The Poor Man Institute

Ah, the racism that doesn’t exist in America anymore (and would y’all quit complainin’ already):

And I have to respect His decisions in these matters.

I never particularly liked Michael Jackson.  I’m not being a music snob – I own enough Rush albums to choke Geddy Lee’s shnozz, if that makes this any easier to take – I just never liked it.  But I didn’t like his music in 2nd grade – I was more of an El DeBarge man, if you must know – and I don’t like it now, and while he may not have been a child molestor, yes he was.  But now he’s gone, and now we’ll never cure cancer.  Or something.  I’m sure there’s some reason why, two weeks after he floated to his reward on a pillowy cloud of lab-grade pharmacuticals, everything is a tribute to Him, the Greatest Human Ever To Live.  So, fuck him, fuck that 70’s chick with all the hair, that guy who isn’t Donovan McNabb, that dude from that one old cop show, and everyone who brings any of this up, including me, and let’s hope Madonna’s next.

When Neal Peart dies I’m going to light myself on fire.  In a spinning, strobe lit drum kit 50 feet above the stage.  Tickets go on sale now.  Post here if you have any good Dead Michael Jackson jokes, or if you have his doctor’s phone number.

Sarah Palin, why do you keep playing with my emotions? 

I’m pretty sure she can hear these guys from her front porch. And woe is us who lost our sentinel to the north, tirelessly policing our airspace for unauthorized incursions by giant floating Putin heads. Doomed. Doomed I tell ya.

Shorter Michael Scheuer:

The only thing that can keep this country safe from a spectacular attack by al-Qaeda would be a spectacular attack by al-Qaeda.

Alternative Shorter Scheuer:

We have to raze this country to save it. From being razed.

Seriously.  His argument boils down to this: if America isn’t attacked again, we as a nation will never do what it takes to keep America safe from being…attacked again. 

I know I’m repeating myself here, but the argument is just so magnificent in its self-refuting circularity that I can’t help but stand in awe.  Even Orwell would have left that scene on the cutting room floor, deeming it too much of a strain on the credulity of the audience. 

And yet, there is Glenn “Batshit Crazy” Beck nodding along as if these were the wisest words he’d ever heard.  His retort is brilliant in its own right:

Which is why I was thinking, if I were [Osama] that is the last thing I would do right now.

So, Osama wouldn’t want to screw up his chances of setting off a WMD in America at some later date by…setting of a WMD in America now.  I…but…the point is…he would…why is there blood coming out of my nose?

You’d think at this point that when a pundit felt the compulsion to call Paul Krugman “shrill,” that pundit would pause as the word made its initial journey from diaphragm to mouth, and think long about aborting the mission before full-blown enunciation.

Why?  Because, in relation to just about every major issue that Krugman has supposedly been ”shrill, shrill, shrill” about (the Iraq War, Bush’s tax cuts, the housing bubble, the general fucked-uppedness of the Bush administration, etc.), he has looked overly timid in retrospect.  Cautious to a fault.

But then, as President Bush reminded us in his usual eloquence: “Ours is a society where things are like instant, so therefore, history almost is like so far back it doesn’t count.”  Enter, Andrew Stuttaford:

There are indeed reasonable grounds for believing that man is having/could have a significant impact on the climate (just as there are reasonable grounds to suspect that man’s impact on the climate may be reduced to insignificance by countervailing natural factors). But for those inclined to believe in a hoax, shrill, hysterical language such as Krugman’s is only like [sic] to reinforce their suspicions…

For what offense is Krugman once again being bemoaned as strident, uncivil and overly impassioned – that is, in what way will Krugman’s words eventually appear calm, measured and complacent in hindsight?

A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the [Waxman-Markley] bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases. And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet. [...]

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is. 

What this tells me, based on Krugman’s Law of Shrillness and Accuracy, is that we are all fucked. Proper fucked? Yes, Tommy, proper fucked.

Given that The Toot’s clarion call for primary challenges for those Dems that opposed the public option in health care legislation has already yielded results (if you ignore chronology, actual level of influence and several other key factors), and given that it’s one of the few tools available to those that want to push feckless incumbents, consider this another such call: Dems that screw up global warming legislation should face serious primary challenges come hunting season.

Whatever you want to call them – if “traitor” is too strong a word for a politician that values campaign contributions more than the welfare of the planet and its billions of inhabitants – they need to be replaced. 

(links via the Jameson Family Jamboree)

When God is in the mood for a morning shrill, God heads for the mountains of Bush beer cracks the pages of the K’thrugmanomicon.  The brilliance of the shrill burns even The Almighty’s eyes.  Or whatever it is Shakira’s Ass uses to read with:

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get [health care reform], because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers. [...]

Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.

I’m not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs. [extra shrill added]

I don’t think I’m being too Dirty a Fucking Hippie to point out that there are some Democratic Senators out there that could use them some primary challenges.  If this is the best that the “centrist” Democrats can do, then let’s get some Democrats that can do better.  If we can’t get Feingoldian progressives in every state, at least we can get moderate candidates that at least recognize that the vast majority of Americans want this kind of public option - they want what the governments in such economic powerhouses as Mexico, Poland, Peru and Costa Rica have managed to provide their populations.

And a note about costs: Sometimes, my fellow Americans, we really suck. 

A few trillion (more actually) to kill a bunch of foreigners in a couple of wars that have yielded almost nothing but instability and suffering?  It would be unpatriotic to bring up the price tag. 

A couple of trillion in tax cuts for the insanely wealth heir and heiress set?  Opposing them would be class warfare.

$1.8 trillion to cover American citizens who (frequently) must choose between food and medicine, their kids welfare and medical treatment, life and death…?  

Well, that is a lot of money.  Government needs to be more fiscally responsible.  Let’s not get carried away.  Looks like socialism to me.  Just think of the deficits. Does David Broder think the bill is bi-partisany enough?

According to Ralph Peters, the Iranian regime decided to rig the election not out of domestic Iranian concerns, not because of internal power struggles, not because of fear of a ref0rm-minded and mobilized voting population but because…Obama gave a speech that was too conciliatory.  Seriously.

Our president’s public flagellation of America only emboldened the junta in Tehran — leaving Iran’s power brokers more defiant, determined and dismissive than they’ve been in years. [...]

Our president’s speechwriters made the same mistake no end of diplomats and pundits made before them: They didn’t pause to consider the enemy’s viewpoint. Like Obama himself, they didn’t bother trying to understand the mullahs’ logic for acting as they do.

But Peters understands their logic perfectly: everything they do is a reaction to the words of US politicians and diplomats, not to mention liberals – or conservatives if God has graced us with their presence in positions of power.  It’s all about us. Every time.

But the point really isn’t whom the voters chose. It’s that Iran’s entrenched interests read Obama’s meant-to-be-conciliatory remarks as a confession of weakness, a signal that the United States is at the end of its strategic rope.

The result was that the mullahs and state corporatists no longer saw a need to play pretend. Bush worried them. Obama doesn’t. They judged, correctly, that Washington wouldn’t so much as issue a tough-minded statement in response to this mockery of an election. And they were right.

Ah, yes, they feared the Bush administration’s penchant for “tough-minded statements” – the Piranha Brothers of demarche if you will – but now they are free to go about their business, safe in the knowledge that the President of the United States won’t say mean things about them. 

Oddly enough (or not given it’s a Ralph Peters column) the next passage seems to contradict the previous:

Well, consider the view from Tehran (or from Qom, Iran’s religious capital): Improved relations with the United States would rob the religious junta of the justification for much of what it does, from looting the country in the name of righteousness to pursuing nuclear weapons.

The rulers in Tehran need us as an enemy (along with Israel). A demonized foe is essential to their grip on power.

So it’s preferable to act confrontational with a regime that needs you to act confrontational for domestic reasons, but if you don’t come out all guns-and-bluster you’re a chump playing right into their hands? 

Palin/Peters 2012.

And because no Ralph Peters piece would be complete without a dash of colonial condescension tossed in the direction of the benighted wogs:

Mousavi mayhave won the most votes: Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably didn’t receive the landslide majority announced two hours after the polls closed — in a country that’s barely progressed beyond the abacus. We’ll never know the real tally of ballots. [emphasis added]

So the country that’s got the neocons in such a tizzy because it is supposedly on the verge of devel0ping a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the missile technology that can deliver them far and wide, is, in truth, incapable of technological advancement much past the abacus?

Kind of reminds me of the certainty on the part of many of the pro-war set that the slightly more advanced IEDs in Iraq were imports because Iraq – with all its engineers and scientists (whose WMD prowess we were told to fear) - couldn’t build those complex machines on their own.   Of course, in that case, the technological powerhouse that Iraq needed for IED production was Iran.  It all makes perfect sense.

Shorter Jonah Goldumbass:

By refusing to thrust himself into the spotlight which would hurt the cause of the Iranians protesting the election, Obama is making it all about himself.  Plus, he’s hurting the cause of the Iranian protesters.

Bonus Goldbraindead from the same column:

Labor unions are essential for the growth of democracy and therefore Obama and the Democrats should support their efforts everywhere. Except in the United States.

National.  Embarassment.

Old Gregg is back like cooked crack, baby.  The results are what you expect:

Gregg Easterbrook’s review of Robert Wright’s “The Evolution of God” (Bookshelf, June 8) says that “Paul, by contrast [to Christ], actively wished to start a cross-borders, proselytizing system of belief.” Amazing! Did neither the book’s author nor its reviewer consult the Bible? After all, the Bible describes the unfolding plan in great detail.

Even Sunday schoolers know Jesus’s final words on earth in the Great Commission, “Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, ESV). They also know about his personal conversion of Paul. In Acts 9:15, Jesus says of Paul, “. . . he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the gentiles [non-Jews] and kings and the children of Israel.”

The Old Testament, throughout, points to “a righteous God and a Savior” for “all the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 45:22, 23). Jesus further reveals, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14).

Perhaps Mr. Wright shall pen many anthropologic theories, and Mr. Easterbrook many nonfiction reviews, before the end arrives. Meanwhile, for those interested in the facts on the outreach of grace through faith, please consult a Bible.

Dave Reed
Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

He’s right; I checked.  (In fairness, Wright may have been referring to “Historical Jesus“, the Jewish apocolyptic preacher who came to Earth to save historians from their sins.)  That Old Gregg’s research method continues to center on not doing any research and knowing nothing is, in itself, not surprising.  That a man who has spent the better part of a decade scolding physicists for not proving Jesus (or something – trying to make sense of this makes me feel queasy) can’t be bothered to crack the Bible is sort of ironic, if you ignore the previous sentence, and if you are trying to pad out a blog post you are writing on this subject, and/or if your name is Alanis Morissette.  Most importantly, this proves conclusively my theory that what we think of as “the Universe” is really just a rather over-broad comic novel called ”Jackass of All Trades”, wherein hilariously inept polymath Gregg Easterbrook – “the DiVinci of incompetence” – rises to the heights of the journalistic and public policy professions, only to be stopped by a deadly asteroid.

In happier news, the world just got less stupid.  Brookings will now have to skip the middleman and hire Vox Day directly.

You know exactly who you are.