Brew Ha Ha

So there's a big snit happening over the "leak," published in the NYT, that President Obama personally presides over the "kill list" for drone strikes, and that he approved last year's cyberattack on Iran. John McCain and his BFF Lindsey ("Butters") Graham and the rest of the RWS™ see it as a shocking and deliberate attempt, coming from the White House itself, to bolster Obama's anti-terror credentials. And I see the winger response as a deliberate attempt to distract people from recognizing that their current president's "war on terror" has been immeasurably more effective and astronomically less costly than that of his predecessor. (Unlike many on the left, these red-faced guys are perfectly happy with the idea of the attacks themselves, just not the idea of Obama getting credit, which is really at the heart of their faux outrage.)

In fact, I'd disagree with the idea of a deliberate "leak" only insofar as I think Mr Obama should have stood at his potusium and said it all outright. Why not? It neither changed anything about what has been and is going on, nor released any national security information (McCain's AOM* outrage and claims notwithstanding) to enemies that's not already obvious. He should take credit where it's due; as well as the negative reaction from his left.

So I just find it amusing, and can only hope there's more to come: as Rs continue to paint Obama as someone he's obviously not, once in a while he reminds everyone about that thing Rs so desperately hope to keep hidden: reality.

And the more that bitter sad remnant of his former self John McCain shakes his thin-skinned and wizened fist at it, the more people sit up and take notice.

_________________________

*(AOM)

He Just Can't Help It

Another lie from Rominee:

Under Obama, the GOP candidate says, government will "control half the economy." Economic experts rate this scare tactic somewhere between "ridiculous" and "stupid."

The article quotes several economists, among them my new go-to guy:

Bruce Bartlett, who served as a senior economist in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, was more blunt in his appraisal of Romney's assertion that Obamacare will lead to government control of half of the economy: "This analysis is so stupid it is hard to know where to begin." He notes:

Health spending has been rising for years for reasons unconnected to Obamacare. Why assume that all of any projected increase between now and 2020 results solely from that? Tossing in all private health spending as essentially part of government spending is fundamentally dishonest. Its only purpose appears to be to find some desperate way of lifting total spending above the 50 percent threshold. If you are going to do that, why not include every other sector of the economy subject to government control?

And, in case you think he'd take such factual criticism to heart, you'd be wrong. He's taken it to the next level.

Big lies, small lies. Red lies, green lies. Lies by distortion, lies by omission, lies, it seems, just for the sake of lying. Lies because he can, lies because he does. Lies because the truth won't get him elected.

People have referred to Romney's "pot calling the kettle black" strategy. It's apt. But I think a better term is the "Romney breaks into your home, kills your kids, and then says watch out Obama wants to break into your home and kill your kids" strategy. Or, for simplicity, just call it the cookie strategy.

And, having written the above a while back, the lies just keep a'coming. And this may be the most illustrative of them all:

Mitt Romney, on the campaign trail, bashes Obama for not having a jobs plan:

“[W]ith America in crisis, with 23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work, he hasn’t put forth a plan to get us working again,” Romney said Tuesday. “Now I know we’re getting close to an election so he’ll come out with one soon, but three and a half years later, we’re waiting.”

Of course, as Jed Lewison notes, Obama proposed the American Jobs Act, much of which Republicans blocked, and continues to demand that Congress pass various components of it, such as investing in the nation’s infrastruture and sending federal aid to the states to staunch government job loss.

Jed is right to point out the absurdity of this, but it gets worse. In the very same appearance, Romney went on to slam Obama for blaming Congress for our economic woes:

“[h]e blames Congress, he goes after Congress, but we remember the president’s own party had a super majority in both houses for his first two years, so you can hardly blame Congress for the faults that he’s put in place himself, and so he’s casting about looking for someone to blame and just hasn’t been able to find anybody — whether it’s the ATM machines or the tsunami or Europe.”

And what is Obama blaming Congress for, exactly? Why, for not passing ... his jobs plan, which Romney says Obama lacks. So Obama is at fault for not having a jobs plan, and is simultaneously at fault for urging Congress to pass his jobs plan, which proves he’s passing the buck.

He's just got another one going, too. And another. I could go on.

Lies like that -- easily disproved, made up out of whole cloth (whatever that means) -- assume the stupidity of the intended audience, and so far that audience has done nothing to discourage it. There's no sign they ever will.

How has it come to this: a deliberate, continual, and transparent liar very possibly about to become our next president, at the hands of a carefully created electorate so befuddled, so simplistic, so pitifully naive (or is it hate-filled?) that they accept -- no, they demand -- those lies like manna from Moroni. Seriously: it's really, really discouraging.

Problem Solved

[Oops. In case there's an error message with the video, here's the link to it on Hulu.]

A few years back, when I was chairman of the local Surgical Quality Assurance Committee, we got dinged on a visit by JCAHO (the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations, pronounced "jaycoe" for reasons unknown.) Our monitoring process was flawed, they told us, because we weren't uncovering unnecessary surgery. When I suggested maybe it was because, in our community, we weren't doing unnecessary operations, the response was "C'mon!!" (Pronounced cuh-maa-hnnn, with the maa scaling downward, and with facial expression to match.)

So I did what any responsible surgeon would do: I sent around a memo (from the fictitious Surgical Utilization Committee, or SUC) to the entire medical staff, detailing the trouble we were in, asking for suggestions how we could increase our amount of unnecessary surgery, and including a few ideas of my own: declaring certain operations always unnecessary, such as left inguinal hernia; designating one surgeon a month to do unnecessary operations; arranging a specific location, such as the newly-opened surgery center as the place to do them.

Sitting in the doctors' lounge as people picked up their staff mail the next morning after I'd gotten there early and deployed the paper, I noticed a certain stratification of responses: internists, seeing the word Surgical, shitcanned the paper without reading it; surgeons read it over and got an excellent laugh out of it; family docs read it with incredulity, saying, "This is terrible! They can't do that!!! They can't DO that!!!"

Anyhow, as I read of the above-Reported typically teabagger response by North Carolina legislators (fresh off marshaling discrimination into their constitution) to worrisome scientific data, I thought of my memo for some reason. Both are incredibly stupid responses; one a seriously deluded and dangerous (if quite emblematic of the current R party) response to an actual problem, and the other a fanciful (let's call it brilliant and hilarious, okay?) response to a non-problem. But in North Carolina, no one's laughing, and, evidently, not enough are saying "They can't do this!!" Revealing much about the teabagger mentality, they actually think they were making a global problem go away, like babies playing peek-a-boo.

Me, I didn't really think I was; but when JCAHO followed up six months later, we passed without having made any changes.

Reflection

I just read this at TPM. I print it in its entirety:

Your reader “JM” offers a counsel of despair, one that very honestly I rather expect from Democrats (especially the most liberal Democrats) during times of political adversity.

I expect Democrats to be unreflective about their own failures, utterly convinced that history is something that just happens to them, terrified of Republicans, and resentful that Republican misdeeds are not repudiated by the public without the need for any coaxing from Democrats. I expect liberal Democrats to partake fully in the great American national vices, self-admiration and self-congratulation, without sharing in the compensating American virtue of faith in the country and its institutions. I expect liberal Democrats to react to adversity in ways Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman would not recognize.

You know enough political history to recall that Roosevelt generation of Democrats hung the name of Herbert Hoover around the necks of their political opponents for a generation after 1932. Reagan-era Republicans did the same, for a shorter period of time and less dramatically, with the name of Jimmy Carter after 1980. It’s not the Republicans’ fault — or the product of any Republican “strategy” — that the President who was more unpopular for longer than any President since the invention of modern opinion polling was allowed to vanish without a trace by January 22, 2009.

George W. Bush’s invisibility, and the profoundly Bush-like Mitt Romney’s lack of any public identity as a “Bush Republican,” were the product of Democratic choices. So was the inadequate stimulus package at the beginning of 2009 that ensured a crushing recession that began under a Republican administration would not draw an effective government response under a Democratic administration. So was the disappearance from memory of the politicized, demoralized Justice Department of Alberto Gonzales, and the inept, crony-laden FEMA leadership that had let New Orleans drown.

So was the expanded, hope-centered military commitment in Afghanistan, doubling down on a bet that the Bush administration had already lost. So was the Obama administration’s surrender to the financial services industry on regulation in wake of a monumental market disaster for which that industry was largely responsible. So was the administration’s negotiating with itself on health care reform. So was the Democrats’ embrace of the rot pervading Congress as an institution: the abandonment of oversight, the casual acceptance of corruption, the inability to pass even one appropriations bill on time when Democrats had majorities in both the House and the Senate. So was President Obama’s immersion in permanent campaign culture, fully as great as Bush’s had been and aptly symbolized by the regular use of electioneering hands like David Axelrod and David Plouffe as administration spokesmen on serious, substantive issues of national policy.

Choices made by Obama and his Democratic allies were what they were. It is perhaps evident that I regard most of them as mistakes with respect to policy substance, but for our purposes here what matters is that they were political mistakes. In the simplest English I know: the United States does not make a black man President of the United States unless Americans have decided a huge change from what they had before is necessary.

The ill repute George W. Bush had earned for the Republicans was what made Barack Obama President: not his “story,” not the “hope and change” schtick, not that community organizer business, and not his army of self-consciously self-admiring campaign consultants. That’s the political asset Obama and the Democrats cast away, by choice, right from the beginning.

As you know, Josh, I’m not a Democrat. What sympathy I have for Barack Obama and the staggering burden under which he labors is due to his being President, not to any partisan feeling or particular ideological affinity. Beyond that, though, I just see a lot of Johnny Fontaine in your party: facing political adversity during a very difficult time for the country, talking about being terrified for the future, head in hands and complaining about cleverer, more powerful men who won’t give them what they want. ”I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.”

You can be a man.

Yeah, sounds a lot like me, lately. Other than the flip last lines, there's a lot to contemplate. I'm inclined to agree with the guy about much of what he said. On the other hand -- taking it personally -- I've never claimed that Obama and Ds bear no responsibility for the fact that they're in trouble; I've been pretty critical, in fact, I'd say. Whatever the reasons, though, it's not just wailing and moaning to note that Rs are being dishonest about their plans, are presenting budgets that, in addition to not coming close to their claims of balance, are certain to devastate the most basic needs of a twenty-first century country.

Feeling despair for the future based on an open-eyed view of the sort of campaigns that are being run on both sides doesn't necessarily imply failure to see the causes; nor does drawing the conclusion that a huge portion of the electorate has been made incapable of thinking beyond slogans suggest hiding one's head in the sand. To note that Rs are succeeding in creating a version of Barack Obama to run against that bears no resemblance to the real one is not a retreat into"unreflective" behavior. Quite, in fact, the opposite: it's reality-testing.

I'd also point out that, unlike today's R party, the Ds are a very disparate group, with many in Congress labeled as D being much further to the right than some of the good old days' moderate Rs. So whereas Rs speak the same handed-out talking points without batting an embarrassed eye, and vote consistently en bloc while explicitly deriding the very idea of compromise, Ds are all over the fricking place; and without their cooperation with the previous administration, nothing Bush proposed, including his tax cuts, would have passed.

By the way, I guess the writer means Johnny Fontane, not Johnny Fontaine (I had to look it up). If I knew what "being a man" meant in this context, and if, as the writer suggests, that's all it would take to make a difference, I'd guess the lines would be long to sign up, testicles in hand; or sold to those waiting, because Ds' are so small, in packets of four. Meanwhile, I give money, and I write.

And, yes, I despair.

If I thought the election were going to be about the real issues and what's really at stake, I might feel better. If voters really do want to increase defense spending and lower taxes even further on the wealthy; if they really do agree that the way to pay for that is drastically to reduce spending on education, health care, the environment, research, infrastructure and more; if they've put on their green eyeshades and looked carefully at the Ryan budget and concluded his non-existent numbers (click it, PT; it's your guy) really do add up and can specify how (or, more realistically, have explicitly concluded they don't care if they don't); if they recognize the multiple disasters Bush left to Obama, but still think the economy is Obama's fault because they either think he should have spent more on the stimulus or less, lowered taxes on the middle class even more than he did, or not at all; if they recognize the bank bailouts were Bush's baby; if they think we should still have troops dying in Iraq; if they think belligerence is the best foreign policy; heck, even if they made a conscious choice to vote for Rs because they consider marriage equality a more important issue than all of the preceding -- if all of that were the true reflection of the voters, based on careful thought and considered deliberation, well, I guess I could no longer blame the steady stream of lies and propaganda that issues nonstop from their pocketed media.

But I wouldn't find a lot of pleasure living in a country like that, even knowing it couldn't exist for much longer in the aftermath of those choices.

Not That It Will Convince Birthers...

Because haters gotta hate, and Trump gotta get his pub.

Doing A Job On Us

The above chart (which embiggins by imclickens) demonstrates the lie in The Rominee's argument about job creation, one that ought to be obvious to anyone who gives it a moment's thought. One that I've pointed out here many times, to which my libertarian readers have never provided disproof: businesses won't hire people, no matter the so-called incentives, unless there's a demand for their product. You don't create jobs by lowering taxes and getting rid of regulations: you create jobs by creating jobs! And for a government, that means investing money in needed projects. Building roads and bridges, repairing dams, giving states help hiring teachers and cops, and, yes, investing in new technologies. And then, also obvious as a dog on a roof, there'll be more people with money to buy other stuff, and businesses who make that stuff will start hiring. It's not high-order economic theory. It's accessible by anyone capable of marking a ballot.

And then, by golly, at some point you gotta pay for that government spending; which means increasing revenue. Because cutting spending alone not only won't do it without dissolving government, it has the perverse effect of increasing unemployment.

Sadly, the taking of a moment's thought is exactly what Rs want the public to avoid, which is why they constantly bombard their huddling sheep with distractions and lies (check it out!), and by creating an image of President Obama that bears no resemblance to reality, any more than their economic proposals do.

Public thought -- even a moment's worth, if it's based on reality -- is anathema to R strategists. So they keep pumping the handle of tax cuts and deregulation, loudly, hoping against hope that the noise will, once again, drown out the simple truth. And, given the power of concentrated lying against disorganized honesty, it probably will.

Mission Accomplished

Justice Stevens thinks the Supremes will revisit Citizens United:

In a speech at the University of Arkansas, retired Justice John Paul Stevens argued that events since the decision “provide a basis to expect that the Court already has had second thoughts about the breadth of the reasoning” and will likely return to its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Hey, who cares, right? I mean, they will have accomplished the goal of getting that black guy out of that white house, right? Anything beyond that was always just gravy.

Or not. I'm not sure at all that as long as the four-and-a-half activist right-wingers are on the bench they'll be interested in revisiting anything they've done. What about Wisconsin would they see as unintended or unfortunate?

[Addendum: since the turnout for the Wisconsin recall election was even greater than it was for the original Walker election, I'll concede that it must really represent what the people want, which only goes to reinforce my pessimism. Whether the huge money advantage was dispositive I suppose we'll never know. But the vote would seem to demonstrate the triumph of mythology over reality, as it seems to have been largely about unions, in a time when blaming them for economic calamity is simplistic and false. But it's an effective way to convince people to vote for the failed policies of tax cuts and deregulation. Nor, maybe most importantly, should it escape us that destroying unions eliminates the main counterbalance to the anonymous billionaires spending big for teabaggers.]

[Addendum #2: a friend points out that it's likely many who voted against recall did so because they don't think recall is to be used for policy disagreements -- especially when Walker did exactly what he said he'd do when he was running. It's a good point, an important point. I had misgivings about going that route, as opposed to waiting for the next election; and, to be consistent, it's the same argument I've made to those who are upset, right or left, with Obama: he's done exactly what he said he'd do. Pretty much, anyway. To the extent Rs didn't block it or force him to water it down.]

Shower Us With Love

I can't figure out why Jesus and Mary speak only in oil slicks, pancakes, ill-kept showers, potato chips, and the occasional slice of toast, any more than I understand why the dead communicate solely through paid psychics, as if they're getting kickbacks, and only by dropping obscure hints using numbers and letters and colors, like aphasic kindergartners. What happened to burning bushes and parting seas? And the internet would seem to be a perfect medium, as it were, for the unrisen dead, it being cyberspace and all. Why not just send an email? Or set up a blog?

Wanna really convince me? Jesus himself shows up (in the shower, if that's how he likes it; or rises up out of a toaster, why not?) with my dead mom, and she speaks in complete sentences.

Boo Hoo

[click to enlarge]

As they have for, like, ever, Republicans are pushing the idea that the media are being unfair to The Rominee, and overly favorable to Obama. It's gotten more heated lately, after a self-serving and multi-erroneous article in Politico.

The above charts, based on -- what's it called, again? -- actual data, suggest otherwise. It's worth going to the source (The Project For Excellence in Journalism), where the lower graph is entertainingly interactive.

Having taken over The Washington Post, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and having their 24/7/365 propaganda arms know as Fox "news" and RWS™ radio, Rs are engaging in their usual strategy of falsely accusing others of doing what they really do, all the time. It's really quite amazing; especially to the extent that their willing fodder buy into it all.

Random Assortment Of Good Ones

Biblical Proportions

This is why things will only get worse:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

Why care? Well, the problem is these are the same people voting for teabaggRs. And what's the problem with that? Well, only that to hold such beliefs one has to reject obvious fact, believe science is either corrupt or inherently fallacious (while selectively welcoming its manifold benefits into their lives), and have no curiosity or willingness to seek knowledge. Which makes for a pretty piss-poor electorate: the sort that accepts the propaganda of Fox "news" and the RWS™, and the lies of Mitt Romney with neither the desire nor the ability to question them. It's no coincidence that religious fundamentalism and today's Republican party are joined in the midline, just posterior to the hips.

Nearly half. Far more than any other developed country (it's fewer than Turkey, though). So much for the daydream of the founding fathers, the one involving a well-informed electorate.

I've said it a million times: I really wouldn't care what people believe if it hadn't come so negatively to affect our politics; and I accept the value of religious belief for most people. It's evident that some people can have religious faith and still be open minded to the world around them. But since by definition that kind of thinking describes people of varying points of view, it's being overwhelmed by the solidarity of astronomically narrow minds, people who wear their ignorance like a talisman. As the world gets increasingly complicated, the 46% seek increasingly to gather together to hide in not-knowing, while striking out at otherness with increasing fury. And, given the frailties of the human mind in the face of such difficulty, their numbers will only increase. (The 46%, according to the study, is statistically unchanged from last measure, two years ago. But it's up from 44%.)

It's a form of thought, if that's what it's called, that's so foreign to me that I can barely process the fact that nearly half of our country "thinks" that way. It makes me feel like I'm living in another universe. I'd sure as hell rather live in one where the numbers are the other way around. But, since we're in this one, and assuming there's a desire to hang around awhile, I'm working on not caring. If the election goes the way I think it will, it'll be a matter of self-preservation.

Cosmic Thoughts

I particularly like the thoughts at the very end.

Bumper Wisdom

Saw the above the other day while driving; hadn't seen it before. Pretty good.

Down

I have to admit I'm starting to feel pessimistic, and it's not just the latest jobs report. It's the unrelenting lying, and the torrential flow of billionaire money into deceptive ads, the nastiness of which is just beginning. And, of course, it's the constant and undisguised propagandizing by the right wing's favorite "news" source.

But it's more than that. Many liberals are disappointed with Barack Obama -- because of policies that ought to have made the RWS™ deliriously happy and because of which their claims of terrorist-loving America-hating on the part of the president ought to have disappeared in a flashboom, like the leadership of al Queda: kill lists, citizen targeting, Gitmo, detentions. The list goes on.

And that's the point: Obama is the centrist he always was, and he's doing -- legally or otherwise -- what he thinks he needs to do to protect against terrorism; and he's done what he thinks he had to do, by way of compromising on important issues like health care and taxes and the stimulus, to get done what little the Rs have allowed. And yet, the RWS™ keep pushing the idea that he's a radical socialist, a weak-kneed terrorist appeaser; and the sheep lick it up like corn sugar.

As always, the bottom-line issue remains choosing between fiscal priorities that will allow us to pay for such frivolities as education, infrastructure, health care, safety nets, environmental protection, research, alternative energy, predict the weather, etc, etc, versus ones that will preserve and increase tax cuts for the wealthy and for businesses, increase military spending, and drastically and irreversibly cut the aforementioned government functions to make the numbers work (although they don't). (It's also a choice between foreign policies in which war is a last or a first resort.) But the seriousness of that choice is lost in the din. Which is partly because the Ds, as usual, are unable to maintain a coherent and focused message, but mostly because the right-wing scream machine is so loud and well-funded, feeling no moral need to attach to reality; and because its target audience is so uninterested in and incapable of hearing truth through the noise.

I know it's too early to draw conclusions, and I know summertime polls are notoriously non-predictive; but based on what's really at stake -- as opposed to the false picture drawn and paid for by the only group that stands to benefit from a Rominee presidency, ie those that have theirs and will be fine no matter how badly the country stumbles -- it ought already to look like a landslide for Obama.

It doesn't. Deliberate blocking of Obama's jobs programs by teabaggRs, followed by decrying (barely containing their glee) the lack of jobs. Unaccounted money and unbridled lies. An easily deceived public, their prejudices and paranoia carefully (and brilliantly) stoked nonstop. Ruthless and concentrated messaging untethered by fact, opposing discohesive, disorganized and limp response.

Yes, I keep giving money, and every time I do I get asked for more. But it'd take millions of me's (does that apostrophe go there?) to counter just one of the Rovians, and I don't get the sense that it's gonna happen. Obama is the left-leaning centrist I always thought he was, a fact disappointing to the further left, and ignored by the right to advance their greedy goals. In the elation of his victory, I completely underestimated the kind of reaction, from day one, there'd be on the right, nor foresaw how far right the entire Republican party would go, how willing they'd be to wreck the recovery for their political ends, and how unthinkingly their sheep would follow.

For a realist, which I am, pessimism seems to be the only logical state of mind.

America-Hater

You can disagree with his policies, like rescuing the auto industry or stimulating the economy; you can have issues with trying to provide affordable health care, or with ending the war in Iraq, drawing down in Afghanistan. You can prefer budgets that cut spending on education and health and infrastructure and research and environmental protection in order to increase spending on aircraft carriers and to lower taxes on the very wealthy. And, sure, you can be irate over making birth control available, or supporting equality for gays. But you have to be frigging insane to see in President Obama some sort of evil anti-religion America-hater.

If you do, after watching the above video -- not to mention observing him over the past three-and-a-half years, you really need to lie down and take a nice long nap. And, if you don't mind the suggestion, keep on sleeping until the election is over.