Know Your Class War: You can't afford rent at 40 hrs a week in Any State at all

As the graphic shows , people can't afford to live independently on the current minimum wage. Just leaving aside the issue of rent, consider also that people regularly need food, to pay utilities, to be clothed, to pay for health care, and to cover transportation costs. And many people trying to do all of this with insufficient funds, are also incurring debt which also must be paid.

If you're working enough hours minimum wage to cover your most basic expenses--you are basically living to work.

Is that living?

When people discuss the minimum wage in terms of more jobs being available at lower wages, they are forgetting that people only purchase goods and services that they have the money and time for. Your grocery dollars contribute to the jobs of the people at your local food store. Your clothing budget helps support a salesperson or cashier. People spending money is what creates jobs--and people who are broke and exhausted, just aren't doing that.

I don't think it's a case of the rents being "too damn high", as it is a problem of wages being too damn stagnant. Raising the minimum wage would strike me as being a very good stimulus.

If aliens came?

Via MoveOn.org.

But Do You Want Them?

Despite what the stylized rendition of The Donald's hair seems to represent, this poster is neither selling cotton candy nor alpaca fiber woven rugs. No, this poster, portraying Trump as a kind of billionaire Uncle Sam (Uncle Semoleons?) is recruiting (see?) donors with the promise of being entered in a drawing to have a meal with the former governor of Massachusetts and the reality-show real estate mogul.

That's a bargain, depending upon your threshold for awkwardness and/or sense of humor. Me, I'm a lefty blogger and I presume drinks are paid for, so I might even be a little curious to see what the chemistry is really like between those two wild and crazy guys. Maybe I'd try to engage on what they really think about competition economically with China or the limitations of a truly free market, but I think we all know what the real Trump card is, and why it's kind of weird Romney is willing to play it this close to his actual physical, pretending-to-be-moderate-enough-to-win-a-general-election chest.

It's the Birther card, natch. And as Patrick McKinnion's heroic "Dispatches from Birtherstan" regularly shows, there lies some outstanding stupid and crazy.  Let's just say, if I were Mitt, and trying to look not-stupid, I wouldn't necessarily want to enjoy a candlelight supper with riparian entertainments with a guy who still straight-up thinks Obama was born in Kenya, even after Obama released the long-form birth certificate and actually laughed right at Trump like a boss. (Yeah, Romney joke in there, too. Because, you know. Inevitable Mitt.)

"C'mon, Mitt" Says Reality-Based Person, Colin Powell

I could still be bitter about Powell's Show'n'Tell presentation for the UN with the actual vial of crack he bought just a block away from the White House  anthrax vial and the Diorama of Doom showing the limits of Near Eastern meteorological technology  cunning mobile biowarfare labs that most likely were no such thing, but that's not me. I forgive people for spewing the kind of utter nonsense they consider to be their jobs, if--if--if  I have reason to suspect they might be retired enough or done with the nonsense enough to actually level with us. I got that feeling from Powell when he endorsed Obama last time, and I more or less still think Powell is not the worst of people. And he may even know what he's talking about.

So that said--C'mon, Mitt. Because I don't think that guy even has the credibility I'm willing to front Powell.  (No, read the "that guy" thing. It's Romney on about Russia.  So precious! He's like Sarah Palin with a bigger house to see Russia from.).

There Hasn't Been a Spending Binge Under Obama, Despite What Romney Says

The graphic really does most of the talking, here, and I don't have a whole lot to add to it, except to point out that just because this chart has gone viral on Facebook and been called "mostly true" by Politifact, doesn't mean that Romney won't carp on about spending under Obama's administration as if his candidacy depended on it--because it probably does.

The only way things Romney says about the economy make sense is if you buy into the idea that government spending is an economic problem. The federal debt is a kind of problem, but at historically low interest rates, it's not as immediate a problem as unemployment, for example, or high personal debt in the form of mortgages, credit card debt, or student loan debt is for millions of Americans whose wages have been stagnant even as some staple costs like fuel or health care have gone up.  A lot of the federal spending arguments strike me as being beside the point--revenue should be paying down the debt, but not at the expense of functions of the government that are necessary to protect the welfare of our citizens. If we have more homeless, hungry and unhealthy people among us--we will all pay more in the long run than if we are taking steps to keep people capable of contributing to the economy and to our society.

Romney has come out as a proponent of the Ryan budget, which is definitely not a debt-reducing plan in the least. When conservatives wax maudlin about how future generations will suffer under the yoke of massive debt, they kind of forget one of the possibilities that exist for not so encumbering their grandbabies--actually generating revenues right now to pay it down (which is why I'm bullish on the Progressive Caucus' budget plan, myself.)

Anyhow, Romney's claim about understanding the economy is just bullshit, and not just because Krugthulu and I say so.  Listen to him, and compare what he says against your own kitchen table conversations about how we can get out of the financial mess going on. In your guts, you'll know-- (he's....not right).

Well, at any rate, he's willing to lie about it all, Romney is. And his ability to lie--well, that counts, too.

Bain, Romney & Ampad 2

Because it is a valid issue.

Bain, Romney & Ampad

Just watch the clip.

Blaming the Messenger?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Sorry about the Boeing advert up-front--it's part of the clip. But if you were possibly in the market, for say, a small jet, I hope that was helpful to you.)

Now that we're in the second day of foofaraw over Newark Mayor Cory Booker's oddly off-message statement on Meet the Press, I feel comfortable saying: Meh. I know. Some people are saying he's trashed the Obama campaign's line of attack regarding Romney's record at Bain. I think that on the merits of Romney actually not having a damn thing else he's running on, it's still a good line of attack, as these things go, especially when you look at things like the amazingly lop-sided profits to creditor repayment ratio in the Ampad deal (that looks like a Mafia bust-out, seriously). It's still a valid line of questioning regarding Romney's involvement with job-creation (or destruction, as the case may be), as Booker himself has pointed  out in his walk-back.

The "both sides do it" part of his comments is what I found more distasteful. There just isn't an equivalence between Obama's attendance at Trinity United Church being used as a smear ("Black! Liberation! Theology!") against him, versus a critical look at just what Mitt Romney is putting forward as his claim to understanding the economy. The former tactic is a device to try and make President Obama responsible for every out of context thing another person may have said in his presence to present him as a dubiously American "other". The latter is, I would say, the thing Mitt Romney's campaign has invited us to do by making his record as businessman the central rationale for his campaign.

I just don't think there's really a long-term harm coming from a muddled message, here. Honestly, although there's going to be some waving of Booker's statement around in a "even Obama Surrogate Cory Booker said...." fashion, it's still early in the campaign. It'll pass. And actually, I'm more interested in some ways with the degree of push-back Booker has gotten from Obama defenders (I'm kind of glad to see it, actually).  It tells me people are fed up with false equivalence and fired up to set the record straight.

Also, I don't think it should do much more for Cory Booker than remind him: there is no such thing as post-partisan in an election year. I can appreciate the point of keeping a positive message as a surrogate for Obama, and he did mention some good points about how Obama's policies have benefited the economy already--but without pushing back against smears, given how dirty this campaign is shaping up to be with all the PAC money involved--he wasn't really doing it right.

Show Me the Plane Ticket

What a weird, birther-y week it's been. We've had one CO US Representative, Mike Coffman, indicate that he didn't know where Obama was from, he just wasn't an American. We've had the Secretary of State of, where else, but Arizona, Ken Bennett, imply that President Obama might not be on that state's ballot because he considers Obama's birth certificate to be suspect, following in the footsteps of the great detective, one Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose evidence consists of "read a book saying its' suspect", "WND", and "oh look, shiny thing". And then there was the journalism find of the week from the Breitbartlets (complete with "non-Birther, no really, we're just raising questions and presenting evidence" disclaimer): the smoking brochure, where apparently someone at the literary agency repping Obama mistakenly indicated that he was born in Kenya.

This is supposed to be proof that people surrounding Barack Obama have been carefully cultivating an Obama myth to obscure the Real Obama. I think it's proof that agents more or less skim the books their authors put out.

But it's not a bad theory: there we have Barack Obama, poised to embark on a political career that will ultimately take him to the White House; and there's the literary agency, conspiring to help him by dishing out a nugget of disqualifying information....Wait, what?

The narrative breaks down just a bit more in John Nolte's response to the Obama Campaign's response.

Let's Define Mitt Romney--by Mitt Romney

 I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.

That's great stuff, Mitt!

Something Something Ron Paul's Not Campaigning, Something Something Delegates.

I feel like I should say something to mark the sorta-suspension of the Ron Paul campaign, just as I marked the end of the Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich campaigns. Somehow, my heart just isn't in it. For one thing, even if Ron Paul isn't actively campaigning, you know, deep down, some of his supporters will never say die. And also, Rand Paul. And also, delegate finagling.  (Would Ron Paul get a prominent berth at the Convention to give one of his speeches? Let me reiterate: one of his speeches?)

In other words, to the extent that he was a fixture of this campaign year, his version of not campaigning would still feel to me like he never left, if that makes sense. And if it doesn't, that's probably fitting.

Donna Summer--RIP

My mind has been replaying so many of her songs since I heard she passed on.

Mitt Romney Got Away With It. Probably a lot.

Jason Horowitz's WaPO piece revealing young Mitt Romney as a "prankster" whose version of pranking involved one one occasion, walking a visually-impaired teacher into a door and on another, involved physically assaulting another student with scissors in the company of a mob, actually turned the screw for me. My original perception of Romney was "clueless"--I though he suffered from just a bad case of privileged boobery combined with a mild empathy-impairment. I upgraded my estimate to: "and a gutless coward, too" as the only explanation for his squishy weaseling on the issues not long ago. But that article just made me see a sociopath. That wasn't the behavior of a dumb kid making mistakes. That was a pattern of preying on the weak and thinking their weakness was amusing. It was intolerance of differences. And I don't think he learned thing one from his experiences because no one bothered to teach him that it was cruel, or wrong.

From the article:

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. 

(Snip) 

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall. 

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

It's noted later in the article that Lauber was expelled for smoking.  They are very different things, after all. Administering a beating and a haircut at the head of a mob is very different thing when you are the son of someone very important from smoking while being a victimized kid of someone....probably not quite as important. I think the lesson young Mitt would have really learned is all too clear--


Whether he acknowledges how and what he learned is, of course, not quite a task Mr. Romney is up to.

Well, that took long enough...

But it was definitely time he said it:



I've pointed out before that I didn't entirely buy the idea that his position was "evolving" so much as he was waiting for an appropriate moment to share his view. I'm conflicted about the issue of timing the expression of a potentially divisive opinion when one knows their position is just, but the presidency lends weight to an opinion. It's not called the "bully pulpit" for nothing, and the president does have the opportunity to advocate for the positions that have meaning to him--

But it's also limited, especially on issues like this. It can be a net positive that the president supports marriage equality. On the other hand, his advocacy of an issue can't be about him. For whatever reason, there is a contingent of people on the right who have decided that whatever the president is for, they're against. What I think President Obama has finally realized is that the same people who are dead set against gay marriage are pretty much the same people who don't support him and never would. There's just no value in going after their support.   But all the same, it makes sense that he expresses his support after NC's Amendment 1 * vote. That had to play out on its own, without even the appearance that his statement was about influence.

Regarding that vote, I think that it occurred during a primary election influenced both the numbers of people voting and the composition of the voting pool in a way that skewed more in favor of the Amendment. The percentage by which is passes is disheartening, but what's infuriating to me was finding that there were people who supported the amendment not even knowing exactly was it was about. I disagree in principle with idea of letting a majority vote regarding the rights of a minority--this really shows how people's rights can be voted away without much of a thought by people with no real involvement in that issue.


*Blog note: I was disturbed this morning to find that I had a blog post up about Amendment 1's passing that I distinctly did not remember publishing because it was only in draft form, containing one image, one long quote from an article, and a sentence or two.  I shuddered and deleted it--and I'm not really sure what I'm more disturbed by: the possibility that I could have been tired enough to publish instead of save what I'm working on (I've kind of been doing this awhile--but Blogger, oh Blogger. You change things.) or that the platform I'm working on made the editorial decision to run with my draft (ghosts in the machine).  This is not paranoia talking. I have one blog post that is incomplete when viewed in IE but shows up in Chrome. I can't explain that, folks.   So in the meantime, I've had some traffic from blogrolls to a non-existent page.  Sorry about that.

One day, I will get the hang of this blogging thing.....

No, Mitt, Julia isn't Fictional--she's a composite.

So, today Romney commented on a neat little gimmick the barackobama.com site has to show how one person's life might intersect in positive ways with the government through policies that the Obama Administration has either instituted or supported.  I think it's a pretty cool way to illustrate the differences between the policies of the two candidates, and also reminds us that government can provide opportunities to do things as opposed to limiting options.

It must be effective, because Romney had a case of the whiny's over it:

“Have you seen, by the way, the president’s vision for the future?” he asked. “To help us see it, his campaign has even created a little fictional character. It’s on the website, living an imaginary life filed with happy milestones for which she will spend the rest of her days thanking President Obama. It’s called ‘The Life of Julia.’ And it’s a cartoon.” 

“Julia progresses from cradle to grave, showing how government makes every good thing in her life possible. Weak economy, high unemployment, falling wages, rising gas prices, the national debt, the insolvency of entitlements — all these are fictionally assumed away in a cartoon produced by a president who wants us to forget about them.” 

Romney added: “By the way, what does it say about a president’s policies when he has to use a cartoon character rather than real people to justify his record?”

Oh, Mitt, you sad robot, that's not how it works at all. Actual people living not-wildly-privileged-beyond-dreams-of-avarice lives might just identify with Julia at her different life stages, and say "That is a program I could have benefited from"  or even "I did benefit from that thing." "Julia" is a composite of all the people in this country who benefit from different aspects of government every day.  People are born in state hospitals. They go to public schools.  They might have government employees for parents. The government of the United States and its subdivisions actually is responsible for a lot of what we call "good" in our lives as citizens. It's something we inherit from over two hundred years of democratic government, where people have voted their values and various programs have arisen from that representative government to fulfill aspects of those values, whether it be educating people so that they can occupy the workforce effectively, or ensuring the public health, or even just acknowledging that we owe entitlements to those that pay in to our system through their taxes in the form of Social Security and Medicare.   We Americans like to talk about our successes, and we consider ourselves a great and prosperous nation. Our democratic system of government, and the choices wisely made by our people over time, have contributed to that.

By not recognizing the relationship of government programs to actual people--instead carping about the fictional Julia--Mitt Romney shows that he simply doesn't get it. The economy may go through cycles of boom and bust, jobs may come and go, gas prices may rise and fall due to market forces--but the life the "fictional" Julia has experienced has made her more educated--which makes her more employable, less likely to lose a job, better able to find one, and more likely to make a good salary once she has one. Her children have health benefits and also are likelier to have more successful lives because of a government that provided opportunities.  They are better able to weather those difficulties because they had a government that had their back. That's not too shabby for a "cartoon" (and really, Richie Rich over there should prove he isn't a cartoon, himself).

If Barack Obama is "looking back"--he's looking back at the history of our nation and the ways we've come together to try and address problems through civic means. By mocking the systems we've put in place to create the higher standard of living we enjoy in this country, Romney is really misunderstanding what this American experiment has been about--how we together built a government responsive to our real human needs.

If he has a problem recognizing that real people benefit from these programs--maybe he doesn't know enough about how government works. If he thinks government can't or shouldn't provide opportunities, he can go be a part of some other country that hasn't prioritized those things. Maybe Somalia. Or maybe he could stop using the term "opportunity society" since he doesn't appreciate the opportunities our government already creates.

This makes a lot of sense--al-Qaeda's Would-be Undiebomber a Double Agent.

Because I'm not sure how they even recruit people for this sort of thing:

U.S. officials said Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, one of America's Most Wanted terrorists, was scheming to bring down a U.S.-bound jetliner with a new, "sleeker” version of the underwear bomb when he was killed by a CIA drone Sunday in Yemen. 

Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency provided the key to thwart the plot by setting up an undercover informant to pose as a wannabe jihadi, a source said. 

The double agent managed to get the Yemen Al Qaeda franchise to trust him with the latest version of the underwear bomb. 

He delivered it to authorities and is being debriefed by U.S. officials and allies. The Los Angeles Times was the first to report the use of a double agent.

You know, like the bomb Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab singed his junk with. Seriously, why is AQAP still trying to build a better bulge bomb? Are they that committed to futzing with air travel? Can't get new material? Because really? The tinkering involved to get a nice big "boom" from a gadget smushed up in someone's briefs instead of just a manscaping incident gone terribly wrong? Is probably going to continue to have a very limited payoff.  I'm no demolitions expert, just a person who has smuggled a small, nonmetallic device in my drawers from time to time, but I can attest to the practical issue of poor ventilation and the reality of having a whole person's body piled on top of the "package".   And while I agree with the article that the people involved in this terror plot are hardened, violent veterans of international terror--there's still just a part of me that hears "underwear bomb" and thinks "What the fuck is wrong with these people?" and not in a "very impressed with their deviousness" kind of way, either.  Even if a terrorist successfully mined their own shorts, they are still a person who thought mining their shorts was a good idea.

Honestly, AQAP? Villain weirder, why don't you?

On the other hand--yay CIA for excellent bad-guy getting. You guys? Way better than shorts-mining terrorists.  I mean that.

And the cock took credit for the dawn.

Mitt Romney is ready to "take a lot of credit" for the auto industry bail-out.

And?  Right.

He's really the worst, isn't he? Obama can't take too much credit for stuff he was actually involved in, like the decision to go after bin Laden, but Romney can take credit for something he was on record opposing. YAFB details the Mitt by Mitt evolution of Romney's finger-in-the-air twists on what ultimately turned out to be a good idea.

I'm still trying to absorb whether this is something Romney's campaign people are actually okay with:

Yeah, Governor Romney, just, uh, go out there and shamelessly lie. It plays to your strengths for one, and for another, gives you a vice that might actually be interesting.


Greed, after all, is merely done to death. And jealously is too obvious.

"You're So Bain"

Just brilliant.

Regarding NC's Amendment 1--a great speech regarding Constitutionality

(Hat-tip, Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice)



This was so eloquently put and ably argued I needed to link to this. It's a powerful witness to the wrongness of putting civil rights of any marginalized group up to the vote of a majority and a stark statement regarding the wrongness of the racially divisive tactics of NOM and their allies in trying to co-opt the African-American churches. I hope North Carolina rejects hate.

Romney Hears a Wha-?

This audience member in Ohio asked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney a question about restoring the Constitutional balance of the branches of government, but not before accusing President Obama of treason and "acting outside of the structure of the Constitution". She wasn't specific about what she found treasonous in President Obama's execution of his office, but without missing a beat, Romney gave an answer regarding the awesomeness of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and some right wing boilerplate complaint about Obama's statement that the Supreme Court finding the ACA unconstitutional would be unprecedented. (Really? Is another Harvard Law school graduate actually going to accuse Obama of not understanding the process of judicial review, when he was talking about the historical precedents in favor of the commerce clause? Actually, that kind of got to me more than blowing off the treason charge did.)

But, wait--what about that claim of treason? Didn't Mitt find anything a little weird about that?

Well--no!  She did get a little applause for it, after all. These days, I don't think that sounds too weird to Republicans anymore.  He's been compared to Hitler and to Chamberlain. The Republicans are just looking for an angle to impeach him over, so, what the hell, why not accuse him of treason? After all, the candidate himself has accused Obama of apologizing for America all over the world (and would he be so good as to tell us where those speeches were so we can queue'em up on YouTube? Oh, that's right, it's a damn lie.)  By saying she wanted to see Obama on trial for treason. she was just saying "hello". It's not that Obama has to be guilty of treason, after all.

She'd just like to see him on trial for it, is all. Then watch the sentence and the execution thereof. Nothing to see here--just a Republican who wants a Democratic president facing a firing squad. And candidate Romney understands. So he gave a standard reply: Constitution, good. Declaration of Independence good. Obama, dumber than wet paint.

Now, he does develop a sense of endangered rep when called on it later by journos. But in the moment? Why would it sound funky at all? Of course Obama is guilty of treason.  He's in Mitt Romney's way.

I'd say it was another episode of Profiles in Something Other Than Courage for Mitt, but if I have to cluck every time he plays the coward I'll be thinking I'm a chicken before all this is over. And he wasn't being a coward right there, exactly. He was just being a Republican.

RIP, MCA

I don't do nostalgia and whatnot. But the Beastie Boys were part of my life soundtrack.

Romney Doesn't Win WIth the Haters, Because of Hate

(H/T Towleroad)

What have left-bloggers been saying? Well, Bryan Fischer just summed it up--Romney can't be expected to sack up against any foreign malefactor because he's sackless in the face of Fringy McWingnut. (Sic--all references to "sack" as a synonym for courage being the imaginative property of Patriarchy, Inc. All rights reserved to people not like me. ) As I said, Romney doesn't owe these people one damn thing because they don't approve of him on general principles. His yielding to any pressure from them is basically wasted energy, and a gift to the Obama Administration, who wouldn't at all mind seeing him painted into a far-right corner.

If he's painted into a far-right corner (and can't get no Indy's) and hasn't tickled the political libido of the far-right base either, then that guy is gonna lose. And good riddance to diffident rubbish, I'd say.

Implausible Deniability--

The White House has sort of walked this back, but I don't think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. It's 2012, and I just don't know how anyone who is concerned with the civil rights and equal protection under the law of all people can deny that the relationships of gay people absolutely deserve the same equal treatment to those of straight people--a lifetime commitment, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer, 'til death is marriage, and the biological sex of the participants in that vow has no bearing on the meaning and the reality of the journey those partners set off on. It's the committment, the vow, the loyalty, that forms the family there, not the fleeting erotic bits. I've always considered this thing a no-brainer, and kind of fail to understand how anyone else doesn't.


Some people believe that Vice-President Biden is somewhat gaffe-prone, but I don't. I think he suffers from a case of something a bit rare in politics: an honest intellect. What some people view as unpolitic statements, I actually view as a sign of an active intelligence, and, more often than not, a fair and a kind one. For that reason, I take what he said today on its face: he is comfortable with gay marriage, and wants to see gay couples enjoy the same rights as straights. For what it's worth, I've always thought Obama's "evolving" position was just code for "can't say it out loud yet, but has no real opposition to gay marriage",

Maybe this is just a straight-married bi-girl's civil libertarian projectionism, but having known hope, why shouldn't I expect change? I don't think this was a trial balloon to see if maybe America was socially ready for marriage equality, but if it was, I think most of us are, and I think it's time the Obama Administration bust out of the tolerance-closet. I know it's an election-year, and I think it's important to be forward about it because Obama's opponent is not, and will never be our ally, but I think Obama could be.

Conscience and poll numbers doth make cowards of us all--if we let them. Leadership sometimes creates the change you want to see in the world. I kind if hope this is a signal that the administration that saw the end of DADT, will recognize marriage equality, and put on the record that what fate has brought together is not the government's business to keep asunder.

Michelle Obama Today--(Did I mention I Admire her?)

(Don't mind the advertisement in front--I can't help it. Just hit "Skip".)



Building a decent life for yourself and a better life for your kids is something I think everybody can get behind--and that's why I support Barack Obama.  But knowing we have a no-nonsense, smart, caring First Lady like Michelle Obama doesn't hurt, either.

Joe Friday Re: Right Wing Militias.

I don't have cable, so one of the things I've been watching regularly is reruns of classic television on Antenna TV.  I enjoy it because old television is kind of a time capsule of "The Way We Were", but also, sometimes it reminds us of things that don't change. Because I'm a big fan of police procedurals (CSI, Law and Order, Criminal Minds, etc.) I really like looking back at shows like Dragnet and Adam-12. Anyway, there was an episode of Dragnet I saw recently that fascinated me, because it involved a right-wing militia operating mostly out of the southwest running stolen guns. It reminded me a lot of the types of folks David Neiwert covered in The Eliminationists, actually, and reminded me the type had been with us awhile. Anyway, Joe Friday (Jack Webb) talked about where he stands politically, and I just found it interesting:



I kind of said "Right on" at the tv. So, I thought I'd share the clip since I found it on YouTube.

Maybe Mitt Romney Needs Bill Kristol Advising Him...

Ordinarily, I would not recommend Bill Kristol as an adviser, but here was Mitt Romney one day ago:

Chen took refuge at the embassy after escaping house arrest. He rejected a deal to keep him safely in China and now says he wants to leave the country. Chen has said he feels abandoned by the U.S. American officials have said they didn't pressure him to leave. 

"If these reports are true, this is a dark day for freedom and it's a day of shame for the Obama administration," Romney said. "We are a place of freedom, here and around the world, and we should stand up and defend freedom wherever it is under attack." 

The State Department said this week it conveyed no implicit threats and the issue of violence never came up in its discussions with Chen. They told him that China had agreed for him to reunite with his family if he left the U.S. Embassy. 

Romney suggested U.S. officials were motivated by the politics of Chen's case. He said U.S. officials "willingly or unwittingly communicated to Chen an implicit threat to his family" and accelerated negotiations for his safety because of scheduled high-level talks in the country with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts.

And here's what turns out to be some very sensible advice from Mr. Kristol:



And as it happens, here is the situation as it stands one day later:

The US says it expects China to allow prominent dissident Chen Guangcheng to travel abroad soon. 

The US state department said Mr Chen had been offered a fellowship at an American university, and it would allow his wife and children to accompany him. 

Earlier, Beijing said the blind activist could apply to study abroad - paving the way for a resolution to a tense diplomatic stand-off with the US.

So, basically, the outrage lasted about a week, would you say?  At the embassy for about six days, then let out, then, voila! a perfectly reasonable and legal way for him to travel abroad appears! In real terms, this situation lasted an actual day for Mitt Romney, as in, he read a thing in the paper to criticize, pronounced it a "dark day for freedom and a day of shame" and now is just kind of looking awkward and clueless. Again.

The name of the SuperPAC supporting him, Restoring Our Freedom, kind of bothered me, but now it makes sense. I was always thinking, "Well, the future hasn't happened yet, so, where did it go that it needs restoring?" But now I get it. Romney can't win on his history, and he sucks at current events. So, the future it is!

Always Read Krugman--Keynes Was Right

This is the man :

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash. 

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits 

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

 I've got a metric fuckton of observations that go with this, from "Wouldn't it be neat if Bush et als were big on Hayek back when Bush inherited a budget surplus, so that instead of a tax cut and massive government spending, the house would have been in order for a less-miserable crash that more people could have walked away from?" to ""True stimulus has yet to be tried", to "The operation isn't successful if it's killing the patient".  And also "Things cost more because they cost more--not because of inflation right this minute" and also,  Atrios makes sense when he talks about free money.  Or if you asked me, (who does?) I'd at least say since this slump had to do with a debt crisis, let's see some debt forgiveness and for an old-fashioned kind of money-in-people's pockets scheme--pay raises. Up the minimum wage. Bills get paid and more money goes around.

*I don't even know where that Russ Meyer econowonk tattoo display came from. Of course I don't.

Mr. Newt's Wild Ride Comes to An End

Instead of linking to Newt Gingrich's rambling farewell speech, in which he thanked many people, and um, said many things (including a digression on his lifetime achievements) and, um, didn't really support Mitt Romney so much as state that any Republican was better than Obama (inspirational!), I think I'm just going to concentrate on Newton Leroy Gingrich's real contribution to this campaign.

For one thing, there's the negging he did earlier in the primary to make the Romney campaign really want to hook him up with support from their donor list to help in retiring his massive campaign debt.  You know, like these comments right here:



And then there's this marvelous and accurate statement from Fox News' own honest fellow, Shep Smith, who comments on Gingrich's parting words and Team Romney's response to them:



"Politics is weird....and creepy, and now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality."

I would make that into a needlepoint to hang over my bed if I could do needlepoint, I tell you what.

This moment is bittersweet for me. I don't think there's much of a political future for Newt Gingrich and actually, I suspect that his campaign may have even harmed his reputation by calling attention to the rare batshit flavor of what has generally been assumed to be his scholarly, historical, and technological Big Ideas. Viewing him in the light of 2012 casts a pall over the earlier version that once loomed large in my political imagination--the 1994-1999 Gingrich whose Contract With America and whose leadership in the House led to such...nonsense. The government shutdown. The impeachment of President Clinton.

I don't think you could blame me for seeing the echoes of that time in the 2010 mid-term elections that swept in a mess of GOP freshmen armed with hard-core partisan ideals, or for wondering if someone like Eric Cantor or (more probably) Paul Ryan might have Gingrich-like influence as Speaker themselves one day by following in his creative-destructive footsteps (no fear of Boehner--he's useless).  Yet seeing the curtain swept back on the Great and Powerful Oz to reveal a little con man is kind of satisfying, in a way. Did he give brains, a heart, courage, a home, to arch-conservatism? Or were they merely tokens?

Meh. Ding dong, the career is dead.


(X-posted at Rumproast.)

A Quick, Smart Gender Income Inequality Tie-In to Defeat Walker from WI Dems:

"Dudes Get Paid More" --Rachel Maddow

Everyone who knows me, must know I'm a sucker for charts. This is from Rachel Maddow, in response to the Condescension Heard 'Round the Blogosphere from Alex Castellanos, where he basically said she was being an emotional girl (and wrong) about gender-based income inequality.

Honestly, challenging Rachel Maddow on the facts is like saying, "Here's my ass, could you just wrap it up in a nice bow and hand it back to me? KTHX."

So, here's the video, and all (sorry about the ad, but it's short):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Hat tip: The Political Carnival)

Profiles in Whatever You Would Call That

The Romney campaign's recent hire of Richard Grenell was met with a little controversy for a couple of reasons--for one, he had a bit of a mean sense of humor on Twitter (although that was easily deleted, if not entirely forgotten) and for another, he was openly gay. It looks like it was the latter detail that lead to Grenell's resignation today, as Jennifer Rubin reports:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives. 

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

 I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

 According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

This is really quite disappointing. The last week or so has focused attention on Romney's foreign policy views, and Grenell might have been able to, well, do the thing he was presumably hired for and help the campaign craft a consistent message if the social conservatives could actually bring themselves to view a person based on his merits, not his identity, and if the Romney campaign wasn't--how should I put this?

Gutless.