Comment

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on June 15, 2012 at 4:17pm

Comment by Susan Stanko on June 15, 2012 at 3:58pm

WTF?!

Comment by doone on June 15, 2012 at 2:46pm

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign… That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization… that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people," - John McCain.

Comment by Adriana on June 14, 2012 at 7:59pm

I prefer not to hear anything about the Sandusky case. He is a sick, sick man, and a danger to society. But worse than him, are the people who knew about it and did nothing to stop him.

Comment by doone on June 14, 2012 at 7:47pm

That is horrible, best you left out the image else I would scream more

Comment by doone on June 14, 2012 at 8:18am

June 13, 2012

The Aristocrats!

Lots of people like Atrios and Dean Baker are complaining about yesterday's column by David Brooks headlined "The Follower Problem." And it first glance it does seem pretty gross:

We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power...our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect [makes it hard] to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves…

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem … people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else...

But what's going on here is that David Brooks—as widely celebrated as Richard Cohen for being an extremely funny man—is telling his own version of the classic joke:

DAVID BROOKS: Okay, so our act starts with us inflating a giant internet bubble. Then that collapses, taking the country's economy with it, just as we massively cut taxes on millionaires because, we say, if we don't the government will have too much money. Right after that we blow off warnings about terrorism and let 3,000 Americans get slaughtered. We use that as a chance to lie the U.S. into invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack, killing hundreds of thousands of people and turning millions into refugees. In the middle of all that we borrow torture techniques from the Inquisition and use them on people in secret sites around the planet. Then we make billions off another financial bubble, the biggest in human history, and do nothing as it collapses, plunging the world into the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. To fix that we open up the national bank vault and shovel out money as fast as possible to all the criminals who made it happen in the first place. Then—as the amazing finale—we refuse to prosecute anyone for that, for the war, or for torture, and we start killing U.S. citizens with flying death robots.

[LONG PAUSE]

AGENT: ...That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?

DAVID BROOKS: The Aristocrats!

—Jon Schwarz

Comment by doone on June 13, 2012 at 2:36pm

‘FREEDOM TO SKIP TRAFFIC LIGHTS’ INITIATIVE FAILS IN NORTH DAKOTA | A broadly-written ‘religious liberty’ ballot initiative failed in North Dakota last night. The measure was an attempt to defy discrimination bans against LGBT people and to refuse repro..., but the language was so expansive that it could have allowed religious people to exempt any law under the guise of religious liberty — even something like speeding through red lights. The initiative failed two-to-one.

Comment by doone on June 12, 2012 at 1:16pm

POTUS Pic of the Day

Jun. 12, 2012

James Furbush at Sly Oyster wins the caption award: “If ever something deserved to become a meme…”

[whitehouse]

Comment by doone on June 12, 2012 at 10:56am

George W. Bush's Tab

Bruce Bartlett tallies it. The damage this single president did to the core of the country's fiscal health - and our ability to weather a storm like 2007 - 2009 - is hard to find parallels with. Money quote:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis - giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare - its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I'm tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it - and remind people that Romney's policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never "to balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

Mitt Romney has no qualms about doing that very thing. And he will, if he is given the chance.

(Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty.)

Comment by doone on June 12, 2012 at 8:01am

RETHINKING RELIGION AND WORLD AFFAIRS

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together. Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain. This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn.

more from Timothy Samuel Shah at The Immanent Frame here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 03:26 AM | Permalink

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