Isn’t there ANYBODY else, ANYWHERE?

Neocon-Realist Collaboration on Ending Cuba Embargo?

I am so sick of people whose only quarrels are about which stupid and gratuitous wars that are none of America’s business to fight.

Why do we have to spend the rest of our lives listening to Pat Robertson or his like, declaiming on which Middle Eastern country we have to invade and which Latin American politician we have to assassinate?

Why do these people never go away??

The news says nobody in the White House considers withdrawal, even in the manner described by George Will, an option.

Much less complete withdrawal followed by letting Afghanistan go its own way until and unless it actually does us harm, or looks seriously like it might.

In the White House, it's all about how much war, pushed how hard, to go on with.

So, how far is this, really, from the Hundred Years' War promised us by old John McSame, anyway?

I'm losing track.

Quiet beauty on the Florida coast

Brown pelican taken off endangered list

I used to love watching them fly in single file, slowly, not very high up, along the shore around St. Augustine.

So quiet and beautiful.

“Greed is Good!”

Maddow: Big Business and the "Child Labor Endorsing, Pro-Slavery Freaks"

Ah, the profit motive!

A day of anger about what?

Matthew Yglesias » Armistice Day

Americans have long been at least half willing to agree The Great War was a pointless horror.

But under the influence of “the greatest generation” no one but the subtly or openly pro-Nazi right has been willing to agree the same is pretty much true of the Second World War.

To this day, few are willing to entertain the idea that the world, or at least America, would not have been much worse off if we had refused to rise to the bait and stayed out of the European conflict, or even also the war in the Pacific.

And perhaps not enough worse off to justify the added costs and bloodshed of our participation.

The futile awfulness of The Great War was so long ago that it seems a bit much to claim to be angry about it, at this late date.

One could even say the same about the Second World War.

As for me, the war that draws my anger at its futile wretchedness and ruin was my own, the Vietnam War.

That war almost convinced me America is an exceptionally vicious, stupid country full of exceptionally vicious, stupid people.

The attitude of our parents' generation, people who never stopped patting themselves on the back for being “the greatest generation,” was throughout that our proper place, like theirs in their time, was to shut up and obey, marching off like cattle to slaughter and be slaughtered.

I do not remember that with gratitude, nor do I recall their own march to the slaughter with warm, approving feelings.

I am returned to a reasonable perspective by thinking how anti-war Germans must have felt, looking back at their homeland after the Second World War.

This morning I saw a bumper-sticker urging us to remember America's fallen with gratitude.

That would make sense if they had all died in an effort to defend us or save us from harm.

But they didn't.

To thank them is to mindlessly buy into all our past wars, indiscriminately.

That we don't all sport bumper-stickers like that is rather a good sign, actually.

Should we really look back with gratitude on so many people who obediently killed and died in such futile and useless, and sometimes downright wicked, battles at the behest of American rulers?

Mightn't the world have been better off if more of them, or even all of them, had refused to go along?

Or at least America, anyway?

Just a glimpse, this morning, of the American mind.

Rep. Steve King calls Obama administration the ‘gangster government.’

Rick Perry Caters To The Far Right: Obama Is ‘Interested In Punishing Texas’ And ‘Hellbent’ On Socialism

Just look at that front page on Murdoch’s New York Post.

A nation of fucking idiots.

Still, we aren’t always complete fools.

Think Progress » ThinkFast: November 12, 2009

The fast thinker writes,

President Obama will not accept any of the options given to him by Gen. Stanley McChrystal on the future of U.S. involvement in the Afghanistan war. Obama “believes the U.S. needs to make clear to the Afghan government that America’s commitment to the country isn’t open ended,” an official said in a statement.

Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, has sent two cables to Washington in the past week expressing his opposition to a troop surge in Afghanistan. Eikenberry instead favors a focus on improving governance and anti-corruption measures in the country.

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll has found that 56 percent of Americans oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan and just 40 percent support the war there, where as 58 percent oppose the conflict.

“Absolutely no constituency for withdrawal in the White House”

Matthew Yglesias » Taliban and al-Qaeda

No economic gurus but bankers and financiers.

No health reform advisors but bosom pals of insurance companies.

The guy always picks the fox to guard the hen house.

The real subversives

Seven Days in May

Pacifists and authoritarians apart, it is agreed all across the American political spectrum that some defiance of law can be justified, even in a democracy, in rejection of injustice or with the aim of securing justice.

The defining division between left and right as regards what are the demands of justice is in the matter of property rights.

But key differences as regards what one may do about injustice turn on differences concerning other political values, chief among them being democracy.

And the fact is that a signficant portion of the everyday right, the ordinary right, the normal right such as we find it, for example, dominating the Republican Party sets little or no value on democracy per se and is now and has historically been willing to limit it, frustrate it, and even abandon it to protect what they see as justice in the matter of property rights.

That is to say, the dominant strands of the ordinary right of America are part of the further right, or the extreme right, and teach every day in their propaganda an essentially subversive message about just when and why, for example, a military coup against our own government might be legitimate.

In contrast, and just because almost everybody on the left sets some store by democracy, there are very few on the left would would be willing to abandon it to advance or protect what the left see as justice in this same area.

That is to say, the further or extreme left are vastly outnumbered by the democratic left who dominate the Democratic Party and the outlook expressed by almost all the propaganda of the left in America.

Actually, this was very likely true even in the depths of the Cold War when the right was so powerful in America that it could create a red scare, causing Americans to look under their beds in terror lest Communists overthrow our government and take over the country, or at least sell it out to the Russians who would themselves destroy our democracy, our freedom, and our American Way of Life.

Not everybody was taken in by the lie.

A good many thought the real danger was on the right.

Hence the film, Seven Days in May.

The threat of Communism is gone, now, of course.

But the danger on the right is not.

Those hillbilly conservatives I spoke with a few weeks ago were typical of many.

They are the real menace.

They and the entire conservative movement from which they have learned their political values.

PS.

It is noteworthy that the willingness of the right to overthrow democracy in order to protect property has always been very clearly demonstrated in American foreign policy, especially but not only in Latin America.

It is also worth noticing that Democrats have frequently been divided by such right-wing interventions.

Thus the picture is clouded as to what lessons we could draw about their respective attitudes toward any right-wing coup in our own country.

Will she follow Specter?

Poll: Snowe Could Lose 2012 GOP Primary In Landslide To Conservative Challenger

Heck, anybody’s welcome in the Democratic Party.

Even Joe Lieberman, for cryin’ out loud.

A more presentable Pat Robertson, is all

We Are Living Among Crazy People

Republicans still like Gomer.

For that matter, he is right there with the overwhelming majority in our congress on anything that relates to Israel.

Spiritual leader of millions of Americans

Pat Robertson on Ft. Hood: Islam is ‘not a religion’ and Muslims should be treated like ‘some fascist group.’

What a bunch of psychos.

Pat Robertson denounces Islam, wants adherents treated like Communists

And how, exactly, are communists treated?

Or members of “some fascist group”?

How should they be treated?

Like asking Boeing whether we need more airplanes

Special Ops Commanders Want Large Deployment to Afghanistan

Do I remember this right?

We finally left Vietnam when the military told us all, “Ah, heck. It’s not worth it.”

Is that what happened?

She got a personal note of condolence and got pissed off because of spelling errors?

Emotional Gordon Brown on defensive after Jacqui Janes confrontation

Schoolmarm gone mad, or what?

What do the boys in Vegas say?

What are the odds on us getting a decent health reform bill onto the president’s desk and signed this year?

The prospect looks worse, every day.

Our best shot since Clinton’s first term, and they’re going to blow it.

And all over America tens of millions will angrily declare, “What the fuck difference does it make? It’s always the same fucking people in charge, doing the same fucking things.”

No matter how crazy they become – and the craziest among them know this – if the Democrats don’t come through 2010 will be a Republican romp and Obama will be a one-term wonder.

Likewise if what is finally passed is just far too much a turd.

Just another lie from the right wing noise machine, actually

Does The Media Give Islam A Pass?

Matt Y reminds us of a few home truths.

Oh, and he goes on record about Jesus.

Dick Armey on the undeserving sick

Armey’s View Of Americans With Pre-Existing Conditions: Someone Who ‘Eats Like A Pig’ And Has Diabetes

Told you so.

This is what real Americans think.

Make the case for government

E.J. Dionne Jr. on how government won on Election Day

A lot of people just don’t realize until you tell them.

The kind of establishment no conservative court will ever strike down

For Abortion Foes, a Victory in Health Care Vote

I hate this, and there is nothing to be done to stop it.

Religious Neutrality is not Disestablishment

Protestantized American Catholicism - The Daily Dish By Andrew Sullivan

Religious neutrality is what the religious people of America want us to accept instead of disestablishment.

The difference?

“In God We Trust” on the currency is neutral as among the principal, “Judeo-Christian” religions of America.

So is “under God” in the pledge.

But both are slices of forbidden establishment, nonetheless.

Does it remind you of the 17th and 18th Century version of toleration that allowed legality to any religious opinion except outright atheism?

John Locke's version of toleration?

The version written into a lot of law, once upon a time?

It should.

The way today's conservatives insist freedom of religion does not entail freedom from religion is right in tune with those ideas.

Not waiting for the investigation, not listening to the military authorities

The Reality Of Religious Terror

Sullivan has decided the killings at Fort Hood were a case of religious terrorism.

Not that he’s wrong.

But it looks like it was more like Columbine than 9/11.

More a case of religious mania than religious terrorism.

Yes, the killer was a Muslim who objected to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But a pretty nutty, as opposed to primarily political, kind of Muslim.

He personally just seems a lot more like one of the usual American nut-cases who go on shooting sprees than like a member of a team of religiously motivated suicide bombers.

He seems much more a stressed-out loner with a botched life than a man who turned away from a promising and real future to devote his life and death to Allah.

More like the right wing nut in Pittsburgh who shot it out with local cops to keep his guns than like the Saudis of Al-Qaeda.

Or maybe even that other guy over at LA Fitness.

But it isn’t just abortion

Matthew Yglesias » The Silence of the Anti-Abortion Activists

The Catholic bishops not only prioritize establishment in the law of their sexual morality above the social democratic side of their own social teaching, but they prioritize state financial support for religion and for religious schools that highly, too.

The Republicans promise them vouchers, textbooks and transportation assistance for parochial schools, money for faith based enterprises, an unquestioned right to hire only loyal Catholics, a right to refuse adoptions to gays, and maybe even eventual rollback of the Supreme Court decisions of the 20th Century that undermined the church’s power to censor TV, movies, and culture both high and pop.

It is not unusual to hear Republicans talking about toughening up divorce laws, again, for that matter.

Democrats have so far held out as the more disestablishmentarian party, despite Clinton’s error of starting that faith-based bullshit and Obama’s error in continuing it.

And as the Vatican hunkers down deeper into theological and moral conservatism with every day that passes since the death of John XXIII, the Catholic Church in America moves more clearly into a relationship of open enmity toward the Democratic Party and its leading politicians.

In effect, they are blackmailing the Democrats and the rest of us, holding hostage America’s social democracy, threatening to harm it and keep harming it until and unless the Democrats show themselves willing to trade.

A slice of establishment in return for a slice of social democracy held hostage.

And that is why they did not come out for the health bill after it was cleaned up to suit them as regards abortion.

It’s a hostage.

And they shoot hostages until they get what they want.

Want to kill feminism?

ThinkFast: November 9, 2009

Not to mention the Democrats' control of the congress and, in 2012, the White House?

The fast thinker writes,

The historic health care legislation passed by the House over the weekend included an amendment that sharply restricts “the availability of coverage for abortions.”

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) said she has collected “more than 40 signatures from House Democrats vowing to oppose any final bill that includes the amendment — enough to block passage.”

So refusing coverage to illegals, many of whom will die, was OK?

Would refusing Viagra be OK?

Is refusing birth control OK?

But if they refuse to cover abortions you’re going to kill coverage for some 40 million Americans so about 35,000 of them will continue to die every year thanks to YOU?

Right.

How many will be children whose mothers will want to rip your fucking heart out for this?

Harassing Children for God!

Westboro Baptist Church Organizes Homophobic Anti-Obama Protest Outside Sasha And Malia’s School

These are the “God Hates Fags!” people.

What do you suppose these folks tell their own children at Sunday school?

Do they beat up kids who look like they're not shaping up, correctly?

One-two punch

64 anti-abortion Democrats

And 26 of them, having successfully put the anti-abortion amendment into the bill, voted to kill it, anyway.

Altmire, Barrow, Boccieri, Boren, Bright, Chandler, Childers, Davis (AL), Davis (TN), Gordon (TN), Griffith, Holden, Marshall, Matheson, McIntyre, Melancon, Peterson, Ross, Shuler, Skelton, Tanner, Taylor, Teague

Why is this only 23?

Anyway, Bill Press on the radio this morning said they cleared the exact wording with America's Catholic bishops.

This was an amendment written for the Catholic hierarchy.

Rethinking Giordano Bruno?

Close encounters of the religious kind

The religious questions raised by aliens

The Christian story of creation, the fall, and redemption and the sacred texts in which it is recorded presuppose not only an anthropocentric cosmos but even a geocentric – nay, a pre-geocentric – and very small, very recently made world.

In the news account, Marc K alludes to just one evangelical who speaks, probably, for a strong majority of traditionalist and conservative Christians when he tells us a plurality of worlds is flat out incompatible with the truth of his religion.

Bad enough, having to get used to the world not being flat and the sky not being a vault above our heads, beyond which live God and his angels and (in later additions to this very old view) the souls of the happy dead.

These things are already incompatible with the historic, biblical world view to which creationists and fundamentalists so frankly attempt to cling in defiance of the cultural authority of secular science.

The Church and the churches did not burn all those heretics either on a whim or in consequence of faulty readings of the texts.

The discovery of aliens, though, would be a final and unmistakable falsification of the essential Christian view that the meaning of all existence is found only in a story of the cosmos that is entirely and profoundly a story of us.

From that perspective, E T’s message to Earth is the same chilling news heard by Pascal in the supposed eternal silences of infinite spaces.

“It’s so not about you.”

None of which is to say that religion with a considerably broader perspective, essentially one announcing to a terrified humanity, “Well, it’s not just about you, but it is about all of us,” could not prosper in the face of so inconveniently enlarged a community of rational creatures.

But given just how poorly the mythology of the actual, historic Christian texts would fit such a wider religious view it is a good question whether Christianity, specifically, could compete very well with better suited mythologies in such an enlarged world.

The idea that myths (Some myths? Most myths? All myths?), though clearly false, can nevertheless be true is by and large a consolation and an excuse the unbelieving learned offer themselves in their nostalgia for faith and their continuing need for the comfort of the churches.

The people in the pews are, as a rule, considerably more demanding than that.

However ignorant they may be of the details and however willing to accommodate much that they neither believe not even understand, the people in the pews not only actually believe some central, crucial parts of what their religions say but actually want religion they can honestly believe, above some absolute minimum threshold.

For a lot of those people, convincing evidence of alien races would push Christianity well below that threshold.

Moderate camouflage enables wins for lunatic conservatives

The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down

I’d much rather watch honest tea-baggers crash and burn than watch them win by dressing up as “moderates.”

The only difference, after all, between the loony, outright hillbillies and the moderates as we now find them in the Republican Party is that the former tell you frankly what they think while the latter pretend to a degree of sanity they do not really possess.

And on a completely separate issue, see Frank Rich’s take-down of the administration for its kissy-face approach to Wall Street and Big Money.

Is it because it’s Sunday?

Devilstower chows down on mush

Daily Kos: The Case for Karen Armstrong

Heather sympathetically posts Frank Schaffer, chowing down on mush

Frank Schaeffer: Fears of Fundamentalism

“Mythos” is permission to drivel shamelessly.

Friends like these?

Darcy Burner says progressives should not vote for the bill if Stupak amendment passes.

I can hear Newt laughing his ass off at the swell advice this fool is giving progressives.

Might as well just say outright, “Let’s give the conservatives an easy veto on health care reform.”

But, hey, maybe she’s one of those “It’s all about me” girls.

“If I can’t get what I want, why, we’ll just go on letting 35,000 people die every year because they have no insurance coverage.

“That’s how I feel, so there.”

More on the pernicious influence of Ayn Rand

Atlas Drugged

It’s that friggin’ Constitution, stupid

The Senate’s the Thing

As Matt well knows but does not here say, the problem goes well beyond bicameralism.

The real killer is that the second chamber is grotesquely over-representative of conservative voters and packed full of absurd, anti-majoritarian rules giving the nation’s conservative minority even greater powers to obstruct.

Were the upper house mostly ceremonial and the lower house plenipotent America would long since have had universal health care and a much more robust social democracy than we actually have.

Liars on MSNBC morning TV would not be looking us in the eye and mocking us with the absurdity that “America is a center right country,” either.

The Democrats need to pass two successive amendments, neither of which would run afoul of the small state veto in Article V and the first of which would simply repeal it.

This is Article V.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article;

and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

First, an amendment to standardize the procedure for amending the Constitution, the text of which would be something like.

The portion of Article V of this Constitution that reads “and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate” is revoked, that article now ending with the clause “Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article.”

Second, an amendment to normalize representation in the senate to read something like this.

Representation of the states in the senate shall be proportional to population as determined by the census and the number of senators will neither exceed one to every 500,000 of population nor be less than one to every 1,000,000, except that every state will have at least one senator.

To prevent them being stupid, must we add an amendment forbidding the filibuster?

Though, in truth, it would not be anywhere near as harmful if these two amendments were in force.

Meanwhile, George Will is not by any means alone.

NY Times calls for a jobs stimulus

Jobless Recovery

Still think they have 60 votes in the senate?

House of Representatives passes Barack Obama's healthcare legislation

220 to 215 in the House does not augur well for the millionaires’ club.

All but one Republican were against.

39 Democrats were against.

Liberal purity is NOT an excuse

Health Care 911

Kucinich is on Digby’s list of people who may go the wrong way.

Somebody needs to tell Kucinich that voting against this just because it’s not single payer is like voting to kill Medicare because the copays are too high or voting to kill Social Security because the benefits are too low.

Viagra, next? Maybe birth control?

Abortion deal as Dems try to reach 218

These are Democrats fucking with us, now.

Writing religion-based morals into law is establishment of religion, and Democrats ought to know better.

Susie Madrak is right, taking it that way.

About those small employers

Healthy Families Act Would Offer Paid Leave to Workers Hit By Swine Flu

Congress is forever exempting small employers from legislation protecting workers for the reason that they can’t afford to comply.

That may be true, but it’s no reason why workers stuck in jobs that are already in many ways inferior to those provided by big employers should be made to suffer even more by being left out of important rights and benefits.

In this case, why not just add a rider that employees of small employers must still get their sick days, but the pay will be subsidized by the government?

You would hope for better from them

Tom Tancredo walks off the set of The Ed Show after Markos calls him out as a chickenhawk

John Amato jumps right in and joins KOS, playing the very same chickenhawk card the Republicans played so contemptibly against Bill Clinton.

Why not let government publicly do what’s needed?

Matthew Yglesias » Politics and Public Works

Why not a WPA? - Paul Krugman Blog

As for Matt’s shocking absurdity about making the unemployed go pick up trash in parks while wearing government-issued beggars (losers?) uniforms for their pittance, let’s pretend we didn’t hear that.

That suggestion puts Matt on exactly the wrong side of an issue that has set Democrats and Republicans at loggerheads for more decades than I care to publicly admit to.

Let's let it go at this.

Has Matt forgotten that in the immediate aftermath of Katrina one of the nastiest fights in congress concerned provisions in some Republican reconstruction bill to allow - or maybe it was require - contractors and subcontractors to hire non-union labor at local "free market" rates for work in an area with as close to universal unemployment as you could get?

It will be no surprise to the reader that the Republican arguments in favor of this in congress rehearsed all of their usual attacks on the minimum wage, unions, and other progressive provisions to support wage levels and the rights of labor.

That inter-party conflict is now and again echoed by a recurrent intra-party conflict among Democrats between unionists and other laborites on the one side and the upper-crust and academic liberals on the other, concerning the question of a domestic Peace Corps, how it should be staffed, and exactly what work it could be used to do in place of non-volunteers commonly hired to do the very same work for a living and hence, one hopes, for a living wage.

Anyway, that shameful lapse of Matt's apart, the question very nearly answers itself since the last thing Republicans want is for the public to see government acting in a big, helpful way to further the common good while private enterprise, flat on its back, conspicuously fails at the job.

In fact, given their hatred for the New Deal and for FDR, I have often wondered why, when they were in power, the Republicans did not actually vote money to pay people to go out all over the country and remove or plaster over or otherwise efface all those WPA signs on public works still in place doing much public good, 70 years later, all over America.

Public finance of projects undertaken by whatever is the usual mix of private contractors and public employees is a much better idea than Matt’s suggestion, truly worthy of Scrooge (“Are there no workhouses?”) as Christmas approaches, and these projects ought to be conspicuously labeled as federal stimulus projects.

There are bridges and parks all over Allegheny County with those WPA signs all over them, to the chagrin of local Republicans and the satisfaction of local Democrats.

We need bridges, highways, parks, and dams all over the country with big signs all over them saying something like “Federal Stimulus Project Administration, 2009.”

That, and not armies of the unemployed dressed up shamefully in stripes and looking like chain gangs along the nation's highways, is the sort of high visibility government involvement in useful public works that we need.

Or you can write them

Matthew Yglesias » Your Statement of Support on Health Care

Contacts via their websites are cheaper and likely faster than calls to the offices of the president, your senators, and your representative.

I just took Matt’s advice and, by no means for the first time, contacted my federal reps and the White House using online forms at their sites to provide the identical urging to each of them.

Dear [whomever],

This is to urge you to support health care reform with a public option aimed at insuring all Americans fully and at insignificant or even zero cost to the insured in premiums, copays, or coinsurances, depending on their ability to pay.

Necessary subsidies from the government can and should be raised through significant increases in income taxes on those making above $250K a year, including rollbacks of the Bush tax cuts and even the Reagan cuts for incomes that high.

These reforms are the most important matter facing the congress this year and, barring the unforeseen, will affect my vote at the next election more than any other single issue.

My federal congress people are:

Congressman Tim Murphy (R)
504 Washington Rd.
Pittsburgh, PA 15228

Senators:

Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D)
383 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Arlen Specter (D)
711 Hart Building
Washington, DC 20510

It took about 10 minutes, what with filling out the forms.

You might want to take the time.

Ask for the whole enchilada.

You might get a taco.

Green energy from . . . guess where?

Matthew Yglesias » Frum on Nuclear Socialism

I find it interesting that Matt is pro-nuke.

But also that he does not seize the moment to insist the only thing we can afford to have “too big to fail” is government.

This would have been a fine opportunity.

Still how liberals think? Or, at least, claim to think?

“As early as his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts.

“Three years later the Scopes 'monkey trial' confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority – the very worst tyranny of all.

“Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa.

“But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits – Hindi for ‘wise men,’ a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce – were the nation’s best defense against the terror of the mob.”

- Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm, Nation Books, pp 232-233.

Only really, really stupid people could honestly think the “tyranny of the majority” the “very worst tyranny of all.”

Especially among people who lived and thought through both world wars and much of the Cold War.

Told you so

The economy is doing swell for them.

So what the fuck is your problem, eh?

ThinkFast: November 6, 2009

From the fast thinker.

A new labor report this morning indicates 190,000 jobs were lost last month. Unemployment rose to 10.2 percent in October, the highest rate since April 1983 and “much higher than analysts expected.”

But the stock market is doing fine and GDP growth is positive so we definitely don’t need another stimulus package.

A jobs stimulus?

Even to suggest that is talking class war, you know!

Impervious to irony

Government health care rescues protesters at anti-government health care rally.

Or maybe they'r just exceptionally stupid.

By the end of the day, “medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care.”

One was saved from death by heart attack.

And you thought it was just “Christianists”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Government Funding is the Only Future for Jewish Day Schools

Then they need to dry up and blow away with the Christian Academies and parochial schools.

Any assistance to religious schools is assistance to religion and hence forbidden establishment.

It’s a tougher call for GI Bill money spent at colleges and universities.

Training for the ministry is certainly out.

But Harvard was founded as a seminary.

Can’t go there?

What they call, “Hardball”

The Right-Wing War on the AARP

An important fact about politics is that anyone can play.

From the brightest to the most stupid.

From the most decent to the most wicked.

From the most undeceived to the most wretchedly deluded.

From the most sane to the most loony.

And when people express disgust at the way it is played by the worst among us all the dirtiest bastards laugh and quote, “If you can’t stand the heat ,” and make jibes about “goo-goos.”

These guys did a Hell of a job on ACORN, and they would love to slaughter AARP.

Earth to David . . .

Wingnuts rush to conclusions about Fort Hood shooter -- but cousin says he was 'good American' harassed for being Muslim

David Neiwert writes

Hasan . . . had never previously been deployed to Iraq or anywhere overseas, for that matter.

So much for the theories he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Deployment in a war zone is far from the only origin of PTSD.

Recent graduates of military basic training, for example, are frequently diagnosed with this problem.

And there seems to be a pretty good chance that it was the Jihad, sort of.

I heard reports last night he was noted among his peers and superiors for vehement opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Too early to tell, though, really.

Also, last night I heard others were arrested with him.

What was that about?

Pennsylvania Hillbillies go to the Federal City

Astroturf In Action: Right-Wing Billionaire David Koch Pays For 40 Buses To Haul In Protesters

Those were real people inside the busses, I think.

25 busses from Pennsylvania, alone.

Senate bullshit

Coburn places hold on veterans benefits bill.

Would senate rules survive even a tiny part of the adverse publicity they deserve?

Groups are always taking polls to see how far people would support the Bill of Rights or other features of the Constitution.

Has anyone ever asked whether Americans would favor or oppose the existence of a legislative body in which half a million people from one part of the country would have as many voting representatives as 30 million people living in another?

Ten to one less than half the people asked would get the joke.

How many Americans who fall for conservative veneration of the Constitution are among the illiterate multitude who swear by the inerrancy of the Bible but have never read a word of it?

As well as the people who reject the Bill of Rights when they are individually read to them in a poll?