Fact-esque

Red Sonia: If She Ain't Wonder Woman, She's No Damn Good

You know, the right-wing obsession with comic books and Robert Heinlein novels has gone so far that next week I expect to see Peggy Noonan wandering around on the tarmac at the DC airport with his arms outstretched trying to find Wonder Woman's invisible plane. I get this from the list of right-wing grievances against the next Supreme Court Justice wherein if she can't fly a jet while reciting the Book of Genesis verbatim and dancing Swan Lake in a suit of armour, she shoudn't be on the court.

The latest bitch is that she sometimes interrupts lawyers, especially when they try to defend torture. Go figure.

David Brooks Is an Increasing Embarrassment

In the same way that a competent adult doesn't allow a child to play with matches because he might hurt himself, the NYT needs to protect David Brooks from playing with economics. Mr Brooks' column today is so remarkably simple and child-like that it's clear he doesn't have a clue. Writing like a 6-yr-old attempting to explain nuclear physics to other 6-yr-olds, Brooks would be embarrassing if his column was in The Weekly Reader. That drivel like this is in a major American newspaper is a disgrace.

Markets tend toward efficiency. People respond in pretty straightforward ways to incentives. The invisible hand forms a spontaneous, dynamic order. Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models.

This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis — how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once.

No kidding, Dave? Really? Gosh. This guy is so naive he probably doesn't have enough economic horse sense to be up and around.

Please. Save him. And us. Take his PC away from him before he hurts himself.

WaPo Notices Biased Judges 5 Yrs After Everyone Else; Obama's Opportunity

For years a major charge against Bush has been his packing of the Federal courts with conservative GOP flunkies and ideological robots. Liberal blogs were covering this long before newspapers thought there was anything the least bit hinky about Bush's picks despite their records of racism, political hackery, and statements by nearly all of them that the Constitution was, you know, just a piece of paper. An odd stance for a Federal judicial nominee whose job it will be to interpret that "piece of paper" you might think, but few newspaper editors thought that issue was worth covering. During Bush's whole first term, about the only good thing the Dems did was keep Bush from packing the benches with the worst of his neocon hacks, a valiant and fairly successful effort that was all but ignored by the nation's media.

Well, now that it's way too late to matter the Washington Post has finally looked around and noticed that, gee, there are a lot of Bush appointees on our Federal courts who ignore the law and replace it with Republican dogma just to embarrass Democrats. Jeffrey Smith writes that GOP judges seem to go out of their way to reverse  decisions made by Democratic judges on appellate courts.

"Liberal" NPR and Brennan's Resignation

Glenn Greenwald has become one of the foremost media critics in the blogosphere that media figures actually pay attention to and this week he turned his attention to NPR. In his Salon podcast interview with NPR's Tom Gjelten, Greenwald's questioning about Gjelten's handling of bloggers' criticisms clearly shows up yet another facet of media reporter's gullibility and laziness.

Greenwald asks Gjelten where he got the idea that liberal bloggers were objecting to Brennan's appointment as CIA Director simply because he happened to be at the Agency when renditions and torture were going on, approved by the Bush Admin?

Tales of Old Dartmoor

David Horsey discovers the source of GM's difficulties.

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman discovers the cause of the current Depression after suffering some, um, liquidity problems of his own. You don't suppose there's a connection between those two things, do you?

From now on I'm re-defining a Friedman Unit as the amount of time it takes Tommy to realize what the rest of us have known right along. It will probably be measured in decades to make the numbers easier to handle.

Stop the Madness!

Would somebody please go find that one guy who's still listening to Bush and tell him to quit it so Georgie will shut up?

What? You Don't Like "Kill Obama" As A Campaign Theme?

If you're the Goebbels & Braun of the NYT, Adam Nagourney & Liz Bumiller, the best possible spin you can put on the crumbling McC campaign is that "John's message isn't getting across". So here's what they wrote. Together. (It took both of them.)

Again and again, [GOP] leaders said in interviews that while they still believed that Mr. McCain could win over voters in the next 30 days, they were concerned that he and his advisers seemed to be adrift in dealing with an extraordinarily challenging political battleground and a crisis on Wall Street.

The expressions of concern came after a particularly difficult week for Mr. McCain. On Friday night, new questions arose about his choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate after an investigation by the Alaska Legislature concluded that she had abused her power in trying to orchestrate the firing of her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

“I think you’re seeing a turning point,” said Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, where Mr. McCain has decided to stop campaigning. “You’re starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign’s message, isn’t connecting.”

Of course it's connecting. It's just that "Kill the Terrorist Traitor Obama!" is more a comic book than a political message and, like, nobody is on board with it except the 23% who think Bush is Batman and Obama is The Joker.

If McC has a message other than that, then yes, it's not connecting and maybe he ought to spend more time talking about whatever it is than accusing Barack of murdering Bambi and raping Orphan Annie.

The McCain Narrative, Brought to You By...The NYT

Not that I should probably pick on them more than anyone else. Even the usually reliable Boston Globe had a set-piece about how Saint John was going to be a "maverick" again and how "moving" his speech was.

McCain spoke movingly about his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and how it changed him from a selfish and brash young man to a mature "servant" of his country. "I've never lived a day, in good times or in bad, that I don't thank God for that privilege," he said.

It's just that the ever-predictable Adam Nagourney outdid himself praising McC's manliness. He was "firm", he "pledged", he's "an iconoclast", a locution I don't mind him using because it's so esoteric very few people know what it means, even educated people. But it sounds positive (if it isn't, you know, dirty). You don't find out about the less attractive aspects of St John's evening until well down in the article, stuff like protesters and an unresponsive audience sitting on its hands.

it was often offered in a monotone as he stood before a solid-color backdrop that flicked from green to blue. The reaction was far more subdued than it was the night before for his running mate, Ms. Palin. There were stretches in which he drew only a smattering of applause.

***

One of the livelier moments of the evening came when Mr. McCain was interrupted by several antiwar protestors who had infiltrated the hall. Their signs were quickly ripped from their hands, and they were carried out of the arena as the crowd shouted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Mr. McCain, who by now has become accustomed to these kinds of interruptions, responded with a smile. “Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static,” Mr. McCain said, before adding “Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.”

Then why did Sarah Palin spend half her speech last night yelling at Obama and liberals?

McGovern the...Turncoat?

Apparently, while I was on vacation last week George McGovern - who I've been on the fence about for  years - embarassed himself with an editorial in the WSJ attacking EFCA (the Employee Free Choice Act), and in the process repeating every tired right-wing argument from the Ken Mehlman Anti-Labor Handbook: the "secret ballot" nonsense, the "new economy that changes everything" myth (also known as "the 9/11 meme") wherein the crashing of 2 planes into 2 towers 7 years ago is the reason workers shouldn't be asking for raises and should be grateful to be paid the minimum wage.

TMiss was disappointed in him. According to Rick Perlstein, so were a lot of other people.

Last week the talk of our progressive blogosphere, and with good reason, was the Wall Street Journal editorial by 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern, the Pope of Principled Liberalism, arguing the right-wing line on the Employee Free Choice Act, liberals' most promising strategy in a generation to make joining a union easier and more fair.

It was creepy. It was embarrassing.

***

It argued:

To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

And it was all bullshit.

As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Budget Priorities, explained to me in an email, "If anyone is really that hung up on the 'secret ballot' crap then they should be asked why they aren't upset by the fact that current law allows unions to be decertified by card check. The only change with the Employee Free Choice Act is whether card check recognition is at the discretion of the employer of the worker. In other words, it changes absolutely ZERO about whether the right of workers to organize is determined by secret ballot or not. The only thing it changes is who gets to decide the manner of certification, workers or employers."

Anyone who was disappointed in McGovern for this doesn't know him. It was, unfortunately, entirely in character.

The NYT Tags the Blue Dogs: "You're It"

This is what we've come to: the NYT Editorial Board, far more sane and less in the tank than the rest of the paper, a voice of reason in some of the darker days even if nobody heard it, took the Democrats to task for laming out on dealing with the looming economic crisis because they've got bigger fish to fry - the election.

There may soon be more bank failures and a spate of corporate bankruptcies. That means that unemployment will almost certainly rise — employers have shed nearly half a million jobs this year — and those who keep their jobs will have to cope with fewer hours, measlier raises and evaporating bonuses.

In an election year, sound policy making is almost always trumped by political posturing, making the situation even bleaker. A case in point is the new foreclosure-prevention law. President Bush threatened for months to veto it, before signing it in July. The law’s main feature — allowing the government to guarantee hundreds of billions of dollars in new mortgages to troubled borrowers — won’t take effect until Oct. 1.

The law’s other important feature — a contingency plan for a government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s biggest mortgage companies — was a last-minute, crisis-driven addition, the opposite of the ahead-of-the-curve action that is now needed.

The country cannot afford more delay and more posturing. Before the crisis gets any worse, Congress must take several steps.

Which it then lists, and while it doesn't mention the BD's specifically the list is exclusively made up of all the initiatives they joined with Republicans to stop in the last session.

Guys, blaming the whole "Congress" when the culprits are a small minority of conservative dead-heads with a stranglehold on the process doesn't cut it any more. It's time to name names.