distress, God, how we ache to be that, but such fairy tales are not real. Killing dragons would be easier. What's real is an effort that will take decades to achieve, but one that can only begin in earnest once we are gone. We're sorry, Aisha. Most of us can't imagine your pain, your life, your fear. But when you're in a plane that's plunging out of the sky, you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else put on theirs.
(Note: we're never leaving Afghanistan.)
I think the best that can happen is we'll all get our own goats to hump.
Immigrants and Islam: We're All Rednecks Now (Part 1: Mosquemania)
Let us mourn now for the passing of the days when we could mock the rednecks. As backwards ass country fucks, these assholes wore their stupidity and ignorance as badges of pride, penning songs to celebrate how immune they are to progress and how much they love white racist governors. Whether we lived among the rednecks in South or Midwest or West of the United States, or if we sat in our liberal brownstones of the wicked Northeast, we whose necks remained unburned could feel vastly superior to the rednecks and scoff as they wallowed in the mud of their own inbred pool of devolutionary thinking. When George W. Bush was elected, "Quel horreur," we thought as we ironically drank our Pabst Blue Ribbons and got into alt-country music, as if overcompensating for being made to feel unAmerican in the reflection of the redneck uber-patriotic mirror. Sure, we could dismiss the Bush election as the primal yawp of the yahoos. We didn't vote for him. They did. Our little island of tolerance was shrinking, though. Oh, for the comfort of the myth of geographical identity.
But now, with the surge in Islamophobia and the anti-immigrant tear the nation is on, we cannot deny it anymore: we are a redneck nation, even here in the supposed bastions of liberality.
Here's the deal, rednecks of all income levels and corners of the country: you want freedom of religion? This is what you get. You want unregulated capitalism? Well, motherfuckers, telling someone what property they can buy and where they can build is pretty much as anti-capitalist/government-interferin'/fascist/communist/whatever-the-fuck-you-idiots-call-it as you can get. And if you really think that the growing Muslim population is gonna bring Sharia law to America, then you should probably stop trying to create laws against things like gay marriage based on your Bible and get on board with the separation of church and state. 'Cause, see, that works for all faiths, not just the ones you choose.Go.
The thing about rednecks, though? They don't learn. As far they're concerned, they're right, you're wrong, and fuck you for thinking differently and using "facts" and "logic," you elitist pussy. Grunting, heaving emotion is what works. Shit-tossing instead of dialogue.
Tomorrow: Oh, so many Mexicans.I kinardly wait. ¡O Sí!
Kurt Kelly, some Republican doofus in Florida involved in a primary battle, thought it would be helpful if he took a shot at Democrat Alan Grayson.
"He missed the vote. He took a walk on the vote to provide supplemental funding for our soldiers. He put our soldiers, our men and women in the military, in harm's way and, in fact, maybe he wants them to die."
Grayson's campaign manager's response is a keeper..
"Kurt Kelly thinks the stupider he sounds, the more Republican votes he'll get."
From an e-mail to me of a week or so ago:
My first factory job was cleaning 55-gal drums, then I was promoted to cleaning production machinery. I made $3.10 an hour at the first job, $3.25/hr at the second. There were guys there who had been working at the plant since the 1940s. Those at the higher-paid jobs were making $4.50 an hour, maybe $5. They had families. Most of their wives stayed home to care for their children. Many of them owned homes and they drove late-model American cars, usually the lower end Fords or Chevys.Along those lines, the NY Times today had a story about the 99ers. This is not the association of women pilots, there are people who have been out of work for so long that they are on the verge of being homeless, if they are not already. These are the people that the inhuman douchebags on Fox News, in the party of Hoover and in the Teabagging movement are demonizing as being "lazy."
This was nearly 40 years ago.
...
Damn few jobs are out there for [a] paycheck [which will permit a worker to buy a house anymore]. Big business and their lackeys in the GOP have been doing their best to shove down the pay of the American workers. The biggest fights over the GM/Chrysler bailouts in early 2009 were by senators such as Richard Shelby who was adamant about cramming down workers' pay.
It wasn't the workers who failed to design decent cars. It wasn't the workers who made GM and Chrysler build large SUVs. It wasn't the workers who chose to invest large amounts of capital into building H2 and H3 "Hummers". But it was the workers who the politicians in the GOP and their propagandists on hate radio and TV went after, hammer and tong.
The days of being able to graduate from high school, get a good job in a factory and provide for one's family are gone. They are gone because the guys who run the companies, guys like Mitt Romney have made a shit-ton of money from gutting the American industrial base and sending it overseas.
You may look at a guy like Romney and others like him, who have exported millions of jobs, and think that they are smart businessmen.
I look at them and I think that they are traitors.
Sometimes I wonder why the far-Right of this country seems to revel in its lack of humanity.
The closest Obama came to a critique of war in Iraq was pure pablum: "Our nation has had vigorous debates about the Iraq War," he said. "There are patriots who supported going to war, and patriots who opposed it."Patriots who supported going to war? Does he mean the deluded fools, the nonproliferation freaks and human rights extremists who joined Bush's crusade? Does he mean the Zionist lobby tools who believed that eliminating Saddam Hussein was a useful step in protecting Israel? Does he mean the oil companies who couldn't wait to get their clutches on Iraq's vast pools of oil? Does he mean the defense contractors who relished the idea of making vast profits supporting the war? Or the right-wing ideologues who felt it necessary to slam Americas's fist down in the Middle East to show the world who's boss? Maybe these are "patriots" in Obama's book, but not in mine.
Those who supported the war in Iraq, whether they were bloodthirsty neocons in Dick Cheney's camp, useful idiots such as Peter Beinart of the New Republic, or iconoclastic weirdos such as Christopher Hitchens, weren't patriots. They were regime change addicts, imperialists, and worse.
Once more, with feeling:
Those who supported the war in Iraq, whether they were bloodthirsty neocons in Dick Cheney's camp, useful idiots such as Peter Beinart of the New Republic, or iconoclastic weirdos such as Christopher Hitchens, weren't patriots. They were regime change addicts, imperialists, and worse.
If we learn nothing else from the Iraq clusterfuck, let it be that those who were right from the beginning - whether about an invasion or an economic crisis - are the only ones whose opinion deserves respect the next time around.
Because there is always a next time.
"You're (probably) a federal criminal," declares Alex Kozinski, an appeals-court judge, in a provocative essay of that title. Making a false statement to a federal official is an offence. So is lying to someone who then repeats your lie to a federal official. Failing to prevent your employees from breaking regulations you have never heard of can be a crime. A boss got six months in prison because one of his workers accidentally broke a pipe, causing oil to spill into a river. "It didn't matter that he had no reason to learn about the [Clean Water Act's] labyrinth of regulations, since he was merely a railroad-construction supervisor," laments Judge Kozinski.This is what you should know: Every free adult person in the United States of America is an unprosecuted felon. With enough prosecutors and enough cops, they could lock up all of us.
We all pay for this insanity in taxes. We all pay in that heavily armed cops wearing body armor and carrying out Gestapo-style searches on elderly flower sellers and raw food sellers pushes this country further and further over the borderline of being a police state.
This needs to be brought under control.
From Digby, all the proof you need that the rich are the problem, and getting rid of them is the solution.
Robert Frank has a thought provoking op-ed piece in the WSJ this morning, positing that the rich no longer need the rest of us. It seems that except for fighting, cleaning and garbage hauling, the vast number of Americans are no longer necessary for their economic well being, which is a fairly alarming prospect, although not one that seems particularly surprising at the moment. After all, it's become increasingly obvious that there's no longer any reflexive resistance among the ruling class to the idea of a permanent underclass or even a belief in the necessity to keep a stable middle class thriving for economic (much less moral) purposes.I mean it. Everybody with an annual income over one million dollars, out. You don't pay your fair share of taxes, you don't create American jobs, you don't perform a public service - you're parasites, every effing one of you. You suck the lifeblood out of all the rest of us and give nothing in return.
Late last year, the U.S. economy experienced a surprising decoupling. As stocks boomed, the wealthy bounced back. And while the Main Street economy was wracked by high unemployment and the real-estate crash, the wealthy-whose financial fates were more tied to capital markets than jobs and houses- picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and started buying luxury goods again.Who knows what the next few months and years will bring. But one thing seems clear: the economic fate of Richistan seems increasingly separate from the fate of the U.S.
[...]
[Michael Lind]says the wealthy increasingly earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of the U.S. "A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country."
That's a fairly creepy vision, which flies in the face of the old Henry Ford credo that he had to pay his factory workers enough to be able to buy his cars (even if he was a Nazi.)I guess when a country doesn't make anything it may be inevitable that it becomes a nation of aristocrats and their servants.Yves Smith says that although the attitude certainly is pervasive, this is probably more hype than reality. They've just found a new business model:
Yes, the rich increasingly live lives apart from those not in their economic cohort. But separation is not the same as independence. The Southern plantation owner had little interaction with his slaves (his overseer took care of that), yet he clearly depended on their labor. The financial crisis resulted in the greatest looting of the public purse in history. While the banksters were the obvious beneficiaries, most of the rest of the rich were carried along with them. The sudden recovery in the fortunes of the wealthy was no accident, but the result of a host of policies to prop up asset values.So the new business of America is looting the coffers of the US treasury. Sounds about right.This line of thinking is hardly new. James Galbraith, in The Predator State, discusses how the corporate elite have come to serve their own interests rather than those of their companies, and have become adept at using the state to further their personal aims. Thus the profit potential of remaining engaged in the US (albeit at as much of a remove as the top echelon can manage) is too great to be ignored.
I'm sure the United Arab Emirates will be thrilled to have you.
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Republicans do not suffer from amnesia
Preaching to Republicans is a waste of time.
Historical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that — F. Scott Fitzgerald notwithstanding — there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.
On the other hand, our inability to remember what our policy was last week, never mind last decade, drives outsiders crazy.
[...]
Parties, of course, can change; politicians can see the light; lessons can be learned; and perhaps some Republicans have learned them. But you cannot start from scratch. You cannot forget history. You cannot pretend that the Republican Party has not supported big and wasteful spending programs — energy subsidies, farm subsidies, unnecessary homeland security projects, profligate defense contracts, you name it — for the past decade. Before the GOP can have credibility on any spending issues whatsoever, Republican leaders need to speak frankly about the mistakes of the past.
They also must be extremely specific about which policies and programs they are planning to cut. What will it be? Social Security or the military budget? Medicare or the Transportation Security Administration? Vague "anti-government" rhetoric doesn't cut it anymore: If you want a smaller government, you have to tell us how you will create one.
Give me a break. If one was referring to a serious political party which honestly cared about the welfare of the citizenry, then yes, talk about having to learn from "mistakes of the past." Inform them that "lessons can be learned" and credibility can be regained if they would only stop forgetting about history. But this is obviously not the case with Republicans. They are quite aware of policies they have held in the past which they now conveniently dismiss on a daily basis. When pointed out to them, they switch to ignore mode and simply repeat whatever position they now claim to hold regardless of how hypocritical it makes them appear. They don't care. They really don't. It is a trait found in people who lack the ability to feel shame or remorse.
Republicans have no desire to elevate politics to a place of greater integrity and honesty. It does not serve their purpose to do so because they have but a single mission. Namely, regain power by opposing EVERY single idea introduced by the current administration regardless of whether or not they themselves hold the same belief. That's it. Nothing more is required to understand the game being played or the motive behind what they do.
Reminding Republicans that they were the party of big government and rising deficits under Bush, with the belief that a bulb will suddenly light over their collective heads, is naive. They already know. They don't care. And when they regain power, they'll just go back to being who they are – a self-serving political party of heartless, greedy bastards who cater to the rich and big business and who care about anyone else only as far as they can con them into casting a vote their way.
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I'm a Fox News credentialed guy and I could sit in the front row [at the White House Briefing Room] and believe me when I tell you that I will be there sometime down the line. And Glenn Beck might be there. Hannity might be there.
– Bill O'Reilly said with a grin.
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