The content of his character

Hunter connects the dots:

Willard Mitt Romney is quite convinced that the contents of a person's tax returns are defining evidence of their character. He is equally insistent that he does not want anyone to see his own. It would be remiss to assume there is no connection between the two beliefs.

Selfish people vs. citizens

The best thing Obama ever said:

[A] freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.... 

America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.

Countering Frank Luntz

We need some extremely plain talk to counter Frank Luntz's latest salvo, in which he instructs Republicans to say the Ryan budget "strengthens," "preserves," and "protects" Medicare and Social Security. 

Karoli at Crooks & Liars obliges:

Here it is, plain and simple. Paul Ryan is a fervent believer in killing social insurance by privatizing it for profit. To that end, his budget proposal ends Medicare. It ends it. Period. There is no "choice" involved. It ends Medicare and shifts the burden for medical costs onto senior citizens. Similarly, his scheme for Social Security ends it. Period. It takes our retirement funds and gives them to Wall Street, where all the risk then shifts over to the retiree and all the profit heads into Wall Street's pocket. 

Wall Street and health insurers benefit from Paul Ryan's plan, but people don't. They can paint that pig with all kinds of different shades of lipstick but everyone needs to know that Paul Ryan aims to destroy the social safety nets by shifting all costs and risks from the government to individuals, terminating the agreement that has worked so well for so many years, and handing our retirement to profit-driven enterprise.

Emphasis added. And another thing: we have to stop saying "entitlements," with its horrible something-for-nothing framing. We paid into those programs for years. We earn those benefits. They are insurance programs, shared-risk programs. What Ryan proposes is to strip out the profits and saddle us with the risk.

UPDATE: Even shorter and more to the point, via the Overpass Light Brigade:

Progressive values

Progressive values, around which we frame every argument:

Responsibility. Fairness. Character. Shared sacrifice. Love of Country. Honoring the sacredness of American shared identity and purpose.

'Nuff said.

R.I.P. Facts

I'm a week late getting to this tear-inducing obit written by Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune:

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists. 

Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

Read it and weep.

The "View from Nowhere"

Sarah Jaffe has a great piece up on NPR's new code favoring "truth" over "balance." It includes this quote from media critic Jay Rosen:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by a majority of newsroom professionals. Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.

Please, please, please let this mark the turning back from the insanity of our national discourse... a/k/a the Age of Ignorance.

"Stupid doesn't begin to describe it"

A European loses patience with American whining about outsourced jobs:

China isn't taking your jobs, you are giving them away. There is no great conspiracy here, all that is happening is that the great God of Capitalism is working precisely as intended. You wanted it, you voted for it, quit moaning about it.

Someone sold you the Brooklyn Bridge when they convinced you that Capitalism works better, is more efficient, more profitable, more American when unfettered by regulation. Well yes, it is, for the Capitalists. For you ... nope, not so much because now you have no job and are left to live in the filth and pollution they left behind when they sent your job to India. 

And you sit on your great Oklahoman ass and blame the very people who were trying to protect you from that. Stupid doesn't begin to describe it. "Low Information" is not an excuse. You have no excuse for not knowing what your Representatives are doing. There can be no finger-pointing, no blaming, no apology. You got exactly what you deserve. You got what you voted for when you weren't paying attention.

It's not because they're rich

Matt Taibbi nails it:

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich. 

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

And then he gives examples. It's a must read.


UPDATE: Says Ministry of Truth, "Let's admit that if corporations are people then they are abusive, sociopathic people who have no sense of patriotism or empathy."

I didn't realize it had got quite this bad

Holy smokes:

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."

And for extra credit, he calls Grover Norquist a "fiscal terrorist."

It's off to Fox reeducation camp for you, Mr. Stockman.

Worth remembering

Worth remembering:

The U.S. does not have oil. Exxon has oil. The Koch Bros have oil. When the oil is in our ground, Exxon (or whoever) owns it. That gives them the right to spend some of their billions to bribe (sorry, campaign-contribute, lobby) our public officials to let them drill it out.

Then they put it on the open market, where we have the right to bid against the entire rest of the planet to poison ourselves with it.

On conservative victimhood

Amanda Marcotte:

Meanwhile, across the nation, people are losing their jobs and homes, and dying of treatable illnesses because they don’t have health insurance. With real victimhood all around us, it’s hard to find an ounce of sympathy for someone who feels victimized because they aren’t teaching creationism in schools, because they have to pay their taxes, or because they have to endure pressing “1” for English when they call AT&T.

She goes on to argue that conservatives are losing their hold on the national conversation. Hope she's right.

Food for thought

A discussion last night on the nature of evil led me to revisit M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie, where he says:

For adults to be the victims of evil, they must be powerless to escape. They may be powerless when a gun is held to their head...Or they may be powerless by virtue of their own failure of courage...Whenever adults not at gunpoint become victims of evil it is because they have - one way or another - bound [themselves] by chains of laziness and dependency....settling for a child's impotence.

And this further from Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil:

The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decisions, the more our heart softens--or better perhaps, comes alive...Most people fail at the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road.

Hmmm.

Occupy Wall Street for Dummies

Hunter explains, in his inimitable fashion:

Here's a helpful tip: if you are a political pundit and you still don't know what Occupy Wall Street stands for, you are an idiot. If you purport to make your living analyzing the political landscape, or from parsing the effectiveness of various political messages, or if you write columns explaining what the American people want based on your deep, intimate knowledge of what the American people want, but you still, after a month, cannot quite grasp what these uncouth people in the streets are going on about, then you are categorically bad at your job. If you find yourself tuttering and tsking over how the protestors are merely a group of fringe figures, and you do not notice or care to notice the polls expressing wide support for the message, you are a fraud. 

[...] Here, I will give it to you in a mere few words: the Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest against rampant income inequality, against corporate excesses, and against a government rigged to protect and worsen both.

Read the rest here.

Batshit Bachmann

Haven't been to Wonkette in a while, but today, reading reactions to Michele Bachmann's latest insane campaign commercial, I found this:

Welcome to Batshit Bachmann's Emporium of Insanity! You want Xtian Fundamentalism! We'll push it!!! You want no regulations whatsoever! It's done. No more deficit spending! It's all yours! More War!! No more gubbiment in your Medicare? No Homo?!? Done, done and done. At Batshit Bachmann's we don't do anything smart or sane. You name your deepest darkest craziest desire and we'll do it! Go vote at Batshit Bachmann's where we're flush US America down the toilet in the name of low taxes and Jeebus!!!!

...and as another commenter noted, this could describe the entire Republican platform of late.

September 11

Richard Trumka:

Just 10 years after 9/11, despite our vows, the public servants, construction workers and others who lost their lives or still suffer with the cancerous remnants of the Twin Towers haven’t just been forgotten. They’ve been vilified. The extremist small government posse has turned them into public enemy No. 1, as though teachers and firefighters, EMTs and nurses and union construction workers ruined America’s economy.

 Unbelievably sad.