"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Monday, November 19, 2012

The stupidest fucking article ever written by someone not named "Peggy Noonan"
Posted by Jill | 3:07 PM
If I hadn't checked the authorship of this, I'd have sworn it was penned by Rich Lowry.

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Thursday, October 04, 2012

I was so angry today
Posted by Bob | 11:50 PM
I couldn't understand why President Obama was so off his game last night. Then, around 1 am, listening to BBC World Service, the Turkey-Syria border crisis was big, big news. The Turkish Parliament had even authorized its military to enter Syria. I realized President Obama had cleared his calendar Wednesday to deal with that - it is a very serious national security & NATO problem, was dealing with it right up to the time he entered the building for the debate. Unfortunately, the debate was not about foreign policy, so the Commander-in-Chief & "Leader of the free world" could not give a little "what I was doing today & will be doing the moment I leave here" talk. No wonder he looked distracted. He was stopping a war from breaking out in the most volatile region on the planet. The weenie on the other side of the stage receives national security briefings. He knew what was happening. But he didn't have to worry about it.

It's no excuse. Judging from the lack of spin, President Obama ordered his people not to use it as an excuse. That would be like him. He knew what he was there to do. It wasn't to say, "Sorry folks, I was busy being President all day." Americans hardly believe there's a world outside America, & our TV news media is terrible at reporting international news, almost totally ignores it. Next debate, let's get back to that "3 am phone call" theme.

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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

It's a big club...and you ain't in it.
Posted by Jill | 5:37 AM
I will post this as many times as it takes:



Yesterday Rick Perry unveiled his so-called "flat tax plan", offering up the twin pillars of temptation for the uneducated: simplicity and the false promise of "job creation" -- as if those who head up corporations are going to magically, out of the goodness of their hearts, "create jobs" if we just give them enough money; if we just make them RICH ENOUGH. How rich that is remains to be seen, but we've been shoveling money into CEO pockets for thirty years now and they don't yet seem to be rich enough -- if in fact the trickle-down doctrine worked, which of course we know it doesn't.

Rick Perry is at six percent in the polls right now, so perhaps even discussing his tax plan is a moot point. But Republican voters have already shown themselves to be a fickle lot, easily tempted by Teh Shiny at any given moment. And Perry is a huckster, a snake-oil salesmen dangling promises of jobs and income tax filing that a ten-year-old can do and a cushy retirement brought to you by the same people who almost brought us to global economic collapse three years ago. His "plan" is the bastard child of Ronald Reagan and Steve Forbes, and it's designed to do one thing: tempt the stupid with the promise of easier April 15ths and the false promise of a better lot through the further enrichment of the already-wealthy. It's snake oil, and we will see in the next few weeks if Republican voters -- and the pundits who have shown themselves to be equally fickle -- buy it.

The ugly underbelly of Perry's speech (which you can read here) is the demonization of what he calls "The Federal nanny state", with its misogynistic undertones. In Rick Perry's world, those in need of help -- the elderly, the sick, those affected by natural disasters who DON'T live in Texas, the poor, the unemployed -- deserve our contempt, not our help. Because in Rick Perry's world, reaching for a brass ring that is systematically out of reach because there are no public schools, no nutrition programs, no Head Start, nothing to help move the children of tomorrow out of poverty or keep the middle class kids of today from sliding into it, is what has to be done in order to keep the rabble from realizing what the 1% has done, is doing, and will continue to do to them.

Rick Perry's plan, as does Herman Cain's plan, is designed to give that top 1% MORE. It reminds me of that ad a couple of years ago, I think it was for big-screen TVs, and the guy is standing there in the electronics store as the voice of Freddy Mercury shouts:
I want it all
I want it all
I want it all.....and I want it now!

Here's what the 1% has gained since Americans started believing Ronald Reagan that if you Just Give The Rich ENOUGH, they will piss silver dollars and gold coins upon you (NYT link):
The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt.

In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.

“The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller” in 2007 than in 1979, as “the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,” the budget office said.


[snip]

The report found that higher-income households got a larger share of the pie, while other households got smaller shares.

Specifically the report made these points:

¶ The share of after-tax household income for the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled, climbing to 17 percent in 2007 from nearly 8 percent in 1979.

¶ The most affluent fifth of the population received 53 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, up from 43 percent in 1979. In other words, the after-tax income of the most affluent fifth exceeded the income of the other four-fifths of the population.

¶ People in the lowest fifth of the population received about 5 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, down from 7 percent in 1979.

¶ People in the middle three-fifths of the population saw their shares of after-tax income decline by 2 to 3 percentage points from 1979 to 2007.


George Carlin was right in 2005. They want it all. They want it all and they want it now...and what little you have, they're going to take it. Your pension? Gone. Now you have a 401(k) that pays fees to Wall Street banks out of your money, and you sit there while a man lies dying of pancreatic cancer in California at the age of 56 and all you can think of is how his death is going to affect your retirement. That statement you get every year that tells you how much you're likely to get from Social Security in retirement? Just shred it. Because you're going to get bupkis. You'll get bupkis because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Whether you're a baby boomer, Gen-Xer, Gen-Yer, millennial or Brownie scout -- forget it. Because you're getting bupkis. You'll get bupkis because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. A permanent job with benefits? Forget it, you're getting (if you're lucky) a contract job that pays half of what you used to make. Because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Good public schools for your kids? Forget it. In the very near future you'll have to pay to send your kids to school. There's no money for schools because THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW. Clean air to breathe instead of vaporized mercury? Forget it. We have to dismantle the EPA becase THEY WANT IT ALL AND THEY WANT IT NOW.

They'll promise you that this anal rape with a red-hot poker they're delivering to you will give you a shot at their club...that you too can someday join them in that top 1%. But there's a reason it's the top 1%. It's a big club....and you ain't in it.

And you will never, ever, ever be.

Rick Perry will, though. Because he's aiming for a position where he can give them what they want.

All of it.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Ron Paul's doctrine of "personal responsibility" in action
Posted by Jill | 6:52 AM
Yes, Americans who do not buy health insurance must take the consequences of their actions, according to Ron Paul. What he didn't tell you is that part of that "taking the consequences" is leaving behind $400,000 in medical bills for your family to pay:


Once again, I ask you: Exactly what of this (and like the Carlin clip about how you're not in the club, I'm going to post it as many times as I have to), is not true?

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Next!
Posted by Jill | 7:11 PM
Now that Rick Perry has only been running for President for 72 hours and has already accused Fed Chair Ben Bernanke of treason and said he could expect some bodily harm if he ever went to Texas, the Money Guys of the Republican Party appear to be already looking out for an alternative to The Mormon, The Beard, and The Cowboy.

The latest name to be floated? This guy:



Yessirree, the Undead Austerity wunderkind himself:

Bill Bennett, from somewhere in the West, e-mailed me: “There are many talented candidates in the race already, but there is always room for a man of Paul Ryan’s intellectual depth, temperament, talent, and conviction.” Bennett and Ryan go way back. In a piece in the Weekly Standard from January, Fred Barnes recounted:


Ryan came to Washington after graduating from Miami of Ohio in 1992 to work for Republican senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin. When Kasten lost later that year, he recommended Ryan to [the late Jack] Kemp. As Kemp’s assistant, Ryan met the intellectual leaders of supply-side economics, including Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, Alan Reynolds, and Jude Wanniski. He sounds starstruck in talking about them today.

Bennett says Ryan hasn’t changed. “He was the exact same person then, only younger.” Bennett remembers Ryan asking him, “Dr. Bennett, I’m thinking about running for Congress. Does this pass the laugh test?” Bennett thought it did. Ryan, elected in 1998, still addresses Bennett as “Dr. Bennett.”

It sounds like Dr. Bennett is prescribing a presidential run. Whether Ryan will oblige remains to be seen. But Bennett is on to something: There is still an opening in the field for a conservative Republican with smarts and a broad electoral reach, especially one who has already successfully engaged the president. For those who think President Obama can be beaten on his policies not by personal quips, Ryan remains an attractive figure.


I don't know about you, but if I'm going to vote for a Creature of the Night, it's going to be this one:




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Meet Rick Perry
Posted by Jill | 6:30 PM
Note to Rick Perry: If you're going to run for president, it's probably not a good idea to get caught in poses that confirm what people whose votes you're going to need may already think about you:


(via)



(via)



(via)

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Thursday, August 11, 2011

The worldview of Michele Bachmann
Posted by Jill | 6:00 AM
Ryan Lizza's superb scare-the-bejeezus-out-of-you profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorkeris sucking up most of the ink and keystrokes about just how batshit crazy this woman is. But a little tidbit in the article mentions the strong influence an evangelical theologian named Francis Schaeffer had on her.

That evangelist's son, Frank Schaeffer, is these days shouting from the rooftops about how dangerous his father's views, and those who follow them, really are. And this week he tells us over at Alternet exactly why:
When you hear words like “We want to take back America for God!” the 21st-century expression of such theocratic ideas can be traced back to some of my old friends: the Reconstructionists.

Most Americans have never heard of the Reconstructionists. But they have felt their impact through the Reconstructionists’ profound (if indirect) influence over the wider (and vast) evangelical community.

Take Michele Bachmann. She is a Reconstructionist schooled – literally – by some of that obscure movement’s leading thinkers, including my father.

The evangelicals have shaped the politics of a secular culture that barely understood the religious right, let alone the forces within that movement that gave it its edge. The Americans inhabiting the wider (and more secular) culture just saw the results of Reconstructionism without understanding where those results had come from—for instance, how the hell George W. Bush got elected and then reelected or why Michele Bachmann was into home schooling long before she was into trying to become president in order to turn America into a homophobic theocracy.

The Reconstructionists have been like a drop of radicalizing flavoring added to a bottle of water: They’ve subtly changed the water’s flavor. And even though most evangelicals, let alone the general public, don’t know the names of the leading Reconstructionist thinkers, the world we live in—where a radicalized, angry government-hating religious right has changed the face of American politics and spun off into movements such as the Tea Party—is a direct result of that “flavoring.”

Anyone who wants to understand American politics, not to mention North American religion, had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists. For instance these folks just held America hostage in the debt crisis, an attempt to – literally – destroy the government’s ability to function at all a manufactured “crisis” in which Bachmann was a leading proponent of scorched-earth, destroy the system “politics.”


When one is living in the kind of times we are, it's understandable that people might want to throw up their hands and resort to prayer to a great while alpha male in the sky. But once you get outside of Christian Reconstruction circles, I wonder how many people look at their fresh-faced children and want to see them burnt in some holy fire just so they can prove to nonbelievers that they were right. What's scary is that Michele Bachmann DOES.

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