Bombs or Buicks?

My hypocrisy detector burned out on overload ages ago, so I can't really tell whether the idea that preserving jobs at GM and Chrysler is an outrageous example of Democratic overspending while eliminating a smaller number of jobs producing weapons systems designed for all-out war with the Soviet Union is an equal and opposite outrage -- even though the overall military budget will increase by $20 billion and even though the plan to halt production of the F-22 super fighter and the C-17 cargo carrier come from George Bush's former secretary of Defense.

It's getting harder to be partisan when the perceived difference between spending and cutting, big and small government no longer relates to the actual budget -- unless, of course, you just cover your eyes and ears and pick a side.

Of course there's a difference between pouring money into consumer products, the use and maintenance of which creates further jobs and into products that create shock and awe and a lot of debris, but if there's any discussion of that, the noise of the turf wars between the military and private sectors may be drowning it out.

The defense industry is trying to hang on to its share of the gravy train, says The Washington Post today.

"Why, they ask, would President Obama push hundreds of billions in stimulus spending to create jobs only to propose weapons cuts that would eliminate tens of thousands of them?"

Maybe because building more jets not only takes money away from systems we need more of, like armored vehicles and armored soldiers, but because every Chevy built supports not manufacturers of the car; of tires and batteries and spark plugs and glass and paint and steel : it supports not only dealers, mechanics, salesmen, gas stations and all the businesses drivers patronize, but it supports every business that needs to transport people and goods and that means virtually all of them. More money travels more places, through more hands and at a higher velocity and that's exactly what we need to save our sabotaged economy.

But that's just my opinion which hardly counts because I can only vote and I only have one voice to complain with and I don't have the $175 million or so the defense industry spends on contributions and lobbying. I don't have Rupert Murdoch's billions behind me or a huge, underground staff of spammers and swift-boaters and seditious talk radio gasbags hoping to profit from further chaos and collapse.

Am I wrong to expect nothing but the worst?

Is it just me...

...or is holding a politically partisan and divisive protest in DC on the the weekend of 9/11 a really bad idea?

09.12.09 National Taxpayer Protest | The Tea Party Movement Goes to Capitol Hill

Those involved in planning and promoting this--and everyone who attends--should be ashamed of themselves for exploiting the memories of those who were affected by the 9/11 attacks, for partisan gain.

Navy Seals in the sea of slander

I didn't have a chance to write about it last week. I've been out of town, but even before the rare glow from the successful recapture of the Maersk Alabama and the astonishing rescue of her captain had a chance to wear off by itself, the letter appeared in my in-box. It was signed by Admiral Lou Sarosdy saying that he had it on good authority from Navy SEALS that the rescue had been delayed, and almost didn't occur at all because of the dithering and interference from that weak, incompetent, Nancy-boy in the White House. It had been forwarded to me from someone who does a lot of this sort of thing and believes each and every screed that lights up his screen. He appended a tirade about the weakness of Presidents and about how we need Teddy Roosevelt back again, perhaps to start another war to sell newspapers.

I had my suspicions, as constantly referring to the pirates as "raggies" stinks as though it were intended for the bottom of the barrel audience, so I wrote to Snopes.com, who at that point had nothing on it. After a couple of days research on their part, It turns out that Sorosdy retired 27 years ago, denies having said anything like it and insists he doesn't even know any Navy Seals. Wouldn't you know it, I soon got another copy which now assures me that it came :

"From a Marine that lives just outside Coronado where the Seals train. He uses the Coronado Officers’ club."

Seamlessly we segue from the Admiral to some guy in a bar who heard it from some other guy who heard it from a Navy SEAL.

"Having spoken to some SEAL pals yesterday and asking why this thing dragged out for 4 days, I got the following:

1. BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation."

I'll spare you the rest because of course it's a lie and probably was constructed in the same basement chamber of horrors where most of the Republican propaganda of the last decade was sewn together like Frankenstein's monster. All reputable sources deny all the claims, of course, but I'm sure the bulk of the recipients will still go on and on about "weakness" and how we need exuberant and gratuitous aggression against all "raggies" just like good old Teddy would do.

It never ends and it never fails to find a sympathetic audience. Walking through a hotel lobby this weekend, I glimpsed Fox News on a giant screen, "Obama is increasing the size of the Federal Government" crawled across the bottom. Later, in the car, John McCain told us that there was an element of political revenge involved in prosecuting torturers. It never ends and if firefighters were Democrats, Fox would tell us every day how much private property had been ruined by pouring water on it while extolling the virtues of smaller fire departments, with smaller hoses filled with less water under lower pressure. While we're at it, let's privatize it and give the contract to Halliburton.

Hey, did I tell you about the e-mail I got from Jesus saying he's not coming back until we waterboard everyone at Fox News?

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

I have long been interested in epidemiology and tend to follow disease epidemics as they unfold. For other Stephen King readers out there, the new flu epidemic affecting Mexico and the southwestern US will be eerily reminiscent of “Captain Trips” from The Stand.

So, a unique strain of swine flu that combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans has killed dozens and sickened thousands in Mexico causing the government to close schools, museums and other public buildings.

"We are very, very concerned," World Health Organization spokesman Thomas Abraham said. "We have what appears to be a novel virus and it has spread from human to human ... It's all hands on deck at the moment."
It might already be too late to contain the outbreak, a prominent U.S. pandemic flu expert said late Friday.
"Given how quickly flu can spread around the globe, if these are the first signs of a pandemic, then there are probably cases incubating around the world already", said Dr. Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota.

So far eight people in the US have also caught this flu but no one here has died. The disturbing aspect of this flu is that those who have died have been young people and adults. One of the problems with the flu is that each year a new strain travels the globe causing worldwide pandemics. Whether these outbreaks are large and devastating or less significant usually depends on what type of flu people have been exposed to in the past.

The more virulent strains seem to be swine flus. As a young woman of 21, I nearly died from a strain of swine flu that originated in Asia. I had been quite healthy prior to my illness but ended up out of work for four months. I had a year old baby at the time and my mother and mother-in-law (neither of whom got the flu) took turns caring for him.

CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen before in people or pigs. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia. It may be completely new, or it may have been around for a while and was only detected now through improved testing and surveillance, CDC officials said.

The most devastating flu epidemic in modern times was the pandemic of 1918-1919. In the two years that this flu ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected and it was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It has long been suspected that this “Spanish flu” was a strain of swine flu.

The news story can be found HERE. And if anyone is interested, you can visit your local library for the books “The Hot Zone” and “The Coming Plague.”

While many focus their fears on things like missles and terrorists, what if the real threat to is not even visible to the naked eye?

Tough guy Ed Rollins

Well what can we expect Ed Rollins to say when he tries to make a case for Barak Obama's weakness? After all Rollins can't make much of a case for anything but "toughness" in the Reagan administration he worked for or indeed the party he's long been part of. Not that he will get specific about Reagans testicularity, because if a Democrat had "cut and run" in Lebanon, Ed would still be howling about his effeminate weakness. But one can't take Ed for anything but a low key polemicist, an Ann Coulter without the filed teeth, a Lower fat Limbaugh with less gas content. It's all theater; all a continuing part of the fear mongering the humiliated GOP has been using to make us feel good about giving up freedom and prosperity and distract us from the abject failure of all its promises.

So Barak Obama wants to be loved, says Mr. Rollins. Horrors!

"He wants to be loved passionately and daily"

he writes for CNN.com as though he could know. As though he learned of the presidents innermost dreams through pillow talk: as though he weren't building yet another straw man, stuffed with pot-pourri and dressed in lace panties.

"He wants to be loved by the Democrats on the Hill and even the Republicans who have still not given him any love." (despite many having voted for him)

"He wants to be loved by the Europeans who have made a career out of badmouthing U.S. presidents and their policies."

which is Ed's way of placing the blame for calling them all Terrorist supporters of the Axis of Evil because they didn't agree about our false assurances about Iraq on them rather than on George Bush's glaring weakness of character.

"The real example of searching for love in all the wrong places was last week's lovefest south of the border when, in effect, he appeared to be hugging Castro, Ortega and Chavez who have spent their lives fighting everything the United States stands for."

continues the puffed up patriot, twirling his baton, wacing his flag, wishing you could believe that George Bush's Chavez handshake was fundamentally different than Obama's Chavez handshake which, to a prejudiced eye appeared to be a "love fest" and that these banana republic leaders were, by dint of socialistic ambitions "fighting against everything the United States Stands for." The very nerve of showing basic respect instead of making threats! The very weakness of decency and dignity!

Perhaps they do fight against some of the things we stand for, in their own countries, Like Ronald Reagan's death Squads and the fuedalism of foreign corporations, but as a threat to the security and way of life of our republic, they can't do the kind of damage that's been done by Rollins' party, nor are all the things we've been standing for, like torture, military aggression, supression of dissent and bombing the bejusus out of innocent civilians, all that worth defending. I hate to mention it, but Jesus lost his life fighting against many things we've wasted time standing for, nor did he think love was such a terrible and weak thing.

Still Obama should court respect, says Ed, meaning fear. He should just spit on these spic bastards and tell them in no uncertain terms just how many bombs we could drop on their miserable citizens just for voting against our wishes, like we did in Veet-nam. Fear is what we want, not love: grovelling, abject submission to the will of the American President, through fear.

Now of course appealing to the basest sentiments of the public with slander and libel and a smorgasbord of false accusations as the Republicans have done, is really all about wanting to be loved; only it's more pure by virtue of its dishonesty and hostility.

Consider the torture memos. Obama was weak fo releasing them: weak for allowing the Justice Department to decide who to go after and sorst of all, he looks weak, says Ed, to both the people who wanted to hide the information and the people who are our for Republican blood.
Weak if he does, weak if he doesn't. In fact the courage to ignore the passion of either mob must be weakness, right?

"Weakness is the death knell for a president. With 1,366 days to go before this term is up, Obama's got to get tougher or he will be viewed as a personality who reads well from a teleprompter."

So Ed is already partying like it's 2012 and he's trotting out that shibboleth about telepromters to prove his comfort with the most childish and idiotic of his party's giggling points. Pretty weak Ed, I'm sorry to have to say it.

But that's what America liked about Kommander Guy Bush and Reagan - toughness - reading tough words written for him by arm chair belligerants like Ed. I just wish someone would define the concept well enough to differentiate it from pandering, from intransigence, stupidity, dishonesty, unwillingness to learn -- even to make peace.

I just wish politicians like Ed Rollins could explain to me why it's wrong to expose atrocities rather than be grateful to the perpetrators who have allowed us 1200 some odd days of not being attacked by a dozen or so saboteurs -- and why being so pants-wetting fearful justifies taking our freedom, respect, dignity and prosperity away while he whimpers about Obama being weak.

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?