Fact-esque

Mo-Do Dodo

You know that it’s all unraveling when even Maureen Dowd is figuring out that the Democrats are just Republicans with less money.

W.’s administration played up Al Qaeda ties, exploiting 9/11 to invade Iraq, which the neocons had wanted to do all along. The Obama administration sidestepped Al Qaeda ties in the case of the Libyan attack to perpetuate the narrative that the president had decimated Al Qaeda when Osama bin Laden was killed, and to preclude allegations that they were asleep at the switch on the anniversary of 9/11. Better to blame it all on a spontaneous protest to an anti-Islam video on YouTube.

It’s remarkable that President Obama, who came to power abhorring the manipulative and duplicitous tactics of the Bush crowd, should now be vulnerable to similar charges.

You know you’re in trouble when Donald Rumsfeld is the voice of reason.

Uh-huh. Or when you catch Democrats pulling the same shabby tricks as Cheney & Co. When MoDo catches on, the only ones who could still be out of the loop work for Fox News.

The Democrats are so deeply into the tank to corporate interests that this so-called “election” is little more than a Hobson’s Choice: vote for Romney, we lose; vote for Obama, we still lose but it takes a little longer.

Maybe it’s time for Roosevelt/Kennedy Democrats to take a stand at last against the Nixon/Reagan Democrats and vote for somebody – anybody – else. Third party candidates are suddenly looking a lot less impossible. I mean, since the Nixon/Reagan Dems are in charge, what exactly is left to lose any more?  

Business First. Also Second, Third, Fourth....

President Barry O, continuing confused on his role wherein he apparently thinks he's president not of a nation but of a corporation that helps other corporations to screw consumers, has decided that with the economy everywhere but Wall Street in free fall and banks foreclosing on homes they don't own, the real problem is...too much govt regulation. (Via Blue Texan at FDL)

The Culture of the Rich

So our democracy is finally dead after 235 yrs, replaced by the corporatist plutocracy the rich have always wanted. Our old level-seeking, middle-class-directed economy is no more, replaced by a plutonomy aimed at filling the needs of the rich and ignoring everyone else. Is that as far as it goes? Unfortunately, no.

Unsatisfied with simple control of all the money generated by the society on which it feeds, the plutocracy has been using a sizable chunk of its wealth to pay for propaganda to help "reorganize" the role and goals of the whole culture. Since this is the culture in which we will be living for the foreseeable future, it probably behooves us to start learning and internalizing its rules.

Simplicism and the Religious Right

sim'-pli-cis-m: (n) The belief that the answers to all problems, no matter how complex they may seem, are easy to understand and uncomplicated by nuance or ambiguity.

It has become part of the left-wing's conventional wisdom that Tea Partiers are crushingly stoopid (TBogg calls them "Teatards"). While this viewpoint is not, on the surface, without its merits, I don't believe it's that easy to explain. I don't think most of the people in the video below are so much dumb as ignorant and, in true American tradition, intellectually lazy.

The difference between "stupid" and "ignorant" is one of ability and will. The stupid cannot understand no matter how much information they have, the ignorant can but only if they have enough information for a reasonable analysis, and that requires both the will to search out the pieces and an intellectual work ethic of sufficient strength to connect the dots once the info is in hand.

Not that it would take that much intellectual strength. In most cases an amount of intellectual energy equal to that put out by an 8th-grader writing a short report on a subject about which she cares not a whit would be all that was necessary. Given that the information required to solve our worst problems ought to be a good deal more important to the average citizen than a report on Ecuadorian flax production, one would think most of us would be willing to spend the small amount of time it would take.

One would be wrong.

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?

Wal-Mart Spends $2M Fighting $7K Fine; Obama Admin Mystified

Although why they should be defies explanation.

The fine arose from an incident wherein a WM employee was trampled to death in Long Island two years ago during the insanity of the day-after-Thanksgiving bargain shopping.

Wal-Mart Stores has spent a year and more than a million dollars in legal fees battling a $7,000 fine that federal safety officials assessed after shoppers trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death at a store on Long Island on the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

***

Wal-Mart's all-out battle against the relatively minor penalty has mystified and even angered some federal officials. In contesting the penalty, Wal-Mart has filed 20 motions and responses totaling nearly 400 pages and has spent at least $2 million on legal fees, according to OSHA's calculations.

OSHA assessed a relatively modest $7,000 fine ($6-7K being the amount corporate-owned courts have decided is what a human life is worth [see decisions after Imperial Sugar and BP Houston explosions, as well as various mine disasters, all due to corporate negligence and a refusal to follow safety procedures because they were "too expensive" and interfered with profits]) but Wal-mart isn't having any and the poor old regulators can't figure it out. What's the big deal? Well, it's all right here:

The Last Independence Day: Welcome to the Corporate States of America

For those of you keeping track, it was last year. This year the truth has become all too painfully obvious. Joel Pett, political cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, sums it up neatly.

We are locked down, locked into a system which, wherever we look, gives rights and money to the rich, the powerful, and the corporate - often the same group - and at the same time takes them away from us. And it doesn't seem to matter to anyone that this only makes things worse and worse. Believing that giving the rich control of the society will lead to economic prosperity for everyone is now dogma for the religion of $$$, also known as Molochianism. Like the Catholic notion of the Virgin Birth, there's no evidence whatever that it was or even could be true and plenty of evidence that it isn't but we've decided to take it on faith anyway. Because the rich told us to.

And Now, Another Chapter of "Your Wingnuts in Action, SCOTUS Division"

So Sarbanes-Oxley survived Fat Tony and Bobby the Mole Alito. Isn't that a Good Thing? Isn't that a reason to applaud them? Why would I pick on them for making one of the very few decisions of this corporate-owned Supreme Court that isn't, you know, criminally stoopid and/or outright corporate toadying?

The first group established by Congress to regulate the accounting industry survived a constitutional challenge on Monday, emerging only with its members having a little less job security.

***

In its ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which established the board and sought to reform corporate America after the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals.

A small accounting firm and a group called the Free Enterprise Fund had asked the court to rule the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was illegal because it was appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, rather than the president.

Because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act contained no severability clause, some legal commentators forecast that such a ruling would lead to the entire act being thrown out, forcing Congress to act again or return to the law as it was before the act was passed.

Instead, the justices unanimously ruled that the board has been legally established and appointed. There was a 5-to-4 split, but it concerned only the way members of the board can be removed from office.

Norris and Liptak write as if they've never heard of this strange, upstart Free Enterprise Fund which is a) absurd for a couple of experienced NYT business reporters and b) a disingenuous way of ignoring the reason the SCOTies went against all their previous history to support a law their banker-bosses pretty much loathe and despise. See, it isn't the decision that's the problem but the reason the decision was made: internal wingnut-welfare politics.

Yes, b's & g's, I'm afraid we've reached the dungeon bottom of the SCOTUS' long slide down the chute of politicization of the law, a point where a legal decision potentially affecting the ability of our govt to regulate Wall Street banksters ended up hanging not on any point of law but on the conservative Justices' personal and political dislike of the plaintiff.

The Free Enterprise Fund, you see, is run by a Free Market ideologue named Stephen Moore. You've probably never heard of Moore but before FEF he was responsible for the creation of a group you probably have heard of - The Club for Growth. The CFG has had its corporate-stooge nose buried in pro-business propaganda for over a decade. It is perhaps most famous for describing Howard Dean's presidential campaign as a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." One of its more subdued rants.

But then, along about the '04 SOTU, Moore - the Founder of CFG and up to then a hero of Wingnuttia - noticed that Bush was spending way more money than anyone since Reagan (a Big No-No for devoted Norquist followers) and, in an unexplainable fit of integrity, criticized His Holy Highness as "a big government Republican".

Needless to say, his heresy did not go unnoticed. Or unavenged. He was promptly and unceremoniously chucked out of the CFG and told to peddle his papers elsewhere. He then doubled his sins - and the petty loathing of his conservative confreres - by founding FEF as a competitor to CFG. Horror of horrors. He has been persona non grata in Wingnuttia ever since.

Naturally, even if it meant putting the kibosh on the notion of a footloose and fancy-free Wall Street, unfettered by the interference of non-M'sOTU, Moore couldn't be allowed to win. That would be like asking Boston to forgive Babe Ruth for being a Yankee.

So unless you can figure out how to put an apostate conservative in front of every suit that comes before the SCOTUS from now on, I don't think the decision means very much. Certainly we can't expect it to presage lucid, intelligent decisions from the likes of Fat Tony and Bob the Mole.

After all, petty is as petty does.

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BP's $20B Escrow Acct: the Katrina Gambit & GOP's Apology to BP (Updated)

BP's oil spill, after some actual measurements have been made as opposed to weeks of reports of BP execs' "gut feeling" that it was only 3-5000 bbls/day, is now known to be more like 80.000 bbls/day and may reach 120K bbls/day before it's diverted to a new pipe.

(NOTE: There is now no talk whatever about "stopping" the spill - capping or otherwise plugging the well. All anybody talks about is "capturing" as much of the oil as they can. BP's early lame efforts to cap are now being used as proof that the well can't be plugged and the company's only choice is to grab as much of it as possible.

And sell it.)

BP, after some arm-twisting by an embarrassed Obama, agreed to "voluntarily" create an escrow account of $20B to cover the cost of damage by the spill.