I Take It These People Never Studied 19th Century Utopias In College

I got a one-two punch here:

Over on Salon.com, they got an article about Glenn Beck wanting to start an Ayn Rand inspired Utopia community.

Over on Balloon Juice, they got an article about the gun-worshiper crowd offering up a map of the proposed Citadel, a walled community of Second Amendment acolytes defending themselves from the imminent global apocalypse brought on by godless fascist commie libruls.  See below:

This looks like a beginner-level Dungeons & Dragons module from 1982.

(The quality of such a walled-in community is best left to the military experts.  But having just one route in or out through two gates is a major design flaw.  And a serious campaign using siege engines like trebuchets would make quick work of the walls and housing without even risking troop incursions... and we're talking using weaponry from the Middle Ages, peoples.  Like Patton said, fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.)

And for any of you regular readers, you kinda already know how I feel about Utopian thought: the absolute expression of an -ism ideology brought to the real world... where Utopias quickly fall apart from internal strife and mismanagement.

It does amaze me that there are yet another round of generations eager and willing to buy into this kind of Utopia business pitch (and there is money involved here.  Why not?  Libertarianism is all about the free market).  Part of it may well be that most of my fellow Americans pursuing these libertarian communities simply don't remember their American history, or that our schoolbooks no longer devote a chapter to the attempts like New Harmony and Oneida and Fruitlands to build a "model community".

It doesn't amaze me that there seem to be enough Americans willing to buy into these communities out of what looks like cultural fear.  There's been that fear brewing for ages, brought to the fore with having Obama in the White House, and it's gotten to the point where such communities are openly promoted on the national stage.  From where I stand, this is an unfounded fear: there is no Apocalypse or Armageddon approaching, there are no invading hordes charging across the oceans. 

Look, a lot of the anger stirred up against Obama are from partisan media hacks paid to stir up trouble.  Always talking about the current President as ZOMG WORST PREZ EVER.  Which is what they've been saying since the days of George Washington for God's sake (yes, even he got demonized by the masses during his two terms).  A lot of this anger from the Far Right?  I heard a lot of this sh-t back during Bill Clinton's tenure.  Guess what?  Nation's still here.  There was a lot of wailing and pulling of hair from the Far Left (and then the centrist Left, and then about 60 percent of the nation) during Bush the Lesser's tenure about him being the WORST EVER.  Guess what?  Nation's still here.  Every President - even James Monroe, the only other guy than Washington to run unopposed - gets demonized by the opposition: it all depends on how accurate they truly are.  Do you think ANY of these wingnutters are going to feel sheepish about how they've been behaving these years when Obama finishes out his term and exits in 2016 with the United States of America still here?  I doubt it...

Back to the planned Citadel and GlennBeckistan communities.  If you're seriously intent on throwing in your money on these communities, just remember: they've tried this already with something called Future Cities Development and they filed for bankruptcy in 2012.  There's a list of attempts on the Economist's website as well, and none of them ended with smiles and sunshine.  Caveat emptor, people (it's Latin for "suckers").

The Only Miracle I Want Today

A certain Rage Merchant is marching on D.C. today in mockery of a Real American's stirring call to action.  I refuse to link otherwise to anything about today's hatefest.

The S.O.B. hosting this travesty is claiming a Miracle will occur today.  Unless that miracle involves God turning Glenn Beck into a pillar of salt, I won't be impressed.

Breitbart Delendus Est.

Counting the Lies

"The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might" - Mark Twain

There was another quote - "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" - but the attribution there isn't really to Mark Twain.  So there.

Spotted this on Hullabaloo, with Digby referring it from another blogger at Oz and Ends:

...To keep on top of urban myths of all kinds, I subscribe to the Snopes.com update list, and I noticed a pattern there that I thought deserved to be examined more arithmetically. It struck me I was seeing a lot more rumors about President Obama, and a lot more false rumors, than I remembered from earlier years. So I ran the numbers, as of this week. After eight years in the White House (with Snopes.com around all that time), George W. Bush has been the subject of 47 internet rumors. After less than two years in office, Barack Obama has been the subject of 87, or nearly twice as many.  Even more telling is the relative accuracy of those stories. For Bush, 20 rumors, or 43%, are true. Only 17, or 36%, are false. The remainder are of mixed veracity (4), undetermined (4), or unclassifiable (2).  In contrast, for Obama only 8 of the 87 rumors, or 9%, are true, and a whopping 59, or 68%, are whoppers. There are 16 of mixed veracity and 3 undetermined...
...This evidence accumulated over ten years shows a shameful but undeniable fact of American politics: our right wing now contains a lot more liars, and a lot more folks who spread lies out of gullibility or wishfulness, than our left wing...

This shouldn't be much of a shock.  And it's not much of a shock because it's been pretty obvious the last 10, scratch that the last 20 years the media has NOT been held accountable for poor journalism.  Almost no fact-checking.  And worst of all, clearly no desire to punish those they KEEP INVITING ONTO THEIR TALK SHOWS AND EDITORIAL PAGES when evidence has shown again and again those 'commentators' are really LIARS.

Because no one - not the talking heads in the media (and I am pointing the finger at you Rush and Glen and the rest of your buddies), not the politicians, not the business leaders, not anyone - gets held accountable for their slander and defamation and bullsh-t.

The First Amendment SHOULD NOT and DOES NOT defend the right to lie.  Lies destroy and distort.  Lies prevent people from being properly informed and educated.  Lies keep us from doing our jobs as best we could because without informed instruction we're going to screw up.  Lies kill.

We need to get back to punishing liars again.  We need to see more defamation and slander and libel cases in the courts.  We need a new law that directly holds elected officials and government workers at all levels whenever they attempt to make any distorted statement or outright lie.  The rest should attend to itself.

I Keep Humming "The Final Countdown"

After years, after months, after so many God-Help-Us moments, it might be over.

We might get a half-baked Health Care Reform bill by the end of tonight.

Yes, the bill won't be perfect.  It's not going to be like any of the other universal health care programs other capitalist nations provide.  But it's a start, it has a few saving graces to it, and other things to make health care better can get added to it later once the Far Right b-llsh-t gets proven wrong.

And maybe now we can get Obama and the Congress to focus on what really matters: GETTING ME A JOB DAMMIT!

Observations from the 2009 Off-Cycle Elections

By off-cycle I mean the national-level 2-year cycle of Congressional elections/4-year cycle of Presidential elections. Anything going on here will be either state and local elections of import (Governorships of Virginia and New Jersey), special ballot initiatives (gay marriage in Maine and Washington State), or special Congressional elections to fill seat vacancies (New York and California).
There was especially some crazy stuff involving NY-23, so this year was more special than most. So let's head to the observations (I will come back later to edit in links, I'm currently juggling between this and my A+ class studies):

1) Every other pundit or blogger pontificating about the results - other than ME - will get the results completely WRONG. Heh.

2) The real consequence of these elections for Governor and/or Congress isn't about who's in the White House: it's about the actual candidates and how the state and voting districts liked/hated them.

3) The result in Virginia - Republican beating Democrat - wasn't about Obama: it was about the fact that the Democrat ran a mis-managed campaign from the get-go and that Virginia is one of those borderline states that shifts regularly between Republican and Democrat.

4) The result in New Jersey - Republican challenger overthrowing incumbent Democrat - wasn't about Obama: it was about how unliked the incumbent was. That the race itself came down to the wire - before the results came in with a solid victory for the Republican - was due to the fact the Republican was swimming upstream against a lot of anti-GOP sentiment and personal issues of his own.
In fact, there was polling for the VA and NJ elections where the exit polls specifically asked "Was Obama part of your decision-making on your vote?" Solid majorities in both states said Obama wasn't a consideration. So how do those results honestly reflect on Obama? Answer: they don't. It's just the Far Right wants to attack Obama on EVERYTHING so every GOP victory is a referendum that VOTERS HATE OBAMA and every GOP defeat is a referendum that VOTERS ARE REALLY CONSERVATIVE EVEN THOUGH THEY VOTED AGAINST US, OH AND THEY HATE OBAMA. /Headthump

5) The result in New York - A Democrat narrowly winning in a district/region that hadn't gone Democrat since the Grant administration! - was about Obama only as far as the outside agitators who hijacked the election from the established GOP candidate wanted it to be. Oh, but it's still about the VOTERS HATING OBAMA. /Headthump

6) Once again, a moderate Republican candidate stepped up to represent in a state/region where moderates are key to victory, only to have the Far Right Wingnuts from outside charge in, disrupt everything with their own extremist choice, and end up tossing the district/state to the Democrats. The Kos guy just sent the Club for Greed a big "Thank You" card.
And for some Godforsaken reason, the Far Right still thinks this is GOOD FOR REPUBLICANS to have their representation drop to levels that will make the party an ineffective minority party for now and the forseeable future. At what point will the Republican leadership look around and say "Hey? Club for Greed? STOP KNEE-CAPPING US! Our whole party is now small enough to fit in a Denny's banquet room!"

7) The Bucs unofficially have the first overall draft pick for next April, and they REALLY need to look at the BEST AVAILABLE DT coming out of college. I mean, sign him up in February for God's sake... oh wait, that's my football observation, my bad...

8) The gay marriage state referenda mostly split, with Maine narrowly shooting it down but Washington State passing their gay rights (everything up to marriage rights) package. Thing is, sooner rather than later this is gonna get to be a moot point... gays will get the right to marry. All it takes is keeping the pressure up, and recognizing the fact that the opposition to gay rights is a overly paranoid, overly selective reading of the Old Testament that won't stand up to scrutiny (ask the anti-gay people if they uphold EVERYTHING in Leviticus or anything else deemed Abomination in the Bible, and I guarantee you half of them won't even answer you).

9) What does this all mean? I'm going go against Conventional Wisdom of the Beltway and say it's ALL GOOD FOR OBAMA! IT'S ALWAYS GOOD FOR OBAMA! What? It can't be GOOD FOR REPUBLICANS all the time...