Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You cannot shame the shameless.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

People are complicated. Love is not.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

So many bastards, so little time.

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Archives for January 2005

The War on Your Neighbor

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Mark Kleiman discusses the idiocy that passes as thought at the NY Times regarding the use of hallucinogens in research, and it occurred to me how truly wrong all of our nation’s conventional wisdom is regarding drugs. It appears that almost everything we think, do, or fear regarding drugs is just ass-backwards, and we owe this to the hysterical drug policies our elected leaders have foisted on us over the last eighty years.

If you ask me, one of the greatest failings of the Bush adninistration has been the continuation of an untenable War on Drugs, to include the disgusting (and illegal) agitprop that you and I are funding. if you look at it, nearly everything our government has done about drugs has been wrong:

– Banning or making nearly impossible medicinal use of drugs.

– Banning or making nearly impossible research with the use of drugs.

– Lying about the outcomes of drug use and drug experimentation, which has the reverse effect of what is intended. Rather than scaring off users, it mythologizes drugs, perhaps increasing first time use through curiosity.

– Creating the incentive to spread the sale of drugs by cacking down harshly on supply, rather than focussing on demand. QUick- what happens when supplies are limited, and demand remains the same? If you say people just quit doing drugs, you are as dumb as Nelson Rockefeller.

– Imposing absurdly harsh criminal sentences on addicts and low-level suppliers, clogging jails and creating a professional criminal class. No one comes out of jail a better person, but lots of drug offenders come out of prison with a new set of criminal skills.

– Failing to spend even close to adequate funds on rehabilitation.

– Stigmatizing addicts as criminals rather than as people with a medically recognized disease.

And that is what I can think of off the top of my head- Mark can probably come up with much, much more. I recomend you peruse his writings on drug policy (which needs to be updated, Mark).

The “drug warriors” are wrong, have been wrong for years, yet they continue to dominate the policy debate and the policy design and implementation. This needs to change, or the cycle will just continue. And I say this as someone who has a heroin addict (who almost died twice) as a member of my family.

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The Daily Dump

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Andy’s idiocies are coming so fast and so consistent I may have to make up a new category for him. At any rate, check out this whopper:

Jonah Goldberg notes that Martin Luther King Jr III (unlike his mother, Coretta) hasn’t endorsed equality in civil marriage. Jonah cracks: “I guess he’s a bigot.” What King actually said was: “I think we need to find a way to honor partnerships, but I don’t think that marriage needs to be redefined.” I don’t know anyone who would describe that position – which is John Kerry’s – as a bigot.

Umm. You would, jackass, as you have consistently called Bush a bigot since he voiced tepid support for the FMA. Let’s work through things here so we understand what happened.

Bush has always been on record stating that marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman. No problem- the majority of the country agrees with that, and it has been codified into law through DOMA during the Clinton years. Bush is also not against civil unions, which would confer legal rights to homosexuals. However, this would be decided by the state.

So what happened? The great gay over-reach of 2004. Gavin Newsom happened. The Massachussetts Supreme Court happened. Bush’s position on gay marriage did not change ONE IOTA. What changed were that activist homosexuals attempted to use the courts and extra-legal measures, to do what:

REDEFINE MARRIAGE.

Bush then showed tepid support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which, depsite your rhetoric, would not have banned civil unions, but would have banned gay marriage, preserving marriage for HOW IT WAS BEFORE THE NEWSOM/MASS ASSAULT.

Bush reacted, and maintained the position he has always had, and you over-reacted and called him a bigot. And that is the way that it was.

BTW- I say this as someone who really is rather progressively oriented on this issue. I vacillate between not being able to understand why homosexuals have to have the word marriage when what is important are the legal rights and not giving two hoots in hell how marriage is defined. If you guys would quit trying to change things overnight, and quit villifying everyone who doesn’t have a pink tirangle on his Prius, you might have a little more luck.

For some reason, the hard core gay activists are under the belief that in your face tactics are the way to acceptance. This is utterly absurd, as the path to acceptance is whenpeople learn their best friend is gay, their neighbor whom they have been friends with is gay, their uncle or aunt is gay. And you know what? Most people are at that level of acceptance- even in those whacky red states.

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It’s Just a Flesh Wound

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What’s Ailing CBS News? Let’s Make a Not-So-Little List

Van Gordon Sauter- Van Gordon Sauter was president of CBS News in the early 1980s and until recently was chairman of the California Boxing Commission.

What’s the big problem at CBS News?

Well, for one thing, it has no credibility. And no audience, no morale, no long-term emblematic anchorperson and no cohesive management structure. Outside of those annoyances, it shouldn’t be that hard to fix.

Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News, even though I was unceremoniously shown to the door there nearly 20 years ago in a tumultuous change of corporate management.

But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. I still check in, but less and less frequently. I increasingly drift to NBC News and Fox and MSNBC.

This week, when CBS News announced that four employees would lose their jobs in connection with the George Bush National Guard story, I was struck by how the network had become representative of a far larger, far more troubling problem: A large swath of the society doesn’t trust the news media. And for many, it’s even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society…

For CBS News, the only path back to anything near first place will require a compass setting based in objectivity and quality.

Or it can sulk and feel victimized and drift even further into a partisan milieu with an even smaller but highly dedicated audience.

I’d bet on the former. The stockholders bought into broadcasting. Not narrowcasting. The market will prevail.

Ouch. (via Ipse Dixit)

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Social Security

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If you have noticed, I have not written about social security reform, and there is a reason for this- I don’t care, really. I think there is nothing wrong with me investing in personal funds, but if not, I am willing to accept that I may or may not see a return on my money if social security is kept as it is.

After all, it is only 6.5% (or whatever the number is) of my income. I am more concerned with the other 30%-50% of my income the government is pissing down a hole. Once you get past my knee-jerk opposition to government programs such as this, the whole topic of social security just makes my eyes glaze over.

It does moderately piss me off that we pretend every now and then to have balanced budgetsm when in fact we are ripping off several hundred billion in social security receipts. I am getting sleepy.

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The Daily Dump

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Andy engages in some recreational Bush bashing, swings, and hits himself in the face:

This quote might help clear up some misunderstandings about president Bush. It certainly helped me see the world as he sees it. For Bush, accountability in government is a total, once-every-four-years thing. Individual mis-steps or mistakes are not subject to accountability – whether in war-planning or fiscal matters or anything else. When someone fucks up, the most important thing is to extend loyalty, not reprimand. There’s only one moment of accountability for a president and that’s the election, which encompasses everything the president and anyone in his administration have done. So re-election logically means that the public waives its right to hold any individual in government accountable for anything for the next four years:

Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.

So our job as people not in the administration is now to sit back and hope for the best. We had our chance. We lost. As Mel Brooks almost observed, it’s good to be the president.

First, let’s provide the context for the quote, as the President was asked the folowing:

In Iraq, there’s been a steady stream of surprises. We weren’t welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn’t gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

To which he responded with the quote provided by Coy Andy. Not satisfied, hawkish Andy wants blood. Why weren’t people fired? Why were there no demotions? And off goes our fearless pundit into some babble about loyalty. This ties in with Sullivan’s meta-narrative about the Bush presidency, with a cabal of neo-cons who have won over the President, and with the emphasis on loyalty for theprivileged few rather than performance and fairness and acountability under the law.

Except, as always, Andy truncated the damn quote, eliminating the response to the question Andy is now demagoguing. Bush’s quote continues:

Listen, in times of war, things don’t go exactly as planned. Some were saying there was no way that Saddam Hussein would be toppled as quickly as we toppled him. Some were saying there would be mass refugee flows and starvation, which didn’t happen. My only point is, is that, on a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad.

Bush believed the intelligence. Kerry believed the intelligence, and we all believed the intelligence. That is why we went to war. Bush is working to fix the CIA (with, guess what- demotions and firing taking place daily, much to the horror of Mr. Sullivan). However, Bush does not believe that the people who acted with good faith deserve to be thrown overboard, and I would agree.

As far as Sullivan’s mocking Bush’s perception of the election as an ‘accountability moment,’ once again, the joke is on Andy. Incumbent Presidents do run on their record, which is why two-term Presidents are such an exclusive group. In fat, this is the entire purpose of voters guides, it is why no Senator has been elected since Kennedy- their record has served as a noose. Should the people determine that the President has not performed to their liking, they do not re-elect them, and this is not unheard of in modern times. I am sure Andrew is familiar with President’s Ford, Carter, and Bush 1.

Second, it is clear that Bush has a much firmer grasp on the concept of representative Democracy than Andy does. Has Andy ever wondered why the Senate is a 6 year term, the President is a 4 year term, and the House a 2 year term? Initially, there was a great debate over the length of the President’s term, with 4 years, 7 years, and 11 years suggested. At one point, the President was to be elected by Congress to a term of seven years.

The founders were very concerned about a tyrannical executive, and ultimately decided that one man should serve as President for four year terms, thus mking it easier for congress to keep check on his power. Once again, Bush has it right. Accountability of the President is limited to the elections and the oversight of Congress, who has the power to impeach and remove the President.

I guess they just don’t teach that in her majesty’s private schools.

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King’s Legacy

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I wonder how MLK, an advocate of nonviolence, would feel about being used as a political weapon every year:

In his first high-profile address since conceding the presidential election, Senator John F. Kerry used Boston’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. memorial breakfast yesterday to decry what he called the suppression of thousands of would-be voters last November.

“Thousands of people were suppressed in their efforts to vote. Voting machines were distributed in uneven ways,” the former Democratic nominee told an enthusiastic audience of 1,200 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston.

“In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, 11 hours to vote, while Republicans [went] through in 10 minutes. Same voting machines, same process, our America,” Kerry said.

In an e-mail message he sent to his supporters on the day before Congress certified the election results earlier this month, Kerry cited “widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials, and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote” in the battleground state of Ohio.

But he also said his legal team had found no evidence that would alter the outcome. President Bush defeated Kerry in Ohio by 119,000 votes.

No mention of who ran the elections in the Republican and Democratic districts. No mention of the massive increase in voting and registration (up 25% in some key counties in Ohio). Demagoguery doesn’t need facts- it just needs a subvservient press and a willing audience.

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The New ‘New’ Plan to End Poverty

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The UN has released a ‘new bold and sweeping’ plan to reduce poverty. Predictably, political and social reform are completely avoided in the document. What, then, is the plan?

The report says drastically reducing poverty in its many guises – hunger, illiteracy, disease – is “utterly affordable.” To fulfill this goal, industrial nations would need to double aid to poor countries, to one-half of 1 percent of national incomes, from one-quarter of 1 percent.

In short, more handouts and bully tactics for the countries who are doing everything right. Clearly, the way to help the poor is to give them money, which lifts them out of poverty, until they spend the money. At which time they are poor again and another UN report is released.

This is, of course, assuming that the money we give does not end up in the pockets of Kofi Annan’s son.

Also note the cashing in on the recent disaster in Indonesia, India, Thailand, etc.:

The worldwide outpouring of grief and aid since the tsunami in South Asia killed more than 150,000 people has stirred hope here that the same wellspring can be tapped for what Professor Sachs called a “silent tsunami” of global poverty that kills more than 150,000 children every month from malaria alone.

Grotesque.

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