The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

A MUST READ by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone

Monday Morning Funny

(ht/ Shan)

Animal Farm Friday: Dedicated to the Vultures of Wall Street

The foie gras fight

Just read a mostly decent article on Salon about the fight over foie gras (h/t Kitten). Some very good points were made by the writer, Alex Koppelman, until the last paragraph, which nearly discredits the entire article:

The anti-meat activists can't very well persuade Chicago to ban beef or pork or chicken, so they focus instead on something easier, arguably to the detriment of general livestock. They're demonizing and hurting small farms that care about the health of their animals. Meanwhile, factory farms that do unspeakable things to the creatures in their care are let off the hook.

Anti-meat activists - esp. PETA - wage just as intense of a war against factory farms and all meat consumption as they do against foie gras. I'm a former animal rights activist and former PETA member, and am now a co-owner of an organic/human/sustainable meat company, so I have a clear picture of both sides of the "meat debate", and I've had it with jerks who attack groups like PETA out of ignorance and petty spite.

Just as there are some foie gras farms that are inhumane, there are also animal rights activists that are disingenuous. But making gross generalizations about animal rights activists is just as harmful as gross generalizations about foie gras farming practices. Alex Koppelman should keep his frustrations with specific animal rights activists confined to the narrow few that are being deceitful - just like he tries to single out bad foie gras farms from the goods ones, and back off attacking the movement at large.

I'm sick of this kind of sloppy journalism. Salon can do better.

I am really starting to hate Israelis

...at least their soldiers. They make me sick to my stomach.

Cast Your Vote

For the next Freedom From Religion Foundation bus sign!

I wonder if David Axelrod thinks people won't care about this

Citigroup Inc. plans to spend about $10 million on new offices for Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit and his lieutenants, after the U.S. government injected $45 billion of cash into the bank.

People don't care?

I am blown away by this asinine remark by David Axelrod.

“People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG,” Axelrod said. “They are thinking about their own jobs.”

Um... David. This is not an either/or situation. People do sit around worrying about their jobs, and being pissed off that the greedy bastards who are largely responsible for them losing their jobs are making off with millions of dollars that their taxes are going to pay (should they be so lucky to find enough work to pay the taxes).

This is stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Dork Rap!

Even more funny each time you watch it.

Props to the Mayor

Gavin is sounding pretty good here:

Earmark Hypocrites

TPM has a great photo spread of all the earmark hypocrites, the blowhards railing against excessive spending while they're responsible for a loading up the spending bill with pork. You can see right through their slimey tactics. Fatten up the bill first, then attack Obama for passing a bloated bill.

Of all the hypocrites though, the one that has irked me the most is that punk Evan Bayh. Since he's been in office, he's done nothing to stand in the way of GOP/George W Bush spending and budgets, but now that we have a Democratic president, he suddenly grows a pair and is now an instant fiscal conservative? Give me a f***ing break! The chump needs to be taken out behind the wood shed and taught what happens to hypocrites and liars! At the very least, we need to start fielding credible primary challengers to run against this fool when the time comes!

Holy Bile: Pope says condoms don't stop the spread of AIDS

If anyone ever wonders why I HATE religion, especially religious authority, here's a great example:

Pope rejects condoms for Africa

The spread of HIV and Aids in Africa should be tackled through fidelity and abstinence and not by condoms, Pope Benedict XVI has said.

Never mind that the overwhelming mountain of actual data makes this claim about the most pathetically asinine thing this scumbag Pope has ever said, it's just entirely dangerous as hell. The words of this former Hitler Youth (and child rapist enabler) have the power to condemn millions more Africans to death of HIV/AIDS, simply because of an utter lack of understanding of human nature, and disregard for scientifically proven facts.

Santelli, Sen. Kyl Push Back Against "Outrage" Over AIG Bonuses

Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought Jon Stewart made the case that CNBC has zero credibility.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Washington is predisposed to see public passion and anger as a threat rather than an opportunity

The title of this post is grabbed (and paraphrased) from David Sirota's excellent post at Open Left.

Wall Street sycophants like Summers and Geithner continuing to push a red herring that says there's nothing that can be done to stop corporations from using our taxpayer money to subsidize bonuses for the same executives who created this economic crisis.

... the populist anger that the Times examines could be a huge force for good - if the administration gets serious about championing it, rather than trying to suppress it out of deference to a punditocracy that says it is "dangerous" or "unserious" or "too emotional." Doing the latter, in fact, is the best way for the White House to become a target of the public's ire.

I'm getting increasingly frustrated by Geithner specifically, and Summers recently. For Geithner, I'm fairly convinced now that he's in waaaaayyyy over his head, and is completely lacking in vision, internally and externally. Ancedotal evidence would indicate that he's trying to balance chainsaws with razorblades; he's trying to keep the richies from having to part with too much cash while the economy collapses on the little people. Which one can stand the bigger loss? Which can tolerate the chainsaw, and which the cuts of the razorblades?

If he had smart leadership behind him, the rich SOBs that got us in this mess in the first place would be getting the full brunt of the chainsaws, face first. But we're not seeing that kind of leadership right now. Again, another day, and we find out that we're into AIG for even more money that they're using to enrich themselves. The very small group of "pirates" that caused the crisis at AIG are raking in the largest amount in bonuses. And once again, Obama is a day late and a dollar short to this mess, and he has to go out and deliver another speech to cover his ass.

No one expects Obama to have all the answers, and this mess is really too big for any one man to handle. But huge mistakes like this just make it that much harder for everyone. It's directly related to shortsightedness, and a distorted pro-business perspective. For example, how in the world is anyone able to say with a straight face that we have to coddle the very thieves responsible for trashing the global economy out of fear that we won't be able to hire the "best and brightest" to get us out of this mess? Who believes that there aren't plenty of smart but cautious economists who could help untangle this Gordian Knot? I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of economists who were actually smart enough to see this house of cards for what it was and decided not to sully themselves by playing the foolish games of the greedy. Why not let the thieves go, and replace them with the smart guys, the ones who weren't spending every waking hour trying to game the system, but the ones who want to make it work?

Who else believes Liddy, the current CEO of AIG, when he says they are bound by contract to pay these bonuses? I know litigation attorneys, and the first thing each of them will tell you is that the validity of any contract depends on which lawyer argues his case better. In other words, there aren't many contracts that can't be "altered". I want to say that Obama should have known this, but now there is a report out that Treasury knew all along about these AIG bonuses, and helped make it happen.

All this said, I'm still not ready to give up hope on Obama. I'm shouting this out because I want him to do better, and I think he can do better. Of course, my entire post is based on what I've pieced together, and my argument is only as strong as the weakest post of all I cited. I need to dig some more to see what the deeper story is here, but so far it's just not looking good.

As much as I'd love to see Geithner go, it's politically untenable, as letting him go would be worse for Obama than just gradually marginalizing him. I think at this point Obama needs to get someone else in to give poor Tim a hand, or 2010 is going to look a lot like 1994. That's the real backlash they need to be concerned with.

I Watched the Watchmen

I have a confession to make, and one that might destroy my comic geek cred. I've never been a fan of Watchmen.

Don't get me wrong. I have tremendous respect for the impact that Watchmen had on the genre. Were it not for this book, other great works and writers that followed may not have been possible. But it must be said that of many great works that did follow Watchmen, or were inspired by Alan Moore's other works, most of them were actually better than Watchmen, as were many writers being better than Moore. It was through the post-Watchmen writers and books that I found my way to Watchmen. By the time I got to Watchmen in the mid-1990s, it was already past its time. More than a decade after that I see the movie, which is as faithful to the comic as any movie could be, and is exactly why it fails.

Taken at face value, Watchmen is a seminal piece of work, and groundbreaking for the medium, but it is no literary masterpiece. As a comic book, it is masterful. As a work of fiction, it is really quite average. Watchmen is groundbreaking in the sense that this story is one of the first times that comic book heroes are shown to have genuine human failings, weaknesses that can - and do - cause great harm. Even though it is a modest study of human nature, this nature is somewhat distorted by the focus on the heroes, who are arguably still greater than other humans by comparison to the common man in the book. Watchmen is not an examination of the human condition through the fall of people that society has elevated to hero status, it is a story about comic book heroes, written for fans of comic books. In the words of the series illustrator, Watchmen is "a comic about comics". Watchmen was not written for the general public, which is why it should not have been made into a movie, and certainly not a movie that tries to remain as close to the original book as possible. That should have been obvious to anyone paying attention, as the author said this directly:

"What I'd like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating", and emphasized this by stressing the differences between comics and film.

Watchmen made for a bad movie for many reasons. Criticisms of the book aside, there are many devices that make the story work in book form that cannot be translated to film. The slow pace of character development, minor characters who are actually very important to the plot, various complicated subplots, and  the insertion of sometimes seemingly irrelevant back stories, all elements that help immerse the reader into this alternate reality are simply not possible to recreate on film, even in a three-hour movie. In the absence of the devices, all the audience has to suspend disbelief and become part of the Watchmen's world are novel twists on actual historical events and characters, allusions to real-world places and people, flashbacks of events in the characters' pasts that are mostly the standard trope of stereotypical conflicts (adultery, wrong place/wrong time, etc.), and a lot of cheesy, expository dialogue.

The Watchmen themselves are thin and cartoonish in the book, and on the big screen, that becomes even more pronounced. All of them pay homage to characters from early comics, which won't matter a bit to anyone who is not a fan of the medium. And many of those characters were thin and cartoonish out of necessity, and this is a major reason why comic books have always been scorned as unserious.

I take issue with most of the characters in the book, but especially in the movie, since the movie magnifies greatly the weaker aspects of the characters. Nite Owl’s alter-ego has been called an “impotent Clark Kent”, but in the movie, Patrick Wilson is more like Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswald from National Lampoon's Vacation, though he suits up well and has some decent fight scenes (likely a stunt man). Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II was most interesting when she had her clothes off, and I don’t mean that in a perverted sense. The rest of the time, she’s just vapid and whiney. She was as convincing in her fight scenes as was Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, which isn’t saying much. As for Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias, I’ll say that his fight scenes were decent enough, but I have nothing else good to say about his otherwise flat and dull performance. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s The Comedian character was successfully detestable, so much so that you wanted bad things to happen to him, and were satisfied when they did.

The one character with the most potential for being interesting was the least interesting character of all. This is true of the book, and made even worse by Billy Crudup’s weak performance in the movie. I speak of Dr. Manhattan, a superpowered human capable of controlling matter and energy at the quantum level. Many things about this character have always bothered me. While most comic books treat science loosely, Alan Moore feigned scientific knowledge when writing Dr. Manhattan. Unfortunately, Mr. Moore has the same thin grasp of quantum physics as most comic writers, so as cool as the character could have truly been, he turned out to be nothing more than a big blue parlor trick. In the book, his character at once has no emotional concern for humans, yet does. Both of these exist in the character at the same time, but I guess since his character is not of time, this is gag. But it just doesn't make sense. He portends to be beyond other humans, yet he embodies the same pettiness as most humans. As for his magnificence, we see Dr. Manhattan use his powers over atoms to assemble and disassemble machinery, but it's always done in whole parts, not at the atomic level, which would make more sense (although, he does tend to disassemble humans at the cellular level). Also, Dr. Manhattan can grow to forty feet, apparently, completely ignoring the Law of Conservation. I also never quite got his ability to be two places at once. Entanglement doesn't work that way, and even if he is not of time, those who observe him are. So even on a theoretical scale, he couldn't be boning Laurie in one room while working on machines in another. Like I said, parlor tricks. This is too bad, because the real science of quantum physics is extremely cool, and the character could have been really amazing. I get that his character was based on an amalgam of "atomic" characters from pulp fiction and other cheese-ball sci-fi classics (including Captain Atom), and this speaks to why Watchmen is bad for a movie. People are tired of that type of schlock. We've moved on. But Moore doesn’t deserve all the blame for Dr. Manhattan’s poor screen presence. Billy Crudup did a perfect job making the character even more boring than he was in the series.

The one character I found the most interesting in the Watchmen movie is the same as was in the book: Rorschach. Jackie Earle Haley's performance was by far the best of the entire movie. His character wasn't particularly complex, much like the pulp characters he was based on, but was still intriguing. He is the masked vigilante with inexplicable abilities, questionable morals, and is of singular purpose: Justice! Haley's performance was spot on. He made you feel Rorschach's inner rage that burned hot enough to erupt like a volcano at times, and at other times you'd swear he had ice in his veins. He had the best line of the movie, and delivered it - in the prison scene - with awesome perfection:

"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me."

But one character, no matter how great the performance, could not save Watchmen from itself.

Watchmen began as a comic series cum graphic novel that was an "homage to the simplicity and unsophisticated nature of Golden Age comic books" overflowing with Cold War paranoia, populated with narrow characters and corny dialogue. Watchmen ends as a larger than life example of just that. Such that large screens allow us to see the pores and the wrinkles and the blemishes on the characters’ faces,  the big screen exposes what is the worst of the Watchmen comic series, magnified a thousand times.

Is Glenn Beck sorry?

Glenn Beck is a petulant retard. Sorry, that wasn't nice to insult retarded people.

From his site: Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it?

Do you believe that your voice isn't loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?

Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you're completely alone?

If so, then you've fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different. Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don't surround us at all.
We surround them.

I felt that way prior to the '08 elections. But not so much anymore since the right-wing-nuts lost to millions of people voting for Democrats and Barack Obama, not Republicans, and certainly not Glenn Beck.

Sorry Glenn. You're irrelevant. And you might also be guilty of sedition.

Obama Scraps 'Enemy Combatant' Definition For Gitmo

Big ups to big O.

In contrast to other scary positions the Obama administration has taken with regards to executive power, Obama drops the "Enemy Combatant" definition for Gitmo detainees. This brings us one step closer to accepted international rule of law.

No doubt the gun toting hillbillies will be upset by this, though. (And anyone upset by this is pretty much on the same level of "low life" as a gun toting hillbilly in my opinion.)

Comedians matter

Jon Stewart had already established his credentials as a bulwark against media stupidity when he publicly called Tucker Carlson a dick on national TV, but he may just be immortalized after last night's "gloves off" interview with - nay, utter takedown of - CNBC's Jim Cramer. But, in fairness to Cramer, as Glenn Greenwald so deftly describes, at least he had the temerity to face criticism in person, unlike just about any other so-called journalist. Glenn makes an excellent case that there is nothing unique about Cramer - or CNBC - though, when compared to the rest of our press corps and Establishment Media. Very much worth a read!

I, and many others, have marveled repeatedly over the fact that it is our comedians who are the only ones we can trust to tell us the truth. Jon Stewart uses mockery and juvenile humor to ease the shame and disgust of the nude Emperor rubbing his genitals all over our faces by pointing out that the Emperor is hung like a hamster. Stephen Colbert dons a persona amalgamated of the worst traits of many a pundit to mock just how ridiculous the level of political discourse is in our society. The late George Carlin used biting wit and vulgar profanity to feign anger at our political leaders and talking heads, thus serving as more or less a relief-valve for the rest of us by making us laugh out loud when we might otherwise cry. And the great Bill Maher employs his vaunted wit with biting sarcasm to speak truth to the cadre of cowardly liars who we entrust to lead us.

As put by a particularly smart fellow from a discussion group I'm following:

Comedians play a crucial role in our free society. I'm sure you recall seeing Cabaret -- where the floor show catered to the prevailing power instead of attacked it. It mocked Nazi's at the beginning, and ended by mocking the Jews, playing to the audience. There can be no cows too sacred, no myth too precious to spared from attack or we, too, risk being trapped in a society where all of our expressions must be (literally) politically correct with force of violent sanction applied to those who moon the cow. Comics like Maher (I'll add Stewart, Colbert, Carlin, et al. -ed.) are the bellwether of a free society. - RGB

With apologies to all comedians - women and men - who deserve mention here but are not included (for lack of time), all of those mentioned share in common intelligence, wit, and the courage to stand for truth against powerful forces who are more than willing to lie to and deceive and potentially put in harms way the very people they should be looking out for, but also depend upon for their very existence.


Here is but one segment of several worth watching (and I only wish Jon Stewart was this tough on Bill O'Reilly):

Animal Farm Friday: Quite the blow job!

I love helicopters and blow jobs. Here's both at once, and Bambi too!

Raisin of Reason: The Silent Minority

The awesome Cenk Uygur champions the cause of the godless, and urges us to be silent no more!

There is a minority group in America that is a bigger percentage of the country than blacks or Hispanics. But they are often ignored or derided in public. Almost no politician would ever admit to being one. And they are given no voice in the public arena.

They are the non-religious. A new comprehensive study by The Program on Public Values at Trinity College shows that this group is now a whopping 15% of the country. Mormons by comparison are a puny 1.4% of the population, and people can't shut up about the Mormons. The Senate Majority Leader is a Mormon, one of the top Republican presidential candidates was Mormon and even HBO has a whole show devoted to them.

My guess is that there are actually more than 15%, and that most are too afraid of coming out of the closet for fear of retribution in their jobs, or being ostracized by their communities. But it surprises me that people are more comfortable living lives predicated on mythologies, fairy tales, and superstitions.

A shred of decency from Madoff?

In no way does this guy deserve any respect whatsoever, but it's only fair to give him props for wasting any money his trial would have cost. Pleading guilty to all charges was a decent thing to do.

I hope the Fed goes after anyone and everyone who was complicit in Madoff's scheme (I sincerely doubt one man could have pulled this off alone), including friends and family members.

Shitigroup indeed

Why am I not surprised at Citi going on the offensive against the Employee Free Choice Act? They're happy to take the money of the working man (except when they aren't, but they'll keep it anyway, thank you very much!)

Makes me feel that much better canceling my credit card with them last week. The Citi call center worker asked why I was canceling the account. I laughed, and asked if he was kidding. He said he really wanted to know. I said it was because Citi represents all that is evil in the world. He said nothing. Perhaps he knows he's working for the devil.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

Worth four minutes and twelve seconds of your day to watch.

That "Dan White Hero" psycho

I was on the steps of the California Supreme Court last Thursday in a heated shouting match with that psychopath carrying the Dan White Hero sign. I can tell you that this individual (I'm loathe to call him a person) clearly had some mental issues, apart from being stunningly ignorant. He was shouting the usual epithets of "God hates fags" and couldn't stop confusing me as a "fag spreading AIDS" even though my wife  - introduced as such - was right next to me.

My refrain was to shout at him repeatedly "You are supporting a murderer!" which eventually drew the attention of pro-Prop 8 supporters who actually turned their attacks on him, driving the psycho away. Or at least driving him away from us.

I can only hope he was met with the same fierce berating he got from us wherever he went.

Chas Freeman follow-up

David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy has what is for the most important perspective on the matter of Obama caving and letting Chas Freeman withdraw his name from consideration for Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

The United States will get along fine without Freeman and without each and every one of the casualties of this latest hiring cycle. But we will ultimately suffer irreparable damage if we do not reverse this pernicious trend. Further, those who celebrate keeping out Freeman or any others whose views do not align with theirs or who feared his associations would do well to remember that the same kind of criteria can be applied by other groups. The result is not a government of people without conflicts of interest or troubling ties, rather it is a government full of people whose conflicts and ties are with groups powerful enough to protect them. This among other reasons is why I, as a Jew with a memory, was so opposed to the attacks on Freeman. But for the record, the most compelling reason I found for believing Chas Freeman would have been a superb Chairman of the National Intelligence Council was one that seldom came up in all the articles I read. I actually know him.

(emphasis mine)

I'm also pretty sickened by the fact that our government seems to be puppets manipulated by a handful of powerful religious zealots.

Chas Freeman Out: Intel Chair Withdraws

WTF Obama?!?



I'm starting to wonder why Obama isn't showing that "flinty Chicago toughness" he brags about.



First he let himself get dragged around by the Republiscums over the Stimulus Bill, now he's letting the AIPAC-controlled Congress (meaning nearly every damn one of them, D or R) shove him around over his appointment of Chas Freeman - to a position that doesn't even require confirmation!



There very possibly goes our last best hope to put a check on the ultra-right wingnuts in Israel, and their agents that apparently do control our government here.



This is a major disappointment.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Raisin of Reason: Percentage of Americans with no religion on the rise

A glimmer of hope that insanity is waning.

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels, according to a major study of U.S. religion being released today.

Derivatives v. Insurance

Yeah, I wish I didn't have to care about this either. Seriously, who the hell cared about Mortgage Backed Securities, and Credit Default Swaps, or Collateralized Mortgage Obligations besides the Masters of the Universe that were playing Texas Hold 'Em with peoples lives?  But now I have to care. And so do you.

Thankfully, the folks at TPM have been pretty good at explaining this mind-numbing - nay, mind-boggling stuff that might be otherwise hard to understand without a Harvard Business Degree.

So something new to add to this mess: the issue over Derivatives v. Insurance, and why that matters so much now. Here's a hint: it has much to do with that notoriously evil 2005 Bankruptcy bill foisted upon all the hapless suckers (meaning those who were not actually Masters of the Universe).

First read this, then read this.

TPM Must Read: Maiden Lane I, II, III

Lots of good stuff at TPM on economic craziness. We learn something unbelievable every day. This nugget from yesterday really turned my stomach. The Treasury is basically using Enron-style accounting tricks with the bailout. That scares the hell out of me.

By law, the Fed isn't allowed to buy assets -- it can only lend, as lender of last resort. That was a problem for the Bear Stearns bailout, because JP Morgan said it would only buy Bear if someone else assumed responsibility for the crap. Fed came up with this idea to start a shadow company, called a special purpose vehicle (SPVs were how Enron operated, creating "Chewco" and the like named after Chewbacca - the New York Fed called their SPV "Maiden Lane LLC" for name of the street the NY Fed is located on in southern Manhattan). The deal then was JP Morgan put $1 billion into Maiden Lane, the Fed put $29 billion in cash into it. Maiden Lane paid Bear Stearns $30 billion, which went straight back to JP Morgan as this deal happened simultaneously to JP's purchase of Bear. So Morgan got $30 billion in cash ($29 billion net) and the Fed got stuck owning the crap, but was legally only making a loan to Maiden Lane, who was the legal owner (Maiden Lane was incorporated not in NYC, but in Delaware to avoid paying taxes). By the Fed's own accounting - which is very different from a real company's accounting - Maiden Lane has lost $5 billion between its creation and today.

There's a lot more to this post.

Money madness

For some great visuals of what a trillion dollars looks like in stacks of $100 bills, there are some great illustrations at this site to help put things in perspective. For instance, this stack below is a trillion dollars. The area in red indicates $50 billion, the amount that Bernie Madoff is accused of ripping off his clients for. (The speck of red to the left indicates an average sized person).

Conyers response to Lessig

Yesterday, I received in my inbox a note from Lawrence Lessig about a proposal that John Conyers is trying to push through, one that will forbid scientists receiving government funds to openly publish their findings online, but rather force them to have to pay thousands of their own non-government dollars to publish in peer-review journals. Lessig also posted this article on HuffPo on the very same matter.

Conyers responded to Lessig at HuffPo as well, but I fail to see how I can side with Conyers on this one. I am all for peer review of science research findings, because peer review helps keep science honest. But publications and journals are not - and definitely should not - be the only means of peer review. There are innumerable instances of non-published peer review of research and findings, most of which may not have ever been possible if the scientists were forced to wait for review by the publications. Furthermore, the resource pool of the publications is large, but it cannot compare to the broader access in academia and the professional world.

My earlier post referenced an article by a science journalist with Discover magazine, and his points remain unaddressed by Conyers's rebuttal. But Conyers is right in that this is worthy of debate, but until Lessig called him out, there is no evidence that a debate was even going to happen.

 

Dark days for justice in America

If you thought Bush leaving office was a sign that things were turning around in America,you were wrong.

The Beltway media establishment is still pro-Republican, despite how ridiculous, petty, and few they've become. Democratic officials are outnumbered on television appearances 4 to 1, and even the center-left shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann and the Rachel Maddow Show spend a good lot of their time re-hashing GOP appearances and footage from the hard-right shows, and the puppet-heads.

Al Franken is no closer to being certified the winner of the Minnesota senate race.

Bernie "$50B Ponzi Scheme" Madoff may be getting a plea deal.



As for the presumed Enlightened state of California, things are looking dark here too with one lone Republiscum able to singlehandedly block the passage of the state budget.

Adding to that, it now appears likely that the California Supreme Court will uphold Prop 8, which will set precedent for anyone in the future with enough money to use the Ballot Initiative process to strip any minority group of whatever rights they choose.

It gets worse. Former Democratic Governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, who was convicted by a Republican-dominated court (indeed by a judge who is friends with Karl Rove) on trumped up charges brought by the AL state attorney who is married to a friend of Karl Rove, has lost his appeal on all but two charges to another court dominated by Republican judges.

But if you are getting your hopes up over the deal that Obama fenagled with Bush over getting Rove and Harriet Miers to testify about politicizing the Department of Justice, don't get too excited. Their testimony will not be under oath, but only under penalty of perjury, and behind closed doors. Remember all those cases that were successful when the witnesses didn't have to testify under oath? No? Didn't think so.

It looks like Rove has succeeded in his takedown of Siegelman, and he's going to walk away from this current hearing as well, thanks to the limp-wristed approach by the Obama administration. You know, that "Look forward, not back" approach to everything. The real problem with that approach is that by ignoring past misdeeds, Obama is tacitly guaranteeing that those same misdeeds WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. Where's the change in that?

To be fair, Obama has only been in office for a very short time, and he has a lot on his plate. Sure, Obama is doing some good things, like overturning Bush's ban on stem-cell research, and making health care reform a major issue. And while he's also done some other good, like releasing a batch of those horrible legal memos drafted by Bush's Office of Legal Council, he has done so on the heels of upholding one of the most egregious of Bush's power grabs, the wanton abuse of the State Secrets privilege, despite his campaign pledge that he would reverse it. Given the pattern of behavior that seems to be emerging here, I hold out little hope that we will see any real justice with regards to the crimes of the Bush administration, and if we do, it won't be because of Obama's help, but perhaps in spite of it.

That said, I'm still giving Obama the benefit of doubt, and I will very gladly admit my errors of judgment if I am wrong. I hope I am.

Animal Farm Friday: Off-color in Louisiana

For his lineage, the Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) is certainly seems off-color, being one of the brownest white men you will ever meet. Also from the Gulf state, we find another creature off-color for its kind. This being the albino bottle-nose dolphin recently discovered. But just because it's albino doesn't mean it's white. This one happens to be pink.

Is Conyers bought and paid for?

For all the (sort of) good he's been doing pursuing egregious and corrupt acts by the Bushies, he's got a few of his own that are down right disgusting. This is one of the newest that's been picking up lots of buzz on the Internets:

John Conyers (D-MI) [...] is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them.

Why would Conyers do this? Interestingly, if you look at the bill sponsors, you find that they received twice as much money on average in donations from journal publishers than Congresscritters who don’t sponsor the bill — though to be fair, the total amount is not large. Still, Conyers got 4 times as much.

Interesting.

Ironically, this bill is called The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which is much like the Clean Air Clear Skies Act or the Patriot Act, in that it does exactly the opposite of what its name says. This bill is not fair, it puts a burden on scientists and keeps research from being publicly accessible as it should be. I myself rely on things like Astro-ph to do my reporting here; it could become illegal to post papers there for federally-sponsored scientists if this bill is passed.

The brother is going to have to knock off this kind of crap before some of us science-loving populists decide he needs to be brought up on corruption charges of his own.

And so it begins...

Mark this as the beginning of the end for humans and the rise of the machines?

Holy Bile: The destructiveness of the Roman Catholic church

Starting a new category to complement Raisin of Reason. I'm calling it Holy Bible (since the header can't support the strikeout tag, it will read as Holy Bile, which is what I'm going for anyway, sans the geek factor).

Today's first entry goes this story of a Roman Catholic archbishop in Brazil for excommunicating a 9-year-old girl's mother and her doctors for aborting the twins she was carrying as a result of being raped by her stepfather.

In the long run, being kicked out of the Catholic church could be better for the family. This is their opportunity to hopefully learn just how destructive and evil the Roman Catholic church really is. Not to mention that giving birth would probably have killed the little girl. And would the church accept responsibility for that, the same way they've accepted responsibility for ruining the lives of so many children raped and molested by Roman Catholic clergy? It appears that the church is against aborting fetuses, but they are all for destroying the lives of children.

What makes a Conservative

Sounds like every Conservative schmuck I've ever met!

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
  
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  
• Uncertainty avoidance
  
• Need for cognitive closure
  
• Terror management

Just asking...

If it's legal to marry your first cousin in California (and Florida, and Arizona, and 32 other states, why aren't same-sex marriages allowed?

The mother of all mashups!

Wicked awesome!

Raisin of Reason: Religious people don't use their brains

The proof is in the science: Religious people do not think.

In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.

Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made.

At the rally before the California Supreme Court this morning, I heard a religious asshole with a bullhorn this shouting at someone from his own side saying:

"People need to stop thinking for themselves, and start reading the Bible instead.

If [you] have an opinion different from someone else's [sic], you should keep your mouth shut." (Oblivious to the irony that he was shouting this through a bullhorn.)

Self-evident, too.

Raisin of Reason: Some smarts from Susie Smartypants

(h/t Pharygula)

Something from TNR that isn't garbage

From Jonathan Chait no less. I applaud Mr. Chait for calling out an incredibly stupid reporter and her stupid report with some stupid rich people for being, well, stupid.

I've seen a lot of dumb news reports in my life, but I'm not sure anything can quite match this one from ABC News. The premise of the report is this: Barack Obama plans to raise taxes on people who make more than $250,000, so the reporter has gone and found people who earn a little more than that sum who plan to decrease their income so that they come in underneath the magic line.

Now, the obvious objection here is that the tax code doesn't work that way. A tax increase affects the marginal dollar that a person gains. That's means only every dollar over $250,000 is taxed at a higher rate. Obama is not proposing a tax system whereby somebody who goes from $249,999 to $250,000 suddenly becomes poorer. Nobody has ever enacted a tax hike like that in the history of the United States.

That doesn't stop ABC News' intrepid reporter. This story has to be read to be believed:

Generally, I am disinclined to link to anything from TNR, but this is worth it. So go read the rest of the post.

That's what I've been saying

But I'm not an investment guru like Jim Rogers:

"Suppose AIG goes bankrupt, it is better that AIG goes bankrupt and we have a horrible two or three years than that the whole US goes bankrupt," Rogers said. "AIG has trillions of dollars of obligations, let them fail, let the courts sort it out and start over. Otherwise we'll never start over."

...

"The idea that you have too much debt, too much borrowing and too much consumption and you're going to solve that problem with more debt, more consumption and more borrowing? These people are nuts."

...

"Power is shifting now from the money shifters, the guys who trade paper and money, to people who produce real goods. What you should do is become a farmer, or start a farming network," Rogers said.

Just say when

I've been working on an essay on the Fallacy of Conservatism for a while now, and just when I think I've got the premise dialed in, some Republiscum goes and blows it for me. While I've been drafting this essay, I keep getting short-stopped when I hit on something I find too cartoon-ish or just generally unbelievable about modern Conservatives and Republicans. And then I wake up and read in the news or blogs of somet new and astoundingly stupid thing some Conservative or Republiscum has said/opined/been convicted or indicted of, and I have to go back to the outline and start the draft over.

When Conservatives/Republiscums had their fingers on the buttons and their hands on the purse strings, they were worth taking seriously, even knowing all along the pathetic and un-funny collective joke that they have always been. But even I am amazed at just how amazingly ridiculous and bufoonish they are now that they pose no serious political threat (short of the militant uprising they are trying to foment).

I think I'll just sit back and see how much rope these 'tards will keep pulling out, and how many will hang themselves in the process.

Treason, Sedition, or Just Plain Stupidity?

Just a quick note on this "rebellion" garbage popping onto the radar screen from the Republiscums is something I think should be taken seriously. As angry and hateful as I have been to the Bushies/Neo-Cons/ex-Nixonians/Conservatives/Republiscums, I've always kept my anger in check. I may have forgotten my civil tongue in the presence of close company, but I've never publicly advocated revolution, secession, or insurrection, i.e., in a setting that could never have been perceived as anything more than an expression of frustration. But when idiots and assholes openly and publicly advocate for armed takeover and/or violent transfer of power, they have crossed the Rubicon, and should be immediately condemned as enemies of the state, and dealt with accordingly.

To be clear, I am not against people expressing their grievances against their government. I've done quite a lot of that over the past eight years. I also believe that a time may arise when political actors need to be removed from office by force. But those times are - and must be - extremely rare. Only when the majority - or some number coming close to that - is being oppressed by a minority, or when the elected leaders are willfully and deliberately violating the Constitution, should force be considered an option. But, force is only an option when all other civil options have been completely exhausted. Then, and only then, should civil - or non-civil - disobedience be considered an option. But that said, any type of non-civil opposition should expect - and certainly deserves - fierce opposition from the sitting polity.

My main opinion here is that any and every American citizen advocating or publicly discussing armed and violent overthrow of an elected official or body of government should expect to be considered enemies of the state and treated as such. If and when they are found guilty of same, they should also not be surprised if they find themselves guilty of treason, and dealt with accordingly. Some asshole said on Hannity's forum, "it's only treason if your side loses" (or something to that effect). While this may be true, I wonder how many of these Republiscum blowhard assholes are brave enough to ante up. I'm sure they'd make fine bullet-stoppers.

I say put up or shut up, or suffer the consequences for either , because we are - if nothing else - a nation of laws, not men.

Raisin of Reason: Atheist Toast

yep there's No hidden picture of Jesus or the Virgin-Mary - it's just toast.
For as we used to say as students "Toast is the Truth" - Mrs B (aka Chi)

Hypocrites

Why does THIS not surprise me?

Animal Farm Friday: Dedication to the Fat Cats

Nothing like a breath of fresh coal air!

Every penny of 2% Would be a great start

Some money-grubbing coward at the Wall Sleaze Journal - a staff writer or editor too gutless to take responsibility for this piece of garbage op-ed claims that Obama's plan to increase taxes on the top 2% in order to bring some fairness back to the tax system and put more money back into the Treasury won't work, even if we take every dime.

I say that it probably won't work either, only because nothing really will given the size of the problem, but taking every goddamn dime from the top 2% would certainly be a great start, if for nothing more than the entertainment value of watching the Masters of the Universe cannibalize themselves.

The anonymous writer claims that because taxing the top 2% won't be enough, Obama will have to start taxing the middle class too. This is a classic and thoroughly debunked BS defense that the rich like to throw out as chaff to deflect unwanted attention, and it won't work this time. What little credibilty the WSJ had over the past many years has completed evaporated in this current economic climate. They gotten it wrong on every note, every time, just as they are getting it wrong with this op-ed (with the one exception being this).

Taxing the top 2% will not be enough, that is true. But it would be a hell of a start.

Sauce Wednesday

The Catholics have their Ash Wednesday today, so in honor of Flying
Spaghetti Monster, I will enjoy spaghetti and meatballs that my lovely
wife is making for dinner. I hope she doesn't mind if I rub a little
sauce on my forehead.

Twitter explained

Great moments in presidential speeches

Smudge

Excellent ad from the Reality Coalition.

Political Rogues

Political - Rogues
Originally uploaded by DiscoWeaselWaaaaa-waaa-waa-waa-waaaa.

Raisin of Reason: The Great Buzzword

This post isn't against religion, so much as it's against junk science and pseudo-science, which I find a greater threat. Because when people believe and find so-called "scientific evidence" to support daffy and ridiculous claims, this undermines the credibility of the scientific method.

Take this witty post slamming the ridiculous idea of "The Great Filter" (Or, Why We've Never Discovered Signs of Alien Life) for example:

The very existence of life makes finding a four-leafed clover with winning lottery tickets for leaves look like a sure thing.  Add the staggering improbability of our evolution from single cells and you end up with odds so vast they've driven the invention of everything from the Drake equation to an invisible sky-beard who seems unnecessarily preoccupied with what we do one day out of every seven.  People who study this subject file all that under "Shit we already knew", and were too busy actually working on the science to come up with a garbage buzzword phrase that would look really awesome in bold type on the cover of a hardback book (available now for $29.99!)  Luckily Robin Hanson was ready to do that for them.

I love sarcastic scientists! (The whole post is a short entertaining read.)

WTF Obama?: Lost Emails

Time to start a new category of posts to keep track of all the back-pedaling and reversals from Obama's campaign promises, since there seems to be a new one each day.

The latest one flies smack in the face of his claims for more transparency.

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush,
is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be
millions of missing White House e-mails in a stunning reversal of
Obama's rhetoric about Bush secrecy on the campaign trail.

I'll be going back to capture and post on the other flip-flops that I've been letting slide, because I think I see a pattern developing.

Benevolent tyrant, indeed.

WSJ finally gets one right: W worst ever at jobs

Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record

President George W. Bush entered
office in 2001 just as a recession was starting, and is preparing to
leave in the middle of a long one. That’s almost 22 months of recession
during his 96 months in office.

His job-creation record won’t look much better. The Bush
administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight
years, a fraction of the 23 million jobs created under President Bill Clinton’s administration and only slightly better than President George H.W. Bush did in his four years in office.