brainiac conspiracy

Trenchant Insight of The Day

Maybe I should consider moving back East. Gets a bit chilly in the winter months, but there are certain side benefits to living there, not the least of which is the Freedom from Peak Wingnut.

---Vitelius

Dear Wisconsin Voters

Perhaps you've noticed of late that you've allowed yourselves to be ruled by an incompetent gang of sociopaths and liars:

In the name of Feingold, Proxmire, Lucey, Nelson and LaFollette, and for the rest of us, please do something about this at your soonest possible convenience. Your pal,

---Vitelius

No One Could Have Possibly, Etc.

That Lucy Van Pelt Republicans in Congress would snatch the ball away from Charlie Brown again make Joe Biden look like a clueless jackass:

A tentative deal would result in cuts of about half that---$33 billion in cutbacks in one of the largest onetime reductions in domestic government programs.

But House Speaker John Boehner insisted Thursday that Republicans had not agreed to that level of reductions. He said the GOP was holding out for the House-passed bill that included dozens of such politically divisive policy priorities as defunding Planned Parenthood and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. That bill died in a Senate vote.

"We're going to continue to fight for everything that's in it," Boehner said Thursday.

I fail to understand why our wise Democratic leaders keep failing to see what has been obvious for months: The Republicans are going to shut down the federal government, no matter what concession Democrats make, on the assumption that blaming Democrats for it is a winning strategy for 2012. Considering what a surefire loser position this is, maybe Democrats should consider daring the GOP to walk away from the table instead of offering to keep talking to people who aren't even trying to listen.

---Vitelius

Drinking From the Fountain of Liberty

Is sweeter yet when it's 90-proof:

These DUI laws are not doing our small businesses in our state any good at all. They are destroying them. They are destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years. These taverns and bars in these smaller communities connect people together. They are the center of the communities. I'll guarantee you there's only two ways to get there: either you hitchhike, or you drive, and I promise you they're not going to hitchhike.

Wouldn't you know, this clown just happens to be . . . a saloon owner. Hey, he wouldn't be a Teahadi if he didn't try to use the levers of government to feather his own nest, now, would he.

---Vitelius

No More Choo-Choo for You

Because, uh, we're broke?

Actually, I'd be happy to see Scotty get his money back, this time with union set-asides attached.

---Vitelius

Strip Mining We Can Believe In

This otherwise-solid piece of reporting from McClatchy could just as easily be titled "McConnell Leads Fight Against Invasion of Flying Monkeys," inasmuch as it shows the degree to which our political discourse is driven by phantoms, as conservatives rail against policies that aren't being implemented while advancing arguments that aren't true to address problems that don't exist. This fact-free chatter manages to accomplish a couple of important objectives. One, it keeps scribes and pundits busy struggling to stay apace of the GOP's continually evolving reality, which leaves them less time in the daily news cycle for analysis and contextualization. This in turn helps to largely obscure the fact that one of America's two major political parties has come under the control of a bunch of conspiracist-minded cranks and psychotics.

However, it also sorta tends to obscure the bigger picture: You know, the policies that actually are being implemented.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans Tuesday to auction off vast coal reserves in Wyoming over the next five months, unleashing a significant but controversial power source amid uncertainty about clean and safe energy development.

The four coal leases next to existing strip mines in the Powder River Basin---the largest coal-producing region in the United States---total 758 million tons and will take between 10 and 20 years to mine.

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media

No matter how often right-wing media stings are exposed as transparent frauds, someone in our Beltway press will gladly regurgitate the same discredited talking points as if they rested on some factual basis. If anyone wants to know how it is that our political discourse seems to keep drifting ever more rightward, decade after decade and regardless of public sentiment, look no further. This is how it happens.

---Vitelius

Slow Learners

Looks like we have bipartisan agreement among our wise leaders on the theory that holds that the best way to revive a sluggish economy and reduce unemployment is to scale back our investment and lay off more workers. The only points of contention would appear to be over the amount of punishment to be inflicted on us.

---Vitelius

We Are Ruled by Amnesiacs

I guess this is what "handing off" the Libya war effort to our NATO partners allies like. Good to know since this same approach has worked so well for us in the past.

---Vitelius

Shoot the Bunny!

THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON EASTER

Should be a banner head on the homepage of every liberal blog this week.

---Vitelius

Shocking News

The hoi polloi are not content with our wise leaders' happy-talk:

For all the talk of recovery, Americans are growing increasingly pessimistic about the economy as soaring gas costs strain already-tight budgets. But so far, people aren't taking it out on President Barack Obama, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows.

Even so, the survey highlights a central challenge Obama will face in his campaign for re-election. The president will have to convince a lot of voters who are still feeling financial hardship that things are getting better.

That's going to be a nifty little challenge since, for most people, things haven;t gotten any better over the past year, they've gotten arguably worse. Like the causes of the recession, these after-effects have not been due to an inevitable set of circumstances beyond our leaders' control. Far from it. They've simply failed to acknowledge the systemic nature of the problem, and the few times they have, their policy prescriptions have overwhelmingly favored capital over labor. Or, more accurately, wealthy shareholders over working-class home-owners:

[Y]he act’s goal of helping struggling homeowners was shelved until February 2009, when the Home Affordable Modification Program was announced with the promise to help up to four million families with mortgage modifications.

That program has been a colossal failure, with far fewer permanent modifications (540,000) than modifications that have failed and been canceled (over 800,000). This is the well-chronicled result of the rush to get the program started, major program design flaws like the failure to remedy mortgage servicers’ favoring of foreclosure over permanent modifications, and a refusal to hold those abysmally performing mortgage servicers accountable for their disregard of program guidelines. As the program flounders, foreclosures continue to mount, with 8 million to 13 million filings forecast over the program’s lifetime.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has acknowledged that the program “won’t come close” to fulfilling its original expectations, that its incentives are not “powerful enough” and that the mortgage servicers are “still doing a terribly inadequate job.” But Treasury officials refuse to address these shortfalls. Instead they continue to stubbornly maintain that the program is a success and needs no material change, effectively assuring that Treasury’s most specific Main Street promise will not be honored.

Fire Tim Geithner. Do it now. If today's polling data doesn't convince the President that he needs to clear out his old economic team and bring a new Treasury Secretary onboard with a fresh set of ideas for fixing our rotten financial system, I don't know what will. Might I suggest Neil Barofsky for the job?

---Vitelius

Two Years of Kenyan Anti-Colonialism

Have brought our private sector to its knees:

Despite high unemployment and a largely languishing real estate market, U.S. businesses are more profitable than ever, according to federal figures released on Friday.

U.S. corporate profits hit an all-time high at the end of 2010, with financial firms showing some of the biggest gains, data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis show. Corporations reported an annualized $1.68 trillion in profit in the fourth quarter. The previous record, without being adjusted for inflation, was $1.65 trillion in the third quarter of 2006.

Many of the nation's preeminent companies have posted massive increases in profits this year. General Electric posted worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, while profits at JPMorgan Chase were up 47 percent to $4.8 billion.

Corporate profits steadily increased last year as companies continued holding onto record amounts of cash and other liquid assets while cutting costs, laying off workers and wringing more productivity---defined as the amount of output that comes from an hour of work---from remaining staff, even as the recession eased.

To put that in perspective, said Lynn Reaser, the chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, it's important to note that companies were able to bring production back up to pre-recession levels without hiring any more workers.

"We have now recovered all of the output lost in the recession, but we are still down by 7.5 million workers," she said.

Future historians will no doubt wonder many decades hence how a Congress with historic Democratic majorities in both houses and a liberal black President named Hussein failed to take control of America's ethically bankrupt and corruption-riddled economic order and steer it in a more liberal and humane direction. But fail they did, and almost entirely. Were they afraid of being depicted as socialists if they raised corporate taxes? They didn't do that, and it happened anyway. Were they afraid that systemic financial reform, i.e., nationalizing the big banks, would spook the markets and leave a legacy of chronic high unemployment in its wake? They didn't do that, and it happened anyway. Were they afraid that forcing cramdown legislation on the banks would result in record numbers of foreclosures and fraud? They didn't do that, and it happened anyway. Maybe the next time Democrats have the kind of mandate to govern in Washington that they had two years ago--which almost surely won't happen again in my lifetime---perhaps they'll stop worrying about what a bunch of whiny rich people will think about them, and give the voters what they actually want, which is money and jobs and mortgage relief. Unless they really don't care any more than the Republicans, in which case they should just be fucking honest enough to say so instead of paying lip service to Working-Class Americans* while letting Fox News dictate the terms of their governance. Okay, alright, I'll get off the soapbox now, and forget I said anything about it. Let's just start another war tomorrow, and let the free market take care of the rest.

---Vitelius

* Individuals earning $199,000 per year.

Two Can Play at This Game

When some GOP windbag starts extolling "family values," someone on our side should reply with "farm animals." It's only a bit of mischievous speculation, after all---and some say it could even possibly be true. Perhaps I'll take up a journalistic career after all.

---Vitelius

Getting Their Priorities Straight

Ezra Klein poses an intriguing question today, but I think we can all be fairly certain that most of the folks on someone's staff are gonna be way too busy for the next few days rubbing out some monster loads over the Greatest Story Ever Sold to be of much help averting a government shutdown.

Update: The clip was working this morning (I watched it at Redstate), but it's apparently been taken private since then. Too bad, for it is a truly awesome straw-man smackdown of Evil Union Gangsters with plenty of stilted Randian dialogue and a bit of cleavage thrown in for good measure. I smell boffo-box office!

---Vitelius

Illegal Formations

Does this mean the Arizona legislature is getting put on probation?

Top executives at the Fiesta Bowl, the host of one of the nation’s pre-eminent college football games, funneled campaign contributions to local politicians, flew other Arizona elected officials around the country at the bowl’s expense, racked up a $1,200 bill at a strip club, and even spent $30,000 on a birthday party for the chief executive, according to an investigative report commissioned by the bowl’s board of directors [...]

One of the beneficiaries of the trips was Russell Pearce, the State Senate president, a Republican who has gained a national profile over the past year for writing Arizona’s controversial immigration law. Pearce and his wife, LuAnne, traveled to Chicago in 2005 to attend a Northwestern-Michigan game and stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. He and his wife also traveled to Boston on a similar trip with his son in 2008, according to the report.

Pearce did not return calls for comment.

I have no idea whether or no Arizona has a state ethics law that requires legislators to report such gifts, or which bans them altogether, but I am certain the Internal Revenue Service would be very interested to know more about expenses-paid trips worth several thousands of dollars and whether or not these were duly reported on somebody's income-tax returns, wouldn't you think? Considering that Mr. Birthright Citizenship doesn't sound too keen to elaborate on this report, you have to wonder if any of these gratuitous examples of self-serving graft selfless acts of constituent largesse were ever declared in his Form 1040. I guess we'll find out.

Either way, you gotta love the irony:

The Fiesta Bowl is big business for Arizona. Not only a source of pride, but the annual event rakes in the dollars for everyone involved and generates both jobs and tax revenue for the local governments.

Everyone makes out like bandits, except of course the entertainers themselves (aka athletes) who don't see a dime. Wouldn't want to spoil the purity of amateur athletics, would we.

---Vitelius

The Case for Liberal Interventionism

I'm still of the firm belief that Obama is the most inspiring public speaker on the political stage that has existed in my adult life, so if anyone could make this case, he could. But I can't say after watching the Libya Speech that I'm very much persuaded to change my views on the wisdom---or even, frankly, the morality---of raining Tomahawk missiles on a captive population, no matter how carefully targeted the attacks may be. If the sole reason for our involvement is to prevent a mass slaughter of civilians, why no action on Cote D'Ivoire or Darfur? If it's to provide aid and support to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the Muslim world, why the inaction on Yemen and Bahrain? That's the problem with a using a nation like Libya to make the case for interventionism---there's too much money and petroleum at stake for the West to permit such a massive disruption in the existing social order that a wave of mass political killings would surely trigger. Conversely, intervening in the affairs of a "friendly" nation might delight the oppressed locals, but the blowback from the existing political establishment could threaten the viability of Western interests. In other words, there's no money to be made in Darfur, and Bahrain is an American military installation masquerading as a sheikdom, so their beleaguered residents are left to their own devices while we come to the aid of a ragtag Libyan resistance instead.

I also wish I could say I was moved at the end by Obama's appeal to our better angels, reminding us of our decades-long tradition of defending the cause of freedom and our willingness to fight for oppressed peoples around the globe. But the foundations of that global defense were borne out of genuine existential threats to the demilitarized nations of Europe and the Far East---first by the Nazis and the Japanese, later by the Soviets---not by maniacal oil barons threatening revenge on their own insolent subjects. Employed in the defense of intervening in a place like Libya, unlike Europe possessing no long history of democratic aspirations, and no democratic institutions in place to promote them, Obama's rhetoric---while sincerely voiced---struck these ears as stale and recycled, the kind of feckless boilerplate that could have just as easily been uttered by Bush the Younger, or Clinton, or Bush the Elder, or Reagan, to defend equally questionable military interventions in Panama, Grenada, or Sudan.

Besides, our willingness to fight for the rights of oppressed peoples in the postwar period has always been subjective in nature, predicated not on any universally-held altruisms but on our own narrow self-interests. Don't believe me? Ask any Palestinian.

---Vitelius

Is Our Democrats Learning?

You know the answer to that question already:

The White House and Democratic lawmakers, with less than two weeks left to avoid a government shutdown, are assembling a proposal for roughly $20 billion in additional spending cuts that could soon be offered to Republicans, according to people close to the budget talks.

That would come on top of $10 billion in cuts that Congress has already enacted and would represent a deeper reduction than the Obama administration and Senate Democrats had offered previously in negotiations.

This approach worked so well in the past, didn't it? Democrats made plenty of sensible concessions to Republicans in the last session of Congress over health care, the stimulus, banking reform, and environmental legislation. And voters, hungry for displays of bipartisan consensus, expressed their gratitude by handing Congressional Democrats a landmark victory at the polls last November. Oh, wait.

But hey, why not try it again? Especially now, considering that voters don't support the fucking GOP budget cuts:

The Republicans’ proposed budget cuts are in trouble in the 50 most competitive Republican-held Congressional districts---nearly all of which gave a majority to Obama in the last presidential election. Support drops dramatically after respondents hear balanced information and messages, and incumbents in these battleground seats find themselves even more endangered.

These battleground voters are currently split on the Republican plan to cut domestic programs by $61 billion, with 46 percent in favor and 46 percent opposed. This would be a dramatic decline in support from January when Democracy Corps found 60 percent support for the Republicans’ budget cuts.

And after a balanced debate on the issue, support for the Republican budget plan drops sharply, to 41 percent, with a 52 percent majority opposed. The more voters hear from the Republicans on this issue, the less they like. In fact, after hearing the budget debate, 53 percent agree, the more they hear from Republicans like their incumbent, “the less I like.” Just 39 percent say the more they hear, “the more I like.” And this is reflected in the vote, as it moves a net of 5 points towards the Democrats, giving them a 47 to 44 percent lead on the ballot.

Much of the shift up to this point has come among Democrats and Democratic base groups, with independents still holding back from Democrats on budget issues. But it is independents that move in response to the messages and attacks tested in this survey.

It really is true: Democrats are great at policy, but they suck at the politics. With Republicans, it's the other way around. It helps explain why one party can't govern, why the other party doesn't take governing seriously, and why our wise leaders in Washington seem so thoroughly incapable of giving voters the things they really want.

---Vitelius

Our Newest Friends in Freedom

Have fully embraced our time-honored principles of free enterprise:

“Transparency and accountability were sacrificed to widespread falsifications in order to cover up the use of influence,” the Central Bank’s officials wrote in the Oct. 20, 2010, report, a copy of which was recently obtained by The New York Times.

“It was like a Ponzi scheme,” said a Western diplomat familiar with the bank’s dealings who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters on the highly delicate matter. “The bank had to keep marketing and getting more deposits to fund the loans that they weren’t getting interest on.”

The report also suggests that Kabul Bank’s long-term finances are in much direr shape than previously understood, a condition that explains why the Central Bank has been discussing putting the bank into receivership.

Mission accomplished!!! Now can we get out?

---Vitelius

Sushi and Sashimi

Used to be some of my favorite restaurant grub. But now I guess we can scratch it off the list of life's little pleasures.

---Vitelius

Feudalism

One of the disadvantages to being a relatively young nation like we are is the fact that we leapfrogged several hundred years of European history. If we hadn't, we might have learned by now that an economic model that relies on a tiny landed gentry and tens of millions of peons living in conditions of privation and want to generate wealth typically doesn't lead to the establishment of a productive and prosperous society. But I guess we haven't learned that lesson quite yet.

---Vitelius