Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Farewell Blogger... you were a good ship!

This is to announce that the Mojowire has moved... we are now at the mojowire on typepad. Yeah, you may see some ads, and you might even think of clicking through them if there's something there of interest you see... but it will still be the same mojowire you have come to know and love (or perhaps fear and loathe).

So come on over and join us at our new digs; and never fear, the old archive will be here on blogger as long as blogger is around and we aren't using up too much space with our thread.

Thanks for a good run blogger... but it's graduation day!

mojo sends

Monday, May 24, 2010

Tea Baggers in a Nut Shell

His Rudeness does it again:
"The purpose of the Tea Party movement is individualism gone mad, which means "If you fuck off and leave us alone, government, with our god, our guns, our high fructose corn syrup, our Facebook, our shitty jobs and wages, you can go about your business." The Tea Party's "success" is just a clever exploitation of our American nihilism, a march into oblivion, or wheeled into it unawares as we gaze at our Blackberrys assuring us that every little fart of a thought is important. The election of Barack Obama is beginning to seem less like an urgent call to change than the huffing effort of a fat guy forced to call 911 because his kitchen's ablaze because of an exploded microwave burrito. "Oh, the fire's out? Can I get that burnt burrito? Because The Biggest Loser's about to come on."

Pretty much says it all... wish I'd written it...

mojo sends

*fzzt* Hey *crackle* Is Thing On?

Wireheads! Your attention please.

It has come to the attention of senior management at their oar stations and the editorial monkeys that there has not been much happening on this blog of late, other than the occasional sage ramblings of one Hebisner Feniktorod, a known degenerate peacenik and social malcontent.

There are going to be some fairly radical changes here within the next 30 days. I mean, screw it, am I a writer or not? And if so... then it is time to stop wallowing in lameness ... and ellipses and take this to the next level.

The potential for crashing, burning, humiliating defeat and the cratering of my already fragile self-esteem is truly high. But I don't seem to be doing anything else at the moment... so

Stand by to stand by, while we get ready to kick this pig!

mojo sends

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Ignorance? You're soaking in it..

You have to just love this story:

Michael Lewis, the celebrated author of "The Big Short," claims that about 40 or 50 House Republicans skipped a December hearing by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to spend three hours with him talking about the financial crisis. And the lawmakers, who are members of the House Republican book club, were stunningly uninformed about major elements of the crisis, says Lewis, during a recent conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter:
This book club event occurred in December 2009, close to a year and half since Bear Stearns and Lehman blew up.

The only part of this story I find a bit credulous is the use of the word "shockingly". Why would anyone be shocked that the Republican caucus in the house is uninformed? What exactly do they appear informed about? Did the health care debate provide any evidence that the House GOP had any policy depth?. Not that I saw. The ease by which the President dispatched them in that Caucas Q&A should have dispelled any doubts about their ignorance.

I do have some sympathy for this argument though:
At first, several dozen of the lawmakers told Lewis that they were going to leave early to attend the Bernanke hearing but they stayed because "they said, 'We never learn anything from him [Bernanke], he never explains anything to us'," according to Lewis.


A prerequisite for the job of Fed Chairman is the ability to speak in an arcane language so opaque that no one outside the world of economics and finance could possibly figure out what he was saying with any precision. The real joke is that Bernanke makes a conscious effort to be more clear than Greenspan, the Jedi Master of Federal Reserve doublespeak. Of course, even if he used plain English devoid of financial economic jargon, none of the GOP members would understand him anyway. They know so little policy other than "Capitalism good, Socialism bad" that even rudimentary discussions about these topics goes over their heads.

One of the underlying issues here is that the Congressional Republicans outsource policy expertise to the relevant lobbying groups they ally with. So in this case, banking and finance lobbyists are their main sources of information. No doubt as soon as they got back to their offices and placed a call to those lobbyists to demand answers, they were offered a tidal wave of outright lies and nonsense that probably boiled down to "liberals, socialism, liberal media, Hitler, Stalin, blah, blah, blah.". No doubt to the relief of those representatives so outraged by the book club meeting.

The other issue is that many of them are outright ideologues who could care less about the nuances of financial regulation since they have completely bought into a world view that this crisis was caused by government regulations like the Community Reinvestment Act or New Deal era agencies like the FDIC. I guarantee you that last part is widely believed in conservative business circles. You really cannot make stuff like this up.

But this story tells you all you need to know about Tea baggers and the current state of the GOP. They not only are ignorant of these issues, they are proud of it. Anyone who knows anything has to hide it from his or her constituents and colleagues. Only effete liberal commies care about this hippie stuff. I have no doubt that a book club meeting about Hitlers hatred of Socialists and the Nazi regimes campaign to wipe them out would be equally shocking to them.

And then they would quickly tune into the Beck program to be brought back into the fold with another Beckian flowchart detailing the relationship between Saul Alinsky and Hitler and how Woodrow Wilson caused World War II.