Fact-esque

It's the End of the World As We Know It and I Feel Fine

I've been putting off writing this because it's simply too depressing once you put it into words, but somebody has to say it and it seems to be my role. Everybody, especially economists like Krugman and Baker, have been dancing around this for weeks, unable to bring themselves to state baldly and simply the conclusion that all their recent analysis inevitably leads to. So I will.

The American economy is never - repeat NEVER - coming back.

How the Democrats Will Arrange to Lose Despite Widespread Hatred of GOP: Help Corpo's Outsource More Jobs

Even as we speak, Democrat leaders are most likely meeting in emergency session to try to figure out what to do about the latest bad news: everybody hates the Pubs and their policies.

Voters' opinions of the Republican Party are now at an all-time low. According to a new WSJ/NBC poll (PDF), Americans' esteem for the Republican Party is at the lowest level ever found in the 21 years they have asked the question. When asked to rate their feelings about the Republican Party the results were:

WSJ/NBC (PDF) (8/5-9)
Opinion about Republican Party
Very Positive 6
Somewhat Positive 18
Neutral 28
Somewhat Negative 24
Very Negative 22

The American people have a significantly lower opinion of the Republican Party now than they did at the height of the the 2006 or 2008 elections in which Democrats made large gains. Fortunately for Democrats, while popular opinion about the party has taken a beating, voters still view it more positively than they do the Republican Party. The Democratic Party rated total positive 33 percent to total negative 44 percent, while the Republican Party had total positive 24 percent to total negative 46 percent.

This sort of thing is, of course, extremely worrying to Obama, Axelrod, Rahm, Reid, Pelosi, et al. It suggests that they can't lose, despite all their best efforts to make the doom-and-gloom, pro-Pug prognostications of the corporate media come true. They've continued Bush's most unpopular policies, both his unpopular wars, and given the store away to Wall Street. Jeez, what's a party gotta do to give away an election these days?

The Real Victim of the Confederate GOP

Let's start with James Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation . (Via Mark)

The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for its own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our ass because we're down.

I think it goes even deeper than that, and I think, given the totality of the post (a post you should definitely find time to read), Kunstler would probably go along. As horrifying as the destruction of law is, what allows it - along with the destruction of the economy, the destruction of the social contract, and the destruction of representative democracy itself - is the wholesale assault on reality by what Mark has been calling "the Confederate Right".

Defending Bush: The Unlawing of the Law

Apparently the Right has decided that it isn't enough to attack any judicial decision they don't like on the basis of the fact that a judge made it, as per the recent charges over the California same sex decision. No, it is now necessary, from their point of view, to disconnect the law from the social structure altogether and make it, if possible, illegal.

Bare-Knuckle Barry: More Guns, Less Butter

There has been a feeling in some quarters (not mine, of course) that President Obama has been holding back. If that was true, it is true no longer, I'd say. In the last couple of days we've seen two pretty bold moves on his part, not that he expected anybody to notice.

Our Magic Media

In the Old Days before the WaPo decided to become an upscale Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch single-handedly LCD'd the MSM, there were major oil spills, too. They caused lots of trouble and cost lots of money to clean up and many homes and businesses were ruined because the press didn't use its powers correctly.