Dishonesty is strength

Dick Cheney is a man of short declarative sentences. He packs a lot of venom and a lot of mendacity into each one.

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which he’s gone to Europe and seemed to apologize profusely, been to Mexico and seemed to apologize there,” said Cheney to Raw Story's David Edwards. “The world out there, both our friends and foes, will be quick to take advantage of that… I don’t think we’ve got much to apologize for."

"Seemed to" shouldn't slip past the reader unnoticed, since it's an attempt to elevate a convenient assumption to the point where his baseless argument can pivot on it. To be equally as curt and declarative: Cheney lies. It didn't seem so to me or to those who listened to all the words, rather than the tendentious extracts wrapped in tactical opinion we got from Republican sources.

It doesn't seem beyond the pale to recognize that swaggering "kiss my ass you dirty wogs -- I'm AMERICA" foreign policy that has been the joy of the thundering classes who see the world as ungrateful and arrogant for wanting some measure of independence. It doesn't seem like an unqualified, abject and grovelling approach when Obama says we haven't been fair to the world all the time either. It sounds, in fact, like honesty and of course to the man of the perpetually undisclosed location, who keeps his lunch and shopping list in a vault, that's a sign of "weakness."

It's "weak" to disclose that we tortured people to death and lied about it. It's weak to shake hands with Chavez, says Cheney -- but only if a Democrat does it -- and of course any sign of honesty, humanity or willingness to promote peace that does not depend on unqualified, abject and grovelling acceptance of American Empire can be a fatal weakness.

I have trouble understanding the level of fear Cheney lives with; the kind of fear that drove him and his puppets to military aggression, pathological secrecy and a domestic paranoia that led him to think the suppression of civil rights and constitutional law is "nothing to apologize for." It's harder to understand than starting a war on false pretenses for his own profit.

Paranoia: the feeling that even our friends will take advantage of us if we're not unrelenting in our refusal to admit mistakes and uncompromising in our rage for dominion; law, morality, truth and justice notwithstanding. Quite an opinion and what better place to discuss it than with Sean Hannity and what better audience than the people who still watch Fox News and who are sure to fail to notice just how Cheney and his party equate ganging up on a new administration in time of extreme crisis as patriotism, but of course these are the people who accused the Democrats of caving in to terrorism in 2001 even after they voted unanimously to support George W. Bush.

Accepting the consequences of your actions is so unmanly.

LETS GO VIRAL (WITH A MONDAY UPDATE)

You are invited to steal this picture. Drag and drop it to your desktop. Share it with friends. Post it on your blog if you are as annoyed as I am with Tempest in a Tea Bag Day.  All rights are hereby waived.

Our national debt is currently $11 trillion dollars.  Deficit spending by three, successive Republican administrations accounts for $9 trillion of the total … a whopping 82%.  Tempest in a Tea Bag Day is a deception whose real agenda is to blame GOP transgressions on Democrats and obstruct plans to fix our economy.

Nine out of 11 trillion dollars in total!  What an interesting ratio.  It reminds me of another 9/11, but undoubtedly any reference to the terrorist attack of 9/11 would surely offend (although the insinuation is damn tempting).

So go ahead: Steal this picture, post it, and go viral.

MONDAY UPDATE:
A special thanks to our friends and colleagues who supported this effort during the weekend: Brain Rage, Captain Fogg, TAO, Green Eagle, Shaw Kenawe, Generik Brand, and others too numerous name here.  Our friend, The Deranged Leftwing Baker, went even further by adding this graph to embellish the above:

(Double click to enlarge; back button to return)

Sometimes a clever cartoon makes a complex topic even simpler and more dramatic:

Ban the Assault weapons!

If the movement spreads, we may be faced with a movement to ban Jedi-style "assault flashlights" in the United States. After all with some 400,000 or more people in the UK declaring themselves to be Jedi we just have to ban something.

Meanwhile Barak Obama has re-affirmed his support of banning "military style" weapons, which are ordinary rifles that look like the real military rifles that have been banned since 1934 but are not. The plan is to keep Americans from the lookalikes so that Mexico won't have a problem with the real thing. Doesn't make sense to me, but I haven't had my morning loco-weed yet. Perhaps we have to evoke the scary drug-war straw man once again to obscure the lack of evidence that the previous ban had any effect whatever on crime in the US. Evidence to the convinced, after all, is like garlic to a vampire and so must not be talked about.

"The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons--anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun--can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons."

-Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988-

Sugarman, although he is a licensed gun dealer himself and should know better, seems to have pioneered the tautological term " assault weapon" and admits to using it solely for it's ability to deceive the public, not for reasons of honesty. The concern that police departments are "outgunned" can only be seen as fictitious propaganda (I'm trying not to call it a lie, since I'm such a nice person) when we note that even the tiny town of Jasper, Florida, population 1795, with its seven man police force equips every police car with top of the line fully automatic military weapons: machine guns.

Yesterday, in the affluent nearby community of Palm City, Florida, a woman home alone was assaulted by a man who used a shotgun to blow open her back door. Somehow she managed to use the family .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol to wound and drive off the assailant, who is now in custody. That pistol of course fires a more powerful bullet than the semi-auto 9mm Uzi "assault weapon" the banners would like to ban and has the same rate of fire. Still, we don't call it an "assault weapon" since it doesn't look like one. Pass me the loco-weed please.

Even better: we don't call a shotgun an assault weapon either even though it was used in an assault. Any way, the woman is alive, thanks to her "defense weapon" and the "shoot the Avon lady law" that was passed in 2006 over the hysterical objections of the anti-gun lobby. So far, none of our Avon ladies are missing and Mrs. Russo is still alive.

What's in a name? asked Juliet. In magic-thinking America: apparently a great deal, and unlike the immutable rose, the same firearm can be different things. Whether it's an assault weapon or a self-defense weapon has nothing to do with the weapon or its use, yet we think of one as much deadlier because people are spending a great deal of money making us think that way. Too bad our president has given them his large ear.

Good riddance!

And don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Sounds like Texas pretty-boy governor Rick Perry has been smoking too much of that Republican tea and thinks he's intimidating the USA by reminding us that Texas could just secede from the Union if they wanted to. So much for the great depth of that passionate "patriotism" that wafted out of that state like a bad smell during the Bush years. Of course they'll round up their long horn cattle and the attendant bullshit only if

“. . . Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”

Indeed, who knows -- maybe a bit of sanity and representational Democracy for the rest of us?

Washington thumbing it's nose means restoring the top tax bracket to far, far below its historical levels and giving a tax break to 95% of us -- if you speak Republican. "Texas is a very unique place" he says. It is: too unique to remain part of the US.

"In God we trust"

said Sam the pretend plumber Wurzelbacher to a demented Michigan crowd yesterday.

"Say that too loud in some parts of America and you will be shot. It’s terrible." A terrible lie would be closer to the truth. I have and you won't be and no one ever has been. Hardly anyone cares these days.

What they do care about is the failure of deregulation and massive tax breaks for the really rich to do anything but bring on catastrophe. What they do care about is the betrayal of all of us by the Republicans. Could it be that there's something in all this tea other than a misunderstood and misapplied metaphor? Such flights from reality into mass hysteria usually stand out in history books as markers for events we wish never happened, but if there's any meaning to this repudiation of the blind patriotism traditional with the far right and hysteria about the deficit spending that's been the core of Republican practical economics since Reagan I don't think it's anything but an attempt to take by mob action what they couldn't keep by democratic means. It's proof that the new Right is the old Confederacy without the slaves. This isn't anything like the destruction of tea at Boston harbor, it's like the shots fired at Fort Sumter 148 years ago this week.

So while the third string intellectuals dance about the funny farm with their little tea bags and their big lies trying to distract us from reality, the corporate media continue that American tradition of fomenting war to sell papers and try to distract from the truth by balancing sanity with sedition and dementia.

NATIONAL (IRRATIONAL) TEA BAG DAY

Today is the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Today is also National Tea Bag Day, a protest movement against … what? Taxes? Federal spending? Bigger government?  One of my blogging friends may or may not be carrying his tea bags today, but big government is definitely on his mind. In a recent post on Why Government Expands, Open Minded Republican writes:

Largely, it really doesn't matter whether people believe in large government or not, because it will always expand regardless (…) The answer is much simpler and harder to address. People are elected to 'do something'. For the purposes of this discussion, what they are elected to do is irrelevant. It is the 'do something' itself that matters.

Fair enough. Had the article contained the usual partisan attack clichés about “tax and spend liberals,” I would have rejoined: Republican administrations incurred $9 of the $11 trillion in sovereign debt … squandered away a trillion dollar budget surplus … and started the Iraq war on borrowed money.  But Open Minded Republican framed his hypothesis in non-partisan terms. Have we progressed to the point where we can hold a reasonable and civil conversation without recrimination? Octopus should mind his manners, and readers may ignore these remarks.

Lets look at the merits of OMR’s hypothesis. The premise that government expands regardless of which party is in charge misses a point. In essence, OMR makes the expansion of government appear as if this were a naturally occurring phenomenon … like the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang. In other words, OMR offers an entropy model as a fig leaf for polite discussion. Does a fig leaf constitute a viable hypothesis? There is nothing self-evident about the expansion of the Universe or government. Herein resides a problem of logic called the mystification fallacy, as defined by Octopus:

No matter how intelligent we think we are, or how diligent our method of inquiry, there will always be events and situations we do not understand. One response is to attribute supernatural or mystical causes to phenomena that are beyond understanding. Perhaps some events are truly random. Nevertheless, to assert that something is unknowable is to halt all inquiry, whether the thing is knowable or not. In every academic discipline, there is always an article of faith that states: Everything is potentially knowable.

To rephrase the question, can we describe big government adequately in terms of spending, or deficits, or public debt as a percentage of GDP as if these were phenomena lacking cause and effect?

Perhaps the expansion of government has multiple causes depending upon where one looks. Sometimes government expands to mobilize for war or in times of economic turmoil. There are times when government spending is a natural consequence of prosperity, when tax receipts rise along with expectations, and strategic decisions are made about the future direction of the nation. No doubt, earmarks deserve a sentence or two, since there will always be stakeholders competing for a share of the public pie.

When our attention should be focused on the economy, is there a hidden card tucked inside the sleeve of OMR's argument? In other words, trickle-down versus trickle-up?

Every recession replays the same old drama. Business sheds workers when sales revenues decline. Nervous consumers spend less on goods and services … causing business to lay-off more workers. As fear cascades through the economy, the rate of contraction quickens and deepens. For this recession, the stats are grim: unemployment has risen 8.5%, the economy has contracted 6.5%, equity markets are off 40%, and credit has all but disappeared. Bottom line: when businesses and consumers can no longer bear the load, the stimulus of last resort is the federal government.

What are our policy options? Spend trillions of dollars on a stimulus plan, or lose the same trillions in falling tax revenues? Yes, that’s right. Local, state, and federal government will spend or lose trillions either way.  Stimulus spending will increase public debt; doing nothing will accelerate the rate of economic decline. Given this Hobson’s choice, one wonders why we are even having a debate.

Yesterday, President Obama tried to address these concerns in a speech that deserved far more press attention. On the subject of bank bailouts, he says:

… whether we like it or not, history has shown repeatedly that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again, they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months -- years of low growth, years of low job creation, years of low investment, all of which cost these nations far more than a course of bold, upfront action.

On the subject of direct rebates to taxpayers, President Obama says:

… the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that's a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.

Finally, he speaks about strategic policies to secure a better future:

Number one, new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation, not reckless risk-taking; number two, new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; number three, new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and new industries; number four, new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and number five, new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations.

Under the last administration, national debt doubled from 5.5 to 11 trillion dollars; yet, we have nothing to show for it. We still have a crumbling infrastructure, a broken healthcare system, and no national energy policy to make us energy independent. But we do have National Tempest in a Tea Bag Day for every Joe the Dumber who thinks he will someday make mega-millions, tax-exempt and Heaven-sent. Meanwhile, my “open minded” Republican friend wants to start a conversation without starting an argument. I welcome this conversation. Now, what do you want to talk about?

I'm Worth Zillions

I am such a lucky woman. I have won the lottery over & over & over & over again. Reportedly - I am worth zillions! AND - what's more amazing still about my good fortune is that I keep winning the SAME two lotteries - REPEATEDLY! Is this even possible?! Mathematically? Statistically? I wonder! What is the probability that an anonymously squidly woman lurking in the ocean depths of the US could win the British & Irish lotteries multiple days of each week???!!!! Sometimes one each per day!!

So this all has me pondering . . . why aren't I winning any other national lotteries? Like in my own country? Gee - might it be because other countries actually require that you enter a lottery to win it?

Or . . . maybe its just that other national lotteries do not know the mysterious electronic pathway through the atmosphere that leads to my gmail spam box.

Maybe?

It's safe for rabbits - for now

Whew! What a relief. I expected, now that we have a wuss in the white house who thinks this isn't a "Christian nation,"that the Liberal/atheist/fascist/Marxist pansies would begin the assault on Easter I've been expecting for so long. After all, no one would attempt to make Christianity illegal and leave Easter intact.

But it didn't happen. We held a small party for friends on my boat and passers-by wished us a happy Easter and a happy holiday in equal numbers and not a single shot was fired. This morning, I can see two of the long eared symbols of Jesus crazing on my front lawn oblivious to the danger of Constitutional law. No more skulking down back alleys, collar turned up.

Maybe I shouldn't stop worrying though. Even though it's quiet on all fronts of the war, maybe it's too quiet.

Fox and its victims

One of our local solons has scrawled his opinion in the local paper that President Obama is a failure because while engaged in "befriending our enemies" and leading us toward Marxism, Socialism and Fascism in a manner so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree "hates America," he has "no answer for anything -- as is illustrated by having no solution for the piracy problem.

I don't watch Fox News, because I don't support villainy and sedition, so I don't know whether they have covered the US Navy's recapture of the Maersk Alabama from pirates. Yes, the American captain is still a hostage and that's because Obama is too cowardly to be dropped on board the pirate vessel with cutlass and pistol while growling ARRRRRR through the knife in his clenched teeth -- just like Reagan would do if this whole thing were a 1950's B movie. None the less, the US Navy is there despite Obama's pants-wetting cowardice, and reinforcements, including a counter-piracy task force, are on the way.

Meanwhile the wine-besotted surrender monkeys from France have successfully stormed another vessel freeing 4 hostages and killing the pirates. One hostage was killed. A multinational force is assembling in the region as a response to the increase in Somali piracy, but of course "Obama has no answer." Obvious to the Fox poisoned as well, is the fact that Obama has no answer to anything because he hasn't yet undone the damage done by the pirates George Bush sponsored on Wall Street and in the lending industry. It must be cowardice of course, unless it's the Marxist/Socialist/Fascist/Muslim extremist thing. Perhaps it's his cowardice that prevents him from continuing the "Kiss my ass you wog or we'll blow you all to hell" diplomacy, which in Foxspeak means cozying up to our enemies.

"Changes have been made" say a good share of the letter writing peanut gallery and if we don't see the danger we need to wake up. I suppose that means to tune in to all the warnings from Blowhardia on the radio and suck up the toxic twittering of Fox. Unlike the Kommanderguy, Obama is "surrounded by criminals." The end is nigh.

So anyway, the Kingdom of God has not arrived with Barak Obama; something that was not, pace the quick brownshirt Fox, expected by his supporters -- but that's enough to dub him a failure. He's certainly received enough mockery in his first steps down the Via Dolorosa to make Fox's cynical comparison compelling. Of course Jesus was surrounded by criminals and actually was a socialist in the extreme, but the irony -- all irony is lost on the ignorant army of the American Right. The stupid will be with us longer than will be the poor so we might as well accept it, but if only we didn't have the plutocratic pseudo-populists in Fox's clothing to make them the enemy of all things true and just.

Up to our knees in Santorum

"Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions"

says former (hurray!) Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum in a Philadelphia Enquirer editorial titled The Elephant in the Room. Of course the problem with any elephant in the room is not that it's difficult to notice, but that the room tends to fill up with shit rather rapidly.

Of course nothing helped Santorum be convinced of anything, he's just, like any elephant, looking for whatever fodder he can find so that he can, as elephants do, digest it and turn it to dung. Conviction is what you call the straw you're grasping at when you're afraid of drowning.

The fact that president Obama told the French we can sometimes come across as arrogant is a simple statement of truth. We can -- and Santorum certainly illustrates it by pointing out how the French owe us their freedom, while ignoring that we owe the French the same debt. Of course only such an elephant's ass as he would require the French to grovel and eat up such merde as we feel fit to excrete -- and in perpetuity. His own arrogance would be a model for the Sun King.

Of course he fails to note that Obama also called Europeans arrogant as well, which renders the former Senators "convincing evidence" nugatory as well as dishonest. But what "values and traditions" is Santy talking about here other than arrogance itself if Obama is admitting that yes, we can be perceived as overbearing and pushy?

Actually I'm getting tired of treating this man's shit as worthy of comment -- as though he weren't a tin-horn blowhard without the wit or talent to do anything but cut bait for the Republican dementia mongers. You're an elephant's asshole Santorum; you and the Fox you rode in on.

A Gesture Well-Intended

Last week I was given a pink rose – individually wrapped in cellophane. It didn’t look wilted but it didn’t look exactly vibrant either. And the same could be said of the giver & the rose’s symbolic gesture.

It was the day of my annual post-40 rite of passage – my mammogram. After my yearly, teeth-grittingly uncomfortable procedure, I re-clothed & headed for the exit of the clinic. As I was headed out the door, the receptionist called out – "oh wait – here." In distracted fashion she aimed the rose in my direction & called out for the next patient – her focus now attending to other business. As I made my way out of the clinic I thought – oh – a rose. A pink rose. What should I do with it? Not being a flower person I felt awkward. Could I stick it in my purse? But then it might not be seen. Should it be seen? Would I be causing offense to the “cause?” Is this my badge of . . . hope? . . . courage? . . . what? And, did I want everyone I saw to know I’d just had a mammogram evidenced by my being saddled with a pink rose?

PINK has become the color of breast cancer. Pink ribbon stickers on car bumpers, pink packaging in grocery stores proclaiming which products donate to the cause. All of this pinkness is wonderful – it has raised awareness about a major health issue. It has helped to raise money for research. Yes – all of this is great.

But this recent rose ceremony has given me pause.

Am I beginning to sound cynical? I do not mean to be. But I guess that is the whole point of this post. I was so puzzled by this ceremonial lack of ceremony of a symbol - & its efficacy. When do symbols begin to lose their symbol-ness? And, when they do – should we switch to new symbols that resonate more strongly? When does a well-intended gesture, such as mammogram clinics giving out pink roses – become just a routine gesture that becomes, well, just a gesture?

We Americans are infamous for overdoing things to the point of rendering them meaningless. Call it a cultural idiosyncrasy of ours, I guess. But may we please not do so to symbols, to causes, to gestures – that still SHOULD resonate with a sense of urgency.

And as for my pink rose – I am sincerely grateful to the person who initiated the idea - originally. No doubt with heartfelt good intentions. However – the manner in which my rose was bestowed upon me was that of an office worker fulfilling a duty. And she did. She saw that I got my rose. And – in her defense – if I had to give women pink roses all day everyday while tending to a myriad of other duties – I’d probably become a bit mechanical, ceremonially, myself.