Performative Stupidity

Dear Americans, when you elect Republican clowns (via Chris Marquette and Kyle Cheney at Politico)...

In a quest to frame former special counsel Jack Smith as a liar during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Schmitt asked him if he was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, for an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks — amid mounting drama around the Atlanta-based criminal investigation into Donald Trump led by prosecutor Fani Willis.

The esteemed Senator from Missouri was eager and desperate to catch a prominent opponent of donald "Break All Laws" trump in a lie so he could accuse Smith of perjury, and claim another scalp for the Great Far Right Cause that he could parade around the Fox Not-News talk shows.

Thing is, Schmitt and his own staff never paid attention to the details, or did any actual fucking research.

Smith clarified that he didn’t go to that game. But he did go to a different one on the same day: He was in College Park, Md. to see the Maryland Terrapins women’s basketball team play the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by phenom Caitlin Clark, who dropped 38 points that night in a win over the Terps.

It appeared that Schmitt misinterpreted a text message reference to the “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who discussed reserving a seat for Smith in the front row.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” the Missouri Republican asked, intimating that he was about to get Smith to perjure himself.

Schmitt tried to connect the NBA game Smith did not attend in Atlanta to Feb. 2, 2024 — the date Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who was investigating Trump, acknowledged a personal relationship with another prosecutor on her team...

You might recall that Fulton County prosecution went down in flames due to Willis' ill-advised relationship, which was painful considering she and her office did present a lot of damning evidence trump and his allies were attempting to criminally undermine the 2020 election results.

This is due to trump - and the Republicans pandering to trump's delusions - trying to rewrite all of reality by accusing everyone else of being in on conspiracies against him when they uncover real-world evidence of trump's criminal misdeeds. There is one huge ongoing revenge plot on trump's side of things... which isn't working out because trump's lies can't fit the facts as David A. Graham at the Atlantic points out:

When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not...

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it.

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them...

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes...

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post...

...The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Actually David, it's because trump can never admit he lost at anything, so...

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

In order for trump to be a winner in 2020, there had to be a massive conspiracy against him. But like the fantasies trump pushed that he was "a victim" of Democratic schemes in 2016 when he lost the popular vote and suffered an investigation into his corrupt ties to Russia, none of trump's false narratives can hold up to the scrutiny of a courtroom where facts matter. trump tried this attack back then, and his lackeys like John Durham failed to prove a conspiracy then just as they're failing today.

And yet, they need to keep pursuing these false leads to maintain the lie that it's the Democrats who are cheating bastards, not trump or the Republicans (who are). They're going to keep doing this performative bullshit until they get their scalps for display at the next CPAC rally, even as they burn everything down to get there.

Yet another reason to vote these useless Republicans out of office. Americans, please see this stupidity for what it is and get rid of it.

Eighty Sixing Forty Seven

There are several constants in the known universe. One of them is that donald trump will not stop his bullying ways to avenge even the slightest injury to his raging fear/hate.

I noted last November how trump's "Revenge Tour" - attacking everyone who exposed his ties to Russia, investigated that nation's likely involvement in the 2016 election fiasco, or refused to do his bidding to go after his perceived enemies that first go-around - was falling apart because the facts of the universe did not fit trump's fantasies of being the victim/hero. Those legal failures by his puppeteer-ed Justice Department ended up costing lackey Pam Bondi her job as Attorney General, setting up a replacement AG to do trump's dirty work pursuing vengeance on even flimsier evidence.

Which led to this past week's act of injustice when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed charges against former FBI Director James Comey (again) on the pretext that Comey threatened trump's life by sharing a photo of seashells on the seashore (more details from Ryan J. Reilly, Monica Alba, Gary Grumbach and Michael Kosnar at NBC News):

The two-count indictment, posted Tuesday afternoon, alleges that a reasonable person would interpret the image of the shells, arranged to spell out “86 47,” as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

Justice Department attorneys sought the indictment in the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Comey has a beach house and where he posted the beach scene photo. The Department of Homeland Security previously investigated Comey, who has long been a Trump target, over the May Instagram post, even subjecting him to questioning by the Secret Service.

Comey had deleted the post, saying it never occurred to him that it would be interpreted as being violent. "Eighty-six" is a term commonly used in restaurants when an item is sold out, and it's also informally used to mean "cancel" or "get rid of."

In a subsequent Instagram post in May, Comey said that he assumed the shells he saw on a beach walk were "a political message" and that he "didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence," adding that he opposed violence "of any kind."

Comey said in a video posted after his indictment that he was innocent, that he was not afraid and that he still believed in the independent judiciary.

"They're back," he said of the Trump administration. "This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won't be the end of it."

By the by, should we count the number of times donald trump threatened violence or wished harm on other sitting presidents like Obama or Biden? In those instances, he openly directly called for violence. trump never got charged by the Justice Department for that. All Comey did was flash a photo of "86 47", and trump's lackeys are having fainting spells across the Sunday talk shows.

The hypocrisy of this reeks.

It's also pulling what's called The Streisand Effect: By drawing attention to a minor, almost ridiculous matter, trump has instead exploded interest and willingness by a lot of other Americans and protestors to use "86 47" as a vocal protest against him.

Sales of "86 47" merch are expanding.

The actual legality of what Blanche and the rest of trump's enforcers are attempting is up for debate. It's just that a good number of experts are pointing out how stupid it all is (via Matthew Chapman at Raw Story):

Former FBI Director James Comey's indictment for supposedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump is completely ridiculous, said former FBI official and counterintelligence specialist Michael Feinberg on MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" Tuesday.

"I mean, again, [former Congressman] Matt Gaetz posted, 'We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy McDaniel McConnell; Better days are ahead...'" said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "Is there any reasonable interpretation that Matt Gaetz meant we'd killed them? I mean, is this — is this in law enforcement, an accepted phrase that is associated with threats of death?"

"No," said Feinberg. "I actually first learned the phrase when I was working the door at a bar in Chicago shortly after I graduated college, where we would use it to refer to ejecting unruly customers. So when I saw Jim Comey's post on Instagram from last year, I simply assumed it was a reference to removing the president from office."

"It is a very large leap to claim that that is a threat of violence," said Feinberg. "And because of that, I don't want the phrasing I'm about to use to make light of how malevolent and destructive of constitutional norms this Justice Department is being with this indictment. But this is the single dumbest charging decision I have ever seen in my entire law enforcement career, or in my even longer career as an attorney. This is the definition of bad faith."

The indictment isn't even likely to result in a conviction - the case is that weak - but it demonstrates trump's willingness to harass and harm his "enemies" in spite of reality (via Steve Benen at Maddow Blog):

When Comey, a lifelong Republican, went public with his concerns and criticisms about Trump, the president came to see the ousted FBI chief as one of his most important enemies, and in April 2018 he started demanding that Comey be prosecuted for crimes that Trump struggled to identify.

It took several years, but the president is seeing the results he’s long sought.

Months after Trump’s Justice Department brought absurd criminal charges against the former FBI director, in a case that ultimately collapsed, prosecutors secured a second indictment against Comey this week, claiming that he used Instagram to call for violence against Trump by way of a seashell-related code.

Though the case is rooted in an indictment of Comey, it’s actually more of an indictment of a weaponized DOJ. Legal experts are reportedly “shell-shocked” over how preposterous the case is, and for good reason: No fair-minded observer could defend or take seriously such spurious charges.

This isn't about justice, or securing the safety of a sitting president occupant of the Oval Office. This is about trump using the executive branch of government to humiliate and harass anyone who ever crossed him.

A case like this should never have gotten through a grand jury. It shouldn't stand before any judge who should see this as a legitimate witch hunt - pushed and prodded by a guy who screamed about all his criminal and civil cases being 'witch hunts' - for political (and stupid) reasons.

Every DOJ lawyer from Blanche on down involved in this farce deserve to get sanctioned and disbarred for this, along with a hundred other illegal acts trump's gotten them to commit against our nation. This is "sandwich guy getting charged with assault" levels of stupid that Justice lawyers are committing here, and it's going to end with the same (acquitted) results.

In a sane world, trump's campaign of legal terror would lead to impeachment and criminal charges.

Goddamn the Far Right partisan bastards in the Supreme Court and a broken Congress who are protecting trump from the justice he's deserved for decades.

We need to get rid of trump. Get him out of power he's clearly abusing for his own greed and rage. Flush him down the toilet like the shitgibbon he is, the way you're supposed to when you 86 something (that's how my fellow middle schoolers used the phrase back in the day).

Am I going to get criminally charged for blogging that he needs to get flushed down a toilet? Try me, motherfuckers. There's at least 60 percent of fellow Americans you're going to have to prosecute alongside me.

The Stupidity Plus Racism Plus Fearmongering Divided By Republicans, It All Adds Up In Florida

I am waking up to THIS STUPIDITY from my state's Department of Education:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

Yes, our Republican-controlled state government led by Uber-Panderer DeSantis is going after Critical Race Theory again, even WITHOUT evidence that CRT was getting taught in our primary schools in the first.

And the Republicans are so afraid of CRT, so afraid of white students learning about how systemic racism has been throughout our history at the national and state levels, that these wise learned assholes are going after MATHEMATICS as though Florida's pre-Algebra classes are full of race theory.

...

Yes. Republicans are going after MATH now.

You know, I'm 50-something now, it's been ages since I studied mathematics, but I'm pretty sure when I took Algebra I in the Ninth Grade at Tarpon Springs High that there was no racism being discussed in the class.

I mean, I can recall we studied stuff like 2x + 3y = z, or the emphasis on parenthesis in equations, and I vaguely recall word problems like "If Monique goes shopping and finds that cereal boxes of Lucky Charms are selling two for $4.00, how much would it cost if Monique buys 9 boxes of Lucky Charms?" At some point we learned IF = THEN calculations for variables, and then we learned about fractions and percentages, but we NEVER learned about the Rosewood Massacre and its effects on early 20th Century population trends in our state, and we never learned about the economic effects of Redlining and the Ghetto as Financial Policy.

These Far Right wingnut Republicans are so intent on finding "reverse racism" or anything that would make White folk uncomfortable about the long tragic reality of systemic racism in our nation's existence that they will wipe out entire sections of learning to root out such fears.

DeSantis and his lackeys will be going after Biology (because God trump forbid Darwinian Evolution will make religious White folk worry they evolved from apes) and Physics (because God trump forbid learning about potential and kinetic energies might teach kids about passive political resistance used in Black Lives Matters protests) next. Maybe after Chemistry (because trump forbid that our kids learn about mixing things like interracial dates) as well. 

The stupidity of all this is excuse for Florida Republicans to degrade and demolish enough of our public education system to where our public schools are broken, useless, and incapable of preparing our children to higher education or well-paid jobs that require actual learned skills.

The madness of all this is that too many of my fellow state residents aren't paying attention to how Republicans are driving this state right over the cliffs and into the sharp pointy rocks below.

If only there was a mathematical equation that would explain the damage that happens when our entire state crashes into those rocks.

Bleach on the trumpian Brain

I knew going into all this that donald trump would be the most ignorant, ill-informed President Loser of the Popular Vote since Andrew Johnson, but I never imagined it would be THIS bad. Via Aaron Rupar at Vox:

At the briefing, William Bryan, undersecretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), discussed preliminary government research indicating that “heat and humidity suppress Covid-19” and “commonly available disinfectants work to kill the virus.”

After Bryan’s presentation, Trump took to the podium and made a deeply bizarre inference.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light ... and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing Bryan. “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”

There's a video clip of Dr. Birx sitting to one side, listening to what trump is saying, and you can visibly see the moment her body recoils and her brain shuts down from exposure to trump's stupid.

Bryan - an actual expert on things - was talking about how disinfectants work on surfaces as a means of sanitizing stuff to reduce the spread of COVID-19. At no time did Bryan say a disinfectant can be used as a medicinal placed inside a body where those cleaning chemicals would be harmful to our living cells.

And this isn't even getting into the "shining a UV light inside people's bodies" idea he had.

Billy Madison was never this insipidly dumb.

There is a website literally domain-named as whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com covering trump-related news and this was at Day 1191 for the nation and world coping with this stupidity. There hasn't been anything this dumb archived at that site, I swear to the Old Gods and the New.

Quick show of hands to the seven blog readers: How many of you were told at a very young age to NOT drink from the cleaning supply bottles? How many of us were taught in chemistry class at school that certain things like bleach and ammonia are toxic to the human body? How many of us read the FCKING warning labels on our Clorox and Tide containers?

Lysol today had to release a public statement begging the citizenry to NOT start injecting their bodies with their cleaning chemicals. Disinfectant doesn't kill the virus inside your body, the disinfectant kills your body.

Why is the thought-addled Shitgibbon even talking about this as a cure-all?

Because the reports coming back on trump's previous hope for a cure - hydroxychloronique - are showing that solution is toxic as well.

Read how trump is bragging how quickly a disinfectant will work - "one minute!" - as a "cure," and this is just another red flag of how trump doesn't know what he's talking about. In his mind - wherever those remaining brain cells are - he's picturing a quick and simple solution to a problem he doesn't want to be confronted with anymore. No matter how wrong he's processing the information and cherry-picking the results.

This is yet another attempt by trump to reach for something, ANYTHING to be a miracle cure against the COVID-19 pandemic, but even this stretches credibility and common sense to its breaking point.

This is Kakistocracy gone public, with no solution in sight except for an open call to any remaining sane people in trump's Administration to get the hell out of there before it's too late.

trump: We award you no points, and may GOD have mercy on our souls.

The Pettiness of a Tiny Man

So yesterday was a crazy day - ain't it always down this Darkest Timeline - but this was something that stood out. Via the Navy Times but based on a report from the Wall Street Journal (firewalled):

The Navy was reportedly directed by the White House to keep the destroyer John S. McCain hidden during a Memorial Day visit by President Donald Trump to U.S. Fleet Activities Yokosuka.

A May 15 email obtained by the Wall Street Journal revealed instructions from White House staff in preparation for the president’s planned speech to about 800 sailors and Marines aboard the Japan-based amphibious assault ship Wasp, which is based in the same port as the McCain.

The email, which was reportedly shared between a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command official, Air Force officials and the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, featured two instructions pertaining to the logistics of the president’s speaking engagement.

It was the third and final instruction that came as a surprise.

“USS John McCain needs to be out of sight,” the email stated, according to the WSJ. “Please confirm #3 will be satisfied.”

The orders may not have come directly from trump, but I'm willing to bet he's expressed enough anger towards John McCain the person to make it clear to trump's handlers that the Navy vet/POW hero/Congressman/Senator was persona non grata and it included the ship named in McCain's honor. And that led to trump's people going out of their way to be as petty and vindictive as their bad boss.

I'm not angry at the Navy for how they handled this - by blocking McCain crewmembers from even attending trump's appearances if they wanted to - I'm angry at trump. I'm angry at the environment he creates around himself, one of vanity and arrogance and petty viciousness. I'm angry at his lackeys, all so eager and willing to suck up to a man whose hatred for other people is on constant display.

What was it about McCain that seems to drive trump to such vindictive acts? trump had insulted and dismissed McCain for years ever since trump's campaigning in 2015. trump mocked the fact that McCain's heroism was mostly due to getting shot down and caught as a POW during Vietnam.

trump continually acts as though he honestly doesn't understand why everyone else revered McCain in ways they will never worship himself.

A lot of it has to do with trump's World View. To him, everything is Winners and Losers. And trump himself must never be a Loser, he must always project himself as a Winner because that's how people will admire you.

And yet there's McCain. Not the top of his graduation class from the Naval Academy, who got much of his early breaks because - like trump - his family was connected (Admirals all). Not the best politician, who got caught up in the S&L scandals of the 1980s. Someone who tried to run for President in 2000 and got stomped by Dubya. Someone who ran for President as the Republican nominee and got stomped by Obama.

And yet everybody loved him, revered him. McCain was a darling of the Beltway media. Even Centrist Democrats (and even a few Progressives) applauded him from time to time for any "honorable" stances he would commit every so often to keep his statesman cred going.

That was the thing, what trump could never comprehend. The thing about McCain that drives him mad to this day.

McCain, for all his political partisanship, was still a genuinely honorable American. Given an opportunity as a POW to leave the prison - as a PR stunt by the North Vietnamese - McCain refused because his honor told him the prisoners ahead of him should go first. Given opportunities when campaigning for President, McCain always played to a broad consensus, trying to present himself as a reformer and bipartisan figure (he still voted the GOP line more often than not, obviously).

And above all, McCain showed respect to others. I wrote about this when he died:

But there will be moments that stick out for me, the moments when he tried to speak to our better angels during a bitter 2008 campaign, when the Far Right media was going out of its way to fearmonger about Obama. In a place and in front of people who could have turned against him, McCain spoke well of his Democratic opponent, tried to speak to a "respectful" position that tried to make it clear that while Republican and Democrat may be on opposite sides of an argument we were all still Americans...

McCain campaigned against Obama as a liberal, McCain campaigned against Obama as a "weak and inexperienced" figure, but McCain NEVER campaigned against Obama as a human being.

That was something trump will never, can never do. trump simply can't comprehend "honor" as a personal habit. There has never been anything honorable in trump's entire career as a bankrupt businessman, con artist, and foreign stooge.

And so McCain sticks like a spur under trump's skin, probably far more than anyone else save for Hillary and Obama.

And so trying to hide McCain's very memory becomes the only thing trump's lackeys can do.

If trump were an honest man, he would express his displeasure at the things McCain did to hamper trump's plan to nuke Obamacare but then move on. (trump also wouldn't have cheated with Russia's help to steal the 2016 elections) If trump were merely calculating, he'd figure out more subtle ways to commit his revenge in less public ways. If trump were savvy, he'd play the role of respectful rival, try to co-opt some of McCain's personal touch to gain support among those who still honor him.

But trump is none of those things. trump is a vain, petty, insufferable bully who can never respect anyone who can lose and roll on to other accomplishments in life. trump is an unthinking mite who thinks himself mighty because he cheats and steals his way to victory.

It will be telling to history that the USS McCain will continue sailing on while the best trump can hope for is getting a garbage scow named after himself.

It's Schadenfreude Time: Crooks In Virginia Edition

Yesterday's post was about a court ruling that angered me: not the ruling itself, but the bastards - BP Corporation - being held to account for their reckless greed and destruction.

There was another ruling that day that amused me: because it was ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell's jury finding him and his wife guilty on various counts of bribery, corruption, and sheer arrogance.

So now I'm getting around to the schadenfreude portion of this blog.  This is the part of the malicious enjoyment where I lean my head back and guffaw.  A deep, throaty, almost maniacal laugh.  Kinda goes like this:

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

McDonnell is... was... one of those defendants where the sympathy train left the station years ago.  An up-and-coming Republican pol from Virginia, with enough charisma to swoon a room full of fund-raisers and a background catering to the social conservative platform of "family values" (aka Full-Me(n)tal Patriarchy, Pro-Fetus agenda).  He lucked into the national stage as a successful governor of a swing state, able to retain his Far Right credentials yet position himself in public as the "sane and normal" one when compared to his fellow Virginian wingnuts (Hi, Cuccinelli!).  This was a guy getting vetted for being Veep in 2012.  This was a guy who could have parlayed his position into a front-runner for (what is turning out to be wide-open for Republicans) the Presidential ticket in 2016.

This was a guy who couldn't figure out how to keep his corruption on the down-low and in the back rooms.  I mean, corruption is a bad thing no matter which politician is committing it, but there's something to be said about being savvy enough to keep it off the radar...

The feds were able to catch McDonnell's family hanging around with a deep-pocket fund-raising buddy (Jonnie Williams), not only taking money and gifts from him but also turning around and avidly promoting their buddy's diet supplement company.  While Quid Pro Quo is painfully rampant in modern politics, most other politicians tend to be a little more subtle about their deals.

The trial just finished was a soap opera drama worthy of a Lifetime Channel miniseries.  Rather than present a unified defense, Bob and his wife Maureen decided on a finger-pointing approach of accusing each other of being manipulated by a sweet-talking businessman who took advantage of a crumbling, loveless marriage.  Bob especially went with a "crazy wife" defense that essentially threw Maureen under the bus (figuratively, but if someone brought a bus to the front of the courthouse he well could have tried it literally).  For a politician who once stood on the virtue of a husband "defending and providing for his family," this was pretty hypocritical.  It was also pretty tone-deaf.

But the signs were there early: when first charged, McDonnell was offered a plea deal on just one felony charge (meaning minimal jail-time) that would have included all charges on his wife getting dropped (it's a standard practice by prosecutors to pile on charges to make sure a deal can get enforced made).  Even then, McDonnell said no to the deal, figuring he was better off winning over a jury and walking away clean.

Turns out the prosecutors were able to win more than one felony conviction after all.  Hindsight can be a pain, right Gov?

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

As Jim Newell at Salon noted, How could McDonnell be so stupid?:

...In modern politics, corruption charges are usually more tediously complex: Money was wired here and then laundered via a pass-through, which made its way through another pass-through and was distributed through a foundation before ending up at a nonprofit designed to help such and such’s interests with a client trying to change regulations in foreign markets, or whatever. Not in this case. The prosecution just had to show the jury images of the idiot governor showing off his flashy watch that was given to him by the rich businessman for whom he did favors in return. How much simpler could this get? It’s only a degree of reality or two away from an old-timey political cartoon of a tuxedoed plutocrat, smoking a cigar, handing over a big bag marked “$$$,” to a crooked politician slapping his back and cackling.

God, the stupidity...

...Because the defense — the now infamous defense — that they took in court reeked of desperation all the way through. If you’re willing to testify for days about the stunning levels of dysfunction in your marriage, as the best hope for your exoneration, doesn’t that suggest that you may not have the strongest case? Doesn’t that suggest that perhaps you would’ve been better taking a plea deal? It didn’t even cohere...

I would argue it wasn't stupidity.  It was arrogance.  Hubris, the Greek word for Pride: Pride, the highest of the seven deadly Christian sins.  You'd think a rock-solid self-promoting Christian like McDonnell would have learned about the price of Pride in Sunday schools.  That it leads to one hell of a fall.

Death By A Thousand Cuts, Well Not a Death But a Serious Wound To Public Service

Normally I've got another blog to talk about librarianship.  But this topic is more about politics than libraries, and besides this is the blog where I use curse words more often and after hearing this I'm in dire need of dropping some F-bombs:

Miami-Dade County commission just voted to NOT raise the county millage rates in order to keep their county libraries and firefighter stations properly funded.  They'll be closing out 22 out of 49 branches as well as a small number of fire stations, and cutting 251 employees from the library system while cutting back on everyone else's hours.

The cuts are the result of a $15 million library budget shortfall. (The system had been using leftover funds to bridge the gap for the past two years.) Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez recommended the budget which necessitates the cuts, as well as which cuts should be made, to the county commissioners, who approved his recommendation on July 16.Once the commissioners set the preliminary rate, it can be lowered but not raised. Throughout August, there will be six town hall meetings to explain the proposed budget to residents and receive feedback. On September 10 and September 16, there will be budget hearings. The commissioners will vote on the budget at the September 16 meeting, and it will take effect on October 1.But though the millage can’t be raised, Raymond Santiago, director of the Miami-Dade Public Library System and LJ’s 2003 Librarian of the Year, hasn’t given up on mitigating the worst of the impacts. He called the cuts presented to the commissioners and detailed above “a worst-case scenario,” and “probably the most drastic of all the options.”“Before the final budget vote in September,” Santiago continued, “the administration will continue to investigate options to reduce these negative impacts” through different adjustments to the library budget. “We’re looking at everything right now,” he said.

This county commission are pretty much the jokers who voted HOW MUCH in order to build a bullshit overpriced gaudy and unfilled baseball stadium for a morally bankrupt killer of baseball franchises - I dare you to say Loria's name in public anywhere in Canada, I dares ya - who as a businessman could have figured out a hundred other ways to raise his own goddamn money to build his own goddamn park.

The city/county mayor Gimenez is quoted in the article as saying "people have said that the age of the library is probably ending." I call bullshit on that, mayor (the Library Journal article I've linked to shows stats that library use has gone UP).  Which people?  'Cause there's a lot of people where I am - and where I've been at other public libraries as well - that come in to use libraries all the time.  People are still checking out books.  They're coming in to use library computers because libraries are now telecommunication hubs and workplaces.  I've got people coming in all the time needing help with logging into their unemployment benefits and online job hunts and typing up their resumes and downloading their medical records to get their HMOs to approve coverage.  Anybody who thinks libraries are ending hasn't been paying attention.

And speaking of all those people who come in to use libraries.  WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GO NOW?  There may be half of the county libraries still open, but they'll now be packed solid with people desperate to get onto computers - not everyone's got a laptop at home, Mister Mayor - and unable to find worktables to get any projects done.  I did the math of 49 branches to 2.5 million county residents, I got it roughly 52,000 people per branch.  With 22 branches closing, that 1.4 million residents suddenly put out without library access.  It will take them that much more effort to get to a library that's further away - not everyone's got a car, Mister Mayor, and buses get expensive too - and they'll be competing with that many more people to get onto a computer.

I worked in Broward County Libraries between 1994 to 2003.  We're right next door, county-wise, and we had a lot of traffic and usage of our resources, a lot of checkouts and a lot of people waiting their turn to use computers.  I can imagine Dade's libraries were just as busy.  I was there when we had a county referendum to vote for a bond issue in 1998, which involved a small tax increase.  We were expecting a close vote.  We got 72 percent approval, an unbelievable result, and it was because people in Broward liked their community libraries and wanted us to improve our services to them.

What the county commission did this week was unforgivable, unwarranted.  If they were having problems raising funds for libraries and fire stations, they should have done what Broward County did back in 1998: let the people vote on it.  Instead, they're cutting services rather than dare the ire of... lord, there's no sign of anyone even yelling at them to cut spending or even yelling about the taxes going up too high.  Why the hell did they do this?!

Here's a solution: sue Loria and Major League Baseball for that $500 million back for an unfilled baseball stadium.  Maybe when he's on the hook for it, Loria might actually spend his own money and field a fucking team in order to fill his goddamned empty seats.  That $500 million could easily pay for the county libraries, the county fire stations, the county police, and about twenty other social services a large metro like Miami have need for.  It's a far better solution than closing half of everything and forcing a ton of low-income families and retirees to suffer.

GOD.  Our political priorities are screwed, aren't they?  Our cities and counties and states and federal government are giving out millions to a handful of men who already have millions while the rest of us have to fight for table scraps.  At what point do we stop this bullshit?

In the meantime, call the Miami Dade County Commission's office (phone 305-375-4696).  Let them know that cutting back on library and firefighter services is a bad f-cking idea (don't say "fuck", but be very stern and concerned sounding) and if you're a county resident remind them that you can very easily vote them out like the idiots they are if they don't straighten up and do right by the citizenry.

What other topics can be of interest?

There are times I have great interest in politics, in seeing issues discussed, plans enacted, realities confirmed. Then there are times I see the political arena overrun by goddamn wingnut lunatics and wonder why I ever developed an interest in political affairs in the first place... and why I was ever a registered Republican (I think I can blame dad - a Nixon Republican - for that)...

I mean, what else can be said or done regarding how the mainstream media doesn't do journalism anymore, how government is tied up by obstructionist politicians going insane over a national census process that's been in effect for decades, how we still haven't dealt with the previous administration's lawlessness, how an ever-growing number of Americans are out of work and unable to save their homes or families while corrupt financial institutions that caused our recent economic depression (until unemployment drops below 8 percent or I get a full-time job whichever comes first, I'm calling this a depression dammit) are going back to encouraging the same reckless behavior that got us into this hellhole in the first place.

Unlike hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, however, I refuse to decide on retiring from political blogging. Hell, I'm trying to see if I can get hilzoy's job there...

It's Official: the Republicans think it's a marketing problem

From Roger Simon at Politico:

A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution re-branding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”

While I know there's only 4 to 7 people ever viewing this site, meaning no one high up on the Republican food chain would have read what I already wrote about how stupid it is to use 'Socialist' as an insult anymore, I'd have hoped someone else with better connections would have tried to warn the GOP Establishment by now. Seems that hadn't happened.

The Republicans used to use proxies - like their media cohorts, allies like Fox Not-News and their Party Leader Limbaugh - to dish out the insults and name-calling the past 20 years or so. But now, they're making the actual party take over such duties.

Worse, they think that this attempt at name-calling is actual good policy: That instead of thinking up new positions on taxation, or business regulation, or social issues like civil unions and abortion and immigration, all they have to do is come up with better insults and BLAMMO, the Republican Party will be in the majority again.

Guys, I take it none of you watched The West Wing. You missed that episode where C.J.'s backstory had her working as a disillusioned media hack for Hollywood and a media mogul wants her fired for not promoting his crappy movies into more Golden Globe nominations:

"...The movies were bad, Roger, all of them. Even the little kid was bad, but he was a little kid, he had a couple of scenes, big eyeglasses, lisp, he's going to the Golden Globes. You know why the New Coke marketing campaign failed? Because nobody liked New Coke. The movies were bad. If the movies were unknown, I could help you, but they weren't. They were just bad!"

Calling them 'Socialists' isn't going to make the Democrats less popular or less trustworthy, wingnuts. Calling them 'Socialists' isn't going to solve the problems YOU have as Republicans selling a crappy product ("Tax Cuts! No Gays! Bomb Everyone! It's Not Torture Because We Say So!"). If you think it's a marketing issue, wingnuts, you ought to look first at fixing your crappy product instead of mocking your competitor's product.

UPDATE: On May 20th, the RNC changed the proposed insult campaign and decided instead to decry Obama and the Dems' "March towards Socialism". Apparently someone realized directly accusing Lefties of overt "Socialist" attitudes wasn't selling well outside of the 30 percent Rightie base, so they figured making the Democrats look like a bunch of walking ethusiasts would work better. The Republicans still haven't figured out it's not the Democrats' product, it's the GOP Sh-tburgers no one wants to buy anymore that's the problem.

You Keep Using That Word...

...it definitely DOESN'T mean what you think it means, Republicans.

The word in question is socialism. And the Republicans are using that word (and it's harsher cousin communism, but in smaller doses) to describe Barack Obama and his Presidential era.

Now, I wanted to add the definition of socialism to this discussion, and I thought about using William Safire's (noted conservative essayist/columnist) Political Dictionary to do so. But he doesn't provide direct definitions: he instead describes 'creeping socialism' as a political code phrase used by Old Guard GOP from the FDR years. All he notes is the word origin coming from the 1850s.

Without Safire for guidance, I went to Webster's:
Socialism. 1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. 2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state. 3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.

Pretty straightforward. What Webster's doesn't explain is the usage of socialism as an insult/mark of intent in American politics. For that you have to examine the whole of 20th Century, the rise of global communism as a threat, and basically the whole Cold War era.

What has to be explained is how 'socialism' became the insult du jour instead of 'communism.' The Cold War era had rampant anti-communist fervor, marked obviously by the McCarthy hearings and constant hunts for hidden Yuris in every branch of government (and Hollywood). While the Republicans were openly waving their anti-commie flags high, the urge to label Democratic opponents as communists (and by extension, traitors) had to be there. Problem was, in that atmosphere of persecution, you had to really PROVE someone was a communist in order to prove your point. You just couldn't point a finger at a Democrat like, say, John Kennedy, and claim he's a Commie. Because he could come right back at you with his War Record (wounded war hero complete with Hollywood film rights) and make you look like a screeching harridan who's just jealous of his good looks... and hell could even take you to court for defamation/libel because back then being labeled a commie was a BIG deal.

So how to insult Democrats as Commies without the need for evidence that they actually were Commies? The trick was to make Dems out as Commie sympathizers... which a good number of them like Veep Henry A Wallace were. Not actual Stalin-worshipping Reds but close on the rainbow scale: Pinko sympathizers (such as Nixon accusing his Senate opponent in 1950 of being "pink down to her underwear."). Thus came the word 'socialist' as the insult to be aimed at Democrats.

On the political scale - Fascism to the far right, Pragmatic Moderatism (usually represented as modern Capitalism) in the middle, Communism to the far left - Socialism is between the Moderate and the Communist. Socialism basically is where the government nationalizes the means of production, and regulates to the point of absolute control nearly every social service ('rationing') available to the nation. It's more open than Communism in that the people retain purchasing power, some level of individual wealth, and access to various means of financing not related to production. Not every business and industry was nationalized. But the point of Socialism is to try and enforce some kind of social equilibrium: everyone get a fair share of the pie, whether they earned it or not. That usually meant a form of "Taking from the rich to give to the poor," creating a welfare state where the state ends up providing the bare minimum of incentive and motivation of using capital... creating a kind of unemployed malaise and cultural stagflation that noticeably hit Western Europe from the 60s until the Thatcherist years of privitization of the 80s re-opened the floodgates of capitalism.
It never got as bad in the United States as it did in Europe, mostly because 'socialism' remained a bad word. LBJ's Great Society was the closest we would come to a welfare state, which didn't even have as high a tax rate as the post-FDR years did to pay for it all. Nixon, Ford, and Carter's terms of the 1970s didn't see much other than a series of massive energy crises and growing inflation, to which I'm not sure if any movement towards socialism had a role. I can be certain the pro-business anti-communist years of Reagan ended that for good. Even Clinton eventually reformed our nation's welfare system (the grand nail tying the Great Society together) into a more work-oriented re-employment system.
Combine that with the collapse of Communism between 1989 to 1991 (leaving pretty much Cuba as the notable openly-Communist state left, unless I'm forgetting someone from Africa or Asia), and socialism (and even communism) came and went in the United States like a brief unwanted fart.

So what does this all have to do with Obama?

To the Republicans, everything. Because the Republicans want to attack Obama non-stop, and they need all the words-as-a-weapon they can get.

It doesn't matter if you look at Obama's actual record of activity since he got into the White House 3 months ago. The fact that Obama's current tax plan actually LOWERED taxes for 95 percent of Americans doesn't concern Republicans. The fact that Obama's next step regarding taxes is to allow Bush's tax rates to expire AS SCHEDULED by 2010-11 doesn't concern Republicans. The fact that a majority of Americans are at the point for the first time in decades thinking their taxes are "fair enough" doesn't concern Republicans. The fact that Obama's current economic plans for bailing out the economy and combatting the recession are so universally acknowledged as needed that even the Republican Governors trying to refuse the stimulus money are being forced by their own state Leges to accept the funding doesn't concern Republicans. They just see a Democrat, and to them a Democrat is a tax-and-spend liberal who threatens to bring about socialism to this country, no matter what he does to improve a shaky economy, no matter how well he actually does his job.

So they toss out that word - "Socialist" - like it means something. Like it's a weapon of lethal efficiency.

But it doesn't mean anything. Not in the way it used to. And especially not to the up-and-coming generations coming into political power of their own. Which is what should be worrying the Republican Party leadership, but isn't.

This is the 20-year mark of 1989: the year people recognized that Communist nations like China and the Soviet Union had redesigned their economic structures closer to capitalism than communism. That year, Eastern Europe fell in its own Domino Effect as one Communist regime after another collapsed, leading up to the Fall of the Berlin Wall itself. Side note: I was nineteen years old at the time, and believe me I never saw a more joyous moment in all my life than watching on TV as everyone who could danced on the Wall that night of November 9th. Personally, I miss the Berlin Wall: it was the one place you could have legally left graffiti, and I never got a chance to do so...

This is the 18-year mark of 1991: the year that saw a post-Cold War struggle in the Persian Gulf akin to the Korean War, an international effort led by the U.S. to stop the Iraqs from seizing Kuwait, in which our old Cold War adversaries the Soviets sat on the sidelines watching a proxy army (Iraqs armed with their gear) get clobbered in under 40 days. And then that August, the last gasp of a Communist regime trying at one more political coup, a half-hearted effort to oust Gorbachev and stop his dismantling of Soviet ideals. It failed, spectacularly. The only thing the coup did achieve was removing Gorbachev... five months later after the coup itself collapsed. By then the Soviet Union had fractured, Russia replacing the behemoth and essentially signaling the end of Communism. We could joke, then and now, that Communism failed "because there was no money in it."

These are key things when considering the massive generational shift going on in American politics, wherein a younger generation of voters are coming in... and are decidedly coming in on the side of the Democrats.

We are getting, right now with this year's set of 18-year-olds, the first generation of college students and the first generation of voting age that DOES NOT KNOW THE COLD WAR on any personal level. When they were born, Gorbachev was on his way out. The United States was the sole superpower on the planet with any conceivable military, economic, political, and cultural mojo. Cuba was this island off of Florida with a constant supply of decent baseball players swimming over, with a graying old man in charge who could be viewed more as a run-of-the-mill dictator than a Communist propangandist. Okay? We're talking about the first generation ever who learned about Communism IN THE PAST TENSE. Trust me, from my memories of high school history studies: Anything older than ten years in the history books is ANCIENT HISTORY. This is a generation of 18-year-olds who grew up learning how COMMUNISM FAILED. To them, it's not a threat. It's not even a joke. It just... is. Like fuedalism, or mercantilism, it's just things to study. How can you terrify a generation with the boogeyman specter of "Socialism" when they've never even experienced it?

And that's the 18-year-olds. The 28-year-olds were all 10 years old when they saw Communism collapse. They grew up with Reagan and Thatcher as paragons of virile capitalism, and even they watched an economic system fail and sputter to death. Think any of them are frightened by Communism? And try my generation: the 38-year-olds. Generation X, that's us. We were in college watching Communism fail, and we even studied and learned the Hows and Whys, and understood what it meant. While a majority of us went conservative in our leanings as we grew up and grew out, we too learned that Communism was a failure. Hell, we even know Socialism - as we were the generation that grew up in the social decay and destruction of a failed Great Society plan - was inconceivable, a joke.

Generation X grew up as the Soviet Union fell, as Communist China changed to capitalism. Yes, we are the generation that grew up with "Rambo," with "Rocky IV," with non-stop replays of "Red Dawn" on HBO. But my generation - well at least the guys I grew up with - didn't take half of that sh-t seriously. I remember a bunch of us catching "Red Dawn" on TV one weekend, and we chortled watching a bunch of fellow "teenagers" (who looked ten years older than us) take on the whole Red Army. And watching C. Thomas Howell turn into a gun-toting, deer-blood-drinking psycho was scary only in that we saw this guy turn into basically a psycho, not someone worth emulating. 'Course, To us it was a movie. Hell, the whole Cold War was a movie, or a video game (and sometimes both): in which detente was preferable to war, in which we still saw the self-destructive impulses of Communism (its inability to stop Greed as an economic drain onr resources) as a failing system, in which the only real difference between Us and Them was that they drank vodka and we drank whiskey (or scotch). My generation may know Socialism, but it doesn't scare us. We know better.

And that leaves the generation above us, the Baby Boomers. The ones now in charge of things, the age of the political leaders of both parties, but in particular the Republican Party. Note: Obama himself, born 1961, is on the tail end of the Boomers for whom the cutoff year is 1965. Those born near the Generational shifts tend to share traits of the preceeding or following generation, so Obama shares some traits with Gen-Xers, noticeably a love of basketball. For the Boomers, and the older Generations (the Silent, ones caught between Boomers and those who won the Great War, and the Greatest Generation who grew up in the Depression and fought the Big Fight That Saved Everybody), Socialism is indeed a Big Deal. They came of age at the start of the Cold War, with Stalin slamming down an Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe and reneging on the power-sharing arrangements in demilitarizing a Post-War Germany. They grew up with a Socialized Western Europe, an increasingly moody and out-of-sorts France and England with large tax systems that drove out wealthy rock stars on an annual basis. To them, Socialism if not Communism is a threat and a problem, and they worry about it like the hybrid navigators on the re-imagined Battlestar "This has all happened before and it can all happen again."

So now we have a very noticeable generation shift: the party elders who knew and fear Socialism; and younger generations coming of age and power who don't know Socialism or else saw Socialism fail and have no fear of it.

And you see the results: younger voters are aligning with Obama by 66 percent, with the 18-29 age group making 18 percent of the voting bloc. And those numbers will go up as they grow older and as more of their generation gets interested in voting. And this generation - the Millenials - are NOT as socially conservative as their elders, not even Gen'Xers who tend to be libertarian-leaning on social issues. To the Millenials, all they've known is a capitalistic system that grew corrupt and corpulent, taking billions in tax cuts during the Bush years and now coming BEGGING to Obama for billions more in bailouts. To the Millenials, they can't comprehend the level of hatred Ayn Rand had for Communism that would have pushed her to create a socio-political movement out of Objectivism: to this generation, "Atlas Shrugged" is a boring book they had to read in AP English.

And all the Republicans do is point at Obama and yell "Socialist!" They can't even effectively describe what it is Obama is doing that's Socialist, other than the massive spending, and as I mentioned earlier this article, THAT'S THE ONLY THING KEEPING OUR CAPITALIST ECONOMY ALIVE. And the younger generations are gonna look at Obama and think "If that's a Socialist, and we like him, then hell we're Socialists too!" Just the word alone - "Socialist" - it doesn't scare people anymore.

So whenever you hear a Republican say it, someone on FOXNews repeating it, someone writing a Beltway screed against Obama, whenever they bring up the word "socialist," you could consider some level of pity, or sympathy, for those guys. They're trying to hurt Obama the best way they can, the only word they and their aging out-of-touch generation knows.

They're just using a word that doesn't mean what it means anymore.

--

Today, by the by, was a big day for the anti-Obama forces because they were pushing a huge Tea Bag Revolt across the nation, all 50 states, trying to rally their massive forces of conservative angst to show how they are opposed to Obama raising taxes and spending like a Democrat (which does, of course, beg the question of WHERE THESE F-CKERS WERE WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH WAS SPENDING LIKE A DEMOCRAT). Did not see much in the way of explanation of the Hows and Wheres and Whys of Obama being an evil overlord of doom. He just is to the Far Right. No one yet complaining about Obama's shoelaces, but the year is still young...

Amendment proposal on greed

This. Is really. Pissing off more people. Than the Randian con artists thought it would. Kinda figured it was gonna happen back during the meltdown crisis when Bush's economic team (AND STOP BLAMING OBAMA he wasn't in charge back in September 2008!) pretty much doled out bailout money without any common sense restrictions on it all: that the greedheads who incompetantly drove our entire financial/banking industry into the ground would use the bailout to pretty much line their pockets like always. Color me not so shocked.

The one good thing from this AIG bonus fiasco is that it utterly highlights how CORRUPT, STUPID and WRONG the entire concept of laizze-faire, hands-off, greed-is-good capitalism really is. Regulated capitalism, yeah that works well: when the market forces are required to answer to somebody, when the captains of industry are held accountable, when there's a balance between Capital (owners and bankers), Labor (employees), and Consumer (represented by government and advocates), things work. Hence, this amendment proposal to bring some accountability back into our economy:

• Greed is now a capital offense.
• Anyone caught lining his/her own pockets, or the pockets of their business associates, at the expense of the taxpayer or company for which they work especially if said company received a federal bailout geared toward stabilizing the market and not geared toward the greedheads' checking account, shall immediately be tarred and feathered. And then they go to trial looking like that. The person(s) if found guilty of greed will then go to Pound-Me-In-The-Ass federal prison for a set period of time, and then taken from that place to Death Row where he/she/they will then have 50,000 volts shooting out their ass(es).
• Any person charged with a financially-related crime such as fraud, embezzlement, fiscal negligence, or any other element that would have lead to an economic disaster for a company or an entire nation, will have all financial accounts frozen and inaccessible to be able to pay for a legal defense. The damn greedhead will have to rely on a public defender working Pro Bono, no exceptions. You get the same legal protection as poor people, you sons of bitches.
• Anyone in the media attempting to defend greedheads, the greed-is-good snake-oil scam, or any Randian ideology will be immediately forced to "Go Galt" like they want others to: and by "Going Galt" that means leaving their cushy six-figure salary and limo service existence to go work the midnight shift at any 24-hour bowling alley that exists between Toledo, OH and Boise, ID. Minimum wage, no health benefits. See how you enjoy living like the rest of us.

Odds of this amendment even getting looked at: ludicriously low. Odds of people getting pitchforks and rioting in the streets if the greedheads keep up their dumbass "taxpayers are suckers" routine: ludicriously high.

Proof the Republican Party is Screwed Up and Doomed

Linkage here to an article by Sullivan, but check out the polling numbers regarding the stimulus:


Meanwhile over on Balloon Juice I see this:

The country will “pay dearly” if it executes the president’s stimulus plans, Sen. Richard Shelby says.

“Everybody on the street in America understands that,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. “This is not the right road to go. We’ll pay dearly.”

Dear Sen. Shelby: 31 percent is NOT EVERYBODY. Don't drag me and 62 percent of this country into your (wrong) side of the argument.

Sullivan in his article has a point: The Republicans "are feeling better about themselves is that they managed to turn this debate into one about ideology in a vacuum. That's how they governed for many years; it's what they know; and since they have no shame, they feel no need to square their newfound fiscal conservatism in a depression with their record of massive spending and borrowing in a boom."

The Republican leadership truly exists inside this hermetically-sealed echo chamber of theirs, where all they know is getting onto the talking head shows on FOX, CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere, spout their BS, hang out with like-minded media hosts and their handlers, and never ever really recognize just what the hell is actually happening outside of that damn Beltway mentality of theirs. They say "everybody knows" when in fact that's just another unverifible strawman they're pointing at: that Gallup poll shows 62 percent siding with Obama, 48 percent siding with the Democratic Congress. 31 percent with the Republicans? They've capped out to that 1/3 of the electorate, which points to just their GOP Far Right base supporting them. JUST THEIR BASE. No one else is buying the GOP BS.

This is where I think Sullivan is getting it wrong: "The gerrymandering of the past decade also means the Republican rump is secure - with 31 percent approval - even when resisting adequate fiscal stimulus in a deflationary spiral." The gerrymandering of districts isn't going to protect the GOP in Congress, or even at the state level. Republican representation in the House is already lopsided: The Dems hold a 37 seat advantage there. Who thinks 2 more years of possible job losses and economic collapse is going to drive more voters towards an obstructionist Republican Party that caused this economic crisis in the first place? And will be held responsible (re-read that Gallup Poll: people are not favoring the Republicans right now because they know what that party is doing is wrong!) if the Republicans succeed in wreaking this stimulus or any other economic platform Obama tries to pass?
And that's the House. The Senate isn't gerrymandered. And as this economy collapses, more states will feel the hurt, more angry voters will rise up. And they're not gonna blame Obama and the Democrats (again, the Gallup poll is showing the voters side with them) who are trying to pass these bills: they're gonna blame the vote-blockers.
And that's the federal level. At the state level the Republicans have got be scared sh-tless. A lot of states are facing massive deficits: Florida and California are two prime examples. States will feel the economic pinch more because 1) a lot of states have constitutional requirements to balance their budgets at some point, meaning they either cut services or raise taxes or a balance of both; 2) a lot of states have restrictions on how they can raise taxes... if ever; and 3) the Republicans and the "centrists" in the Senate just cut billions of dollars that were going to the states for deficit relief. The state-level Republicans are about to face the consequences of decades of pushing anti-tax policies to appease their Club for Greed overlords: an inability to respond to a nationwide economic disaster because they've had to cut back truckloads of social services in order to budget-balance against massive revenue shortfalls. I'm surprised we're not hearing about Gov. Crist getting on the phone to yell at the Republican Senators "DAMMIT WE NEED THAT $40 BILLION!" Do you think voters at the state level are going to favor Republicans when it comes time to vote for governorships and state leges? Do you think voters are going to forget that it was Republicans who cut back on schools, on health care, on jobs programs, on transit, on everything just so the Republicans could save their precious tax cuts?

The Republican Party is truly doomed, because they don't care. Their leadership are all stuck in the television sound booths, mouthing off platitudes and lies that they already believe and reinforce on each other, and they don't see outside of their windowed little world of theirs. They're not going to win in 2010 like they think they will if they succeed in torpedoing this stimulus or any other stim package. Who is going to keep buying their b-llsh-t when there's no one left with any money to buy it?

More Schadenfreude, More Insanity

For my political fix, I circle about 8 or 10 blogs for regular viewing: Sullivan, Balloon Juice, Obsidian Wings, Yglesias, Atrios. Moderate Voice, NeoMugWump, Charging RINO (dude, update more), and Hullaballoo. I also read some of the more extreme sites like Daily Kos and My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, although for both I usually catch myself shouting "Lighten up, Francis!" at the monitor for each. And for the guys at Vast Right Wing, sorry but I don't wanna livechat American Idol...

What I caught this morning from Balloon Juice gave me my schadenfreude fix for the day:

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

Federal agents in recent days contacted Steele’s sister, a spokesman for Steele said yesterday.

[....]

The recent allegations outlined four specific transactions. In addition to the payment to Steele’s sister, Fabian said that the candidate used money from his state campaign improperly; that Steele paid $75,000 from the state campaign to a law firm for work that was never performed; and that he or an aide transferred more than $500,000 in campaign cash from one bank to another without authorization.

The bank transfer was made against the explicit wishes of other Maryland Republicans

Now, the usual rule here is that It's OK If You Are Republican (I speeled this out), but remember, it’s often not okay if you are a Republican who is distrusted by the real wingnuts in the party (just ask Harriet Miers), as Steele is.

Now this is, of course, just an investigation, there's no criminal charges right off the bat. But guys like Daschle and Sansom can tell you, this doesn't ever look good. Guys like Blago, of course, are too crazy to care...

Meanwhile, some of the other things popping up on Balloon Juice, and indeed on all of the blogs I read, is the economic crisis we're in, how bad it's shaping up, and how the proposed Stimulus plan being pushed by Obama is doing in Congress (which, by the by, isn't doing very well). And indeed one thing keeps popping up on these blogs, a chart issued by House Speaker Pelosi's office:

You see anything? The blue line is the 1990 recession period and the number of months (30 months) it took to curve upward again. The longer deeper red line is the 2001 recession and how long it took THAT to curve upward (45 months!) again. That green line is the current recession we're in, how deep it's already gone compared to the other two. Makes you wonder just how deep and long the unemployment valley is going to be for this recession (are you kidding me? This much job loss in this short a time? This. Is. A Depression. Screaming is mandatory).

One of the things the proposed stimulus package is supposed to do is generate jobs: the spending portion of it, anyways. The tax cut portions are supposed to ease the financial burdens of the taxpayers, the middle class, the poor, etc. One of the other things about the proposed stimulus is that Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are trying to make this stimulus a bipartisan effort, meaning they want the Republicans to provide input.

We're talking about a Republican Party that remains in thrall to the likes of Grover Norquist and the Club for Greed. The political party that nearly every time they've been in power since 1980 have tried for massive tax cuts as part of a Randian obsession with the Laffer Curve and Supply-Side/Trickle-Down economics. The political party that pushes all these cuts in revenue but then increases spending like they were drunken teenagers in possession of their parents' credit cards. The political party that causes massive government deficits, massive government waste, massive financial fraud. So what do the Republicans do when presented with an opportunity to aid and provide input on the stimulus bill?

They yell and scream for more tax cuts. They yell and scream about the "wasteful spending" that the Democrats are doing, mindless of the wasteful spending they themselves are responsible for. They insist on gutting out sections of the stimulus package that would go towards jobs, green eco projects, state funding that would aid a lot of deficit-threatened states (like Florida and Pennsylvania and California and oh about 40 others) in keeping existing jobs intact. Oh, and did I mention that yelling and screaming for more tax cuts? Multiply that by every GOP Senator and Congressperson, and then multiply it by every goddamn talking head on FOXnotthenews, ClulessNN, and the other media outlets, and then add six. And then bang your head against the wall because there's no way any sane person could understand why the Republicans are this out of touch with reality.

We've HAD massive tax cuts already. We've had 8 years of them. We've seen what tax cuts do for job growth (nada), we've seen what tax cuts do for wage increases (not a damn thing). Tax cuts didn't help the majority of Americans facing increasing health care costs, energy costs, and overall costs of living. Right now, this entire recession (DEPRESSION!) is tied into nearly every aspect of our economy: our purchasing power, our homes, products and services, our financial stability, our ability to start up new businesses and new projects... For all I know it's affecting our nation's ability to trade, to conduct commerce, to do a lot of things that makes our economic engine run. The one thing we can do, the one thing that ties in the most to all of this that we can create to stimulate (there's that word) the economy again is with job creation. With jobs, people earn money. With money, they buy things, they pay off debts. The things they buy, services and products, means other people are working. The engine revs up, power increasing to the wheels of industry. So we need jobs. A lot of them. We need to stop the growing unemployment placing huge drains on our nation's and our states' social services. But the private sector can't create these jobs, not right now: there is no sign that banks and financial institutions are putting out loans and funds that businesses need to start and grow. So it's up to the public sector, to the government, to do something about job creation.

And the Republicans don't see that. They don't want to talk about that. They view that type of spending as "Wasteful." All they want are more tax cuts. Permanent tax cuts. Tax cut this, and tax cut that. I swear to God, they won't take any other proposal seriously.

This comes again from Balloon Juice, from one of the primary guys there, John Cole, and it's been quoted all across the political blogs like it should be the Quote of the Year (or at least winner of Sullivan's award named after Yglesias):

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Because this is what the Republican Party is now: Insane. Forget the so-called "centrists" and self-declared "moderates" trying to compromise on the stimulus, who are basically gutting it of programs and funding that we're going to need dammit, because we've seen what's going to happen next in the Senate, same way it happened in the House: The Republicans are going to force the Dems to compromise, and then once the bill is on the floor for the vote the Republicans are all going to vote against the bill and claim victory because they forced the Dems to weaken the package into irrelevancy, and at the same time provide political cover for themselves if/when the stimulus fails by saying "Ooooh, we all voted against it. So vote for us in 2010 and we'll take you all back to the glory years of 2001-2008!"

I made a few links to entries in Obsidian Wings over the past few weeks, wondering where I could fit them in on my blog to highlight my concerns about the economy, and about how screwed up the Republicans are in dealing with the crisis at hand. I highly recommend you (yes, all 4 of you) bookmark Obsidian Wings and glance through it from day to day, it's one of the more worthy blogs I read. The links covered in some detail why tax cuts (and trickle-down) don't work, and why the Republicans are NOT acting in good faith about the economy. Go read 'em. And like me, you might weep.

Because despite the fact that they got thumped in the 2008 national elections, despite the fact that their golden calf Rush Limbaugh is polling unpopular compared to other conservative news outlets, despite the fact that they've had 8 years of tax cuts that didn't work, the Republicans are dictating what is happening with our nation's stimulus bill. This is not going to end well, for anyone...

More moments of Schadenfreude 2009

Schadenfreude: It's one (am I speeling it right, btw?) of my favorite words - esoteric being the other - and while I do cringe at myself for taking such delight in the misfortune of others I try to take comfort from the knowledge that the ones suffering totally f-cking deserve what they're getting (hence the huge glee I had with Blago, which shows no sign of ending any time soon).

To wit:

• Here at home, with the decline and fall of a rising GOP power, now-former State Speaker Ray "Quid Pro" Sansom. Who started off his Speakership with a brand-new part-time job that was never advertised and paid $110k per for a small college that just happened to receive $35 million in state money in the previous budget thanks to Sansom. Who had a private meeting with that school's trustees, only for it later revealed to have violated the state's Sunshine laws requiring such meetings be public, and also revealed that no notes were taken during said meeting with a comical attempt after-the-fact of someone writing up notes for said meeting. Who had a hand in getting a $6 million training air field facility for that school set up in the exact size shape and color that a business buddy of Sansom's wanted for years at that locale. Sansom tried to weasel his way out of the growing scandals by "recusing himself" from Speakership duties, but it was only temporary and it was clearly obvious that he was hoping for the dust to settle before reclaiming the Speakership while no one was noticing. His own party had to force the issue and ousted him from the top spot, although he's still a sitting Representative awaiting the pending criminal investigations. Maybe he and Blagojevich can work the casino town in Missouri as a comedy duo, you know like Abbott and Costello, only dumber.
• Back in DC, where former Senate leader Tom "Taxes? What Taxes" Daschle was forced to drop from his nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary cabinet spot. It had a lot to do with the fact he had, after his fall from the Senate office in 2002, gotten a cushy job with a limo driver from a friend or twelve. The job and driver actually weren't the problem: Daschle's failure to realize he still has to pay taxes on them to teh IRS was, and the $146k bill that hadn't been paid until this January was the kind of thing that p-sses off a lot of the middle and lower class Americans out there. While I don't want to stand with the crowd of Republicans who are crowing over this example of Obama Fail (And It Only Took Two Weeks is the new label on Balloon Juice), I still side with Jon Stewart on this: PAY YOUR F-CKING TAXES!
• And now, with the CEOs of the various banks, investment firms, and other financial institutions who all had driven their corporations into bankruptcy, and had and are still coming to the government with their hands out like street beggars. Obama's made it clear that from now on, CEOs looking to the taxpayers to bail them out of their own stupidity and greed will have to take a massive pay cut and work for $500k a year without additional benefits. And with this, I definitely stand with Obama: "We all need to take responsibility...And this includes executives at major financial firms who turned to the American people, hat in hand, when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves their customary lavish bonuses. As I said last week, that's the height of irresponsibility. That's shameful. And that's exactly the kind of disregard for the costs and consequences of their actions that brought about this crisis: a culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else." I was never a fan of golden parachutes, even when they came at the expense of companies being driven into the ground by fast-buck con artists posing as genius CEOs.

More schadenfreude acomin, you think? Well, the year is young...