Alien Naked

Wonder if Fox "news" will report this. Under Obama, illegal aliens were deported this year at the highest rate in history.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than 1,000 murderers, 6,000 sex offenders, 45,000 drug offenders and 28,000 drunk drivers.

The Department of Homeland Security used biometric information and services to identify criminal aliens in state prisons and local jails across 660 jurisdictions, including all those along the Southwest border.

About 197,000 noncriminal aliens were also removed due to increased audits of more than 2,200 employers suspected of hiring illegal labor. Officials said 180 owners, employers or managers had been criminally charged with $50 million in fines imposed.

The problem is, facts like this don't fit with the RWS™ meme of Obama as America-hating alien-enabler.

On a sort-of unrelated note, there's this tidbit: We have a new teabagger candidate for president. The Naked Cowboy. Seems perfectly attune, since he's neither naked nor a cowboy. Quoth he, in a perfectly Foxobeckian rant of factlessness:

"America is rapidly transforming into a government-run enterprise," the over-exposed tourist attraction said, adding that "American politicians are selling out America and its most cherished institution, that being capitalism."

Well, he's at least as qualified as Christine O'Donnell or Sarah Palin, with a similar command of policy (and it's a safe assumption he won't spend $150K of R money on clothes). His claim of anti-capitalism is as ubiquitous among the uninformed as oil-stained rocks in Prudhoe Bay. With the auto industry rising from the dead, banks flourishing and only wimpishly regulated, insurance companies harvesting cash like Afghan poppies, tax cuts and loans for small business just enacted over R objections (!), some one in the press ought to point out the guy is an idiot.

But that would be like, oh, I don't know....

Make 'Em Laugh

Sarah Palin, to the great guffaws and hoots of the misled, likes to ask, referring to Obama supporters, "How's that hope-y change-y stuff working out for ya?" Funny material. A peak experience for teabaggers, that. Those stupid liberals, wanting to believe things might change.

Amazing. The prospect that in our corrupted and hyper-partisan political system change is impossible brings great joy to these people. In a spasm of retrograde ejaculation, the Palinized populace express their hilarity over the idea that, even when a president is elected with overwhelming approval, and when Congress has close to the largest Democratic majorities ever, a group of negative, consensus-hating, unserious, hate-bating Republicans and their deluded supporters can see to it that nothing changes. Mired, stagnated, bound down by superficial thinking and deliberate disinformation, our country is shown incapable of change, even in the face of the most disastrous -- maybe unprecedented -- combination of existentially threatening problems in need of responsible and consensual solutions -- and Sarah Palin and her like-mindless pack think it's hilarious.

To these proudly stupid, deliberately fact-free, professers of love of country, this failure, brought about by them, is good for a bunch of yuks. High fives for low lifes.

Might they stop for a micromoment, take a brief pause from their destructive know-nothingness, and consider what it really is they're saying, laughing about, taking pleasure in? That a majority of voters, for a moment, against all odds and with history lined up against them like waves of Redcoats, believed things might change for the better in our politics. That people actually suspended cynicism long enough to vote for change in the poisonous politics that has grown from more than disturbing, during the Clinton impeachment era, to the level of threatening impending failure of our republic in the last ten years. That it was believed possible we might still be able to form a functioning government based on a sense of mutual need, lubricated by willingness to rise above purely political obstructionism, for the common good. Funny, huh? It's a regular thigh-slapping riot.

The real joke is that none of those hopefuls anticipated the over-arching cynicism of the minority party, the power of right-wing news media willing to lie openly (the same media that created Sarah Palin out of the wastelands of Wasilla, to advance their selfish agenda). Few, if any -- certainly not me -- imagined that in such dire times, with two wars, a failing economy, years of ignoring sensible energy policy, health care on a path to collapse, the entire right wing would unite to maintain their failed status quo; that their profoundly self-interested and deeply unpatriotic propaganda would succeed in convincing so many that attempts to save the country -- imperfect as they might be -- were, quite literally, treasonous. I'm hardly a Pollyanna, but I simply couldn't imagine our country was so stupid, so easily duped, its hates and prejudices so easily preyed upon. So goddam selfish. So fucking selfish.

Great. Take it back, teabaggers. Turns out, it was yours all the time. Yours, and the guys who led the country over the cliff in the first place. Good job. Grab your jumping clothes, follow Sarah and Glenn and Christine and Sharon and Michelle and John and Mitch and Rush and Rand and Joe and Bill and Bill and Andrew and Dick and Dick and Dick and Ann and Michael and Laura, and have yourselves another laugh on the way down.

I wonder if Sarah and enough teabaggers will be alive in, oh, thirty years let's say, to answer this one: So how'd that hate-y lie-y stupid-y stuff work out for all of us?

Philosophy

Being separated by a thousand miles, my brother and I don't see each other much except, as in the present case, when we gather at my mom's bedside for the latest crisis. (This one seems to be passing, allowing her to return to the ever-ravenous dementia which has eaten most of her past, present, and long-since, her future.)

He was always, and remains, a social liberal. He supported Obama (I'm pretty sure) after his significant financial contributions to Hillary failed to get her there. Now, he's disappointed and has become quite conservative fiscally. While my brother agrees with me that many in the tea party (I'd say most, if not all; he might not) are nutjobs or deeply misled, he believes the movement is not about the crazy stuff, but about philosophy: what is the role of government?

My problem is that it's not really framed that way; or, at least, that in order to get the teabaggers on board with the "philosophy," the powers behind it have to lie and distort. And, more significantly, philosophically, to hide the ball. Not to mention encouraging the coalescing around them of the theocracy-wanting brand of evolution-denying christianists, and the usually suspect fringe hate groups of the right. So, philosophy or not, it's a con-job.

But the question is a fair one, and has been at the heart of our politics forever. What is the role of government? How much will that role cost? How much can we or will we pay for it? Very, very few -- I'd say none -- of the people behind the curtain want to say. The cuts required to maintain -- or, as some would have it, further lower -- the Bush tax cuts and to balance the budget would be truly draconian. It would mean government as military bases, maybe a couple of courtrooms.

My brother seemed to be predicting an end to public education; or, from a practical standpoint, he'd more likely to say, claiming that it's just no longer economically viable. To the question of what happens to those who can't afford private education, I gathered he was saying they'd rely on charitable contributions, and, maybe, the remains of a broken public system. It's certainly true that we're failing our kids with public education in many areas, but it has in part to do with the tax cuts that have already occurred, and there's no way to see improvement in the tax-intransigent world. (The failings have been evolving long before the current economic crash. Prop 13 was a long time ago.) He didn't have much of an answer to what happens to the inner city kids if there isn't enough charity to go around.

Nor do teabaggers.

So let's have that discussion, out in the open. Let's replace the Nazi placards and Foxobeckian simplicities and conspiracies with the real thing. What tax rates do we want, can afford? What government will remain, what will be the consequences? Do we cut loose those in need? What will be the effect on society if we do? Does it matter or not, philosophically, and selfishly? Is it dog-eat-mano and let the cow chips fall in the woods; or does society in general, and individuals in particular, benefit from helping others? Should I care if there are more people living on the streets, fewer well-educated people coming up, people without access to health care until they're dying? If we consign one stratum of society to inferior schools, will it matter? Will we fail to educate the girl who'd have cured cancer, or shall we assume there'll always be another? Is destiny determined by birth?

If so, so much for "the American dream."

Maybe it'd be easier the other way around: to ask what we think government ought to do, and then figure out what it costs, and what tax rates would do it. I wish Barack Obama would give a speech saying exactly his vision of those things, and demand Rs do the same. Let the voters see the real numbers, the real implications, and choose. Implicit in the action of congressional Ds is the conclusion that there are certain things which are bottom-line necessary to a functioning society, and we must do them. Then figure out how to pay for them, like you have to do when you need a new roof. (And, yes, I know paying for it hasn't been high on the list in many past instances, except under Clinton. But the ACA is -- theoretically -- paid for, and Bush's Medicare grade D wasn't. There's tax and spend, and there's don't tax and still spend. How do we get back to sanity when the insane are calling the shots?)

Implicit in teabaggerism, it seems to me, is the illusion that the roof we have will last forever; or that when we need money, cut taxes, and it will magically appear; or God will provide; or if some people out there do need a new roof, it's up to them to pay for it. (If you can't pay, get buckets at the flea market. Just don't come around my place looking for shelter.) What I don't get is that the people they want to return to power have never done the paying part, either; nor have they ever put up realistic numbers; nor have things ever worked out as they predicted. Economies get worse when those guys are in power, and better under the ones they want to kick out.

My brother asks fair questions, necessary questions. But, far as I can see, they're not in any way addressed by teabaggers or their titular leaders like Silly Sarah and eGregious Glenn. The guys in the shadows have, Grover Norquist, the corporate billionaires: they've said, simply, we don't care.

And the RWS™ have said we're not gonna ask, we don't want to know. So shut up.

And the Republican congressional leaders have just said you bring the smoke, we've got the mirrors.

It's A Natural Fact

An ant mill tea party rally is a phenomenon where a small group of army ants gullible people separated from the main foraging party reality lose the pheromone track their ability to think for themselves and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants country will eventually die of exhaustion self-inflicted wounds. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations.^[1] This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies continual propagandizing of Fox "news" and other RWS™. Each ant teabagger follows the ant in front of it lead of Glenn Beck, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms actual solution is required.^[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.^[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.^[4]

[edit]

Idea Men

These are the guys -- and their ideas -- that teabaggers are rolling back into command. Mitch McConnell proposes a tax plan that will add 3.9 billion dollars to the national debt. Says WaPo:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently forecast that a similar, slightly more expensive package that includes a full repeal of the estate tax would force the nation to borrow an additional $3.9 trillion over the next decade and increase interest payments on the national debt by $950 billion. That's more than four times the projected deficit impact of President Obama's health-care overhaul and stimulus package combined.

What signs, I wonder, will the teabaggers stick on their kids when this plan is in effect, and this philosophy becomes the guiding principle of our nation? And, unless these baggers are richer than they appear, they'll be falling even further behind when it happens. But they don't care.

And John Boner's main focus as Speaker, it appears, will be to make sure health care reform never happens, even if it means shutting down the government. Which part bothers him the most, I wonder. Coverage for preëxisting conditions? Helping twenty million or so Americans? Effectiveness research? EMR? Or maybe, given the relish with which he passed Bush's unfunded Rx coverage, it's the fact that it pays for itself and reduces the national debt. (Okay, even I don't believe those numbers: but it's a hell of a long way forward from the reckless way in which Rs did their irresponsible budget-buster.)

Teabaggers proclaim their revulsion at the national debt. They worry for their poor little kids, as they pram signs down their throats. Why, in the name of whatever god they think is guiding them, would they vote for these disingenuous pushers of past failures? The Bush tax cuts, the holy water for brewing tea, didn't work. THEY DIDN'T WORK!!! On what basis can they possibly argue that the things over which they are so steeped in tea water will get better when the doers of disaster are back in charge?

Seriously. On what basis?

Maybe it's that they like this vision, from The Tax Policy Center:

...Thus, to balance the budget McConnell would have to slash the rest of the federal government in half. If you are tea partier, that probably sounds pretty good. But let’s look at what that would mean.

The biggest remaining program is, of course, Social Security. It happens that projected Social Security spending in 2020 is almost exactly equal to the $1.2 trillion McConnell would need to balance his budget. But the vast bulk of that money would go to those who are already 60 or older and there are no serious proposals to make substantial reductions in benefits for those retired or close to it. The one change that might—slowing annual cost of living benefit increases —would reduce total payments by only about 4 percent by 2040. So there isn’t going to be much dough there, especially as soon as 2020.

What’s left? Well, McConnell would have to abolish all the rest of government to get to balance by 2020. Everything. No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more NIH. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress. No more nothin’.

We’re not talking about a temporary 1995-like government shut-down here. We are talking about a government that exists only to fund national defense, provide benefits to the already- or soon-to-be retired, and pay interest to the Chinese and our other lenders.

[...]

As my Tax Policy Center colleagues Rosanne Altshuler, Katie Lim, and Bob Williams have written, balancing the budget by raising taxes on high-income people alone is unrealistic. But as my little exercise shows, it is equally absurd to try to do it by only cutting spending, especially when you try to work within McConnell’s self-imposed constraints.

McConnell himself won’t say how he’d pay for these ongoing tax cuts. He does back a freeze in domestic discretionary spending—an idea that would leave him about 93 percent short of his balanced budget goal. As to the rest, he says he’ll await Obama’s deficit reduction commission that will report, conveniently enough, after the election.

Seriously Unserious

The teabagger-endorsed candidate in my congressional district has a real chance of winning, against a pretty mainstream and fairly thoughtful Democrat. In his latest ad, he says he wants to lower taxes and balance the budget. Cool. With a deficit of over a trillion, which would go up with further tax cuts, that's a lot of spending reduction. How would he do it? Doesn't say. Won't say. Can't say.

And so it is with all the darjeeling darlings. To a person, it's tax cuts and balanced budgets (more often than not with anti-gay, anti-Muslim, birther and hyper-religious seasoning tossed in for the hungry), while refusing to answer questions of how or where. This is not serious policy. In a plane of existence in which voters were something other than just mad, where they demanded answers not just anger, none of these Earls of Grey could have won nominations. They'd be laughed off the stage, told to come back when they have a clue. But that would be very, very elsewhere. France, maybe? A dimension far, far away.

Put more colorfully than I might have, but otherwise entirely congruent with my view of the entire"movement," (in the sense of, well, you know..) this says it well:

O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature from the Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid. ...

Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and "U.S. Senator" seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job.

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing it from the real-world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.

She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that's the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O'Donnell's campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation, with as little to do with the deadly problems this country faces as some guy wanking in the balcony of a grindhouse has to do with Romeo and Juliet.

We're in the age of politics as aggrievement and accusation, of substituting pouts and provocations for policy. In times that demand seriousness from all parties, one has abandoned it entirely, to the delight of -- at the behest of -- its supporters. (Nor do I have a heck of a lot to say for the weak-kneed congressional dems, afraid, evidently, to do the most obvious -- and, ironically, poll-supported -- of tax hikes. Stupid meets pathetic. Equals screwed.)

When Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the dominant influences of an entire movement and what's left of a once-serious national party, we're in indescribable trouble. For what they are is vapid and vaporous. They're playing at it for their own jollies, the adulation, the money. They're traveling salesmen, except they have no product. Name a serious proposal either has put forward, policy-based, workable, thoughtful. When has either come up with anything other than rhetoric, appealing to fear, the paranoid? (Turning it over to God doesn't count. He's not a registered voter.) When, for that matter, has any of them submitted to legitimate questioning at all? Simple Sarah recently said it plainly enough, for those who still think Fox is fair (but we know about teabaggers and fact, don't we?): just "speak through Fox "news.""

I don't have a problem that my country produces such people: what kills me (figuratively only, so far) is the degree to which everyone else has taken their bullshit as something meaningful. (And, of course, the degree to which our media, failing, lazy, negligent, keep it frontal and central.) It's nothing but noise. It's fantasy. It's nasty and crazy. It's not helpful. It has nothing to do with lawmaking and problem-solving.

Mad? All right. Don't like health care for more Americans, don't like rescuing the auto industry? Fine. Suggest something else. Don't want to pay taxes? Me, neither (except that I sort of like roads, cops, the occasional aircraft carrier driving by my house, and the FDA.) So come up with an alternative. Tell me what you'll cut, and what you think the consequences will be. Present me with numbers that add up to zero deficit, and show your work.

Naw, forget it. Turns out you don't need to. Say the magic words, and the teabaggers will call you a hero, carry signs for you, and follow you off the cliff. For, to them, it's about pitching forks, not pitching in. To them, it's enough to be angry, to carry signs. To have ideas that fit on signs. That their chosen leaders provide no solutions isn't a failing.

It's a feature.

We're Going Down

Selective? Probably. But it seems every tea party rally, every group assembled to laud their lions, Glenn and Sarah most particularly, is rife with such people. Convinced that we're going to hell in a hand basket, swallowing whole the delusional claims of their leaders, but entirely unable to articulate anything specific other than aggrievement. Surely they can come up with something specific. I know I can.

That such a big chunk of citizens can have been riled up by people with big egos and bigger wallets, without so much as a thought that they've been played, manipulated, is beyond understanding. They're so sure they're right, but they can't point to a single thing. What explains it?

I just watched a remarkable show on HBO, "My Trip To al-Queda." I highly recommend it for everyone, no matter your political leanings. It's mostly the one man show of Lawrence Wright, who wrote "The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road To 9/11." It's both a personal reflection on his reporting, in which he got to know several pretty questionable guys, and a very revealing history of the roots of al Queda and its main leaders. He's no sympathizer, as the end of the show makes clear. But he does show, convincingly, how our response to 9/11 fulfilled exactly the narrative bin Laden hoped for.

It was his focus on the idea of humiliation -- from the point of view of many Arab Muslims -- that is relevant to the above clip of folks at the Glenngasm. Humiliation, he said, is a great excuse for hate. He compared the showing of the same clip of a couple of GIs taking an Iraqi family out of its house, as seen on CNN and al Jazeera. You don't have to be a bleeding heart or Deanna Troi to see how it would be seen in the Muslim world.

How humiliating it must be to those teabaggers that people they despise, liberals, a black family in the White House, took the upper hand. They want their country back in the same way al Queda wants to reëstablish the caliphate. Read these signs, decide if the people carrying them could be described as thoughtful, or manipulated. The words of a couple of paranoid lunatics have convinced them.* Given the credulity and shallowness (to put the best face on it) we see in Sam's clip, it's clear nothing will convince them otherwise.

A lot of that is going around.

____________________________

*Of the four leaders in question (Beck, Palin, OBL, and al-Zawahiri), I think only Beck is literally crazy (assuming he actually believes his white-board demonstrations), and only Palin is demonstrably stupid. OBL and a-Z seem neither of those (although that level of religious zealotry, like Beck's delusions, can certainly be associated with schizophrenia), but are clearly more overtly and inarguably evil and single-mindedly committed to literal destruction. But I'm not sure who actually has the ability to do more lasting harm to our country. 9/11 took many innocent lives and cost a lot of money, shook our sense of security, but of itself it had no ability to destroy us. The next attack, the same. The destruction of a society like ours has to come from within, from us. From Glenn, Sarah, and their ilkiness among the RWS™, the destruction is harder to see (to some), but is more fundamental and pervasive, and, ultimately, more deadly to us all.

Many, of course, see Obama as a destroyer. But he's doing only what he promised to do when elected (or, in some sad cases, less). Whatever you think of stimulus money, health care, money for vets and roads, Wall Street reform, it's all been done as a result of elections. What the Glennsarahscreamer crowd are about is nullifying elections and perverting the electoral system by replacing informed voters with propagandized ones, using lies, hate, and intolerance instead of planes. Much more powerful, I'd say. Find the HBO documentary and watch it. The parallels are remarkable, despite the fact that it was clearly not the point of the film.