Frank Luntz throws a pity party

I suppose this piece is supposed make us feel sorry for that evil pudgy putz, Frank Luntz who's having a crisis of faith because his slick sloganery isn't doing the job anymore. Damn the little people for failing to kowtow to his superior powers of persuasion. But in the end, the whole interview boils down to this:

Luntz's populism has turned on itself and become its opposite: fear and loathing of the masses. "I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something," he says. "Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn't hear what I hear. He doesn't see what I see." The people are angry. They want more, not because we have not given them enough but because we have given them too much.

Damn the working poor for wanting to live decently. Don't they know adversity builds character? So says the guy with three obscenely opulent residences including his own private bowling alley, which according to him he's never home to use anyway.

Worse yet, he really wants to get out of politics and get into showbiz, but those damn libruls in Hollywood won't return his calls. To which I say, let the scheming miscreant burn in his own personal hell for the rest of his unnatural life. Don't generally wish misfortune even to the most evil among us, but admit I would take some satisfaction in seeing him living under a bridge in a cardboard box after having lost everything. Let him eat phony slogans.

Dueling charts - Updated

Well, this is an editorial so clearly it "was not intended to be a factual statement." For one thing this is not "Obama's Recovery," this is your future under Republican economics.

You might think the editors of the Investors Business Daily would have some interest in telling the whole story because rising tide lifts all ships or something like that. Oh wait, no they don't. The recovery has sucked for almost everyone except the very wealthy investor class, who want corporate friendly Republicans in power. So they won't mention the GOP's obsession with austerity and draconian cuts in government spending they extorted have greatly impeded recovery that benefits all the lower income classes.

Neither will the concern trolling editors at IBD mention how Big Banksters impede the growth of small business.

Neil Irwin highlights these charts from Hyun Song Shin’s comments at the monetary policy summit in Jackson Hole, WY, which provides an “interesting analysis that goes a long way toward explaining why growth has been so disappointing over the past four years.” The chart on the left shows that credit for the corporate business sector has picked up since the recession, while the chart on the right shows credit continuing to flatline for the non-corporate business sector.

Big Banksters got megatons of money on the cheap from the Fed for the express purpose of lending to non-corporate businesses. But they didn't, and still don't, lend to anyone but their corporate cronies because, profit. They like the recovery just the way it is but they're happy to keep the little people angry with half truths so they won't notice who's really screwing them.

Update: Explosive addition to this story by Greg Palast, who has the Bankster's secret end game memo that tells the story of how they invented and enshrined casino capitalism.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

The memo is authentic.

Fair warning. Do not read the nauseating details on a full stomach.

Politifact still useless after all these years

I stopped reading (and especially linking to) Politifact years ago. After they gave the Dems "Lie of the Year" for something that was absolutely true, I was hoping the very serious important people would do the same. They didn't but maybe today's Politifact idiocy will do the trick. Steve Benen catches us up:

Cantor said that the federal deficit is "growing." Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.

In other words, Cantor's bogus claim might be true someday if the planets align perfectly and nothing ever changes in the whole world from this hot minute. As Steve points out, that's sort of like saying: Imagine we're driving down the highway in a car and I step on the accelerator. I then assure you, "Don't worry, the car is slowing down," despite the fact that the car is speeding up. PolitiFact would apparently say my claim is "half true" because sometime soon, the car will probably decelerate.

Or the car might crash into a tree in which case it would certainly stop accelerating. Politifact started out with a good idea and for a while they did a good job. But it's been long since they realized all the biggest lies were coming from one side so they invented false balance so as to look like a neutral observer. Because we all know the truth has a liberal bias.

All truths await

By Capt. Fogg

All truths wait in all things

-Walt Whitman- 

It's been asserted that Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln's mother was illegitimate and that President Lincoln himself was her illegitimate son.  History as is commonly taught to school children seems to have left the legitimacy claims behind to those who continue to impugn the man on the Dollar bill and continue to say the same sort of things about every enemy of injustice ever since.  Certainly those who continue to growl and grumble about the man who bent and broke rules to get the 13th amendment through Congress have much in common with Lincoln's mid 19th century detractors, Northern and Southern, and our current assailants of  nearly every Democratic president since FDR. It's tempting to believe that Americans of today, with their rabid and intransigent and often delusional views are something quite new, but Lincoln's campaign for re-election has far too much in common with Barack Obama's effort to make that idea stand on it's own.

He's a tyrant! he's the enemy of freedom! He's trashing the Constitution and our rights! -- are we talking about Lincoln, or Roosevelt. or Kennedy or Clinton?  All of them and more have faced such accusations.  Did Obama go on an "apology tour?"  Did Honest Abe openly endorse 'miscegenation' (a term that may have been coined by the Religious Right,) and were there articles and pamphlets describing a ball that never happened where 'colored belles'  danced with white men and containing fake pictures?  Yes there were!  just as Houston was flooded with wanted posters and other leaflets the day Kennedy was murdered.

 "At the very time shots were being fired at President Kennedy a right-wing protestor stood a few feet away, heckling JFK by comparing him to Neville Chamberlain"

Relates Donald E. Wilkes, Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law; ostensibly for such things as not forcing Communists to register with the government and for "turning the country over to the UN."  Heard it all before?  Of course we have and we've heard it ever since and from the same damned people in many cases.    "The American Fact Finding Committee" apparently actually the John Birch Society, printed one of those insidious, seditious calumnies. Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries ( who used to do business with the USSR) and founder of the John Birch Society and  father to the Koch Brothers bankrollers of the Tea Party now hounding Obama with the same slimy and false accusations.  Like Father, like sons. Like American Conservatism, like Treason.

Perhaps the "Modern Man" of the mid 19th century of whom Whitman sang isn't much different from the modern men and women who sit up nights fabricating stories about Barack Obama's ancestry and actions. 19th century calumnies about "Abraham Africanus I" and his fictitious dialogues with Satan smell as ugly as anything Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or the Koch boys have ever cooked up in their stew-pots. No, I'm afraid America's 'Conservatives,'  those people who will go to war to preserve the past and particularly a  fictitious past designed to cover up injustice and promote privilege, have been with us all along.

Did the infamous but recently recrudescent Joe McCarthy really say "show me a man who talks about the Constitution and I'll show you a communist?"  I don't know, but his 'Conservative' henchmen didn't think that was as anti-American or trashing the constitution or beyond the definition of free speech as reading Marx or having a certain political opinion or promoting civil rights -- and even, in the case of Lincoln: ending constitutional support for slavery.  The Gospel chewing Bible bullies, the feudal Barons of industry then and now only care about the constitution when someone tries to use it to preserve individual liberty, and so granting the same rights to Biblical pariahs as to others, is "trashing the constitution" when Obama  -- or Africanus II -- favors it.

All truth waits, but who cares to look when it's too likely to challenge our politics, our lies, our precious delusions, our profits, our power?

Tampa and the will to power

By Capt. Fogg

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on Truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt.  So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life" we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians; despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then, there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere who enlightens us with lies like:

 "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama" 

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings  while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage.  Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect?  The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then There's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what - even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies.  Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself.  I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president. Ryan, following in the tradition of accusing FDR of  causing an economic crash that started three years before he was elected. And there's Ryan condemning from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned. Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican?  Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true.  That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is Liberal. Hell you can't even hear History, it speaks in timorous whispers while the Right Wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporate owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all.  He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power.  It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness; it's about power, power and more power and such such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose and yet has the power to destroy the world. 

Damn the lies

By Capt. Fogg


If some day someone erects a cenotaph somewhere in the arid and polluted desert that used to be called the United States of America; some inscription marking two vast and trunkless legs of stone, it should give credit to Fox News.  Amongst the other factors that contributed to the fall of "The Greatest Country there Ever Was" Fox must stand out -- Fox must at least be in gilded letters or garish neon lights, because no day and few hours have passed since its inception wherein some grotesque lie, libel or hyperbolic defamation designed to undermine truth, decency and democracy has failed to appear.

“If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of
America’s finest will be eliminated,” host Shannon Bream said Friday night. “The
campaign is suing to keep members of the military from having extra time
 to cast their ballots in one key battleground state.”

No it isn't.  The suit does not seek to impair voting rights for anyone but seeks to reinstate rights taken from the general population by the Republican controlled Ohio Legislature and if there were a God anything like the fire and brimstone scourge of iniquity people dream about, the earth would open up and swallow Ms. Bream, and Roger Ayres and Rupert Murdoch would become pillars of shit. 


The Suit by the Ohio Democratic Party and the Obama Campaign argues that Ohio's new law creates an unconstitutional tiered voting system, where early voting is only allowed for military personnel. As Jonathan Terbush writes at Raw Story:

"The suit would not prevent military members from, “having extra time” to
 vote, as the Fox report insinuated. Rather, it asks that the court, by
blocking enactment of the new law, reinstate the extra time all voters
used to enjoy for casting their ballots."

You may suspect that I've lost faith in this truth forsaken land and its lunatic tribes and you'd be close to the truth.  Our once powerful and always dishonest country won't be powerful forever nor will its self-righteousness last forever.  The worms, the maggots chewing on the gangrenous  flesh of America are employees of Fox and Shannon Bream is a liar -- if not damned by God, then at least damned by decency.  God damn Fox News. God damn them all to hell

Truth of the Year

In fact, I should say "Truth of the Decades." Kevin Drum says it out loud. It's now profitable to lie, especially if you're a politician.

It also doesn't matter. Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price, since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won't really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler's buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever see this stuff, it doesn't hurt their campaigns at all.

There used to a be a common expression in the world, long ago when I was young. "A man's word is his bond." Time was when honorable men advanced in life by dint of their reputation for honesty. To be caught in a calculated campaign of lies would surely lead to being cast out of civil society. Today honest and honorable men are viewed as losers.

There's no profit in honesty. We're all poorer now that dishonesty is no longer condemned as vice, but rather celebrated as clever tactic to achieve success.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Republicans lie about everything

It's official. There is nothing Republicans won't lie about. The RNC has apparently graduated from the Andrew Breitbart Memorial School of Pseudo-Journalism and came up with this misleading, doctored anti-Obamacare ad.

Recordings of the court proceedings reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal that the audio has been edited. While Verrilli paused once to drink water during the opening moments of his presentation, he stopped talking for only a few seconds before continuing with his argument. In the RNC ad, he pauses for about 20 seconds, coughs, sips water and stutters.

In the RNC’s transcript of its ad, it quotes Verrilli as follows: “For more than 80 percent of Americans, the ah insurance system does provide effective access [pause]. Excuse me. Ah [cough] it ah be-be because the ah the ah the [pause]. Excuse me.”

In the actual proceedings, Verrilli finished his thought. “For more than 80 percent of Americans, the, ah, insurance system does provide effective access,” Verrilli says, pausing briefly and saying, “Excuse me. But for more than 40 million who do not have access to health insurance, either through their employer or through government programs such as Medicare or Medicaid, the system does not work.”

I'm so old I remember when people treated the Justice system, and especially SCOTUS, with respect for the solemn nature of the proceedings. Of course, since then, about half the bench at SCOTUS doesn't treat their responsibilty as the final jurists of the land with much respect either, so I suppose we shouldn't expect any better from the foot soldiers in the culture war.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

If I had a son

By Capt. Fogg

"You know, if I had a son he would look like Treyvon,"

said the president and I guess that's true to some extent. He'd have dark skin, of course, but I took it to mean that his son would be an ordinary looking, ordinary acting 17 year old and not a shooting gallery target.

Newt Gingrich took it differently because he saw the comment, which was clearly an attempt to show compassion and to suggest that he couldn't avoid putting himself in the place of the grieving father of Treyvon Martin, as an opportunity to launch another Fox-faux outrage. Hasn't the entire Republican reaction to the election of Barack Obama been a collection of phony, trumped up, fabricated and exasperatingly stupid outrages?

" Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn't look like him?"

said Newt to Sean Hannity on Fox News. Certainly Fox is the Cape Canaveral; the launch pad of most such desperate grasping at rhetorical straws -- the place where the unscrupulously ambitious launch calumny after slander after blatant lie, not because this president is beyond criticism, but because they, the Republican insiders, are themselves accessories before, during and after the fact of the collapse of our economy, the corruption and outrageous economic policies and the unjustified war that precipitated it and only wild claims can distract the public from remembering. Only wild, unsubstantiated and preferably ridiculous statements can rally the bigotry against honesty and decency.

So is the president suggesting that it was only a tragedy because a black kid was killed? Only a Republican could twist words and facts to make it seem so and only a man of the "I will never apologise for America" persuasion could reflect on the Republican support for segregation, opposition to civil rights for minorities, females and non-Christians and not see the killing as part of a continuum; part of a mentality they've been promoting for at least a century.

The gambit is an old and tired and disreputable one, as much so as is Gingrich himself and the others Fox News gives the megaphone to. "Is George Washington suggesting that he should be king?" In fact he suggested the opposite, but the question suggests that there is indeed a question. Is Newt Gingrich a dishonest, morally unscrupulous, hypocritical liar blinded by an unholy ambition and hunger for power? Does a newt shit in the swamp?

Breitbart's army flounders without their fearless leader

The straggling warriors of Breitbart's army, left leaderless by his untimely death, are doing to best to honor his legacy of fake video "stings." Faked being the operative word, as always.

In yet another humiliating attempt to catch the Obama campaign in a hidden video conspiratorial outrageous outrage, the heirs of Andrew at Breitbart.com have creatively edited a video of a lecture by Harvard Law School Prof. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., to make it look like he was admitting hiding a supposed damning bit of “evidence:” that Barack Obama was a closer friend to Prof. Derrick Bell than they wanted known.

I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that Prof. Ogletree wasn't talking about the Obama video at all. Which, of course, didn't stop CNN from allowing the little Big.Cons from airing the misleading clip during an interview without checking the context.

Meanwhile, the very serious analysts at HeritageFoundation.GOPscam trumpeted their damning discovery that the new black radical demon du jour, the late Derrick A. Bell made not one, but two visits to the White House before he died. Of course, you'll be similarly shocked to find out, a) the Mr. Bell in question was there for a White House tour, not any meetings with the Prez and b) it wasn't that Professor Bell who took those tours.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Sex. Lies and Santorum

By Capt. Fogg

"He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,”

lied Republican candidate Rick Santorum to an assemblage of Tea Bag idiots immediately after having categorized President Obama's "values" and his "agenda"as being

“not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,”

Yes, some phony ideal is on the agenda. A phony ideal involving liberty, Democracy and a constitution that never mentions God or gods or scriptures of any religion and declares that there shall be no religion in government. Science is a phony ideal to sanctimonious Santorum too because we all know that Senators Jesus, Mary and Joseph agree with the oil companies and that the president's job, as 'Rick' told the 'baggers, is to keep gas prices down (and the subsidies up, no doubt.)

No sir, all that Washington, Jefferson and Madison secular prattle is phony and if we're looking for full employment, a decent quality of life and personal liberty you must turn to The Christian Scriptures which forbid us to charge interest on a loan or obtain a divorce or marry whom we will or even to enjoy sex when it isn't only for making babies. Some churches I won't mention have interpreted it to demand a king chosen of God rather than an elected government, but don't bother Rick with that. It's already on his agenda.

So why is this sex-fearing, woman hating, half-witted fake theologian; this lame-brained Longinus and meretricious medievalist mewling about theology while pronouncing Ernulphian maledictions on what he pretends are President Obama's values, cursing them one by one? Because theological statements don't have to be true, you see; don't have to be supported by evidence and are easily and frequently used to do horrible things to people. Cognitively impaired, confused and historically ignorant "conservatives" seem pre-lubricated to receive ecclesiastical wisdom without discomfort and Faith invents facts as well as it rejects them to the despair of brother Ockham.

So Obama, who thinks a Harvard Law degree makes him as good as a white. Christian man, agrees with Justice Scalia that religious freedom does not legalize acts done in the name of religion and yet, conservatives still want to shove the notion that he's a radical, Liberal, Christian-hating Sodomite Commie up the national hoo-ha and true to form, the 'baggers assume the position and take it.

How can any curse suffice?

Comrade Obama?

By Capt. Fogg


I must disagree with Bill Maher that Rick Santorum thinks of gay sex more than a dildo salesman but only because Rick Santorum doesn't actually think, unless one defines that word very loosely. He doesn't remember things too well either and I say that in all generosity since one might interpret the things he says he remembers as outright lies. They aren't even up to date lies or original lies or good lies, yet there are always enough misinformed, low intelligence dung flingers in fatuously faith based America to believe them and make this country seem like the primate house at the world's largest zoo.

Take Santorum's tired repetition of John McCain's 2001 attempt to sell the embarrassingly ridiculous notion that President Obama wants to redistribute the nation's wealth in some Socialistic way, a bit like Jed Clampett arriving at the Royal Wedding in his beat up old truck . Coming from a Republican, whose party has engineered what might be one of the largest upward redistribution of wealth, that's already laughable but Mr. Rick seems to be the last man standing who is still driving that rusty jalopy -- the idea that Our president, beset by critics calling him a corporate whore and a sell-out to Wall Street is a radical socialist and perhaps a communist to boot. What Santorum claims to remember is that Obama supported a constitutional amendment to give your money to the poor ( read black people) when what the president really said in a 2001 interview was that the

"Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. . .”

Essential constraints -- it sounds very little like a man who is deploring those constraints. Indeed when Obama said the court had limited itself to insuring that he could eat at a lunch counter as long as he could afford to pay for his lunch, only a stupid man who thinks other people are even more stupid would interpret, or should I say twist, this as a quote from the Communist Manifesto.

"In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of ‘redistributing’ wealth. Obama’s point — and what he called a tragedy — was that legal victories in the civil rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country."

said Obama spokesman Bill Burton during the 2008 campaign. Certainly no development since then has given credibility to McCain's sad attempt or justification for Santorum's calumnies.

I'm finding it difficult, even without the waves of nausea and loathing, to accept that any candidate could have got as far as Santorum has without being laughed out of town as a cheap, incompetent liar and unscrupulous scoundrel. I can only blame the media ringmasters who continue to provide this charlatan with his own ring in this sad and tawdry circus we call a campaign. Have we forgotten that the purpose of news reporting is to sort truth from rumor, slander and lies? Perhaps we have and it's certainly been a long time since the news was anything but a way for big news corporations and their sponsors to make money. Perhaps we should stop making them richer by occupying Wall Street and start occupying CNN and Fox and the rest instead.

Dems deck the halls with bows of folly

Since I left the business of law, I pretty much save my profanity for special ocassions. This would be one of them. So this is for the hapless sad sacks that populate what was once a political party I was proud to claim.

Dear President Obama and DC Dems: Fk you. No seriously, Just fk you, each and every one of you merry gentlemen and gentlewomen. Why the hell do you think we should fight for you, if you don't fight for us?

I was going to write up my disgust, but while I was getting ready for my big dinner date this evening, my new blogging hero beat me to it. So outsourcing my rage to Charles P. Pierce's eloquence:

Oh, they have made a day of it. First, the pillars of Jell-O in the Senate roll over on the itty-bitty surtax they wanted to lay on the plutocrats to pay for a payroll tax cut for the rest of us. Then, the president announces that he's not going to veto after all the bill in which 400 years of Western jurisprudence is pretty much torn to ribbons and tossed to the wind, albeit slightly less deeply into the wind than the original monstrosity would have liked. And, finally, Ron Wyden of Oregon steps forward to give cover to zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan's latest attempt to "reform" Medicare in the same way that Arthur (Bomber) Harris "reformed" the building codes in Dresden. It's a Very Special Holiday Episode of the long-running hit comedy, Ah, Who Gives a Fk Anyway? [...]

It cannot be emphasized enough. Of the three issues under discussion, the polling data on two of them simply could not be clearer. The American people want taxes raised on the very wealthiest among us, and the American people do not want Paul Ryan's clammy hands anywhere near the Medicare program. Public opinion is (distressingly) ambivalent on the detainee provisions, but it's not overly popular with the people who have to implement it, and it has retired Marine generals throwing bricks at it, and, dammit, the president taught constitutional law, or so we are told repeatedly. [...]

Here's a tip, gang: The American people are not angry at government because people yell at each other and nothing ever gets done. The American people are angry because people yell at each other and nothing the American people really want ever gets done. They want higher taxes on billionnaires. They want Medicare kept out of the hands of the vandals. If they think about it a little, they even like their jurisprudence with a little habeas corpus sprinkled on top. Instead, they get endless platitudes, and the steady, futile placating of an insatiable political opposition.

That's just the highlights. Definitely read it all to experience the full range of my anger.

It's not even that I didn't expect it. It's not like we haven't seen this movie before. But I had some small hope they would rewrite the script. Certainly they were trying out some new dialogue in the rehearsals for the last few months that promised this time there would be vetos. There would be an honest to God fight for equitable outcomes. But, no. As the saying goes, same shit, different day.

It's insulting. Do they really think we don't see what they're doing? That we won't remember by November? We won't forget. We remember every single betrayal. So far, like a battered spouse, we've accepted the proffered bouquets offered in contrition. Accepted the promises to change. To do it better next time. But there's a limit to how many promises can be broken.

I've been around a long time. I understand the need for pragmatic compromise. But this isn't compromise, it's the same devious cave-in to placate the plutocrats. It's not only spineless, it's stupid. I'm really sick of stupid.

Shorter Mitt Romney spokesmouth

Quote notably made anonymously. Shorter: Sure that Romney ad quoting Obama out of context was a mendacious piece of stinking crap. Hey, politics ain't beanbag so don't expect any honesty out of this campaign. Why is that even an issue?

Greg has the longer. You can also be sure the usual media scolds won't be throwing themselves onto the fainting couch over it.


[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

HIPPIES!

By Capt. Fogg

With the Florida Coven of the Republican Party making the Visigoths look like Cub Scouts these days; arguing that a prohibition of "Dwarf Tossing " is destroying American jobs, I think I'm more than justified in a certain lack of restraint when describing the moral character of that party as having everything to do with gaining power by any and all means, and having nothing whatever to do with making the US a real Democracy. These days it's as much about making the news a series of passion plays meant to obscure and often reverse the facts as it has been about suppressing votes and Gerrymandering.

The practice of dirty tricks has come a long way since Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick used the media to convince us that the media was lying and that the vast and silent majority was a small and unpatriotic minority. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the confidence level that allows them to strongly support something one day and denounce it in hyperbolic tirades on the next according to tactical needs.

It's possible to denounce Wall Street brokers and banks; insist that we let them die and scream about it in the streets with tea bags stapled to three-cornered hats, yet support the same corrupt and unpunished entities passionately by denouncing the same sentiments; associating them with "hippies" in fine old 1968 style two generations after the last real hippie got a haircut and went to work on Wall Street.

And yes, you're damned right that Fox News is the Joseph Goebbels of the new Right. You'll remember how ACORN was smeared and destroyed by patched together video, You'll remember fake video made to look like millions were at Republican rallies, but you're less likely to remember that fake video was used by Brit Hume to denounce Iraq war protesters in 2003 as "hippies" -- Protesting the Protesters documentary and other fake documentaries like Indoctrinate U that was intended to show how righteous "conservatives" were being censored at those hotbeds of hippieism, the Universities. You may then not be surprised that the same saboteur behind those atrocities, one Evan Coyne Maloney, has been at work on the sidewalks of New York, handing out rolling papers with pictures of Che Guevara and bongs so that the recipients can be filmed with them and another invidious documentary can be patched together so that we can be Foxed again.

Never mind that the streets are filled with veterans and economists, businessmen and others who demand respect and deserve to be heard, Fox wants them out of the way and can think of no better way than to dredge up hoary straw men in tie-died T-shirts. Look! that investment banker, that war veteran, that Nobel Prize winning economist: HIPPIES! COMMIES! DRUG FIENDS! HATERS OF OUR SACRED CAPITALIST VALUES!

Has any nation been able to stand; been able to avoid catastrophe, been able to maintain the illusion of freedom under such an internal assault?

Killing him slowly

By Capt. Fogg

There simply aren't words adequate to describe Rush Limbaugh unless we quote his own. I'm tired, to tell the truth, of trying to match polemics with him, tired of denouncing him and of course the ears of his acolytes are deaf to such things anyway.

I admit that I don't actually listen to him any more and that's been true for many, many years. I simply can't trust myself in the presence of so much evil, so much hatred of the kind of America I hope for, but at the bottom of it, I can't stand to hear some sinister thing that the law requires us to treat as a human being and citizen, so incapable of reason, so bereft of any human feelings and so unable to feel any kind of shame, so full of hate.

But as I say, his followers can listen to him demanding harsh treatment - even death - for drug users while knowing he's a long time abuser of opiates who has had his employees risk their freedom by buying drugs for him. His hangers on can quote his self contradictions without pause and will smile and nod when he wishes disaster on our country if disaster is what it takes to promote Republicans and destroy any Democratic president. Who but Rush, after all, can call Obama an ineffectual "empty suit" and a tyrannical demagogue at the same time; tell us he was born in Kenya and Indonesia simultaneously and not instantly be dismissed as casually as one flushes a toilet.

Certainly not Limbaugh's ignorant army. They surely applauded his latest verbal atrocity; telling us how that evil Obama sent troops to Africa to help kill Christians: The Lord’s Resistance Army. They certainly aren't going to notice or care or believe that the LRA are a genocidal terrorist group who has murdered, raped, kidnapped and terrorized tens of thousands over many years. They've killed some Muslims, you see and that makes them Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.

They aren't going to be shocked at the way Limbaugh assembles scraps of misunderstood or non-existent or invented stories without any concern for truth or decency or patriotism or anything but the potential to destroy Barack Obama. No, not as long as he keeps up the endless supply of nasty little lies they can tell their friends over a beer and at the barber shop where Fox plays on the TV, where the stupid go to get their wisdom confirmed and hate is in the air.

"Hey didja hear how Rush called Oh-BAH-ma an empty suit? He sure got that right!"

Amerika Über Alles

By Capt. Fogg

Mitt Romney is hard to figure out, partly because his most salient feature is the love of ingratiating himself dishonestly with any group he thinks is worth ingratiating himself to. So I have to wonder if he really thinks the United States is the nation chosen of God to lead the world as he told cadets at the Citadel yesterday or whether he just assumes that people embarking upon a military career are dreaming of imperial glory. I have no way of knowing whether these cadets have Napoleonic dreams or are attracted to arms because of some sense of personal weakness and humiliation, but I'd hesitate to bet that many really think that US history isn't filled with mistakes at home and abroad or that we aren't a better, more moral nation than once we were. Of course I don't mean to say we shouldn't strive to be a good influence in the world, but being a good influence doesn't mean command, doesn't mean control, doesn't mean we're the infallible and mighty hand of some invented Lord as Romney would be implying if there were any implications beyond opportunism in anything he has ever said in public.

But as I say, you never know what Romney thinks, particularly if your assessment is derived from listening to the man. You certainly can know that he's willing to put some strange interpretations on events to bolster his imperial and messianic aspirations whether or not he believes them. President Obama's "apology tour" for instance; Mitt would like to make the psychorabble feel important and loved by associating honesty with apology and apology with weakness and weakness with Jonah-like abdication of a divine mission. Of course Obama never went on an apology tour, but what black man has ever not been in danger from Godly Americans when someone accuses him of winking at a white girl. Where there's smoke, there's fire, we say, forgetting that where there's smoke there may be a smokescreen and there may be arson.

That Obama portrayed American history in a poor light by admitting that we have sometimes been guilty of arrogance and have sometimes made mistakes is a big fish to swallow, to invert the metaphor and it clashes with Romney's carefully crafted humble demeanor. There's nothing humble about him and there's something disturbing about the belief in divinely ordained male control of family life his religion seems to demand, at least to an outsider like me.

"An eloquently justified surrender of world leadership is still surrender"

said the man who is more frightening for his benign smile. To me there is no one more dangerous than a man who can call upon a sufficiently established god to justify world domination and I don't think I need to offer examples. No one more dangerous unless, of course, we add the photogenic charm and the forked tongue. What Mitt really is saying is that America is chosen to be the priest and caretaker of the planet and what he is implying is that by being its ordained leader, he's God's agent on Earth. Where and when have we heard this before? Certainly not from the founders of our Republic who took up arms against God's own chosen King.

I've often been told that Obama "went over there and apologized to them" by Fox News victims totally ignorant of where there is or who said what. It's a lie of course and a big one but it isn't going away even if Romney never says another word about it or is magically transported to another world for him to rule, as apparently he thinks he will be. Lies, like cancer cells, are all but immortal. Truth and decency and the hope for a world not run by pompous and powerful thugs in expensive suits and plastic hair are as fragile as a dream.

Pants on fire

By Capt. Fogg

“The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

-Article III of the US Constitution-

“There is no Supreme Court in the American Constitution"

-Newt Gingrich-

Really, Newt? Are you really a history professor? Do you really think we're that stupid?

It's getting hard to tolerate the stench coming out of the pre-caucus Republican cesspool; from Presidential candidates getting government funds -- our tax dollars -- to teach people how to pray away the gay and advocating the use of Federal might to stamp out all forms of pornography frowned on by their frowning religion and to legislate and limit and punish our personal relationships -- while griping about too much government interference and too much spending and too much social engineering. It's getting damned hard to tolerate morally, mentally and ethically bankrupt creeps like Newt Gingrich, who is quite happy to feed the malignant idiocy now consuming the remnants of our Republic by telling us that our constitution does not "mention" much less provide for a supreme court, Article III of the Constitution notwithstanding.

"We now have this entire national elite that wants us to believe that any five lawyers are a Constitutional convention. That is profoundly un-American and profoundly wrong.”

lies the moral multimillionaire elitist with the million dollar line of credit at the jewelry store and a string of illicit mistresses and abused ex-wives. That's profoundly un-American and profoundly wrong and profoundly Republican. But of course anyone who thinks the highest court is an extra-legal ad hoc assembly of five self-appointed members foisted on the public by "elitists" and with no constitutional authority can hardly be considered an elitist of any kind unless there's a ranking of candidates according to their ignorance and mendacity and greed. Perhaps Newt just forgot that the Supreme Court Justices are approved by Congress or perhaps he's just a lying tub of septic scum who thinks he's entitled by birth and party affiliation to feast on the corpse of America.

You can fool some of the people all of the time: you can fool a lot of them in fact. They're called Republicans. They're called perverts, they're called liars, thieves, embezzlers and saboteurs.