This is simply excellent. Love Cain’s stats. And Newt’s Deity.
(via TNC)
by John Cole| 66 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Humorous
This is simply excellent. Love Cain’s stats. And Newt’s Deity.
(via TNC)
This post is in: Excellent Links
I’m just going to outsource this to LGM.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 19 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
Here’s this week’s harvest of links:
* Southern Beale is always worth a read. Here’s a recent post about the bundling of subprime auto loans that’s a good example of the kinds of things covered at that blog.
* Jeff Fulmer has a post about what he thinks a Christian candidate would say, and it’s not quite the same as Rick Santorum, unsurprisingly. Jeff also has a book with similar themes at that link.
* Sai from the authoritative gayhomophobe.com is looking for examples of people who are:
– in a position of power
– supporting or promoting anti-gay agenda
– credibly outed (for “ex-gays”, that means outed *after* their supposed conversion)
You can contact him through his site, or send me what you have, I’d love to post on that topic.
Finally, not really a pimp, but commenter pragmatism sent this link to a Scientific American article about a study showing that most climate change deniers are white males. He recommends the comments.
My email is at the top right of the page. Send me what you want pimped and I’ll slip it into my post next Friday.
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Republican Venality, Vagina Outrage, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
__
The Washington Post blandly explains how Willard “worked to reassure liberals“:
Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws.
__
Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion.
__
He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely written about,” he said, according to detailed notes taken by an officer of the group, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts.
__
“You need someone like me in Washington,” several participants recalled Romney saying that day in September 2002, an apparent reference to his future ambitions.
__
Romney made similar assurances to activists for gay rights and the environment, according to people familiar with the discussions, both as a candidate for governor and then in the early days of his term.
__
The encounters with liberal advocates offer some revealing insights into the ever-evolving ideology of Romney, who as a presidential candidate now espouses the hard-line opposition to abortion that he seemed to disparage less than a decade ago….
As the MBAs tell each other: whatever it takes! Why can’t the rest of us peons understand that anything before the last quarterly reporting period can be declared ‘inoperative’ whenever necessary to pump earnings for the next quarterly report?
Major props to Dan Amira at NYMag‘s Daily Intel for highlighting an excellent Willard website in his brilliant post explaining how “Mitt Romney Claims He Is ‘As Consistent As Human Beings Can Be’”:
Keep in mind, this does not mean that Mitt Romney has never changed positions. He has — many, many times. It merely means that Romney has analyzed the human race and determined that, as a species, they are not capable of much consistency. And in an effort to mimic the human condition as closely as possible, it is that mediocre level of consistency that has been programmed into his software.
Click on the link, and explore: Which Mitt Are We Getting This Year?
Willard Romney Flunks Another Turing TestPost + Comments (50)
This post is in: #OWS, C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links
(Non Sequitor/Wiley Miller via GoComics.com)
“Tell people they are inferior, they are unlikely to be pleased, but this surprisingly rarely leads to armed revolt. Tell people that they are potential equals who have failed, and that therefore, even what they do have, they do not deserve, that it isn’t rightly theirs, and you are much more likely to inspire rage… For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors — of arguments about the rights & wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestoring of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery. By the same token, for the last five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records — tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place… ” — David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years
Via Ken Layne at Wonkette, Bloomberg Businessweek has an excellent profile of “the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street“:
… It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment. “We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt,” Graeber wrote in a Sept. 25 editorial published online by the Guardian. “Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?”
__
Graeber’s politics have been shaped by his experience in global justice protests over the years, but they are also fed by the other half of his life: his work as an anthropologist. Graeber’s latest book, published two months before the start of Occupy Wall Street, is entitled Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It is an alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling, erudite, provocative work. Looking at societies ranging from the West African Tiv people and ancient Sumer to Medieval Ireland and modern-day America, he explores the ambivalent attitudes people have always had about debt: as obligation and sin, engine of economic growth and tool of oppression. Along the way, he tries to answer questions such as why so many people over the course of history have simultaneously believed that it is a matter of morality to repay debts and that those who lend money for a living are evil.
__
Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy Wall Street protesters tends to cluster around two things. One is the influence of money in politics. The other is debt: mortgages, credit-card debt, student loans, and the difference in how the debts of large financial companies and those of individual borrowers have been treated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis…
Both links are well worth reading in full, and the Wonkette comments aren’t bad either. Sounds like Graeber’s book might be another good choice for the Balloon Juice Book Chat readers, too (it’s a pricey hardcover, but Amazon’s offering a pretty good discount right now).
“Surely One Has to Pay One’s Debts”: the Counter-ArgumentPost + Comments (38)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Republican Venality, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
__
Sometimes the headlines are almost enough. Almost. Via Charlie Pierce at Esquire, “In Which the Washington Post Pisses Off Krugman Again“:
On Sunday, The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now d/b/a Graham’s Chicken ‘n Waffles, published a “news analysis” on the state of the Social Security system that explained that it’s time for us seriously to consider “reforming” the system in such a way that it never again does what it was designed to do by that spendthrift bastard FDR, and in such a way that the financial-services sector of our economy can grab as much of that Social Security money as it can and then do as much for old people as the financial-services sector has done for real estate in Nevada…
… Dean Baker at the Center for Economic & Policy Research explains how the “Washington Post Discards All Journalistic Standards In Attack on Social Security“:
… This article also repeatedly refers to the debate over cutting benefits as being an “ideological battle.” There is no evidence presented in this piece that there is any ideological issue at stake. On the one hand are hundreds of millions of workers who want to see the benefits that they paid for. On the other hand are many wealthy people, exemplified by people like Peter Peterson and Erskine Bowles who would rather use Social Security money to keep their own taxes low or to serve other purposes.
__
This is a battle over who gets the money. The references to ideology just confuse the situation.
For truly scarey Halloween thrills, click the link and read Baker’s full dissection of the three-card-monte dishonesty of the busy, busy Kochsuckers. As the local tag does not quite phrase it, he guts these idiots so I don’t have to pretend to understand economics.
Social Security & the Reverse Robin HoodsPost + Comments (56)
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat
Quick pick-me-up Sunday post, now going wide in the pixelverse. Greg Sargent reports that “David Axelrod goes there: GOP may be trying to destroy economy on purpose“:
… As you know, Obama’s newly aggressive populism and (gasp) partisan rhetoric has sparked a good deal of handwringing and complaining from centrist columists (see Brooks, David) and leading GOP officials (see Ryan, Paul), who have been arguing that the new approach is somehow out of bounds or that it risks alienating the middle of the country. Axelrod’s amplification of the charge that the GOP may be tanking the economy on purpose suggests the Obama campaign isn’t taking these objections too seriously.
__
Indeed, it’s worth asking whether we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the thinking of the Obama team and some Dems — a basic recognition that the old rules don’t apply anymore, that the unprecedented tactics being employed by the opposition require a new kind of response. As Dana Milbank notes, you can see the evidence of this in the unapologetic populism driving Elizabeth Warren’s Senate candidacy, which suggests that “Democrats will no longer play by Marquess of Queensbury rules while their opponents disembowel them.”
__
But this may be about something broader than just a new approach to Republicans. The Occupy Wall Street protests; our political conversation’s intense new focus on inequality and economic justice; and the extraordinary levels of voter anxiety and dissatisafaction with our institutions all seem to suggest that the political landscape is shifting in ways we can’t really appreciate yet. It looks like the Obama campaign is placing its bet on what kind of political response these big changes are demanding.
More at the link. This is good news for Democrats — to hell with the “centrist” fetish for imaginary moderates in search of the perfectly tepid non-response; it’s only the One Percenters (and their deluded supporters among the Twenty-Seven Percenters) who believe “All Is for the Best, in This Best of All Possible Worlds” is a workable political philosophy.