Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

This fight is for everything.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

“They all knew.”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

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Archives for 2009

Kicking It Up a Notch

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We’ve joked that the right-wing loves to play the victim, but our lady of perpetual outrage has kicked it up a notch and is now engaging in what can only be described as preemptive victimhood:

“Get ready for the anti-Tea Party sabotage and smear campaign”

For the next 9 days, the left-wing blogosphere and left-wing clueless pundits will hammer away with their unreality-based Tea Party smears.

And on the ground, the tax-subsidized and Soros-subsidized troops are going to try and wreak havoc every way they can. Many readers and fellow bloggers have seen signs that ACORN may send in ringers and saboteurs to usurp the anti-tax, anti-reckless spending, anti-bailout message.

ACORN and Soros plotting to usurp the anti-tax message. All you can do is laugh.

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Too Little Too Late?

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I’m not sure how many of you follow Krugman on his blog, but I try to keep up with him. It isn’t that he posts too frequently, but that much of what he posts are things that I just don’t understand. I read it, and I read it again, and I google, and then I think I have an idea what it means, and then I see someone completely contradict it and I give up. I get as much out of the “wonk” posts as Tunch would if I were to read Shakespeare to him.

I do, however, understand (for the most part) graphs:

That is from a series of arguments stating that the world economy is as bad or worse than it was during the Great Depression. At any rate, it looks like other nations are embracing stimulus:

Japan’s central bank presented new steps to encourage lending and its counterpart in Australia cut its benchmark interest rate to the lowest level in nearly half a century Tuesday, highlighting concerns that the global economy remains in dire straits despite signs of a pickup in China and elsewhere.

Japan, in particular, is in a recession that economists say could be the worst since World War II, and both the government and the central bank have repeatedly stepped up their economy-bolstering efforts as the extent of the downturn has become clearer.

I keep reading optimistic reports that we have “turned the corner” or “hit bottom,” but is that really the case? I know that unemployment is a lagging indicator, but could we really be near the bottom?

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More On the Torture

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We tortured. You can not read this report (warning- .pdf) and tell me it was just “enhanced interrogation techniques.” This was not, as Rumsfeld asserted, akin to standing at a desk all day long.

We tortured these people, and who knows what else we have done. The details need to come out, and there need to be prosecutions. This was not a few bad apples at Abu Gharaib. This was systemic torture, and it goes to the highest levels of our government.

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Morality

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David Brooks has another of his patented “science explains social things but I won’t tell you how or cite any actual articles” pieces today. This one is about the “science of morality.” It’s hard for me to read neocons talk about morality without thinking about torture. Brooks:

Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

[….]

It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Oh, the morality of those religions and traditions (from Steve Waldman via Sully)!

When George W. Bush was running for President, Christians hoped that having a devout man in the White House would lead to more a more moral government.. traditions and religions!

[….]

But Bush wasn’t the most interesting test of the theory. Though his faith was important to him, it never had nearly the depth of another member of the team — John Ashcroft…

[….]

In Never Again, his book about his years as Attorney General, Ashcroft doesn’t mention torture or “enhanced interrogation” at all. He doesn’t ackowledge wrestling with the ethical issues, even by way of justifying the decisions. The closest he comes is a phrase defending the right to “ask probing questions” of suspected terrorist detainees.

On one of the greatest moral questions of the administration — and arguably one of the greatest challenges to Christian ethics of the last decade — he has nothing to say.


And thank God for cooperation as well.

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded.

I hope I don’t sound hysterical here, but hearing a war-supporter who has been silent about torture tell the world it’s wonder how morality works is just a bit too much for me this morning.

Update. It took me a while to understand what Brooks was driving at here, but I think I get it now: it’s a defense of doing as you’re told, of not questioning things, of living the life of the “Organization Kid“, to use of his own phrases. It’s a message that runs through all his works from the “shut up and drive your Audi” message of “Bobos in Paradise” to the “shut up and eat at Applebee’s” message of “On Paradise Drive.”

When I lived in Athens, Georgia, the excellent free weekly The Flagpole did an article contrasting the Brooks “Organization Kid” piece with some book that had a title like “How To Get Through College”, which gave advice on things like how to avoid doing laundry, how to show up for class hung-over, and so on. I still remember how it closed: “The student who has read `How To Get Through College’ may stagger when he walks, but at least he doesn’t goosestep.”

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Some Good News

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I don’t know if any of you have ever gone through this, but I went through a nasty health scare the past week or so. I had had a sore throat for about the past two -three weeks, and it would go away, come back, go away, etc., so finally last week I went to the doctor to get it checked out. I had no fever, just flu symptoms and a recurring sore throat.

At any rate, while there, my doctor mumbled something about leukoplakia over a molar, and as a former smoker, that sent me into near panic (for obvious reasons), and then after a battery of tests confirmed I did not have strep or mono or anything else, it was off to the CT scan. I’m not exaggerating when I state that the past week, until I got the results, has been one of near constant cancer panic. Maybe it was silly and I shouldn’t have been concerned, but I think all former smokers know what I am saying in that we all are waiting for the axe to fall at any given moment.

At any rate, I got the call a little bit ago, and I am clean. Today is a good day.

BTW, this is sort of related, but have any of you been reading the weekly Dana Jennings pieces at the NY Times? When people talk about the arrogance of newspapers and almost sneeringly want the papers to fail, I think of stuff like this and the NY Times magazine and all the good work they do and wonder if maybe people just don’t appreciate how good some of our newspapers really are.

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