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

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

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.

This is the smartest piece on Afghanistan military and political issues that I've read in recent memory. There are many memorable paragraphs, such as this one:

Meanwhile, Obama's broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.[*]

(emphasis mine)

Uhhh..What??

Mike Konzcal tells us about the new Teabagging meme: FDIC is the devil.

Visiting home for the holidays, it’s amazing to me how certain groups of friends, who I mostly considered in the generic Republicans/conservatives camp, have been wading deeper into the Ron Paul territory. “Abolish the Fed” is one thing, but what surprised me the most was when I was at a Christmas party several people mentioned, fairly out of nowhere, how bad FDIC is for the economy. I think they thought that regular depositors could have done a better job vetting financial institutions than major sophisticated shareholders. When I tried to point out how if there wasn’t FDIC and millions of savings accounts were getting wiped out in ordinary bank runs we’d almost certainly have a wave of turn-of-the-last-century style violence that is hard for us to even imagine now – think bomb throwing anarchist violence – they seemed to be ok with that.

FDIC is actually saving our asses right now by liquidating bad banks and keeping nervous market players from stuffing their money under a mattress. Runs on bank were common before FDIC and the Fed were established, and they created financial havoc. It was a financial panic and run on banks in 1908 that precipitated the creation of the Fed. When's the last we had an actual bank run like that?
Anyone??

Since before the creation of the FDIC, morons.

Seriously, this is where we are now? People are arguing, in all seriousness, that the same people who maxed our their credit cards, took high interest variable loans to purchase houses and used them as credit cards, are the same people who are going to study arcane bank financials to forecast who is more solvent. Is the biggest economic problem we have that we have too many financially savvy people working at the gas stations and McDonalds of this country being held back from joining the billionare club because of FDIC and CRA?

ZOMG!

Moral Hazard?

Megan McCardle, yes that Megan McCardle, actually gets close to something important in a recent post about moral hazard in economic terms.

I go to a lot of pro-market think tank events where one speaker or another blames the financial crisis and the current recession on moral hazard, as well as basically everything else that has gone wrong in the last sixty years. I'm afraid I don't see it. The sticking point for me is twofold. The first is that we had crises before there was moral hazard--really, really dreadful crises, crises far worse than the one we're having now. I just don't see how you can look at the 1930s and name the FDIC as the decade's biggest financial problem. Or this decade's biggest financial problem. The closest our era came to a really devastating financial crash along the lines of the 1929-1933 period was in the total unguaranteed institutional money market funds.

Bingo! Nice job Megan. It's not often a bona fide Kool Aid Drinker manages to spit enough out of their grill to think outside their box. Keep going, you are almost there...

Nor do I find the central story of how the FDIC induced this moral hazard very compelling. Supposedly, ordinary depositors don't bother to check the soundness of their banks because they don't actually have skin in the game. Anyone making this argument cannot have met many ordinary depositors. If you stripped away my mother's FDIC protection, she wouldn't do any better of a job at evaluating Citigroup's finances. Moreover, this theory simply cannot explain the waves of bank failures that happened before 1934--failures in which the depositors neither expected, nor received, bailouts. Bankers still got overconfident, lent too much, and then went out of business. If you read contemporary accounts like the Benjamin Roth diary I recommended the other day, it's very clear that even when the shareholders and depositors were prominent local businesspeople with a lot of skin in the game and a pretty intimate knowledge of the bank's circumstances, they were still unable to foresee the trouble the banks got into.

She hits on an important idea that needs to be explored about what can we reasonably expect a regular citizen without a PhD in economics to understand about banks, markets, and what their best course of action in any given financial choice is, but we'll get back to that. This quote raises another important question, why didn't the bankers and regulators and everyone else figure out what was going to happen?

The central problem(s) we're dealing with right now seem to me to be, first, that asset/credit markets are sometimes subject to bad feedback loops which cause bubbles and crashes, and that the regulators cannot entirely forestall these, because the regulators are getting the same bad information from the feedback loop. And second, that to figure out what is going on in the banking system, we have to ask the bankers, who are going to tell us things that work to the advantage of the bankers. And third, that when new financial assets emerge, we don't fully understand the risks, and we tend to thereby get ourselves in trouble. Moral hazard seems like a distant fourth.

Good job Megan, I'll take it from here. What we might want to add to that paragraph is that one of the solutions to the problem of bad feedback loops that captures all the participants is to limit the systemic risk so that even if we make a bad call, we don't melt down our financial system. That is essentially what New Deal reforms to banking and markets did. As the Krugmanator put it, it made "Banking boring." Now, I don't think we can put that genie back in the bottle, but we can certainly put limits on the ability of lenders of all kinds to leverage themselves, force them to keep more capital in reserve, and make them disclose to regulators and investors all the relevant info. That's the minimum in my view, but its not hard to do. Megan, being the good University of Chicago graduate she is, will not be able to force such blasphemous thoughts through her keyboard onto the page, so I'm doing it for her.

This whole government intervention did it" argument stems in part from Milton Friedmans and Anna Scwartz's book "A Monetary History of the United States", where they argued that it was the Fed who monkeyfraked the economy in 1929-30 by raising rates and lowering the money supply. (true as far it goes) And that also the best way to deal with these downturns is to use monetary policy, which has been done since the 70's and seems to mostly work. Unfortunately, when you are already juicing the economy by keeping interest rates very low and one of these market blowups happen, you hit the zero bound pretty quick. Pulling out your Keynes playbook and blowing the dust off of it to run the Fiscal Policy Wildcat is what is really hard for many of these EMH fanatics to swallow.

Now, I think what Megan argues is true in that players in markets and the regulators get caught up on the feedback loop and don't see the apocalypse until the whole marketplace gets sucked into the abyss. Thomas Kuhn called this way of interpreting information a paradigm, and thus were a thousand awful business plan Power Point presentations born. But it is certainly true that once you buy into a conceptual framework, forever will it dominate your destiny until something drastic happens to shift the paradigm. Like, for example, a huge insurance company engaging in a global ponzi scheme and almost taking the entire financial system down with it.

I would go further and say that while Megan and people on the other side of the Great Divide like Tabbibi or academics like Krugman get close to portions of this, I think they miss the forest for the trees. I see the cause of the financial crash of 2008 as ideological. A free market ideology derived from the Efficient Market Hypothesis and a cultural brain tumor called Ayn Rand(insert your favorite cause here). And put in place and policed by a consortium of media, academic, business, and government group think that is almost Trotskyite in it's fervor to sell the beauty that are unregulated free markets and demonize anyone that wants to make them less insecure and destructive to regular people at the expense of quarterly profits and GDP.

So while I think its fair to point out the failures of the Obama economic squad, or to get worked up over banker salaries, I think that is ultimately spinning our wheels. We need to tear down the ideological construct and replace it with something that values economic growth, entrepreneurship and markets, but recognizes their limits, recognizes the role of the democratic institutions to intervene in markets, and remember that economic growth is only useful insofar as it elevates the human condition, not as fulfillment of biblical prophecy or to validate a particular economic thinker or school of thought.

Now I think Megan, at least in this piece, is sincere in her effort to grapple with what are uncomfortable questions for someone as far down the libertarian rabbit hole as she usually is. But the truth is that most of the people that are pimping the ideas that the Community Reinvestment Act is responsible for this horrible mess because of its liberal hippie meddling and forcing banks to lend white people money to non white people who then turned around and bought McMansions on credit and theen spent government money on guns, Malt liquor, and crack ho's they rented from Huggy bear the pimp are cynical douchebags who should not be taken seriously and probably should be frog marched into a rocket and launched into the Oort cloud to mine ice crystals and UnObtainum for the Trade Federation.

But I'm a DFH, so what do I know?

Just Not Feeling It

I've got such a long list of things that are pissing me off lately, that I can't even begin to make progress on narrowing down the field of what to rant about. If I covered everything that's currently getting up my nose, I'd be blogging full time until the end of the year. So, screw that. Instead, here, read this fresh horror. That's only the tippy top of a huge pile of steaming crap.

Moose bites Woman

I haven't watched the Oprah/Sarah lovefest, but I wanted to weigh in on this discussion about Sarah Palin being a 2012 Presidential candidate. I was struck by a desperate statement/plea by David Brooks on ABC news on Sunday claiming that GOP primary voters would never nominate Sarah Palin.

You might try whistling louder past that graveyard David...

Brooks is wrong of course. GOP voters would gleefully nominate Sarah Palin. They want to nominate her. They will give her every opportunity to get that nomination, provided she meets a ridiculously low bar they will set for her. I don't think she will be the nominee though. Not because she doesn't have a good chance, but because she wants to run for President more than she wants to be President. She likes the process of being famous and the attention of a candidate way more than the crap job of governing. Sarah Palin has the job she wants right now. Running for President is part of that job. It's GOP celebrity in chief that she wants to be, not POTUS.

What this says about Caribou Barbie is less interesting to me than what is says about the GOP. It must really suck to be a GOP pol that isn't a complete Kool-Aid drinker. It was one thing when these Jesus freaks could be manipulated by Karl Rove and the Mighty Wurlitzer every two years by shouting "fag" at the top of their lungs and having Junior play Commander in Chief the way my four year old plays Jedi, only with less panache. Now these people want to actually run things. Don' they know that no one at the Country Club wants to hear them rattle on about salvation and how great Sarah is? It's one thing for them to grovel to Rush. Rush is on the team. Sure he talks like THOSE people most of the time, but he is one the elite. Being a freak is just his job on the radio.

What the GOP base voter considers a conservative is being redefined, or has been. Back in the day when Mojo was a reporter, I would occasionally accompany him to candidate forums, city council meetings, and all the rest of that ugly stuff that reporters use to do before they became too cool for that sissy wonk stuff. You could find Sarah Palins all over those local political events. It shocked me at first. Who the Frak were these people? I'm not easily weirded out by people of faith. I grew up in a tight Catholic community, I'm okay with people who wear their faith on their sleeves. But this was something different. Mojo then explained it all to me..(cue Kenny Rodgers "The Gambler" here)

"Son" he said, (no he didn't call me that, I'm just working the Rodgers groove), this is part of a larger movement. The Christian Right has been telling their people to get involved at the local level. They want them to run for School Board, City Council, Planning Commission. That is how they plan to get political power in this country. Work their way up from local, to regional, to state, to Washington. Be afraid." Guess what. He was right. That's exactly what they did.

There is nothing wrong with that plan really. They have right to run for things and get their political groove on. And it's not like it hasn't been noticed, or fought against, or that its' been easy for them to operate in a GOP where many of the career pols and money geeks who fund them see the Sarah Palin's of the world as nutjobs. I feel their pain to some degree. I'm a liberal and a progressive in a party that would like me to shut up about a whole range of issues. Just vote for us, fund us, walk precincts for us, but don't rock the boat too much. That's what you get when you are a Dirty Frakkin Hippie.

So when David Brooks claims she won't win the nomination, I have to laugh at that. She could if she really wanted to. Her ignorance and stupidity are not deal killers in today's GOP. They are irrelevant. She is one of the tribe to her potential constituents across the country. She talks their language, believes what they believe. The more heat she gets from the media, the more disapproval she gets from New York RINO's like Brooks, the more they love her. She's a natural at this. The people who picked her out were not wrong that she has potential. What they were wrong about and continue to be is her motivation. I seriously doubt she wants any job in politics that would involve governing. She had that in Alaska and she bolted at the first opportunity. And let's be frank, if you cannot handle governing a state like Alaska, you really aren't going to deal with the Oval Office.

The danger for the GOP here is that Sarah's traveling road show doesn't lead anywhere good in the long run. She's not looking to build their brand, or expand their base. She's wants to build brand SARAH!, or expand her base, not the same thing. The GOP desperately needs to figure out how to broaden their base. Their voters are getting older and whiter, a demographic trend that spells serious trouble. The best outcome for the GOP is for Sarah not to run, but to support the most electable candidate and stump for them among her faithful. If she runs and the GOP primaries get as nasty as they usually do, that is going to piss off her voters in a bad way.

The GOP made this bed by trying to play to the worst instincts of their base without weeding out the worst of it. They have played patty cake with the racists, the cranks, and the ignorant to a degree that would make the most cynical Democrat look like Pericles. This was the Rove strategy. It worked for his client just fine. If it creates a huge electoral problem for the GOP in the future, well, that's not his problem. The talk radio audience they have been gravy training on is slipping its leash. And all the happy talk and dismissive attitude from Brooks and his crowd is not going to change that. So get used to the Sarah Palin GOP Mr. Brooks.

I hope you enjoy your Moose Turd Pie.

What Atrios Says

Apologies to our sole non-U.S. reader for the parochial cultural reference, but something Atrios posted today needs to be memorialized here. I'm just going to reprint it in whole:

Looting For Profit

Buy companies, leverage them, pay yourself a dividend, and then go bankrupt.

I think we've finally found the secret phase 2 of the underpants gnomes.

Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: Use underpants as collateral for multibillion dollar loan.
Phase 3: Profit

For those who need some context to catch the cultural reference, I'll save you the search:



(Yes, embedding is disabled. Just click through.)

The AP tells us that somebody in Kentucky has lynched murdered a census worker:

AP source: Census worker hanged with 'fed' on body

By DEVLIN BARRETT and JEFFREY McMURRAY (AP) – 46 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.

[...]
Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau's southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is "an apparent homicide" but nothing else.
[...]

(Emphasis mine.)

Details are still a little sketchy. We don't really know the motive for the killing yet, and the FBI is still investigating.

Marking the body with the word 'fed' is a pretty good clue to me that we're likely looking at a right-wing hate crime. I mean, I suppose we might find out that the guy was also an undercover federal law enforcement agent or something, but... come on... it looks pretty likely that somebody thought it would make a useful display of force to start murdering census workers. Maybe it's just one lone psychopath, but I worry that this might only be the beginning of a series of crimes like this, committed by a group of psychopaths— the sort of psychopaths who're easily spun up by the sorts of crap we saw going on in Washington, D.C. last weekend.

[NOTE: this might have been a lynching, but we don't really know yet. If people in Kentucky start showing around pictures of themselves smiling and standing around in large crowds next to the hanging bodies of federal workers, then there will be no doubt.]

Glenn Beck

Blogger doesn't seem to be showing me the archives... but I'd like to note for the record, that I was sounding the alarm about Glenn Beck over four years ago, well before he was a television personality. Back when he was only a second-tier talk-radio host.

Seriously, people... when it comes to spotting the potential of second-tier doomful assholes, I have mad skillz. Nevertheless, check out David Neiwert's latest dispatch on him at Crooks And Liars. I will tell you now, if this guy and all his fellow travelers aren't stopped soon, then we're going to be living inside V For Vendetta for the rest of our goddamn lives.

Update: more documentary footage of Glenn Beck's stooges out in force..

Know Your Dopefiend!

Keep an eye open for the telltale signs.

'Know your dopefiend. Your life may depend on it! You will not be able to see his eyes because of tea-shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape-victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your bath.'

'Know your dopefiend. Your life may depend on it!'

'There are 4 states of being in the cannabis society, Cool, groovy, hip and square. In that descending order. The square is seldom, if ever, cool. He is NOT with it. That is: he doesn't know WHAT'S happening, but if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to 'hip'. And if he can bring himself to approve of what's happening he becomes 'groovy'. And after that with much luck and perseverance he can rise to the rank of 'cool'.'

'Ahhrm. We must come to terms with the drug-culture in the country. The reefer butt is called a roach because it resembles a cockroach.'

'About those flashbacks. The patient never knows and think it's all over and then he gets himself straightened out for six months and then DARNIT the whole trip comes back on him.'

Look On The Bright Side, Congressman Wilson...

It could have been so much worse for you. You could have been overheard saying, "Go fuck yourself," to Senator Leahy.

So It Goes...

Here is the line in the President's speech tonight that signals where the bodies are buried:

...I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice.

What he should have said:

I will not back down on the basic principle that all Americans have a right to coverage they can afford.

See the difference?

Here's some context in case you're still not reading it:

...To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades, the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable for those without it. The public option is only a means to that end – and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal. And to my Republican friends, I say that rather than making wild claims about a government takeover of health care, we should work together to address any legitimate concerns you may have.

For example, some have suggested that that the public option go into effect only in those markets where insurance companies are not providing affordable policies. Others propose a co-op or another non-profit entity to administer the plan. These are all constructive ideas worth exploring. But I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.

I could go into a detailed analysis here, but that will have to wait for later. At this point, the summary I promised yesterday is all I'm prepared to offer.

President Obama has now quite clearly signaled that he doesn't believe a health insurance reform package can pass the U.S. Senate unless A) it further cements the privileges of asymmetric information and market hegemony [over both patients and doctors] that the private health insurance companies now enjoy, and B) it allows Democrats a political fig leaf over their abject failure to pass either single-payer or the moderate compromise: an option for universal access to Medicare.

By telling us that a worthless bill, loaded with individual mandates, triggers that can never be pulled, co-ops that are nothing different than what we have today, interstate compacts that will only make matters infinitely worse, etc.— by telling us that this crap sandwich is the best we can expect from a Democratic president working with a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate, that we can't even expect Democratic Senators who join with Republicans to deny cloture in debates on Democratic bills to pay any political price for obstructing their own party— by telling us that, he is telling us that we may as well roll up the U.S. government and put it in the big warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It's over. We can't even pretend otherwise anymore, though I predict some will continue to try.

Our corporate aristocracy, with their gun-brandishing wingnut squadristi in tow, are now capable of exercising absolute control over the policymaking apparatus of the State without even needing to pay lip service to the public interest or the consent of the governed.

That was old school...

Well, here's my take on what's happening today before the President addresses Congress re: Health Insurance Reform.

The speech to school kids was part of it.

Maybe I am reaching here (I can easily see how this could be interpreted like this), but I think the Obama people went old school last week.

The key to this is the utter predictability of the wingnut-o-sphere regarding nearly anything the President does.

Last week the Administration announces that Obama will have a national address aimed at our children on the first day of school, and little else other than a vague notion that the Dept. of Education might have some sort of lesson plan suggested for teachers in the wake of the speech.

The spittle-flecked hyperventilating bloviation from the usual suspects was not only predictable, but I think it was counted on and the Administration played it in such a way as to encourage the rabidness to the point where mainstream media smelled a story and picked it up in the middle of the week...

See where this is going?

The media whipped itself into a really fierce little dust-devil for the speech, and then the speech itself, when released the day before turned out to be... a big vanilla soda. Stay in school, work hard, don't quit, respect yourself and nurture your talents.

This not only snatched the wind out of the sails of the wingnut-0-sphere for about 36 hours, but the meta-narrative of the media coverage became: "Why the hell were these morons all worked up about this? Are these guys stupid or just insane?"

And of course, this comes as the immediate precursor of the President's big health care speech to Congress. The Weengnut-0h-Zphere is spinning in it's predictable fashion, but the top-down media is not biting on this one. They just got caught in bed with these gomers, and on something as simple as a cheer leading speech to school kids... they aren't going to fall for that two weeks in a row.

The outcome? As the President goes into tonight's speech, he will have a very nearly even media playing field, without the pre-game hamstringing that would have otherwise almost surely occurred with a Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, Scaife Whinge-Nut dominated mainstream media narrative going into it.

Now let's see if the rest of this team is as good as I hope they are... but either way... that was old school Mr. President! Rock on!

mojo sends

I Think I Just Failed Another Sanity Roll

...with probably about d4 damage.

Julia, at Sisyphus Shrugged, decided to go looking for the origins of the new wingnut meme-du-jour, i.e. that the executive branch is crawling with time-traveling Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian emperors. She noticed that the Wikipedia page is a relatively recent creation [its opening timestamp coincides with the circulation of this polemic from the wingnut Taxpayers For Common Sense], but I think I know where the meme originated: legendary hippie prankster Robert Anton Wilson (or, as I like to call him, Uncle Bob).

Uncle Bob was an eclectic fellow, to put it politely. I have a copy of the book he wrote that I think was the likely source of this weirdness, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. That book was almost certainly ignored by the wingnut hive mind, but I suspect the prank political party that Uncle Bob and his twisted friends put together might have managed to get more purchase. Go read the Guns And Dope Party manifesto and see if you don't think it might have a chance of being taken for serious by certain types in the wingnut wilderness. It quite handily marries Second Amendment militancy with the Tenther madness, then goes on to rail for page after page about the Tsarist Occupation Government. Does that sound like your modern teabagging Glenn Beck fan? It does to me.

How did the wingnuts find out about the Guns And Dope Party, I hear you asking? I think I might have had something to do with that. See, back in 2004 I was passing those links around to all the wingnuts I knew. And I knew a fair number in those days, because they hadn't quite gotten to the point where they were stockpiling ammunition like they are today, and they were still congregating in places where a hippie freak like me could communicate with them freely without being banned in ten seconds flat.

One thing I noticed when I would flow those links at the most weirdly of the wingnuts: they'd go all quiet for a few hours, then they would send a really short and cryptic follow-up message like, "Those are interesting links." And they would never mention it again.

As I mentioned to Julia, I'm more than a little concerned that I might have been one of the vectors for the transmission of this meme. Let That Be A Lesson To You! What happens at Burning Man, must ever STAY at Burning Man.

We Will Soon Have Our Answer

Wednesday night.

We will find out whether my cynicism during last year's election was warranted, or if Change in America is really possible without another revolution. We will know, because President Obama will tell us if he can see a way to overcome the institutional failure in the U.S. Senate and deliver effective reform of our health insurance system. If that can't be done, then you can pretty much forget about reforming financial services or military expenditures or foreign policy or or or... the list is almost endless.

Of the major crises facing the United States, the health care system is the most pressing, the easiest to frame, the most straightforward to fix and the least politically risky for Obama to play with an all-in push. If that can't be done, then we're all fucked.

I Should Just Change My Name To Cassandra Already

Digby sez This Could Change Everything, and I'm having a hard time arguing otherwise:

You’ve probably heard by now that next week the Supreme Court will break up its summer recess to hear argument, for the second time, in Citizens United v. FEC. You may have the sense that this doesn’t happen often and that something important is going on. If so, you’re right and then some.

The case involves a film, Hillary: The Movie, that was produced by Citizens United, a conservative, non-profit corporation, to coincide with the 2008 presidential primary season. The case began as a fairly sleepy challenge to the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC’s) decision to treat the film’s production and release as corporate electioneering subject to campaign finance regulations, but was transformed by an order issued by the Supreme Court on June 29th. Here are five reasons why Citizens United is now a truly momentous case:
[...]

Digby goes on, but I'll just enumerate the five briefly by referencing her headers: A) President Palin, Courtesy of Chevron; B) Reargued Cases in September are like a Snowstorms in July; C) A Cast of a Thousand Stars (and a lawyer’s trick you should not try at home; D) The Alito Court; and E) The Roberts Court and Stare Decisis. She finishes up by saying, "Anybody want to take bets on whether or not the Roberts Court is going to move sharply to the right?"

I'd like to get in on that action, too.

I think the odds of the Roberts Court moving sharply to the right are approaching Sure Thing chances. And if you've been reading the Sara Robinson articles I've been linking, then you can probably infer the reason I'm having a tough time arguing against Digby that this case might not mean very much.

Here's what I want to know: if the Roberts Court overturns both Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and the parts of McConnell v. FEC that uphold regulation of corporate spending in candidate elections, then does that free our corporate overlords to go public under the law with their courtship of the militant right-wing extremists?

Should I be worried?

Another Foul Gust Of Wind

The mighty David Neiwert monitors The Glenn Beck Program so you don't have to watch all of it just to catch the important parts. If, like me, you've been letting others keep an eye on the Hate so you can keep your sanity mostly intact for other uses, then you might want to check in here to see what you've been missing.

Obama's 'SS': Glenn Beck sees scary black people

[...]
Ah, but here's the one thing: If you've been watching Beck this week on his program, he's been imploring his audience to record it -- write it all down, even -- because it's the Most Important Stuff They'll Ever Watch on the Teevee.

That's because, if you watch what he's been doing so far, what seems to be emerging is that he is basically building a case justifying his declaration that Obama is a racist who hates white people.

This became crystal-clear midway through his Fox News program Thursday night, during a segment featuring ex-Democrat Patrick Caddell and the ever-vivacious Michelle Malkin to heartily agree with whatever craziness came burbling out of his mouth.

They were all gathered to talk about the "army" of "thugs" that President Obama is planning to gather under the combined umbrellas of ACORN, SEIU, Color of Change and whatever other insidious "radicals" Beck believes he's uncovered.

And what does this "army" of "thugs" look like?

Why, they're all black people, of course.
[...]

Oh, and Sara Robinson is out with the third part of her most recent series on the prospects of American fascism.

Try to stay upbeat people. We haven't lost yet.