;)
Sunday
Apr272014
The Commentariat -- April 28, 2014
Internal links removed.
Mark Landler of the New York Times: "On Sunday, President Obama visited Malaysia to underscore how much has changed in the last 16 years -- not least in this country's attitude toward the United States, which has evolved from deep-seated suspicion to a cautious desire for cooperation. Citing negotiations for a trans-Pacific trade accord, a formal agreement to cooperate in halting the spread of nuclear equipment, and the international search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, Mr. Obama said, 'We're working more closely together than ever before.'" ...
... Emily Rauhala of Time: "On Monday morning, local time, the U.S. and the Philippines signed a 10 year pact that will give U.S. planes, warships and troops more access to the archipelagic nation. The U.S. will not reestablish a permanent base, but will rotate troops through. The deal, officially called the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, took eight months of negotiation, and gives some substance to the Obama's administration's 'pivot' to Asia."
Andrew Taylor of the AP: "Congress gets back to work Monday after a two-week vacation, and it's looking like lawmakers will do what they do best: the bare minimum."
A Congressional Perp Surrenders. Paul Kane & Adam Goldman of the Washington Post: "Rep. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.) surrendered Monday morning to federal authorities in New York as he faces multiple charges connected to a restaurant business he operated before entering Congress in 2011, according to sources familiar with the long-running probe into the lawmaker's finances. Grimm spent much of the weekend hunkered down, bracing for the unveiling of the federal charges, which were due to be disclosed after his surrender. He turned himself in to the FBI at an undisclosed location Monday morning and was taken to Lower Manhattan for processing."
Julie Creswell & Robert Gebeloff of the New York Times: "... in 2012, according to federal data, $4.1 million from Medicare coursed through the office in a modest white house on Ocean Avenue [in Brooklyn]. In all, the practice treated around 1,950 Medicare patients that year. On average, it was paid by Medicare for 94 separate procedures for each one. That works out to about 183,000 treatments a year, 500 a day, 21 an hour. What makes those figures more remarkable, and raises eyebrows among medical experts, is that judging by Medicare billing records, one person did it all. His name is Wael Bakry, and he is not some A-list cardiologist, oncologist or internist. He is a physical therapist.... Physical therapy has become a Medicare gold mine.... Federal authorities say the borough [of Brooklyn] is a national hot spot for Medicare fraud, particularly fraud involving physical therapy."
"Welfare Queens of the Purple Sage." Paul Krugman: "... at the heart of the [Cliven Bundy-BLM] standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.... In many cases [the BLM] doesn't even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is ... subsidiz[ing] ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers' expense.... Some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they're actually welfare queens of the purple sage. And this in turn means that treating Mr. Bundy as some kind of libertarian hero is, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy." Read the whole column.
Guns for the Kiddies. Jon Swaine of the Guardian: "The National Rifle Association on Sunday offered young children free membership and the opportunity to win a high-powered rifle or shotgun. A 'Youth Day' at the influential gun lobby group's annual convention in Indianapolis was scheduled to culminate with a prize draw in which participants could take home a WBY-X rifle or shotgun supplied by Weatherby, a major firearms manufacturer and a sponsor of the event. All were also given a free six-month youth membership of the NRA. Media were banned from covering Youth Day." CW: What? The NRA isn't proud of giving guns to children?
Richard Kahlenberg, in the New Republic, reviews Place and Race, by Sheryll Cashin. "The achievement gap by income is twice the gap by race.... Cashin proposes giving a leg-up in college admissions to students of any race who grow up in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and attend high poverty schools." Read the whole review.
Adam Liptak of the New York Times: " In a major test of how to interpret the Fourth Amendment in the digital age, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider two cases about whether the police need warrants to search the cellphones of the people they arrest.... The justices are not always savvy about technology. At last week's argument over whether an Internet streaming service is lawful, Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to think HBO is a broadcast rather than a cable channel."
Reity O'Brien, et al., in the Daily Beast: "Federal judges aren't supposed to hear cases in which they have a financial stake. Dozens do it anyway.... In all, the Center [for Public Integrity] identified 24 cases where judges owned stock in a company with a case before them. In two other instances, the judges had financial ties with law firms working on cases over which they presided."
Missed This. David Streitfeld of the New York Times (April 24): "Four of the largest technology companies tentatively settled on Thursday a class action brought by 64,000 of their engineers, who accused them of agreeing not to solicit one another's employees. The amount of the settlement was not released, but people with knowledge of the deal said it was in the neighborhood of $300 million. The companies, which are some of the world's richest, must think that is a bargain." ...
... Kevin Roose of New York: "... Silicon Valley's top-level executives often behave as a cartel -- displaying more loyalty to each other, across company lines, than to their own employees -- and that Steve Jobs was a particularly feared cartel leader with a retributive streak.... In tech..., collusion was the status quo. As the pretrial documents show, executives at these firms made blanket promises not to recruit each others' employees for years, causing thousands of their workers to lose out on opportunities they might otherwise have had."
E. J. Dionne: "The creativity of the National Rifle Association and other organizations devoted to establishing conditions in which every man, woman and child in our nation will have to be armed is awe-inspiring.... Nowhere else in the world do the laws on firearms become the playthings of politicians and lobbyists intent on manufacturing cultural conflict. Nowhere else do elected officials turn the matter of taking a gun to church into a searing ideological question. But then, guns are not a religion in most countries."
When Dumb & Dumber Are One & the Same
Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. -- Former half-governor & vice-presidential runner-up Sarah Palin (R-Alaska), speaking at the NRA convention
Do you know why those clownish little Kumbaya-humming fairytale-inhaling liberals want to be tough all of a sudden and control your guns? It's 'cuz guys like Al Franken and Harry Reid, they are not satisfied with just taking your money and your job, your truck and your property and your rights, your healthcare -- they didn't want to just stop at that. -- Palin again
The Sporting Life
Kyle Wagner of Deadspin: "Deadspin has acquired an extended, 15-minute version of the conversation between Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his then-girlfriend V. Stiviano. If the original nine-minute tape acquired by TMZ left any questions about Sterling's opinions regarding minorities, the audio here should remove all doubt that he's a doddering racist with views not too far removed from the plantation."...
... Adolfo Flores & Bettina Boxall of the Los Angeles Times: "An audio recording said to be of Clippers team owner Donald Sterling making racist statements is authentic, and a woman named V. Stiviano did not release it to any news outlets, her attorney said in an e-mail Sunday to the Los Angeles Times. The 15-minute recording is part of a one-hour conversation between Sterling and his client, V. Stiviano, attorney Mac Nehoray said in the e-mail. Nehoray, of the Calabasas-based Nehoray Legal Group, is representing Stiviano in a civil lawsuit brought against her by Sterling's wife, Rochelle." ...
... Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post: Clippers owner Don Sterling's racism has "surely been common knowledge among NBA owners and executives for years, as far back as 1983 when he allegedly called his own players the N-word.... [His racism emerged in] sworn testimony in a 2002 slumlording case against Sterling for discriminating against tenants, not just blacks, but also Hispanics, who he called lazy drunks, and Koreans, who he deemed too powerless to complain, according to statements compiled by Deadspin.com.... That's the only way to eject Sterling from the league: through a backroom deal forged by the owners." ...
... CW: All of which makes me wonder why the NAACP was going to give Sterling a lifetime achievement award. ...
... How the Super-Rich "Pay" for Their Transgressions. Robert Silverman of the Daily Beast: "The NBA will likely suspend L.A. Clippers owner over his racist remarks and 'encourage' him to sell the team -- and it's not inconceivable the sale will earn him a $988 million profit." ...
... John Branch of the New York Times: "In a silent sign of solidarity, [Clippers] players shed their warm-up jackets together before the [playoff] game and placed them in a pile at midcourt, revealing red, long-sleeved team shirts worn inside out to obscure the team's name. And while they wore the Clippers' blue jerseys during the game, each player also wore black socks and black wristbands":
"Northwestern's shame." Ian Crouch of the New Yorker: "You can make your voice heard. You can change the world. These are the kinds of opportunities élite universities promise prospective students in their glossy brochures. On Friday, the scholarship players on Northwestern University's football team gathered to do just that, in a historic vote on the question of unionization. Northwestern should have supported these players' right to a fair process just as eagerly as it celebrates their accomplishments on game days. Instead, according to several reports this week, school officials waged an organized campaign with a single goal: to sway the players toward voting no."
Presidential Race
I have a source that told me that if Jeb Bush decides not to run, that Mitt Romney may actually try it again. -- Bob Schieffer of CBS "News"
Ben White & Maggie Haberman of Politico: "The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be [Hillary] Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation."
Congressional Elections
Jonathan Chait: "Maybe the election won't be about ObamaCare, after all."
Sasha Issenberg, in the New Republic, thinks he has the formula for Democrats to win midterm elections: "Raise the dollars and secure the volunteer commitments. Then go and turn out those who are already on your side but won't show up without a friendly nudge." CW: Kind of a no-brainer.
News Ledes
New York Times: "President Obama, declaring that Russia was continuing to bully and threaten Ukraine, said [in Manila] on Monday that the United States would impose additional sanctions on Russian individuals and entities, as well as freezing some exports of military technology. The announcement, during a visit by Mr. Obama to the Philippines, was widely expected." ...
... Guardian: "The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, was fighting for his life on Monday after unidentified gunmen shot him in the back as he went for a morning swim. Gennady Kernes, 54, was undergoing emergency surgery in hospital, his office said."
AP: "A judge in Egypt on Monday sentenced to death 683 alleged supporters of the country's ousted Islamist president, including the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader, the latest in mass trials that have drawn international condemnation and stunned rights groups. The same judge also upheld the death penalty for 37 of 529 defendants sentenced in a similar case in March, though he commuted the rest to life imprisonment."
Daily Beast: "If there's no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming 'an apartheid state,' Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday. Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term 'apartheid' in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry's use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America...."
Reuters: "Tornadoes ripped through the south-central United States on Sunday, killing at least 17 people in Arkansas and Oklahoma and wiping out entire neighborhoods, authorities said as rescue workers searched in darkness for survivors."
Washington Post: "Frank Phillips, a Knox County[, Tennessee,] Sheriff's officer was fired Sunday night after a series of pictures taken by photographer John Messner were published in the Daily Mail in Britain. They showed an officer identified by the Sheriff's office as Phillips grabbing 21-year-old college student Jarod Dotson around the neck and squeezing until he fell to his knees."
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Reader Comments (25)
If MitWit runs again, it will probably be AFTER he has recovered from his lobotomy!
Krugman says: "Well, one answer is denial — insistence that such problems aren’t real, that they’re invented by elitists who want to take away our freedom. And along with this anti-intellectualism goes a general dumbing-down, an exaltation of supposedly ordinary folks who don’t hold with this kind of stuff. Think of it as the right’s duck-dynastic moment."
And who do we find featured today in yellow but our very own duckie of the Alaska tundra who totes her gun high and goes huntin fer somethin––bears, moose, birds of a feather–-you name it, she shoots it, lugs it home, cuts it up, and feeds it to her kith and kin family style. Sarah of the mama bear variety––Sarah of the put-downs of all them "librul ninnies" and government goodies. This pretend woman of the rugged fits Krugman's description so perfectly––I say perfectly because there are so many who think she's a hot potato who speaks for them–– and for me, as I see it, it's those millions that make me lose sleep at night.
@Kate: Several days ago you posted a link to an article by Robert Parry whose criticisms of Kerry were pretty severe. I'm wondering what he thinks of Kerry's labeling Israel a possible apartheid state, something many agree with, but never say. Would Parry think this gusty and confrontational or a really stupid remark?
Re: E. J. Dionne. He has a point. What about the rights of those of us who choose not to carry a shootin' arn?
For me the most intriguing line--tho' I went off in another direction in my comment to the Times-- in last night's Krugman Purple Sage/Duck Dynasty Diatribe was this: "The trouble is that such beliefs are fundamentally indefensible in the modern world, which is rife with what economists call externalities," which is another way of saying that when people live as closely together as humanity now does, what one of us does to the land or water around us is now suddenly noticeable, not something that happens "over there" in Africa, Asia or the Colonies...so far away that's its not our problem. In other words, even economists now acknowledge costs that were wholly ignored one hundred years ago.
Our problem? Tho' we now recognize those "external" costs, once again our institutions, policies, and laws have not caught up with reality. And the elements that profit from our lagging acknowledgement of how closely we really are related to one another, how what affects one affects all, are scrambling to extract as much from the holes in our institutional protections as they can before those gaps (as they must be for our species' survival) are plugged.
And once again, the same old story: we have the bunch so genuinely ignorant they just don't get it (Bundy and the boobs with bazookas?) and those that do get it but lead the ignorant around by the nose, laughing all the way to the bank.
Couldn't make this shit up.
Sarah Palin mouthing off at the NRA convention about torture and how Al Franken is trying to take away somebody's truck.
Stupid and heavily armed.
Just brilliant.
Ignoramuses with guns. Another day with the Modern GOP.
@Ak; just to be mean; Sarah the polar bear slayer forgot to mention the appliances in the front yard that the feds are coming for.
Regarding racist NBA plantation owner Donald Sterling.
It appears that the tireless investigative department (formerly the conservative fictive re-writers rec-room) of the Wingnut "News Unishative" (sorry they're not very good spellers), those who never sleep defending FREEDOM from people with brains, went on a manhunt for inflammation. Or infortainment. Or something. Their hero, Cliven Bundy, had been one-upped, it seems on the "Let me tell you about them Nee-groes" scale and they were all ready for another barrage of brickbats. But it seems they have been saved at the last minute.
Way back in 1991, Sterling contributed $1,000 to Bill Bradley's campaign (ostensibly because Bradley used to be a white basketball player). This must mean that Sterling is a RACIST DEMYCRAP!
The Drudge and Breitbart sites haven't stopped digitally quivering all weekend. A racist who isn't one of theirs. Jesus be praised. How the fuck did that happen?
What they fail to recall is that, while this isn't to say that there are no racist Democrats, Democrats, at least in this day and age, tend not to court or countenance racists. We don't vote for them. We don't beg them to go on the TV and mirror our own racist beliefs. We don't dog them for breathless remarks about how to deal with minorities. We don't canonize them. Basically, we think they're assholes.
Now I don't know if this next guy is a Democrat, independent, or what, but he's pretty eloquent concerning the recent, shall we say, insensitive comments of Mr. Donald (no more NAACP awards for you, pal) Sterling:
"Mr. Sterling, there's a Mr. Broadus on line two for you. He says he has a message for you...something about your whitebread ass....I didn't quite get it."
JJG,
And don't forget that 69 Buick up on blocks next to the smokehouse. Obama will want that for hisself. Prob'ly put some dingle balls on the mirror, big pimp wheels on it and install special secret compartments to hold all his drugs while he drives around wondering "where all de white women's at? and thinking of new stuff to steal from real 'mericans.
@JJG: You are one funny guy–-"dem good times they ain't forgotton when we's be out in dose fields picken dat cotton"––said by a black comedian whose name escapes me at the moment, but he was doing a riff on how "dem white folks sees us darkies." It was a hilarious bit, but performed with an inner fury that was quelled at times by drugs and alcohol. Your post above made me laugh out loud–-especially the "where all de white women's at"–––yet we know that's exactly how the small minds of tight assed ignoramuses
think––actually the word think is too kind.
Anyway––thanks for the laugh. I recall Mel Brooks saying the only way to put down Hitler was to make fun of him–-one of the reasons "Springtime for Hitler" was brilliant.
CORRECTION: I meant to address Akhilleus, although JJG is also "one funny guy."
PD,
I don't know how we do it, but we can't hope that conservatives will escape the vortex of their delusions on their own. They need help. In what shape or form, I haven't a clue, but they are taking us all down with them and I, for one, don't want this country to join the ranks of decrepit, defunct, and dead nations, at least not this soon.
What we have here is a party (and even conservatives who claim not to be aligned with or overly fond of the GOP are still connected. They certainly aren't voting Democrat, and the GOP is the only official conservative party with any power) whose thought processes and policies are controlled by fairy tales and fantasies and hobbled by intellectual dishonesty, pretzel logic, astounding internal inconsistencies, hypocrisy, and outright ignorance.
The image of racist scofflaw Cliven Bundy riding the plains with an American flag, a flag which represents a government he claims doesn't exist, or have a right to exist, is a perfect analog to some of these problems. But don't even bother trying to unpack everything he represents.
One idea du jour, forwarded by manly he-man David Brooks, and seconded by many equally John Wayney conservative pundits, is currently that Barack Obama is lacking in toughness, in manly manliness. But it's an idea of manliness subscribed to by fourth graders. It's a Boys Own Adventure sort of manliness so completely divorced from the real world that even most decent comic books gave up on it decades ago. But not the Republican Party.
We have a Supreme Court ruled by ivory tower solipsists who cherry pick their way through the world of jurisprudence. After the recent dismantling of Affirmative Action and the prior gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the word on Conservative Avenue was that the Supremes were, in their scholarly wisdom, siding with Democracy, dammit, giving the people what they want and letting the states decide their own fate. Two things about this idea. First, what they 're describing there sounds more like the Confederation of States than the Constitution. If the founders wanted a Majority Rules Everything type of country, they would have made it explicitly so. Second, if they're so all-fired in love with states' rights, they would have let the vote in Florida proceed in 2000 and the Decider would have been deciding what kind of whiskey to drink after a hard day of brush clearing instead of plunging us into a 12 year war. Their decisions are ideological, disconnected from any idea of justice or legal precedent. It's what's best for the Party, not for the Country. They have become an undemocratic, anti-American institution.
We have the NRA, with the full blessing of conservatives, handing out weapons to children. And we have "leaders" of the party appearing before heavily armed yahoos screaming that someone is coming to take their trucks.
"Insane" doesn't come close.
We have far too many real problems to solve and it doesn't matter that we all agree. What matters is that we have two sane, rational, and reasonable parties who can come together to forge agreement where and when it matters and to debate important issues in a way that will move us forward rather than backward.
I realize that this kind of chaos, magical thinking, and extreme anti-intellectualism redounds to the direct benefit of the oligarchs and Masters of the Universe, but none of this benefits the rest of the country.
If they were all just lunatics, on the fringe, where they belong, and where they used to be, I wouldn't care so much. But now they're sitting in Washington, making policy; propeller beanies spinning madly.
This will not stand. The media is no help. Republicans are unable to help themselves.
Any ideas? Because, barring complete control of both houses and the White House by the Democratic Party (which will be excoriated at every pass trying to fix the myriad fatal problems visited upon the body politic by the right), I don't see any clear solutions.
We have one of two political parties making policy and law based on fantasies, lies, and ignorance and calling it "Freedom". Whether their leaders are simply stupid or purely cynical doesn't much matter. The end result is the same.
They really are an army of stupid people with guns, who want the rest of the country to be stupid and own guns.
Christ.
Ignorance, stupidity, and guns, rolled into one:
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2014/04/alleged_shooter_in_wayside_bar.html
From my hometown in Michigan. I haven't seen a thorough accounting of the event in a single news story, but as I understand it, the sports-bar patron complained that the bartender over-served a friend/acquaintance. An argument ensued and the patron hit the bartender with a mug. The bartender got his gun, chased the patron to a different section of the bar, then shot the patron to death with all of his bullets as the patron hid under a poker table.
In the above account of the court proceedings, the bartender said he was innocent because he had a permit to carry the gun.
This comes from an enlightened city, where anonymous donors have set up a fund to pay tuition for every public high school graduate going to a State college or university.
@ Barbarossa, I fear for you!
This past week, gun nut extraordinaire, and fantasist par excellence (class, do you think delusional behavior goes well with gun ownership?), Wayne La Pierre went on a hallucinatory rant about an America that exists only in video games and the Walking Dead series, an America that cries out for HEE-Roes to arm themselves to the gills, cowboy up, and shoot anything that moves the wrong way.
So what happens if he gets his wish?
I've made this argument before, even to several gun nuts one of who threatened to shoot me. The other two looked at each other, pointed a finger to their heads and made circles, then laughed.
But it's only a laughing matter to unrealistic, delusional imbeciles with a connection to the real world less tenuous than their understanding of the Constitution.
Here's what happens if every jamoke owns a gun, Wayne-O's wet dream.
First, if you really are going all vigilante, you need to be able to do two things well. Always be ready to shoot to kill, and have a really good aim. And if it really is Armageddon, as the NRA contends, you need to keep your weapon (or weapons...sorry, I forgot) loaded and available at all times. And you have to be ready to fire, almost without thinking about it because otherwise Obama and liberal zombies and blah people will get you if you don't. So killing must be second nature.
Someone unexpected opens your door. BAM! Oops. It was your kid. Someone runs through your yard at night. Ka-POW! Shit! The neighbor's kid. Movement in the bushes....BANG! Damn. The dog. And that's if you're ready and willing to shoot to kill.
But guess what? It's not that easy. Cops will tell you that it's not easy to fire on people and they're trained to do it. Many come back from the military with stories about how hard it is to kill someone. During the Civil War there were many stories of soldiers loading their weapons but never firing.
But if you are able to fire, you must also be a crack shot because all those other vigilantes will be firing too and you want to be the one who brings down the bad guy. But guess what, again? There aren't many Annie Oakleys and Sure Shot McGraws around. The bête noires of the right (literally), the infamous heavily armed black gangs that supposedly are rampaging just down the street from your kid's school, seem to routinely kill innocent bystanders during drive-by shootings. So if even these career criminals can't hit what, or who, they're aiming at, how successful do you think your average soccer mom or wingnut screamer, or their 9 year old will be?
Ever see the movie "Magnum Force"? Dirty Harry, in a shooting contest, hits a "civilian" target by mistake. He notes that no one is perfect. And, okay, this is a movie, but that's the point. Even in a fictional story no shooters are perfect. What about the real world? There are plenty of gun owners who are not even close to that. Recently in New York City, during a street altercation, several police officers drew their weapons trying to shoot at a suspect. They hit bystanders instead. And these are guys TRAINED to do this.
And, if you always have your weapon handy (either on your person, or nearby) and loaded, how much easier is it for someone who is not you (your kids or their friends) to get hold of it and shoot each other? Or is that not important? It happens every week, somewhere, even without a complete enforcement of the NRA's Armageddon Rule that everyone go armed everywhere at all times. What about road rage incidents, arguments in a grocery store line after a bad day, plane cancellations on the brink of a family vacation, drunken arguments in bars?
Could there be a much worse idea than to add loaded weapons to stressful situations?
Nonetheless, not a single Republican will stand up and admit the complete, head-twisting insanity of the NRA propositions and the murderous delusions they are foisting on the country.
So now it's not just stupid and armed, it's fearful, untrained, inexperienced, 10 years old, stupid and armed.
Because that's the world the GOP supports.
Christ.
Again.
@Nisky Guy: Mitchell is black, so no problem.
@Ak: It seems you and I have had this discussion before. I remember Crazy Louie Gohmert surmised that if only the Sandy Hook principal had had an M4 carbine, things would have turned out differently. Not so fast, Louie. We know Adam Lanza was a good shot (his mother made sure of that), and that he hadn't the slightest compunction about killing. I submit that even if she had an M4, the result would have been the same for the reasons you outlined.
Another thing, the movies and teevee make it look as if people who are wounded recover quickly with minimum damage. Trust me, they don't. The 5.56 mm round makes especially nasty wounds. The high velocity causes devastation to the flesh around the entrance and exit points. Sepsis always a risk due to pieces of clothing being driven into the wound.
"Fairy tales can come true..." the song goes. In my experience, that's rare. To quote Damon Runyon: "The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
And add to Akhilleus' long list of those heaping the pile of ignorance ever higher and deeper, we have the paid liars...like the Heartland Institute that shamelessly misquoted George Carlin on education.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/26/1294819/-George-Carlin-Quote
Lying is one thing, to be expected from morally bankrupt shills for the Right. But lying about Carlin! Who'll be next? Jesus, Himself or even Tom Lehrer?
Ana Marie Cox in the Guardian on the NRA hootenanny: "Arms dealers are never interested in victory, just eternal war."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/nra-war-on-america-wayne-lapierre-indianapolis
Ken,
There must be a lot knee slapping going on at Heartland, thinking about how the hard right english they applied to the rant of a hated liberal created the impression, at least to their knuckledragging fans who couldn't be bothered checking the veracity of their work, that even a dirty, pinko commie hippie like George Carlin agreed with their opinion of government.
I suppose when you inhabit your own bubble world, nothing is illegal or immoral or unethical. Like the Decider and his mental pygmies, they make their own reality and who's to tell them no?
Government is evil. Everyone knows that. So what if we lie about what someone else said.
Jesus will understand.
You see why they need help? They'll never break free of the gravitational pull of wingnut ideology. They're helpless, hopeless satellites spinning around a world of idiocy, like turds forever circling the bowl but never quite getting all the way to flush.
@PDPepe-
Juan Cole says John Kerry refers to Israel becoming an apartheid state (in the future tense)--whereas he points out that Israel has BEEN an apartheid state lo these many! And worse than South Africa. Obama/Kerry are late to the party!
http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/israeli-apartheid-understating.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+juancole%2Fymbn+%28Informed+Comment%29
I am sure Robert Parry welcomes Kerry's comments--however late in coming they are. I think his problem with Kerry is the manner in which Kerry has supported Ukraine, and continues to diss Putin as being "the problem," and becoming increasingly hostile to Russia. Also, his insistence that the use of Sarin gas was done in Syria only by Assad's troops--when there is evidence that the insurgents used it as well, and probably more. Parry sees nothing but trouble ahead for the U.S. if we keep treating Putin as the enemy and supporting the unstable alliance in Ukraine. He, of course, sees it all as a Neo-Con plot.
I don't know to what extent I agree with Parry about all of this, but I do see the Neo-Cons full of delight that we are once more making
Russia our most bitter enemy. And juicing up for (more) combat in Syria. There's gotta be a war in here somewhere! And lots more oil!
James,
Thanks for the link. A great article. And it's somewhat encouraging to read that even some people within the NRA's tribe understand that guns are dangerous things, and further realize that scaring the shit out of people, the way Wayne LaPierre does on a regular basis, about people coming to get you, is a guaranteed to get people killed.
I'm less encouraged that no politicians or pundits on the right seem able to accept this truism or acknowledge their own culpability in creating a climate of fear, hatred, and violence.
Just another day at the office for conservatives.
Richard Pryor––the comedian I couldn't think of––one of the very best I think~~~~~~
Issa nailed by Abercrombe. High comedy and the ACA.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-hawaiis-governor-20140428,0,6456006.column#axzz30DsserBA
"Any ideas? Because, barring complete control of both houses and the White House by the Democratic Party (which will be excoriated at every pass trying to fix the myriad fatal problems visited upon the body politic by the right), I don't see any clear solutions." Says Akhilleus.
I agree–-however–-when we continue to have, and we will, sooner than later, horrific environmental devastation; more shootings of major proportions (how about close to home like members of congress and their families); water shortages; etc. one wonders how far into these awful scenarios do we have to go into before something changes. Reagan believed in his "little green men"––an Alien invasion bringing us all together as one. Crazy––but one can see where that might be the ticket. Other than some other kind of invasion, I, like you, don't see any clear solution except hope that truth will out and the majority will embrace it. I was raised on Grimm––it's all that German optimism I harbor in my bosom. Ha!
@Kate: thanks for responding. Stephen Cohen, who has been labeled a Putin apologist, probably agrees with Parry on that point. I asked you about this because there are others who seem to think Kerry is doing a good job. I guess time will tell. (As far as the apartheid issue, some of us here on R.C., including me, described it as such many moons ago).
Ms.Palin made my day. I only wish she had spoken for another 2 hours.
That little speech will make it impossible for her to win the Presidency. But should she decide to run, she will enhance the entertainment value of the Republican debates (if they decide to have any)
PD - "pretend woman of the rugged"! I love that! The chipper burg of Wasilla is one place you wouldn't notice you missed if you're planning an Alaskan tour.