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Tea Party Literacy Drive Started

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on September 24, 2010| 2 Comments »

As the Tea Party movement gains strength and raises its national profile, thousands of students and tutors across the country, in town halls and public plazas, libraries and convention halls, have fanned out to bring vastly needed reading and spelling skills to millions of Tea Party movement members.

“Are governmint is trying to take are money,” railed Tea Party protester Max Bonhof, a resident of Fort Wayne, Indiana who has been attending the party’s events since early 2009 and struggling to communicate his basic frustrations with the role of government in his life. “This soshialism has to stop rite now.”

What began as a few spottily organized demonstrations over the last few years has grown into a nationwide movement with a proven ability to win elections, all at a time when the Democratic leadership in Washington seems unable to cure crippling unemployment. Now that Tea Party members might actually move into leadership roles, pundits and analysts on both sides of the political spectrum agree: the movement badly needs book learning and spelling skills.

“We’re talking about a seismic upheaval in American politics,” says Jay Rundson, a Republican pollster. “These people are going to sweep into office on waves of dissatisfaction with the direction of our country. They will be tackling items like the environment and the alternative minimum tax, and I’m just horrified, with blood rising to the surface of my skin, that most of them don’t know what the AMT is and can’t even spell ‘alternative.'”

“President Obama is a muslin,” said Ruth Gabel of Carlsbad, Calif., trying to refer to the religion of Islam but instead referring to loosely woven white cotton fabric originating in the Middle East. “Liberals wont report the truth.”

As the frustration with Washington reaches critical mass, the Tea Party movement, bereft of basic understanding of politics, statistics, science and spelling, has turned to problematic candidates with little understanding of the political process or the mechanisms of legal procedure.

The Republican primary winner for the U.S. Senate seat from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has in the past criticized masturbation and reportedly used campaign contributions to pay her rent, and is considered so unelectable that even Karl Rove, the Republican political strategist and senior adviser to George W. Bush, has called her “nutty.”

“As the winds of change whip through the neoclassical white peristyles, arcades and hallways of Washington, we need to be prepared, just as we were not for Hurricane Katrina, to deal with this onslaught of poorly read, even more poorly skills-tested people reaching the pinnacles of political power,” said moderate Republican Abe Hochstein. “They are about to put their hands on the levers of government. They not only don’t have the instructions, but they probably wouldn’t understand them if they did.”

“We’re at a crossroads in America,” said President Barack Obama. “We face a different set of challenges than our ancestors did. Social Security could be put on ice. Deep sea oil wells are going to rupture or explode. Carbon emissions will change the composition of our skies. Americans are frustrated. So frustrated they can barely articulate their rage. And when I say barely articulate, I mean, they can’t put it into coherent sentences, linear arguments or even understandable grammar.”

Laura Franklin, a grade school teacher from Pensacola, Fla., has been tutoring Tea Party members for the last year or so to help give them better language and speaking tools to get their points across.

“These are people with lots of feelings and strong convictions,” says Franklin. “Things are happening that they don’t understand, and when a person feels disoriented and disenfranchised, at the mercy of political forces he can’t fathom, then he makes self-defeating mistakes out of anger and has a compulsion to repeat them. What I want to do is get these people reading some books and learning something about the forces affecting them. That will help them better focus this awesome energy they have … or, better yet maybe they can peaceably leave the tea party if they wish.”

“I’m through with the taxes and the bailouts and the government messing with Medicare,” said Rosemary Grothe, of Lubbock, Texas, repeatedly contradicting herself.

Jerry Rathskiller, however, of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was more sanguine after working with a tutor for a few months.

“I used to be a birther,” said Rathskiller, “But after my tutor Shelly taught me what the concept of scientific falsifiability was, I realized how much I don’t know and thought I better shut my mouth before I start to look any stupider.”

An important thing to do with tea party members is to teach them strong verbs, says Franklin.

“They tend to do poorly with these. Usually what you see in tea party members is strings of nouns with no correlation to each other: ‘bailouts,’ ‘Obamacare,’ ‘Acorn,’ ‘Socialist,’ ‘Communist,’ ‘Palin,’ ‘taxes,’ ‘liberal media.’

Franklin says that verbs used with these words and phrases might illuminate them better.

“When a man says ‘Obama is a socialist,’ that doesn’t tell us much,” said Franklin to one of her students. “Maybe you explain with a strong verb what he has done that makes you think that. Perhaps you could make a more concrete statement such as ‘Obama will not let the alternative minimum tax expire.'”

The student stared into his notebook perplexed. Franklin shook her head.

“Patience,” she shrugged. “That’s the hallmark of a good teacher. John Maynard Keynes was so smart he could argue mathematicians like Bertrand Russell under the table. Now we have all these people on the Internet calling Keynes ‘stupide.'”

“I remember the very first things crossed off the “to do” list of our emboldened leaders,” said O’Donnell* speaking at a Family Research Council conference in a barely coherent jumble of hot-button words with no diagrammable structure. ” … They started talking about Obamacare and the bailouts. One industry after another. And our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confusion everywhere with chatter about withdrawal dates. Plans for closing Gitmo and trying terrorists in Manhattan. And looming Supreme Court vacancies.”

“Reading is fundamental,” said Rove. “I don’t want to bash anyone. All I can say is that I’ve gotten a lifetime of joy out of reading, and although I have preached to dummies all my life, I can finally say that it has come back to bite me in the ass and I sure wish now that we could send an army of brigadistas out to explain some basic ideas about science, math, statistics and meteorology to the tea party movement. If we don’t, we may be surely lost.”

*Most of the quotes here are fictional. The O’Donnell comments are unfortunately not.

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Dinesh and Newt, Cup and Can

Posted in Politics on September 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

There’s an old slang phrase, “cup and can,” which means “best of friends.” As in, “My friend Snooki and I are cup and can.” “Frick and Frack.” It’s a tidy metaphor. A friend is one who offers fuel for another, like the can fuels the cup.

I thought of it not only because I just bought an awesome new slang book but also, I can think of no better image to describe Newt Gingrich and really bad “academic” right wing writer Dinesh D’Souza, two thinkers thick as thieves–accent on the “thick.” One wrote a grouchy, inarticulate and easily ignorable right-wing diatribe (like many of his other stupid diatribes, which in the past have suggested African American slaves had it pretty good). Newt, who ought to have known better, got a belly full of it. Between this article and his recent recantation of his belief in the First Amendment because of the Park 51 Muslim center, he is fueled and full and off to the races, and has now proudly cast his lot with the racists in his party. That’s almost a textbook definition of the right wing these days: a place that makes a safe bosom for racist behavior.

I almost hate to bring attention to this awful piece of writing, but how can you ignore it when it made the cover of Forbes? When people with good names start offer apotheosis to such horrible idiots, it provokes the rest of the media to comment. Yahoo and Slate had to follow with blistering put downs, so why shouldn’t I? Basically Newt reiterated the obscenely stupid message that Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial intellectual framework,” has been taken directly from his estranged father, and that the link has been revealed by the genius D’Souza. If this sounds like an empty piece of pseudo-intellectual bullshit to you, then I ask you to reconsider. It actually reveals scads, not in its content per se, but in what Gingrich thinks of Republicans. They seem to be so stupid, they will enjoy the bouquet of ugly racial overtone, the taste of academic-sounding jargon, and the finish of Freudian cliche. Barack Obama, who gave money to banks to stop a meltdown, and who shepherds the world’s biggest economy, is still in his heart an African like his father trying to uproot the Belgians from Congo.

The Slate article mainly attacks D’Souza’s past attempts at passing off agitprop as academic research, and is a great read. I will stick to the crazy money stuff here.

From D’Souza’s article:

“The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%.”

Let’s get this straight. Obama is taken to task for spending money on hundreds of dollars in stimulus that have done nothing because unemployment is still high. In fact, the stimulus has raised unemployment.

So my first question: How did this person get an article in a business magazine? A little bit of fact checking will tell you why high unemployment has nothing to do with the success or failure of the stimulus–no, you can lay the blame squarely on the feet of American companies, flush with cash, that are still not hiring you or your Uncle Ernie. Instead, they are hoarding their money and delaying new hires to keep their costs down. This means overworking the remaining laborers (your tired Uncle Ned) and otherwise keeping their earnings per share high and their stock prices burnished so that overseas investors will wade back over.

Obama may in fact be in part to blame, but it’s not because of the stimulus, which most analysts agree saved us from a new Great Depression. No, he’s to blame because the stimulus bills didn’t force banks at gunpoint to lend and didn’t force companies at gunpoint to hire. He trusted capitalism to work, it seems. Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy mostly consumed with trying to get France out of Algeria.

For those of you still not in the know: The unemployment rate is indeed higher, but that has nothing to do with the stimulus and everything to do with the fact that the rebound in employment always lags the rebounding market, sometimes by a year, sometimes longer. It’s part of the healing process of an economy, and yes, Uncle Ernie, it sucks. Jobs come back last. Everybody who’s ever spent one semester in B-school knows this, but for some reason it’s too difficult to relate this to the American people. Everybody thinks they won’t understand. Newt and Dinesh know they won’t. Dear conservatives: You’re being mocked.

If you haven’t been paying attention for the last two years, then we should refresh your memory. The unemployment came after a market crash. The market crash was caused by our largest banks going insolvent after buying bad real estate debt. This is not something a president fixes in two days. And to the extent he fixes it at all, he would be doing it with this same stimulus money that gives Dinesh such a soft-off.

The unemployment rate was lower when Obama took office because the recession was still young. Companies were just starting to lay off. Again, not proof of Obama’s leadership problems. They were going to go up no matter what he did. Why unemployment has remained high for so long after the crash is something that confuses economists, but it’s been getting greater with every recession since George H.W. Bush was in office and it has everything to do with globalization, not failed stimulus. When the jobs come back online, they go to cheaper labor overseas.

So onto the next piece of shit somewhat disingenuous argument. From Dinesh:

“Yet [Obama] wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren’t paying their “fair share.” This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair–to the rich.”

I’ve said it elsewhere and don’t want to sound like a bore, but Obama is not foisting a spending spree on anybody. Taxes are going up to pay for two Republican wars and a prescription drug benefit. The Congressional Budget Office has said repeatedly that if the Bush tax cuts, which never should have been passed in the first place, were allowed to continue, then our deficit would climb up to 90% of GDP over the next 10 years. This is a plea by people in the know who run our budget, not the evil plan of an anti-Colonial crypto-Kenyan black guy who wants the Italians out of Ethiopia.

D’Souza also says that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of federal income taxes and 10% of Americans pay 70% of federal taxes, which is unfair to the rich. Let’s do some math: In 2005, if you were lucky enough to be among the top 300,000 Americans, you made 440 times what the average person in the bottom half of the income universe did (see my story “Bye Bye Beaver,” down below for more on this) and you all collectively took in as much as the bottom 150 million Americans combined. The average income of the top 1% in 2005 was $1.1 million, while the median household in the U.S. has stayed around just over $50,000. If you were in the top 1%, in 2007 you took more than 20 cents of every dollar earned in America, while the rest of us divided up the dregs. Also, if you are in the top 10%, you were among the only people to see your earnings increase.

So if you are paying only 40% of federal income taxes, part of this is by default: You have earned the right to pay it by making so much god damned money. In fact, seems like you’re doing pretty well.

I’m on a tear about the math. But let’s be clear–Newt, a major contender for president, has just forwarded racist samizdat worthy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and passed it off as a critical historical review. To say that a president who is deliberative, maybe to a fault, is actually still a Luo tribesman in his heart, full of black rage, is just as bad as calling him an uppity Negro. The fact that this story hit the pages just as two completely bat shit crazy Tea Party candidates made waves with their primary victories in the East Coast should give us all pause. The Tea Party is a platform with lots of anger and without many ideas. Actually, if your platform is just “liberty!” then that’s a pretty explicit way of saying you have no platform at all. They talk about taking back America. Too much of that rhetoric uses subtle forms of racism like this horrible article. Pseudo-academic histories like D’Souza’s actually further prove how intellectually bankrupt conservatives have become. We’re a long way from Reagan.

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Game Theory

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , on September 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A few years ago, I wrote a blog in which I listed funny but fictional mathematical paradoxes, for instance that a surprise birthday party thrown for oneself isn’t a surprise party unless no one shows up. Funny, and insightful, and I hope worthy of Bertrand Russell or Rodney Dangerfield.

But if you remember, further down the list I wrote something that wasn’t fake at all, but instead so horribly true it’s hard to laugh at: “Two groups working successfully by themselves will fail when they combine their efforts. This is also known as democracy.”

This idea appears to be as timely as ever, since a brace of new blogs and studies tell us that partisans on both sides of the political spectrum currently hold lots of horribly irrational beliefs about government. The Daily Kos, a liberal political blog, recently conducted a poll of Republicans to find out how many wacky ideas they have. Turns out they have several, the most famous of which is that Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country, so was never eligible to be our president. It’s a powerful, if false, statement–showing a helpless and disenfranchised Republican mind trying to regain his sense of personal potency now that his party has imploded, his economic and political ideas have proved disastrous and his self-esteem ranks up there with that of famously depressed drunk Billy Joel. The Tea Party might make you believe again, if they had any beliefs.

But Kos’ tidy avoidance of 9/11 truthers reveals a big mathematical problem all its own. By focusing only on weird Republican ideas, at least half (maybe two thirds) of his number set is missing (a set that would sink a hole in the floor, as surely as a toxic potion of Bertrand Russell’s antinomy sank number set theories). Ilya Somin writes here that “ignorance and irrationality” actually beset partisans of both political stripes, and goes on to mention some of the stranger parochial beliefs of sectarian leftists, including the desire of some for secession and their disturbing ideas about the influence of Jews on the economy. Somin gives a great compelling argument for why these beliefs flower, mostly that voters don’t have incentives to acquire new knowledge that hurts their team. In other words, it’s game theory at work. Voters aren’t thinkers but sports fans rooting for their own groups; they don’t care if the Yankees win because some kid in the stands unfairly snatched a pop fly away from the opponent’s outfielder.

Selective information gathering (shunning bad information about your guy and drinking up bad information about the other guy) allows Democrats to ignore the fact that it was some of Bill Clinton’s policies that helped cause the financial crisis (even if he was following a deregulation path set by Ronald Reagan). By the same token Republicans are currently blocking reform that would actually help Republican constituents, hampering economic stimulus packages that would create jobs, pounding the table for tax cuts that would make the deficit 90% of GDP over the next 10 years, and destroying legislation that would curb out-of-control medical costs. Why do they do this? They are afraid to break ranks, lest they help opponents. Somin says that you vote for your team because there are greater payoffs to being part of a team than constantly breaking ranks to do the right thing. What payoff do you get following the shifting sands of statistics? Being friends with statistics is like being friends with Mr. Spock. You don’t get a lot of joy out of it and he won’t watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” with you.

I have problems with Somin’s points, too, though. The most important is that it’s very static and doesn’t look at how people occasionally play red rover and cross sides, nor does he see how the changing paradigms lead to political stability. He doesn’t look into game-breaking patterns or ask why they happen. When George W. Bush signed immigration legislation that for once pointed to a rational path to citizenship, liberal pundits were quick to support him, and it gave skeptical Republicans the fig leaf they needed to finally turn on him, the way New York turned on former Knicks coach Pat Riley when he went to Miami. The 9/11 attacks also undermined the game, briefly unifying left and right (unless you count the relatively small number of Afghan War opponents). There is also a rather large political center he’s forgetting–a group that comprises mushy weenies who can’t make up their minds; Hegelian synthesists who wait until they have as much information as possible before making a plan of action (or inaction); people blithely ignorant of politics under all circumstances because they have better things to do with their time; and those who don’t have a dog in the fight for one reason or another, perhaps recent immigrants whose desire to assimilate overshadows their feeling about who runs the Senate postal committee.

Why else do people join teams? Again, because they feel helpless against prevailing political winds. It’s often noted that people in totalitarian societies turn to bizarre religious ideas in the form of millenarian movements. (When the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua, they had to contend with Virgin Mary sightings among Catholics who decided their nation was under the influence of Satan, and of course, much earlier several Jewish millenarian movements sprouted up in the Middle Ages as a result of anti-Semitic persecution). It’s exceedingly silly when conservatives call Obama the anti-Christ, but consistent with political powerlessness throughout history. When you can’t have the Earth, you take the fight to heaven, where you promise to tap whup ass another day on heathens and grassroots community organizers.

And how else would you describe a 9/11 truther if not as quasi religious? After all, perhaps one of the most salient descriptions of a religious person is his dedication to post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. If the world is here, there must be a God who made it. If I got cancer, it’s because I did something wrong. If I only sire girls, my young Tudor dynasty must be cursed. If the 9/11 attacks helped George Bush declare war, he must have planned them all by himself. My belief in this is so strong, I can ignore something as important as two plane loads of people smashing into the Twin Towers and countless radio and cell phone dispatches laying the blame squarely on a group of radical Islamists. The belief is unfalsifiable, therefore comes very close to being religious. You show me a truther (or a birther), and I’ll show you a tongue-speaking, snake handling, eyeball-rolling-back-in-the-head Pentecostal.

What’s scary is that within the liberal and conservative spheres, the need for team loyalty is such that you see no negative feedback on the local level when false information flies around. If you read the right wing blogs these days, for instance, it’s frightening how many false assertions go unchallenged by Republicans on these sites who ought to know better or who might feel the need to challenge inaccuracies the way, say, Wikipedia readers do. If you read “The American Thinker” for instance, you’ll find lots of unchallenged statistical red herrings proving that global warming doesn’t exist, and seemingly nobody smart enough there to raise objections against their compeers. You’ll also find that the recession wasn’t caused by undercapitalized, overleveraged Wall Street banks at all (as everybody over the age of 12 should know) but was evidently caused by ACORN forcing banks to lend to poor people. I want you to ponder the stupidity of a person who can demonize one “get out the vote” organization so completely. First it was responsible for mass voter fraud (not possible) then white slavery (patently untrue) and now the financial crisis.  Next thing you know, ACORN will be responsible for the Holocaust, Alzheimer’s disease and your dad’s hemorrhoids.

The fact is, as, again, everybody over 12 should know, subprime lenders popped up everywhere to take advantage of rising housing prices for the very same reason candle makers churn out more candles for Christmas. They were seeking opportunity from market inefficiencies.  It was not a plot by poor people–it was a nasty asset bubble sadly characteristic of the U.S. economy these days when the U.S. dollar has shrunk, when foreigners thus flood our country with money to buy these assets cheap (causing them to swell) and Americans themselves meanwhile spend more than they produce by borrowing against such inflated assets. It was a systematic error was caused by cheap money, and it ain’t the last bubble you’re going to see, folks. It’s the market at work. It’s capitalism gone wild, and without regulation, it’s going to happen again and it’s going to fuck you and your family.

There are many conservative-leaning economists who know this. Why do they not step up to challenge other conservatives? Do they not have guts? Or does the game require them to go mute and turn to zombie-economists? (There’s a movie pitch for you!)

These problems with communication, misinformation and denial have led some people to argue that ignorant people just shouldn’t vote at all. I can’t get behind that idea. Why? I truly believe there’s a rational impulse floating under the game theory. When people aren’t happy with their own guy, they don’t vote. That’s a good thing. It could be that people only vote when they’re angry, but that’s not such a bad thing either. Voting against something is a way of introducing negative feedback into the system. I don’t want the Democratic majority to be knocked out of office this year. But I’m also angry that when I voted in a bunch of liberals in 2008, they didn’t act more like liberals–throwing more money into job creation and suspending bipartisanship with people who were not going to help.

If Democrats lose their substantial majorities now, there’s now going to be gridlock. Is that bad? Not necessarily. It likely means the horribly destructive Bush tax cuts will expire, and we will start balancing our budget. At some point, the economy will recover and it will be no thanks to Republicans or Democrats but to market forces beyond the control of both. Higher taxes won’t stop it, just as they didn’t stop the Internet boom. When the jobs come back online, of course, you will be paid less and you will likely be working in the service industry. You can thank globalization and Ronald Reagan for that. On the other hand, sooner or later, Republicans will look at cap and trade not as a punitive measure wrought upon them by hippies but just another business opportunity like so many others that help a market economy thrive.

We might have to lean on the rudder to get the ship going in the right direction, but we’ll have a political center offering ballast to keep the ship upright. As long as this center doesn’t disappear (or let itself be bullied), then it’s very possible common sense ideas can come to pass. It took us 15 years to figure out Vietnam was an incredible cock up. It only took us seven to figure out Iraq was messed up.

Even in game theory, it seems, there’s progress.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Washington, D.C. Stripper Blasted for Incompetence

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on March 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Sally Jessie Rose, a 52-year-old stripper who works at the Bare Elegance Lounge in Washington, D.C., was blasted yesterday by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike for her horrible dance routine and shocking disregard for quality adult cabaret entertainment.

“This stripper is just terrible,” said Rep. Jackson Peyton (D-Idaho). “I mean, it’s OK to tease, but it’s not a tease anymore if it lasts for, like, four hours. At what point does she just take it off?”

“There is no inspiration in her moves at all,” said Jefferson Potlach, a Republican representative from Wisconsin. “It’s like she can barely be bothered to take off her clothes in front of us.”

Rose did her strip routine some four hours after the Senate agreed to pass a bipartisan bill extending unemployment compensation, legislation that passed in a highly polarized political atmosphere in which gridlock has become the order of the day. However, the jobs bill and Sally Jessie Rose’s horrible and chafing lap dance were encouraging areas of bipartisan consensus, said President Barack Obama.

Though we have differences about execution, both Republicans and Democrats agree that unemployment is a top priority, and that Sally Jessie Rose’s feather boa routine was lackluster and hostile, just the sort of negative, ‘I don’t care’ attitude that brings us all down.”

Senator Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, had threatened to hold up the jobs bill because he thought it would add to the deficit.

“This is a free market economy,” said Rep. Jim McAllen of Utah. “At some point, the market must sustain itself, and the market will take care of those who are responsible and those who are irresponsible. This Sally Jessie Rose person, for instance, is not getting any sort of tip from me. The market knows what to do with her drag-ass, low burlesque routine.”

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Political Polls

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

What are some of the stats shaping our world on Feb. 19, 2010?

–*A poll in early 2009 found that 71% of Americans prefer to have universal health care, even if it means paying higher taxes.

–*However, in 2010, 46% of Americans are now against the current health care legislation in Congress.

–*Among those against, 35% are against it because they are against health care in general while 12% are against it because it doesn’t go far enough. Three percent are for it because they are against health care reform in general and believe the current legislation effectively kills reform.

–*Seventy percent of political independents said that in 2008 they voted for Barack Obama because they voted for change.

–*In Massachusetts this year, independents voted for Scott Brown, a political conservative, in the traditionally liberal state because they were also voting for change.

–*One hundred percent of independents would prefer that things keep changing.

–*Eighty percent of independents describe themselves as angry.

–*Of those, 40% say they are swiping at imaginary bats.

–*Twenty percent of Americans say they are unsure if they are for voting against the current health care legislation in Congress or if they are voting against imaginary bats.

–*Of independents, 10% say they don’t pay attention to political issues at all. Another 10% thought that health care reform was a good idea but that they were physically and emotionally intimidated by sign wielding members of the Tea Party movement and are just being pussies at this point.

–*Fifty percent of those who said they were for health care reform last year but against it this year said they changed their minds because they didn’t realize that universal health care was a communist plot and now they are now better informed by members of the Tea Party.

–*Thirty percent of Americans feel unable to stand up to members of the Tea Party because they don’t deal very well with angry people.

–*Fifteen percent say that angry spitting people railing at bats and communism make them insecure and impotent and unable to find their keys.

–*Eighty percent of adolescent boys use the term “retard” regularly.

–*One hundred percent of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel uses the word “retard” regularly.

–*Ninety percent of those adolescent boys who use the term “retard” also think that Sarah Palin is hot.

–*Eighty percent of Republicans agree with Sarah Palin’s policies.

–*Zero is the number of policies that Sarah Palin has put forward.

–*Twenty percent of those who have switched their position on the health care legislation believe that it will change their relationship with their doctor and 80% of them said that they don’t argue very well when people are yelling at them.

–*Sixty percent of independents just like voting against people and don’t have any political convictions to speak of.

–*Eighty percent of people who believe their federal tax rates have gone up over the past 10 years are retards.

–*One hundred percent of retards and people at the Heritage Foundation believe that low capital gains taxes are the only incentive for people to invest, as if a 20% tax on capital gains means the same thing as no capital gains at all. That means nobody would have invested in Microsoft in 1986 and had a $100 investment turn into $37,000 in 22 years, because they are such suck ass whiners about capital gains they would have instead kept their money in a mattress earning zippity do da. If higher capital gains rates hurt the economy and harm revenue, why did we have an Internet boom, and why did we, at the same time, balance the budget?

–*One hundred percent of retards believe that it’s entitlement programs alone that are causing the current budget crises and not two horribly expensive wars along with huge tax cuts under George Bush.

–*Twenty percent of crazy people think the IRS is out to get them personally.

–*Twenty percent of crazy people think the CIA is out to get them personally.

–*Fifty percent of crazy rich people think Barack Obama is out to get them personally.

–*0.00002% of people think the girl who played Blossom wants to smother them with a pillow.

–*Ten percent of independents want a third-party candidate because they are trying to synthesize what’s best about the positions of the right and the left.

–*The other 90% don’t really know what the issues are because they’re watching Jersey Shore. Is that JWoww built or what?

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Obama State of the Union Address Laden With Double Entendre

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on January 28, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Washington, D.C. (API) As he hoped to keep the country united and uplifted among partisan strife and economic difficulties, Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address Wednesday to the embattled Congress, seeding his speech with all sorts of double entendre, ironic asides and innuendo in hopes of achieving the impossible and somehow telling everybody in the fractious and polarized republic what they think they want to hear, according to their own level of understanding.

“My fellow Americans,” the president said, “One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt. But today Americans stand larger than ever.”

Obama took the lectern at a time when the political discourse has been as hostile as ever–when America continues to face two wars, rising debt and economic uncertainty. In such critical times, Obama said that Americans will not abide by political mudslinging in Washington.

“We’ve reached a level of public discourse where we’re warm only in the breaches,” he said.

Obama has been accused this year of political miscalculation, however, and he admitted that his Republican challengers have vigorously questioned his health care policies at a critical time.

“With the failure of health care, however, our hearts are truly in question,” Obama said. “Before he died, Ted Kennedy said he wanted health care for all. I wish the Republican leadership would join him now.”

But in a nod to conservatives’ call for fiscal responsibility, Obama said, “We have tried in the past year to curb Wall Street indulgences, but we haven’t had the right tools to fight. I concede that there are many tools on the other side of the aisle this evening.”

Obama said that experts from across the political spectrum warned last year about a second Great Depression, and that his administration acted immediately and aggressively.

“The worst of the storm has passed,” said Obama, “but the recession still blows.”

Obama said that all politicians, including himself, hated the bank bailout.

“Americans don’t understand why they are unemployed when they’ve played by the rules but Wall Street bankers are rewarded for bad behavior. What does that say to the next generation of Americans getting reared?”

Obama at one point said that the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend an unlimited amount of money on political campaigns would harm democracy, a statement that drew rebuke from certain court justices sitting in the hall.

“Now that the Supreme Court has let corporations and possibly foreigners fund the politicians they favor, you can expect a new kind of crony politician to come in your face,” Obama said.

Obama went on to say that he’s cut taxes on most Americans, a statement that drew applause from several Republicans.

“I’m just want to hear about tax cuts,” said Rep. John Boehner, (R-Ohio). “I wasn’t listening any closer than that.”

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Rant! The Problem With Massachusetts

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on January 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I have often promised that I wouldn’t ever turn my blog into a strictly political forum. I hate to sound shrill, even when I’m right. Among other things that I don’t do on this blog anymore are post my poetry, blast my home-made music, or post pictures of Dallas star Victoria Principal naked. Well, I would do the last one, but I don’t own the copyright.

And yet I must say that I feel a bit sad about what happened in Massachusetts last night. There are a lot of people who think that with the state’s election of Scott Brown, a conservative Republican now ironically representing the bluest of states in the U.S. Senate, the political center has turned against President Barack Obama, and my friends on the other side of the political divide insist that I have to take their grievances seriously.

I don’t. Much of what I hear about Barack Obama from his opponents after his first year in office is still bullshit. You may argue with some of his political miscalculations–such as his pursuit of universal health care in the middle of a recession. But that just leads to more questions I would ask of the inquisitors: When is a good time for health care? When is it a good time to raise taxes that are ridiculously and dangerously low, especially when taxes are not what got us into our current financial crisis but unfettered globalization? I am reminded of Bert and Ernie arguing on Sesame Street about when it’s a good time to fix a hole in the roof–you don’t want to when it’s raining out. But why it’s not raining, you no longer see the need.

At some point, somebody has to fix the hole.

Democrats seem to have this unwarranted reputation that they “tax and spend.” That argument is easily eclipsed by the more venial image forming of Republicans in the last 20 years–that they simply spend. No, not just spend. They borrow truckloads of other people’s money, mainly the money of the Chinese and Saudis, so that they can do their big, big spending. They easily outspent Democrats when their great heroes Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in office. A Democrat who taxes and spends ought to look pretty responsible by comparison. Taxing and spending allows you to balance the budget, as Bill Clinton did. Just spending allows you to run up monstrously high deficits, like Bush and Reagan did.

So what’s got me so steamed about the seemingly Blue State of Massachusetts suddenly turning red in an off-election year?

Let’s start with some insights from a biz conference today (I do write about finance, as some of you know):

A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, not exactly a bomb-throwing communist, said that the problem with populist outrage like the sort seen in Massachusetts last night is that it tends to discount all government activity, whether it’s useful or not, helpful or not, wasteful or not, necessary or not. Many of those “independent” voters of Massachusetts who voted for Republican Scott Brown likely do not make more than $200,000 a year and probably haven’t looked at the tax rebates and incentives they’re getting from the federal government this year. Instead, they’re listening to fire-breathing demagogues and end-of-the-world types. Exit polls found that voters were simply unhappy with everybody in Congress and so they masochistically took it out on themselves and voted for somebody whom they disagree with on most issues. Cutting off your nose to spite your face much?

Then we get to the elephant in the room, and in this case, it’s a raging male elephant suffering from a case of musth:

Unemployment is at 10% and is probably going to stay high. This is not a result of George Bush’s or Barack Obama’s stimulus packages in the last 13 months. If these two had not responsibly come to the rescue of the economy, most economists would agree that unemployment would probably be a lot higher, since, after all, our financial system would have collapsed. Twenty percent unemployment? Thirty? Fifty? How ambitious are the Tea Party Republicans feeling? My friend Gene used to wear an anarchy jacket, and I wonder if he would like to hand it over to the real anarchists of today: Dick Armey, Grover Norquist and Glenn Beck.

Our recession, in terms of business productivity, is over, something Obama didn’t talk about enough with the good people of the Bay State. But globalization is amplifying the unemployment problem: When the labor comes back on line, this time it’s going to go to China and India, where it’s cheaper. U.S. wages for low-skill labor are going to drop in this environment (they are already) and they’re not coming back up. Meanwhile, capital is flowing back to the U.S. in the form of reserve currency, causing interest rates to dip and asset bubbles to form. The only thing that’s really going to help American employment in this global economy is to boost exports. Which ironically means we need foreigners to buy our stuff and our services. In other words, we need the Chinese to turn into Americans.

All of this has nothing to do with the health care bill or taxes or Obama. It has to do with free enterprise, which I thought we had all signed on for (most of us). Any Reagan Republican who tells you otherwise is giving you a reach-around.

The idea that Obama exacerbated unemployment (not globalization) or that somehow it’s high taxes that have hobbled the American economy (not globalization) is so laughable on its face that it sends you into a kind of denial about people and what they will believe. I say this because we’re in an age of total government irresponsibility brought on not just by too much spending but too much borrowing. Taxes right now are irresponsibly low and have been since Bush II and maybe even Reagan, the first and best Republican liar on the subject. You can’t start a $2 trillion war without raising taxes. That’s a fact any economist (or historian) worth his or her salt will tell you. Maybe the health care bill was ill-timed, but since people had the political will to start a war with money they didn’t have, Obama gambled that they would also pay for universal health care–something the majority of Americans have INDISPUTABLY wanted for years. I still have a hard time sympathizing with the widespread antipathy to the current health legislation since its opponents lied about it constantly in a highly flashy campaign sponsored by the insurance industry and voters ate up the misinformation like it was all-you-can-eat night at Mr. Spriggs.

So to recap: Obama was slimed by the people of Massachusetts for letting the free markets be free on one hand (not creating government jobs himself) and then for being too interventionist on the other (stopping a catastrophe with bailouts). Yes, the voters were mad. If you mean crazy, I agree.

One of my friends said today that we Democrats are obviously in denial today. I’m not in denial about Massachusetts. We’ve seen bullies and liars get their way a lot in the past 10 years simply by bullying and lying. When so many so-called centrists get rope-a-doped into a bullshit argument because of a timorous inability to fight off these bullies, you can only weep.

So that is all. Tomorrow expect poetry, and perhaps some of my rockin’ music.

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Mass. Backwards

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on January 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

On Tuesday night, the voters of Massachusetts voted to replace the late Sen. Teddy Kennedy, a longtime liberal stalwart and ardent health care reformer, with a conservative upstart cheered on by the Tea Party movement, a candidate who has vowed to vote against health care reform in the Congress. His nay vote could destroy the Democrats’ plans for reform and lay waste to Kennedy’s signature issue by breaking the party’s filibuster proof 60-seat majority.

Why did the people of Massachusetts, which is a long-time liberal stronghold, suddenly decide to go with Republican candidate Scott Brown?

–*Brown has done everything he can to give the people of Massachusetts universal health care, and he even loves them so much he’s going to go one step further and deny it to everybody else.

–*He promised them change, any kind of change. Waterboarding kind of change.

–*Massachusetts is home to a large number of independent voters who hate politics, lies and game playing. Most of all, they hate the game of “Got yer nose.” They always fall for that. Not this time. They will not fall for that again … d’oh!

–*Independents pride themselves on their skepticism. Which is why they have believed everything Glenn Beck has told them all year about communist infiltration of our bodily fluids. And you can take that to the bank.

–*The people of Massachusetts are fed up with high unemployment and rightly blame the Obama administration for causing the recession when he took office eight years ago or something like that.

–*The people of Massachusetts understand that it is not the government’s job to interfere with the free market. “And by the way,” they ask, “why hasn’t the government given me a job yet when communist renegade leader Pol Pot already would have by now?”

–*The people of Massachusetts understand that employment is a lagging indicator and usually starts to increase at the tail end of a recession, after market rebounds like the one we’re seeing now. No wait. They don’t understand that. Never mind. Throw the bums out! Faster, Pussycat! Kill, kill!

–*There were many reports of light snow in Massachusetts on election night. Only a crazy jackass would drive in the snow.

–*The Democratic candidate, a supposed shoo-in named Martha Coakley, was widely thought to have run a lackluster campaign and pundits complained that her message was little more than “I’m a Democrat.” Coakley’s defenders were obviously too hopeful that, weak as her message was, it stood a good chance against the whole “I want to waterboard Arabs again” message.

–*Massachusetts is a hotbed of political independents who want to take a chance on Brown, hoping that he also has their rugged iconoclastic streak: after all, he is against cap and trade; he believes in cutting taxes during a huge budget crisis; he opposes amnesty for immigrants; he opposes gay marriage; he opposes a tax on banks that have recorded huge profits after taking government stimulus money to stay afloat; and he has the Tea Party seal of approval. In fact, he’s so independent he doesn’t hold any of the beliefs of the people he’s representing.

–*Bay Staters are all sure that the first thing a young Republican Senator with no friends in Congress is going to do is start playing by his own rules and burning bridges with Republican leaders just to show everybody how politically open minded he is. Yeah, that’s really going to happen.

–*They were drunk?

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Forrest Gump Emerges As New Face of GOP

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on January 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Washington, D.C. (API) Some 14 months after the party was trounced by the 2008 elections and the landslide victory for President Barack Obama, the Grand Old Party has regained its sea legs once again, and a new party leader has emerged in the person of one Private Forrest Gump.

Republicans searching for leadership at a time when their party is out of power have swarmed around this political upstart whose main claim to fame is that he is a developmentally disabled former athlete and entrepreneur who effortlessly comes up with bland, heartfelt aphorisms.

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” said Gump, thumping one of his favorite old saws for reporters at a press conference. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

“The G.O.P. has been looking for a new face for a long time,” said party consultant Jack Avers. “Bobby Jindal. Charlie Crist. Mitt Romney. Everybody hoped that one of those guys might come and pick up our fallen Republican party standard. But then along comes this poor fucker Gump. Nobody’s got these kinds of bona fides. He makes you feel good about yourself in a way that we haven’t felt since George Bush took office.”

Promising to pick up every American and bodily remove him from harm’s way, Gump launched his political career at a stump speech in Alabama last Thursday amid cheers from conservatives, angry about the direction of the country.

“I am not a smart man, Birmingham. But I know what love is,” Gump announced to rapturous applause from conservatives holding up signs such as “Obamanation” and “America for Americas” and “End the Fed.”

“We want no more tax increases!” yelled an angry member under the stump.

At that, Gump stood up bolt upright, “Well yes, drill sergeant!”

When asked later by a reporter if perhaps anger about tax increases might be misplaced, since middle-class federal tax margins have barely increased since the 1980s, he said, “Well I don’t know anything about that.” Once again, the audience responded with cheers and signs of “Drill, baby, drill” and gunfire into the Alabama night air.

Gump’s apotheosis as new G.O.P. star and conservative pace-setter has provoked a frantic scramble for response from embattled Democrats, whose large and expensive bills to overhaul health care and finance have been widely unpopular. The hostile atmosphere toward Democrats has led at least two senior Congressional Democrats to signal that they would be retiring at the end of their most recent terms, including Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who has made financial services reform one of his signature issues.

“Am I missing something,” said Dodd. “This Gump guy … I mean. He’s kind of not there. Am I smoking crack?”

“Stupid is as stupid does,” said Gump, a witty rejoinder that had Republican stalwarts in the crowd jumping up and down, lighting firecrackers and setting trash cans on fire.

When asked what he thought of possibly extending many of the benefits of Medicare and Medicaid to more American citizens, Gump offered, “Momma always said dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t.”

“Gump has the right profile,” said Republican analyst Mitch Michaelson.”He’s not your typical elitist East Coast political careerist. He’s of the people. He’s American through and through from the virtuous innocence to the simple piety to not having any idea how the government works. Whatever he’s got, they ought to bottle it. That sort of speaking in non sequiturs and his slack-jawed, sloe-eyed, jittery quality.”

“There’s a fight for the soul of the Republican Party going on,” said Michaelson. “It’s the moderates versus the hard-core conservatives. And just when you think we’re out of the game, here comes this cretin Mongoloid who just steals your heart and makes you believe.”

When asked how he might deal with runaway unemployment, interest rates, huge deficits and two wars being waged at once, Gump was thoughtful.

“Washington. It’s like a whole ‘nuther country.”

Grover Norquist, the famous anti-tax crusader, was confident that Gump could best Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

“Gump has the simple values of Ronald Reagan. The simple communication skills of Ronald Reagan. The simple view of government of Ronald Reagan. Gump and Reagan are both just simple. … We ought to drown the government in a bathtub. Leave me alone.”

Gump’s handlers, David Sheffield and Audra Banks, two Alabama political allies, plan to take Gump on a listening tour through the heartland states.

“People are angry,” said Banks. “They’ve lost their jobs. They think the government wants to get between them and their doctor. They can’t afford anything. They don’t know why this is happening to them. They don’t know who John Maynard Keynes was. They don’t know how stuff is paid for. They don’t know what infrastructure is. They don’t know who sets weights and standards or who builds roads. They’re angry.

“And then they look at Forrest and say, ‘Wow, that guy’s pants just fell down,’ and they feel better.”

“I don’t know if we each have a destiny,” said Gump, “or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.”

When asked what he would do about recommending Supreme Court investigations into George Bush-era policies on torture, Gump ran away.

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What New Bills Are Wending Their Way Through Congress?

Posted in Politics, tagged on November 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

–*The Carrie Bradshaw Affordable Footwear Act of 2009

–*The Henry Hyde Memorial Early Pullout Birth Control Law

–*A Thank You To Libertarians For Getting No Acts Passed Act

–*The Cleanup of Inactive Mines and Requirement that Lindsay Lohan Wear Underwear Act

–*The Enhancement of Ability to Fight Methamphetamine Act

–*The Enhancement of Methamphetamine to Make It More Kick Ass Act

–*The Let’s Build A Wall Around Pamela Anderson and Her Hepatitis Act

–*The Boosting Workplace Morale by Firing Spanish Speakers Act

–*The Credit Default Swap Prohibition Act

–*The Derivatives Prohibition Act

–*The Automobile Prohibition Act

–*The Bell Bottoms Prohibition Act

–*The Let’s Let the Credit Card Companies Just Fuck Over Anybody They Want To Act

–*The Thank You To Metrosexuals for Their Service to Their  Country Act

–*The Let’s Reconcile With Cuba Act

–*The It’s Not Too Late To Invade Cuba Act

–*The Tax Incentive to Sell Your House and Buy a New One Every Year Act

–*The Economic Stimulus Through Building Unnecessary Bridges In the Middle of the Desert Act

–*An Act To Repeal All Income and Payroll Taxes, Abolish The Internal Revenue Service and Create a National Sales Tax, Otherwise Known as the “Let’s Set Poor People On Fire” Act

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